Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

by Thompson, Lee

  Angel said, “This carousel will make us younger.”

  She opened her eyes. Jerked her head back. He dropped his hands, said, “Trust me, Brooke. It is going to wipe the years right off our faces. And it will keep doing that every time we see age settling in. All we have to do is take the ride.”

  “How? How do you know that?” she said, angry again, not caring if he thought her a threat to his little fantasy or not. “Because she told you? How can you trust her? It’s insane, Angel! You don’t know her! And your letting Natalie stay out there, with something hunting her while this bitch…” she turned her head to challenge me but I wasn’t there anymore, at least not that she could see.

  “She’s tricking you,” she said more softly. “That’s all it is. It’s a trick.”

  “It’s not a trick,” he said. “It’s a treat. Halloween, right? One we’ll never forget and one we’ll be able to remember for the rest of our lives because our lives are never going to end.”

  “Everything ends,” Brooke said. “Even the faith one person has in another.” The anger she felt for his being so foolish quickly passed, for the moment, hoping that if she kept it together she’d be able to help him get it together.

  She said, “If you love me, untie me.”

  “You’ll run away,” he said. “Then you’ll miss out.”

  “It’s my choice!”

  “Sometimes,” Angel said, softly, “we don’t know what’s best for us.”

  “You don’t know what’s best for anyone! Not like this. Untie me. I have to find Natalie and we’re leaving. Stay if you want, but don’t be surprised if you take this ride and it doesn’t make you young. Instead it might make you old. It might make you so old that you can never leave because it hurts too much to walk or because you’ll fear your heart will give out at the slightest effort. Listen to me, Angel. Really listen. This is dangerous, whatever it is. And you’re putting us at risk the longer you keep me here.”

  He frowned. He seemed to seriously consider what she said. She wanted to tell him to put some clothes on but didn’t want to break his train of thought since she felt she might have slid a sliver of doubt into his mind with the bit about the carousel making him older instead of younger.

  And the more she thought about the possibility of that happening, the more she felt a cold darkness moving around inside her. It terrified her. It had a ring of truth to it, possibly something that went back to her childhood when her parents had taken her to Sunday school every week and they learned through the sacred word of God that the Devil dressed in sheep’s clothing, and everything old Scratch promised came with a serious price, or a reversal, or a misunderstanding of the exchange.

  Sweat stood out on Angel’s forehead, glistened upon his bare chest. His hands were large, meaty, and veins ran like roadmaps tracing the course of his life just beneath the flesh.

  “Please,” she whispered. “We have to get Natalie out of here.”

  *****

  Natalie figured out why the boy in the portrait above the piano looked so familiar. It was the little blotch of brown setting on his shoulder, the other brown blotches crawling from the cuffs of his jacket sleeves.

  Spiders.

  The guy from the little shop who cared for spiders.

  The boy who had watched her run into this very building what seemed only moments ago, but she knew that wasn’t right, time was playing tricks on her. Another hour had passed. Long shadows stretched down the street. The desert air had dropped in temperature.

  She looked back to the portrait and she knew who the young woman was, too.

  Their aged host, only decades younger in the photograph.

  Behind her, I said, “He’s my son. Or at least that’s how I think of him.”

  “What do you want from us?” Natalie looked for a weapon in my hands but didn’t see any sign of one. She thought that if I tried to drag her back out into the street she’d claw my eyes out, which would have been a bad idea on her part.

  I smiled at her as if in challenge, as if reading her thoughts, or perhaps just her body language. Natalie forced her tense muscles to relax. She’d run straight out the back door, if she had to, figuring I wouldn’t stand a chance of keeping up with her.

  “That was taken six years ago,” I said, pointing at the photograph. Natalie didn’t believe me of course. The two women, one not even nearing the prime of her life, perhaps in her late twenties; the other, standing in front of her grizzled and ancient, possibly in her eighties. “I know it’s hard to believe, but loss can strip the years from you.”

  “What did you lose?” Natalie said, thinking about her mother, thinking that maybe if she found some common ground with the mad woman, me, that her mother would be set free and Angel loosed of whatever affliction I had cursed him.

  “I’ve lost it all. Imagine that. Your town, your faith, your lover, your son. It’s what aged me, finally, though the laws of this horrible world could not, loss could. A broken heart, is there anything sweeter? Anything else that moves someone as quickly to tears?”

  “You’re not moving me to tears,” Natalie said. “I don’t care what happened to you because you’re letting Angel hurt my mom.”

  I shook my head. “He’s not hurting her. He loves her.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “He thinks he’s going to give her the greatest gift possible. You don’t realize it yet, but as you age, you’re going to despise your body for betraying you. Even if you exercise, even if you eat the right foods, it will take its natural course. And you’ll soften, your eyes will dim, your bones will ache. Worse yet, you’ll see it happening to those you love, those dear to your heart, and you can’t help them as they wrinkle and stumble about, as they forget, and as disease settles in, and their bones grow brittle. And then you watch them die, or they watch you die.”

  Natalie shrugged. “You’re depressing.”

  I laughed. “I don’t mean to be.” I shrugged. “I thought I was beyond being depressed, but after everything that has happened in the past couple weeks, I don’t know anymore… I’m afraid, for the first time in my life.”

  “Afraid of what?” Natalie said, interested, but still hoping that if she understood where I was coming from she could find a way to get her mom free and the spell over Angel broken.

  I pointed to the piano bench, gesturing for her to sit.

  I said, “I’ll tell you because you’re young enough to accept things adults can’t. Things they ignore because they’re painful. Things I have ignored because I thought I knew everything that was out there, but I was wrong. The Devil came to me and I was much lonelier than I’d realized, for a lover and a friend, not just playing mother to a town I cared deeply for, or a boy who stumbled in from the desert…”

  “Okay,” Natalie said, thinking that she’d never get the chance to hear the story if she turned it down now. “I’ll listen. But I want you to set my mom and Angel free.”

  “Your mother is a brave woman. She’d sacrifice herself for you, too.”

  Natalie hung her head, feeling so young and powerless again. She realized how much she admired her mother, how much she wanted to be like her when she grew up, gentle yet hard, unwavering in her beliefs, yet understanding of others.

  “Please,” Natalie sobbed, “just let her go.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I need her.”

  “Then I’m not listening, I’m leaving and I’m going to call the cops.”

  “And when you return they’ll find nothing here, not even your mother’s bones.”

  Natalie shook her head. “It’s not possible.”

  “Forget everything you’ve even dreamed about what’s possible and listen to me child…”

  *****

  When my aunt brought me to this nowhere place 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 the place, the solitude, the quiet. When the first family ca
me 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.

  She loved him more than the town, more than herself, more than me.

  I had loved him too, and he had lied to Auntie. He just wasn’t attracted to her. His natural wife was much younger than him and he thought I was much younger than her, though by then I’d lived for centuries. And he took me in the barn and I let him because I wanted to be filled up with something no amount of magick could give me, something fleshy and quick of breath, and later, we lay exhausted and content.

  We snuck around for a long time. His wife was always suspicious. It was she who first approached Auntie, not long after she’d told Jeremiah that she loved him. And when the woman came, furious, Auntie thought the woman meant to attack her for what she’d shared with the woman’s husband. She’d known the day would come you see. Men are weak and they can’t keep secrets. But his wife had come to her and threw a pair of my panties at her feet. First the rejection from the man she loved, and then betrayed by her own niece. Of course, to me, it wasn’t betrayal at all. He didn’t like her. He liked me.

  I tried to explain that to her on the street but she had poisoned herself before coming to meet me and she died while I was still speaking.

  At first I’d thought she’d only fainted. People gathered around. There was much made of her death and for a while I toyed with the idea that she had presented to Jeremiah, a living carousel that sucked the years away like a babe drinking its mother’s milk. He asked about his wife, which would have been okay if he’d been talking to Auntie, but he wasn’t. The incantations left me in fever for three days but she, Jeremiah’s wife, died slowly, rotting away until she burst like old fruit and the townspeople came to a decision to burn the property to prevent further spread of whatever disease had befallen her. They were smart people but as superstitious as anyone anywhere.

  While they built Jeremiah a new home, expecting him to live out his final golden days in the sun, carting the weight of his wife’s memory admirably, I went to work on the carousel. It took a year to understand Auntie’s notes for she was light of hand, wrote precisely and in sinfully tiny script, not to mention her mind was prone to bits of racing so the mechanics, both physical and occult, were not in order. I pieced it together over months of tiring labor. Then it took only one night to build.

  The next morning the whole town came to see what this strange mystery was. I went to my beloved’s new home, certain Jeremiah would ride the ride, or at the worst, he would object for a while, full of pride. But when I arrived he was dead. He looked peaceful in his bed, his gray hair long and curly, his skin bearing a healthy shine as if he’d just recently scrubbed every bit of dirt from his pores. It hurt to see him so, but I was no necromancer.

  I fled, crying, back to the carousel.

  My people waited there, murmuring.

  I wanted to order them to bring him, place his body on the platform, but I could not bear to see his corpse again. His death meant little to the younger generations. He was just a kind old man with a heavy heart. What they wanted to know was the purpose of the carousel, though the most excited of course were the children, who saw only adventure. Oh, their faces, so pink and bright, the sun beyond them all red as the rock we stood on. I composed myself and decided I would share the gift I had built for Jeremiah with all of them, for I had not, in my fervor of studying Auntie’s notes, intended to share it with everyone. But my chest pained me greatly and the curiosity, the pure, unadulterated wonder on their faces, put me at ease. They were my children. They deserved an eternity of peace if that was what they wanted. Simple minds. Old men eager to be young bucks again, strong and agile, and old women who looked in the mirror every morning with a quiet and stubborn disdain against the effects time had made upon their eyes, their mouths, their necks. Time. It, not Death, was what they feared most. Near the end, death is welcome, it is a relief. It’s while we’re in the pull of time’s terrible stream that we see how quickly the years evaporate even as they erode us.

  The children… They were furious that they couldn’t ride. I took the oldest group first while their grandchildren and great-grandchildren stomped around, pouting, some crying outright, unable to be soothed until they got a turn. The fossils had no idea what the ride was for, simply thinking it was nothing more than what it appeared. Those who had been together for a half-century, stood hanging onto the centaurs and each other. Those who had lost those they’d loved filled the other side, like two sides of the same coin. I chanted and the clear blue sky above us began to darken, storm clouds rising like towers in the west over the far rim. Thunder shook the platform and the glass in every building.

  I whispered, “I love you all,” and the carousel moved at a jerky start, nearly tipping some of them over. The children had gone quiet. The rest watched, fascinated. Slowly, holding their breaths, they watched colors dance from the centaurs’ eyes and the creatures themselves tugged at the ropes they clung to, their desperation feeding the machinations still unseen.

  It whirled, the old couples riding but a blur to those on the ground as the first fat drops of rain fell. Not a soul felt them. Light danced on that whirring, whizzing, otherworldly machine. It built in intensity until the spectators had to shield their eyes. And thunder boomed again, closer, and I prayed for them, that they would understand. The rain pounded, the carousel blurred blue and black and white and red, all of the colors smearing together until a loud pop sounded and the ride went still. Those on the ground uncovered their eyes, blinked, some swore, some cried, “Jesus,” as those on the platform looked at their partners, shaking their heads.

  Tears followed, smiles, laughter, disbelief. The now-young joined those who had only watched. I had expected a rush of movement, a mob of either angry faces or frightened ones. But the spectators were like statues. The now-young strutted for a moment before one of them said, “How long is this going to last?” And I, and their families and their friends, could see the fear in their faces. Even if it was only once that a miracle could happen, it would not be enough for some, because they would desire it, again, and again, and again.

  They t
urned to me. I stood on the platform. “It’s a gift you can use forever,” I whispered, and despite the rain, they heard me, shuffling forward like sheep, like children.

  One of them said, “Forever?”

  I nodded.

  “Forever,” I promised them. “Nothing can take this from you and there is nothing to fear.”

  And for a while there wasn’t. Another century went by but you couldn’t decipher the passage of time by judging the health and decline of our people.

  When Peter stumbled in from the desert during the summer solstice, he was near death, I think. It is hard to tell with things like him, things that look oddly human, yet who neither eat nor sleep. Sometimes I believe him to be a lesser demon that Auntie created to torture Jeremiah’s wife, but who was abandoned mid-spell, and thus will always be lost.

  He has a delicious and beautiful sadness about him, and it was that which drew me to him to begin with. He skirted the town for a while, but I could feel him, every now and then catch sight of his movements. It took a few days for him to build the courage to approach. I welcomed him with open arms but he would squat on the ground and gather bugs to toss to his brothers. His eyes were black splotches of wetness in his face. He may have been unable to speak at the beginning, always making crude noises with his throat, and if so, he learned completely by ear, the way some musicians do, and he was incredibly adept at mimicry. I invited him in and yet he roamed for a while, watching people, noticing that they were troubled by his presence, the look of him, the way he smelled like the desert, and most of all those eight-legged children of his.

  Our town up to that point had never had a name, but the spiders had lain webbing everywhere. It annoyed many, but for me, the spiders, and Peter, of course. For weeks there was a crew of assigned men and women who dealt with nothing but removing the webs. Eventually the spiders learned to build them in places where they would not be disturbed—behind walls, beneath dressers, in attics, in basements, in barns and crypts. Someone, I’m not sure who, had called the silk they produced gossamer and someone else had laughed, now that enough time had went by to know they could live side-by-side this strange boy and his pets without destroying each other.