The Dreams of the Black Butterfly

by Mark James Barrett

  “It’s fine.” Richard handed her a tissue.

  “It’s all so unfair, though, when we were just about to emigrate.”

  “Yes, I know,” he sighed. “Jenny was excited about moving. She talked about it a lot. I didn’t want her to leave of course.” He shrugged sheepishly.

  “Well, you suffered as much as anyone. You were just a child for heaven’s sake.”

  “I wish I’d stayed with her when she went back to the museum that day.”

  The old lady shuffled uncomfortably, eyeing him through the smoke like a poker player on a long losing streak. “Nobody noticed her go back into the museum alone, that’s what I don’t understand.”

  Richard held her gaze, despite his discomfort. “I wish I could tell you what happened. I’ve gone over it so many times in my head. Jenny wanted to go back one more time. I didn’t want to…”

  He couldn’t blame her. The police had grilled him quite hard after Jenny’s disappearance because he had been the last person to see her. The only witnesses who came forward at the time said they had seen Richard and Jenny in the museum and playing in the park. There was nothing else to go on, no clothing or physical evidence of any kind. Even if there had been, it was 1981, before the advent of DNA profiling and the like.

  The clock on the wall broke the awkward silence. Mrs Pity waited for the twelve chimes to finish. “Right,” she said, pushing herself up from the table. “That’s my cue. Do you fancy a real drink?”

  Richard was slightly appalled. “Erm … okay, what are you having?”

  She poured a cheap whisky for him and a gin and tonic for herself. She flung the drink back and poured herself another before sitting down. He let her waffle a bit more after that. She kept repeating herself, jumping up regularly to refill her glass. Richard tried to appear interested, sipping the whisky slowly, feeling it smoulder in his empty belly. A witch’s familiar slinked into the room and began weaving figures of eight between the old woman’s legs. She shooed the cat away with a gentle flick of her foot.

  “That’s Pluto; he’s the best friend I have.”

  Mrs Pity’s blue eyes glittered. “Sometimes, you know” – her voice lowered – “when I’ve had a few, I feel like I can climb into the photographs. Is that crazy?”

  “No … it’s just wishful thinking, I guess.”

  She stood up and closed her eyes, fists clenched at her sides. “I’m in there with her, I hold her and tell her I’m sorry and …”

  “It’s okay,” he said stupidly and stood up. His legs were shaking. He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “… and I ask her where she is. Do you know what she says?”

  Richard shook his head, willing her to stop.

  “She says, ‘Mummy, it’s so dark … so dark …” The old woman crumpled and he held her, his tears dripping onto her silver hair. He wondered if that was rude or not and decided it wasn’t.

  Afterwards, Richard poured Mrs Pity another drink and her face seemed to clear a little.

  “Yes, she was excited about Australia.” Mrs Pity drained her glass, crunching the ice cubes annoyingly. “If only we’d left a few weeks earlier. I wish I could just stop wishing and wishing. I’m so silly.”

  “Don’t punish yourself,” he said mechanically. His store of platitudes was running low, those remaining becoming more and more clichéd. He felt ashamed of the moment they shared, crying like that. It felt too familiar, like they had had sex or something.

  “I really must be going,” he finally lied. “I’ve a long drive ahead of me.”

  Mrs Pity showed him to the door and the alcohol made her move sideways and forward, sideways and forward.

  “My friend will be here soon anyway. Thank you for coming.”

  Richard took her little ape hand and kissed it. “It has been nice.”

  “Packed already are you?” She gestured at the case and ran her hand over one of the frayed stickers on its side. “It’s been around a bit this one,” she laughed.

  For a moment, Richard was struck dumb. He had wanted to show Mrs Pity the contents of the case. Otherwise, why had he bothered to bring it along? But now his nerve failed him. It would be too much for them both, he reasoned; the morning had been more emotional than he expected. He would have to visit her again and next time he would feel stronger for sure. But like a man who passes a beautiful girl every day on the way to work and swears to himself every evening that tomorrow he will ask her out, Richard knew deep down he would never have the courage.

  “Yes, always organised, that’s me.”

  Richard drove directly back to the guesthouse and lay down for a while. He felt utterly exhausted. The spider was in the corner of the room, reluctantly building a web. Its fragile movements quickly wove him into sleep.

  At just after two o’clock, he woke with a cry like a child’s and hoped nobody in the building heard him. He had had the witch dream again.

  The dream was always the same. In it, he came home from work and she was waiting for him in the kitchen, her back to the sink, those gnarled hands braced against the worktop. Sunlight came from the window behind, throwing her face into shadow. The horror was in the details: the cups upturned in the draining rack beside her; the breadcrumbs and sugar granules scattered across the counter. He knew what would happen next but could never move quickly enough. The grimalkin was on Richard in a flash and by a terrible magic, she shrank him and spun him into the darkness of her musty cardigan. There he waited, his body wrapped in hot, itchy thread, listening to the tremulous thump of her rotten heart, knowing that one day she would take him out and do something unspeakable with him.

  Richard splashed cold water onto his face for a full five minutes. He realised he would have to go home right away; all of this had been a mistake.

  Mrs Macdonald was out so he concluded business with her husband: a listless creature who looked like a man who had wandered through a wilderness for years, searching for succour, and had found only his wife’s mirage over and over again.

  Richard stood outside the guesthouse in the small car park, kicking gravel half-heartedly, watching the museum through the swaying branches of the horse-chestnut trees that surrounded the park. When he thought of the petrol can in his boot, of how he had intended to burn the museum down with the old witch inside, he shivered. It was madness, all of it. He shouldn’t be thinking this way. Maybe he needed therapy of some sort. It had been twenty years for Christ’s sake.

  If he could just go back, do things differently, then maybe Jenny would still be alive and he would be another person. He wanted to advise the child Richard, but he couldn’t reach him. There was too much between the two of them: a chasm of darkness they could only peer across wistfully.

  Jenny wrapped her arms around the peeling, steel bar and fought the centrifugal force trying to rip her away from the roundabout. Richard was opposite her, whirling like the pages of a flicker book, his foot pounding the playground floor.

  “Slow down, Rich, please. I want to go back to the museum.”

  “Not unless you promise to run away with me.”

  Jenny could feel the pressure in her neck and back building as she struggled to hold her head up. Her shoulders glowed with pain. Richard’s face blurred and flew from her eyes. She blinked rapidly, hearing his foot pounding and pounding …

  “Okay, okay, I will! Just please slow down.”

  Richard leaned back and dragged his trailing leg across the grey tarmac with a rasping stutter. They sat on the grass watching the roundabout slow down, waiting for the fluids in their heads to settle.

  “I’m so sorry, Jen.” Richard touched her hand but she pulled away. He looked at the drying tears that were gumming up her eyelashes and felt sick. “I just can’t believe you’re going tomorrow night, all the way to Australia. I’ll never see you again.”

 
“You will,” she said without conviction. “Listen, I’m going back to see the old lady one more time. Are you coming?”

  He pulled at the grass between his legs and tossed it into the air, shaking his head. “Uh uh! No way!”

  “Rich, you haven’t really seen her move have you? She’s not a witch, just a waxwork.”

  “Of course I have. She’s after us … I know it.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen anything. I think she’s kind of creepy, but sweet as well.”

  “You’ll be sorry if you go,” he warned her, but she was already walking away.

  It was teatime when Richard finally pulled off the A140 and escaped the rush hour traffic into Norwich. The avenue was stretched with long shadows. He got out of his car, shivering, and popped cracks from his stiff joints. The front door swung open when his key touched the lock. He stood for a moment with the key outstretched, frozen in shock. It was impossible that he could have left it open, wasn’t it? He couldn’t actually remember locking it, because he had been so preoccupied when he left home, but this wasn’t something he had ever done before.

  “Hello?” he called out three times and began to feel stupid. If there were a burglar … or something worse, they would hardly reply to him would they? He put down the cases and took out his phone. Richard didn’t have his immediate neighbours’ phone numbers, but he had Anne’s, the Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinator who lived two doors up. They almost had a thing six months previously but he had backed out; he was rubbish at relationships.

  Anne wasn’t home. He left her a message: had she noticed anything odd while he had been away? It was pointless really. He couldn’t stand outside until she came back could he? Richard listened to the occasional squeak of the door as it shifted in the wind, unable to force himself through it, and recalling the old curator’s mocking words, he was suddenly convinced. He imagined the witch circling the cauldron-black sky, sniffing at the wind, working through the filigree of smells in the atmosphere and occasionally catching the tiniest note of him, edging closer and closer every night until …

  She’s here.

  With great effort, he pushed the thought away, but his body still wouldn’t move.

  What if she’s actually here?

  A newspaper boy entered the garden. The crackle of his tracksuit made Richard jump. He took the free local paper from the boy’s hand and the spell seemed to break.

  “Stupid,” he said as he closed the door behind him, but his heart was banging as he turned into the kitchen. The dripping tap mocked his empty fears. He went straight to the cellar door, unlocked it and released the large deadbolts. Uneasily, he tapped Jenny’s birth date, 28371, into the alarm keypad. He kept looking over his shoulder as he descended the stairs, half expecting the witch to appear in the doorway behind him. The smell was rich and overpowering from the deodorisers, yet there was a sweeter smell underneath that caught the back of his throat, making his stomach quiver.

  Richard walked the length of the quiet cellar with just the buzz of the strip lights in his ears, his hand thumping along the row of suitcases. The last one was a recently bought Atlantic trolley case in top grain red leather. He knelt down beside it and whispered, “Jenny?”

  Something shifted feebly inside. Richard stared at the glossy photograph taped to the edge of the suitcase: a head shot of a ten-year-old girl, tousle-haired and bewildered.

  “Why do you keep coming back?”

  He looked along the line of suitcases, at all the similar photographs, and then he turned and glanced upstairs again. Maybe the witch wasn’t coming; maybe she didn’t know what he had done after all.

  He went to the large, glass display cabinet in the centre of the room. The floor inside was scattered with withered roses. Richard pulled the photo of Jenny from the glass door and carefully stuck it back onto the old black and tan case. He opened the door and placed the suitcase inside, under the spotlights, then knelt and rubbed at one of the peeling stickers – a caravan with Southend written beneath it – and bowed his head.

  “I’m so tired of looking for you.”

  Sky of Witches

  That evening, the surface of ‘The Talking River’ broke with just a whisper. Something dragged itself up onto the rocky banks and collapsed under the huge, arched shadows of the Puente de Piedra. Above, a steady flow of cars and pedestrians passed over the old stone bridge. A faint, persistent breeze funnelled through the arches of the bridge, bringing the smell of human waste and the distant chatter of children. The shape shivered and flapped listlessly in the weak light. The creature had felt the pull of something on its innards; two of the baits excreted as it fell from the sky the previous evening had been taken. Crossing the river had taken the last scraps of energy, and it was too weak to follow the link any further. In desperation, the creature began to coo in an effort to bring the prey closer.

  Two gum-chewing six-year-old boys stepped into the gloom beneath the bridge. They edged forward, pushing each other, banging their sticks to make courage. From the moist darkness, a voice, caught with phlegm, sang a strange lullaby. Too late, they saw the shape and the empty face that was making the sounds in the thickening shadows. It fell on the nearest boy as the other ran back to the box houses of the shanty town, crying about the duende under the bridge.

  The creature swallowed what was useful, but the boy was malnourished: his dreams were dry and thin. By the time it opened its arms and let the child drop, there was just enough strength to migrate. The creature made a short loping run up the banks of the Rimac and then opened its tissue wings to let the breeze take it upwards.

  The cloudless summer sky above Lima was falling into ash as the sun sank behind the mountains. The cooling air swam with translucent shapes, embryonic kites that sniffed at the fears of the population below, searching for a deep well to drink from and so a way back into existence.

  In the shanty town on the slopes of San Cristóbal, behind the walls of those blue and pink and yellow houses that seemed to be fleeing up the mountain to escape their fate, the pickings were slim. But away to the south-west, the districts of San Isidro and Miraflores stank of bloated fears, and those that were able to, begged the winds to carry them there.

  Javier Escobal left the Banco Continental offices as early as possible and took the Avenida San Pablo into the Victoria district of the city. He took the detour at least once a week. The guilt he always felt was never strong enough to stop him. Almost every radio station was reporting new cases of Los Duendes Nuevos: the frightening attacks that were occurring in the wealthier parts of the city. Although he didn’t believe in duendes, new or otherwise, you couldn’t help but be worried. People were being hurt and whatever was happening, seemed to be increasing as the summer wore on.

  Javier kerbed the car when pulling up, such was the excitement that gripped him whenever he saw the black gates of La Iglesia de la Mariposa Negra.

  He looked around nervously as he eased open the creaking gates, convinced against all logic that his mother or his sister would be waiting for him there one day. His throat dried at the thought as he walked up to the low stucco building. He paused at the entrance to admire the black steel wings, which rose from the church roof into the gritty air. What would his mother say if she did find out? It wasn’t hard to guess: the good catholic man, successful bank administrator, owner of a property in one of the most desired neighbourhoods of the San Isidro district, now worshiping with the unwashed in the house of a Pagan god? Yet none of these fears stopped Javier from coming here. Because when he looked up at those wings, they seemed to beat for him, beckoning him into a world of unlimited possibilities.

  The church interior was cool and the scent of orchids filled his mouth. Above the altar was a 12-foot square image, a close-up of Moises Quispé, the boy who had found the black butterfly in the rainforest near Iquitos. It was of poor quality, yet the boy’s gaze was still arresting
despite its choppy pixels. Javier stared into the boy’s dark eyes. He wished he could see what they had seen. There were about thirty locals sitting in there, some writing on their black cards, others staring at Moises’s image, pencil in hand, waiting for the magic of La Mariposa Negra to teach them how to write.

  Javier Escobal marched to the altar and placed his hands on the cold, stone shape of the black butterfly that was cut into its surface. He closed his eyes for a few moments, letting his imagination drift, then picked up a pencil and a butterfly-shaped card from the pile and found a seat.

  The sign was out in the front garden again when he got home: Se necesita muchacha.

  “Monica, what happened with Irene?” he called as he entered the house. The creak and whine of violins being played badly almost drowned out his words. “Monica? Monica!”

  His wife met him at the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a towel. “They are working you too hard at that bank, Javier.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek and stepped back. “What is wrong?”

  Javier sighed. “What happened? Where is Irene?”

  “Oh her…” She waved her towel dismissively. “I told the girl to go home early. She makes a mess of everything.”

  “Why the sign again? We don’t need another domestic; Irene is good … Irene is–”

  “No, we need to replace her and get another. I will get your dinner.” She turned away before he could reply. Javier put his hands on the door jamb above his head and sighed deeply. “A su madre, Monica! Why do we have to keep doing this?”

  “Papa, look what we found.” Virginia and Sofia were around his legs, their big eyes pleading for attention.

  “How are you today mis pequeñas? Your violins sounded magical.” He took the two small boxes that were being offered to him and looked them over. “What is this?”

  “We found them, Papa … in the garden.”