“Alone?” Josie asked, intrigued. “You mean you never…”
“Not once,” Carol smiled again.
“How did you deal with it?”
“It’s easier if your stomach and your closet are full.” She put out her cigarette. “I took hypnotic pills. After a while it was I who started locking the door. I don’t know. It’s been so long. You get used to it.”
“Used to it?”
“Listen, kid,” Carol lit up another cigarette. “I don’t know why he chose you. I wish I could say I see myself reflected in you, but I don’t. You’re pretty, but there are hundreds of girls prettier than you. You’re not particularly sophisticated, and not even well mannered. A bit nicer than the other girl, perhaps, but you’re definitely not the smartest chick in Los Angeles. Being as old as he is, you’d think that brains would be an important trait to look for in a wife. And then the age difference. I couldn’t possibly marry a man of your age. What would we talk about? What he learned at school?” She blew out some smoke. “Men are stupid. I really don’t know what he saw in you, but I do know why you came here: because you don’t have anywhere else to go. That’s the only thing you and I have in common: it is scarier to go back,” she took a long drag. “Give it a try. Marry him. See where it takes you.”
“All of this is happening so fast,” Josie stood up. “This morning he said I could stay for as long as I wanted. Now he wants to get married… Is there anything you regret? Any advice?”
“Well, sometimes I think, I should have divorced him ten years earlier. I could have re-married. Or not, who knows? Back then I was having too much fun. After the war ended, everybody was eager to get back to their lives, and never was I freer than when I was married to a millionaire who never cared who his wife slept with as long as she didn’t sleep with him. You have a boyfriend.”
“Yes,” Josie nodded.
“Keep him. I had a boyfriend, too. His name was Angus. He wanted me to leave Richard, and Richard wanted me to bring him over for dinner. We had a nice arrangement. I hated to be poor and Richard hates to be lonely. At the end, Angus married my cousin. I made him wait a little too long. Hilde never left.”
“Hilde?” Josie asked taken aback. “You mean, Mrs. Coenegrachts?”
“You didn’t know? She was married to Richard, too. I don’t think they ever got a divorce. You gotta be some sort of masochist, don’t you think? Why would she stay with him all these years and pretend she’s the housekeeper. Well,” she smiled, like a trickster caught in a lie, “look at me. Still hanging around. I guess I’ll pretend to be his secretary. It’s not that difficult to understand, is it?”
“But she’s old!”
“It doesn’t make sense, I know. But he’ll explain that to you tomorrow. Now, have a good night.” Carol stood up and knocked on the door. Mrs. Coenegrachts opened it. She had been waiting outside all this time, keys in hand.
“Good night, Hilde,” Carol said on her way out.
“Good night, Carol,” Mrs. Coenegrachts responded, giving a cold look to Josie, and locked the door again.
Josie lay down on the bed, now more confused than before. Mrs. Coenegrachts used to be Richard’s wife? She was older than him. And why would she be interested in Richard getting married again? What did he have to explain? Was it about what happened inside the mysterious ballroom or was it something else? It couldn’t be him just dancing. Why had he invited her little landlady to the funeral? And why had she been so secretive about her book? Oh, she had so many questions! She stood up. Maybe taking a long bath would help.
She put on a robe and entered the bathroom. What would it be like if she and Richard got married? She sat on the edge of the tub, watching the water run. Elegant dresses, parties, and trips abroad? Would she have to be locked in her bedroom every night?
She turned off the faucet and heard Richard’s voice calling Mrs. Coenegrachts in the corridor. She sprung out of the bathroom and put an ear to the door. He seemed to be giving orders to her about some bottles. Was he having a party? If so, why couldn’t she be there as well?
She returned to the bathroom and got in the tub. If I marry Richard, she thought, Russell will never forgive me. Maybe he knew by then where she was. Eva wouldn’t keep the secret for too long. Maybe it was already too late. Maybe he already had a new girlfriend. Maybe it was Eva. She certainly hadn’t waited long before moving into her old place; why would she wait a day more to steal her boyfriend? It must have been so easy for her. He must have been so vulnerable, so heartbroken. And Eva enjoyed taking care of him.
Maybe it was better this way, she closed her eyes and sunk deeper into the tub. She realized she preferred Eva as Russell’s new girlfriend over a stranger. At least she knew Eva would take care of him. Yes, it would be much better this way. No goodbyes. Just the memories. Russell, curled up in his sleeping bag. Russell with an old shirt blocking his eyes from the sunlight entering through the window. That last peck she stole from him at the stairs, before leaving.
She opened her eyes. She could hear music. A piano. Was that the music that Mrs. Coenegrachts had referred to earlier that day?
She pulled herself out of the tub, dried off, and got into her pajamas. She could barely hear it, but it was definitely music; not ballet music, but a cheerful tune, birthday-like music, and it came, she could swear, from the forbidden room downstairs. She opened the doors to the balcony. The music flooded into the room. She heard laughter, too, and footsteps down below. People were dancing. Richard was having a party! Why hadn’t she been invited? She had to know. She couldn’t wait until it was too late, until she couldn’t return, like Carol. If she was to marry this man and leave the love of her life, she needed to know what sort of things happened inside this house.
There was a wooden trellis between her balcony and the next one. If she could reach far enough, maybe she could use it to climb down. She wouldn’t need to go all the way down, just enough to spy through the French windows… She stepped onto the railing and stretched her right arm as far as she could. She grabbed one of the bars of the trellis, put her right foot on it and then the other.
The trellis broke. She found herself hanging by one hand from the edge of the balcony.
It was almost fifteen feet all the way down.
“Help!” she cried.
But the music was too loud.
She would die if she fell. If she died, she wondered, feeling the pain of carrying all her weight in her fingers, would anyone know how to find her mother? She hadn’t seen her parents in over three years. What a pity, she thought people would say, to die so young, like a half-smoked cigarette. What an unhappy ending, to crack your head open, to die alone in a pool of your own blood, steps away from a party.
She used to dread becoming old, the wrinkles, the arthritis, the nurses helping her to the bathroom; yet for one moment, for one brief moment, as she hung by one hand from that balcony, she wished she had had the chance.
“Russell!” she cried, again.
And then she fell.
Later that night, during a game of blind man’s bluff that had extended out to the terrace, one of Richard’s guests, a charming young man with a high pitched voice and a waist narrower than that of most women, called the millionaire’s attention with a loud cry: “Richie,” the boy said in a rather distraught tone, “there’s a corpse in your garden.”
“Bollocks,” the blinded man said, removing the handkerchief tied around his head and rubbing his eyes because of the sudden brightness. Other than the handkerchief, he had nothing on but his shoes. “That was my fiancée.”
23
In which we go back to the house on the Linnie Canal
Oh, she survived. That girl’s head was as hard as granite.
Richard’s guests—all of them men, all of them young, dark, and attractive—brought Josie into the forbidden ballroom and laid her body down on a sofa. �
�She’s still breathing,” one of them said. He took an ice cube from a nearby champagne bucket and rubbed it over the girl’s face and arms to reanimate her. The girl opened her eyes. She saw the men around her, all of them extravagantly dressed with tall hats and feathers, or in various stages of dishabille. Some of them had makeup on. Was this a masquerade, like in the movies? Josie closed her eyes again. She couldn’t be more confused.
“Are you okay, lollypop?” she heard Richard ask her.
She opened her eyes again. Now she saw the grandiose interior of the room they were in: the Italian frescoes on the high ceiling, the gold-leaf moldings on the walls, the iridescent shimmer of the Bavarian cut-glass chandeliers, the mother-of-pearl tiles encrusted on the capitals of the massive pink marble columns, the exquisitely crafted furniture, the silk, the velvet, the ivory, and, finally, Richard’s distraught face leaning down towards her.
“Yes,” the girl mumbled, making an extraordinary effort to talk but with the assertiveness that can only come from someone who had suffered a near-death experience. “I will marry you.”
Now, sadder and much more perturbing than Josie’s prospective life as the forty-eighth wife of a centuries-old vampire was Eva’s death that same evening. It was so much easier for the little woman this time: she killed herself, accidentally. Eva liked to swallow colorful pills with her drinks to help her cope with the painful memories of her childhood, and that night she had added heroin to the mix. It helped with the nightmares. It helped her forget everything and everyone that needed to be forgotten in her life.
By the time the little woman entered the room to watch the Polish girl in her sleep, for she had become fascinated with Eva’s golden mane and her alabaster-like countenance, just like she had been fascinated with Josie’s beauty before, Russell’s “little sister” had long left the happy land of Nod, and Charon ferried her soul across the Acheron River to Hades.
“Can I have the eyeballs?” asked President Buer, poised on top of the little woman’s head, already salivating.
He could have the eyes, the tongue, the feet, or the nipples. Our little friend was interested in one part only: the young woman’s chin. Her body wouldn’t go to waste. They dragged the corpse into the tub and, with a few strikes of her cleaver, the little woman chopped off Eva’s lower mandible.
No time to lose cleaning. She rushed downstairs with her trophy, put it inside a pot she pulled from the oven, filled up the pot with cold water, and set it to cook. She rifled through the kitchen cupboards looking for the other ingredients—the lentils, the cardamom, the orange peel, and the dry rotten lizards. She took out the chicken pulses and the wether blood from the freezer. She got the dusty cobwebs from their neighbor’s rain gutter.
Still in its cage on top of the rickety cupboard, the black hen slept placidly.
The little woman must have been careless, pulling drawers and slamming them shut, rattling the contents of the cupboard, darting from the kitchen to her shed, for one of her sisters appeared at the kitchen door.
“What are you doing awake at this hour?” Victoria asked in a groggy voice.
As usual, the little woman didn’t respond. She didn’t hunch either, this time, nor did she turn her eyes away with a pathetic look. She remained still, one hand holding a wooden spoon and the other a metal lid, as though her stillness could make her invisible.
“Are you making soup?” Her sister asked. “Is that for tomorrow?”
The little witch nodded.
Victoria sat in front of the television set. “You can’t sleep?” she asked, almost sympathetic, and turned on the TV with her cane. “I can’t either. Some nights I simply can’t.”
The little witch reduced the flame of her concoction and covered it with a lid. She had to let it reduce before she could add the pulses. She stepped on a stool and took a seat on the cupboard.
“Do you ever think of Mamá?” Victoria asked.
The little woman didn’t respond.
“I do, sometimes.”
The little woman stared at her feet.
“How come you never married?” Victoria asked. “You never wanted to? You have two human feet.”
The other sister woke up. “Victoria!” Rosa yelled from the bedroom. “Where are you?”
“I’m watching television,” Victoria growled back.
“You left me alone.”
“Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t,” Rosa cried. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“I said, ‘I’m watching television.’”
“Victoria, please. I can’t hold it.”
Victoria turned to look at her youngest sister, but the little woman didn’t look back. She was determined not to move from the kitchen.
“Victoria,” Rosa kept calling, “For the love of Christ!”
Victoria reached for her cane and rose from her seat muttering curses. She returned after a few minutes and sank on her chair.
Rosa followed her to the living room in her wheelchair. “What are you watching? A movie? What is it about?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to watch television too. Help me get through.”
Victoria rose again and pushed her sister’s wheelchair next to her seat.
“What is this? Is it Alfred Hitchcock’s show? I like Alfred Hitchcock.” Rosa made herself comfortable in front of the set.
She noticed her other sister behind her. “What are you doing here? Go back to your shed!” she ordered.
“She’s cooking soup for us,” Victoria responded.
“She’s waiting for us both to die, that’s what she’s doing. It better be good,” Rosa said. “I don’t always like her cooking.”
Victoria went back to bed before the show ended. Rosa stayed awake till the end and for half an episode of a western, then fell asleep in her chair. The little woman pushed her wheelchair into the hallway.
By then, the flesh had come off the bone and the broth had reached the creamy consistency that the recipe required. She put the concoction aside and placed the lentils with all the spices in a second saucepan. Now it was only a matter of bringing it to boil, covering it with the fat from the first pot, and letting the whole thing simmer.
She wound up a kitchen timer and sat at the dining table.
“What are you going to do when you become young again?” President Buer purred from below the table.
The little woman raised the tablecloth and hunkered under the table.
“Buy a new dress?” the cat continued.
The little witch nodded.
“And new shoes?”
The little witch nodded again, this time with a smile.
“You will look so pretty, won’t you? Wearing high heels and perfume. Prettier than either of your two sisters ever were. You’ll drive men crazy. That’s what you covet, don’t you? Somebody’s love. Somebody’s admiration. Someone to hold your hand and whisper soft nothings in your ears… Yes, that’s what you want. A man to tell you that he loves you. A man to protect you. Why do women think they need a man to fill up their empty lives? Isn’t the love from your dog enough? He can jump in your lap and let you pet him. The warmth from the light bulb inside the fridge is warmer than the heart of any man. And murdering people, getting rid of their bodies is so much work—don’t you think?”
The little woman let the tablecloth down.
“Will you still care for me when you find true love?” the demon continued from under the table. “Your sisters forgot about their familiars. Will you still feed me with your blood?”
The witch shrugged.
“I know you won’t. You’ll be too busy scaring off suitors,” the cat licked his paw, pretending not to be jealous. “Call me selfish, but I hope you never find true love. I hope you die alone, so you learn your lesson. And I hope that no one ever loves you. Looks aren’t eve
rything, you know?”
The black chicken clucked. The cat hissed.
“Half a century without so much as a Christmas card and then he offers you a book and a chicken.” He came from under the table and jumped onto the little woman’s lap. “Forget about using the eggs, let’s make it tomorrow’s dinner. And get rid of that book. Can I have it? You don’t need it. You will be young again. You’ll find a man. If what you want is a child, I can make you one.”
The timer went off. The little woman sprung from her chair and turned off the flame. She removed the lid from the pot and sensed the smell of the lentils. They were ready. She added the contents into the first pot and mixed it. She was about to taste it when President Buer asked, “Did you put any salt in it?”
The little witch shook her head.
“Well, you better put some salt in it. It isn’t a necessary ingredient, but without salt it will taste like warm swill. Is there a salt shaker in this house?” the demon asked, looking inside the cupboards.
The witch put down the spoon and started looking for the salt shaker.
“Is it in here?” the demon rifled inside the drawers. “Where did you put it? On the table? Inside the fridge, perhaps? Where—where? I cannot find it.”
They looked all over the house: the kitchen, the living room, under the dining table, between the cushions of the old sofa. Nothing. There was not a grain of salt in that house.
“No wonder you’re poor and you have no money. I would recommend that you break into your neighbor’s, but it’s not worth it to commit a crime for a pinch of salt, is it? You’d better go buy it. You have to wait till it cools down, anyhow…Do we have bread? Coffee? Let’s make a list. What else are we missing?”
What was President Buer talking about? She wasn’t going to wait anymore! The little woman cleaned the sweat on her forehead with her apron, climbed back on her stool, sank the spoon into the soup and took a small sip. Yuck! She grimaced in disgust. The soup tasted like pig scouring. She forced a second spoonful into her mouth, but the flavor was so bad, she had to spit it.
Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle Page 40