by Allyson Bird
‘In reality.’
Leonora pulled back a smile. ‘I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of you. Aren’t you afraid of the consequences of your actions?’
‘They’d have to find me first.’
‘There was another who offended you.’
‘The other—mmmmm there was one who played Bottom in the Shakespeare play and when he tried to remove the head it wouldn’t come off—everyone said the head looked so real.’
‘What happened to him next?’
‘Sideshow for a time then his real head was put back on. He still thought he was an ass though so he was committed to the Belmont Mental Institution.’
Juliette began to play with the silver charm bracelet on her left wrist.
‘Any more additions to your bracelet?’ Leonora enquired. ‘You had added the donkey’s head last time we met. What else have you from before my time? And it seems to have many more. Not all enemies I hope?’
‘Indeed it has. And indeed not. I have the swan, the dog, the cardinal—the pretty red bird not the other.’
‘Do you still have the one I found for you? The horse with wings?’
‘Pegasus? I do.’
‘Good. Don’t lose it’
Juliette rose from the couch.
‘Before you go—tell me you haven’t met Shakespeare yet?’
Juliette raised one eyebrow. ‘You know sometime in the future someone calls for his books to be removed from schools because they think he was gay?’
Leonora took on a serious tone. ‘You tell me all this—you influence all that. I’m worried for the future.’
‘You should be.’
‘It is like being told a story—and the ending changes constantly. Also that if you can influence events there seems to be a protagonist who does too—to the world’s detriment. Except I put you on the so called devil’s side which could turn out for the best.’
‘Religion again. Damn the Catholics? We’re all damned.’
Juliette walked across to the window. The sun was setting. Against that beautiful sky one chestnut tree in particular reached its arms to heaven—its roots trying to pull away from hell.
‘I have to go now.’
Leonora looked disappointed. ‘So soon? No parties for us to go to this time?’
‘Not this time but there will be another. I hope.’
Juliette crossed the room and looked at another painting. ‘You’ve given the white horse wings now.’
The horse was centred on the canvas—about to fly. And there was the chestnut tree. Its leaves had fallen to the ground.
Leonora turned back to the painting she was working on. ‘I’ve much more to do on this. But here is something again for you.’ She pointed to the canvas. In the bottom left hand corner was the yellow sign.
How many times had Juliette been to see Leonora? This was perhaps the last time? She would try once more. For half an hour she tried to tell Leonora of the horror to come. Words continued to fail her. Leonora said no, quietly, again and again. Juliette finally gave up, and reached out to her friend, and held her gently in her arms. Juliette knew at that point Leonora would never leave—she had made her mind up. She would have to go on without her.
‘Goodbye Leonora.’
‘Until the next time, Juliette.’ Leonora turned to the canvas—quickly painting over the one tear that had fallen upon the painting.
Juliette left but then sat under the chestnut tree and thought some more. The yellow. The Egyptians thought that it represented the eternal and that the gods were made of gold. In the Middle Ages the colour was associated with Judas Iscariot, and dissenters in The Renaissance were made to wear yellow. That would happen again but a yellow triangle would suffice. What did the yellow sign really mean to Leonora? It would change to the sunflower in Carrington’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. If people looked for it—it was there in many works of symbolism. In all art. Van Gogh. It stood for hope now and again, too. But mostly for madness. Juliette was right by Charlotte’s side when she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.
Juliette found many people soulless. They had little kindness or no compassion within them. Except to appear so for self gain. All dried up and bitter. She liked artists because they gave some hope. And as for those called insane—she had as much time in the universe that there could be for them. She felt compassion for the isolated. In despair she would leave Carcosa now and again just to give them what little comfort she could. Now with no end in clear sight to her life she could try to do something—although she was limited in many ways. And she was not indestructible. Juliette would be there for some in the future but she would not be able to save many, perhaps. Or take them to Carcosa. She could try. But only HE could do that—or only when he let her. The King in Yellow would have the last word. And many times he said no. He had said no when she asked about Solveig. That had brought Juliette great sadness. He simply said Carcosa was not for her. Juliette loved actors. They put on masks and took them off. Most of the human race wore theirs all the time. Some of them she saw take them off now and again and she did not like that. Many were monsters underneath the glossy façade. Inhuman.
She remembered her childhood. Smells associated with people and other things. And then she remembered when the tobacconist also sold the most amazing vanilla ice cream. She hated the smell of cigars and tobacco but she would rush into his shop, thrust her money in Brindle’s face, tell him what she wanted, and then hold her breath until she was blue. He would give her the prize and she would run out. There was the one time though when he paused and smiled, a sour smile—she had almost cried with frustration as she gulped for air.
With that last memory she left Avignon. She would never meet up with her friend in that place again.
The other business. Thought Juliette. Her memory was filled with the colour red, now. She could almost see the blood on the ground. When she closed her eyes she could hear the cries of the crowd and for one brief moment she felt a hand thrust her head towards the blade. She resisted, looked up and all she could see was a swan coming down to land on the Seine. There had almost been a terrible mistake, she thought. Place de la Concorde. Place de la Revolution—no—the first one.
When Juliette finally arrived at the Chateau she thought about why she had been sent. The woman lay in the Chateau de Nemoirs—within the Oratoire Romano Gothique to be precise. And the child—holding her dead mother’s hand—guarded by the people who adored her. She would have enemies, though—many of them. It was too late for her mother to go to Carcosa. She had refused once and the king would never force her to go. But now it was time to think about the daughter.
The body was laid out in a cream gown ending at fine crimson slippers, and the face covered with a long silver veil decorated with a filigree of fine gold, twisted into the antique lace. Her brown hair cascaded over the edge of the white marble dais—the relief along the two longer sides showing twin moons and stars—and a strange city. She was surrounded by the black tulips. Her right hand enclosing one tulip cup as if to crush or caress it. The residents of the castle were seated against the walls. They formed a circle, except for where the old door was, and when Juliette looked up at the ceiling she saw golden stars swirling against a black sky. He’d sent that—that was all—and Juliette. Those seated arose when Juliette entered the room, bowed, and then left her alone with the corpse and the child. The little princess wore a yellow veil. Face unseen. She had been named Fleur. And she had been looked after by the people who loved her but that would not be enough.
Juliette had many enemies, too. There was one in particular who hated poets, writers, and any artists who ‘interpreted’ the yellow sign—he would try to bring about their demise in some way. Silence them. Shut them down. She knew exactly where he was and Juliette had been told that he would not catch up with her just yet. She always lived on the edge. She thought of Salome and the red moon and the black cloud across it. The swans again. In Baudelaire. And how she had been back before her birth. Her fate.
She was an artist, a messenger, and a muse. And she was nothing.
But Juliette had made another enemy. A new one. From a time when her good intentions had caused tragedy for another. The Red Queen had been thinking about Juliette and would find her the next time around.
As Juliette and Fleur made their way through the corridors the walls began to dim in colour as if one artist was shading them in. Juliette saw those who would suffer and the swastika everywhere—a symbol that would be reviled for centuries to come. The little girl did not look. She held Juliette’s hand tightly and kept her eyes on her own golden slippers. Juliette held the child’s head close to her black skirt and carried on. Then Juliette pressed a finger into the peacock eye at her throat and suddenly the voluminous cloak enveloped them both—as she did so Fleur looked ahead and thought she saw golden rose petals before them but what she could not see—were the petals of black tulips that shrivelled—and died behind them.
Fleur looked up at Juliette. ‘When do I get to paint?’
Juliette’s expression turned from that of concern to a broad smile. ‘All in good time, sweetheart, all in good time.’ With that she took the little girl by both hands and they entered the mirror together. For Juliette there was that liberation for the soul again.
As the Princess in Yellow stepped over the threshold she pulled the veil from her face, smiled—and looked up again at Juliette. For a moment Juliette faltered but regained her composure. At that moment a charm fell from her bracelet and landed on the stone floor. They left it behind.
WHILE THE BLACK STARS BURN
BY LUCY A. SNYDER
Caroline tucked an unruly strand of coarse brown hair up under her pink knit cap, shrugged the strap of her black violin case back into place over her shoulder, and hurried up the music building stairs. Her skin felt both uncomfortably greasy and itched dryly under her heavy winter clothes; it had been seven days since the water heater broke in her tiny efficiency and the landlord wasn’t answering his phone. Quick, chilly rag-baths were all she could stand, and she felt so self-conscious about the state of her hair that she kept it hidden under a hat whenever possible. She hoped that her violin professor Dr. Harroe wouldn’t make her take her cap off.
Her foot slipped on a spot of dried salt on the stairs and she grabbed the chilly brass banister with her left hand to keep from pitching forward. The sharp, cold jolt made the puckered scar in her palm sharply ache, and the old memory returned fast and unbidden:
“Why aren’t you practicing as I told you to?”
Her father scowled down at her. He was still in his orchestra conducting clothes: a grey blazer and black turtleneck. His fingers clenched a tumbler of Scotch over ice.
“M-my hand started to hurt.” She shrank back against the hallway wall, hoping that she hadn’t sounded whiny, hoping her explanation would suffice and he’d just send her to bed.
The smell of alcohol and sweat fogged the air around him, and that meant almost anything could happen. He wasn’t always cruel. Not even usually. But talking to him when he’d been drinking was like putting a penny in a machine that sometimes dispensed glossy gumballs but other times a dozen stinging arachnids would swarm from the chute instead. And there was no way to know which she’d get, sweets or scorpions.
“Hurt?” he thundered down at her. “Nonsense! I’ll show you what hurts!”
He grabbed her arm and dragged her to the fireplace in the music room. She tried to pull away, pleading, promising to practice all night if he wanted her to. But he was completely impassive as he drew a long dark poker from the rack and shoved it into the hottest part of the fire. He frowned down at the iron as the flames licked the shaft, seemingly deaf to her frantic mantra of Please, no, Papa, I’ll be good I swear please.
The iron heated quickly, and in a series of motions as artful as any he’d performed on the orchestral podium he pulled it from the fire with one hand, squeezed her forearm hard to force her fingers open with the other, and jabbed the glowing red tip of the poker into her exposed palm.
The pain was astonishing. A part of her knew she was shrieking and had fallen to her knees on the fine Persian carpet, but the rest of her felt as though she’d been hurled through space and time toward the roaring hearts of a thousand black stars, cosmic furnaces that would consume not just her flesh and bone but her very soul. They would destroy her so completely that no one would remember that she had ever lived. The stars swirled around her, judging her, and she knew they found her lacking. She was too small, unripe, and they cast her back toward Earth. It was the first time and last time she’d ever been glad to be a disappointment in the eyes of the universe.
Tears blurred her vision and through them her father looked strange, distorted. In that instant she was sure that she knelt at the feet of a monstrous stranger who was wearing her father’s pallid face as a mask.
“Now, that hurts I expect,” the stranger observed cheerfully as her flesh sizzled beneath the red iron. “And so I don’t expect I shall hear you whining about practice again, will I? Now, stop your little dog howling this instant or I’ll burn the other one, too!”
She willed herself to bite back her screams, and he finally let her go just as she passed out from the agony.
When she woke up on the couch, she discovered that her father had fetched some snow from the porch and pressed a grapefruit-sized ball of it into her palm to numb her burn. Icy water dripped down her wrist and soaked her sweater sleeve. The air was filled with the odor of burned meat. Hers. It made her feel even sicker, and for the rest of her life the smell of grilling steaks and chops would make her want to vomit.
Her father gazed down at her, sad and sober.
“I would never hurt you, you understand?” He gently brushed the hair out of her face. “If anyone has hurt you in this world, it was not I.”
He bundled her into the back of his Cadillac and took her to see a physician friend of his. Caroline remembered sitting in a chair in the hallway with a handkerchief full of ice in her hand, weeping quietly from the pain while the two men spoke behind a closed door.
“Will her playing be affected?” her father asked.
“Christ, Dunric!” The physician sounded horrified. “Is that your only concern for your own daughter?”
“Of course not!” her father huffed. “Nonetheless, it is a concern. So, if you would be so kind as to offer your professional opinion on the matter?”
“She’s got a third degree burn; her palm is roasted through like a lamb fillet. I can’t see how she could have held on to a live coal so long of her own accord. Are you sure no one else could have been involved? Perhaps a resentful servant?”
“Quite sure,” he replied. “My daughter has some…mental peculiarities she regrettably inherited from her mother. You know how unstable sopranos are! Her mother often had a kind of petit mal seizure; I believe some pyromania compelled the girl to take hold of the coal and then a fit prevented her from dropping it as a sensible child would.”
“That is unfortunate.” The physician sounded unconvinced, and for a brief moment hope swelled in Caroline’s heart: perhaps he would challenge her father, investigate further, discover the truth. And then perhaps she’d be sent to live with her mother’s people in Boston. She’d only met them once – they were bankers or shoemakers or something else rather dull but they seemed decent enough.
But it was not to be. The physician continued: “Her tendons and ligaments are almost certainly affected. She may need surgery to regain full mobility in her fingers, and I fear that her hand may be permanently drawn due to scarring.”
“Well, she only needs to curl it ‘round the neck of her instrument, after all.”
It took two surgeries to repair the tendons in her hand, and all her father’s colleagues marveled at how brave and determined she was in her physical therapy and practice sessions afterward. Her father glowed at the praises they heaped on her, and while he never said as much, something in his smile told her that, should she cease to be s
o pleasingly dedicated to the musical arts, there were things in his world worse than hot metal.
Caroline traced the lines of her scar with her thumb. The doctor’s knife had given it a strange, symbolic look. Some people claimed it resembled a Chinese or Arabic character, although nobody could say which one.
She flexed her hand and shook her head to try to banish the memories. There was no point in dwelling on any of it. Her father was long gone. Five years after he burned her, he’d flown into a rage at a negative review in the newspaper. He drove off in his Alfa Romeo with a bottle of Glenfiddich. Caroline suspected he’d gone to see a ballerina in the next city who enjoyed being tied up and tormented. But he never arrived. He lost control of his car in the foggy hills and his car overturned in a drainage ditch that was hidden from the road. Pinned, he lived for three days while hungry rats gnawed away the exposed flesh of his face, eyes and tongue.
At his funeral, she’d briefly considered quitting music just to spite his memory … but if she refused to be the Maestro’s daughter, what was she? She knew nothing of gymnastics or any other sports, nor was she an exceptional student or a skilled painter. Her crabbed hand was nimble on a fingerboard but useful for little else. Worst of all, she knew—since she’d been repeatedly told so—that she was quite plain, good as a violinist but unremarkable as a woman. Her music was the only conceivable reason anyone would welcome her to a wedding. A thousand creditors had picked her father’s estate as clean as the rodents had stripped his skull; if she abandoned the violin, what would she have left?
“Caroline, is that you?” Professor Harroe called after she knocked on the door to his office.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do come in! I have a bit of a surprise for you today.”
She suddenly felt apprehensive, but made herself smile at the professor as she opened the door and took her accustomed seat in the chair in front of his desk, which was stacked high with music theory papers, scores, and books. “What is it?”
He leaned back in his battered wooden swivel chair behind his desk and smiled at her in return. Her anxiety tightened; Harroe had been her music tutor since she was a teenager, and he almost never smiled, not at his colleagues’ jokes nor at beautiful women nor at lovely music. She searched his face, trying to decipher his expression. He looked practically giddy, she finally decided, and it was a bit unsettling.