Marshsong

by Nato Thompson

  “Stop it!” barked Isabella. “Ever get Indian burns? I am going to give you little Indian burns until you cooperate.”

  “Stop it!” screamed Chelsea. She was a petulant teen. After struggling to resist, she became suddenly calm. “very well. You know who talks about old things,” Chelsea smiled a cunning strange smile, “strange things . . . my favorite person on the planet. You want to meet her?”, Chelsea looked all the more coy. Maybe crazy does exist, Isabella thought.

  “Let go of my arm. You are filthy anyways. I can summon Aunty if you like. She can tell you all you ever wanted, hee hee. She said that if anyone tried to hurt me I could just summon her. Are you here to hurt me?”

  Isabella really couldn’t stand this little girl. She was all games and not the kind Isabella wanted to play.

  “I might soon,” Isabella mumbled beneath her lips.

  “What?” screeched the girl, launching to her feet, pulling the blanket closer to her face. “What? You’re here to hurt me?”

  “I didn’t mean that. You’re just very annoying is all,” said Isabella half bored. Now the girl was going into performative hysterics just to up the excitement of the situation. Suddenly Chelsea began to scream. The scream bounced off the metal walls. It was a kind of scream that only the most spoiled could do. The kind of scream that begged for something to control it because it was so unused to being controlled. Chelsea began stamping her feet on the mattress.

  “Help me, Aunty! Help me! Help, help, help!”

  Isabella felt the urge to stop the girl from screaming with a physical response. She focused her energy and did not submit. Let that creature scream. Chelsea continued to freak out in the corner of the room, letting tears cover her face. Her voice screeched painfully—each cathartic burst tearing at her larynx. Perhaps this aunt would show up and provide a change of atmosphere. This little number had certainly proven all it could.

  The lights began to flicker in the building and the girl began to laugh.

  “Hee, hee, hee. Now you’ve done it. Aunty is coming! Aunty will show you!”

  Her voice screeched and cracked at the severity of her laughter and she began to wave the blanket around and around. Isabella could feel something shifting on the wind and in her body. A growing sense of something very unusual filled her being and her stomach took two turns for the worse. The sickness!

  Saliva built up in the back of her throat and little beads of sweat emerged on her tiny forehead. A round and round spin cycle erupted in her gut with the flavor of gutter-puss. Whatever and whoever was coming, she knew one thing for sure—Marty did not want them to meet.

  Minasha Darkglass arrived in an aromatic mist of wilted dandelions, molding cotton, desiccated leather and cinnamon sticks. She looked the spitting image of an older Chelsea, but with a face more stern, lined, gaunt and hollowed. Her eyes were painted in black, her hair a briar's nest of tangles. She wore a brown torn gown and a massive clunky necklace of animal bones shown prominently across her ratty flat chest. She entered the room in a burst, the door clanging wide open. Upon seeing Isabella, her posture tightened, her face contorted. She pressed her body against the wall and when she spoke, it seemed as though she hissed every word.

  “Get backsss demonsss,” Minasha hissed. She placed her hands in a strange cat's cradle configuration in front of her body and pushed it toward Isabella while sliding across the wall. Simultaneously, Chelsea shut her trap and slid her way behind her snake-like aunty.

  Isabella stared at this woman while her stomach continued to churn. She was the witch of House Revan—the dark sister who scared the likes of the entire monarchy. Isabella could see why. She was demonstrably strange.

  “I didn’t hurt her. I came to ask questions,” Isabella said plainly. She wasn’t afraid of this woman, but she didn’t like how she had become suddenly vulnerable.

  “The demonsss always liesss. Thisss is a kind of conjuring, I am sure. Pick on a defenselessss girl. You have no shame. Stay back, I warn you!” Minasha moved along the wall and ushered Chelsea out the door behind her. She truly had arrived to rescue the strange girl. Isabella just stood there trying to keep her body calm. She breathed slowly and felt a slight relief to have a changing of the guard.

  “My name is Isabella. It is very nice to meet you at last, Minasha Darkglass. I’m not a demon and I am not your enemy,” said Isabella, and she reached out her hand in a kind of hello meets peace offering.

  Minasha Darkglass twisted her face and stared at Isabella's hand. The offer clearly perplexed her and did nothing if not scare her all the more.

  “Riddlesss. Always riddles you pose.”

  “We have never met. I have never posed a riddle to you and saying hello, in my book, doesn’t constitute a true riddle. I also need to sit down. I don’t feel good at all.” Isabella did just that—her stomach taking five turns for the worse, her head pounding and her vision blurring. Marty’s magic was strong.

  Minasha Darkglass turned her eyes toward Isabella. A straight look and Isabella could see a tremendous amount of fear bouncing around in those sockets. She could see perspiration and feel the thud of Minasha’s heart banging away, as her blood moved in an adrenaline-fueled panic.

  “The demonsss is sick. Reminds me of myself when I first beganss, the feelings of the yousss and the usss colliding. Shape-shifter you are. Revenge is always your motive.”

  “I swear to you, “ panted Isabella, suddenly very worried that she was losing consciousness. “I only want to know what I am.”

  “I don’t trust this. It is a ploy. I can sssense you. You might be too much for me. I will not feel sympathy. Playing possum won’t work, pretty kitty. I have retrieved what you came to take away and you won’t take me either!” Minasha blew some dust into Isabella’s eyes.

  Her eyes stung and she smelled the witch dust of blackberries, duck feathers, and queen bee jelly. She scratched at her eyes and could hear the quick exit of the witch of House Revan. Tears fell from her tear ducts and her belly relented. Isabella vomited onto the floor of the room, her body shaking with weakness.

  She heard the witch yell down the hall. “I’ll see you again, Mire Witch!” then laughter.

  Isabella submitted to the sleep of sickness that had been calling her name. As her eyes closed, she felt the sharp pain of something on her head—someone took a clump of her silken hair.

  Chapter 6

  Isabella woke to the sound of keys jangling down the hall. The institution was waking up. She shrugged to brush off the irritating sound and return to the world of blank that constituted her sleep. She didn’t sleep like others. She didn’t have dreams. As fantastic as her waking hours, her circadian rhythms brought to her mind nothing but the flat void. When the lights went out, no one remained home. She opened her eyes to the fluorescent lights of Chelsea Revan’s cell. It appeared that Isabella had become the new inmate.

  She sat up to see the pile of barf spilled out in front of her. She stared down in a haze wondering how long she had been out and then wiped her lips on the blanket. Her body was still quite weak from the attack that had made its way through her tummy. She got to her feet and found she continued to wobble far more than her liking. The earth seemed to shift and she was, uncomfortably so, a much weaker little creature.

  Isabella scooted her way toward the massive steel door with the square plexiglass window. She could see the smudges of what must have been Chelsea’s hands on the freshly painted institutional green door. Her hands shook as she attempted to pick the lock, but dexterity no longer accompanied her. She was stuck. Somehow, Marty’s magic continued to work on her bones and the thought of being stuck troubled her deeply. What compelled him to assault her now? The feeling of helplessness was typically reserved for being around Marty, but this time it was in the homes of the deeply human.

  She made her way back toward her bed and lay on her side. Nothing she could do but wait. The sickness in her appeared to be vaguely subsiding.

  “I will just lay here and close
my eyes. Time will be on my side.”

  She closed her eyes and fell straight into darkness. The next time she opened them, she saw a guard enter the door, his pants sagging, eyes wide awake from too much coffee. He placed a steel tray of food on the table near her. The smell of wheat toast, butter with lingonberry jam and a hard-boiled egg was like a conspiracy to make her vomit. She closed her eyes once again.

  She woke to a new smell. It was a peculiar one indeed. Apple tobacco, gin, and root were the three flavors that floated in the air as she heard the presence of her new guest. She peeked between her blankets to spy him.

  He sat across from her with his legs crossed and a notepad held in his left hand. He stared at her from behind small spectacles. He was older with a small black peppered beard and a shock of hair that seemed to spring out of the top of his head. He wore a laboratory coat only furthering Isabella’s growing suspicion that she had inadvertently become a lab rat. His eyes looked troubled as he gazed down at Isabella.

  “Wake up, Chelsea,” he said with a strangely soothing sound in his voice.

  Isabella kept her head covered with the blanket. She didn’t feel like being discovered as an imposter just yet. Her stomach wasn’t ready for any excitement. She did her best to imitate the young girl’s high-born affectation.

  “I want to talk to you from under the blanket this morning,” she said. “Don’t make me come out, doctor.”

  “Well, this is progress. So you now admit that I am a doctor. Fair enough, stay under the blanket. Do what you must,” said the now confirmed doctor. Isabella could see him shift in his seat. He oozed control and she did wish she had enough strength to kick him off his chair. “The nurses tell me you were sick over the night. Are you feeling better?”

  “I am. It was something I ate I think. I just need more sleep,” said Isabella. She tried to muffle the sound of her voice but so far so good. The doctor seemed to not notice a thing. “So you know what I am going to ask you so tell me, what did you dream about last night?”

  Isabella hated that she couldn’t answer this question. It struck a nerve. The fact that humans could dream and she could not bothered her most terribly. This troubling point reminded her that as much as she and Fennel considered themselves superior, there were hints in the world that they lacked some basic qualities—dreaming being one of those most magical. Nevertheless, Chelsea Revan could most definitely sleep. She liked the idea of being Chelsea: a girl with problems, but a relatively normal girl nonetheless—one that could dream; one that, despite her position, was nevertheless lost in the drama of humanity; one that woke up in the morning and not the night; one that may have terrible parents, but not so bad that they'd stuff them in logs.

  Isabella lay there on the bed. Glad to be confused, for a second at least, over a girl whose concerns were more bearable and down to earth. From her supine position, she could sense the electric nerves of the refined doctor. He could barely contain his excitement of having his new facility built. He still wished the rooms could be painted ochre and the dining services improved, but overall, he continued to be over the moon about it all.

  It had been a dream of his since such a young age. The creation of the facility felt like the culmination of historic inevitability. He was born to cure. Ever since his days back at the school, he had dreamt of literally building on the new ideas that had been only hypothesized. He wanted to help people. This he knew. He had entered into psychology at the crisp era when this department had just begun to see the light of day—the science of mind and emotions. The entire discipline had ever fascinated him. His parents had always found him hard to read and at times, he was told he was emotionally inscrutable. So there was that. He continued to fall prey to the cliché that psychologists become that way because they wanted to solve themselves. But hey, people had to start somewhere.

  Now he had this shiny new building with a renowned scrawny young woman of royalty as a celebrity patient. Her healing was paramount to his work and he knew what she needed. Daddy issues. They were all the same. He told himself that he wouldn’t judge and would listen to the nuance of every word, but he had, up to that point, worked in so many test cases that patterns emerged. Remedies repeated. Young hysterical girls wild with emotion. The city may be predominately mad, but their cure remained basically the same.

  That morning he had awakened before the sun as usual. The birds were chirping. He got his coffee and read the paper that showed up at his doorstep. He read about the building boom, the volunteer parade, the celebrity section that showed the faces of the nouveau riche that seemed to grow up in this town like weeds, and finally, the section that he was ever so pleased to see debut: Out of the Box.

  This section, which he had lobbied for when he had met with the editors and the Mayor, Big Boy Charlie, focused on innovation. It was a space to highlight the ingenuity and intellectual prosperity that were the emerging face of the new Barrenwood. The articles focused on new innovations in electricity and gas power. But the doctor knew with great certainty that inevitably these pages would highlight the good work he had embarked on at Wellington Manor. Yes, he had chuckled to himself that morning he had truly become brilliant.

  He was partially reflecting on this when the snaky words of Isabella pretending to be Chelsea Revan slipped back into his ear.

  “I dreamt that you were a snake poisoning my ear. Whispering things that weren’t true and trying to get me to become something I am most clearly not. I was naked in the woods and you were chasing me. The woods were wild with branches like claws and the clouds a mess of angry streaks. I ran toward a cave and hid in there. It was moist and mossy, there was lichen on the walls that I hid in and you could no longer find me in there. Then my aunty came. She was on a black horse. She rode up and her horse squashed your head. Your head splattered like a water balloon. Aunty took me away.”

  Isabella thought that sounded like a dream. She enjoyed making it up. She wished she could dream something like this.

  “How does that dream make you feel?” inquired the doctor. That was often his go-to response to most things. It kept the patient talking and covered up the fact that he had been ruminating on the new newspaper section. He had trained his voice to sound calm teetering on the bored. Disinterest evinced the professional.

  “Scared I suppose. And euphoric. I liked hiding in the cave and I liked seeing Aunty,” Isabella responded. She liked talking about dreams.

  “Did being naked in the woods make you feel vulnerable?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question? Does sitting in that chair make you feel powerful?” Isabella snapped at Dr. Eldridge Never.

  She didn’t like this situation. Not only did she remain trapped in the room, but as she pretended to be Chelsea Revan, she also began to sympathize with the squirrely spoiled rich girl. They had her locked up in there with a doctor who threw questions upon her like coal into a steam engine. The imbalance of power in the situation was so evident that it exacerbated, not mollified, the extant tensions in the soft girl’s daily life. Chelsea was just a girl with too many expectations and not enough self-agency. Like everyone, she suffered small in a big world. Chelsea just felt perhaps extra small.

  This doctor sits there and studies as though his presence had nothing to do with the equation of power thought Isabella. His objectivity is a sham in the face of clearly tangible interpersonal dynamics. Isabella realized with clarity that this man was partly responsible for the removal of the mad. He was a scientist who confused his power with solutions. It made Isabella angry and nothing cured her sickness more than anger.

  “Now, now, Chelsea,” the doctor replied as though she had said nothing controversial whatsoever. “Just answer the questions. They are for your own good, believe me.”

  Isabella moaned out loud and lay back down on the bed. She didn’t want to be interrogated and now that the doctor had already shifted to interpreting her fake dream, she had entered a very bored domain. Her stomach continued to make progress and she figured she
would only have to remain in there for about a few hours more. Just as she had resigned herself, she sensed her brother coming down the hall. It brought a smile to her lips. She should have figured he would come for her, but the sickness had clouded her thoughts.

  A knock at the door and a most timid voice.

  “Excuse me, Doctor Never. Miss Revan has a guest. He said it was most urgent.”

  Eldridge Never got up from the chair. This interruption was not tolerated. They knew very well the protocols. He needed precise focus in these sessions.

  He replied in a voice most stern and agitated, “Visiting hours are mid-day. I have made it very clear that my sessions are not to be interup . . . ” before he could finish, in came Fennel with cane and top hat. He bowed low to the doctor and placed the end of his cane squarely on the lips of Doctor Eldridge, stopping the words at the edge of his beard.

  “Shhh, good doctor. Good tidings are always bound to interrupt. You must open yourself up to the magic of the universe, my wise ol’ chap. Open your heart and let the love shine in.”

  The Doctor pushed Fennel’s cane to the side looking quite flustered. “What is the meaning of this? I will not be interrupted in my clinic.”

  “Untrue, good doctor. You have already been interrupted. It has happened. No going back now.” Fennel turned to look over at Isabella. “Ah, the patient. She is looking much better, I must say. I was very concerned. We all were. Oh, you wouldn’t believe the look of her good daddy and mummy. The worries! Alas. They are very concerned. These maladies afflict not only the delicate sense of a woman’s emotional state but their entire nervous system.”

  Fennel leapt over nearly to the bed and sniffed in the air. “I see she has been sick of late. I knew it. This is the kind of illness one gets from behaving very poorly, don’t you think, Doctor? Pardon me, my good sir, but let me introduce myself to you. Persifell Pemberton at your service, Duke of Junkmiser and Frankenfish.