My House Gathers Desires

by Adam McOmber

  “Hours later, I finally found my beloved girl. Eleanor was still drenched in the black waters of the swamp. Her limp body was curled in the shadows beneath a lemon tree, face pressed against its trunk. We were on the outskirts of the grounds; the garden had seemingly returned to its previous natural state.

  “‘Eleanor,’ I said, breathlessly. ‘What happened, my darling? How did you find safety?’

  “Eleanor made no response.

  “‘We must go back to Paris,’ I said. ‘We must tell someone what’s happened to us.’

  “Finally, she turned to look at me, eyes dull. She did not move to leave.

  “‘My dearest,’ I said.

  “Eleanor studied my face. It was as if she no longer quite recognized me. ‘Tell someone?’ she said finally. ‘Who would we tell?’

  “‘Anyone,’ I said. ‘Anyone who will listen.’

  “‘Anna,’ she whispered. ‘We made a mistake—’

  “‘But we’ve done nothing wrong,’ I said. ‘We only have to leave the garden. Go back to the city.’

  “She shook her head. ‘We must pray for the queen,’ she said. ‘And pray for ourselves. This isn’t the sort of dream that lets you go. This is the sort of dream that stays.’ And with that, Eleanor pressed her face against the lemon tree, and she looked at me no longer.”

  Sodom and Gomorrah

  We pause at our work and watch as two strangers make their way across the plain. Their flesh is salt-white, covered in chalk from the cliffs near the sea. Their eyes are lamplit, wanting. They ask to wash themselves in the pool at the center of our square. They want to rest in the shade of the standing stone. We understand their desires. The pool is filled with fresh water, replenished by a buried spring. The stone is our mystery, a ruined monument from bygone days. In winter, the stone has a reddish hue; in summer, it reveals flecks of gold. There are those who claim it is perhaps a pillar dragged from the broken gates of Eden. Others say it is a gravestone, marking the burial place of the monster Tiamat. A few even claim the stone is older still. It fell from the high wall that separated the earth from the sky when the black stars of creation still turned in the firmament.

  Wind blows about the stone as the strangers arrive. The cracks in its surface seem to sing. Each of us pauses when we hear the song. In our recollection, the stone has never made any such sound. And yet the song is familiar, nonetheless. Lot, tiresome old scribe, leads the strangers to his home at the dusty edge of the city. He washes them there and feeds them. He asks them questions in a labored voice and later tells his wife he believes they are messengers. “From some king in the East?” Lot’s wife asks. Her husband does not answer.

  We, who have been listening to the song of the stone, understand the strangers are far more than mere messengers. We realize we have been waiting for them all our dull and toilsome lives. That evening, we are compelled to make a circle around the old man’s house. Our mouths are open. Our eyes, hollowed. We hear the song of the old stone, drifting toward us from the square. And all of us sing together. Lot offers his daughters to us (two sullen girls in braids), and we know how ridiculous such an offering is. The old man bars the door in an attempt to protect his messengers. Still singing, we break the door down. Inside, we find them, the two strangers who came. There in the candlelight, they look not like men at all. They wear a human skin, as one might wear a cloak on a cold day. They make a sign with their pale hands that tells us where we are to take them.

  We fall upon the strangers, bringing them to the monument in the square. On the marble bier near the pool, we come together, clinging to each other’s backs. And using all our strength, we begin to form a single body. It’s difficult at first. We wrestle and climb. But soon, we are a giant, composed of innumerable, heaving men. There are those of us who act as the body’s great arms, and others are its bracing legs. A number of us fall together and form a hard thick phallus. The strangers then are no longer like two men at all. They have undressed themselves, giving up the pretense of skin and becoming a denser part of the air.

  We are hungry for them. Ours is a sacred desire that was buried too long in our chests, like some city beneath the sand. Those of us acting as the giant’s hips thrust forward, penetrating the dense air. We press inside a strata of deep time, feeling the lush warmth of it. Deeper still we push until, finally, in a haze of rose and blue, we see a garden. An intricate enclosure, rising. We think of Eden and the Grove of Dilmun, but this is neither of those places. Bright waters lap at the garden’s shores. We see the stone—the very monument of Sodom—standing there at the center of the garden, strung with flowering vines. It is newly carved, sculpted with scenes that are strange to us. They tell stories of creation. We realize all our old tales have been a lie. The long ago sun touches our skin. There are animals that walk in the shade of the garden and speak warnings to us in odd tongues. The hare, the lion, the serpent, all of them make portents. But we do not listen. We know our aim. We move our great body, pressing against the membrane that seems to surround and support the ancient garden. We rock against the warmth of it.

  When finally we find release, our voices rise, words lit by fire. And the air around us is filled with the sudden bright fluid of a new music. Not a hymn, but something that strums the golden strings of the cosmos itself. We bathe in the sound, losing our grips on each other’s backs and slipping down into a jumble in the square. The strangers are there among us, once more sewn inside their lovely skins. We are all covered in the liquid that is neither our own sweat nor the dew of the garden, but something brilliant we have made together. Lot makes his way out of the city, frightened old creature. He takes his daughters to a cave where they will live out their days like animals. Lot’s wife turns to look back at us, thinking we men are a marvel—a thing that is entirely new. And we men lie together with the strangers, bare and glistening in the shadow of the stone. We finally understand the meaning of our monument’s song, the words it has been chanting even when we could not hear: There are no gods, it says in its beautiful voice. And if there are, my friends, believe me: they do not matter.

  Poet and Underworld

  Tents rose against the morning sky, their soot-black peaks like woodcuts inked on a vellum scroll. Late-coming mules made their way toward the fair, dragging skiffs loaded with copperware and bolts of fabric. Men from the coast carried horned ocean fish in water-filled leather tanks, and those from the country pushed carts of fragrant cinnamon and cardamom. Drouet moved carefully, concealing herself behind the black trees at the side of the road. Any one of these travelers might know her father, the burgher. If she was caught, she’d be returned to him by a merchant hoping for reward.

  On a different morning, Drouet might have climbed to a low-hanging branch and written about the merchants’ procession in her Book of Hours. She’d make a record, as her mother taught her long ago. But she found herself unable to concentrate in the high, pale light of the morning. She was tired of the city and tired of her father’s strictures. She wanted to feel the hot and busy release of the fair. And she could think of little more than the elm-shadowed butcher’s stall where Bledic would be working. The boy was Italian; he’d come north in a caravan along the Roman road. He fumbled his knife when he worked. He gouged flesh and cursed. It was clear that, like Drouet, he longed for escape.

  Drouet had been visiting Bledic since the fair began. The last time they’d spoken, he asked if she had money.

  “For what purpose?” Drouet said.

  “There’s something I want to see,” Bledic replied. He worked at the piece of meat on the block in front of him with his knife. Even covered in animal’s blood, he was so terribly handsome. Drouet thought that if she got any closer to this boy, a tongue of fire might leap from her skull. “They say there’s an entrance to hell,” he continued, “over at the southern edge of the fair.”

  Drouet almost laughed at this but stopped herself. As a rule, she did not favor whimsy. Her mother had told her that such conceits were sometimes e
ven dangerous.

  Bledic glanced at Drouet. He made a circle in the air with his still wet knife. “Rumors are nothing more than rumors,” he said. “I want to see the place for myself.”

  “I can get money,” Drouet said, thinking of the lead coffer her father kept on the stone mantle. It was full of coins. “I’ll bring it tomorrow—on one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “You’ll take me along,” she said, “to Hell.”

  Bledic grinned at her. He slid his long knife back into the meat.

  The fair was like a painted halo, concentric alleyways cut by the radii of stalls. Bledic’s butchery was in the western quadrant. Chickens and rabbits struggled before poultrymen’s carts. Drouet rounded the column near charred Tannery Gate, stolen coins jingling in the pocket of her dress. The gate had been damaged in a fire ages ago. According to her father, who kept a chronicle of the city, the Devil himself had appeared at the fair in 1188. He walked the grounds in fine clothes and talked kindly to the men selling wares. A day after his visit, a south-bearing wind carried sparks to the thatched rooftops and burned half the fair to the ground. The burgher said it was likely that the Devil would return one day, as he was drawn to places where he had history.

  Drouet didn’t care about devils. She cared only about Bledic. When she finally reached the butcher’s stall that morning, both the jowled master and his handsome apprentice were working on a calf that lay open to the spine on the wooden block. Blood flowed across the grain of the wood. Black flies swarmed the body. The smell was not of death or rot, but rather a clean coppery scent. It was only when the master slipped behind the tattered curtain of the stall to collect some fresh implement that Drouet allowed herself to approach.

  Bledic looked up from the animal, hands gloved in shining blood. “The burgher’s daughter,” he said, as if he hadn’t been expecting her.

  “Drouet,” she countered.

  “Why do you always come alone? Don’t you have anyone to walk with?”

  “I don’t,” she replied.

  “No mother?”

  “I have a mistress,” she said, “from Paris. My mother is—” For a moment, Drouet saw her mother’s body hanging before her, cool and frail. Her deathbed had been suspended on ropes to avoid an infestation of fleas. Light from a high window illuminated dust motes in the air. Drouet’s mother smiled. She mouthed the words “my love.”

  Drouet pulled herself back from the memory. She reached into the pocket of her dress, removing the coins she’d stolen from her father’s box. Bledic looked at the coins, rolling a bit of animal fat between his fingers and finally flicking it to the ground. “Meet me at Tannery Gate in an hour.”

  She nodded.

  “You aren’t frightened?” he asked.

  Drouet’s skin prickled. The sensation did not come from fear.

  “Go, before signore returns,” Bledic said. “He doesn’t like me talking to girls.”

  Drouet did as Bledic asked, moving away through alleyways, back into the maze of stalls. As always after speaking to Bledic, she felt shaken. She walked through the narrow artisan’s corridor and thought of meeting him at Tannery Gate. To actually travel with the young apprentice through the fair. How wonderful would that be?

  She paused at a table of painted clay dolls of the sort her mother had once made for her. They had molded heads and burlap bodies that were filled with sawdust. She dared to touch the fragile arm of one and the roughhewn skirt of another, taking pleasure in their simplicity. The doll merchant, a man with one drooping eyelid, was busy attending to another customer and didn’t seem to mind her presence. Drouet certainly didn’t look the part of a criminal. The dolls themselves wore absent expressions, neither asking for her attention nor rejecting it. Though Drouet had put away her own playthings when her mother died, she found she longed for one of these dolls now. But what would she do with it when the church bells rang? Carry it along for Bledic to see? Should she also wrap herself in swaddling clothes?

  The last doll in the row was larger than the others and curious enough to cause Drouet to momentarily forget the butcher’s handsome apprentice. The figure was quite unlike all the others. Made with a finer sense of craftsmanship, its features were detailed in such a way as to make the doll seem almost fit for a reliquary. Yet it was not this precision that interested her. It was the fact that clearly, astonishingly, the doll resembled Drouet herself. Its hair was the same as her own—hay-colored and held back from the face. Even more remarkably, the doll wore the red cape, stitched at the hem with lilies, that Drouet donned each day for the fair. The way the doll clasped its hands reminded her of the penitent way she often held her own hands when she walked.

  Drouet glanced at the doll merchant who was still busy with his customer. Had this man seen her one day and been so enamored with the burgher’s daughter that he made a replica of her? She wondered if that was the sort of thing a man might do. Whatever led to its creation, Drouet knew she had to have the doll. It belonged to her, after all. It was her. She certainly could not spend the coins she’d taken from her father’s box. Bledic needed those coins. So, with great resolve, Drouet simply grabbed the large doll from the counter and then ran as fast as she could into the jostling crowd with the figure’s clay head nodding against her chest.

  There was a moment when Drouet felt sure she’d be caught. She knocked against another merchant and fell sprawling in the dust. Yet no one came to take her by the shoulder. No one called her a thief. She was still free, though she’d torn her dress and scraped her arm and didn’t look as pretty as she’d intended.

  In a nook near the cathedral of St. Étienne, Drouet concealed herself and sat considering the doll. She wished her mother were still alive so she could ask what such a thing might mean. If Bledic fell in love with her, would he also make a copy of her? A bloody Drouet with bones for eyes and gristle for a tongue?

  When the bells rang Terce, Drouet dusted off her dress and tucked the doll under her arm. She couldn’t very well leave her double there in the shadow of St. Étienne, and though she tried to make the thing appear as unobtrusive as possible, it was much too large and awkward for true concealment. She reached Tannery Gate by way of side alleys, keeping close lookout for the doll merchant who might be searching for her. She found Bledic leaning against a pillar, thumbs tucked in the waistband of his woolen breeches. His eyes widened at the sight of the doll, but he made no disparaging remarks. It seemed that he’d either learned manners or his mind was elsewhere. “The burgher’s daughter,” he said.

  “Drouet,” she replied.

  “Follow me,” Bledic said, turning away from the gate. Drouet hurried to catch up, the doll kicking at her with its sawdust legs, as if in protest. She followed Bledic along the graceful curve of a wooden alleyway, moving deeper into the fair. They passed guilds marked with the symbols of their patron saints. The wheelwrights were gathered beneath a sign painted with the figure of Saint Catherine, who’d broken a torture wheel merely by touching the instrument with her frail hand. There was Saint Magdalena too, who’d washed the feet of Christ with oil. Saint Claire’s face loomed above the mirror maker’s stand. She’d been too ill to go to the cathedral, and it was said that an image of the Mass had appeared flickering on the wall of her room so that she might watch the service still.

  Drouet looked down at the face of the doll she carried. She wondered whether it might be meant as a sacred image. If Drouet was a saint, what was she patron of?

  She nearly lost Bledic in the crowd but then found him again. Spots of animal blood were spattered across the back of his linen shirt. She thought they looked like a constellation of stars.

  “Where did you say this stall is again?” she asked him.

  “At the very edge of the fair,” he replied, not glancing at her.

  “What’s it to be like,” she asked, “this entrance to Hell?”

  “Dark and wet,” he said. “Full of creatures.”

  “But isn’t Hell supposed
to be fiery?”

  Bledic continued as if he hadn’t heard her question. “There are yearly fairs in the underworld too, you know,” he said, “more majestic than the one in Troyes. Impossible wares are sold: golden heads that speak ten languages, animals that wear clothing and walk upright, boxes of blood that can give birth to an army on command.”

  “How do you know these things?” Drouet asked.

  Bledic finally glanced back at her. His gold-flecked eyes were nearly more than she could bear. “Because I’m from Rome,” he said. “We know all the old stories there.”

  “My mother once told me that Hell is nothing more than centuries of poetry,” Drouet said.

  Bledic seemed irritated. “We’ll see,” he said. He pointed into the distance where Drouet could make out a low wooden structure with two Doric columns that formed a gate. The columns were clearly made of some cheap material and painted to resemble Italian marble. An old merchant slouched on a stool, wrapped in what appeared to be a winding cloth. He’d fallen asleep in the depths of the fabric. The sign nailed above the entrance did not bear the mark of a saint but rather read, “Averno: Entrance to the Under Realms.”

  “It’s a theater, Bledic,” Drouet said. “Just look at it. There’s probably a stage inside with actors dressed as ghosts and devils who’ll prance around for us until we’re as bored as the old man who sells glimpses of it.”

  “I watched a man go in last night,” Bledic said. “He didn’t come out again.”

  “Bledic—”

  “You have the coins?”

  They’d drawn nearer the entrance as they talked, and now they stood in front of the sleeping man who had crusts of yellow tears at the corners of his eyes. Drouet reached into the pocket of her dress and felt a sinking in her stomach. The coins were gone. They must have slipped out when she’d fallen after stealing the doll.

  Bledic looked astonished, then angry. “You spent the money on that ridiculous toy, didn’t you?”