Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

by Thompson, Lee

  All that followed was a blur, as if glimpsed and heard and felt as if from underwater. He ransacked the premises, searching for god-knew-what, and he was only angrier when he didn’t find it. He jerked my arm so hard I screamed and he threw me out into the hall.

  The priest, Longfellow, was there, his back leaned against chipping paint, his face very grave and any compassion he might have once had erased.

  I said, “He fell.”

  “We don’t care about him,” Longfellow said. “And neither should you.”

  “You know they lied about Mother.”

  Longfellow shrugged. “People lie all the time. What do I care?”

  “What about the truth?”

  He laughed for several minutes before regaining control of himself. Then he approached me while inside the apartment O’Connor tossed things about. Longfellow lowered himself and stroked my cheek but there wasn’t any tenderness in it. His nails stunk of shit and dried blood, dead bodies. He said, “What have you done with your mother’s corpse?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know. Truly. I doubted Auntie had left it to decompose in the alley until the time of our departure, which, at that moment, I didn’t believe could come soon enough. Longfellow said, “It’s a cowardly thing to steal.”

  “I have nothing for you,” I said.

  He nodded, looked at the door as O’Connor joined us in the hall, sweating, huffing. Longfellow said, “She admitted all kinds of crimes while you were in there looking for it.”

  “Looking for what?” I said.

  “Shut your godforsaken mouth, girl,” O’Connor said. He looked at the priest and I watched both of them. “So, what do you want to do?” Asking as if the man of God was the boss, and he, the policeman, the humble servant to a higher power. It seemed, to me at least, ludicrous. But most of all I wanted to know what the cop so desperately sought. I asked him again. He ignored me, then thought about it and smacked my face. It stung. I didn’t ask him any more questions.

  Longfellow gripped my right elbow. “We’re taking a little walk.”

  Outside, in the day’s bright light, I saw a few men around my father’s cracked remains. They were peeling him from the drying blood and pebbles stuck to his brow, his nose, his chin. His eyes were open, and I assumed they would remain that way throughout eternity, open, and terrified of what they saw in the distance and closing fast.

  Longfellow led me into the heart of town and beyond, where the buildings grew older along the coast and a structure that ran the length of the coast, for what seemed miles north and south. I jerked away, or at least tried to, but the priest’s hands were like iron digging into my clothing and my flesh. “No,” he said, so sternly that I could not resist, nor take another step. He stopped beside me, saying, “I will carry you if I have to, unconscious, preferably.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  He smiled, and if he’d meant it to be warm, then God damn him.

  He crouched near me, his black pants growing dusty with roadside spew. He patted my head, and said, “I know that evil lurks behind those young, innocent eyes, and you may think you have everybody else fooled, you little fuck, but nothing gets by me. Understand? Nothing.”

  I shook my head, tears stinging my eyes. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Move,” he ordered. He jerked me off my feet, and I flailed, and, unable to get my footing, he dragged me by my arm, much stronger than his thin form would have suggested. The circulation I’d had disappeared. My arm felt like a ton of bricks baked in the sun, their weight able to bend a thick board, but he, Longfellow, he did not bend. He dragged on, huffing, sweating, cursing in Latin.

  We approached a large gate made of steel. It reminded me of a castle though there was no mote nor horses nor knights. A man, chubby, dirty, his face covered in hair, said, “State your business.”

  “I have a charge to add to your number,” Longfellow said.

  “An escapee?” the guard said.

  “Open the gate,” Longfellow said.

  “Now, now,” the man said, truly looking at me. He said, “She’s but a child. Hell, man. She been walking nigh two years or three?”

  I said, “I’m five.”

  Longfellow smiled a very cold smile and slammed me against the gate.

  He said, “Does evil know age? Are you learned in deciphering what is and what should not be?”

  The jailer shook his head, spittle shiny at the corner of his mouth. He said, “Shall I get the warden?”

  “You should, and quickly,” Longfellow said.

  He glanced behind him. I looked as well. I saw O’Connor coming, a half mile back, his uniform a smudge in the gray distance. He raised a hand and the priest waved back in recognition. I said, “You can’t put me in prison. You can’t.”

  I am little, I thought, ask the jailer, ask anyone, me not understanding that what he saw, the priest, was what I would become, the everything that threatened his calling and duty… I would become a woman, and soon, sooner than I could imagine, and in that small space of time the will I had from birth would grow stronger and sharper, and I would question things, openly, and I would demand answers that those in power resisted giving or simply cowered from.

  The warden appeared on the other side of the gate about the same time that O’Connor’s tread sounded neatly behind us. The warden, a slim, hardened white man wearing a black coat not unlike Longfellow’s said, “What’s this all about?”

  “An escapee,” Longfellow said.

  “She’s not one of ours,” the warden said. “We don’t jail children.”

  O’Connor cleared his throat and said, “This is a delicate matter.”

  The warden’s face seemed perpetually befuddled and somewhat angry with whatever it was he was missing to understand circumstances outside his prison walls.

  “How’s that,” he asked, pointing at me, at them.

  Longfellow said, “Her mother was a prisoner here until her recent demise.”

  The warden studied my face for a moment and nodded to himself as if confirming some hidden suspicions. “One of the witches.”

  “Precisely,” O’Connor said. “This one is like her. We have her father’s testimony.”

  “And what does it say?” the warden asked.

  Longfellow shrugged, leaned forward, said, “She threw him from the window of his apartment before full disclosure…”

  “To protect herself from accusation,” O’Connor said.

  The warden looked skeptical again. “She’s small,” he said.

  “But dangerous,” Longfellow said. “Perhaps more dangerous than her mother.”

  “Have you taken her through the proper channels? This is a prison, gentlemen, not a day care.”

  “I’ll have the information to you later this day,” O’Connor said. “But don’t let her appearance deceive you. She’ll cast a spell behind your back that will cause your testicles to shrivel like dying fruit, and we,” he pointed at himself and Longfellow, “do not wish you the trouble.”

  “If you have a more secluded area,” Longfellow suggested, “one away from the main population.”

  “We have such a place,” the warden admitted. “Solitary.”

  “Best for everyone,” O’Connor said.

  Longfellow nodded. He ripped a strip of cloth from my dress and gagged me. I tried to fight him but O’Connor stepped forward and clubbed me, and the last image that carried me into unconsciousness was the grin splitting his ugly face.

  *****

  I woke later, at night, with the howls of the damned and mad all around. I blinked, trying to force my eyes to adjust to the room I found myself in, but it took longer than I wanted. The murk was damp and shining black, the floor hard, the blanket covering me wooly and causing my skin to itch.

  All four walls were formed by blocks of limestone and things, rats probably, scurried in the darkness. A heavy door with a slot about waist high gleamed dully, as if seeing it through fog. My head ached, and running my fin
gers over my scalp I flinched as they brushed the goose egg O’Connor had gifted me with his club.

  It was cold but I stood and approached the door. There was no handle on the inside, and the hinges were hidden. I beat the heavy oak with my fist. I screamed, the sound if it heartbreaking and frightening to my own ears as it mixed with the sound of everyone else in the dungeon. My voice did not sound like my own, but as that of something forever shackled to the darkness, something forgotten, helpless. And for the briefest second I feared that they were right, O’Connor and Longfellow, to discard me like they had, for there was something inhuman living inside me much like there was something living in Auntie.

  I tried to think of Father there, with his skull leaking on the cobblestones and his arms and legs broken, hoping that I could find some compassion, but I felt nothing for him, or the loss of his existence. Heartless, surely. They were right. I was a monster. Had not Auntie always called me her little ogre? She had, because it was true. I was one with the darkness, and though I feared it at the time I knew that the curtain of night cloaking the walls would part and something otherworldly would cross an invisible threshold and welcome me into his horrendous arms. Because that was where I belonged, with the hidden things, with the outcasts, trapped inside the fiery embrace of the demonic.

  Accepting such revelations terrified me. I cried for Auntie, cried so hard, so hungry, so hurt, for so long that I fell asleep for a time, and even in my dreams I wished I’d never wake.

  *****

  A month crawled by, succumbed to darkness and defeat and a loneliness I feared would crush my fragile little spirit.

  They brought mush and hard biscuits once a day, the same thing, at the same time, every day, and without a window it was the only way I could keep track of how many days had passed. Then on the eighth day I woke and Auntie’s spirit, glimmering whitely in the dim light from the slot, sat hunched near my head. My neck ached and my throat was so raw I could barely mutter. She watched me for a time. Then she said, “You can outlast them.”

  I shook my head.

  I can’t, I thought.

  She did not touch me. She said again, more sternly, as if to lend me faith: You can outlast them... She flickered for a moment and then a popping sound invaded my ears and I blinked and when I looked again she was gone.

  A knock echoed off the door and it was the most absurd thing I had ever heard.

  I said, “Yes?”

  “Visitor,” the jailer said.

  It had been so long since I had seen anyone else’s face that I would have welcomed the Devil himself.

  “Yes,” I said. And the bolt outside the door slid free and the heavy oak groaned as it swung in and the light that had been a narrow knife blade slammed into me like a slab of rock. I held my arm in front of my eyes. Beneath it I could see black shoes shuffling forward, nearer my blanket, and I thought of my bed and how soft it had been, how warm.

  Longfellow said, “Are they treating you well?”

  I didn’t answer him. It took time for my eyes to adjust to the force of light, time to realize that he was truly there kneeling next to me. But slowly, I lowered my arm.

  I gasped at the sight of him. He was not the same man who had brought me to this exile. This man was smaller, thinner, weaker, though his eyes still glowed with that fanatical light.

  He said, “You’ve done this to me, haven’t you? And God, in his mercy has let you, to teach me something.” He shook his head. His hair had receded horribly and his pate was shiny and clear through the miniscule strands still covering it. He raised his eyes again. “What am I supposed to learn from this?”

  I pushed my back to the wall to avoid his breath, which was nearly as bad as my own. I cleared my throat and my stomach rumbled from the motion. He asked me again, “What am I supposed to learn from this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You do!” he said. “Tell me now and make it quick.”

  “You’re dying,” I said.

  He had one hand raised pointing at nothing in my cell. He said, “I am dying,” and it seemed something inside him fell apart, perhaps it being the first time he’d voiced his fears. “Why?” he said.

  “Because you deserve to,” I said.

  He nodded. “And if I get you out of here?”

  “What?”

  “Will you take this curse off me?”

  “You’ll free me?”

  He nodded. “I swear.”

  “I can’t trust you,” I said. “And I’d rather know you’re dead.”

  “You!” he screamed and leaned forward, clawing at my face. I screamed and the jailer rushed in, dragging Longfellow back. He landed heavily on his hind end and cursed. He pointed a finger at me and said, “I will outlast you!”

  “No,” I said. “I will outlast you.”

  “Fucking cunt!” he said.

  “Enough,” the jailer said, ripping him from the floor by his lapels. He shook Longfellow, once, twice, three times, harder each time, saying, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “It’s her,” the priest said.

  “It is,” I said. “It’s me.” He made me smile, thinking that he believed I had so much power when what I had at that time was nearly nonexistent or I wouldn’t have been so afraid of the darkness or starving to death.

  It was Auntie, I thought. She’s trimming pieces of his soul away, a little each day.

  The jailer hauled Longfellow screaming and cursing from the room.

  “Wait,” I said.

  They stopped at the threshold.

  I said, “Come again. I would like to see you a month hence if you’re still alive.”

  Longfellow elbowed the jailer in the jaw and broke free and he made three steps into the room before he doubled over clutching his stomach, and puked out a horribly smelling black mush. He trembled. He cried weakly, “Please, have mercy…”

  “There’s no mercy for any of us,” I said. “Even children know that.”

  And there was no mercy for him in the end; or for the fat Irishman he partnered with.

  *****

  After months passed and I longed for them to end my life to release me of the nightmare they’d forced upon me, they set me free. The evidence against a child was too slim, though the evidence they had on my mother was little more. It had been the longest few months of my life, as if years had been crammed into the pouch of time, as if some cosmic mix-up had bested me. And the time following my imprisonment to the present flew by, all that I’ll share with you in a moment, until just weeks ago when I met the sweet little girl Natalie, and her mother, who, like me, were lost and would soon lose even more.

  But first, I must give you a quick glimpse of the intervening years, peaceful for the most part, other than man’s common greed, the fear some had of the boy walking out of the desert, and my own failings in regards to my heart’s greatest intruder.

  The sky was ashen and smoky, the ground covered with dirty snow when my aunt came for me at the prison. She wrapped my dirty, stick-thin bones in her arms and in the sleeve of her dress, warm, so warm, and carried me away as more executions continued. Though there was nothing she could have done to save my mother, I do think she contributed to my father’s fall, his cracked skull leaking on the street, me in the window above crying because the cabinets were bare and I missed my mother’s cooking and the smell of my father’s pipe smoke. And I knew that it was her who had given Longfellow and O’Connor some acidic plague that ate them up from the inside out, and for that I loved her all the more.

  After she acquired the supplies we needed we fled west through Indian Territory. She brought my mother’s corpse with us, tied to a vertical beam in the back of the wagon, her skin drying and her insides stinking, the stench seeping from her every pore. We traveled through many lands, and the natives watched us pass with worried faces, superstitious in their own customs, fearing we were an apparition born of the spirit world that foretold of coming trouble. And generations later—after t
he white man had taken their lives and freedoms and pride from them—the Ute, Cherokee, Choctaw tribes all told of the woman and child dressed all in black who towed a corpse with its face boldly cast in defiance toward the sun.

  Auntie took me to the secret place she’d found in her latest travels. It was a great depression in the earth in the dense, rugged mountains of what would become northern New Mexico, centuries later. She taught me of magic and of the desert, and it was peaceful though the sun burned my pale skin. She troubled herself with ointments and pastes that would reduce the pain for a short time but would quickly wear away.

  In time I grew to love our secret place, the solitude, the quiet.

  When the first family came in the 1800s we had lived so long alone that I wanted to snuff the breaths in their chests, because I saw it as an intrusion, you see? An unforgivable intrusion. But my aunt dissuaded me. She said that the magic she’d taught me was charged by the faith of such simple people, the salt of the earth. We fed them and the man, Jeremiah, looked long and hard at the crater we’d come to escape prejudice, and he gave his wife a knowing look. He talked with Auntie, and she said that yes, they could build a cabin, that yes, we would enjoy their company. And slowly, over decades, others families trickled in.

  What was once a barren beauty, then a small encampment, grew into a town. The first family had aged greatly, and Auntie, who never said it, but I believe it with all my being, loved Jeremiah. She’d always hoped that his wife would die of natural causes, refusing to use the magick she possessed to push the limits of her mortality along.

  So, Jeremiah had aged greatly and she loved him dearly, secretly. She feared never feeling his hand on her shoulder at the dinner table again when she visited their home, and she feared never seeing his bright blue eyes twinkle when he smiled her way in passing upon the street. It scared her so badly that she wept hard at night and barely slept. She decided she would build a carousel that would erase the marks time had scarred him and his children with.

  He didn’t believe her at first, of course, and he was angry that she had not offered such a miracle to his wife. Auntie said nothing for a time, the two of them in her house near the church. Slowly it dawned on Jeremiah that she loved him. But he could do nothing about it, he loved his wife, would always love her. He only loved Auntie like a sister, he’d said. It destroyed her. It is hard to murder a real witch. A noose won’t do it. Or a bullet. Or fire. There are charms used to protect one’s body, powerful devices that disprove the physics of the natural world. Jeremiah didn’t want to hurt her like he had, but his words cut her deeply in the red thick muscle where she housed all her dreams.