“Julie,” I said once, getting words in between her sobs and tears, “it’s what you wanted. Freedom to follow your dream.”
“But, Howard...”
“No.” I cut her off firmly. “This is what you wanted. I’ve given it to you. The studio, the supplies, the time to create. You must assert yourself, Jules. You must always be conscious of finishing what you start.”
I stepped toward her, put my hand on her chin, raised her face to see me. Holding it there.
“Do you agree? Or not.”
“Yes,” she said, looking down, away from my judging eyes, but not daring to pull her head from my patient hand.
“So there it is,” I said, leaving to make myself a drink. With my bourbon poured I sat at the table, watched her over my glass. I felt small writhing worms of disgust in my belly as she stood in a pouting stance and, sometime later, flat-footedly brought out plates of food, served stiffly like a sacrifice. I let it go for the sake of peace and took another drink, not even seeing what she had prepared. Most likely a pasta.
* * *
I had miscalculated my effort. Julie, having no excuse to not work at her art, began to lay a blanket of guilt on top of what was already a considerable stack of emotional bedding.
Guilt for not working. Guilt for not being successful, for not achieving her dreams. She was getting no younger and our marriage, forged in the hot fires of young love as a life partnership, was becoming a cold iron albatross around her thin white neck, weighing her down, wearing her out. Her own passions were mocking her, and our marriage was an echo chamber for those cruel jabs. They surrounded her, filling her head with her failures as an artist, a wife, a person of any interest to the world.
To my credit I tried repeatedly to assimilate her with my group of associates. But she had become so withdrawn, so empty, that my friends thought her odd, and even whispered about what I was doing with her in the first place. Granted, I am not as charismatic or entertaining as some, but compared with my tiresome bride I might as well have been Harry Houdini and P.T. Barnum rolled into one.
Her attitude went beyond depression. Past apathy. Her loss of intellectual appetite seemed to reverse itself, turn inward, to feed in places I could not see.
And then something strange happened. As weeks passed her interest in things seemed to... perk up. But this new enthusiasm did not stem from banal curiosity or social kindness. Certainly not marital warmth. No, it was something else. Something private. She had a sudden desire to understand the motivations of the things surrounding her. People, geographies, the science of leaves and trees, the trajectory of the mosquito, the coloring of the sky when suppressing an inevitable cloudburst. She was curious as a young student.
And yet I could not fathom what subject she pursued. What weaved through her distracted mind in those affection-starved years? A stark need to fill the emptiness within herself? Some sort of enriching philosophy? A desperate quest for universal answers? How dark were her thoughts even then? How far down the slippery, shadowy road of damnation had she already traveled?
* * *
“Julie!” I cried out, my voice shivering in the cold damp, the dark, insect-chewed wood of the back deck chilling the soles of my bare feet, the surface slick with oily morning dew.
I looked desperately into the trees, toward the creek and the nothingness. A dangerous, alien world. Not once had I stepped foot into that dank formation of trees and wet brush. The vanguard of poplars, turning now as autumn approached, were wide yellow stains smeared across the forest’s thick green pallet.
In the early morning the landscape was especially sinister. A broad expanse of leafy canopies, the aprons of a hundred towering witches hiding what lay nestled deep within the rotten crotch of Mother Nature. The creeping, crawling things. The slithering, deformed underbelly of God’s creations. My mouth turned distastefully knowing Julie had run out there, her feet bare, her face wet with tears, her pale cheeks reddening from both the crisp air and, one more so than the other, the collapse of my fortitude.
She had pushed me too far.
* * *
I had woken early that Saturday morning and found her gone from the bed, the lumpy roll of twisted sheets typically enshrouding her body now a long empty knot, one as welcoming as the other.
I assumed she had absconded to her studio to study the blank canvas and await the inspiration of the meek and sick-hearted while I hunted for grounds to make a pot of coffee, a task she had never once failed to complete, in our five years of marriage, prior to my awakening.
Completing the morning coffee, and still hearing nothing from the floors above, I decided to go upstairs to see the fair princess in her tower.
The hallway leading to the attic door was silent and shadowed. I searched for fortitude within my cup, taking a hot sip to stabilize me and banish the chill creeping up my spine, the result of precognition or the hall’s damp air I don’t know. Steeled, I walked to the narrow door at the end of the hall and, finding it slightly ajar, slipped silently through.
I quietly padded up the firm oak steps, turning at the switchback in the staircase, hoping to spend a minute or two spying on my young wife engorged by the creative process.
I turned on the final step, and I saw her.
She was not studying a canvas. Her head was not cocked slightly to the side in deep creative thought, the early morning sun shining through the arched window at the end of the room framing her, turning her figure into a sinewy shadow, one hand poised with the brush, the other holding a tray of smeared oils. The canvas was not dashed with color, did not show the first pink strokes of a flower’s petals, the vase it protruded from still in her imagination, waiting to be created, giving the trembling flower’s stem a vessel in which to repose.
I did not see this.
I saw my wife—my naïve, innocent, sheltered young bride—standing naked in the middle of the cold empty studio. The painting tubes, brushes and other supplies were piled in the corner like windblown trash. The canvas and its supporting easel were turned away, faced against the wall, a punished child. On the floor at Julie’s feet was a large book, its cover sprawled open before her, the thick brown oversized pages split in the middle. A welcoming womb.
As I breathlessly recorded every detail, what struck me most was her body. The tense, alert way in which every muscle seemed to be straining against the skin, as if she were a high diver preparing to leap—not into a warm pool twenty feet below, but into the vulva of the tomb nestled by her toes, its thick smile spread wide, the withered ends of the puckered pages a paper mouth, straining for an open kiss.
Surrounding the book and my wife’s nakedness—dotting the floor like weeds—were black candles, their waxen cylinders burned down nearly to the polished floorboards. They were arranged in such a way that their overall design formed a wide, dented circle around her.
I left the stairs and approached her from behind, her rear end taut and twitching, as tense and shapely as the day I met her. As I grew closer I noticed the other things. The patterns.
Across the surface of the floor she had painted symbols. I know now they were occult in nature, but at the time they seemed more like designs, a spiraling congregation of bizarre shapes, forms and symbols painted in all the colors of her kit. The kit my money had so agreeably purchased.
Moving to within a few inches I could hear her breathing, smell the sweat and soap of her glistening skin. Her head moved ever so slightly, and I heard whispering. Staring at the back of her head I knew, though I could not see her face I somehow knew, without doubt, that her eyes were wide open. I listened more carefully to her whispers, the jabbering words I doubt even she understood. They were inhuman sounds, guttural and slick, foreign, broken words drooling from her mouth like ashen saliva.
I spoke her name with a despairing breath. Nearly a sob. “Julie?”
The word was a breaker of spells, a slithering thing that pierced an unseen bubble surrounding her, a shell of membrane I could neither see no
r touch but could sense (and perhaps smell—for the room seemed thick with decay).
She spun at me with a twisting jerk, her eyes wide as I had imagined, but not in surprise. It was more like fascination, as if I were the most amusing thing in the world. She smiled and it was something far worse than the sardonic twist of malice I saw years ago in our small apartment. It was foul and slutty. Her lips were wet with spit, her white teeth bared in primal desire. It was hunger, the same look of gleeful amazement a predator might wear when woken from a dream, stricken with malnourishment, to find a roomful of docile prey awaiting ingestion.
She stepped toward me and I flinched backward. I was repulsed, frightened. Without thinking, and purely from self-defense, I swung my hand out and hit her. I slapped her so hard that her head snapped to the side and her body sagged, as if dangling from an invisible thread. I took two steps back and stood poised, ready to give her worse if she turned to me with those damnable eyes again.
But Julie did not leap at me, her jaws gaping, her fingers hooked into claws. She looked at me... and I saw nothing but a shamed, naked girl standing cold and alone in an empty room, filled with a knowledge of her own impropriety. An Eve caught with a mouthful of apple.
Before I could speak she ran past me, a trailing groan escaping her. She reached down to snatch a blue cotton gown from the floor as she went, and hurtled herself down the stairs.
After a moment or two to regain my senses, I followed her down and, just as I reached the hallway, heard the rear screen door burst open and snap back shut on its rusted hinges and powerful spring. I ran to the bedroom, pushed open the glass door leading to the deck and watched for her as she ran away from me one floor below. I saw only a glimpse, a flash of cornflower blue from the gown which draped her frail, fleeing form. Her weeping carried to me on the thick atmosphere of the moist morning air, the heartbreaking and mystical sound of a dying nymph. I yelled for her once, weakly, my breath transforming to frost.
I called out again, more loudly this time, fearing for her wellbeing in the harsh morning cold, but she had already run deep into the forest, likely to be alone and reflect. Perhaps to be away from me, from the life I represented. I didn’t know.
Even now, when I know everything there is, I’m still ignorant of so much.
* * *
Several hours later she returned. I sat at the kitchen table sipping my third cup of black coffee. I hadn’t dared go back up the stairs, hadn’t crossed my mind for a second to intrude a second time into the attic, where a different world than the one I knew resided.
Julie came in, dirty and shaking, staring at me with wounded eyes. Her hair was flecked with bits of dead leaves, her feet stained with streams of moist earth. I could say nothing, had no idea how to begin. It was she who broke the breathless silence.
“I’m sorry for that. For what you saw,” she said. “It was a playful experiment, nothing more. Something I read in a magazine.”
Her words came from her mouth like a transcription, a dictation as toneless and placid as her lost dreams.
I nodded and asked if she wanted coffee.
“After a shower,” she said. “Later, I’ll clean up. I’ll clean the attic, I mean.”
I nodded again and she went upstairs to shower, leaving me alone to think about the early morning’s bizarre events.
* * *
I never found anything strange in the attic after that morning. The strange book disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared, and the arcane symbols were removed by an afternoon’s scrubbing. The incident, however, continued to nag at me. I finally gave in to my curiosity and asked a university associate of mine—a professor of ancient religions, the occult and other such nonsense—what some of the symbols I’d seen might be derived from.
One midafternoon I went to his classroom and sketched out the images as best I could. He looked over my shoulder, his white bread and ham sandwich disappearing in large sloppy bites, the stinging tang of the yellow mustard infiltrating my nostrils as he bent closer to study my scrawling.
With a mouthful of mushy processed meat and fattening dough my associate pointed with a crumb-laden finger at the page and almost gasped with delight, nearly inhaling a lump of ham down his gullet as he exclaimed, “It’s Wicca crap, Howard. Book of Shadows nonsense.”
He pointed at one symbol I had likely not drawn correctly, a circle with two moons facing outward on either side.
“That’s pretty basic stuff. Triple goddess, et cetera. This one,” he moved his finger to a spiraling image, “is the symbol of rebirth.”
“Wait a moment,” I said, “what do you mean, Wicca? And what’s the Book of Shadows?”
He scoffed, waved his sandwich in the air as if swatting a gnat. “The most basic of witchcraft, Howard. Stuff you could pick up in any corner bookstore.”
“Or a magazine?” I inquired hopefully.
“Sure, I suppose,” he answered. “What is all this? Some kid got you spooked?” He smiled and nudged me with an elbow. “Some young cut leaving love spells on your chalkboard?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
I thought for a moment. There was one other symbol, drawn under my naked wife’s feet, seemingly the center—the focus—of her drawings.
“Wait,” I said, scribbling the symbol as best I could remember it. “What about this one?”
My associate looked at the new drawing. His smile faded. He looked closer, squinting, and then quietly, almost trance-like, set down his sandwich. He pulled a gnawed, stubby pencil from behind his ear and proceeded to complement my design, thoughtfully drawing a few lines, then sketching in some detail at the middle. He stood up straight, studying his work. Then he turned his attention to me, his widening eyes no longer playful.
“Where did you see this, Howard? Seriously.”
I shrugged, not wanting to tell the truth, not unless I wanted my wife to be known as the Great Witch of West Virginia.
“It was scrawled on the back of a paper turned in by one of my students. I thought it fascinating and couldn’t understand what it was about. I suppose I was just curious.”
I didn’t look him in the eye, but down at the symbol, the culmination of our combined process. “Why?” I said, feigning flippancy, “isn’t this more of that Wicca nonsense?”
He looked at me for a long moment, his eyes searching mine, saying nothing. Then, abruptly, he shrugged and picked up the sandwich.
“No, Howard,” he said, walking back to his desk, leaving the doodles behind, as if they never existed in the first place, “that’s not a Wicca symbol.”
I picked up the paper, studied it. The drawing was a large circle with a triangle within. Inside the triangle was a snaking branch with three smaller circles attached. He had added a large, encompassing exterior circle, filling in some more detail along its border, strange lettering I did not recognize. There were many smaller symbols scattered within and a pentagram crisscrossing the entire design. Much more detailed than what my wife had crudely drawn on our attic floor, but certainly similar in most attributes.
“So what is it?”
He picked up a newspaper from his desk, as if he was discussing the score of last night’s baseball game.
“Demonic, of course. Can’t be a hundred percent, but it appears to be a symbol you would use, if one were practicing the arts of black magic, to create a pact.”
I stared at him, then back at the symbol. I tried to laugh, but only managed a weak smile. “A pact? Like what? A deal with the devil?”
He scoffed and stuffed the last bite of sandwich into his mouth.
“Probably not that direct,” he said, swallowing. “The seal of Lucifer being a bit more, uh, intricate.” He belched, then continued. “No, what you have there is a ritualistic symbol. Something used during a sacrifice—blood of a bat, that kind of shit. Whoever the kid was who drew that, whether they knew what they were doing or not, had at least done their homework. And based on some of the other symbols you showed me, I’d gu
ess they’re attempting a pact with one of the lesser gods. It’s a little all over the place... you’d have to know if there were a totem, uh, creature...” He put down his paper and unapologetically gathered his things to leave, now mumbling more to himself than talking to me.
“The descending hierarchy, the three-faced goddess, spirits of manifestation... who knows? They could have seen it in the Grimorium or some such text. Could be chance, random, or taught. Although...”
He stopped for a moment, thinking. His eyes found me, and he started to speak, then shrugged, dismissing the thought.
He sidled past, patting me on the shoulder as he made his way to the door.
“I’ll tell you this, Howard” he said, putting a faded, logo-free baseball cap on his big head and pulling the door open, the distant sounds of student voices saturating the room, “whoever the student was, I hope you gave them an ‘A’ on that paper.”
I shook my head, trying to keep up with him. “And why is that?”
He gave me a sickly smile, pointing to the sketch clutched in my hand. “Because that’s not someone you want pissed off at you.”
* * *
At home things were tranquil, and I didn’t invite trouble where there was none to be found. I kept my mouth shut about the incident in the attic. Julie seemed happy, energized. She bustled about doing small projects, even building a birdhouse on our rear patio—a white wooden A-frame on a tall pole with plastic feeders set neatly on either side, the trim a royal blue.
She began painting again. Soft, subtle images that focused on our natural surroundings. A typical landscape showed tall, dark trees surrounding a clearing brightened by a burst of light, inside a nestling of wild flowers flowed, their petals dusted with the pink of dusk, and above it all a hovering sky filled with a Turner-esque rolling of blood-red froth streaked with gold.
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