Eloisa frowns. “Don’t you know? Tonight is the feast of San Rafael.”
“Is that a big deal?”
“They take the statue of the saint on a procession around town, then sit him down in front of the church. There’s fireworks and music.”
And dancing. Most of all there is dancing. Even though Eloisa is a young woman, she has not been allowed to participate in the festivities. But this year is different. Her cousins are coming to visit and Mother says they can all go together to see the fireworks.
“It sounds delightfully pagan to me. What’s your name?”
For some reason she has a childish impulse to lie, to deny herself. Why? What does a name matter?
“Eloisa.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have an automobile, would you Eloisa?”
“No.”
“Too bad,” he says. “Hey, would you know of a place I can stay? If I can’t get an automobile I’ll need a room.”
There’s an empty room in her mother’s pension. Mother normally rooms men who work at the glass factory, but one of the boys has gone off and married, leaving his room behind just two weeks ago.
However, she knows exactly how it’ll look if she returns home with a man—a devil, perhaps—in tow, after Mother instructed her not to speak to any strangers. Mother, who is even angry when she reads poetry—Father’s old books, the skeletal remains of his collection. Harmless words which deserve a beating. And why won’t Eloisa do something useful rather than sit on the front steps of the house, daydreaming. Nothing good comes out of poetry and daydreams and girls who think so will soon be carted off by the Devil.
“You won’t find a room, not with the festival tonight. Everyone has come for the festival,” she says.
He smiles, as though he can tell she is lying and Eloisa feels a shiver go through her body, as if she’s just jumped into a pond.
“Well, then, I must find a mule or a cart or some way to El Monte. Take care, miss.”
With that he grabs the small suitcase he had set on the ground and the cane, limping merrily away.
Eloisa and her cousins, Mother in tow, go to the town square. Eloisa is not allowed to wear ribbons in her hair, she is not even allowed to wear a nice dress. Grey are her colours and Mother is always in black, though Father passed away nearly seven years ago. But it doesn’t matter for there are purple, yellow, and white papers adorning the buildings around the square and plenty of colour in the jackets and the skirts of the attendants. Colour in the shaved ices the children carry and the handkerchiefs peeking from suit pockets and the flowers laid before the feet of San Rafael.
Mother plops herself on a chair next to some old ladies and refuses to dance, but she agrees that Eloisa may walk around the square—even dance—as long as she partners with one of her cousins.
For a little while it is this way, she walks with a cousin on each side and they chatter and laugh. But eventually a couple of girls catch the boys’ fancy and even though they are not supposed to, they scatter away to dance with them while Eloisa steps back, standing under the arches that frame the town square.
“You were right. There is no way out of town. Not a blasted automobile for miles around and apparently mules are also scarce.”
The man in the blue overcoat is just a few paces from her. His coat is so very bright, it seems to light up the space around him, making the shadows of the arches recede. Like a moth, she drifts to his side.
“It’s the festival,” she says. “Tomorrow you can ask one of the townsfolk to lend you a horse.”
“I’ll be damned if I can ride it. I’m a city boy, I ride the trams.”
She chuckles for it’s an odd thing to discover that the Devil does not ride horses, after all.
“You find my predicament amusing?” he asks, smiling.
“No. So you have a place to stay for tonight?”
“Something of the sort.”
She nods. He checks his pocket watch and she wonders if the rule is true and he must leave by the time the cock crows. Because that’s how it goes. The Devil rides into town, he asks a vain girl to dance and she dances—ignoring the warnings, never bothering to look at his feet—and when the cock crows he vanishes and she is singed. Hair burnt off, body smelling like sulphur.
Girls like that always end insane or dead.
She stares at him. He cocks his head a bit.
“What?”
“They say the Devil comes into town on dance nights.”
“Does he? How do you know?”
“You recognize him by his hoofs.”
“It’s a good thing I’m not dancing, then,” he says, lifting his cane.
“Were you a soldier?”
“No. I’m the Devil, remember?”
He’s making fun of her and she likes it. The lightness of his words and how he smiles.
She spots her mother coming across the square, fury in her eyes. She’s seen her. She knows Eloisa is not in the company of her cousins. If there’s a hell, Eloisa is about to enter it and though she should stare limply at the ground, accepting her punishment, something stronger than fear ignites her body.
She grabs the man’s hand and pulls him with her.
“Come,” she says. They rush through the narrow alleys. He moves fast for a man with a limp and his steps seem to draw no echoes. Her own footsteps are as loud as drums.
When she stops to catch her breath he is laughing. The crackling of the fireworks echoes through the town. A dry, sour smell drifts through the air. Burning sulphur, the gunpowder that has gone off in the fireworks.
“That was my mother,” she explains. “She wouldn’t want us talking.”
“Is she some evil stepmother who has you locked in a tower?”
“Sometimes.”
“Here, want to see a castle?” he asks and it is his turn to grab her by the hand.
They arrive at the heavy doors of a large house and Eloisa frowns.
“That’s Mr. Carrasco’s home. He’s off in Mexico City until winter time.”
The man looks like he already knows this and he opens the door, walking into the house. Eloisa pauses at the threshold. Is this magic? Or is she in the company of a common thief who picked a lock and made himself a bed for the night?
Eloisa steps inside. She can’t see a thing, but he grabs her firmly and guides her through the rooms as though he can see in the dark. He stops and lets go for a moment. A light blooms and he sets a lantern on a table. The furniture around them is covered with white sheets. The man pulls a sheet and reveals a couch.
They sit there while the dim noise of the fireworks seeps in through the cracks.
“What do you do in your tower, Eloisa?” he asks, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling.
“It’s hardly a tower. It’s just a little house. A pension. I do the things everyone does.”
“What does everyone do?”
“Help with the household chores. Read.”
“Anything good?”
“Poetry.”
“I only read the papers,” he says.
He proceeds to ask more questions, tugging stories out of her until she has laid her whole life before him: the town, her home, her relatives. It strikes her then that he is at an advantage and has revealed nothing, only vague hints which hover like smoke for a moment, then dissipate.
“I don’t know your name,” she says.
“Don’t have one,” he replies, sounding earnest. “You can make one up for me.”
“Really.”
“Give it a try.”
“How about … Abelardo.”
“Eloisa and Abelardo. Isn’t that a love story?” he asks. “I think it has a nasty ending.”
It’s one of many tragic stories she found in her father’s books, amongst the silverfish. Great loves and great rhymes, a pressed flower—forgotten, left behind—to mark the pages. All those pages which her mother despised because her old man had been good for nothing, always with his head in the clouds
and when he died, they had to turn the house into a pension to survive. One of these days, Mother said, one of these days you’re going to take a wrong step and break your neck from staring at the clouds. Eloisa is certain this is precisely one of those days.
“I suppose,” she says.
He drifts closer and without a word plants a light, chaste kiss on her mouth. He smiles at her when he draws back, then repeats the motion. Lingering this time. Nothing chaste about it. His hand brushes her cheek. She wonders if she should slap him. That’s what she should do. But she also shouldn’t be here at all, shouldn’t talk to men she knows nothing about.
She feels warm, like the conflagration she was warned about—you’ll burn in hell, the Devil will take you away to writhe in scorching agony for all eternity—is really engulfing her. If the stories are right, she’ll burst into flames and perish.
Eloisa frowns.
“Can I look at your feet?” she asks, though really, she’d rather not. But she has to see.
“To make sure I’m not the Devil in disguise?” he asks.
She stares at him. The smirk on his face fades. His eyes, now that she looks at them carefully, gleam with the hellfire Mother warned her about.
“If I do and I’m the Devil,” he says, carefully removing the right boot, fingers slow, “then what happens next is you’ll scream. The house will mysteriously catch fire … ”
He stands up, switches his attention to the left leg. He works on the metal brace, removing the straps that attach it to the boot.
“ … and only ashes will remain to mark the place. A memory of a folly. Yeah, I’ve heard the story.”
He takes off the boot, rolls up the pants legs and reveals a hideously scarred foot. Instead of five toes there are three, with dark nails resembling claws.
“Are you going to scream?”
She raises a hand and begins unbuttoning the grey dress. Eloisa stares at him and he shakes his head in a vague gesture she can’t recognize. He mirrors her, removing the coat, his shirt and vest, his trousers. His leg is completely scarred, as is his torso. Ugly, puckered marks mar his skin, reaching the neck. Burn marks.
She steps forward, kissing the spot where his neck meets with his shoulder.
Ghost light intrudes through a gap in the curtains, waking her. She is on a sofa, naked, covered only by a blue overcoat. After Eloisa dresses, she looks for him, knowing already he’s left the house for it’s cold inside, as though frost has fallen.
She walks back to the town square, which is littered with dozens of paper flowers from the night before. The church is a few paces away. Or she could spin west, to her house.
Eloisa thrusts her hands in her coat pockets and walks to the silent train station, sitting on one of the wooden benches and surveying the tracks, which seem to go on forever in this hazy dawn. The station’s clock ticks and she observes the big hand move. Black like the man’s eyes.
And she already knows she is going to become a cautionary tale for other girls in town.
They’ll say the Devil rides into town on a train. They’ll say to watch out for men in blue overcoats.
The taste of ashes coats her tongue.
And she closes her eyes, smiling.
And there is the loud toot of a horn, making her frown and look at the source of the noise. That’s Mr. Carrasco’s automobile, glossy, inky black. It raises a cloud of dirt as it suddenly halts.
“I’m heading to El Monte and I can’t ride a horse. Can you point the way?” he asks, as casual as casual can be.
“Did you steal that car?”
“Well, you stole my coat. Can I have it back?”
She crosses the tracks and tosses the overcoat into the back, then climbs in.
This Is Not a Love Story
Nicole Kornher-Stace
Fool girl, what’s in your head?
Tell me, did you think to have
a meringue dress, a picket fence,
fat babies with your husband’s eyes?
Hypocrite, I’ve seen you:
blowing kisses to the greenwood,
flashing flat tits at the wind.
Hush up. Save your blushes. Listen.
You’d wear all the wide world’s iron shoes to rust
halt and faltering, blood-footed, nub-footed.
I know. You’d hold fast to what you fight for,
although it—wolf, serpent, flame—
test your grip, your heart, your mind,
to breaking. Girl, you read too much.
Books lie. They promise happiness
to daughters who shun quests (the sport of sons)
and keep to paths, who peek under the bed for monsters
hoping to find nothing there but dust.
(There’s a heap of old skirts on the doorstep
and a trail of old blood down the hall
There are bones, fleshed and gnawed, in the kitchen
and skins tucked like new babes in the beds
There’s a tangle of lockets, gummed shut
on pale portraits of quest-orphaned sons)
Fool girl, what’s in your heart?
Tell me, did you think to find
some incubus to barter for your firstborn
in the sallow grass, some ghost to haunt
your bridal bed, lying between you
and your husband like a sword?
Hypocrite, I’ve heard you:
wishing you could bite your heart in two,
tiptoeing indecision like a wire.
Don’t you backtalk me. I once was young.
My text was flesh, was dreams, was salt. I learned
of love (like childbirth, not pain so much as work)
and lust (better a monster’s dedication than an angel’s disregard)
and fascination (some are doomed to wander, some to stay).
Girl, you dream too much. Dreams worry at
your wounds. They take. Then dart
like startled fishes from your opened eyes.
All your wealth is acorns in the light.
(You will know him from his voice like a crossroads
and his eyes of blue, brown, hazel, green
You will know him from his heart like an owl pellet
spiked with eyeteeth, wristbones, maidenheads
You will know him from his smell like gallows new-built
like trespass, like wrack, like homecoming)
Fool girl, what’s in your hands?
Tell me, did you think to best
all otherworldly pull with knots and iron gauds,
all domesticity with resignation?
Hypocrite, I know you:
bending your neck to darning needles,
oven mitts, will not unmoor your heart
before it founders; waiting nightlong
in the faery rings probably won’t
earn you more than chills.
Gently, sweetling. Dry your eyes.
You’ll not follow this old woman into dotage
or your sisters into madness and
an early grave: don’t your books teach
it is the lot of wayward daughters
to unriddle and to wander; that
the only thing worth questing for
is the wherewithal to choose?
The White Prince
Orrin Grey
At night, then, it came crawling through Miss Anna’s open window. A pale thing. I doubt it ever had seen the sun.
Why did she accept its embrace and not my own? By the time we knew the truth, she was already far gone, and her shame sealed her torn lips with silence. Neither would she speak to me, one of her suitors, nor to Peter, her fiancé. Visiting Dr. von Stane attended her that last night. Afterward, he pulled me aside and told me that, delirious, she pleaded for her “alabaster prince.”
That final night we all waited: Peter crouched in her wardrobe, the rest of us in the next room. Lights hooded, hands sweating on the hafts of spears cut from the ash trees found dow
n by the stream, listening for the sounds of its ascent. I thought I heard a wet sound, as if something damp slapped at the walls of the manor. We had to wait to be sure, wait until we saw the hideous outline set against the moonlight streaming through the open window, until it had slumped into the room and was almost upon her bed, as it had been now for how many nights. Only then did we reveal our lanterns and spring into the room.
Its bulbous eyes grew wide, swiveling in a batrachian face, as it peered at us. It was Peter who drove in the spear, piercing the damp, fleshy bag of the thing’s body. It made a sound, not quite a dog’s bark, and it stumbled back, its long fingers with their sucking pads reaching feebly for my friend, who drew away in terror. The ungainly creature flopped for a moment, then disappeared out the window.
The gardener was the first to the ground, and found the spot where the body had fallen, the grass crushed flat and smeared with blood. Even in the dark we could see the trail it left, spatters of crimson that showed black in the lantern light. Peter’s father, Sir Godfrey, organized the party to hunt it down. Peter wanted to go, demanded to go, but Dr. von Stane laid his hand on Peter’s arm and said, “Anna needs you here, now more than ever,” and so Peter stayed behind.
The good doctor, Sir Godfrey, and I went out, along with the gardener and two of the stablehands. We armed ourselves with lanterns and spears, shotguns and revolvers, though I don’t know if any of us really believed that the guns would do us much good against our quarry. Sir Godfrey brought along the hatchet from the woodpile behind the house.
We followed the trail into the woods that bordered the property, past a stream where the rocks were spattered with blood. One of the stablehands said something about how it “couldnae a got far, leakin’ like that,” but I thought of how bloated it had been, and wondered how much blood it could keep in that sack-like body, how much it could do without.
During the whole affair, no one had ever uttered the word “vampyre,” not even Dr. von Stane, who told us to cut the branches from only the ash and sharpen them into long stakes. But all of us had read Mr. Stoker’s work published the prior year and I doubt I was alone in my thinking. But then, was it really blood it took from frail Anna, those nights when it oozed into her bed? I had been the one who caught them together, I in my bold—dare I even admit, untoward—mission to change her mind about marrying Peter. I had seen it atop her, seen her hands caressing its clammy flesh. Certainly, though, it was taking something from her, for she had been wasting away before our very eyes, dying in front of us even as her countenance took on the glow of a girl newly in love.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 5