Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  Desdemona’s escape from the house was one of eagerness tempered by the genuine fear of waking Mother and Father. She moved through the sun-soaked foyer and the dining room, racing directly toward the scullery door at the rear of the house.

  Her path to the family vault was sure. Celeste was standing in wait. Desdemona’s sprint came to an abrupt halt when she saw what had become of the interred card.

  The Tarot grave had erupted. No, not erupted…blossomed. The crude burial place had, overnight, become host to a nest of colourful roots. From this, a thick stalk had conquered the entanglement and had surged up. It now towered above the girls like an old growth tree. The bark was the same pattern of shimmering scales as the back of the card. Its boughs stretched every which way, jutting into the air at impossible angles. Several of these shoots conspired together, knitting themselves into a single, powerful appendage, one that grew long enough to reach the family vault and strong enough to rend its door. The once-imposing barrier of iron had been punctured by the colourful vine, which had then wound and rewound itself around the door’s base, pulling it back from the stone frame like a peeled fruit rind.

  For the first time, the sisters were afforded a view of the vault’s interior, which had for so long been forbidden by Mother. The forced opening was low enough to the ground that Desdemona needed to crouch to spy the inside (a view she decidedly did not want), but it was the perfect vantage for Celeste. In fact, this new rip in the vault was a passage almost tailor-made for Celeste’s slight body. Fearlessly, she moved toward the cave-like hole.

  Desdemona grabbed her shoulders just in time. “No!” she commanded.

  “But we’re supposed to!” protested Celeste. “We have to see inside!”

  With a surge of strength that shocked her older sister, Celeste broke free and plunged herself headlong into the negative space beyond the iron door.

  A millstone of impotence overwhelmed Desdemona. It caused her hands to tremble and her stomach to curdle and her thoughts to grow thin and malformed in her brain. She looked about her, at the fledgling day that was climbing above the woods, growing brighter and hotter. Somehow this made Desdemona feel all the more flustered.

  “Desi!”

  Celeste’s voice escaped from the ruined tomb like a ghost’s. It was amplified by the stone walls and was seemingly disembodied.

  The younger sister’s arm emerged through the crude opening. It was reaching for Desdemona. It looked so pale and delicate, like a doll’s arm.

  “You won’t believe it in here! You have to come inside.”

  Desdemona bent at her hips with the intention of dragging her sister out from the forbidden vault, but what ensued was a violation. She felt herself being thrust forward, impelled as if by a potent gale, toward and through the jagged hole. Celeste did her part to aid in this process, gripping Desdemona’s slender fingers and dragging her deeper inside.

  The vault was a mere hint of a place, like the setting of a dream. It felt complete but lacked definition, detail. The daylight pressed in through the ruined door and then splayed out in a fan of sunbeams. Yet even this scant illumination was enough to confirm to Desdemona that this vault was far too slight to house even a single casket, let alone a string of corpses that reached back however far into the family’s lineage.

  Never having a head for specifics, Desdemona did not trouble herself with estimating the vault’s exact dimensions. Instead she focused on the altar-like structure that stood in the centre of the chamber. It was a pair of wooden cubes, one set atop the other, askew. The surface of the wood was gouged, its finish worn and lustreless.

  Upon this base there sat something veiled, something vague. To Desdemona’s eye it was an unsightly lump masked in a swath of fine linen. Time had tempered its pristine whiteness to a mournful, grubby shade of grey. At once, two opposing drives took hold of Desdemona; one, the irrational wish to see what reposed beneath the veil, the other, profound repulsion toward the very idea of what might be concealed there.

  Celeste clearly held no conflicted feelings, for she raced toward the concealed thing and, despite Desdemona’s protests, tugged the veil free. She executed this move with all the flair of a stage illusionist.

  What was it? A primitive drum, a clay pot forged in some ancient kiln? It was a halved sphere with a base of rosewood. A pelt of animal fur was stretched across the top and was held tautly in place by a web of thin leather straps. Dangling from this reeking mesh was an array of decorations: polished stones, bones the shape and colour of a waning moon, glass phials filled with sludgy fluids.

  “What kind of coffin is this?” asked Celeste, her voice echoing against the stone walls.

  “Don’t touch it!” Desdemona said, but too late. Celeste was already on her tiptoes. She tapped on the pelt.

  Something inside the bowl tapped back.

  ‘The echo,’ Desdemona told herself, ‘only an echo…’

  “Let’s open it!” Celeste whispered. Her hands were clasped in excitement.

  “Come away from there. Right now.”

  Celeste then acted with the rebelliousness that was her wont: her tiny hands clawed at the covered bowl. The cords that held the canvas snug must have been frail, for they snapped under the mild power of Celeste’s tugging fingers.

  She peeled the canvas back as though it was the rind of some ugly fruit. By now Desdemona was paralysed; her brain a cold lodestone inside her skull, her skin bristling with an anticipatory dread.

  What had Celeste unveiled?

  If the child’s expression was any gauge, it was something cryptic, obscure.

  Temptation flared inside Desdemona, and there were pangs of jealousy, too. It pulled her body like a magnetic force. She stepped up onto the dais and stared hard into the face of her sister. Celeste locked eyes with her for just an instant before turning her focus back to the wooden cauldron.

  Desdemona followed her sister’s example.

  The bottom of the bowl was lined with a bed of ashes. Upon these ashes there lay a small sarcophagus, its surface vibrantly painted, its edges rounded. The face that stared up at the girls from the sarcophagus lid was jolly; cheeks rosy, a moon-like head crowned with lively-looking daisies.

  “I didn’t know they made coffins this tiny,” Celeste breathlessly declared.

  “It’s not a coffin,” Desdemona replied. She reached fearlessly into the hollow of the cauldron and removed the grinning lid. She set it down on a little ash dune. “It’s a matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls.”

  “Just like Mother had when she was small like me!”

  Desdemona nodded. “I always wanted one of these.” Desdemona’s tone was pained, sorrowful.

  “Look! The next one’s a man!” whispered Celeste. “Wait, I mean a king!”

  Nestled within the slightly larger base of the first doll beamed the lid of the second: a man with wild eyes and woolly beard and a crown of yellow spikes. The king’s mouth was open to an impossible degree, and in its cave-like gape there stood a golden ram with piercing eyes.

  “Let’s see the others!”

  Thus began the sequence of unveilings. The king birthed a smaller shell that depicted a weighing scale with stars gleaming on its plates. From this, conjoined twins with distended heads and ossified frames. Deeper and deeper the girls went, each doll growing not only smaller but more gruesome. When Celeste uncovered the ninth, they could not even identify it as a human likeness. It was something shrivelled, crooked.

  “Is that it?” Celeste asked.

  “No,” said Desdemona. “There’s one more, I think.”

  “What are you waiting for? Open it!”

  “I…I can’t.”

  “I’ll do it then!”

  And before Desdemona could protest, Celeste had pulled herself up on the heavy bowl and reached down to fiddle with the tiny matryoshka. Her fingers pressed and twisted at it. Finally, the foetal lump split in two.

  The halved doll emitted a noise; something near to a gasp, a keen wisp o
f breath. It froze Desdemona’s blood in her veins. It was, to her mind, the single worst sound she had ever heard.

  Until the deathly silence of the morning was shattered by an agonised scream. Another immediately followed. The cries came tearing across the land from somewhere near, somewhere beyond the family vault.

  “We have to…” Desdemona began, but the words dissipated before she could even organise her thoughts completely. She looked at Celeste. The child’s expression was a broken one. She was sobbing.

  Another scream, this one nearer.

  Desdemona craned her head and peered over her shoulder, through the open crypt door and up the path toward the lawn.

  What she saw hollowed her, clawed out all the elements that kept her intact.

  Father was tearing across the rear yard, racing down the slope toward the dock. He was dressed only in a pair of pyjama bottoms, which were saturated with crimson. His uncovered chest and arms were greasy with flowing blood. His face was bearded with a smear of that morning’s shaving foam.

  Desdemona cried out to him, but a fresh sight lodged her voice in her throat.

  That sight was Mother. She too was racing across the lawn. But unlike Father, her journey was horridly graceful. She moved with all the speed and beauty of a shooting star. Still dressed in her billowing nightgown of soft whiteness, Mother glided after her husband.

  Desdemona then noticed that Mother’s feet were not touching the ground. She was like a puppeteer’s prop, animated by a hidden network of pulleys and cords. Her head wobbled as though it was too heavy for her frame.

  Mother held a pair of great knives in her fists. The one in her left hand (which was nearest to Desdemona and thus most plain to her shock-widened eyes) was narrow and dripping. The other, which Mother had raised above her bobbling head, was wide and chunky, nearer to a cleaver than a dagger.

  On instinct, Desdemona snatched up Celeste and pressed the child’s face into her shoulder. “Don’t look,” she muttered frantically into her sister’s ear. “It’s okay, shh, shhh. Just close your eyes.”

  But Desdemona was unable to follow her own instructions. She could but stare helplessly as Mother pounced upon Father and drove the blades into his prone body over and over again; chopping and plunging and slashing with impossible speed and savagery long after Father’s screams had ceased.

  Something in the damp, faint song of steel parting flesh managed to alter time, to slow it down to the protracted, inescapable torture of a nightmare. Desdemona couldn’t guess as to how long she stood holding Celeste, listening to those noises that seemed to silence the wind. She stared in a petit mal trance at the rippling leaves of the great mountain ash that stood as a sentinel outside hers and Celeste’s bedroom. She remained transfixed on the sight until a sudden movement in her periphery forced her to look headlong at the sight of Mother, terrible Mother.

  She was coming towards them now, skating on the hot morning air. Mother of Swords, her weapons still dripping from the fresh kill, advanced.

  Her face was transitioning before Desdemona’s very eyes. It was as if her flesh and the skull that braced it had become clay for eager and unseen hands. Muscles and arches and contours now existed for merely a blink before becoming hurriedly transfigured into some new and outlandish composition. Eyes sagged and then lifted. Lips that were plumped like those of a lover awaiting the union of a sacred kiss were suddenly pulled keen across the gums, giving Mother the appearance of an animal about to pounce on its quarry.

  Desdemona ran; ran with a momentum she’d never before known. By now Celeste’s insatiably curious nature had bested her ability to obey: she was staring out over Desdemona’s shoulder, staring at What-Had-Been-Mother that was hunting them. Celeste began to scream and sob. Her little body quaked in Desdemona’s arms, which seemed to double her weight. By the time the sisters stumbled into the rear entrance of the great house Desdemona’s head was swimming.

  Petrified that she might lose her grip on Celeste, Desdemona loped ahead, through the scullery and the kitchen where Mother’s tea kettle sat wailing on the stove.

  The spiral staircase was nearly insurmountable. Halfway up, Desdemona’s legs gave out. She released Celeste with a whimper and shouted for her to run.

  The Mother abomination came thundering into the foyer. She halted at the foot of the stairs, and for one magnificent moment Desdemona thought they might be safe.

  She was studying the steps, assessing them like an animal seeing such a structure for the first time.

  ‘Can this thing, whatever it is, even climb stairs?’ Desdemona wondered, or rather wished.

  The creature threw itself prostrate on the foyer floor and plunged one of its swords into the bottom step. The second blade was stabbed into a higher stair. Using her weapons as braces, the Mother of Swords began to pull her twitching body up the stairs.

  Desdemona shrieked and tore up the last few stairs. The terrible thunk-thunk-thunk sound of What-Had-Been-Mother stabbing the steps resounded through the great open foyer.

  “This way, Desi! Over here!”

  Celeste was in the master bedroom, her body half-concealed behind the ornate door. Desdemona dove through the open frame and kicked the door closed. She scrambled to her feet and leapt to one end of Mother’s large dresser.

  “Help me push!” she pleaded.

  Celeste offered what little strength she possessed. Panic gave Desdemona strength enough for the two of them.

  The dresser became a barricade, though Desdemona was wise enough to know that this was far from enough to protect them.

  She flung the dresser’s drawers open and rifled through Mother’s belongings. She found the crushed velvet pouch, tugged its drawstring loose and shook the Tarot deck out onto the Persian rug. The sisters sifted through the scattered cards.

  The thing was now just beyond the door. It was unleashing a rain of stabbing blows against it. The tips of its weapons poked through the wood, appearing like the silver beaks of some ravening flock. Desdemona knew it was only a matter of seconds before the barrier would be rent.

  At last she found the card she was looking for. It had a sextet of gleaming golden wands clashing before a robust sun. Below the illustration, the card bore a single word of Latin text: Victoria.

  She hopped over Celeste’s hunched form and slapped the card’s face against the door.

  The assault from What-Had-Been-Mother ceased instantly.

  Bolstered by the effectiveness of her spell, Desdemona began to drag the card across the door, forming precise geometric patterns with great skill, just as Mother had tutored her to do.

  From the landing there came the faint noise of slithering, of something slinking back down the grand staircase.

  “Is it gone?” Celeste asked in an uncharacteristically small voice.

  “I think so…but I’m not sure.”

  “What happened to Mother?” Celeste asked and immediately began to cry again.

  Desdemona pulled her sister close and tried in vain to console her. The rapid, mumbled assurances had some effect, for Celeste’s sobs eventually softened. In time the master bedroom’s silence was only occasionally punctuated by Celeste inhaling sharply.

  A form darkened the second storey window. Its shadow fell lean and crooked across the bedroom.

  Celeste was the first to look out the window. Once again she started to scream. Though she harboured no desire to see, Desdemona felt her head turning to face the shape at the pane.

  The entity was hovering on the other side of the glass. The swords were still gripped in its gory fists. It was smiling, smiling… By now the face had suffered so many contortions that its original traits were lost. It was now a mask, no longer human; the effigy of some chasmal entity that should not be witnessed in the world that lay outside of Dream.

  “No!” Desdemona cried. The card still between her fingers, she leapt to the window and pressed the image of the Wands firmly against the glass.

  The thing lost its grip on its weapon
s. Desdemona could hear them clattering against the stone walkway so far below. She traced the protective designs on the window, then the other two windows that flanked it.

  “Help me, Celeste!” she instructed as she opened the slat cupboard and began to wrestle free the cumbersome sets of storm shutters.

  Forged from thick slabs of oak, the shutters were designed to protect the house’s interior from the squalls of hurricanes, which, when the house was first built, had been very common on the island. Or so Father had told her. Each room had a double set of shutters; one external, one internal. Desdemona hoped that this single barrier and the strength of her magic would be enough to protect them until this most unnatural of storms passed.

  Together the sisters secured all three windows, locking the shutters snugly with their latches of pig iron. Celeste was now more afraid than Desdemona had ever known her to be. Seeing Celeste this way upset her, but she hid these feelings and tried to convince her sister that this was just another form of ‘playing night-time,’ as she liked to do in the dining hall.

  They huddled together in the gloom and listened to the sound of tapping, so incessant, endless. Mother had evidently scrabbled down to retrieve her dropped weapons, for the chamber was now filled with the hideous pulse of blades rapping upon the panes.

  “Don’t cry,” Desdemona cooed, desperate to calm Celeste, “hush.”

  …taptap…tap

  “She can’t get in. We’re safe in here.”

  …tap…

  “We just have to wait.”

  …tap…taptap…tap…

  “We’ll wait until she goes away.”

  Celeste ran out of tears. She went silent. She slept.

  …tap…tap…

  “Can we go the scullery?” Celeste asked. Her voice was creaky. She was groggy and parched.

  …taptap …

  “No. The rest of the house is unprotected. We’re sealed in here. Just try to rest. It will be over soon.”