Magic

by Audrey Niffenegger

  “What do I have to do?” asked Sasha.

  THE PROCESS WAS old and not without its risks. It had been passed down among the womenfolk from one generation to another. Martitia told her to sit back and relax, but Sasha was nervous, and in the back of her mind there was a suspicion that she had made the wrong decision in coming here.

  “If it helps, you can think of this as an ancient homeopathic remedy,” said Martitia, sterilising a needle in spirit. “I need your blood and urine, just tiny amounts of each.” Inserting the needle in the crook of Sasha’s arm, she withdrew a small amount and emptied it into a plastic beaker, to which she added something pungent from a white paper packet, and a brown liquid. The combining process took just a few minutes. When she had finished, she asked the girl to remove her jeans and pants.

  Martitia sang softly to herself as she donned a pair of plastic gloves with practised ease. It sounded like a folk tune, dirge-like and vaguely annoying, the sort of thing old people hummed as they pottered around their flats. “Now, I have to feel inside you, just as far as your unborn baby’s head. It won’t hurt, but you may feel some discomfort.”

  “Are you sure that–”

  “You mustn’t worry about anything. Why don’t you just lay your head back on that cushion and close your eyes for a few minutes? I need to put some lubricant on, and it will feel cold. Try to think of something nice. Think of a time before all this happened, when you didn’t have anything to worry about.”

  Sasha tried to relax but she could feel the chill, slippery wetness, the alien hand between her thighs. She thought of her mother, and of Riley singing on the player in her bedroom when she was ten. She thought of innocence and the sheer simple pleasure of not knowing. There was a brown stain on the ceiling, beer or a burst pipe. Martitia was humming again. The sound seemed to pass through her, washing away her apprehensions.

  “There, how are you feeling?”

  She awoke with a start. Martitia had removed her gloves and was washing her hands in the bathroom basin next door. Sasha raised herself and pulled up her pants, still a little sticky. “All right, I think.”

  “Well done. That’s all for today.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are two more treatments, exactly the same as the first. It has to be done over three days.”

  “You didn’t mention–”

  “Well, I didn’t want to alarm you.” Martitia came back into the room, drying her hands. “Just come back at the same time, and now that you know the procedure I imagine we’ll be through in about twenty minutes.” She went to the desk and wrote out her number. “Here you are, hang onto this. Call me if you need to move the appointment slightly, but it’s important that you try to make it roughly the same time each day.”

  “What happens at the end?”

  “At first, nothing. You won’t feel any different. Then after about ten days you may feel a slight change – nothing very strong, just enough to make you want to go to the bathroom. You’ll pass the – what would have been the baby. That’s all. The very same afternoon, you could go swimming or play a game of tennis, although you probably won’t feel like it. Every process we undergo takes something from us, but we’re strong, our bodies can handle a surprising number of changes.”

  Martitia could not have been kinder or more solicitous, but there was something about her – the way she fiddled with her neck-chain, the occasional piercing stare – that bothered Sasha. Stepping back into the street she drew a lungful of cold air and felt suddenly safer in the uncaring crowds.

  BACK AT THE house she avoided her father and Karen, who were arguing in a distant, weary manner about a weekend to be spent with Karen’s family near the coast. She lay on her bed thinking about the baby, its tiny head anointed with – what, exactly? Some kind of ancient remedy that would send it to sleep forever, although she only had Martitia’s word for that.

  The TV was on with the sound down, some inane grimacing comedians and a singer with too much makeup. Riley could have been given his own spot on TV instead of this rubbish, but the programme makers were as stupid as their audiences. They had no imagination. If Riley hadn’t been misled into drugs by Drexelle he would have become famous. He would have kept his beautiful innocence.

  And then she realised; the baby was half his, which meant it was likely to be like him, and if she kept it the baby might grow up with a talent far greater and purer than its father’s.

  Once planted, the thought grew. Other young girls found ways to keep their babies, didn’t they? What if she didn’t go back to that awful hotel room? She had not given Martitia any way of contacting her. The woman had been completely trusting. She hadn’t even been paid yet. And what had she been doing anyway, wandering around the vast waiting room of a hospital drumming up business for her home remedies? She had just wandered in from the street, on the con or simply mad, or perhaps some kind of creepy paedo-lesbian getting her kicks from young girls. And an American – weren’t they all religious crazies hellbent on stopping abortions?

  Three days of treatments. If she didn’t go back it couldn’t work, otherwise why would the woman have kept pointing out the importance of returning?

  Sasha told herself she would decide in the morning, but she had already made up her mind. She would not go back.

  The next morning she folded up the slip with Martitia’s number and tucked it under her computer. Then she went back to school as if nothing had happened.

  OVER THE NEXT few days she evolved the plan. She would lie to her father and say she had taken care of the problem. Karen would never need to be told of what had transpired. And when her jeans no longer buttoned up and the baby started to show, she would run away to her mother’s house in Devon, where no-one would bother looking for her. She would call her mother soon, but not just yet. The time had to be right.

  She tried to pretend that her meeting with Martitia had never happened, that she had not been persuaded to accompany her to a station Travelodge so that the crazy woman could fake some mumbo-jumbo in order to feel her up.

  The passing days made her nervous, but when her period failed to reappear she relaxed, knowing that her baby was alive. On a rainy Saturday morning her father drove out with Karen, and Sasha sat in her bedroom downloading pictures of Riley. She printed them out and matched them with photographs of babies, trying to imagine what hers would look like. Would it have his incredible eyes? She thought of him, how he had been when he was still innocent, not about the corrupted thing he had become. She decided she had finally made a good match with the photographs when her mobile rang.

  “Sasha, I have to talk to you.”

  She recognised the voice immediately, and almost hung up.

  “Please, it took me a long while to find this number. I wouldn’t have called, but we had an agreement.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ll pay you the money I owe you.”

  “It’s not about the money, Sasha. Why didn’t you come back for the rest of the treatment?”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “But we started the process. I warned you there were risks.”

  “I’m fine. I’m well. I’m going to keep my baby.”

  “You don’t understand. The process isn’t reversible. I explained this to you. Your baby isn’t the same anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not really fully alive.”

  “That’s not true. You just want me to come back.”

  “I want what’s best for you.”

  “You don’t even know me!” Sasha cut the call and threw the phone onto her bed. It rang again, and she let it go to voicemail.

  HER FATHER WAS spending more time with Karen’s family at the coast. Since his daughter’s loss of innocence, he was less inclined to spend his evenings with her. She was no longer the little girl he had loved so much. The couple went to Scotland for a week, leaving Sasha alone with the housekeeper, and he had barely bothered to say goodbye.

  She wandered
about the place looking for something to do. Tamara no longer spoke to her. Although the pregnancy didn’t show, it was as if the change transmitted itself to other people, separating her from them. She felt different too; she had experienced something they had not, and it had matured her.

  She was about to make coffee and watch a DVD when a sudden spear of pain cut across her groin.

  It came in hot sharp stabs about fifteen to twenty seconds apart. As each attack subsided, it left behind an ache that felt like food poisoning. She made her way to the kitchen and filled a hot water bottle from the hot tap, pressing it against her lower abdomen, then lay down on her bed. The pain remained at the same level of intensity, each burst dropping back to a cruel, persistent gnawing. Finally unable to stand it any longer, she went to the bathroom and ran the tap until the water was nearly scalding.

  She wanted to lower herself into it but was too frightened to do so, and besides, while the heat might deaden her pain it could also harm the baby. Placing her hands over where she felt the new life to be, she was certain she sensed something tiny shifting about, twitching and nipping, pulling at its life-cord. But whatever was inside her had altered somehow. It felt upset and anxious, but surely it was too small to experience such feelings?

  She took two sleeping pills from Karen’s bedside table and washed them down with cola. Then she undressed and fell asleep on her bed, hugging her old Edward Bear. It was a little after ten o’clock.

  Her dreams were storm-tossed, crimson and violent, not scary but merely disorienting, strange and sad. She seemed to be tilting about on a raft in a hot red sea.

  Then she awoke to find the bed streaming with her blood.

  It had just turned midnight. The bedside light did not work. The street lights made the blood look black, and when she gingerly lowered her hands between her legs she knew the baby was gone. Using the light from her cellphone she searched through the bloody covers, sure it had somehow chewed through its cord and freed itself, but there was no sign of it.

  She saw the trail, though. It led from the bed to the chest of drawers, smeary little prints on the cream carpet, first on all fours and then in tiny pairs, as if it had already learned to walk.

  A wave of weakness overcame her, but as soon as she felt strong enough she pulled the dresser out and searched behind it. She found it in the corner, black and shiny with dried blood; an upright foetus with a bulbous delicate head and tadpole eyes, a mouth that would have been comical, so wide and gummy, but it just looked unfinished and unready to be born. She had arrested its development but the magic had allowed it to live on.

  The baby was making a noise. It sounded like the folk-song Martitia hummed in the hotel room, but now some of the notes were wrong, and the melody was menacing. She found herself thinking This is absurd, it’s so tiny, what possible harm can it do? But when it suddenly pulled itself away from the wall and took a faltering step toward her she found herself backing toward the door.

  It hissed now, a startling high-pitched noise that resounded inside her head. What scared her most was not knowing what it wanted. She had kept the slip of paper with the telephone number on it. Snatching it from beneath her computer she fled from the room, convinced that the ugly little thing could not possibly travel any distance.

  Dropping to the landing steps she punched out the number. It rang eight times.

  “This is a strange time to be calling.” Martitia sounded half-asleep. “I’m guessing the baby has left your body, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s in my bedroom. I don’t know what it wants.”

  “I can’t help you now. You should have come back. It’s not human anymore.”

  “It still has my genes.”

  “Yes, but in a mutated form. It’s between two worlds. It’s very hard to understand what such creatures want.”

  “Can’t you do something?”

  “I’m afraid not. I can’t see you, Sasha. It knows I poisoned it and will only try to hurt me.”

  “What about me? What will it try to do?”

  “It will either love you, or it will hate you.”

  “What should I do?”

  “You must wait for it to tell you what it wants. Neither result is desirable. If it loves you it will try to hide inside you, where it feels warm and safe. It will tell you what to do next, because it is you.”

  “And if it hates me?”

  “It will eat your flesh until it reaches normal size, so that it can continue to grow after you’ve gone. Soon it will make up its mind. Until then you must try to stay awake. It’s dangerous to fall asleep.”

  “When I went near it, it started hissing.”

  “Then maybe it’s already decided that it hates you. I don’t know. It’s clever. It knows exactly what you’re thinking because it’s a part of you. You can try to kill it, but it will know where to hide and how to hurt you. It knows what you really want. It will wait in the dark until you’ve fallen asleep. You can’t run away, because it will always be near you until it gets what it wants.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It will decide for itself. It will tell you.”

  “It’s a foetus, you crazy bitch, how can it talk?”

  Martitia sighed as if she’d had enough of the conversation. “It will. It’s hard to explain. You see, it isn’t really there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told you, it’s between two worlds. Yours and his.”

  “You’ve seen this before?”

  “Only once.”

  “What happened to the mother?”

  Behind her there was a sound of scampering feet.

  “What happened to the fucking mother?”

  The sound of the baby was coming nearer.

  She lowered the phone and held her breath, slowly turning. Behind her, no more than two feet away, the baby swayed in the shadows on shiny wavering legs, its blackened flesh cord hanging down like a puppet’s cut string.

  She stared down at it and tried to understand what it wanted.

  The baby slowly raised its wet tadpole eyes to her and opened its gummy mouth to speak.

  Its voice sang inside her head.

  It said, Let’s kill Daddy.

  DO AS THOU WILT...

  STORM CONSTANTINE

  I first encountered Storm Constantine at Fantasycon, when I was but 17 years old. I didn’t know Storm or her work at the time, but I picked up a copy of her novel Sign for The Sacred and was very glad I had. There’s a real warmth and complexity to Storm’s writing, which the following story beautifully demonstrates. Storm writes movingly about how we empower ourselves and others through symbolic acts.

  FOLLOWING THE STRANGE affair with Brett Lyle it took Leah Metcalfe almost five years to realise the level of his scorn merited action. She might never have done anything, simply allowed the pain to heal and fade, get on with life, as you’re supposed to do after a bereavement. She read stories in the media of men who conned gullible women out of all their money – she had always thought them rather careless women – but in her case of conning, Lyle, she felt, had cleaned out her soul rather than her bank account. Or at least he had murdered a little bit of it. She grieved for this sundered part, long after it was polite or sane still to be noticeably doing so. After the vanishing years of moping and longing, which had felt like some nightmarish enchanted sleep, she had eventually become utterly disgusted with the emotions and had put them away, at last awake, and aghast at herself for wasting so much time on what had ultimately proved to be nonsense. Only when her friend Sophie, in whom she had confided during the two years of her involvement with Lyle, brought his name up in conversation during one of their fortnightly lunch meetings did Leah think about him again.

  The two women still met each other with an embrace and the greeting, “Blessed be,” even though Leah had not been part of Sophie’s magical group for several years. She and Sophie rarely spoke of such matters nowadays; their friendship was confined to the mundane. It had been Sophie
who’d put considerable effort into maintaining their relationship; Leah was fully aware of this. Perhaps Sophie considered it a charitable act.

  A few minutes after they sat down to their lunch, Sophie eyed Leah carefully. “Brett Lyle,” she said. “I don’t know if this is still a ‘no go’ area for you, but I thought you should know. It’s just burning a hole in me. You weren’t the only one, you know. He was still at it after you. Still is.”

  Leah shifted awkwardly on her seat. The cafe was hot, felt steamy. Outside cold rain hammered the shopping precinct, where women marched about their business. Some had bare legs. Rather unwise, Leah thought, in February. “I’m hardly shocked,” Leah said, although just the sound of his name had shocked her.

  “Well, of course. I realise that. But... Not everyone is as aware as you. Not everyone can get over things so easily.”

  Leah did not really think squandering years of precious life on mourning the loss of a man like Lyle could be described as being aware or getting over it easily, but decided to let this pass. Perhaps Sophie meant it as a compliment. “Why do you mention it? Have you heard something?” Leah realised she was in fact eager to know. She wanted to hear details of another woman’s emotional car crash. Inside, we are all ghouls, she thought.

  “This one is a lot younger than you,” Sophie said, sipping her latte, “thought it was for real.”

  Leah coughed up a laugh. “And I didn’t?”

  Sophie screwed up her eyes briefly, shook her head. “Sorry, you know what I mean. She doesn’t have your experience, you know? At least you did get over it. I saw the way you were. You did... incredibly.” She grimaced. “Ack, whatever I say sounds crass.”