Eastlick and Other Stories

by Page, Shannon

  Once people who went below with them to drink their mead and lie with their women did not come back until their children’s children slept beneath the churchyard soil, and people called them elfshot and sleep-woken and bound them over to the sea for the coldest judgment.

  Once the world voiced magic on the very wind, and the changing of the leaves foretold the patterns of the winter snow and where the wolf would hunt by the bitter moon.

  Once a girl was born, her parentage irrelevant to her fate, in that the oldest doors slipped a crack so that spiders scuttled out, bearing among their number a bodiless shadow which roamed this forlorn relic of creation until it found that girl, and using a magic known only to those who bore swords of thorn and shields of beaten copper, split her from herself.

  The ax told me these things, and many more secrets besides, when it remade me between one breath and the next there in the cave above my sobbing Grandfather. I reached down to stroke the blood from his eyes, and dropped my greatcoat over him to shelter him against the chillier fog of evening which can lay a glissade of ice over everything in its path, then I turned once more into the last of the day.

  Only one thing the ax had failed to tell me: how a blade might unite what had so long ago been torn asunder.

  Only one thing the ax had lied to me about: parentage is never irrelevant to fate.

  Walking like an older man, I passed the footprints of a callow, careless youth along the orchard path leading back to my farm. A person whistled tunelessly, swinging a bloody ax to gauge its heft, though neither he nor I expected to use it as a weapon in that most obvious of ways, even at this late moment. Naïve? Perhaps. Even so, on we went.

  If tiny shapes buzzed through the fog along my progress, I did not take note of them. Some things it is best not to see until you have the power to loose and to bind them.

  ~o0o~

  I was back on the main street before I knew I had passed through the whispering, weeping trees that hugged the path. My mind touched lightly on my body, holding it only enough to guide my boots where they needed to go. I came back to myself on the stone steps of the cottage. My knuckles were already rapping on the door, the ax held firm in my grip.

  The door flew open, though by no one’s living hand. Sara Maarinen and my Christina stood at the far end of the small room. They faced each other, a pace apart, locked in some terrible binding of fear and hatred and power and … love?

  Neither head turned; they kept staring into each other’s eyes. Damp air filled the cottage even as the power crackled between them. It grabbed me in its salty embrace, pawed through my heart and mind and soul, gripped my manhood, squeezed my guts till they threatened to explode.

  I stood there. I held the ax.

  A sound came from the two witchlings, high and keening, a whine or song or scream, echoing through the small room. My head pounded with it, and my own voice joined theirs, against my will—leaping from my lungs unbidden, uncontrollable.

  I lifted the ax. I held it high, and pointed its sharp edge at the space between Sara and Christina.

  My shoulder throbbed, and my arms almost threw the ax down, but I held it steady.

  Sara Maarinen broke the gaze first. She turned a face of death to me, her mouth twisted into an ugly, grinning rictus. Released, Christina fell to the floor, her eyes rolling back in her head.

  “Cary Palka,” Sara said, in an entirely normal voice. “Put that silly thing down and come here.” She reached out her arms as if to embrace me.

  “No,” I said, even as I lowered the ax. My right foot moved a step forward. The wound in my shoulder turned and twisted, beyond pain—it was as if a sharp spiny creature had found a home in there, but was now threatening to decamp, erupting right through my skin. I moaned, and my left foot joined my right. “No!”

  Christina lay unconscious on the floor. One leg splayed out toward the middle of the room, where it was touched by a ray of sunlight from the impossible window.

  I had to get her out of that light. I knew it—I didn’t know why, or how, but that light could not continue to touch her. It was the key, even more than my ax.

  I took another step forward, this time towards Christina. But that was also towards Sara.

  “Excellent,” Sara Maarinen said. Her death-mask smile widened. The keening howl had not stopped, though none of our voices were adding to it. It whipped through the room. I blinked my eyes, wanting to stop up my ears, but I could not loose my grip on the ax.

  Another step.

  Sara raised her arms higher, reaching to me, pulling me further in even as she took a step backwards. Away? No—she was moving to the tidy bed. The bed that was bathed in the same sunlight that was stealing Christina’s soul away, bit by bit.

  “That’s right, come to me.” Now Sara’s voice was soft and crooning, but it froze my heart all the same. And yet to her I went. I could do no less than to obey. Her blood had the owning of mine, as it always had.

  My unwilling body eased into her arms as she leaned back, taking us both onto the narrow bed in a terrible parody of lovers. I still held the ax, making me slow and awkward. Sara pushed at my arm, still grinning, trying to nudge the bloody thing aside. She wouldn’t put her thin hands on it. “Come, sweet, put that down and touch me. Touch me everywhere.”

  My fingers would not let go, though my mind screamed out to do as she bid. She was danger, and magic, and desire, and fear all at once. The sunlight was warm on my back, and it made the blood sparkle and glow.

  Sara pushed my arm again, as she leaned up and kissed my face, the hollow of my throat, just as Christina did.

  Christina!

  I moaned, low and soft, as I tried to turn my head to see my witch. Sara took my face between her hands and brought it back to her mouth, kissing me hard. My lips opened to hers as I let her in, let her taste my essence, my echoing traces of whatever magic I possessed that had made Christina seek me out in the first place. Sara ate it up, writhing and rolling beneath me.

  I grew hard, wanting her, even as I was desperate to flee. My body, no longer unwilling, played traitor to me, craving something far greater than it should have to endure.

  My fingers loosened on the ax, just a bit. I gripped it again, swallowing a curse, and struggled anew to pull away from Sara Maarinen.

  She wrapped strong legs around mine and dragged my hips down, matching my groin to hers. Fully dressed we were, but intertwined more intimately than most lovers ever achieve, as she enticed every bit of my will and soul out through my mouth and breath and pores and into her hungry body.

  “You are mine,” she whispered, then set her mouth to mine once more.

  I felt both drained and invigorated by her touch, her kiss. The ax slipped an inch as my fingers sought to travel familiar pathways, the landscape of Christina’s body, Sara’s body ... I grabbed it tighter once more. I would not let go of it, I would not! All would be lost.

  Sara twisted and purred underneath me, inflaming me further. Her movements brought us both out of the sun for a moment. The icy air on my back was a tonic; in the moment of clarity, I heard Grandfather’s quavering voice: “The duty! Do it!”

  Sara hissed as I pulled away from her, stronger this time. My knuckles were white where I held the ax. I staggered to my feet and danced away from Sara’s claw-like hands. “No!” she screamed.

  On the floor at my feet, Christina stirred. I could feel her weakness, her loss of power. I reached down with my free hand and moved her leg out of the sunlight, then was forced to jump back as Sara leapt for me.

  Everyone was screaming, though none of us were. What was that sound? My ears rang from it. I darted away from Sara, but she was fast, and came for me again.

  Then I saw the diadem, and I knew.

  I fended Sara off once more, stepped around Christina’s prone body, and raised the dripping ax high over my head.

  Grandfather, why did you do this? He had nailed the awful thing there in the first place, all those years back. He had thought that woul
d put paid to it, to its terrible magic: fastening it to this dead cottage amid the tall weeds and dancing bones. No such luck.

  Sara saw what I was doing, and the shrill wailing grew even louder. “No!” she shouted, over the din.

  I brought the ax down hard, meaning to smash the awful object in two. The blade bounced off it, sending droplets of blood flying. Some fell on Christina, who moaned and stirred again. I could smell the blood burning into her sweet flesh, where her leg was exposed.

  I raised the ax and smashed again. Once more, the diadem resisted both the force of the magic and my own youthful strength, but I did knock it from the wall. It fell clanging to the floor, then rolled across the room, coming to a stop at the front door.

  Sara lunged for it, but stopped short.

  In the open doorway stood a tiny child, Janey Iverson’s poppet, not quite two years old, and of indeterminate parentage, as they say. Not mine, I was pretty sure. She was an adorable thing, saucer-wide blue eyes framed by a halo of wild golden curls, and cheeks so fat and rosy even a ruined witch’s familiar like me couldn’t resist pinching them.

  Little Laureen picked up the diadem and placed it atop those curls.

  Sara screamed. Christina awoke and joined her witchsister in screaming.

  I stared at the child.

  Janey appeared behind her, snatching the youngling up and hefting her into strong mother’s arms. “There you are! You gave me an awful fright!” Without a glance inside the cottage, she marched down the front path and back into the street.

  Laureen stared solemnly back at me, clutching at her mother’s plump shoulder. I watched those unblinking blue eyes and thought, She does look like me.

  I realized something more, too, in that moment, though I didn’t want to admit it. There was more wisdom, more magic in that two-year-old face than in any witch, foreign-born or locally grown.

  A sound brought me back to myself—or, rather, the absence of sound. The high wailing, keening noise had vanished with the diadem on the poppet’s head. I turned around to face Sara and Christina, to finish what I had started.

  The cottage was empty.

  I let the air slide out of my lungs as I leaned against the front wall. They were both gone, as if they’d never been there in the first place. The only evidence that anyone had passed through the room was the mussed bed, and the splintered hole in the back wall where I’d hacked away the diadem. Even the sunlit window was shadow-dark.

  That’s when I realized the ax was gone as well. Even the droplets of blood had vanished.

  I ran to the tangled yard, shouting, “Christina! Christina!” After a bit of wild flailing, I called for Sara as well. But they were both gone, and a part of me knew it. Knew it the moment the terrible artifact had touched those golden curls.

  I stumbled on something in the weeds and fell to the ground. Something hard, jutting out of the soil. I reached back for it—a stick, a rock? My fingers found it and pulled. It was a bone, thick and ancient.

  Cursing, I dropped it and scrambled to my feet, but my boots found another bone at once. They were pushing outward from the very ground, rising to the surface. The whole yard was filled with them—and beyond the yard, all the way down the slope to the beach.

  And here was the blood, all the blood that had vanished from the cottage, and then some—gallons, tubs of blood, running in thick rivulets down the sand, pouring into the boiling bight, crashing back against the shore in pink foamy bubbles, then rolling out again. Blood, muddying the sand, dripping from the trees, spattering my shirt and hands and face. Fat wasps with the faces of raddled women flew amid the droplets, shrieking curses in the language of stock and stone. Two women fought on the beach, barely visible in the blood and fog, alike as twins, familiar as lovers.

  Crows screamed overhead, and I answered them, running wildly. I needed to retrieve my ax. I hadn’t fulfilled the duty.

  “You have,” came a quiet voice at the back of my mind. Grandfather? But no one was there. I stopped my wild running and clung to the trunk of a tree, letting the blood pour over me, sink into the sand, slip into the sea.

  “You have,” I heard again.

  A heavy rain started just then, as if the fog-laden clouds had finally given up their burden, all at once.

  I fell to my knees, put my face in my hands, and wept.

  ~o0o~

  “Damned peculiar weather we’re having,” Grant Archerson remarked to the room at large. He let his eyes rest on me a moment longer than necessary. “Damned peculiar.”

  Sunlight streamed in through the filthy windowpanes of the Tossed Pot, highlighting the thick layers of dust that rested everywhere on the kitschy decor. No sense tidying up, when the light was always so gloomy, Grant always maintained. Except for three days now, the golden sun had blessed Bone Island with its sweet charms, bringing housewives out to sweep their porches, an extra boatload of tourists from the mainland, and a foul temper from Grant.

  No one had mentioned Sara Maarinen. It was as if she had never existed. Christina... Well, her presence was everywhere, like a friend half-seen passing a street corner at night. I imagined the ax, bloody and snug in a chalky grave between two women twined tight as any sacrifice at the foot of a standing stone. Noisy magic and quiet magic, united once more. Had the entirety of Bone Island become the witch’s window?

  No matter. Sunlight would pass, and people still went about the business of living no matter who was bleeding in the back alley. I shrugged and rested a hand on Janey Iverson’s warm knee. “Might have to buy a short-sleeved shirt if this keeps up.”

  Laureen played at our feet, the diadem still nestled in her curls. Something flashed in the child’s bright blue eyes from time to time, then passed again like clouds before the sun. There was a witch line, and a line of keepers. Always had been. Always would be. Who was to say they couldn’t be the same line?

  Janey, who was cousin to Christina’s mother, smiled at me and laid her head on my shoulder. “Can’t get her to take that silly thing off, even for bed,” she murmured.

  I just nodded, then looked to Grant. “Another ale?”

  Home

  This story was commissioned for the coolest anthology idea—stories that grew from a single musical album (Scenes from the Second Storey) from an obscure band (The God Machine). Each story would be one song, and would carry that song’s title; beyond that, we were given free rein. The song I was given was “Home”.

  The assignment arrived when I was deeply concerned with home. My life was in total upheaval—divorce, leaving my home state and a career and pretty much everything—and I didn’t know what was ahead of me. So I bought the album, listened to it over and over again (it is marvelous, actually), and wrote this. The anthology was published by Morrigan Books in 2013.

  _______________

  I keep having real estate dreams. Night dreams, I mean; everyone in this golden state of mine has unattainable fantasies. I’m a lifelong Californian, so dreaming of Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, sweet little Edwardians, even an Eichler or a Marina style—this is all to be expected.

  These dreams, though, they’re unusual. Peculiar.

  Disturbing, even.

  They weren’t always like this. I’ve always dreamt of homes—houses where I’ve actually lived during the awake side of my life; mansions and palaces I saw in movies or read about in books; or dwellings from nowhere but the gelid depths of my overactive imagination.

  For a long time after my first marriage crashed and burned, I dreamt repeatedly of finding new rooms, entire new floors, wings even, in my house. My therapist loved those dreams. “It’s your consciousness, your creativity! New paths, new directions, new areas of your mind are opening up!”

  Well, okay, I thought; whatever, fine. I just figured it meant I wanted more space, that I was sick and tired of living in tiny cramped apartments with too much hand-me-down shit: sagging love seats and blenders that barely worked and painted particle board bookcases and unmatched glassware, cracked
and pitted with hard use. And the apartments themselves: mildew everywhere, peeling paint on the high ceilings, stained and warped hardwood floors, a general odor of decay and neglect underneath the reek of burnt grease from our inept experiments in cookery, curtains made from bedsheets or Indian tapestries. Who wouldn’t want to find a fresh start, a whole new floor, rooms opening into more rooms, light and air and color and loveliness?

  ~o0o~

  By the time my second marriage foundered on the shoals of quiet despair, I had the lovely house with all the extra rooms, and the light and the color and all that, but it didn’t feel like home. It wasn’t where I was safe or comfortable or welcome … welcome to be me, at any rate. I promise you it didn’t start out this way, but by the end, I was living a role. Playing the part of someone else entirely.

  Well, it wasn’t my home. That much is clear, now. At some level, I must have always known.

  So here I am. Just me and the orchids in yet another rented apartment, dreaming of home.

  ~o0o~

  Home is where the whisky is.

  Home is where you cry alone.

  Home is where the temperature is up to you.

  Home is where there’s fresh flowers. Or not. Home is where the dreams are.

  Home is where you can find me.

  ~o0o~

  I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that “home” and “hope” differ by only one little letter, only a few ticks apart in the great alphabet. There is so much hope involved in setting up a new home with a new lover, mate, husband. Love and joy and excitement and the absolute certainty that this is now it, and will be it, for the rest of your silly lives. Every salad bowl purchased, every rug laid down, every piece of art hung on the walls … tangible expressions of desperate, pathetic, wretched hope.

  Even the brand of toothpaste. He uses Colgate, and you’re a Crest person born and bred? Someone will compromise, you will agree, a change will be made, your journey toward soul-mate-ness takes another creamy, minty-fresh step! Pearly white smiles of hope!