by Octavia Cade
She had never been so offended in her life. It was enough to make her wish that she were a demon after all.
“I knew you’d come,” said Bluebeard, over and over. Pandora found it extremely frustrating, and the box had received more than one good swift kick, but without result. She was stuck at halfway points, with wives who were almost enough to open the door for her but never quite managed.
There’d been a few bad moments when Pandora had wondered if it was him bringing her through, if he was actually halfway decent at summoning, well, something that wasn’t a demon but would be close enough if she had her way. Bluebeard did seem to say “no” a lot, and he certainly was willing to face the consequences. The trouble was there weren’t any for him to face. But the box had only ever brought her to women before . . .
It wasn’t until wife number four that Pandora grasped what was going on. “Another one down, then,” she said. “Don’t you ever feel sorry for them?”
But he didn’t, and no one else did either. The lack of consequences wasn’t because Bluebeard was particularly brave, but because no one else particularly cared. Wives dying, in quick succession, with no childbed or disease to account for it and no bodies to be decently buried. The whole damn countryside knew what was going on in that castle, thought Pandora, and they sent him their daughters anyway, gifted up for gold and the sense of power they got from being the in-laws, however briefly, of nobility. The box hadn’t brought her to a man that said “no.” It had brought her to an entire community that said “yes.”
And maybe the poor little things around his feet weren’t made of earth and water like she had been, but their fingers were like her fingers, and those rings could have fitted on her own left hand before the right was cut from her body.
When Pandora came through the tunnel she found herself in the geology section of an enormous museum. Rows of glittering display cases stretched before her, and in each was a different rock. Pandora found them all fascinating, remembering a time when she had lain amongst them, back when she was earth instead of woman. Doors led off at regular intervals, and she could see through one into a long hall of polished bookshelves, but the rocks were too pretty to leave.
Sometimes she tucked one into her box as a keepsake. There was never anyone around to stop her, and she always left something in return.
“I wonder what it stands for,” said Pandora, tracing the letter on the lid of the box.
“Perhaps it’s for Good Wife,” said Epimetheus, still over-awed and barely able to look her in the eye.
“Who knows,” said Pandora, privately hoping it did not. “Gorgeousness, maybe?” She had a mirror now, and she wasn’t blind. “Or glory, or grace, or getting away with it.”
Pandora knew that her hair was disgustingly perfect. It was straight and smooth and shiny, a perfect midnight waterfall of deliciousness. Yet when she came through into the dungeon and saw another girl standing there, standing determined with irritation in her eyes and slippers that were just a little too big for her, Pandora saw hair that was nearly the color of her own and she wanted nothing more than to bury her face in it.
This hair was curly, full of sweet little ringlets and just a bit frizzy about the temples. If Pandora rarely had to worry about tangles, the hair of Bluebeard’s wife became knotted if she so much as looked outdoors, and Pandora was forever coaxing her out for walks just so she could have the pleasure of untangling it.
And in the times when she was doing so, when Bluebeard’s wife rested her head against Pandora’s stomach so that she could brush out the snarls and wind her fingers through the curls, Pandora was most grateful for her disobedience.
“I’d always wondered,” said Bluebeard’s wife, “what they meant about hope.”
“Hope,” said Pandora, “is having someone to love.” For all the box had sent theft and murder and sin into the world, it had also given her that.
She lay awake at night, grinding perfect teeth and wondering how sharp a knife would have to be to cut through bone.
The first time she had taken a keepsake back to the museum, all she had needed was a spoon with razor edges for a gift. “Don’t look at me!” Psyche had been told, and the poor little thing had had to stumble about in the dark for months before she’d tired of barked knees and stubbed toes and a husband who found blindfolds to be such a turn-on he wouldn’t even visit her bed unless she’d crippled herself with them.
“If you think it’s so much fun, you can try it,” she had said, unsympathetic, and now he was so horrified at the sight of an eye-patch on his too-pretty face that he’d covered all the mirrors up and Psyche, fed up with complaints about his butchered vision, had run off to be an animal trainer with a sparkly outfit who looked at anything she pleased and more besides.
“It’s about time,” thought Pandora, when the girl with the hair and the slippers brought her all the way through into a dungeon she’d long since wanted to reach at the right time but couldn’t. “My brave girl. Good for you.”
“I expect I’m meant to be sorry,” said Bluebeard’s wife, with the silk slipping down her shoulders. “This isn’t how it goes. There’s fidelity and faithfulness and forsaking all others.”
“If you want to scream about it, darling, go right ahead,” said Pandora, unlacing her bodice and sliding warm hands, like little fish, underneath the chemise of Bluebeard’s wife.
“But I’m not sorry,” said Bluebeard’s wife, with her dress pooled around her feet and reaching for Pandora in turn. “Not really. I know what I’m married to.”
“You are not allowed to open the box,” they had said to her—all of them, over and over again, as if she could forget it. “We’ll know if you open the box, young lady.” Zeus was the worst, he was, pottering about her with incessant reminders that Pandora was sure were designed to annoy her. Behind those rheumy, old man eyes, though, was a gleam that said Open it, go on, do! And so she hadn’t, just to be difficult.
And then she had, later on, just to be more so.
“Timing is a wonderful thing,” giggled Bluebeard’s wife, and hiccupped.
Pandora patted and prinked and plumped, braiding thick coils of hair into spirals and then loosening them again, trying chignons and fishtails and rolls, winding fat dark curls around her fingers.
“Don’t turn around, darling,” she said, pins in her mouth and in the middle of a tricky bit. “I’ve almost got it . . . just keep yourself still.”
Of course Bluebeard’s wife did turn around, out of sheer perversity if not out of habit, wanting to see herself in the mirror, see the coiled piles snaked around her head and fastened into place with long iron pins. Moving, she dislodged one springy section and it tumbled down the nape of her neck, displacing more pins and pulling the whole supple mass into disarray.
“You naughty thing,” said Pandora, laughing. “See what you’ve done?”
The beginning was easiest to explain. How she had stood, all cheeks flaming but only two in anger, while Epimetheus put away his strap. How she had stood with the box and watched his own cheeks pale in panic while she mimicked him, all malicious. “This hurts me more than it hurts you, dear,” she said, her fingers hooked under the lid. “But you have to learn proper behavior. I won’t put up with less.”
“Served him right, it did,” said Bluebeard’s wife, who’d lived a version of that story herself, who had had girlfriends who lived it.
It was harder to explain the rest—the doors and tunnels and glass cabinets, the horizon of shelves. Pandora didn’t really understand it herself. It was easier to take Bluebeard’s wife by the hand and let her see for herself.
“Look at it,” she said. “Just look at it—the beginning and the end of everything.”
It was all there—everything Pandora had ever wondered about, and far more that she hadn’t; everything that scratched at the door and hid under the bed and scrabbled at box lids.
Everything but company. Pandora had searched—rather desultorily, it was true, poking h
er pretty nose into nearby corners and opening adjacent doors, but she always came back to the museum, and the result was always the same. There was no one there to share it with. She had called and coaxed and, climbing up on the display cases, let out shrieks like the harpies. She’d danced and scampered and rolled though the library hall in a strange wheeled chair, all the way to Y. None of it made any difference. The place might as well have been deserted, and if there was more to explore than in her own small home, she soon grew bored with it, without someone to share it with, without someone to say “Yes, let’s!” or “No, don’t.”
Being too much by oneself, Pandora mused, could take the fun out of anything.
She struck a pose on the bed, snuggling into borrowed clothes, a silk nightdress a little too short in the leg and a little too tight round the chest—a small discomfort Pandora remedied by unlacing the front a lot lower than subtlety allowed.
Before her stood Bluebeard’s wife that was, her ears glinting gold in candlelight. At first she had wanted to bury the rings as deeply as possible, toss them into the sea, hurl them from a cliff. “Oh, don’t,” said Pandora. “They’ll just turn up again—you’ll cut open a fish or a chicken or a turnip, and there they’ll be. Might as well get some use out of them. They are rather pretty, despite it all.” And so the rings had been fitted with little hooks and swung charmingly beneath the small brown lobes that Pandora could barely keep herself from biting.
“I look fantastic,” said Bone, posing in front of the mirror with a necklace of ring fingers strung about her throat. “And ridiculous. I’m not sure which I look more.”
“Darling,” said Pandora, eyeing the silhouetted legs, the fitted boots, the hands slightly marred with just the beginning of calluses. “You look perfectly wonderful.”
“Of course I won’t open the box,” she said. “What on earth do you take me for?”