Wicked Women

by Gaie Sebold

  I say ‘loveless’ yet it can’t have been entirely so, otherwise I wouldn’t have been at all upset by what happened. Which I undoubtedly was. Jettisoning Martin from the stricken ship of my heart was surprisingly painless.

  It may sound cold, but what was I supposed to do when I walked into the marital bedroom and Seraphina Ilyana Belosselskya-Belozerskya lifted Martin’s face from her twitching loins like Salome offering up the head of John the Baptist on a plate? Break down in tears? Or was shooting both of them in the head with a twelve bore shot gun the done thing in these situations?

  No, I quietly and efficiently began to pack Martin’s suitcase, while Phina made futile protests that it was just sex that Martin and I were made for each other, and should never be parted.

  ‘Great,’ I muttered. ‘From scarlet woman to marriage guidance counsellor in zero seconds…’

  While she was making these impassioned speeches on behalf of our marriage, I never heard a peep of agreement from Martin, who just sat there, a skinny arm dabbing at his mouth with the corner of a sheet. And all I could think was: three years, and he’s never once given me oral pleasure.

  Then I went out into the garden and pruned the Hydrangea with such recklessness that I pushed my face too close to the razor sharp point of a Yucca leaf; horribly injuring my eye. Phina appeared then, fully dressed by now, as I was clutching my streaming face.

  ‘Rebecca,’ she began.

  ‘I’ve hurt my eye,’ I replied through clenched teeth.

  ‘I know you are weeping, Rebecca. There is no need to hide it.’

  ‘No, I’ve really hurt my eye!’

  It was only a tiny injury, but it was excruciatingly painful. I’d never held with the notion that emotional or spiritual torment is worse than physical pain, or that agonies of the body can distract the mind from the soul’s anguish. It had never been my experience at any rate. And that day did nothing to change that view. Perhaps I’ve never experienced either to a sufficient degree to know. Or perhaps I’ve never allowed myself to surrender to the more metaphysical kind of suffering in the way some seem to do. All I know is, after the pain of that superficial ocular abrasion, I can’t imagine what drove Phina to do to herself what she later did.

  What she did right then was drive me to the eye hospital. As she helped me into her car, I couldn’t see any sign of Martin. Either he had left already or he was just cowering inside. It was difficult to see with my injured eye gushing with fluids. In any case, when I got back from the hospital, he’d gone.

  In the car, before she pulled out of our driveway, I said: ‘I’m sure you know how fatuous it is to say sorry in these situations, so don’t.’

  ‘Of course,’ she replied.

  ‘So why, Phina? Why us? Why him? I mean he’s hardly Don Juan…’

  ‘Your husband is actually rather a considerate lover, Rebecca.’

  ‘I’ve only just found out today: it’s a side my ex-husband has only ever shown to you, it would seem.’

  ‘Anyway, as to why… I don’t know why. Maybe it was…’

  ‘Jesus!’ I cut her off. ‘My eye is streaming. Tissues in the glove compartment?’

  Before she could answer, or elaborate on her feeble explanation, I fumbled for the catch and opened it. I should add that one of my eyes is slightly weaker than the other, and it was the stronger one I had hurt. Perhaps it was a mercy, for in the dim light inside the compartment I could just make out the blurred impression of a saturnine, wooden face suffused with a lambent glow.

  ‘Don’t look at it, Rebecca,’ cried Phina, ‘I thought it had reset itself!’

  She slammed the glove compartment, and in the closing gap, to my impaired vision the face seemed to move, to twitch and distort.

  ‘It is resetting itself now, but I never meant for you to see that, Rebecca.’

  ‘I can barely see anything,’ I snapped, rather testily. Then, a few minutes later, as we drove along the main road to the hospital, I asked ‘So where did you find it in the end?’

  ‘Oh, a funny little junk shop in Abingdon run by a retired civil engineer. He said one of the workers discovered it when they were cutting back the scrub during an upgrade of the hard shoulder. A notorious accident black spot, he said. That was why they were widening the road there. It seemed like destiny that I should find it after visiting you: I so wanted to celebrate it with you! But when I got to your house, you were out…’

  ‘So you decided to celebrate with Martin instead.’

  ‘Please, Rebecca, let me explain. I never thought of myself as a scarlet woman, more an experimental theologian. And when I finally found the Kravolitz I so wanted to play the game. I hadn’t had the chance in all those years since Emily… since she bought it. I think she must have solved it all those years ago in the car. That’s the reason why her father crashed the car, not the road being too narrow. Well, it may have been part of the reason. I don’t believe it would have happened if she hadn’t gone off her head and distracted him. I think it’s why Ted … why Mr Callaghan lost his head too. He was the only other person to have played the game. At the time, it seemed as if every nonentity had played it apart from me!’

  This last outburst sounded almost bitter. I dabbed at my wounded eye to make it seem as if the gasp I’d just let out was a reaction to the pain, rather than to her insouciant contempt for two people she seemed to see as her minions.

  ‘Some people just can’t face what it shows you about yourself!’ It was almost a cry of protest. ‘Like Emily. Like Mr Callaghan. I thought I could. I thought I was stronger.’ What was this? Humility? ‘The man in the shop said he had never tried to solve it. So I was the first person to have played in all that time. I sat in the car for three hours, absorbed in its mysteries. When I came to myself, I felt a little… odd. I needed company. I so wanted to see you. The Krasivoye Litzo is a harsh task master, Rebecca. It demands certain sacrifices. It says you must kill yourself, or the better part of yourself. I thought I was strong enough, but when I came to your house and you weren’t there. Martin was, and I could see he wanted me. I needed comfort. I suppose I wasn’t as strong as I thought I was…’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, drily. We were approaching the hospital.

  ‘But your eye…’

  ‘I can manage from here. No need to wait. I can get a taxi home.’

  I undid the seat belt, forcing her to pull over. Stumbling along the pavement towards the hospital, half blind, I thought about what she’d just said. An admission of weakness, alongside breath-taking arrogance: she’d seduced my husband, destroyed my marriage, not because she’d particularly wanted him, but because she could. And not once had she said ‘sorry’. I know I’d told her not to bother, but surely she didn’t really think I’d meant it!

  Still the same old Phina after all then. And that strange phrase she’d used about Emily: ‘she bought it’. Either it was inappropriately callous slang for dying that sat oddly with her affected Russian accent, or she meant that she had literally sold the puzzle to the ill-fated girl.

  It did seem more likely when I thought about it than Emily just spiriting it away without consent, though everything had appeared to indicate this at the time. Part of the Legend of Seraphina Ilyana Belosselskya-Belozerskya was the story that her family had fallen upon hard times, lands confiscated by the Bolsheviks, etc. So it was always a struggle for them to keep up appearances and continue in the manner to which they were accustomed. It did not seem inconceivable that Phina had sold the valuable toy to Emily to further this aim, perhaps even to help pay for her school fees. Maybe Emily’s toy magnate grandfather had financed the deal, possibly handsomely given his political sympathies.

  This is all just speculation, from someone who was very much out of the loop at the time. On the other hand, it’s a preferable scenario to the possible one where Phina allowed her to purloin it knowing full well what would happen, in revenge for her presumption. This possibility is as terrible as it is unlikely, though the first scenario does sti
ll beg the question: given how dangerous she has repeatedly implied it is to the unwary, would Phina really have countenanced the manufacture and mass marketing of the Kravolitz?

  Perhaps she would, if she were the diabolically amoral creature I sometimes think she was, in my more uncharitable moments.

  VI

  On the way to visit Phina, I have to drive along the stretch of motorway where the crash happened. Maybe that’s why I put off the visits. Or it could just be another excuse. There are kites that circle overhead on that stretch of road, prehistoric-looking birds of prey, reintroduced in recent years to the woodlands on either side of the motorway. I wonder if they hover in wait for human road-kill. I could imagine them swooping down when the Blunketts ‘bought it’, to use Phina’s unfortunate phrase.

  I keep expecting to see a maimed, mousey figure darting around the scrub. Perhaps if I had the Kravolitz…

  Surely I don’t buy into the legend Seraphina’s spun around her lost toy, the powers she attributes to this thing of wood and wire and tiny, coiled springs. And even if I did, she’s hardly made it a very enticing proposition. On one visit she compared it to staring into the Abyss:

  ‘You might look away, but then you see it in everything. From then on you are as one whose eyes have become accustomed to the dark, so that you begin to see the shapes moving in the shadows.’

  VII

  I think she’s harmless now, too drugged up to the eyeballs in the white-washed walls of ordered calm to pose a threat to herself or anyone else.

  I say eyeballs…

  She did it with a spoon. It was quite a shock when she first removed her dark glasses to show me what she had done. She explained that they had to go, because they were evil. Those pallid, blue orbs were responsible ‘for hurting Emily and poor Mr Callaghan. Yes, and for hurting you and Martin, Rebecca.’

  In that way, she’s still the same Seraphina Ilyana Belosselskya-Belozerskya of old, still grossly over-estimating her power over others. But she also blamed the Kravolitz, both for the trail of destruction she believed she’d left throughout these peoples’ lives, and for her horrifying act of self-mutilation.

  ‘It changes the way you see things, Rebecca,’ she said on one visit. ‘It shows you the intense beauty of some things in life, and the grotesque ugliness of others. Both extremes are more than most souls can bear. The face shows you these things, Rebecca.’

  She still has a gift for the beautiful turn of phrase, though she’s lost her own physical charms, buried under mounds of flesh in plain, baggy clothing like a convict’s uniform; strange to hear such eloquence from this lumpen, lethargic, creature, half-asleep with her medication.

  Was she still the same Phina, I wondered, even devoid of her beauty, even without those limpid blue eyes? She went on:

  ‘You see, its name is only partly a joke. Its face is indeed beautiful. But it is the terrible, wanton cruelty in that face that makes it so deeply ugly. In the case of weak souls like Ted’s or Emily’s, the effect is almost immediate. In my case, it has taken far longer for me to feel its full effects. It held up a dark mirror to my soul, and trapped it there. Now I can no longer bear to look into a mirror of any kind.’

  What she had done had certainly made sure that could not happen, yet surely the lack of fresh visual stimuli just trapped her with the memories of all her misdeeds? And I am sure there are many. Some years after we parted company at the eye hospital, I heard that she’d drifted into a squat in Brighton. I’m not sure what she got up to there; I imagine it involved a good deal of staring into the Abyss. She subsequently admitted herself voluntarily to Millview Hospital, where she soon found herself sectioned after they made the mistake of allowing her a metal spoon to eat with.

  The eye doctor sent me home with antibiotic eye drops and codeine. For a few days, I thought my good eye was going to be permanently damaged. It seems like nothing compared to Phina’s condition. How like her to go one better. Ever the alpha female.

  That sounds unforgivably callous I know. I can only imagine what she went through to go to such extremes, what she’s going through now. I’ve only ever experienced light eye damage, after all, so I can only guess what it’s like to lose both eyes. Not to mention all the other mental anguish she can boast.

  There I go again. I can’t seem to talk or think about this whole sorry affair without accusing poor Phina of spiritual one-upmanship, as if she’s putting it all on to justify all the liberties she’s taken.

  Then I think of returning from the eye hospital in the taxi to an empty house. Martin had wasted no time in making himself scarce. I’d never known him so proactive. Our marriage might have been a whitened sepulchre, a gutted shell, but maybe we could have used that empty frame to rebuild it. Should I have tried to make it work, forgive him, or at least given him another chance, put him on probation for the one lapse? Had Phina dragged me into her world of uncompromising, romantic extremes? That’s what made me so livid about her behaviour. Not sleeping with my husband: such a silly turn of phrase, as if they just lay down side by side and had a few minutes’ cat nap. No, it was this idea she always put about that her torment was so epic and dreadful and incomprehensible to us hidebound mere mortals that such things were bound to happen to poor little her. It left you feeling as if you were made of baser stuff if you weren’t getting up to the kinds of things she did. Especially if she made a point of not inviting you to join in.

  Like with her toy. It’s probably just an upmarket Rubik’s Cube. All her hyperbole’s left me wondering what all the fuss is about.

  The doctor talked a lot about displacement: ‘Seraphina feels guilt for the way she has behaved to others. The guilt has become so intense and unbearable that she has displaced it onto an object. A remarkable object, but an object nonetheless. An object can be put away, discarded, removed, even destroyed. Guilt cannot be dealt with so easily. When that displacement failed, she instead targeted a part of herself she could blame and objectify.’

  He’s wrong. She may have discarded, removed, destroyed her eyes, but she hasn’t done the same with the Kravolitz. She’s just put it away, somewhere within easy reach. She just told me.

  Is she playing me? Surely not. After all, she’s lost her glamour now, her bulk jammed into a chair, her eyeless face framed by electrical hair. She’s got no hold over me now.

  So why am I looking over her shoulder at the guard outside the glass-panelled door, wondering how many are on duty in the corridor, how easy it would be to sneak into her room and rummage in the drawer of her bedside table?

  Why am I still wondering what all the fuss is about?

  If I don’t play the game, I’ll never know.

  NO PLACE OF HONOUR

  A. R. Aston

  The world died as you neared the Yucca Thorns. The trees grew gnarled and leafless, the grass and fruits and flowers vanished. All colour and vitality retreated, bleeding away into the lowland regions below.

  Few folk ventured this far upland, but the Band of Sessian Cutress was a different story entirely. Her force was stronger than most others in the valleys below; fifty warriors, men and women in their prime, with a well-stocked baggage train of serfs and merchants and other, less savoury camp followers. Sessian had made sure to raid the Narrocmen before the journey to the Yucca Thorns; their larders were fat and their menfolk soft. Some of the Narroc captives walked with the cattle at the back. Most wept openly, while others bore masks of hatred for the war band which had captured them. Sessian paid them little heed in either case.

  They said the Yucca mountain passes crawled with bandits, but she had seen none so far on their journey. They likely feared the dozen horsemen who rode on either flank of the march, scoped rifles scanning the high-sided cliffs for any sign of the ravaged ones. Sessian had a dozen rifles; relics, ancient yet deadly as they were in the forgotten days of their creation. New rifles were noisy and crude, but not so these ancestral weapons. She rode at the head on her red charger barded with silver coins, carried a relic b
i-barrel shotter in her belt, and a revolver, which only enhanced her deadly reputation. Of course, she didn’t use them often; shells were rarer than gold flecks in this age. She favoured her basket-hilt dagger in a fight. No reloading, just the cut and slash of the up-close kill. Still, her advanced weapons made her and her war band a nightmare for the ravaged born, the sickly reavers who were said to roam Yucca, ever hungry for an easy kill.

  The pebbled path soon vanished in the foothills, and the horses neighed in misery as they were forced to trot over uneven, hard surfaces. The wind picked up here too. It was bitter and Sessian could almost taste the corpse stench drifting down from up high. The clouds themselves girdled the upper reaches, and already she could see fog rolling down them like a suffocating blanket. Soon, the way ahead would be invisible. She had no desire to get lost in choking fog; not while on the cursed mountain.

  Sessian turned to the dark rider to her right. ‘Haast. Ride ahead. Need a path, and a camp,’ she grunted.

  Haast, her half-uncle, was a scout of many years; his face painted black and white, with crow feathers woven into his grey mane, and a crossbow stowed across his back. Haast nodded without another word, before he kicked the side of his swift black mare. His dark shape vanished into the mist ahead, dissolving like a wisp. Though it didn’t reach her battle-worn features, Sessian smiled as she considered uncle Haast. He had seconded Sessian when her husband-king Gorl had been challenged by her for the mantle of War Chief of the Band. Gorl Cutress would have had the Tribe Carls drag her from her tent and beat her to death. But with Sessian’s uncle supporting her, she was granted a personal duel with Gorl. The duel had been fierce and gruelling, but in the end, her blade was the swifter. When Gorl was finished bleeding, kneeling in the dust with ropes of intestines spilled over his lap, she had made him look her in the eyes before finishing him off. She spared a glance towards the grim-faced warriors behind her, clad in their looted armour painted in the red heraldry of the Mistress of the Dagger.