Perplexed by the involuntary body movements, I began to press my hands down flat upon the cold gray marble countertop in order to prevent the digits from moving. No matter how hard I pressed, they continued with their involuntary dance. Soon, my arms and wrists were tired and aching from the exertion.
The pot issued forth a loud pitched whistle and I jumped in alarm, conking the top of my head against the cabinets above me. I winced and let out a yelp of pain. Catching my breath, I spun around on my heel and then carefully turned down the gas burner on the stove. I spent a few moments nursing my aching head as the tea kettle cooled.
By the time I began preparing my tea I had developed a sudden, very agitated sounding persistent cough. Every cough increased the pressure at the base of my skull, and the pain from the earlier head bump began to reform into a headache. The hacking worsened, and was shortly accompanied by a reflexive spasm of the jaw. I’d never experienced these sorts of unwanted body movements before. Panic set in. Had I misjudged my grandfather? Had the old man in a fit of vengeance, poisoned the tea?
I carefully set down the teacup, afraid to take another sip. I was certain I was going to die. What happened next was even more unexpected and equally, if not more, terrifying.
I felt I might leap from my skin when an outside presence forced open my mouth to speak. At first it felt like a jaw spasm, but the movements of lip and tongue and the beginnings of unmistakable vocalization horrified me. A voice was coming out of my body, and although it resembled mine, it was not my own. I recognized the pronunciation immediately, and I knew it was my grandfather.
“I hope you’re enjoying the estate,” Reginald hissed, his sibilant vocalization no longer hindered by dentures, or muffled by aging flesh. The voice was forcibly torn from my own throat. I felt my chest tighten with anxiety and my pulse began to quicken. I was overcome by an urge to run screaming from the room, but where would I run to? My grandfather somehow possessed my body. How could you escape something that was inside of your very skin?
“Out, demon!” I screamed back, alarmed.
My protests were to no avail. I attempted to leave the room, but I couldn’t move my own feet. The occupying force held me steady in place, refusing to allow me the luxury of turning my head to one side to look away from it.
“You know I am no demon,” my grandfather sarcastically retorted. Even in death, he was insufferably pompous. “Things might be simpler if I had been a demon. Then, I would have no need for flesh. But I, like you, am a spiritual traveler. It’s an inherited condition. Unfortunately for you, you won’t be living long enough to learn how to exercise your powers.”
What did he mean by inherited? I was a passenger in my own body, as the pushy old man strode my feet into his kitchen. He chuckled under my breath, lending his lilting tone to my voice as he described in some detail his experiences as an entity who occupied the flesh of others.
“I’m much older than you think,” the old man explained, pouring himself a fresh cup of ginger tea. “Yours is the third body I’ve occupied. I was your grandfather’s grandfather before I took his flesh. I was a young man in the early eighteenth century. Believe it or not, I was your age when Gulliver’s Travels was published back in 1726.”
“Fascinating,” I told the old man in my body. “I bet my grandfather was as amused by your endless jabbering as I am now.”
The old man cut me off without a thought, as though I had said nothing. He simply continued his lecture as though I were an unruly student. “Traveling was all the rage for young men of my era and background. We left our homes in Europe to sail the seas, in search of exotic locales in Asia and Africa. Some of us traveled as I did, by caravan, to locations near but not less enticing. I took the spice roads into the Near East, traveling with merchants who variously sold spices, clothing dyes, and fancy cloth. It was during these travels that I became well acquainted with any number of popular opiates and additionally, the theories regarding astral projection.”
“You’ve been reading too many old horror stories,” I told myself in irritation. “You sound like a character from W. W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw.”
“That certainly is a modern tale,” the old man chuckled. “I rather enjoyed it. I wish I could say I wrote anything anywhere near as imaginative, but as you can see by my bookshelves, all I have written were dry academic articles and fanciful travelogues encouraging bored young men to sail the seven seas in search of adventure.”
“I need ask you to leave my body,” I cried in frustration. I’m not sure why I argued with the foreign invader in my body. Perhaps I had some strange notion that the parasite could be reasoned with. It did not seem reasonable, refusing as it did to allow me to control myself. It took me through the motions of bathing and tooth brushing before it adjourned to bed.
“How lovely it is, having teeth again,” the old man said as he brushed.
It was just before dawn when I awoke quite naturally to the gradual illumination of the pink-tinged gray clouds in the morning sky. I felt no tinge of the unwanted presence around me, and momentarily, believed it had all been a terrible nightmare. I was overcome by sense of relief so pervasive that it filtered into all aspects of my being. I walked through the house rolling up shades, binding curtains with sashes and throwing open the windows. Fresh air entered the rooms, cleaning away the dank and dusty scents from the corners. Drops of sunshine entered the room, illuminating the dark corners. I felt as though my very soul was cleansed.
It was in this carefree and happy state that I stepped out the back door and entered into my garden. I was smiling when I entered the tin walled gardening shed and picked out a pair of gloves, a weeding hoe, and pruning shears. My grin only broadened as I sat in the dirt, tending to the garden. Half an hour passed before it occurred to me that gardening was nowhere among my ordinary set of leisure activities. I frowned. When had I suddenly developed an interest in gardening? As if in answer to my unspoken question, my jaw burst open in a series of braying guffaws.
“I bet you didn’t know I was here,” Reginald chuckled in my mind, sending me leaping up from my seat. My lips didn’t move this time, so I thought that perhaps I’d just imagined it. “You probably thought you developed some new talents through osmosis as you slept,” it taunted. “You always were the arrogant one, ignoring my good advice.”
By the time my body was finished gardening, my mood and spirits had dampened considerably. I began to believe I was having some kind of a break down, and I was losing my mind. A sense of malaise overtook me.
In my despair, I began to daydream of my kind and ordinary Leslie. She had been such a loyal and dependable person. I remembered how she’d visited me with soups and lozenges when I’d been sick two months ago with the flu. She’d been heartbroken when I decided to move so far away. She called me daily now that we were far apart. How I missed her today.
“You won’t miss her for long,” the ominous voice issuing forth from my strained vocal chords mocked. “Soon, you won’t feel anything at all, except what I allow you to feel.”
The next three days were a series of ongoing and increasingly futile battles to regain control of my own body. Reginald seemed to wait until I was exhausted, physically and mentally, to take over completely and run me like a marionette all through the house. When I resisted, he used the physical exertion of my own efforts to purposely tire me. Soon, I realized that my only hope at winning this battle was to cease struggling against him and to allow myself to become rested enough to resist.
I was in this meditative mode, disciplining myself not to resist, when I first found myself terrifyingly untethered from my own body. I floated through the air to a destination one to two feet above my head. It was frightening, this sense of liberation from my own flesh. I felt anxious that I would never return to it if I did not immediately reenter, and so I shoved myself back into my body. I was sweating and delirious, trapped in my own skin, staring into the mirror while Reginald went through the motions of shaving.
<
br /> Every day, I found myself spending more and more time outside of my body. When I ventured back in, I was lectured by the caustic first Reginald Moore. He assured me that soon, my detachment would be permanent. I would become a bodiless, wandering spirit like all of the others before me. I might haunt him briefly, but like my grandfather before me, and his grandfather before that, I would give up one day and simply vanish.
When I was able to focus on other things, my attention went to sweet Leslie. Absence in this case did indeed make the heart grow fonder. Her virtues began to outshine any flaws in my memories of her. I focused on her so much that I believe, almost superstitiously now, that it was my thoughts that brought her knocking on my door on the seventh day of my disembodiment. It was not, of course. It was the elder Reginald’s failure to respond to her calls and text messages. Still, it was wonderful to see her face.
“Can you hear me?” I asked her, my wandering spirit chattering restlessly in her ear. My grandfather batted away my persistent attempts to reenter my body, my former lifelong domicile. It was useless. I, the previous resident, had been illegally evicted.
How I wished that I could communicate with my poor, dear Leslie.
But my grandfather was right when he said be careful what you wish for.
I imagine that it was my avid concentration on Leslie that caused me to become sucked into her body. The magnetism that pulled me inward was nearly irresistible, a force of nature, like a tornado, spinning me into a vortex somewhere in the center of her soul where she longed for me.
The moment I arrived at her center, the volcano roused in seeming disagreement, and the earth shook in trembling complaint. Hearing its plea and warning, I wished to quickly exit her body. It was too late. I was bound to her flesh.
Now I sit in Leslie’s body, trying desperately to refrain from exerting my own will upon her. How would I be able to bear it, if I had to subject this innocent woman to the fear and disillusionment I experienced when my grandfather operated me against my will? A million times a day I wished I could extinguish myself, but it was not anything I could control.
So I sit here instead, in the wee hours of the night, typing a manuscript with the sleeping body of my beloved Leslie. I worry that she will become conscious, and aware of my usurping her power. I trouble myself with thoughts of how difficult it will be for me to allow her free will, especially when she may make choices that I disapprove of, like taking another lover.
If I were my grandfather, I would have taken her against her will. Her body would now be my full time residence, and she would be ousted from her tenancy. But I am not him. I can’t bear to do it. So I live here, hiding my presence. I hide here, hoping I will remain undetected, and not the instrument that will send my unfortunate love into a state of unrelenting psychosis.
WOE, VIOLENT WATER
Lily Childs
“I have fingers that creep,” she said. “From the line of your spine to that place on your neck where I could break you, shake you, steal your soul.”
Exhaustion stopped the Elders from doling out more punishment to the wild waif they’d gathered into their bosom, but they listened to the words crackle from her husky throat. They would not forget.
“Enid.” A young mother clapped hands over her baby’s ears; the child wailed into the eternal sunset. “Your voice could curdle butter, girl.”
“It does,” the girl said. “And it shall again.” She squatted on the barren earth, shifted the skirts they’d lent her, and relieved herself in a great gush. “Do not speak my name. It is mine, not yours to spill.”
They forbade Enid to dance, and would not let her sing.
Dragging themselves across dustbowls toward ever-distant mountains, the Woebegones regarded the girl’s ceaseless energy.
Whilst they lost muscle from bone, and organs failed from malnutrition and thirst, Enid thrived.
Her company was not fruitless, however. Disappearing for hours into nowhere, her return always yielded gifts of sweet water. Together with the fittest of the group, she shared it out in small doses.
“T’will be enough to keep us alive,” the Elders agreed. They offered no thanks to their benefactor, sending prayers instead to the unearthly provider in the sky. Enid said nothing more about this. She would gain her reward when she buried the Woebegones’ dead.
Boots ruptured, clothes tattered, they moved on, half the number that had started out on the great journey. They awoke one morning to thick fog, a cold potage that soaked their garments.
“T’is a sign,” someone said. But of what, they could not agree. Murmurs of salvation countered wailing omens of a hell arisen from the depths. All for the sake of a little mist.
Enid climbed off a boy and whispered in his ear.
“There’s a change in land nearby, that’s all. It’s no great portent.”
Enamoured yet fearful of what he had just given himself up to, the breasts he had suckled, the boy shivered as his body succumbed to an all-pervading chill. He stared into the murk of this new morning. No day would ever be the same.
“Enid,” he called.
She didn’t call back.
The group set about collecting the moisture to drink. Women wrung out sodden blankets, hats and clothing, not questioning whether the filth of travel, of creeping uncleanliness could ever be boiled out of the black water that emerged. They filtered it carefully, hopefully.
The mist rose.
The sun set.
The light did not change.
“We must travel overnight,” said the Elders. They did not argue, for the Woebegones kept books of punishments due. No-one wanted their names on those pages to be associated with Enid by pen, her misdemeanours recorded with ink and spit.
They trudged onwards, belongings clattering as nocturnal bells on their backs. Human asses. Heads down. Eyes half-closed.
“Stop!”
They didn’t stop, accustomed to Enid’s outbursts.
“Drown then,” she said, loud enough to falter the most stubborn of steps. She stood before the leading pack, signalling, waving, her arms clad in tattered-edged sleeves, wings of leather. “You cannot cross here.”
A woman collapsed to her knees, then down again to hit her head upon stony ground. The babe strapped to her chest was crushed by the fall. It didn’t cry. Instant death. By the time its mother regained her spirits, the child had been baptised in the flowing river and buried beside it.
After resting for two days upon the riverside’s lush land, the Woebegones fell into two camps—those that wished to settle right there and those who believed the distant mountains offered better survival choices. The Elders commanded a bridge be built. The younger people refused. Despite a declaration that such dissent would be neither tolerated nor go unpunished, the young stood strong. When the Woebegones’ Punisher took a whip to three men’s backs, it only strengthened their resolve. And when the Punisher was found dead the next morning with a rope of human gut tied around his throat, the split was finally made.
Enid was blamed. For causing ructions, for debasing the Woebegones’ young men, for murder. And worse.
“We cannot suffer a witch to live.”
“But she saved us, Borthwick—brought us water, gave us sustenance.”
“And all the while she blossomed at our expense,” the leader cried. “How do you think she fared so well whilst the rest of us were dying? What do you think she did with our corpses?”
Seeds of doubt swiftly sown.
She had eaten their flesh, sucked the souls from their mouths. The cloaks and skins she wore were not the hides of animals but those of the Woebegones themselves. All rumours, all plausible grains of truth.
As the mountain-goers constructed a simple bridge and the valley dwellers made huts of stone and mud, Enid was shackled and caged. Everyone ignored her pleas and rants, whispering instead of her madness as she howled through the nights, disturbing their sleep.
The day came for the community to select their chosen paths.
Having come to a temporary peace, the Elders travelling on to the mountains cast a blessing over the river valley.
One of their number would remain behind, Borthwick declared, to act as their intermediary with God. Feet shuffled whilst voices stayed silent. The Elders controlled them still, burdening them with rigid beliefs. The young watched the old traverse the bridge on foot, pulling with them the groups’ remaining carts.
They reached the other side and waited as their leader traipsed back to the centre of the bridge. Both groups looked on, expecting another blessing. Borthwick turned to his appointed deputy on the valley side—his brother—and nodded. Gasps arose from both camps as the deputy returned to the bridge with a naked, bleeding Enid. Her beguiling face a miasma of bruises, one shoulder dislocated. Her right arm hung a full hand’s length farther down than the left.
Women, both sides of the bridge, covered their eyes in disgust and pity. Some of the men looked down in shame.
“Just let her go,” said a carpenter from the valley. “It’s what we agreed. She should not suffer this humiliation.”
“I agreed nothing.” Borthwick stepped towards Enid, who stood, head held high despite her injuries. He took a knife from his cloak. Its dull blade twinkled at Enid’s throat.
He cut.
Tress, by tress, Enid’s ink-black hair fell into the fast flow of the river.
“You are no longer Delilah, no more the temptress sent to weaken our men.”
Enid shot him a look, defiant to the end.
“Foul bastard, you cannot even recite your own bible tales with accuracy.” She spat in his open mouth. “I am no more Delilah than I am Samson; cutting off my hair will never sever my strength, even in death.”
Borthwick pushed her to the cusp of the bridge. Her toes clawed the edge.
“You will die for your sins, girl.”
“And what of your sins? Where was your repentance as you fucked me front and back while your wife lay sleeping?”
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