by Gemma Files
Also fell three drops of Uranus’s blood, from which sprang—other things.
But this is just a story.
* * *
Monday was slow. Rain began in the early morning, still going strong a little after dawn, when Mavis woke. She made herself a cup of tea and studied wallpaper samples until noon, setting aside one with a pattern of thin blue leaves on pearl grey. At three, there was the funeral. She was home by five, and ironed a blouse while watching the six-thirty news.
Soon after that, at dusk, they came.
* * *
It was very late in 1943, during the Blitz, when Mavis met her husband. She had come to London, ostensibly to work in a munitions factory, along with her three older sisters. But all of them knew the unspoken reason for their collective flight from Glasgow. They went because Scotland was an old place, and a cold place, and because none of them fancied ending up like their mother, who had coughed her life away in the upstairs bedroom of their lower-middle-class home only a few months before.
Clara joined the army and ended up in artillery—shooting down Jerry planes all day, jitterbugging with Allied soldiers all night. By VE Day she’d gained two children, but remained staunchly unmarried. The kids turned out bad—one drowned down a sluice-gate, the other an interior designer in Manchester (and we all knew what that meant.) Joan, always the pretty one, drove her ambulance over an unexploded shell in 1944. And Ellie was a nun somewhere in Brussels, but her order didn’t allow mail so Mavis let her slip away without much regret—such a stiff little nit at the best of times, Ellie.
It was cold that night, walking home. She’d just reached the edge of the bridge when the sirens went off—blackout. She heard the bombs whistling around her and froze solid. Then, out of nowhere, a man—jumping past, pulling her with him as he dove for the nearest cover. “Get down, girl, Christ alive!” And they’d tumbled into a ditch together and stayed there all night, her head glued to his chest, eyes screwed shut in his arms and feeling his heart against her cheek like a snare-drum.
Three weeks later, they were married.
Eileen soon followed, and the war’s end, and the boat to Canada.
* * *
The doorbell rang.
It was 7:15 by the kitchen clock—one of Eileen’s presents, an idiotic grinning sun fringed by bent tin rays. Definitely not an hour for visitors, even expected ones.
Mavis rose. As if on cue, her headache drove needle-deep behind her left eye and lodged there, twisting. She squinted against the light, trying to dull it, and moved stiffly down the steps. As she touched the doorknob, the bell rang again. Anger welled up, a jet of blood in her mouth.
“Coming!” she snarled, wrenching it open.
The rain had finally stopped, and the sidewalks lay slick and dark before her. Across the street, Arthur A. Perry Junior High School—square as ever but unusually silent against the sky. An indigo-tinted flood of shadow smeared its outline to a blur, the full moon lighting one corner briefly before a cloud put it out. Mr. Cioberti’s willow creaked to her left, shifting in the wind with a wet slither of leaves.
The porch was empty.
“Bloody kids,” Mavis muttered.
She stood still a moment, looking out. The swollen joints of her elbows had begun to ache again, and the damp didn’t help. But the street slept on, nothing stirring beneath the surface of its uncanny calm. At length, she turned away.
A nice cup of tea, she thought. That’ll set me right.
The kitchen clock read 1:18 when she opened the door, and saw them.
The man who’d saved her, that night in 1943, was Allie Hennenlotter—tall, handsome devil-may-care Allie. He gave her his name, a child and a fresh start in a new country. He also turned out to be just the kind of shiftless drunk Clara’d always said he was. Refusing a battlefield commission because he didn’t want to leave his drinking buddies behind, he dragged her out to Saskatchewan and parked her on his father’s farm while he pursued a series of low-paying jobs he couldn’t hold long enough to send her a quarter of what she and Eileen needed to live on.
Even so, it took her three years to leave him.
She fled to Toronto, losing him in the crowd. When her bruises had faded, she applied herself to the task at hand—raising her child right. Took a secretarial job, upgraded her skills through night classes, fended off intermittent offers of marriage or mistresshood with a bland kind of “company” charm that won few friends but made even fewer enemies. She didn’t make much, but all of it went to Eileen, who never showed the slightest bit of gratitude. Not that she’d really expected her too—like father, like daughter.
They fought daily until Eileen was 16, when she ran away to Montreal, with some cockamamie idea of becoming a ballerina. The postcards, far and few between as they were, retained an ever more strained optimism. Still, Mavis wasn’t a bit surprised when her friend Dorothy’s son Kerry saw Eileen dancing topless in a downtown bar.
It proved there was some form of justices in the world.
After that, she marked all of Eileen’s communications “return to sender.”
* * *
“What—?” Mavis began, and stopped in mid-question.
They reared up in front of the stove, blotting out the kitchen light. One great mass of—no, three; three sloping, shrouded heads. They regarded her eyelessly, without judgement. And the rest all just fell away, a grey, jumbled torrent of something that looked a bit like gauze—stained and stiff-streaked with clotted slime—sweeping almost to her own feet.
Their shadow poured over her, stagnant and cold. She held her breath against the smell. The air grew stale and heavy with moisture, as if before a storm.
Then she screamed, almost as an afterthought, and fled.
They followed, keeping a polite distance. A dull, rustling noise trailed in their wake.
She slammed the downstairs bathroom door on it, and paused, panting.
Minutes passed. Mavis met her own eyes in the mirror and grew steadily calmer. No need to rummage for her pills—this was a dream. Those things simply were not there. Could not be.
Would not be, once she’d gotten a hold on herself.
“You have nothing to be afraid of,” she told herself, as deliberately as she could. “There is a God. And there are no monsters.”
Eventually, she opened the door and strode forth.
They parted to let her through, giving her a good head start.
* * *
“It was really inevitable, Mrs. Hennenlotter,” that nice doctor—Evans?—but he’d looked a bit Jewish, really—had assured her. “Your daughter was hopelessly in debt, addicted and alone, but too proud to ask for help. Her note blamed no one. In fact, the last sentence merely expressed a hope that you not be too disappointed in her.”
He went on to confirm the funeral arrangements—closed coffin, no reception, donations to Covenant House instead of flowers.
Mavis thanked him and walked home, passing an inordinate amount of baby carriages for that time of year.
* * *
At work, the girls got together on a card. WEEP A WHILE, THEN MOURN NO MORE/I KNOCK AT LAST ON GOD’S GREAT DOOR, it read.
“If you ever need to talk, dear—” Dorothy said.
Mavis nodded, absently, scanning the room from the corner of one eye. She didn’t have to look too far. They were leaning against the far wall, next to the office copier.
No one took any notice. But then, no one ever did.
Not the passengers on her daily bus rides here and home. Not the people she met while walking to the store each evening. Not the customers at the neighborhood McDonald’s, to which she had finally fled in despair, unable to cook under the constant pressure of that blind, triple stare.
They never came any closer, and they never spoke.
After a week, she broke down, and began to talk to t
hem.
* * *
The call had come so early in the morning that Mavis was utterly unable to place the noise until her telephone had already rung five times. She scooped up the receiver, jamming it between ear and shoulder, and hissed: “Yes?”
“Mum, it’s me.”
Like a kick to the stomach. All air rushed from her lungs, leaving her answerless.
“Mum, are you still there?”
Mavis gulped, trying to steady her voice. “What do you want, Eileen?” she asked, finally.
There was a pause. Mavis could hear her breathing, shallow, as if something were caught in her throat. Then, thickly:
“I have a question.”
“Well?”
Another pause, this one so long Mavis suspected she’d hung up. But instead of the dial tone, Eileen said:
“Did you ever love me?”
The stupidity of it slapped Mavis fully awake. She was back in known territory now. Struggling up in bed, she snapped: “What a thing to say! Really, Eileen—are you drunk?”
“No, mother.” But she did sound remote—submerged in some frozen sea of pain, with ice blocking her escape.
“That’s a change, then. Did I ever love you? I only worked all my life to keep you in good clothes, and no thanks for it, either. If that’s not love—”
“Is it, though?”
“Four o’clock in the morning’s no time for riddles, Eileen.”
“Then you didn’t,” Eileen said. “Thank you. I’d wondered.”
“Now, you just hold on a—”
“No,” came the reply. “No, I’ve held on too long, I think.”
Mavis groped for words, but they fled the numb, measured tone of Eileen’s voice as flame flees water—extinguished at a touch.
“I just wanted to get it all straight, before I did it,” Eileen went on. “When you started sending everything back, I think I knew then. It just took me a while to make up my mind. Now I have.” Pause. “I guess I should thank you.”
The line hissed softly between them.
Mavis felt her pulse hammer against the silence, unable to break it. Not for Eileen. Not for anything.
“I hate you,” Eileen said. “I’ve always hated you. Even if you said you loved me right now, I’d still hate you.” Her voice broke. “So why—why—can’t I stop caring—what you think of me?”
Then a click, and an empty hum.
It wasn’t until nine the next morning the police came to tell her they’d found Eileen, hanging by a studded leather belt from the shower-curtain rail in her apartment.
It was a lovely day. Birds singing and everything.
* * *
“I want you to go away,” Mavis told them.
They, as usual, said nothing.
She paced up and down, feeling the strain in her limbs with every step. Her hips cracked as she turned to face them again.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
One of them, bored, tilted its head slightly towards the window. The others remained level, the blackness beneath their cowls locked steady with her eyes.
“Speak, God damn you!” she screamed.
The room dimmed, and the air filled with dust. A kind of murky haze seemed to rise from her beloved furniture, making it look old and clumsy and precariously perched on the edge of decay.
“It’s Eileen, isn’t it?” she said. “Isn’t it? You want me to say I’m sorry, don’t you? Well, I’m not. She was just like her father, never finished what she started. Thought she was better than me, who had to work for my living, but she found out, didn’t she? Nothing but a whore, she ended up, and that’s the plain truth.”
They watched. Waiting.
“And what do you know about any of it, anyway?”
Dust filled her nostrils, stinging her eyes. She blinked at them, coughing.
Suddenly, a dull pain rolled through her like a tide.
“All right,” she whispered. “I am.”
The distracted one’s head whipped back, surprised.
“I am,” she repeated, sure of it now. Then: “Oh, I am.”
Tears clotted the dust on her cheeks, as the light faded even further.
For a moment, nothing happened.
And now they’ll go, her mind chattered away somewhere in the distance. They’ll go now. They’ll go. They will.
Then a kiss of pleasure rippled through the room. She looked up, just as the tallest one bent to show her a wide, flat, sharp smile that split its face from side to earless side.
Mavis smiled back, uncertainly.
Won’t they?
“You repent,” the tallest one said, in a voice like wind along a gully filled with dead leaves, at the height of October. “Good.”
The others nodded.
“Now we can begin,” they replied.
And as they raised their hands, Mavis saw their fingers were knives.
* * *
After Uranus’s downfall, Chronos went slowly mad. Obsessed with the idea his children would destroy him, as he had destroyed his own father, he ate the babies his sister/wife Rhea gave him as quickly as they were born. But she saved the last one, Zeus, and hid him until it was time for him to fulfill Chronos’s fears by becoming the ruler of a new crop of gods.
Rhea knew Chronos’s madness was the work of creatures he himself had created, by committing the world’s first murder; the goddesses of revenge, known as the Furies. Their names were Alecto (who Perseveres in Anger), Maegara (the Jealous One) and Tisiphone (the Blood Avenger.)
They were dreadful beings. To placate them, men sometimes called them the Eumenides, or Kindly Ones.
But this is just a story.
By the Mark
All naming is already murder.
—Lacan.
Hepzibah, she called herself, mouthing the syllables whenever she thought no one else was looking. Hep-zi-bah. A powerful name, with strength in every note of it; a witch’s name. She whispered it in each night’s darkness, dreaming of poisons.
Outside, across the great divide between schoolyard and backyard, she knew her garden lay empty, sere and withered, topsoil still bleak with frost. Snow festered, greying, on top of the trumpet-vine’s dead tangle. Behind that, the fence; further, a sloping away. Down past graffiti in full seasonal bloom, down into the mud at the base of the bridge, into the shadows under the pass, where the “normal” kids fought and kissed and loudly threatened suicide.
Into the Ravine.
One month more until spring. Then the nightshade bushes on either side of the property line would be green, each leaf bitter with possibilities.
But here she sat in Wang’s homeroom class, textbooks laid open on the desktop in front of her: Fifth Grade English like an endless boring string of Happiness-Is-To-Me, When-I-Grow-Up-I, My-Favorite- Whatever Journal exercises, Fifth Grade math like hieroglyphics in Martian. Real reading matter poking out from underneath, just barely visible whenever she squinted hard enough—Perennials and Parasites, A City Garden Almanac; roots and shoots, pale green print on pale cream paper, a leftover swatch of glue from where she’d ripped the school library slip off the inside back cover still sticking its back pages together. She sat there scanning entries while Mr. Wang reeled off roll-call behind her, desperately searching for something, anything she could recognize from that all-too-familiar tangle of weeds along the winding path she usually took home, wasting as much time as possible until Ravine finally turned to driveway and the house—
—“her“ house—
—that place where she lived, on Janice and Doug’s sufferance, reared itself up against the sky like a tumor, a purse-lipped mouth poised to pop open and swallow her whole.
“Diamond, Jennifer,” Wang droned, meanwhile, back in the world nine people out of ten seemed to agree was real. “Edgecomb,
Caroline. Garza, Shelby. Gilford, Darien. Goshawk . . . ”
Daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus); Looks like: Star-shaped bright yellow corona of petals around a bonnet-shaped bell, with long, tulip-like stem and leaves. Toxic part: Bulbs, which are often mistaken for onions. Symptoms: Nausea, gastroenteritis, vomiting, persistent emesis, diarrhoea, and convulsive trembling which may lead to fatality.
“Often mistaken for onions . . . “ like the kind Doug insisted on in his micro-organic salad, maybe. So no one’d be likely to question her having them, even away from the kitchen. Even hidden somewhere in her room . . .
She frowned, tapping the textbook’s covering page. “May lead,” though; not good enough. Not nearly good enough, for what she had in mind.
“Herod, Kevin. Hu, Darlanne. Isaak, Stephanie.”
Oleander (Nerium oleander); Looks like: Smallish, wide-spread pansylike blooms on thin, tough stems with floppy leaves; Toxic part: Entire plant, green or dried—when a branch of an oleander plant is used to skewer meat at a barbecue, the poison is transferred to the meat; Symptoms: Nausea, depression, lowered and irregular pulse, bloody diarrhoea, paralysis and possibly death.
Nausea, depression—nothing new there, she thought, with a black little lick of humor. But Jesus, wasn’t there anything in here that didn’t come naturally (ha, ha) attached to having to roll on the floor and shit yourself to death? Anything that just made you . . . God, she didn’t know . . . fall asleep, sink into peaceful darkness, just drift off and never wake up?
Aside from those pills in Janice’s cupboard, the ones she’d probably miss before you even could swallow ’em? A little voice asked, at the back of her mind. No, probably not. ‘Cause that’d be way too easy.
And if she wanted easy, then why play around with plants and leaves and tubers at all? Why not just straddle the rough stones of the St. Clair East bridge, shut her eyes and let go, like any normal person?