Where had her fight gone? She didn’t know the answer to that either. Shya turned her mind over to something else.
The other day, Shya had seen someone staring at her as she walked home from Walmart. She had recognised him. His hair had been a wild halo about his head, hanging in his eyes, and the most startling shade of blue Shya had ever seen.
The boy went to her college, though he wasn’t in her department. She had caught his eyes in the courtyard while school was still on. He seemed to be friends with the other boys in her classes and often came by after class to hang out with them. The other boys in Shya’s class were rather obnoxious, but she attributed it to the fact that they were theatre kids. (Shya, of course, was not obnoxious. Though she had a biased opinion.) Still, that boy had been different. Attractive, too, but not in a conventional way. He didn’t have a chiseled chest and shiny curls. He had doe eyes and thin lips and was terribly lanky, but the expression on his face was something akin to innocence.
Shya wondered if she might have plucked up the courage to walk straight into his hoard of obnoxious theatre kid friends and ask him his name, see if he wanted to get a coffee with her. Ask him why he chose that particular shade of blue to die his untamed hair.
She would never see that boy again. Would never get the chance to see if they clicked or if they didn’t, if they were polar opposites like her mother and father, or if they were literal polar opposites, repellent of each other.
There were a lot of things she would never get the chance to see. Not the Big Ben nor the Sydney Opera House nor the CN Tower. Not someone with electric blue hair. There was nothing but dirt and cement and palm trees here. No matter how far she looked, how hard she squinted, Shya could not for the life of her spot a smidge of freedom.
***
The car had been running on fumes for several miles by the time Berht pulled into a gas station. It was dingy and poorly lit. A man stood hunched over the counter inside, and a sole patron lingered on the outside, a cigarette between his lips, opaque smoke billowing from its end.
“I’ll be just a second,” Berht said.
Shya smiled, and Berht exited the car, leaving the door open. The smell, unrestricted, hit Shya all the harder.
A few slow minutes passed until Berht returned. He keyed the ignition and set his hands on the wheel, but the car didn’t move.
“Berht?” Shya questioned. “Aren’t we gonna go now?”
His arms were trembling, the hairs on the raised. Suddenly, his head whipped around. Immediately, Shya could tell something was song. His eyes seemed far away, glassy. His mouth had fallen open, and the breaths that came were fleeting and shallow.
“Never run from the creature,” he cautioned. His voice was strange, too. Booming, much deeper than normal. And so rich, almost like he was a choir, layers of voices underlying his own. “If you leave, his curse will not break and we will all perish at his hands. Every monster needs his moon, and in his sky, you must shine the brightest.” Berht blinked. His eyes were clear once more. His mouth broke into a gentle smile. “Shall we get going?” His voice had returned to its normal pitch.
Shaken, Shya nodded. She didn’t mention the episode until they were back on the road: “So what the hell was that back there?”
Berht’s brows knitted together, and the faintest frown tugged at the corners of his lips. “What the hell was what?”
“What, you don’t remember? Is this some kind of joke?”
“What?”
“That—that—I don’t know—your voice went weird and your face went weird and you said some weird thing, and now you don’t remember.”
That realisation had dawn was evident on Berht’s face.
“What,” Shya said flatly, crossing her arms over her chest. “This isn’t funny, you know.”
“It’s not a joke. Sometimes I have...well, sometimes that happens. I told you I could do what my grandfather does. Prophecies and stuff. But I can’t remember them afterwards. I don’t know what I said, and I don’t know what it meant.”
Her mother was one of the most superstitious people she had ever known. Shya often found herself inwardly ridiculing her, wondering how on earth she could believe in spirits and psychics when there was real, proven, grounded science, especially when she was married to an actual scientist. Sometimes, Shya wondered how her father, such a logical man, could put up with her mother. Because she loved the woman with every fibre of her being but god, no pun intended, did she believe in the most far-fetched things.
There was a girl in Shya’s eleventh-grade math class that had been nearly as bad as her own mother. She was the type of girl who carried crystal balls in her backpack, played poker with tarot cards, flipped to the back of the newspaper to find the phone numbers of local psychics. Shya never understood what could lead a person to believe in something so unfounded, so fallible.
Still, whatever had happened to Berht didn’t seem like a ruse. Not that Shya completely believed it either. But there was some innate honesty in Berht that made Shya want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Whatever had just happened was weird, but she didn’t know if it was a genuine psychic episode.
Berht had told her he had no memory of his prophecies, and Shya wondered if she should tell him what he had said, ask him if he could help her to decipher it. But she didn’t.
It made her think, though. If there was truth to carnival psychics, if there was truth to her mother’s ramblings, if there was this whole other side to this world that delved into a dimension only a handful could see.
Out of interest, Shya had taken a theology course in high school. It had made her think. Religion and the occult were by no means the same thing, but they seemed to attract the same type of people. Her mother stood by Krishna the same way she stood by her trinkets that allegedly warded off evil. The Christian girls in her school stood by the bible, hung onto its every word, treated it as gospel because it was. But there was no proof to it. Then again, there wasn’t any proof against it. Just like Berht and his abilities.
Shya’s theology teacher had worn a rosary around her neck. It could almost have been mistaken for her mother’s prayer beads that she stashed in the walls. Shya had seen some modest rosaries in her days. Small, silver crosses the smallest glint on the chest. But her teachers...the day Shya walked into that class for the first time and saw that woman who looked about sixty by her wrinkles but still had blonde hair (probably dyed) with a cross as large as her fist and as ornate as the Buckingham Palace resting on her breast, she knew that this class would be ninety-nine percent Christianity.
Everything Shya thought got her thinking. Her theology teacher had thought according to what she believed, not what everyone else in the world believed. That was the problem, Shya decided. Everything in her life was controlled by what someone else wanted her to know, to see, to be.
* * *
By the time Berht’s car rolled into Amalpur on its rocky dirt roads, the sun was beginning to set.
People still lingered outdoors, but they dared not approach the car. There was not a smile on any of their faces, not even the children’s. They simply stared, some of them watching the car with something akin to pity. It was puzzling. Shya had expected this to be something of a festival. Wasn’t that how weddings were? Instead, the mood was sombre and doleful, as though the villagers were waiting for something dreadful to occur.
Shya turned her head away from the villagers and stared straight ahead, willing herself to focus on nothing.
The road was beginning to fade into grass. Still, Berht persisted, and the car lurched forward, leaving the villagers behind.
A small house stood solitary in the distance. Fear began to curdle in her stomach. This is real, she realised. It hadn’t struck her until then that she was in Amalpur, about to wed the man she had been set aside for for her entire life.
They pulled up in front of the house.
House was stretching the truth, actually. It was more of a hut, but even then, not quite. P
erhaps a large tent, though not entirely made of fabric.
Shya exited the car after Berht and shut the door behind her. She watched him as he opened the tailgate. “Do you have clothes?” he asked. “For the wedding?”
Shya nodded. She rummaged through her luggage for the dress, veil, and ankle bells her mother had meticulously packed for her. By the time she shut the tailgate, Berht was already approaching the house’s entrance, and Shya scrambled to catch up, the bells clutched in her hand, the dress and veil folded over her arm.
The house’s interior was testament to its abandonment. It was grimy, not a single surface free of dirt. Shya glanced up at the fabric canopy that was intended to keep out rain. There were tears in it. The whole room stank of mildew and disuse.
“This is your grandmother’s house,” Berht said.
Shya’s mouth twisted. “My grandmother’s dead.” She had died just after her mother had left to be with her father.
“Yes,” Berht agreed. “And this is her house.” He swung the bag off his shoulder and handed it to her. “You’ll be wed at the village centre at dusk.”
Looking down at what she was holding, Shya let out a small, breathy laugh. She held up the ankle bells. “They’re to ward off spirits,” she told him. “Silly, if you ask me, but…”
Berht laughed.
Shya studied his face. There was something wrong. Not like before, when he was in the midst of a psychic episode, but still wrong. His smile seemed right and forced, tinged with worry.
Shya offered her own smile, hoping to ease the other’s ill-concealed anxiety, but also hoping to quell her own growing fear.
When Berht left—he said he’d wait outside for her—Shya discarded her clothes she was wearing.
She put the ankle bells on first, both of them jingling as she fastened their clasps around her leg. The dress was difficult to don. It was heavy and pleated, jewels sewn into its folds, glimmering. She pinned the veil to her head, letting it fall gracefully over her face. She put her shoes back on; they were covered by the dress. With a sigh that made the veil puff out, Shya exited her grandmother’s house.
Outside, as promised, Berht was waiting. When his eyes fell upon her, he grinned, the strange emotion he had been exhibiting earlier almost falling completely into the background. “You look good,” he commented.
They drove back to the village centre. Berht parked off to the side and they got out, Shya pulling up the hem of the dress to keep it from brushing the ground.
Berht spotted her clad feet. “You should take the shoes off,” he advised.
Sighing, Shya kicked off her trainers and rolled off her socks with her big toes, deftly shoving them into her shoes. Her feet scrunched up on the ground, avoiding the sharp pebbles that dug into her skin.
“I’ll hang onto these,” Berht offered, and when Shya nodded, he swiped them up.
Shya glanced skywards. All that was left was the dying light, the last rays of sunlight illuminating the sky blue and orange from beyond the horizon.
A great fire roared. Not many people gathered around it. The many villagers from earlier were gone, and only lone stragglers (and Berht) remained.
Shya approached. Before her was a tall figure, his face and body cloaked in robes. Not a part of him was visible. Shya grasped her dress again and began to move, treading cautiously towards him, half out of fear, half out of worry that she would cut her feet on rock, miles away from medical attention.
The ceremony is a blur. She repeats what she is told to repeat, barely listens as her husband-to-be does the same. She walks, as instructed, around the fire with him, with each revolution, promising to care for each other in spite of any circumstance that may present itself.
When it is done, the fire was dying. Shya looked to Berht, but he only handed her back her shoes and her luggage before ushering her back to her husband.
Together, they begin to walk to her husband’s home, Berht growing farther and farther away with each step. Shya didn’t bother herself in keeping her dress clean (even if she wanted to, she couldn’t; her hands were full), and let it trail behind, letting it grow dirty.
They didn’t touch. Her husband still wore the garment, his hood still up, shrouding his face in deep shadows. She looked back. She could see the faint, flickering flames of what had been their bonfire, and the receding black dot that must have been Berht (for it was standing where he had been), still watching her.
When she turned her head back around, a great house loomed before her behind a tall fence. Her husband was still at her side, though judging by his height, his stride could have carried him far further.
The house was larger than the ones she had already seen. Its interior was clean and neat, its decorations the only divide between it and her house back in America. She was missing the States more and more with every passing second.
Shya’s husband let her upstairs—none of the other houses were more than a story high—to a vacant bedroom. Finally, she was able to set down her things. He turned to go, but Shya shot out her hand, grasping the fabric of his clothing.
“Please,” she said hesitantly, “can I see you?”
Her husband was still for a moment. Then, he held up his hand, and his sleeve fell to his elbow.
Revealed was an arm. But it wasn’t human. It still held the same shape of her own, but it was furred and clawed, much like a paw. Shya gasped and her husband’s arm dropped, the sleeve falling over it again. Before she could say a word, her husband had retreated elsewhere into the house.
Shya went into her room and shut the door behind it. Feeling horrified and overwhelmed, she collapsed onto the bed. The mattress was thicker than that of the hotel she and Berht had stopped in, but less so than the one in her bedroom back home.
No, Shya reminded herself. This is home now.
Her mind dragged back to the animalistic arm her husband had shown her. What had she done? What had she married? She searched her mind for an answer and could only find one: a monster.
A terrible feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. It had been bad enough to be married to a stranger. But now she had found out that she was married to a monster, too. Some type of creature. Something inhuman.
Was she in danger? Was her life at risk?
She was now living with someone, eternally bound to someone, according to her wedding vows, that wasn’t human. Down the hall was a beast. There was something living with her in this house that could quite possibly rip her vocal cords out with one swipe of their claws.
All of a sudden, her safety was jeopardised. She had come to this country with the knowledge that she would be wedding a stranger. Already, the situation was at least mildly dubious. But now, she was living with something with the capability to kill her. In time, she would learn its nature (that is, if it didn’t hurt her before then).
But perhaps she wasn’t being entirely fair to her new husband. He had yet to exhibit any ill will towards her. He had given her a home, had shown her himself at her command, had given her no reason to doubt that he was anything but benign. But maybe he was just biding his time. Whatever the case, Shya had to live with it. She was here now,wed to a monster that she had been promised to for her whole life.
Had her parents known that this man was some otherworldly creature? Had they sent her off knowing full well into whose (or what’s) arms she was headed? Or had they had no knowledge of her husband’s affliction?
Endless questions poured into her mind, swirling around, demanding to be answered. But Shya had no answers to give.
She fell into an uneasy sleep.
FOUR
The day following Shya’s wedding was tense. She hadn’t eaten the night before, and when morning had come, she had woken to an uncomfortable empty stomach.
Shya tiptoed, barefoot, to the kitchen. There, she scrounged up a meal, one for her, another for her husband, who seemed to still be asleep. She left his meal on the table and ate her own before withdrawing into her room.
The
only thing she could thing to do was paint. She had packed art supplies, and it had always helped her in particularly distressing times.
She dug around on one of her bags. She set up a collapsible easel and mounted upon it a small canvas. She donned old clothes, ones that were already paint-stained and torn. She squirted dots of paint onto a palette and filled a cup that, too, was paint-stained, with water from the washroom adjacent to her bedroom.
She made arbitrary strokes on the canvas, splashing colour into every corner, and shadows under every object. As she painted, she wondered how things were back home. How her parents were, her friends, her classmates. If they missed her. She sure as hell missed them. That was how he passed the day. By the time she deemed the painting finished, the sun had dipped below the horizon, and her legs ached from standing for hours.
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