“But, Elizabeth,” Maurice’s voice dropped to a whisper. He stared about him as though the very walls were listening in. “Something was wrong, very wrong. Your sister’s appetite became so demanding, like a feral cat. I could not satisfy her in our bed and she begged of me sordid, ungodly acts of such depravity.”
“Maurice, please! I really don’t think this is a suitable conversation. I...”
Duval slammed his hand on the table.
“You must listen. You think I want to talk about this, how she stole my ability to perform as a man?”
Elizabeth dropped her gaze, wringing her hands in her lap. She shook her head.
“I’m so sorry. Please...go on.”
Duval took a slug of watered-down wine and wiped his mouth with a filthy sleeve, something Elizabeth would never have believed of him six years earlier. He reached out and touched Elizabeth’s chin, making her flinch.
“I thought her possessed, Elizabeth.” Tears welled and quivered before spilling onto the farmer’s gaunt cheeks. “But all the time, the one possessed, was me.”
A heavy rattle shook the floorboards, accompanied by a high-pitched whine that studded the air. Elizabeth shot to her feet.
“What’s that? Do you have a dog chained up back there?”
“Non.” A twitch of a smile contorted Maurice’s lips. “It’s her child, Jacques. He’s hungry. He’s always...hungry.”
Elizabeth ran from the small room and was half-way across the courtyard, skirts be-damned when it struck her she’d neglected to ask about the boy. That Maurice referred to poor Jacques as her child - Carolyn’s, not ours – what did it mean? Surely this Chênard character had to be a Gypsy Davy type that dwelled within the woods and seduced local women with his handsome looks and wild demeanour. Elizabeth imagined the man; black of hair and eyes – not unlike Maurice but strong, with an irresistible allure of passion and indifference. A raven, a snake, a man like no other.
As she reached the front door it slowly opened without being touched. Elizabeth heard slurping noises coming from within; she swallowed – regaining her own composure – and walked into the darkness.
The scene that assaulted the English woman’s eyes burned a permanent scar. Candles flickered in jars at each corner. Everywhere, furniture lay broken. Faeces pooled and were piled in heaps about the floor. Dim as the walls were, Elizabeth could still make out a strange scrawling across their surface, neither French nor English but a jagged symbolism, sigils and unrecognisable alphabetical characters. At an alcove in the back wall hung a curtain, loosely strung from the ceiling. The fabric twitched and Elizabeth heard the plaintive sobbing of a child. She took a careful step into the room, her hand outstretched.
“Jacques?”
Nothing. The curtain fell still, the weeping dissipating into silence. Elizabeth crept forward, the light juddered with her every move.
“It’s alright Jacques.” Did the boy speak English? “Je suis ta Tante Elizabeth – I’m your Aunt Elizabeth, from England.”
She moved closer, step by step until she reached the dirty cloth. Ready to open her arms to a starving little boy Elizabeth pulled back the curtain.
“Mamang?”
Shackled to the ceiling and floor by its wrists and ankles the naked wraith stood six feet tall, towering over Elizabeth. The unfortunate creature’s jowls hung to its shoulders, dribbling with a slow-bouncing stream of saliva.
“Où est mamang?”
The stretched, old man's physique asked after its mother’s whereabouts, its voice a perfect resemblance of an infant child’s. Except this was no child. Carolyn had said in her letter Jacques wasn’t normal but the pendulous creature slobbering at Elizabeth was no better than a circus freak, a monster – yet it looked at her with wet, sad eyes – Maurice’s eyes, and Elizabeth’s heart broke.
“You poor thing, what have they done to you?”
“Faim,” it said. Hungry.
Elizabeth’s breasts ached, flooding with the memory of milk produced for a baby that barely lived two months. Her sister’s child licked its lips, its nostrils flaring. Elizabeth wrapped her arms around her chest and was appalled to find her nubs leaking into her corset.
“Mamang,” Jacques growled. “Faim.”
He stood up, as tall as the alcove would allow. Bones, sinew and vessels clearly visible through paper-thin skin he began to wrench himself from the chains binding him in place. Between his legs a mound of testicles bulged over the boy’s thighs, supporting a pencil of a penis which pointed, semi-erect at Elizabeth.
“Oh, dear God.”
Elizabeth slipped to her knees, her immaculate skirts skimming a layer of filth. She watched in a half-faint as the child tore himself, joint by joint, knuckle by knuckle from his bindings and by the time he leapt upon her and tore her bodice open with fully adult teeth, Elizabeth had fallen into a raging, unconscious state of oblivion aware only of a mouth at her nipples and thunder in the skies.
***
“You came!”
Elizabeth opened her eyes. They hurt, as though all the moisture had been sucked from them. She looked about herself; she lay in a low-ceilinged room in a bed supported by posts at each corner. A woman sat beside her, long golden hair hanging loose over an open blouson, her bosom pouring forth from the crisp linen.
“Beth, my dearest Beth. I am so sorry to have troubled you, it was all for naught. I am restored, my Maurice is returned with the purest of vigour.”
Elizabeth’s thoughts flooded with the vision of an emaciated Maurice Duval. All was not as Carolyn believed it to be. Her plans to rescue her sister and child now drifted towards the begetting of an asylum order to incarcerate Carolyn until she could be restored to proper health. Half-blind and scratching at crusty nipples, Elizabeth succumbed to an unsteady sleep once again.
***
“Here,” a voice whispered. “Have some breakfast.”
Elizabeth wiped a veil of sweat from her brow and sat up in the wet bed. Carolyn slouched beside her, completely naked. Fascinated but appalled by the glorious curves and glistening hair Elizabeth turned her face away.
“Carolyn. Have you no decorum, no respect?”
Her sister laughed, a deep throaty gurgle.
“Why?” she said. “He loves it, why shouldn’t I?”
Carolyn lifted a slice of cake to her sister’s lips; red jam cloyed to Elizabeth’s mouth but she ate, ravenous, as though her very soul had been bled dry of all nourishment. She took her fill and slowly the events of the past day re-emerged. Avoiding looking at Carolyn’s nudity Elizabeth reached out to take her sister’s hands in hers.
“My dear, I’m taking you home. The carriage will arrive in the morning and I can take you, and...” she fought with the words, “even Jacques, back to England.”
Carolyn roared with laughter; Elizabeth continued. “We can get help for Jacques, for both of you.”
Carolyn leant across her sister, her flesh rubbing against her arms.
“We don’t need your help. If you want to take anyone with you, take Maurice. He’s not the man I thought he was.”
Elizabeth pushed her away. “What are you talking about? He’s devastated, a shadow of a man. God knows what you’ve done to him but he’s a shell, he’s...”
Carolyn slapped her sister in the face.
“You. You know nothing. You come here with all your good intentions, desperate to steal my son away from me because you have a flaccid, unproductive womb of your own. Well, I tell you this sister. Jacques isn’t Maurice’s son – he’s the offspring of bondage, a bind between me and Le Chênard, a creature of the land, muscle and cock, lover, suckler...”
Elizabeth grabbed Carolyn by the hair.
“Stop it. Be quiet. You don’t know what you’re saying. By God you’re quite mad. Jacques has encephalitis or some such sickness. He won’t live much longer, that much is obvious.”
Carolyn threw herself back on the bed, saliva spilling from her lips.
“Suddenl
y you’re a medical expert Beth? Let’s add it to the rest of your mighty expertise.” Her jaw jutted forward, the sneer a crevice in the beautiful face. “Well you’re correct there. They only live until they’re seven years old so he won’t be troubling our little community here for much longer before he drops down cold-fucking dead.”
With all she’d seen, all she’d heard, nothing shocked Elizabeth as much as the foul street language spilling from Carolyn’s tongue.
“Don’t be so disgusting.”
Fury outweighed the distress coursing through Elizabeth’s soul. The young woman before her was a stranger, a facsimile of her younger sister, an automaton.
“What do you mean? Why seven years old?”
Carolyn began to sway, rolling from side to side across the bed, her head thrown back in a strange ecstasy.
“Ha!” the younger woman spat. She threw herself onto Elizabeth’s lap, her hand playing between her open legs. “It’s the law, the law of nature. Chênard is older, so much older that than this place, or the people, or the church – the dirty, corrupt church.” Her lips curled back over her teeth. Corrupt, that word again. “We nourish Jacques – Maurice, Chênard and me. But unless my son can feed on seven souls on his seventh birthday he’ll die a desperate death, and so will I.”
Elizabeth pulled herself out of the bed, throwing Carolyn back onto the sheets.
“What superstitious nonsense. Your son’s deformed, that’s all.”
Below, in the kitchens of the house, chains clanged, furniture scraped across wooden floors sending screeches through the thick ceilings.
“He’s starving,” Carolyn said. “He needs to feed.”
Elizabeth clasped her chest; once again her breasts spasmed with lactation. Ridiculous. A natural function occurring in the most unnatural of situations.
“I don’t understand, Carolyn. You wrote to me, you were desperate – and I believed you. Why do you think I’m here? It’s obvious to anyone that your marriage is a failure; your child is little more than a...”
Carolyn launched herself at her sister’s throat, culling her words. She licked the skin, hesitating to slaver at the throbbing artery, then raised her face to Elizabeth’s.
“A freak? Yet you came, didn’t you? You did believe me.”
Jacques’s cries rose to a shriek. His calls, a banging, demanding drum.
Elizabeth nodded. She whispered through the cacophony. “But Carolyn, was it true?”
The sisters fell apart, all confrontation temporarily lost. Carolyn’s eyes glazed as she struggled to remember and she frowned. “Yes,” she said. “He left for a while – for years. And all the while Maurice became sick and Jacques grew more and more hungry, until I thought I would die. And then yes! I wrote you. But the day I sent the letter, he returned.”
“Maurice?”
Carolyn threw her head back and hissed silent laughter.
“That’s what I thought. He came at me, prick as thick as it used to be but the moment he took me to our bed, this bed, he showed me his true self, and told me what Jacques really was.”
Elizabeth stepped back in the small room, still unsure if this was real – at least in her sister’s deranged mind – or something even more sinister.
“What are you saying?”
Carolyn leapt from the bed whilst behind the closed door Jacques lurched up the stairs towards the room.
“A Kilcrops, sister. That’s what they call Jacques. The demon offspring of a mortal woman and an incubus, or what the locals call a twistweaver. Carolyn sucked the spit from her lips. “He’s an ancient being that sews knots into our minds and threads our souls – our very souls, Beth – into interminable tapestries where we will wander forever in search of redemption, satisfying our bodies with every willing pathwalker along the way.”
Carolyn backed away over the bed towards the door. Jacques’s sloping footsteps grew louder as he dragged himself up the stairs, heading for the bedroom and the breasts that throbbed to feed him.
“Viens, ma cherie,” Carolyn called. “We’re waiting for you.” She pulled the door wide open as Jacques lurched through the gap, manacles still hanging from one bleeding wrist, the other limp and broken. Elizabeth stumbled, trapped by the bed and the monstrous mother and son. She raised her arms up over her milk-wet bodice and covered her face with trembling hands. The child’s voice filled the air with the only words it knew.
“Faim. Mamang.”
Elizabeth’s knees gave way and she slid to the ground, awaiting the inevitable attack. Furniture flew around the room as Jacques made his way towards her with Carolyn’s shrill giggles and whispers to feed stabbing at the air in a wild wail that rose with the pair’s frenzy. The floor beneath Elizabeth’s backside shuddered as the bed creaked beside her then collapsed as if in surrender, showering the small space with splinters and worm-infested wood. Carolyn screamed, forcing Elizabeth to peer through her fingers; her sister lay trapped beneath the shattered bed base, the Kilcrops standing on top of it, a thin tongue probing the crushed woman for its mother’s milk – its back to the room.
Elizabeth jumped up and ran across the wreckage, reaching the door just as the demonic offspring found its mother’s throat. Elizabeth’s words of “I’ll come back for you” died in her mouth as Jacques ripped open her sister’s flesh and – bathing in the gush – swallowed the last the young woman had to give. Refusing to submit to the nausea that surged into her gullet, Elizabeth slammed the door shut behind her and ran down the stairs. As her feet hit the kitchen floor all light was extinguished by one, two, three shadows and more at the windows and door. Maurice charged into the room with several other men behind him, all holding guns, their eyes wild with the kill.
“Where are they?” Maurice shouted, with more verve than Elizabeth had seen since she’d arrived.
“En haut,” she replied. “Upstairs.”
The mob headed for the stairway, heavy feet crushing the detritus that lay everywhere in the squalid room. Elizabeth dragged herself into the courtyard, collapsed into the mud and stared skywards with tears coursing down her face, to the rabid orchestral sounds of gunshot and murder.
***
The driver didn’t say a word, simply picked Elizabeth and her luggage up as arranged. This time the journey was a pleasant one, the winter sun prickling her with a white frosty heat. She stayed just one night in Bordeaux before taking the early morning passage back to England.
“James,” she called as she walked through the front door of her house. “I’m home – are you here?”
The rooms were as she had left them, clean, tidy with all ornaments in position and nothing out of place. Above her, Elizabeth heard the shuffle of feet, no doubt Higgins would be creeping out the trade entrance, still wet between the legs. Mrs Bailey sat down on a leather armchair and waited.
“My dear! What a lovely surprise. I didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”
Elizabeth rose and walked to the window, rebuffing James’s effort to kiss her cheek.
“Evidently,” Elizabeth said. She grabbed his wrists, as he had hers before she left the previous week. “I hope she was worth it.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” James puffed and blustered.
“There are to be changes,” she said, ignoring his remonstrations. “You will leave the house in the morning with all your personal possessions – your own, not ours, or mine.”
Red blooms erupted on James’s cheeks. Elizabeth cared not a whit if they were from rage or embarrassment. “I went to the bank before I left Brighton...” She let the words sink in slowly. “And left instruction for all your recent financial transactions to be reported to me, and for a solicitor to be appointed to investigate your personal activities.”
James took a step back, his thin lips unable to find an argument.
“I returned to the bank before I came home, James. I don’t think I need to tell you what they, and the solicitor discovered; how you’ve been gambling your salary away and spending my in
heritance on gifts for your sluts.” Elizabeth gave her husband the chance to redeem himself, but his arrogance was such he had believed he would never be discovered. He had no words to refute her claims, and simply shook his head, making no attempt to apologise.
Elizabeth stood tall.
“You won’t appeal against my application for a divorce on the grounds of repeated adultery, James. Otherwise I’ll expose your gambling and whoring, publicly.”
James had the audacity to smile.
“You wouldn’t do that. Think of your reputation, your status.”
“I don’t care about any of that. Just leave, agree the divorce and you – and your employers – will hear no more about it. And take that whore Higgins with you, before I fire her with the back of my hand.”
Elizabeth watched, with no satisfaction as her husband stared around the room, looking to see what he could claim as his own. He would find very little, his investments were empty card-table affairs.
By Saturday afternoon, Bridge House was Elizabeth’s again. She waited three hours to make sure James would not return before inviting her travelling companion into her bed.
She stared down at the twistweaver as he pulled her onto his groin, and smiled straight into eyes that were darker even than Maurice’s.
“Make me a son,” she said.
And he did.
L Is For Lempo
The Love Revolution
Daniel I. Russell
NOW
He squinted, trying to see her, but the girl lingered behind the camera and tripod, shielded by blinding lights. Beneath him the bed felt spongy and moist and stank of baby oil. Lydia, his dear sweet Lydia, had already started to remove her clothes, peeling them off sensually beside him. Her expression flitted between a dull mask and a well-practiced pout at the camera.
He used to love that sexy little glance. Now it terrified him.
“This is my church, these are my clergy,” said the hidden girl. “Blessed are the ones that eat from my table.”
The Demonologia Biblica Page 15