by Alex Bell
‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘Dear God you’re so lovely, still. What will happen to you, Chrys? Will he leave you to someone in his will, do you think?’ He gave a drunken sob of laughter. ‘No, he’ll try and take you with him. Suttee, is that what they call it?’
Darren, close behind him, grabbed his collar. Marcus was taller, fitter, but Darren’s fury propelled him to the door. Darren snatched it open and thrust him through it and slammed it, turned around and leaned his back on the door and stood there flushed and panting, jacket askew and shirt open, showing sparse grey hairs.
Chrys looked at him, opened her mouth to ask something. What was that? What did he mean? But what came out was, ‘Darling, did Marcus upset you? I shouldn’t have let him have so much wine.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Darren said, smoothing his rumpled hair. ‘Nothing. Let’s get to bed. I’ll do your hot chocolate.’
‘You are sweet,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? Do you want me to make it?’
‘I’ll do it. You get to bed.’
She undressed slowly. High hard heels, glossy as paint. Stiff blue satin, tight and chilly. Filmy stockings. The other women didn’t dress like this for dinner; why did she? She glanced at herself in the mirror, in the black and scarlet underwear, laced and wired, and thought; I look like a picture. I don’t look real at all.
Darren came in with her hot chocolate and looked at her, and said, ‘You’d better drink this quick or I won’t be able to wait!’
And she laughed and drank the thick sweet stuff and everything was fine.
*
The quarrellers were back.
‘What have you got?’
‘Barberry. And angelica.’
‘Good, good. Under the pillow, quick.’
Don’t put that under my pillow, she thought. I’m allergic. Darren will tell you.
But she couldn’t be angry at them. Besides, they were weaker this time, their voices gone thin and grey. Poor little angry mice, she thought, with a sudden rush of compassion. My faithful little mice. Go home.
‘It’s not enough.’
‘Lady, please…’ Something pulled her hair, something else pinched her fingers; faint desperate little touches fading away even as the birds began to sing outside her window.
So many birds, frantic to greet the dawn. Trees full of them, their throats beating like a thousand tiny hearts full of music. The procession winding through the hills…
Hush. No. Sleep. Night is for sleep.
But it’s morning. I should wake up now.
And she was fully awake, suddenly, in the pre-dawn music-filled darkness. Even through the closed windows and the double-glazing she could hear the birds, and was there another music woven in with their song? Something that made her sit up with her heart clenched in her chest and tears in her eyes?
It was gone. Suddenly the room was unbearable, stuffy and small and smelling of nylon. She slipped out of bed to the window. The hell with allergies, but it was locked. She crept downstairs, easy in the dark as a cat, but the doors were all locked and she couldn’t find the keys. She put her nose and mouth to the letterbox, breathed a thin trickle of dawn air. It came into her like wine, powerful and sweet, but already fading even as she breathed it. And there was something else, also fading, something unpleasant, and sad.
She pulled back as the scent faded. What if Darren found her, kneeling on the prickly doormat, trying to breathe the dawn air? Dawn and dusk are the worst times for your allergies.
There was something smeared on the edge of the letterbox. The source of the sad smell. Grey-green, tacky when she touched it. She lifted her finger to her nose. A last fading trace, a bitter scent that meant sorrow and loss.
Back upstairs she crept, into the bedroom. She stared at the tuft of grey hair that was all she could see of Darren. Then she darted her hand under her pillow.
Leaves and stems, dry and crumbling. Already drifting away to ash. She lifted them to her nose, sniffed.
Sharp smells, shocking, jolting her back on her heels and making her sneeze.
Darren grunted and shifted.
Chrys looked down at the fragments in her hands, and felt something huge surge up inside her, something furious and shattering. But the sun came through the curtains, the last of the leaves crumbled away as she stared and Darren’s alarm went off, dah-dah-dah-dah.
She grabbed up her dressing gown and went to make tea. Going down the stairs, thrusting her arms into the sleeves, she realised she had been ready to run out into the street naked, if she had found a key.
She must be mad. Poor Darren, he had enough to put up with without a mad wife.
She felt thin as old glass, ready to break at a careless touch. She kissed him goodbye carefully.
‘I’m going to be a little late,’ he said. ‘There’s a work thing. Don’t forget to close the curtains, and put some music on, I don’t want you getting upset.’
‘I will. Have a good day,’ she said.
‘I’ll try,’ he said, and smiled and waved and she shut the door and leaned on it and cried, without sobs, tears rolling down her cheeks and soaking the collar of her dressing-gown.
She cried for most of the day. Perhaps she should get some help. That was what Tina had said, wasn’t it? Tina who used to work with Darren, who used to be their friend and come to dinner. Tina who had suggested a therapist for Chrys’ agoraphobia. ‘This woman helped my brother with his spider phobia, poor sod, he’d hit the roof if he saw a bit of thread on the carpet and it looked enough like a spider, it was crippling him,’ she said. ‘Now he can pick them up! I’ve seen him do it! Seriously, I’ll give you her number, she’s brilliant.’
‘Oh no,’ Chrys had said, before Tina could even finish getting her phone out of her bag. ‘No, I don’t talk to people like that. Therapists and so on. Only our friends. Darren thinks it would upset me.’
And after that Tina had started asking more questions. Questions like why Chrys didn’t have her own email address and why she never answered her phone unless it was Darren calling. Tina made excuses to try and talk to Chrys when Darren was in another room, asking her if she was all right, if she needed help. Then Tina had stopped coming to dinner.
Why hadn’t she remembered any of that? Why had she forgotten what Tina had said, and why, now, had she remembered it?
But as the sun grew higher in the sky outside, shining down on grass and leaves and windows and concrete and plaster, she forgot again, turned on bright brassy music and wandered from room to room, looking at all the plastic things and the glass things and the nylon things, wiping absently at the tears she had forgotten she was crying.
Late afternoon Darren texted to remind her he was going to be late. ‘I’ll be home in time to give you your hot chocolate,’ he wrote. ‘Xxx.’
And she was glad because she knew that once he was home everything would be fine, she would feel better, and not so distracted and full of shadows. But he would be home and she had not made the bed that morning. She ran up the stairs and flung back the sheets and pillows and there were fragments of leaf and stem.
Things from a dream. She reached out to touch them, then, frightened, drew her hand back and clasped it with the other, restraining it.
They’re real. If I’m mad, why are they here?
Who put them there?
Maybe it was me. In my sleep.
But that would mean going outside, and all the doors were locked. And I don’t go outside.
Why are the doors locked?
To keep me safe. Everyone locks their doors at night.
But during the day? I don’t even know where the keys are. I couldn’t get out if I wanted to. I’m locked in. Why am I locked in?
To keep me safe. Darren’s at work, I’m here alone, anything could happen. Someone could break in. A burglar. After treasure.
Treasure like you?
‘Stop it!’ Chrys said out loud to the empty room, clamping her hands in her hair and twisting, pulling, as though she could pull
the thoughts out of her head. ‘Stop it!’
She would wash the bedding, even though it wasn’t the day she did that, she would wash the bedding and get rid of the evidence and she grabbed at the sheet and the dust of leaves rose and she sneezed and sneezed and with every explosion there was an inner explosion, a blast of colour and light shaking the walls of the room she’d been living in.
The Court and the dancers in their gowns of starlight and living flowers, the music, oh the music that they try so hard to imitate here and never can, not even knowing what it is they have heard at the edge of their dreams…
He crossed the river of blood. ‘Let him in,’ I said. ‘Let us show him the hospitality of our people, for he is a great adventurer…’
I wore a ring of moonstone, trapped mist and seastorm, on my forefinger. When I gestured they bowed and obeyed… where is my ring?
He kissed my hand and his lips were warm. He looked at me and his eyes and his smile pleased me so…
The letterbox rattled. She heard it quite clearly. She went downstairs, her eyes wide and burning. Outside, it was dusk; she could feel it even through the walls.
One of them was already on the mat, helping the other to climb through. Little beings a few inches high, dressed in green and brown, berry-child and flower-sprite.
The berry-child heard her and turned, bright eyes gleaming in the dusk. ‘Lady?’
The other, still struggling through the narrow slit, said, ‘Will you stop, she can’t fucking hear you,’
‘Yes, I can,’ said Chrys. ‘My darlings, come to me.’ She gathered them up in her arms, and they wept, their tears falling on the blue-glaring nylon carpet like rain on sterile, alien earth, and Chrys, Chrysephaline, Lady Chrysephaline of the Crepuscular Court, remembered everything.
They were very weak, her darlings, near death from their passage and fighting the hostility of the land and the house. The sprite was injured, too: last night she had left her blood on the frame of the letterbox, a sticky smear.
‘How?’ Chrysephaline said.
‘He didn’t set wards for such as us,’ the sprite said, nestling into her shoulder. ‘Too small, too weak for a warlock like him to bother with. That’s why it had to be us that came for you; oh, lady there’s been such a wailing of loss for you that the trees are all withered with the noise of it. Come home!’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘But soon he will be here. And I will be here to greet him.’
‘But what if he catches you, binds you again?’ The berry-child said, putting the moonstone ring back on Chrysephaline’s finger.
‘Have you, too, forgotten who I am?’ she said. And she made a gesture and opened a doorway, and through it she summoned certain of her court.
*
Darren made his way up the walk whistling and turned his key in the door. His wife, his beautiful Chrys, was waiting.
She wore a gown of deep blue smoke, shot with starlight. Her silver-gilt hair twined and writhed about her, whispering. Her eyes were no longer a clear and childish blue but all the colours of a brewing storm.
About her were the highest of the Crepuscular Court. They filled the hallway with breathing shadows and gleaming blades; horns, hooves, fur and feather, stream, stone, leaf and bark. All their eyes were on him, and they were dreadful in their eager stillness.
He turned to run. Bindweed, growing faster than the eye could follow, raced up his legs, trapping him, curled hard about his arms, wrapping them to his sides. He fell heavily to his knees.
Only then did he remember his art. His fingers twitched.
‘No,’ Chrysephaline said, and the few things he still troubled to carry, herbs and feathers and hollowed stones, flew from his pockets and landed at her feet. ‘With this?’ She toed them with one bare foot, and her voice was winter in his bones. ‘With these trappings, you thought to hold me?’
‘I did hold you,’ he said.
‘Lady, for the love I bear you, let me silence him,’ said one, whose voice was the rustle of things in the undergrowth, who moved like trees in the wind; ‘I will stitch his tongue with thorns and sew his lips with spider-thread. Though he scream to burst his lungs, no whisper will escape him. Let me!’
‘Hush, my love, not yet,’ Chrys said, without taking her eyes from Darren. ‘Yes, you held me. Because I thought you pleasing, I let you gull me. And it seems that you used almost all the power you had, to take me and bind me here.’ she toed the scraps again. ‘This is all that is left.’
‘Not all,’ he said, trying to draw himself up, to stare her down. But it was.
‘Marcus knew, did he not? Is he a warlock too?’
Darren gave a bitter yelp of laughter. ‘Marcus? A dabbler. He could never have done what I did. He couldn’t break it, either.’
‘You tore me from my home. You enslaved me.’
‘I did it for love!’ he said.
The court snarled. Darren shuddered, but kept his eyes on her. She must see it in his eyes, the thing that she had first seen, that had made her step from her throne and put her hand in his. He was special.
‘This is your idea of love?’ she said. ‘To bind me, blind me, to tear me from all I cared for, from all that loved and needed me?’
‘You came willingly!’
‘To see your land, you said. To know your heart I must know your land, and so I came, willingly, indeed. But this,’ she flung out her arms, and the walls of the house shrank further in on themselves, becoming thinner, and meaner, and smaller, ‘this I never willingly submitted to. Tell me why.’
‘Why?’
‘Yes, why. I have learned some of your heart, Darren, Warlock, soul-binder. I have seen your land, that bit of it you allowed me, these few mean inches of it, and it has told me much. But not all. Tell me why.’
‘For love,’ he said.
‘Tell me the truth, Darren.’
‘For love…’
‘The truth, or I will let my court loosen your tongue.’
‘I wanted you,’ he said. It was true, after all.
‘You could have had me.’
‘I wanted you here.’
‘Why? You spend your time in a small place, with small people, doing small deeds. With the power you had, and the favour of my Court, this world and the other opened before you like flowers. Yet all you did was bind me here, and you used up almost all your power to do it. Why? You were invited to stay. With me. Such an offer is not often made. ‘
‘As one of your court.’
‘Yes.’
‘While you were queen.’
‘Oh,’ she said. And for some time she was silent, and when he tried to speak again she made the least of gestures and there was a toad filling his mouth, its panting belly pulsing against his tongue.
‘Pride,’ she said. ‘Strange, when you grovel like a dog before your own masters.’
He tried to protest, through his mouthful of cold squirm, and could not.
‘Yet you would rather exist here,’ she said, ‘impressing your fellows with the one thing you had that they did not; your dollslave wife. You could have lived for centuries in a world of marvels and miracles, but you ran from it, dragging me behind you, a child’s toy, to flaunt before the bigger children.’ She looked at him with a kind of wonder.
‘Let me return his hospitality, my lady,’ growled a beast of marsh-stench and lambent eyes. ‘Let me take him to my home, to eat of my bread and drink of my wine.’ And the toad was gone from Darren’s mouth but his throat filled with dark water full of undead things that poked their fingers under his tongue.
‘Let us take him,’ said the berry-child, holding hands with the flower-sprite. ‘We’ll pinch his flesh from his bones, a sliver at a time, and set what’s left to dancing,’ and his flesh shivered as though it was trying to leave his bones before they could do so.
‘Pride, he has? Let me teach him the meaning of pride,’ said a beauty in silver, whose hands were blades and whose teeth were those of a great cat, in whose eyes Darren saw hims
elf a small, plumptious mouse, running in panic from his own spilling guts, knowing himself pathetic, forever prey. ‘It is my speciality.’
‘Enough,’ Chrysephaline said. And they were silent.
‘I could make you my slave in turn,’ she said. ‘To crawl at my heel, adoring and grateful should I deign to beat you. Or I could give you to the Singing Children, and watch you descend the steps of that particular and exquisite madness; but I think that too elegant a fate for you. What should I do with you?’
She came close to him now, one finger resting on her perfect lower lip, her eyes the clear cold green of the sea in springtime.
‘Stand,’ she said, and his limbs jerked him upright.
She looked into his eyes.
‘Such a very little soul,’ she said. ‘You tried to crush me small enough to fit, when there is no room for anything much at all. I think… yes, I think I know your fate.’
Suddenly his mouth was clear, and he could speak, but before he could ask her what she meant, she was gone; all of them were gone, in a whirl and shimmer and the scent of dark flowers.
Darren looked at where they had been. The bindweed withered and fell from his limbs and drifted away to dust.
He got down and gathered up the feathers and the bones and the hollowed stones, but they were empty and there was no power in them, nor in him. The little he had left after he had bound her was gone; she had stripped it from him so easily, and he had never even felt it leave.
But they had left him alive.
So much for their vengeance, so terrible in story. Had she at last been afraid of him, at the end? Was that it? He smiled to himself.
The hallway was stuffy. At least, now, he could open the doors and windows, let some air into the place.
He hesitated, his hand on the door. How would he explain? He needed a story that would make him the hero, a reason why his beautiful wife was no longer there, but not gone of her own will. A disappearance, a kidnapping, some brutal ex-boyfriend… He pushed at the door.
It wouldn’t open.
He huffed impatiently and shoved the key into the lock, turned it.