by Rose Szabo
And then she feels Margaret go limp in her arms. Persephone lays her on the floor and puts a hand over Margaret’s nose. She’s breathing. My younger self and Miklos hunch over her for a long time, watching her with furious concentration, until her eyelids flutter open. Then she picks her daughter up, and he changes shape, and we scatter: Persephone to put her daughter to bed, Miklos to the woods, and my current self through the floorboards and down, until with a kind of splash I emerge into the cellar. I push through the dirt and cobwebs, slip around the rotted wooden box where Arthur’s heart still glows like a hot coal, and go down into the present.
Eleanor and Arthur are there still. I’d felt years of my life peel away while they’d barely finished their conversation. I watch them curiously. Eleanor is promising Arthur that she’ll help him. She’ll be the one to set him free, to keep my broken promise. She doesn’t want to. Like her father, she’d like to wrap up this strange man in her arms, keep him tucked into her bed like a hot water bottle, play piano with him in the dusty parlor, live and die with him by her side.
I don’t understand it. But then again, I never saw the appeal of him. I only wanted to be with him because I thought it would answer my questions, but what I learned from him instead is that no one you love is ever fully yours. Not your lover, not your husband, not your child. No wonder I hated Arthur so, for introducing me to that truth. No wonder I made him stay and serve me, just to prove to myself that I had absolute control, if I wanted it. But understanding has come for me and has me in its grip. It hurts.
I believe Eleanor when she says she’ll save him—she doesn’t have any reason to love the rest of us, but he’s different. Eleanor looks into the place where his eyes should be, and her expression is familiar. There’s exasperation there, and pain and wonder and hope. Her feeling is real, even if the object of the feeling is not. Arthur died on that hill; whatever she is looking at isn’t the man I knew, the man he pretends to be because I demanded it.
But there’s something else. I’ve watched Arthur for years. I have a sense of how he feels about us: pity and loathing when someone takes an interest in him, and bitter rejection when they eventually abandon him, all without ever seeming to want anything from anyone. He doesn’t even long for Miklos, not now that he’s seen who Miklos really is: someone who would rip him up and leave him for dead. But this is different. He leans toward Eleanor like he’s cold and she could warm him. When she eventually retreats up the steps, he flinches when she slips on a broken step. When we are alone again, I tell him, “I should never have done what I did.”
“You had your reasons,” he says. He clambers face-first into the pit in which he lives, and picks up his book, ignoring me and the sounds from upstairs alike. “Luckily she forgot to put me away. At least I can do some reading while I wait to find out if she dies.”
I whisper to him in the darkness, “You sound almost melancholy.”
“I don’t love her, if that’s what you mean,” he says. “I just want her love to save me.”
I don’t tell him that that’s how it always begins: in selfishness, in ambition, in lust or desperation. That love starts out as something you want to bite into and ends as something that swallows you up.
ELEVEN
For a moment, I was not myself. I was in the past, watching a group of nervous women cluster in the empty hall, clutching one another’s arms tightly in terror as they tried to explain something to me. But then I was myself again, in the present, the same hallway now lined with paintings. Grandma Persephone was telling me that she was here. That she hadn’t abandoned me.
I took a deep breath as Grandmere gestured me toward the dining room.
“Will you come and sit down with me?” she asked. I didn’t move. “I would rather not have to tell you.”
I followed her into the dining room, Father padding along behind us. She seated herself, and when I’d done the same, she folded her hands together and beamed at me from across the table.
“Why did you do this to him?” I asked her.
“Because it was necessary,” she said. “He was too useful to ignore or get rid of, but he was not behaving as he should. I did what I had to do.”
“He wasn’t something for you to use,” I said. “He was my father.”
“Oh, these things come and go,” she said. “When you are as old as I am, you can take a longer view. I believe you will understand eventually.”
“How old are you?”
She shrugged. “I do not keep track of these things.”
“How old is Mother?”
“Oh, she is quite young. Perhaps two hundred. Does that help you?”
That meant Grandmere very old indeed.
“So,” she said, “I think we can both see that this went badly.”
“You’ve done this before.”
She nodded. “I have to, from time to time, to stay alive. But it’s useful in other ways, too.”
I imagined her doing this over centuries. Turning up places and then managing them, commanding some, devouring others, laughing and joking and throwing parties all the while. The ruse could last for a long time, I imagined, if she was careful.
“Grandpa said you tried to eat him when he was young,” I said. “Have you been after him all this time?”
“I certainly never forgot him. What an interesting specimen! But I had no idea that he was here until your mother wrote to me. And then I came and found all of you. So many of you, and all so … useful.”
“Are you going to kill me now?” I asked.
She looked shocked.
“Eleanor,” she said, “why would you say such a thing? No, of course not.” She reached out to touch my hand; I snatched it back. “You are one of mine, and I want only the best for you.”
“Then leave me alone.”
“Oh, I cannot do that,” she said. “You are still very young, and you do not have very much. I have an army inside of me.” She touched her throat with one gloved hand. Her neck was still bandaged. “You do not. You need some strong creatures to help you get started in the world. When you wrote to me, you asked me to help you. This is the help that I can give you, my love. You are your mother’s greatest achievement. You are my only heir. I cannot let you go.”
“You killed my father.”
“I should have saved him for you,” she said. “I meant for you to have all of them. To take with you, so you could keep them forever. But, sadly, it is too late for that.”
I looked around wildly. “Wait. Where’s Mother? Is she still here?”
“You think I would hurt her?”
“I’m going to go find her now.”
She waved a hand. “Be my guest. I would not restrict you in your own house.”
I stood up, looking at her warily. She shrugged. I went past her, past Father, and up the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor. I knocked. “Mother?”
A wary voice inside said, “Yes?”
“It’s me. Eleanor.”
I opened the door. Mother sat in the tub, submerged up to her chin. She looked like she had been crying.
“Is it you?” I asked. “Tell me something only you would know.”
She studied me cautiously.
“When you were little, I knew what you were,” she said. “I saw you telling Rhys what to do, and Charlie. I told you to stop, that if you did that, you would never know who your friends were. And then you cried.”
I shut the door behind me and ran to the tub. I reached in and hugged her as hard as I could. When I pulled back, I’d stained her face with dirt from the cellar.
And then I reached over and turned on the tap. The room filled with the sound of rushing water. I leaned in close, so I could whisper.
“Mama,” I said. “We can’t let her do this. You have to tell me how we can stop her.”
“I can’t tell you,” she whispered. She started to say something, stopped, tried again. “She asked me not to. I can’t. Do you see? I can’t.”
She
clung to me with her damp hands. I forced myself to look at her face.
“You can’t,” I said. “Because she won’t let you?”
She nodded.
“Well,” I said, “you can tell me now.”
She opened her mouth, and then put a hand to it in astonishment.
“She is very weak when she has just taken in a new person,” she said. “And she gets tired when she tries to control more than a few people at a time.” She saw my face fall. “I don’t know if I can tell you much more than that. Other than…”
“What is it?”
“She loves you,” Mother said. “That’s real.”
“Are you defending her?”
“No,” she said. “I’m helping you.”
There was a knock on the door. “Eleanor?” Grandmere said from outside.
Mother slid down under the water as I opened the door.
“Are you satisfied?” Grandmere said.
I glanced back over my shoulder. “Yes.”
“That’s enough, then,” she said. “Will you come back downstairs with me?” She phrased it as a question, I noticed. I followed her.
“If you really want to leave this place,” she said, when we were back downstairs, “we can. But you should come with me. And I will compromise with you. You can leave the rest of your family, if you want. I doubt they will pursue us. But before you leave this house, you will take one of them. For protection. I think the boy is best.”
“Rhys?”
She nodded. “He is strong and fast. He will represent you well, when you need him to—you can even wear him, once you are more practiced. It’s useful to have a man with you, for traveling. You and I can even go our own ways, if you want. I will not make you stay with me.”
I hesitated.
“Once we leave, the rest of your family can do what they please,” she said. “Your sister and your grandfather will come back from the woods, your mother can stay in her bath for as long as she wants, your aunt can cook and clean in peace. They will be happy. And I doubt they will miss you very much.” She frowned. “They have never understood you like I do.”
She could make me do it. But Mother had said that Grandmere loved me. She wanted me to choose to do things her way. I had the most power if I could make her believe I was still like her. More power to save my family, to save Rhys.
“You’re right,” I said. “They don’t understand me. They never even liked me.”
I made myself cry, then. It wasn’t very hard; I just looked at my father, sitting on the floor at Grandmere’s feet, waiting for her next command. I thought of my grandpa in the woods. Of Arthur, somewhere in the dark below me.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my dear.”
She stepped forward and folded me up in her arms. I forced myself not to pull away. While she held me, I could feel shapes swimming under her skin. I imagined birds, fish, men-at-arms, and things I couldn’t name.
There was no way out now, I thought. I couldn’t leave until I ate someone. But maybe I could distract her long enough to get everyone else out. She’d told me not to let Rhys out of his room. But what if he was already out?
The idea began to form in my mind, but I didn’t act on it right away. I cried in Grandmere’s arms until I exhausted myself. She sent me upstairs to bed, and then sent Margaret up with a bowl of soup. I ate what I could, and then Grandmere came in to talk to me some more, to tell me about all the wonderful places we could go when it was just her and me. I listened, and leaned against her shoulder, and she stroked my hair.
“I think I would like to see California,” I said at last.
“That is nothing,” she said. “You still ask for so little. I wish you would ask for more. You deserve so much.”
“I don’t know how to ask,” I said. “Can I have some time to think about it? About all of this? I want to come with you.” I kept my eyes on her, even though they wanted to dart toward the door. “I want to see the world with you. But I need a little time to let go of this place. Of who I used to be.”
“Of course,” she said. “We have all the time in the world.”
She kissed me on the forehead, and tucked the covers in around me, as though I were little. And she left, shutting the door behind her.
For a week, I came to her whenever I thought of anything I might want, or whenever I could pretend to be sad or lonely—which was not so hard to pretend, rattling around that empty house. Arthur didn’t come upstairs. I wondered if he’d told Grandmere about the door, or if she had figured it out on her own. Either way, I wasn’t sure he could help me. I was cold to Margaret and ignored Mother if Grandmere was out and about.
She started talking to me about her past. A lot of what she told me was jumbled. She didn’t seem to have a clear understanding of time, and some details seemed to be from the wrong stories. But what I learned was that she had been doing this for centuries. This was her way of living: enter a castle, or a great house, and eat it from the inside. She had to eat, she told me. It kept her fresh and renewed over the centuries—a new body for her outside, new creatures to call upon. It didn’t have to be people, but that was what she preferred.
She didn’t seem to sleep at normal hours, but whenever she took a nap, I roamed the house. Sometimes I tried the doors, to see if her powers had worn off over time. I couldn’t even touch the doorknobs. And always I had to stay out of sight of the thing that used to be my father, which stalked the house while Grandmere slept, moving silently from room to room.
And then one day, she said to me, “I think it’s time to practice.”
She sent Father out into the woods. He came back that evening carrying a struggling, kicking sack.
“Now,” she said, “I will show you what you can do, if you only try.”
She nodded to Father, and he opened the sack and pulled out a young rabbit by the ears. He held it down on the table while it struggled. Grandmere picked it up around its midsection with both hands and opened her mouth.
It got wider and wider, until it seemed to be splitting her face, until her jaw creaked and strained. Inside was darkness: not a mouth, just black nothing. She slid the rabbit in, and it vanished, down to its kicking hindpaws. She shut her mouth, and swallowed, and smiled at me, all at once a grandmother again.
And then she opened her mouth and let it fall back out.
The rabbit that emerged was not afraid. It ambled over to me, looked up at me, regarded me out of cool yellow eyes.
“It’s mine now,” she said. “Do you see?”
The rabbit returned to her and allowed itself to be swallowed again. I suddenly had a sense of enormity, of scale. I imagined ships. Villages. Forests. Creatures from the bottom of the sea.
Father pulled out a second rabbit from the bag. One of its legs was broken, so when he put it on the table, it was oddly still, although I could hear its heart beating wildly.
“Somewhere inside of you is a crack,” she said. “Why don’t you try to open it?”
I could feel something in the back of my throat. It was the feeling I got when I was angry, when I was lonely. The feeling that I was a pit and that I could swallow anything if I tried. I looked at the rabbit. I knew exactly what she meant. It had been in me for as long as I could remember.
I grabbed the rabbit with both hands and opened my mouth wide.
It was gone before I knew what had happened. It was so easy. My throat ached, and I felt sick to my stomach.
Grandmere was elated.
“Very good!” she said. “And on your first try. You know, your mother couldn’t do it, even when I insisted. She tried, but she doesn’t have it.” She clapped her hands together. “Oh, I am so proud, my darling. Can you let it back out? I want to see you do it.”
“I’m very tired,” I said.
“Oh, of course. I am sorry. Please, get some rest.”
I went to my room and shut the door. Sitting in the rocking chair, I tried to let the rabbit out. It slipped out of my mouth and into my lap
and sat there calmly. I could feel it, in the same way I could feel my hand on my leg. I had it walk around the room. Its leg was healed, its body made perfect, but it wasn’t alive. It was just me. Just more of me.
I had it get in my arms. I picked it up and carried it into Luma’s room. And then I pushed aside the dresser and had it crawl through the hole into Rhys’s room. I made it hold still, in the middle of the room. I could see Rhys through its eyes. He sniffed at it, and then snapped it up in his jaws and broke its neck. It hurt, but only for a second, and then I couldn’t feel it anymore.
I huddled up on my side of the wall and cried. Eventually, Rhys crept over to the hole.
“Wait,” he said. “Should I not have done that?”
“No, I wanted you to.”
“Ellie,” he said. “Why did you do this to us?”
“I didn’t mean to.” I sniffled. “I’m sorry.”
A long pause. And then: “It’s okay.”
I crawled through the hole and into his room. He had blood on his face. He wiped at it with his sleeve.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” I said. “But you have to trust me.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “But I promise, I won’t mess it up this time.”
* * *
At breakfast the next morning, I waited until Grandmere had settled in, and then coughed.
“Grandmere,” I said. “Can I ask you for something?”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Of course,” she said. “Anything.”
“I feel a little silly.”
“Nothing you could say is silly to me.”
“I’d like to have a party,” I said. “Before I … take Rhys. I’d like to have a party, like a normal girl. With guests, and music. And dancing. And flowers, and maybe someone other than Margaret to do some of the cooking. I’ve just never felt wanted here, not with Rhys and Luma always getting the best of everything.” I made myself choke up. “I’d like to feel special, for one day.”