The Furies

by Katie Lowe

  ‘Hey,’ Robin said, from across the room. I turned, and she beckoned, raising her finger to her lips.

  ‘What?’ I whispered.

  ‘Come closer.’

  I stepped towards her. ‘Closer,’ she hissed. I took another step, and she dived towards me, a chalky skull on her fist. I screamed and fell backwards into a stand of flyers, scattering advertisements for healing therapies and crystal magic to the ground.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a tall, thin woman said, appearing in the doorway. She glared at the two of us as we tried to contain our laughter.

  ‘Sorry,’ Robin said, sheepishly. ‘My friend scared herself.’

  The woman watched us with narrowed eyes as I scooped up the spilled flyers. ‘Mystical Walks of the Pagan Gods’, one said; ‘Harnessing the Sea: A Workshop’ another.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I whispered, as Robin ran her fingers through a large bowl of beads, the sound roaring like the sea. ‘We’re not going to find anything here. It’s just tourist crap.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she said. ‘What’s this, then?’ She held up a squat, black candle in a cork-topped glass.

  ‘A candle.’

  ‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, you know.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Go on, then. What kind of candle?’

  ‘The kind we need.’ She passed me the candle, and grabbed another two, the glass clinking as she rolled them together in her hands. ‘Might as well stock up. Just in case.’

  We paid, the old woman still glaring at us as we did so.

  ‘These aren’t toys, you know.’

  ‘We know,’ Robin said, with a sarcastic smile. The woman’s hand hovered, a moment, before she took the crumpled note; before she could change her mind, we were out in the street, blinking in the silvery light. We walked back the way we came, stumbling as we laughed at the old woman, the strangeness of her old curiosity shop; the types of people who’d shop there, ageing hippies and single women seeking love potions, cursed like woodcut beasts.

  Robin sat at the base of the statue and began to roll a joint. In more civilized towns than ours, being so conspicuous in our drug use might have been risky; to us, however, it was nothing, the sweet smell of the joint mingling with the salt of the sea, of burnt driftwood and candy floss. She took a long, lazy drag, and passed it to me.

  ‘Hey, I … I got you something,’ she said. The uncharacteristic pause made my stomach drop, with the sense that she’d been building up to this, choosing her words carefully. When she didn’t go on, I turned to her, raised an eyebrow, and blew smoke in her face. ‘Fuck off.’ She laughed, her elbow sticking in my rib.

  ‘What is it, then?’

  She fumbled in her pockets, one, then another, before rooting deep into her coat. ‘A-ha,’ she said, finally. With her free hand, she plucked the joint from my lips. She looked up, and exhaled, slowly. ‘This is kind of nerdy.’

  ‘No surprise there,’ I said, with a gentle nudge.

  ‘I figured it’d suit you, you know.’

  ‘Touché.’

  She pulled out a thin, silver chain, another looped through it. On each was a twinkling, silver pendant. She pressed them together, forming a circle. ‘See? It’s a friendship bracelet. You said you wanted one,’ she added, a faint blush on her cheeks that might have been the pinch of the breeze.

  I threw my arm around her shoulder. ‘You are such a loser.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Give me your hand.’

  I held out my arm, rolling up my sleeve, and she tied the bracelet around my wrist, carefully. ‘Now you do mine,’ she said. I tied it, my fingers chilled by the thin, cool chain.

  ‘There you go,’ she said, smiling. ‘Together forever, and all that.’ She held my hand, tight, and we watched the lonely people of the town, and pitied them. Pitied everyone, in fact, who wasn’t us.

  Chapter 8

  She had the frayed edge of my sweater between finger and thumb, twirling it as we listened to Annabel. I tried to concentrate, to listen, but I felt my attention constantly drifting back to her hand, thoughtful, possessive, refusing to let go.

  ‘You no doubt played with toys,’ Annabel said, ‘created magical stories, imagined whole worlds shared between you and your friends. Play, for children, and the development of the imagination, is a mode of expression, of unity in experience. We learn, as children, to form contracts of agreement, a shared belief in things which, to those on the outside, are creations of the mind, inventions, and fantasies.’

  She crossed her legs in the armchair, leaned her elbows on her knees. ‘But to the child, this isn’t an active process. Everything they imagine is real. I, for instance, believed in fairies – I saw them, convinced as Lady Cottington herself, even as she sketched the fairies she would tell her parents she’d pressed. As children, we can believe things at the same time as knowing, as being an active participant in, their creation.’

  Robin shuffled a little closer, her hand now touching mine. I leaned over the arm of the chair, pulling myself away.

  ‘You told stories, with these inventions, great, swooping tales of life and death, love and betrayal, of worlds colliding time and again. Stories which had the weight of myth behind them, those grand narratives that underpin all human experience.’ She looked up, at each of us in turn. ‘But how? How do we know, as children, that the betrayal of a loved one may lead to death and suffering? That the good doctor may save us, with some last-second intervention; that the winged ones come, beautiful and terrifying, exquisite in the shadow of death? That revenge, sometimes, is a right?’

  Robin coughed, looked at Alex and Grace, who stared wilfully forward, refusing to acknowledge her point. The fight we’d been having before Annabel hung between us, thick with words unsaid.

  ‘Once again, we are left facing something we cannot explain. It is a glimpse of the eternal, the a priori, the enduring archetype. For we see, and we believe, and we know these fictions, the truths that underpin our whole existence, our human form. They may be games, may only be childish play, but they are the foundations of the stories that teach us – or remind us, depending on how you look at it – how to live our lives.

  ‘And yet,’ she said, turning a page in her notebook, words surrounded by thin, swooping sketches, Giacometti figures reading in the margins, ‘you are no doubt aware, or, at least, becoming aware, of the slow decay of adulthood. The loosening of the imagination, the dry, straight misery of believing what you see, of trusting only what you can hold in your hands. It seems strange to me, even now, that we see the move into adulthood as something positive, the “growing out of” old ideas, aspiring to lives that are lived on a dull, simple level. Marriage, desk jobs, the rejection of wonder. The march towards death, losing gut knowledge, love of beauty, joy, along the way. The dull, rote processes of meaningless jobs; hollow entertainment over meaningful experience. Filling our waking hours, that we might at last be released into some fitful, dreamless sleep; bland conversations, hour after hour, with no thought behind them, moment by moment creeping ever towards the abyss.’

  The birds nesting in the clock tower had stilled their wings, rapt; the wind had dropped, silence falling all around. I thought of all the ones who weren’t us, who weren’t part of this secret society: who only saw lives as they seemed, and not as they could be.

  ‘For the ancient Greeks, however, lived reality was one shared with the presence of those we might now call the “imagined”. For Hesiod, daimones walked the earth alongside mortals; in the Phaedo, Plato tells us that the souls of the angry dead hovered above tombs and graveyards, lingering in the mortal realm. And in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, these same souls track the wicked, taking vengeance where they might.

  ‘These souls – mortals departed – walked side by side with the gods and monsters of the whole Greek cosmological system. Divinities walked the earth, real as one’s own skin, and just as tangible. They shared the same space in the mortal realm, all partaking of the same reality, the same physical space. The Greeks were a
ttuned to this, as were almost all cultures before our own, modern space: their imaginations were not curtailed by adulthood, but flourished, allowed to see the world on multiple layers at once, not narrowed by the walls we, now, build around us.

  ‘And then, we wonder why our sense is always of something having been lost. Of a longing, of missing a thing we cannot name. We ask ourselves: “What is missing from my life? What is it I want? What is it that I need?”’

  I felt a pinch on my thigh, and slapped Robin’s hand away. Annabel looked up, startled at the interruption; when she resumed, I turned to Robin, and mouthed ‘fuck off’. She shook her head, pinched me again.

  She’d left for Andy’s as the sun set, begging me to come along. But the risk of stumbling into Tom was too great. I hadn’t seen him since our ‘date’, and he hadn’t called – a fact I knew I ought to find upsetting, but which was only a relief. I’d almost managed to push it to the back of my mind, emerging only in dreams (those same dreams that carried the litany of other things I’d sooner forget – all blood and bone and shattered glass). If I could leave it there, I’d rather do so.

  I went home, watched TV, read a book. I smoked a cigarette out of my window, and rolled over onto the bed. In the lull before sleep, I woke up with a jolt, and peeled back the curtain to see a lightning-bolt crack in the glass.

  ‘What the hell?’ I hissed at Robin, standing in the grass below, shivering in a t-shirt.

  ‘Let me in,’ she mouthed, pointing at the back door.

  I crept downstairs, past my mother sleeping on the sofa, her head tipped at an uncomfortable angle on her chest. Slowly, aware of every sound, I peeled open the back door. Robin breezed inside, her skin ice-cold on mine as she leaned in for a hug. She smelled of cinnamon and wood smoke, and when she pressed her hands to my cheeks I caught an earthy ring of pot; her eyes were red, pupils wide and pitch dark.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I whispered. She pressed a finger to her lips, and pointed upstairs.

  I felt a dull, grim shame as we stalked through the house; caught her staring, briefly, at my mother’s lonely silhouette, the TV flashing blue behind. I wondered what she thought of the duct tape that held the bannister in place, the damp oozing through the ceiling, down the walls. With each step I shrank a little more, and as I gripped the handle of my bedroom door I wondered if it might be too late to ask her to leave, to forget all that she’d seen.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, waving a hand in front of my eyes. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I whispered, and opened the door.

  She wandered around, reaching for objects, touching everything she could, while I sat on the bed, watching. She opened the wardrobe door, ran her fingers through the folds of an old, tattered dress; picked up a burning candle, spilling wax on the thin, white sheen of my desk. She picked at the edges of a chest of drawers, revealing the MDF beneath, and leaned in close to see the necklaces hanging on my cracked, dusty mirror.

  ‘Robin,’ I said, finally. ‘Why are you here? It’s late.’

  ‘You know I’m a creature of the night.’ She grinned, turning to face me, playing cat’s cradle with a shoelace I’d tied into knots months ago, and thrown down beside the bed.

  ‘I’m sure you are. But I’m not. I’m tired.’

  ‘Your light was on.’

  ‘I was about to turn it off.’ This was a lie. Since the accident, I’d always slept with the light on, a cloying, childish comfort. I shook off the last of sleep. ‘Want a drink?’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘There’s probably some wine downstairs,’ I said, sliding off the bed. ‘Stay here, and don’t do anything,’ I added. ‘If my mum wakes up and finds you’re here she’ll kill me.’

  When I returned, I found Robin picking chunks of black varnish from her nails, reclining up against the headboard. The book – Alex’s book – was open on her lap, pages golden in the light.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I said, pouring the wine into two mismatched mugs. They were the only things I could bring down from my room without arousing suspicion, though the reality was that all the wine glasses we owned were cracked or drying on various surfaces, dusty with sediment.

  She turned the book towards me as I sat down beside her. ‘Ever heard of poppet magic?’ I shook my head, and she tapped two fingers on the page. ‘From here,’ she said.

  ‘“The Use of Dolls to Cast Spells on a Given Subject,” I read aloud. ‘“The subject of the poppet spell will be at the mercy of the wishes of the witch who casts it, whether that be for protection or revenge.”’ I ran my fingers over a sketch of a doll, bound with twigs and cloth. ‘These spells must be used with extreme caution,’ it said beneath. ‘Poppet magic is an art not suitable for beginners.’

  I looked at Robin. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Andy.’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘He’s fine, thanks very much.’

  ‘Then … what’s this about?’

  ‘Nicky,’ she said, matter-of-factly.

  I sighed, closed the book, and pushed it aside. ‘No way.’

  ‘You’re protecting her?’

  ‘She hasn’t done anything,’ I said.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Come on, Robin. This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Don’t be a wuss,’ she said, grabbing my hand. ‘If there’s anyone around here who deserves it, it’s Nicky. All we’re going to do is give her a little touch of the spirits. No big deal.’ She pinched my skin between her fingers. ‘The magic equivalent of that. That’s all.’

  I shook her off. ‘Fine, fine. Whatever.’ As I said the words, I felt sick, a gut feeling that I had made the wrong choice. With Robin, though, there was no going back. ‘So what do we do?’

  She smiled, teeth bared. ‘Got any Barbies?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Barbie dolls. Or any dolls, really.’

  ‘I’m sixteen, Robin. Fucking hell.’

  ‘I don’t mean “Have you played with any Barbie dolls lately?”’ she said. ‘I mean, are there any Barbie dolls in this house? Hidden in an attic, under the bed … Something like that?’

  I felt my stomach lurch, sick, as it always did when I thought of my dad and sister. The familiar blue light flash and stink of blood came in a blink. ‘Why?’ I said, finally.

  ‘So that’s a yes?’

  I sighed. ‘My sister’s room. She used to play with them.’

  Robin rolled off the bed, and moved towards the door. ‘Let’s go have a look.’

  ‘Wait – wait. Robin, I can’t.’

  She stared at me, eyes wide, bright. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I haven’t been in there since she died. Mum wants to leave it as it was.’

  ‘Christ, we’ll put it back. It’ll only take a second.’

  ‘What do you even want it for?’ I said, hearing my voice crack.

  ‘Robin, you can’t—’

  ‘Look, look – I’ll be right back. I won’t touch anything else, I swear.’

  ‘Robin—’ I hissed as she disappeared out into the hallway. I threw my head back against the headboard, closed my eyes, felt the anger rise and fall. Minutes passed, endlessly. I willed her to come back, horrified at the thought of having to fetch her, to set foot into my sister’s abandoned room, with its Care Bears, fairy lights, pictures of birds tacked to every wall, clipped from a book.

  ‘Hey there, beautiful,’ she whispered, poking a blonde doll’s head through the crack in the door.

  ‘Robin, get in here,’ I hissed.

  She closed the door behind her, and sat down on the bed, waving the doll proudly in the air. ‘FYI, Violet, this isn’t a Barbie. This is Sindy, the cheaper, nastier British version. Kind of a skank. Possibly a crack whore. Which, to be fair, is probably about right for our purposes.’ She paused. ‘What was your sister’s name?’

  ‘Anna,’ I said; it was the first time I’d said it out loud since she’d died.

  ‘To Anna, then,’ she s
aid, raising her mug, a splash of wine rolling over the side. ‘Get the candles.’

  I reached over beside the bed, the candles we’d bought earlier that day still tucked inside a paper bag. She rooted around in her backpack, pulling out a Swiss Army knife, a length of black ribbon, and a clutch of tiny vials I recognized from the craft shop, packed with dried leaves and powders, labelled in a crisp, green hand. ‘Got a bin?’ she said, looking around.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A bin.’

  I pointed to the wastebasket under the desk, overflowing with paper, nail clippings, cigarette butts, and receipts. She tipped the contents onto the floor and placed the bin beside the bed.

  ‘Did you have to do that?’

  ‘Sorry. Kind of a mess in here already though, right?’

  I kicked her with my heel. ‘Fuck you.’

  She turned, crossing her legs on the bed facing me, the doll lying face down between us, and opened the book again, heavy pages whooshing as they turned. ‘Okay, so we’re meant to make the doll ourselves, but I figured one of these plastic soulless horror bitches would be more appropriate for Nicky – right?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Imagine Nicky’s here, in the form of this doll.’ She plucked three stalks of thistle out of a jar, jerking her finger back and sucking it as one caught her with a barb. She pressed them to the doll’s chest, and handed it to me. ‘You hold her still, and I’ll do the tying.’

  I held the Sindy out in front of me, trying to keep her steady as Robin slowly wound the ribbon around the doll. ‘Poppet, we see you for what you are, and who you represent,’ she whispered, looking down at the doll. ‘Vivi,’ she said, looking at me. ‘We’ve both got to say it. Repeat after me.’ She cleared her throat, and began again. ‘Poppet, we see you …’

  I echoed each line in a whisper as she tied the ribbon tight around the doll’s arms and neck, and flicked open the corkscrew from the Swiss Army knife. ‘What are you …’ I began.