“It was dark.”
“You don’t know what kind of trouble you’d be in if he caught you here. Especially in here.” His eyes pointed out the faces on the walls, as if she might have missed them.
“You opened the door.”
“I didn’t want Rayne to see you. You shouldn’t be here!”
“You mean, I shouldn’t be here yet. Or aren’t I supposed to be invited tonight?”
Leo said nothing.
“Why shouldn’t Rayne see me? Isn’t she my friend?”
It was a challenge. He hissed at her to keep her voice down.
“Well, isn’t she?”
Leo pressed his hands to his eyes. His mouth twisted as if he were crying. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“Leo.” Sadie waited for a response, then picked up the imp mask by its ribbon ties and held it out between them. “Leo, what happens when I wear this the third time?”
He pulled his hands away from his face and looked bleakly at the mask. It swivelled on its ties, glaring at the populated walls. He said, “The same thing that happened the first two times.”
“And what,” her voice was husky, she coughed, “what happened? The first two times?”
“You – we – you led the dance. And the hunt.”
The mask was still, staring now at Leo’s feet.
“The hunt,” Sadie said. “The bear. Only the bear isn’t a bear. Is it? Leo?”
He looked old and bitter, his shoulders slumped against the door.
“The third time isn’t the same, not really, is it?”
“The same.” He licked his lips. “Except after. . .there is no after. You can’t take it off. You lead the dance, and the hunt, forever.”
“Forever?”
“Until it kills – until something – someone—”
“Until one of you kills me.”
“To be free,” Leo whispered. “If we ever want to be free again.”
They stared at each other. The masks, silent audience, watched. The imp danced, impatient on the end of its ties, as Sadie’s hand sank to her side.
“Why?” she said. “Why me?”
“Because Rayne wore it.” Leo took a ragged breath, leaned his head against the door and closed his eyes. “Rayne wore it twice. We love it, the dance, the hunt.” He sighed. “But you know how it is.”
Sadie bit her lips. She knew.
“He loves it too. Mr Nero. He lives for it. Tom realized he was waiting for Rayne to wear it again, to keep it always hunting season, and we – Christ! – we love it but we love her more.”
“So you found someone expendable. Someone you didn’t care about, who would wear it for her,” her voice shrank, “for all of you.”
Leo squeezed his eyes tighter, then opened them to meet her gaze. “Yes.” He said it simply. “Yes.”
Her hand shook, throwing the imp into a giddy spin. “So that’s how it is.”
“That’s how it is.”
Silence spilled from the mouths on the walls, loud enough to fill her ears. She began to wonder if she would ever hear, ever speak again. What was there left to say?
Leo said it, pushing himself away from the door. “We’re supposed to be going to meet you, but I’ll get them into the kitchen. Give me a couple of minutes, then get down the stairs as quietly as you can and out the door.” He reached for the handle. “Two minutes. Got it?”
“But,” Sadie said. “But.”
“Just do me a favour.” He looked at her, and his eyes were narrowed, his teeth showing, it was so hard for him to say. “Take that thing with you. Burn it and wash the ashes down the drain. Can you do that for me, Sadie?”
She took a long, stuttering breath. The imp’s ties were tangled in her fingers. Its chin nuzzled against her leg.
“Sadie?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and opened the door. “Two minutes.”
Then he was gone.
Down the stairs, out the door, running light-footed into the street. The night air was sharp and cold. There was a moon cruising white among remnant clouds, only a few children’s voices crying the sweet seasonal choice. Trick or treat? Sadie ran, the imp gyrating on the end of its ribbons, ran because she could, because her blood was on fire and she needed to gulp the cooling air. Free again.
Leo! she wanted to shout. Rayne! Tom!
Free!
Across the street and into the park. There were no children here. Folded into darkness, she slowed to a jog, to a walk. To a halt. For a moment she’d forgotten how hungry she was. Her head whirled. The imp mask nudged her leg.
Burn it and wash the ashes down the drain. Fine. All she needed was something to light it with, something to help it burn. And then . . .
And then?
“Sex-y Sa-die.”
That damn stupid bit of song.
“Sex-y Sa-die.”
The call of the hunter who stalks his game through the dark. She flinches, deep inside. But the imp, ah, the imp does so love to dance – to hunt. The mask’s ribbons still tangled in her fingers, she turns, slow and graceful as a line of music, gravel biting under her heel.
BRIAN HODGE
If I Should Wake Before I Die
BRIAN HODGE LIVES IN Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of ten novels and close to 100 short stories and novellas – all told, roughly two million words and counting.
His recent works include Hellboy: On Earth As It is in Hell (Pocket Books) and the short novel World of Hurt (Earthling Publications). Forthcoming titles include his next crime novel, Mad Dogs, and his fourth story collection, A Loving Look of Agony, both from Cemetery Dance Publications.
An avid home studio rat, he was also the first musical guest on a recent CD-ROM version of Dark Recesses magazine. For this, he worked up two new extended tracks of industrial and atmospheric music and sound design, interests that influenced the story that follows.
“I’d promised a story to Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick for their Outsiders anthology,” Hodge explains, “but with a month to go before the deadline, didn’t have anything yet.
“So I did what I sometimes do: took off one day with no fixed agenda, just trusting that I would blunder into the right story. I was wandering around Denver on a chilly, rainy, early spring morning and saw some balloons snagged in the top of a tree next to a cathedral bell tower. That did it. I headed for a coffee house and got to work.”
MY WRITING THIS CAN ONLY BE REGARDED as a tremendous act of faith. That I believe you will not only live to be born and see the world outside my belly, but that you’ll reach an age when you can read this cumulative letter and understand what a miracle all of that will have been.
And I don’t use the word miracle lightly. Used to, I was the type to roll my eyes whenever I heard prospective parents talk of their fertilized egg as being something miraculous. Cause for rejoicing, sure. But a miracle? It just didn’t seem to qualify. It’s the most natural thing in the world, something that happens somewhere every moment of the day. But then, that goes back to something said by Albert Einstein (and you’d better have studied him in school by now!): that we can live as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is. Okay, so you got me there. Still, I don’t think I felt any different about pregnancy-as-miracle even after the doctor confirmed what the pharmacy test kit and I already knew.
But times change, my little one. In ways we can’t possibly foresee.
We’ll have to continue this later. It’s morning, and I have to get things together for school, and don’t take this personally, because I thought we were past all of this months ago, but you’re making me sick.
Today was bad. But maybe now you’ll better understand why I’m frightened enough to need this ongoing show of faith that soon I will see your beautiful squalling face.
Like most people, I’ve made a habit of not looking up. Sure, the sky could fall – but in my experience most of the things you really have to worry about live at ground level, so that’s where you keep your eyes. Just
by being watchful, I’ve thwarted two muggings in the past year alone, me and my trusty canister of pepper spray.
But this afternoon I looked up . . . had to, my attention drawn by the sight of deflated balloons high in some oaks, a splash of color against the slate sky and stark branches, their tiny buds struggling against the ice after a false spring. Helium-filled runaways, let go by the careless hands of children during some function or other on the grounds of St Mark’s. I walk past the place twice each weekday, to and from school. It’s the most peaceful route I can find, keeps me away from the busier streets and the incessant traffic noise that seems impossible to escape when you just want to think. So the balloons caught my eye, hanging before twin belltowers that, if you must know, preside over the crack dealers and prostitutes two streets over. Hanging up there, they made me think of souls lost halfway to heaven.
And they were the only reason I saw the girl before she jumped.
She stood in one of the high, narrow openings near the top of the closer tower, portals through which the bells peal each Sunday to call whatever flock remains. All I saw was a pale face and an indistinct body framed by rough grey stone. When she nudged one foot into empty space, at first I thought she was only reckless.
Our eyes met then, I think – she did seem to look down in my direction. So was this her cue to jump? To do it before anyone could try talking her out of it? I took it that way, but then (not to speak ill of your grandparents) I was born and raised for guilt.
No scream, from either of us. It was a remarkably quiet death. I stared at her all the way down, past seventy-odd feet of stone. She didn’t thrash, and even seemed to fall in slow motion. I barely heard the impact over the traffic two streets over.
Maybe she lived for a moment, or maybe not. Certainly there was no life left by the time I reached her. Kneeling beside her hip, I tried to ignore the blood seeping from the back of her skull onto the walkway. Her face, fragile and too young, looked oddly peaceful and resolved, her eyes half-open.
I put one hand on her belly – flat, definitely flatter than mine right now, but the skin felt slack and loose, as recently deflated as one of those balloons overhead. For me, it was as good as a signed suicide note. There was no baby in a crib somewhere. It lay like wax in a fresh little grave. Or worse, if she’d miscarried early enough, it became hospital waste, incinerated with wrappings and tumors.
“I’m so sorry for you,” I told her. “I felt like doing this too, after I lost mine.”
So few of you seem to make it out of the third trimester these days.
The hand I held must have been cold even before death, and didn’t squeeze back.
And to be totally honest with you, I still can’t say whether or not I would’ve given in to my despair had it not been for you. You and I may have lost your twin, but because you’d hung in there and survived, I knew there was something yet to live for.
I told about the jumper at group tonight, to a rapt and silent audience. At group, it goes without saying: we’ve all been up in that bell tower. If only for a few moments, we’ve all looked down and stuck a foot into empty space. All of the women, and maybe a few of the men, too, the guys who haven’t been too stoic to admit they need the support of strangers after their hopes for fatherhood came unexpectedly slithering out in an ill-formed mass from between the thighs of their wives and girlfriends.
I’m very aware that I’m sometimes describing things in a way that no mom should describe them to her child, at any age . . . but why sugarcoat it? Along with love and care, I owe you truth: You’re struggling for life in a perilous time, just as I’m struggling to maintain hope.
About the jumper, a woman named Danika said, “Ain’t nobody should die alone that way. Did you get to her in time?” Danika’s been coming to group for a month. “Did she say anything at the end?”
“Just barely,” I told her, and in the silence of our borrowed classroom you could hear the slightest creak. “She asked me to forgive her. Because she knew it was wrong. I know I don’t look anything like a nun, but maybe she thought I was from the church.”
We’d all stood in the balance and wavered, then chosen life.
But for some, I suspect that the debate still isn’t entirely settled.
Group – ah, yes. What seems so thoroughly a part of my life right now will, I hope, by the time you’re reading this, be just a distant memory.
Citywide, these past months, support groups have become a way of life, a spontaneous network arising to meet a growing need. They meet in church basements, in classrooms, in fraternal halls and civic centers. Their attendees drink lots of coffee and smoke lots of cigarettes, because now, for them, there’s no reason not to. They find themselves in the heartbreaking position of suddenly having no unborn to think of.
Except for me. Even in groups bound together to survive losses that we don’t understand, I don’t entirely fit in. If any other woman out there is in my position, lucky enough to still be carrying a surviving twin, I haven’t heard of her.
How else to describe what’s going on but as a wave of spontaneous abortions? Pregnancies failing first by the handful, then by the dozens, an epidemic that cuts across all ethnic groups, all income levels, that reaches into urban and suburban wombs alike. It continues to stymie the Department of Public Health as much today as after that first spike in the miscarriage rate . . . which I was part of, dismally enough. The Centers for Disease Control is here, but has yet to find any evidence of one. Nothing in the water, nothing in the air, nothing in the tissues scraped for tests. No genetic abnormalities in a thousand sperm samples; no toxins contaminating the food supply. Or, should I say, nothing worse than usual, still within the “safe” levels allowed by law – but I am thinking of you, trying to eat organic whenever I can afford it.
I started attending group on the north side while staying with my parents after the miscarriage that robbed us of your brother. At the time, it was a way to get out of the house for a couple hours to escape my parents’ habit of tiptoeing around me as if I were china poised to shatter.
Except that first group was just as bad, in its own way. Yes, they all knew how I felt. I knew how all of them felt. We understood one another . . . to a point. But I wasn’t one of them, not anymore, if ever, and they knew it. Knew it in my clothes, my hair. I imagine they thought I’d just strayed into the wrong neighborhood, with no idea that I remembered what it was like to grow up among them.
You’d think that a thing like a plague of miscarriages would be enough to tear down the walls of pretense, to let us at least see eye to eye on our shared tragedies. You’d think our differences wouldn’t matter, but they did. Oh, the others were polite enough. They’re often polite. But as we traded tales of sorrow and struggle, I couldn’t help but notice an undercurrent of judgment, so many of these inwardly sneering women seeming to believe that they had lost so much more. My child would have had potential, they might as well have said. What would your child have been but an eventual burden on the rest of us?
I hadn’t told them about you, you see. I wasn’t showing as much then as I am now. So I’m glad I hadn’t said anything about you, because while they could pass judgment on me all they wanted, how dare they judge you. How dare they think they know you, your future, your dreams and your determination. By the time you’re reading these pages, I hope I’ve told you this so often it’s running out of your ears, but here it is for the very first time: You can be anything you want to be. Me, I’m working on it. I know there are plenty of people who’d say that if all I am at this stage in my life is an underpaid teacher and unwed mother, then I haven’t exactly set the world on fire.
To that, I’d just say that it seems to burn quite well on its own.
So. While I didn’t like this particular group, I found the idea of a support group in general to be very therapeutic, and found the fit much better much closer to home. Where we meet isn’t nearly as nice – of course not; it’s a classroom in a public school, one district over
from where I teach. The paint may peel and the ceiling tiles may have huge brown water stains, but from the moment I walked in, I could tell that nobody was going to care if in my off-hours I still had a stubborn streak or two about totally outgrowing the aesthetics of my malcontented youth.
Please don’t take that as a license to make my life miserable someday. I prefer to delude myself into thinking that with me as your mother, you won’t have anything to rebel against.
You’re giving me a terribly restless night, I hope you know. We should be asleep right now. I’m game. But you, at two a.m., are evidently competing in a swimming meet. Let’s blame it on the neighbors, shall we? Somebody fired off a gunshot and you mistook it for a starter pistol.
But I don’t begrudge you your recreational activities one bit, for reasons that should be obvious.
You know something . . .? The strangest thing for me about this letter is that I’m writing to someone who doesn’t have a name yet. For that matter, your gender is a mystery as well. I haven’t wanted to know, and the few who do are under strict orders to not say a word. I want surprises, the kind of good old-fashioned surprises that went out of style after doctors gained the ability to peek inside and see what I’ve been growing all these months.
Odds are, you’re a boy. But maybe not. If you and the brother we’ll sadly never know were identical twins, of course you’re a boy. But if you were fraternal twins, well, we’re back to a toss-up again, aren’t we?
So for now, I just think of you as the Tadpole.
What your non-amphibian name should be fills me with constant soul-searching. I half suspect that our destinies are intrinsically tied into our names, as if these are templates imposed for us to fill. If my parents hadn’t named me Melody, would I still have gone into music? Who knows, and maybe I overstate the case – those who can’t do, teach, right? Well, all I have to say to that is: you try making a living off talent alone when your repertoire rarely extends much past 1790.
So I’m sure there will come a point when you find it thoroughly humiliating that your mom’s great sustaining passion, besides her brilliant and talented child of course, is a batch of instruments with names like recorder and schreierpfeif and crumhorn.
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