by A. D. Koboah
The sound of my feet against the ancient floorboards sounded like thunder in the unnatural stillness. Lying at the back, halfway through the secret trapdoor, was Mama. I was at her side in an instant. It appeared as if she had crawled up the stairs before collapsing and I smelt blood, though I was not sure where she was bleeding.
What on earth was she doing here?
I clasped her hand, too scared to pick her up, and drew her with me into the ether. We were outside moments later, the air no longer cloying, the unearthly chill no longer seeming to pervade my every pore. I saw now that the bleeding was coming from her nose and mouth and her chest was stained with blood, but there was no evidence of a wound. Her right arm was lying at an odd angle, no doubt broken. Anger surged through me at what the entity—and there was no doubt in my mind that the spirit in the chapel was responsible for this—had done to her.
For a moment, my mind grew completely blank and I couldn’t speak, battling my fear at the thought that she would die and I would lose my dear friend and confidant. There was only one course of action left to me, and although she would probably never forgive me for this, I could not let Mama be taken from me.
So I drew my nail against my wrist and held it to her lips, forcing her to drink. When I pulled my wrist away, my fear and terror increased, because nothing happened. Although her heartbeat seemed to grow even, her breathing stayed the same.
“Oh, Mama.”
I picked her up and moved into the ether, taking her away from the hateful presence of the chapel and to her home, where I lay her in bed.
My blood appeared to have had no effect on her, so I was going to have to watch her die. I pulled up a chair and sat down by the bed with her hand in mine. Placing my head against the bed, I wept.
I stayed with her for the rest of the night and an hour after the sun had risen, I was still at her bedside, holding tightly on to her hand and listening to her heartbeat and shallow breathing, praying to God to not take her from me. That is when I felt the fragile, thin hand in mine squeeze my fingers. I looked up. She was awake and staring at me through half-closed lids, a weak smile on her lips.
“Mama?”
“You came.”
I nodded. “But I barely heard you. What were you doing there, Mama?”
“Trying to right a wrong. But it was too strong for me.”
It was all she would say and her mind was closed to me as she looked off into the distance, lost in her thoughts.
“Help me get up,” she said after a few moments. “I have to go back. I have to finish—”
“No!” It was a shout in the small room. “No,” I said again less forcefully this time. “You’re too weak. I...I had to give you my blood. I am sorry,” I added quickly, expecting anger at this trespass. “But I do not think you would have lived if I had not.”
She stared carefully at me for a few moments. “Help me up,” she said again.
I reached over and helped her to her feet. Although her right arm was no longer twisted, it still seemed to hang stiffly.
“Your arm is still not healed.”
“No,” she said, glancing at it absently. “It will not let it heal, to serve as a reminder to me to never enter the chapel again. But I have to go back.”
“Mama, I cannot let you leave here.”
She glanced at me again, the same way she had only a moment ago, and then she seated herself on the bed and gestured for me to sit also.
“Wɔfa Avery. What you fear, what you have feared for so long now, you cannot stop it. For someone who will never see an end to the days that stretch before him, you must know that death is not to be feared. It is a release. It is not to be feared.” She placed her hand on my shoulder.
“I know that, Mama. I know that.”
“You are like a son to me in so many ways. I will always be with you, in some way, so do not think I will ever abandon you, or Luna. It is why you have to let me go back. I have too many wrongs to right. I cannot let that spirit grow. It has tasted my blood now so it will haunt us all if I do not banish it.”
“You have to rest, Mama. Please.”
She nodded and let me push her back against the bed. She was fast asleep a short time later. She slept for most of that day, waking for short moments. It was a week before she was well enough for me to be able to leave her side and return to the mansion. But she appeared extremely troubled as she stood at the front door watching me, and she made sure her thoughts were carefully hidden from me.
“Thank you, Wɔfa Avery. You have never let us down. I promise I will find a way to return what I took from you.”
I was not sure of exactly what she meant, but I was just relieved she had recovered and I would have a few more years with her.
***
I thought I would be ready when she finally left this world and that I would have time to say goodbye, as I’d had with Philip. But it was not to be so. She left suddenly, and it was nearly a week after when I arrived for my weekly visit that I discovered she was no longer on this Earth.
The home, which had always been open to me, was empty, all her furniture cleared away. The shock was like a strong gust of wind that blew against me when I entered her home, and I had to grasp the door to steady myself. The night was young but I did not want to see the world. Did not want to embrace the pain. The loss cut to my very soul, the core of my existence as a vampire. This life would always be one of death. I no longer meted out death, but it found me anyway.
With desolation creeping into my being, I ran, actually ran away from her home, seeking the darkness and silence of the woods. Once there, I went to ground as had been my way before Luna, and the humanity she helped awaken in me. This night there appeared to be nothing left for me in the world. Only Luna. And before long, a day like this would come when death would claim her too. Then I would be completely alone.
I fell into a grief-stricken sleep. As the sun began to rise and a dull ache crept into my bones, I began to dream.
I was with Mama in her home. It was the night I returned from my trip to England. She reached over and placed her hands over mine, sorrow marking her features.
“This is the same promise I made to Luna,” she said in the dream, the grip on my hands much stronger than it had been that night. “You will always have my devotion. Whether it is in life or death, it will always be yours.”
I was awake.
It was real, there was no denying that. Her death had left a huge void that couldn’t be filled. I already felt adrift, anchorless now my weekly visits with her had been taken away. But she would never completely leave me as she had promised.
I repeated those words, a mantra to ward off the evil of grief. She would never leave me, there was comfort in that. I dreaded the day Luna would disappear from the Earth, but that would not come for many years. I could go on. I could continue to watch over her, her descendants, and my family in England. I could go on.
Chapter 25
Despite Mama’s reassuring presence from time to time, loneliness was a terrible plague after her death. Those weekly visits had sustained me, allowed me to see Luna through her eyes, watch her with her children, watch her laugh, cry and live. I saw her age, and instead of stealing her beauty along with her youth, she grew more beautiful as time wrote a tale of love across her features. With Mama’s death, it felt as if I had lost Luna all over again, and with each year that passed, my fears increased as I watched time rush toward the day when it would take her away from me.
I only saw glimpses of her over those years, usually through the eyes of strangers, or people she bought from and the few neighbours she spoke with. Her first child, Lina, had returned to Mississippi years before and the two were rarely apart, especially after Mama’s death.
When Jupiter died, I considered going to her, but I knew I would not be able to resist taking her with me, and then the inevitable would happen. I only had to picture Mama’s broken body when I found her in the chapel to keep my distance from Luna.
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bsp; It was a blow when on one dreary, winter’s morning, I dreamt of a grave by Luna’s home. I already knew who sent me that dream and what it meant.
I awoke immediately. It was midmorning. Not wanting to believe it, I dressed and left to make my way to Luna’s home.
It was true. She died during the night and they were burying her that morning as had been her final wish. I hovered in the woods, as people gathered near the house for the funeral, and listened, still hoping against hope that there was some kind of mistake.
The first person I heard was Ebenezer.
Crazy. They all are.
He was looking at Lina, who stood at the grave. Her back was straight, her lips pursed as she stared, almost contemptuously as they began shovelling earth in the grave. Curiously, she was the only one who wasn’t dressed in black. She was, instead, wearing a sunburst yellow dress and coat that got more than a few stares of disapproval along with a couple of tsks and head shaking from those who were brave enough.
Curious as to what Ebenezer meant, I searched his mind to the event that had occurred just a few hours ago.
Lina was walking through the house in a rage, taking the sheets Ebenezer had placed over the mirrors off again.
“What the hell is you doing, woman? You want a haint to come in this here house?” he said, referring to the Negro superstition regarding the spirits of the dead and the custom of placing sheets over mirrors so they wouldn’t have a way to come back into the world of the living.
She stopped long enough to glare at him.
“If my mama wants to come back, she’ll just walk right on in through the front door. Ain’t no sheets over mirrors is gonna stop her.” She pushed past him onto the next room, leaving Ebenezer to enter and place the sheets back over the mirrors.
Standing by the graveside, his expression softened as he stared at her. But God, I loves her. A soft sigh escaped him, his grief cutting into him again. Along with her crazy mama and grandmama.
My attention was taken away from him when Lina abruptly turned around and stared at the woods, her gaze hard. She was curiously dry-eyed, unlike most of the other mourners. She couldn’t possibly see me from that distance, but she definitely knew I was there. I slunk away, and it felt as if her gaze was still on me long after I left.
I returned to the house at night when I was sure they would all be asleep. I knelt at the grave, finally giving way to my grief and rivers of it poured forth from me. The harsh reality of her death was like a whirlwind of hurt I could barely see through.
She was dead, gone. I stayed there for about an hour until I heard stirrings within the house, in one of the bedrooms, Lina and Ebenezer’s.
I retreated into the shadow of the large tree where I was sure I wouldn’t be seen and stared up at the house. A few moments later, Lina appeared at the bedroom window and opened it. She wore a white cotton night dress and her thick wavy hair hung in two braided ropes. She didn’t need to see me to know I was there, she had probably been aware of my presence from the moment I got there. She stared at me long and hard, still so very angry. I didn’t need to delve into her mind to discover this, she wanted me to know it.
She’s betrayed me. She kept repeating it over and over again.
Confused, my heart went out to her and I moved out of the deep dark provided by the tree and into the moonlight.
She is dead, Lina. That is not a betrayal.
She merely snorted, though I saw tears glistening in her eyes before she threw something out of the window. She closed the window and then I heard her get back into bed. But she remained wide awake, her heart in turmoil and her thoughts churning endlessly.
I moved to the small object she threw out of the window. It was a small leather-bound journal. I opened it and the first words were like a lance, the pain of Luna’s death deepening.
My name is Luna and my tale begins on a dry summer evening in 1807.
I closed it and placed it in my pocket. With one last look at Luna’s grave, I left. Lina didn’t want me there. And all that lay there was Luna’s corpse, she was gone.
I spent the rest of the night by the lake. It was so still and peaceful, a direct contrast to the roiling river of pain and despair rocking me.
I remained there even when it began to snow and a soft blanket of snowfall painted the landscape white. I didn’t want to go back to the mansion where the memories of her would surely kill me, but at dawn, I stood up to go and found myself standing at the chapel door. I spun round to see Mama Akosua standing in the middle of the clearing watching me.
Usually I saw Mama in dreams and she was always a faint, gossamer echo of the woman I had known in life. But on this occasion, she was almost completely solid, the strongest she had ever appeared to me since her death. I walked toward my old friend. The fact that she should appear now in my darkest hour was some comfort to me.
“Mama?”
She gazed at me carefully and there was something weary about her stance.
“I have fulfilled my promise to you, but she is still angry. You have to remember that and tend her anger like you would tend seeds, otherwise it will rise up and strangle the good you have sown.”
“Mama, I do not understand.”
“Go home, Wɔfa Avery.” She placed a hand on my cheek and a small tired smile touched her lips briefly. It was quickly replaced by apprehension. “Be careful.”
She was gone and I was standing alone at the foot of the lake. Confused, and with a strong sense of foreboding, I ran back to the mansion.
The heartbeat was the first thing that filled my ears when I materialised out of the ether some distance from the mansion. Amidst a sea of snow was a small figure standing before the mansion. I had to look carefully over every inch of the figure. First the slim brown legs in battered men’s boots. Up at the slender body in a faded blue dress that was too small and the grey blanket that was wrapped around her. She looked incredibly forlorn and vulnerable as she shivered against the cold. At last I gazed at the face peeping over the blanket she held up to her neck.
I was looking at Luna’s face, the young, fresh face I had seen during those years in the wilderness, and the one I saw for the very first time when she wandered out of the chapel to the stream all those years ago. There were tears in her eyes and a wistful half smile as she gazed at me.
I found I could not move. I was scared to move, to do or say anything that would break the spell and render me out of whatever dream I was clearly in.
She reached out a trembling hand and took a shaky step forward, and before I realised I had moved, I was standing before her, reaching out to clasp the proffered hand even though I still believed it must be some kind of trick or illusion.
“Luna? Is it really you?”
“Yes,” she whispered reaching up to touch my face as if in disbelief, tears falling onto her cheeks. “Yes, Avery.”
I gathered her small, trembling body to mine. That was when I realised with a jolt that the years of despair were at an end.
She had returned to me.
And in my exhilaration, Mama and her warning were completely lost to me. But the seed of what would eventually destroy us were there even then.
She was so beautiful, her raven eyes shining with unshed tears and the pain of those forty years of separation from me.
“I thought I’s gonna die without ever seeing you again,” she said, her voice trembling with intense emotion. “But I still ain’t give up on you. You has to promise that you ain’t never gonna leave me again. You has to promise, Avery, ‘cause I ain’t gonna let you do that to me a second time.”
“Nothing will ever keep us apart again,” I promised.
There was a clear threat behind Luna’s words that morning, but I mistook it for passion. And I continued to be blind to the little manifestations of it over the years, and just as Mama had warned, the seed grew until eventually it overran our little garden of love.
PART II
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
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sp; That so many sweet flowers bore;
And saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briers my joys and desires.
–William Blake, The Garden of Love
Chapter 26
In the beginning we were very happy. That first week, Luna and I rarely left the red velvet room, which had been redecorated along with the rest of the mansion. It was not so much about our need to slay our physical desire for one another. Often it was merely to hold each other, as it was still so difficult to believe that after so, so long, we were together again. So we stayed in her room—which was now our room—and mainly lay in silence in each other’s arms, bathed in the other’s thoughts. Now she could read my thoughts as easily as I could read hers, we achieved an intimacy that few mortals will ever have the privilege of experiencing.
I discovered much during that first week. I saw the years she spent with Jupiter and how she pined desperately for me. I also saw the dream that had terrified her, a dream in which she saw me shrouded in darkness whilst some nameless, faceless evil descended on me. She had lunged at the threat only to be caught in a circle of flames and then awoke in bed with Jupiter, her agonised screams piercing the night.
There was no denying the fact that Luna had been the one to save me from Onyx. And it was during those first few days that the mystery of how I came to see Luna’s face all those years ago was revealed to me. Luna had been able to somehow reach into the past, to reach me in those years spent in the wilderness, and tell me to wait for her.
My Luna, my immortal beloved. There simply would never be another like her.