by Brian Hodge
“Why did Ethan kill himself the way he did?” Maia asked. “Do you think it was only because you both thought the tree was Patrick’s and he wanted to defile that for you? Or was there something about hanging that meant more?”
God. What a question. Because it had an answer.
Pandora sipped at the tea, with greed now, found it calming, soothing, despite turning lukewarm. Maybe these herbs were just what she needed. She spent a moment swamped by the sense of well-being that often descends in the midst of tragedy: It will be all right. Somehow it will be all right…
“I’ve thought about it ever since I found him,” she said. “We used to talk about suicide, you know? When we were younger. When you go through that stage where you romanticize it. Except I guess Ethan still did. And it’s funny, because back then he would dwell on the idea of cutting his wrists. For him, that would’ve demonstrated the ultimate commitment: opening yourself up, literally. So if you’d told me ahead of time I was going to find his body, that’s how I would’ve expected to find it.”
Tramping through the grass. One foot after the other. Jesus, shouldn’t they be coming upon Patrick’s real shrine by now?
“But I had this poster. I thought it was the most beautiful thing, in a morbid way: a picture of a medieval hanging tree. It must’ve been autumn, but later than it is now, because there weren’t any leaves. Or winter, before the snows. It showed this huge oak silhouetted against a purple twilight sky, and from the lower branches there were all these bodies hanging from the neck. Men, mostly, but a few animals, too. Horses, dogs. I remember reading that back then they executed animals sometimes. Everything was in silhouette, so there weren’t any gory details. Whoever did it must’ve Photoshopped it, because a thing like that isn’t going to exist today…which maybe was part of the appeal. I found it peaceful more than anything. Their struggles were over.”
Tramping through the grass. One foot after the other. Though Glenmullen burned, she felt as if she could walk forever…then was drawn from her reverie when the first diffident raindrops spattered her cheeks.
“So when I found Ethan,” she went on, “even though I knew he’d killed himself out of selfishness, and a perverse jealousy, I knew it was the last thing he had to say to me, too: ‘Is this what it takes for you to want me?’”
“I’m sorry,” Maia whispered.
“Aren’t we all.” Tramping through the grass. One foot after the other. Feeling as though she could curl right up in the grass and go to sleep. “Why couldn’t I have loved him the way he wanted? Why couldn’t he have seen that I’m not anything special?”
She wanted to hear a rebuttal, expected it even, Maia telling her no, no, she was special, she was very special, that she’d seen this in Pandora the same way she had in Patrick. Except Maia said nothing. And said no more until she at last stopped walking and announced that here was the place.
A well. They had put the final share of Patrick’s bones down a well. Flanked by trees, encroached upon by dense growths of brush, even in the moonlight it looked very old. It was ringed by a wall made not by brick but stones, rough and flat and mortared together however they might fit, this ancient mouth a yard tall and less wide. In the moonlight, its growths of moss and lichen looked dark as blood.
And somewhere down its wet black throat lay Patrick’s skull. Surely this was where they’d lain his skull.
She thought of it down there, submerged, half-buried in silt, grinning up at her past, what—ribs, femur, clavicle? She wondered how his blood had settled in Maia’s belly, his flesh and seed taken by the other two Sisters. If she lowered a bucket, drew it up, drank a draught, would it fill her with any of the things for which she’d hungered?
The rain fell heavier now. Maia raised one palm, tipped her face to the sky with a smile she then turned upon Pandora. “Glenmullen has more than one defense. It will survive.”
Pandora went to her knees—not even willing the act, it just happened—and watched her arm disappear to the shoulder down the stone gullet. She reached, fingers splayed wide, felt nothing but a cold moist exhalation from below; was aware, dimly, of the earthenware mug tumbling from her other hand, striking something hard. It was too dense to shatter; it cracked, like a fallen egg, and the earth drank the last of the tea.
And she could not stand up again.
The tea…?
“Don’t fight it,” said Maia, now a weight bearing down upon her.
Right. After so many years, Maia would know all about herbs, wouldn’t she?
At first Pandora thought the sound of feet that she heard were her own shoes, or Maia’s maybe, whisking through the grass during their pitifully short struggle. She was wrong. When she saw a pair of male faces looming above, etched against the sky as grim as granite, she didn’t know whether to feel relieved because neither belonged to Fergus, or if it meant he’d sent others to handle something more terrible than even he wanted to be part of.
“Please don’t fight it,” Maia pressing her against the stones, Pandora trapped between soft warmth and hard cold, arms around her, arms that had held the countless children Maia had never borne, the same tender arms Pandora had for years dreamt of feeling, because their embrace would mean she was worth more than the world had ever given her credit for. Hold me, teach me, she would’ve pleaded from their sanctuary. Show me the world through a better pair of eyes.
But it was all one lie after another, wasn’t it, and these instead the ruthless arms that had welcomed the countless men who had come to Maia to die, whether they knew it or not…and surely deep down most of them had.
For who could fail to notice the grief in her eyes?
She would cradle the dying as if in a pietá, a virgin embracing her rotting son.
IX
With the impotent detachment of a dream, she saw. Whether imagination, or the disembodied omniscience of the dead, she saw, and couldn’t turn away. Over treetops and a steeple, past roofs of shingles, slate, and thatch, Pandora drifted with the smoke of dying fires. She ran with the blood that ebbed down muddy lanes; she merged with the shadows that lashed Glenmullen together as one, its buildings and its people and its secrets, and roped them to their fate.
And when that fated judgment befell another victim, it did so with frightful quickness, detaching itself from the dark in a blur of rain and wrath, obliterating any distinctions between heaven and hell.
No matter how sturdy the man’s legs, or how broad his back, they could never stand before the razored whirlwind wearing the scarred remnants of Ethan’s face—
*
Her eyes opened, blinking at the coldwater tears falling from the sky, dripping through limbs and leaves, streaming down her skull. A wonder she could get her eyelids over them; they felt ready to burst from their sockets.
Pandora weighed less than a paper doll; she was dense and cold as marble. She realized she was staring at the tips of her shoes as they spun in slow arcs against the grass below. A breeze, bearing needles of rain, gave her a nudge and left her swaying, gently swaying, as water beaded upon the tip of her tongue and sluiced down her chin.
She creaked her head upright, through the corrosion that gripped her neck, like a hinge that had rusted shut. Her throat tried to open for air and was all but denied, protesting with a reedy whistle. Somewhere between throat and shoes, her wrists twitched and her fingertips jittered, the most they could manage no matter how desperately she willed them to rise, rise.
Had the rope been thinner, had the noose been cinched lower, it would surely have cut deep enough to close her airway entirely. Instead, the thick round collar of it sat wedged beneath her jaw, the right side more than the left, so that she hung suspended by a precarious shelf of support.
Her heart began to hammer, and when she tasted watery blood, she knew she was biting the tip of her tongue. She pulled it from her teeth and tried to maneuver her sideways-sagging head until a grinding scrape of gristle and vertebrae radiated into her ears.
At first she
thought she must be near the well, still…but with another gust of wind and a creak of rope she turned again and this time saw the serpentine tangle of thick roots. The yew. They’d taken her back to the yew.
The war within her was escalating by the moment, panic raging against the lingering stupor of the soporific she’d been fed. Her toes began to scrabble for a grip and found only air. She wanted to scream but couldn’t, felt her face bloating into a hot purple mass—meat, she was meat suspended in air, kept alive by the same agonizing immobility that threatened to drive her mad.
And worse yet…
She wasn’t alone inside her skin.
It glowed inside her like a coal banked beneath ashes, left for the night and then forgotten—another presence, scratching futilely at the walls of her soul as surely as her fingers scratched at air. It was male—she sensed this because it seemed in so many ways the opposite of her—and so full of loathing for itself that had it been forced upon her even on her best day, it would still have convulsed her with sickness.
Revelation, then, and not reason: A body need not be as dead as Oran’s to be invaded; near to death must open doorways just as wide.
“Patrick…?” she croaked, or tried to.
It wouldn’t answer, or couldn’t. Or its answer was beyond words and thought, and the response she got was the only kind it knew how to give—she felt flooded with its biles of guilt, of regret, of condemnation from the unforgiving tyranny of its conscience.
And she wanted to die.
For all that she had hoped, for all that she had believed, for all that was now so plainly the yearnings of a fool…she wanted to die.
Soon enough, no doubt. With each pelting drop of rain that soaked her sweater to the skin, she felt as though she gained a pound, more weight to stretch her neck until it snapped, or seal her throat completely after a final wheezing breath.
Soon she heard the sound of shoes squelching upon sodden ground. The arrival set Patrick to scurrying inside her like a rat, as if confined by walls and about to drown. She let her gaze rove about its limited range but saw no one. Somebody come to gloat, maybe—look at her now, stupid girl from America who’d let herself get played for the village idiot.
A flash of memory—not her whole life but right now it seemed representative enough, and wasn’t that a sad statement—the second or third day she’d had a car of her own to drive to school, and even though she’d been accounted a nothing by the irrefutable standards that divided people like her and Ethan from all those who mattered, her new mobility must have caught someone’s eye and imagination. Because they’d snapped off the radio aerial halfway, then skewered three dead bats onto the sharp end.
The feet were still mucking across wet earth, closer now, coming to a stop a few moments before she saw the dull gray flicker of a blade.
Ever since that day, she’d never stopped wishing she’d had the stomach to clean up the mess unfazed…slide the dead bats free like papers off a spindle and continue on her way, giving as little satisfaction as possible to the assholes who had to be watching from afar, braying their stupid laughter over how they’d put another one over on the resident spooky chick they all loved to revile. But she’d been unable to do it without getting sick, possessed by a dread that the bats hadn’t been dead first, that they might come to twitching life at the touch of her fingers.
She wouldn’t have ducked the blade even if she could’ve, preferring it to a slow death by suffocation. But it flickered past, inches from her eye—hurled, she realized; no one had arms this long. She heard the sharp woody whack as the metal edge bit deeply into wet bough—thrown with such ferocity that it must have encountered no resistance from the rope at all. The pressure on her neck suddenly eased and she plummeted.
In the end, she’d found Ethan, still at school because the bug for drama had bitten him and he was volunteering for the spring play’s backstage crew. Reviling herself for needing his help, needing anyone’s help, she’d led him out to her car and turned her back until the cleanup was done, the small skewered bodies stuffed into his book bag. There were no words, of course, and he’d understood that so purely, Ethan turning shy and awkward because he knew, he knew, that the bats weren’t the half of it. He could’ve said so many wrong things right then…yet he had avoided every single one of them.
“You’re my angel,” she’d told him, and that day, he was.
But look at him now.
Just look at him now.
She’d already seen the dead speak tonight. Was it any worse a miracle to see them walk now, as well?
Pandora lay sprawled across wet grass, spongy soil. She whooped for air, like vomiting in reverse, hands clumsy as she tugged the noose wide enough to slip over her head. She raised herself on an elbow, tipped her face to meet the rain, and watched him in the gloom as the first gray of dawn crept down through the gutted clouds.
Neither she nor anyone else had ever thought of Ethan as a towering figure. He hadn’t lacked for height, but he’d slouched something awful, trying to melt below the notice of the world. Now, though, from where she lay, he brushed his shoulders on branches and scraped his head against the sky.
Last week’s clothes hung from him in tears and tatters, stained with mud and blood. From head to toe he streamed with water; his hair was a plastered veil. And yet he stood so tall. His pride was the pride of angels, and his remaining weapon that of a reaper. Dangling from his hand was a sickle, until this night used for someone else’s lifetime of cutting wheat, oats, barley.
She tried her voice but it failed her. Did he expect thanks? Would he even know the meaning of the words?
Back up a bit: Was there anything of Ethan left to hear her at all?
There must be—they had hung her, and he had known. They’d betrayed her and then hung her, left her to awaken soaked and choking in the last gasp of night, echoing his suicide, and he’d been drawn…by what, her distress? If all that lived within and moved him were an avenging angel, would he have cared? Would he have bothered to pause and save a life instead of taking one more?
She sought his face for answers, anywhere behind that cold, blank stare.
He gazed at her, his wonderful downturned eyes lending pathos to an otherwise pitiless face. His lips slackened and parted, then dribbled over with rain. And there was recognition there, wasn’t there?
What do you think, Patrick? she asked silently. One mass murderer in the presence of another…
But he was no help, pooling like sludge into her darkest recesses, and she wondered if he could feel that her keenest wish was that she’d never heard of him. Even more than she hungered to breathe without pain, more than she wanted Ethan living, she wished she’d never heard of Patrick Malone, never let herself fall under his undeserving spell. Because that would take care of the rest.
Ethan closed the last few steps between them, then dropped to his knees. For a few precious moments she could imagine he was still her friend, and that the dawn tried a little harder to break through.
Naive as ever, naturally.
Though he’d dulled his blade on the bones of others, it was still sharp enough to wield in one final assault. He scarcely needed longer to hack away her clothes than he did to remove what remained of his own.
She didn’t lack the will to fight, only the breath, the strength. When he forced his way inside her, it didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. Perhaps she’d passed the point beyond which she could feel much more…or it mattered less because, as far as she was concerned, she’d been raped once tonight already. She found a bitter comfort in realizing that while she no longer knew which side of this jihad she was on, it no longer seemed to matter.
He was a cold, slick weight upon her, exuding a strangely sweet fragrance that made a mockery of his corruption and the god from which he fell. She mourned the Ethan she’d known, loving him because she knew that he, at least, would never have done this…even if his old desires may have fueled the attack. They work in harmony with
what they find. Still, the wrathful thing that had been made of him seemed to take no satisfaction in its battering thrusts, neither cruel nor carnal, and so she couldn’t tell which carried the greater guilt here—the avenger itself, or the deep remembered longings of the body it exploited. This could’ve been punishment, or lust, or both.
And heaven was well served.
The Sisters, according to Patrick’s account, had been transformed by a kind of sacrosanct rape in an Israelite palace. She hoped that this was to be her fate as well—anything to bring meaning to something so ugly—but could not sustain the belief. No, this felt so base, so low. It had begun in mud and in mud it would end.
Arms pinned wide, nailed through the middle to the ground beneath her, she sucked blood from her tongue and spat it into the face above. He took it impassively; it diluted in the runoff to rain back to her eyes.
No dawn had ever taken longer to arrive. He had to weary of this sometime. She imagined the end as if seeing it through someone else’s eyes, happening to someone else’s body: He would rise and leave her to abhorrence and memory; or he would take up the sickle again and reduce her to one more bleeding carcass.
She couldn’t settle on which would be worse.
But whichever it would prove to be, it was moments away—she could feel it as surely as she’d felt Patrick, cowering and unworthy as a thief. While Ethan, or the thing inside him, had found ecstasy elusive, it was not altogether absent. Pandora sensed the build-up the same as she had with any guy she’d ever given her body to. They’d never had to gasp that they were coming for her to know. As long as they were inside her—not merely her mouth, but inside her, so resolutely connected—she knew. It was more than hardness and spasms and breath. It was power, a welling force that overwhelmed flesh and cried out in triumph across time. Even if the rest of the sex was a wretched, mechanical mistake—and it usually had been—she’d always found this moment to be somehow sacred, a breach into the innermost core.