by Tim Curran
When the witches pushed Bad Girl, forcing her into the coven, the circle of dire confession, she would tell them something which she knew to be truethe bite. This is what haunted her constantly, the desire to bite and bite and bite. When you spent your entire life eating, the need to bite, to tear and rend was overwhelming. To get something between your teeth and into your throat to swallow. The eating processnot just what you got into your stomach, but the ritual that led up to thisstarted with the bite. It was this more than anything that made bulimia so enticing: binge and purge. Satisfy your cravings by stuffing yourself to the point of bursting and then free yourself of the fat (and guilt) by vomiting it all back out. What could be better?
“Sometimes,” she admitted, “you just need to bite. Bite anything. And keep biting it.”
As the other inmates discussed all the laxatives they ate on a daily basis, the shitting of blood and water, the terror of starvation itself as your body begins to feed upon itself just before shutting down completely and giving itself freely to the earth and worms, Bad Girl thought of other things. She thought of the hunger gnawing at her vitals, of days upon days upon days of subsisting on coffee and cigarettes, sugar-free Jell-O and flavored water. How she sometimes found herself out of her head, lost and alone, stumbling along in parts of the kingdom that were alien to hergrassy, vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites and cloistered neighborhoods of tall, shuttered houses falling into themselvesas the world spun and spun, her knees filled with rubber, the ground tilting, the angles insane and invasive. Her eyesight would become kaleidoscopic and she would see…yes, high, high above, beyond the blue-black-purple bruise-like clouds marring the pink meat of the sky…the ever rotating vortexual mass that looked down over mankind hungrily.
Helleye.
Helleye…
Only those on the brink of starvation and systemic failure could see it hovering over the world. You needed to be purified to glimpse it, but it was always there.
Very often when Bad Girl spoke of this, it was necessary to sedate her before she became completely hysterical. And more than once, she had to be strapped down before the drugs knocked the fight out of her. All the while she would scream and scream about Helleye.
Because it was coming.
And it was starving.
Chapter Nine
The only girl in the Dark Castle that Bad Girl really liked was Bethany. She liked her because Bethany was obsessively paranoid and sensed plots and conspiracies forever winding around her. She was certain the witches held evil, blasphemous rites in the dungeons and bowels of the Dark Castle and their only reason for making their charges better was to fatten them up for the pot.
“You think they’re cannibals?” Bad Girl asked her.
“Why not? It’s strictly Hansel and Gretel, you know? Eat, girls, eat! Put it in your mouths! Shove it down your throats! Fill your bellies! Get chubby! Get fat! Put on the pounds!” Bethany was sickened by the very idea as if eating was some unnatural, obscene act. “They’re fattening us up for something, aren’t they? Can you say for sure it’s not to turn us into plump little dumplings for their pots?”
Bad Girl did not argue the fact. Maybe it was true. Everything was distorted and warped in her mind; she could no longer think straight. Those things that once made sense no longer made any sense at all. She believed in things now that once she had been certain were morbid fantasy or the province of crazy people. She tried to express these things to Bethany, to get her to understand what it was like for her.
“I think about the skeleton in me. I think about it all the time,” she told her. “I dream about how beautiful it is and how it will look when it escapes this,” she said, poking her sallow flesh with one long, narrow finger that was withered into a skeleton key. “It will be like a state of grace, you know? My bones will be pure and white, fragile and delicate, graceful like a swan, a crystal swan.”
Bethany nodded. “You don’t have to convince me, girlmy skeleton has been trying to tunnel out of this ugly flab for years. If it wasn’t for this place, it would be free by now.”
Bad Girl did not think there was an ounce of ugly flab on Bethany. She was near-perfect, as perfect as you could be with flesh on your bones. She was tall and willowy, her skin bleached of fleshy blood-pink into a uniform porcelain whiteness. Her cheeks were sunken into pits, her eyes retreated into black chasms, and her lips shriveled back to the gums giving her the most engaging (and toothy) corpse grin.
When she was naked, she was skeletal and frail, so cadaverous it made Bad Girl’s heart feel weak. She was a study in angles and jutting bones. Her ribs stood out like the bars of a cage, her clavicles like arches, and her shoulder blades thrust forth like rudimentary wings. All of it was contained by a thin membrane of pale, shiny skin stretched beyond endurance.
Bethany (much like Bad Girl) liked to sit in front of the mirror and watch herself. If the witches did not interfere, she would sit there for hours, naked and sensuously bony, her broomstick legs crossed, her dark eyes shining, and her puckered mouth grinning at some saturnine joke she did not dare share with anyone but the leering, emaciated corpse doll in the mirror. Like death and burial, it was a secret.
During one of these viewings, Bethany turned and said, “You haven’t split yet, have you?”
“What do you mean?”
But Bethany could not explain. “Just wait. You’ll see. You’ll know when it happens.”
As the weeks passed, Bethany pulled Bad Girl deeper and deeper into her web of conspiracy. There were additives in the food they ate that would make them ravenous. The drugs they gave them were not simple antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds but experimental pharmaceuticals that were restructuring their brains so they would eat with gluttonous abandon and become soft, overfed, lolling slugs. The so-called psychotherapy and nutritional counseling were actually behavior modification techniques meant to erase their personalities and turn them into mindless eating machines.
Then she told Bad Girl the tale of Erysichthon.
Erysichthon was a Thessalian king who chopped down the sacred grove of Demeter, the Greek goddess of harvest and fertility. He wanted to build himself a feast hall. In the process of felling trees, he killed a dryad nymph and incurred Demeter’s wrath.
“When he chopped the sacred oaks, blood gushed from them,” Bethany explained. “The dying nymph put a curse on him, and Demeter saw to it that the curse was carried out. She sent Limos after him. Limos was the goddess of starvation, of famine, of unrelenting hunger.”
Demeter’s order to Limos was this: “Slide into Erysichthon’s entrails. No feast on earth should ease his hunger.”
Limos lived in a barren, freezing wasteland on the edge of Scythia, Bethany explained. A sprite delivered Demeter’s message, finding Limos in a stony field, grubbing about with her nails and teeth amongst the weeds.
Bethany let Bad Girl read from Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Her hair was coarse, her face sallow, her eyes sunken; her lips crusted and white; her throat scaly with scurf. Her parchment skin revealed the bowels within; beneath her hollow loins jutted her withered hips; her sagging breasts seemed hardly fastened to her ribs; her stomach only a void; her joints wasted and huge, her knees like balls, her ankles grossly swollen…
It was amazing, Bad Girl thought as she watched Bethany study her image in the mirror, feasting upon her shrunken nakedness, gazing upon her dark and deathly beauty, her sepulchral and sterile elegance. It was if Ovid had been describing her. That was what Bethany looked like. It really was.
Bad girl read on. Limos found Erysichthon sleeping and wrapped herself around him like a shroud. She invaded him like a germ, sliding into his mouth and throat and lungs and stomach, flowing through his veins, filling him with a ravenous hunger that could never be satisfied.
“But he tried,” Bethany said, picking at her skin, trying, perhaps, to find a seam that she could open or unzip to free the gleaming white angel within. “He
spent his entire fortune trying to fill himself. He even sold his daughter off. But he was still hungry, starving to death. So, he finally devoured the only thing lefthimself.”
The story tormented Bad Girl for many days. Bethany knew it. That’s what she wanted. She wanted it to sink in, seep, simmer in Bad Girl’s soul. Then one day, she took her hollow-eyed worshipper aside and said to her, “That’s what the witches are doing to us here. They want to drive us mad with hunger so we’ll eat and eat and drown ourselves in fat and flab. And in the end, if they don’t eat us, we’ll eat ourselves because we won’t be able to help it.”
“So, what do we do?” Bad Girl asked her, transfixed by her cemetery charms.
Bethany pulled her in front of the mirror where they both stood naked and famished and dwindling by the day. She wrapped her arms around her and kissed the pronounced cords of her throat.
“When the time comes, we’ll eat each other,” she said. “I’ll eat you, and you can eat me.”
It made perfect sense, more sense than anything ever had in her life.
In the days to come, Bad Girl’s condition worsened and she was hospitalized twice. And it was while lying in her cold bed, staring out at the stars in the sky, that she realized her mind and body had now become two separate entitiesthe body wanted to feed and the mind wanted to starve. She had finally split. And it was between these two poles, in the dark and nameless gulfs, that the demon first manifested itself.
Chapter Ten
Despite the best efforts of the witches at the Dark Castle, Bad Girl continued to lose weight. Even their constant, invasive supervision could not help her. In times of delirium, which were many, she tried to explain to them that it was Helleye, that it was watching her, that it was coming for her and perhaps all of them, but they would not listen. In her more tranquil, ordered state of mind she would tell them she did not know what was happening.
The witches were worried; Bad Girl was distraught.
Her room was searched regularly. There were no hidden laxatives or illegal emetics. There was only Bad Girl and her obsessive, anxious, and depressive personality.
At meal times, she scrutinized what was on the end of her fork, whether that was scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, or spaghetti. She did not trust her food. She believed secretly that Helleye was invading her through it, trying to plant seeds within that would eventually take her over as kudzu will take over a field. She often stared with some fear at her plate because even though no one else saw it, she knew her food was alive and plotting. It didn’t sprout legs or eyeballs or any such B-movie nonsense, but it did move. Her green beans would migrate, her chicken circumnavigating the other comestibles while the buttery potatoes would slink amoeba-like towards the center of the plate. It took her forever to eat. The witches didn’t care. She would eat, and that was that.
Sometimes a good dose of Lexapro and Prozac made things easier.
Still, she lost weight.
When she was down to eighty pounds, the witches became very concerned. At night, she could not sleep. She would lay there half-awake, terrified to submit to slumber because that would leave her open to God only knew what sort of horrors from the witches themselves and attack by Helleye. She would lay there in a drug-induced stupor, alternately sobbing and giggling into her pillow as she thought of Good Boy and the things they had done together. All of which, for some reason, would remind her of some silly cartoon she had seen as a child where the skeletons in a cemetery rise from their graves at midnight to dance to orchestral music they created on their own bonessomething she could appreciate because she was so emaciated her ribs were like the keys of a xylophone and her femurs and tibias like flutes and piccolos.
Her skeleton, that beautiful architectural scaffold of bone within, was her main obsession, of course. It was closer and closer to escaping by the day and during those long, grim and sleepless nights, they would discuss it, whispering in sepulchral tones, conspiring together like two convicts preparing to tunnel free from a prison camp. But there was still much work to be done before all that ugly flesh was destroyed. The witches knew about this, and they told her she hated herself for things she had done and could not forgive herself for.
But they did not understand anything.
They simply could not accept the fact that skin, tissue, and meat were parasitic upon the skeleton and must be purged at all costs if you were to be free.
Bethany, her only real friend, was moved to a different castle whose location was a closely-guarded secret. When Bad Girl asked, the witches told her it was for the best, because their relationship was unhealthy if not downright toxic.
Bad Girl was watched constantly by then. She was not even allowed to walk by herself because several times she had folded up. Her vision blurred and her center of gravity simply evaporated. There was nothing to hold her upright. Things just went dark, and she floated away, waking sometime later, staring with glassy, unfocused eyes.
After that, things stopped making sense if they really ever made any at all. Sleep. Wake. Dream. Fugue. Fog. Talking to people who were not there in a cracking voice. Screaming. Crying. Collapsing. But as the days wore on and she was hospitalized yet again, there was less and less of anything. She was withdrawn, weak, out of touch. Her mind was an unmoored raft that floated whichever way the current pushed it.
At night, Helleye looked in her window and she began to feel a heaviness overtake her which she knew was death. Something inside her, something buried in her core was pulling away, trying to escape. It wanted to fly away like a shadow to the western hills and become nothingness.
This was Death.
She had sought it, worshipped it, offered herself as sacrifice at its bony feet, and now it had come to claim her, to make her its own. She had had lovers before, but never like this, never so tender and devoted and infatuated. Death lived inside her. It was in her heart and lungs and curled blackly around her spine. It scratched in her skull. It swam in her blood and lived in every breath, cold and embracing and forever.
And then at the eleventh hour when the Evil Queen was told her daughter would not live another two weeks, some last bit of sanity and survival instinct cried out from the charnel depths of Bad Girl’s being, oh please please please I don’t really want to die I don’t really want that at all save me save me from myself oh please oh God oh anything out there save me…
Something answered.
Something that had been hiding in the deep, dark, and fathomless divide between body and soul, flesh and self. In this darkness, the entity she thought of as Helleye, or part of it, answered her summoning.
It made a slithering sound.
That was the first thing Bad Girl was aware ofthe slithering darkness in her room. It was as if dozens of snakes were sliding out of the walls. Then she saw an eye, a single huge and globular eye that was yellow as urine. It appraised her coldly, wetly.
And a voice that was neither male nor female, young or old exactly, but hissing and abnormal, said, “You’re going to be hungry now. You’re going to eat. You’re going to fill yourself. I will guide you. I will stand at your side. And when I call you, you will come.”
The miraculous thing was that whether Helleye was a figment of her imagination or not, she did get better. She stunned the medical staff of wizards and conjurors, straw witches and diviners. Slowly, infinitely slowly, she came back from the brink of death. She brought a friend with her and he/she/it stood at her side as promised.
Her memories returned, they clarified, took on substance, and she began to think of Good Boy again and where it was he had gone and the events that sent him there and how she had spiraled out of control. The witches told her she would have to accept what had happened and come to terms with it. There was no other way. That when she was overcome by terrible memories and ideas, she should write them down and put them in a box, lock them away where they could no longer hurt her.
During those endless days of recuperation, she could o
nly see Good Boy’s face. His eyes. He haunted her. Delighted her. Terrified her. Made her cry and rage. She thought of how easy he had been to manipulate, how she had peeled him like an onion until he was bare and could no longer hide his true self from her. And to think, it had all started that day she had taken him by the hand and told him, “Come upstairs. I want to show you something.”
Day Four
1
Sometime after midnight, the most extraordinary thing happened: sunrise. Six hours before there should have been even the faintest indigo glimmer of it in the eastern sky, the sun lit up Birch Street like high noon. Which was pretty applicable because its position was directly overhead.
It was impossible.
Yet, it happened.
Bria saw it from her room about the time she had finally regained her senses and decided she was going to try to climb from her window and shimmy the downspout into the backyard. At first, it looked like headlights coming in her window, then the full brightness of midday.
She stood before the window for the longest time, that sense of unreality which had never really lessened for the past couple of days hitting her stronger than ever.
Even at that stage of the game when nothing seemed real, she questioned what she was seeing. She questioned her state of mind. She questioned how it was she could have lost the night. Her mind raced about in her head, coming up with rationalizations—I fell asleep, I’m insane, I’m hallucinating. I’m still in the Dark Castle.
And her inner voice that found such practicalities ridiculous, said, Do you really think it’s anything that simple?
What else could it be?