Used up.
And then I understood it. My feverish brain made connections in the swirling stream of images and associations, of fear and of knowledge. It was . . . It must be . . .
I hadn’t heard the door open, but I did feel the movement in the wood floor when she entered the room, and I heard her voice. ‘That’s the life streaming out of you, dearie. Your prana, your essence. The child is almost used up, but you . . . All that compassion, all that empathy . . . It drips out of you. Wouldn’t it be a waste if someone didn’t do something with it? A sin, almost?’
I wrestled the words out of my mouth. ‘Let me go. Please . . .’
Movement beside me. The girl? She picked up the metal bowl. Gave it to her. Gottlieb . . . was that even really her name?
And then once more I felt her thin hands and the cool porcelain against my skin. ‘It doesn’t last long,’ the girl’s voice whispered.
Liquid between my lips. Black, bitter tea with a hint of ginger. I swallowed. Panted.
‘Why?’ I asked again.
Her voice, far away: ‘Because I want to.’
This time it indeed didn’t last as long. The panic, I mean. Once again I awakened with the feeling I was choking, but I realized after a few seconds what was happening.
I managed to spit the slime out and air rattled into my lungs. There was no emaciated child beside me. No hollow, black eyes searching my face.
I tried to tell myself that this was progress, because the kid had scared me half to death. And I seemed now in any event to be able to use some muscles.
Where was the woman?
I lifted my head a little as I tried to move my fingers. My hand began to tremble and my index finger and middle finger came a little way off the ground.
My head slammed heavily back on the mattress. A new mouthful sought an outlet between my lips and dropped on the gray-striped cover. A yellow-gray puddle formed on the fabric. Transparent like a dead jellyfish on the beach.
I looked at it, my blurry eyes straining painfully as I tried to see it. I smelled it. Grim, poisonous, sweet. I . . .
. . . heard the footsteps on the stairs. The door of the room – it creaked a little – opening. I saw Mrs. Gottlieb – warm, old. But I smelled ash in her graying hair. I saw bones in her eyes. And I felt, knew suddenly, that she was more than just herself.
‘Ah, good girl. Just a bit more.’
Despair spread through my body when I felt the cup against my lips.
Black tea.
I didn’t choke any more when I woke for the third time.
The slime no longer forced its way out in great quantities from my mouth but oozed out the corners like drool at the dentist’s office. I commanded my hand to wipe my mouth and it obeyed.
Now I tested my neck and back and buttocks. I fought my way upright.
The movement brought wafts of heavy sweat and stale tea and the room swayed around me. I waited till it was over and then looked carefully around the room, which I was finally able to really see.
It was an attic room, that was now certain. I felt cool air on my face: wind that was coming in through openings in the rafters. I saw two small, square attic windows, soiled by dust and spiderwebs. But in the middle the filth had been wiped away by thin fingers.
I managed to stand up and tottered in the direction of the little window. Looked out.
Below me I saw the neglected garden; behind that, between the branches and shrubs, the cobblestones of Appelstraat. A red Volkswagen Polo was making its way and I perked up.
Matt?
I stretched my neck, followed the car until it reached the bend where Dante had sat waiting, and felt my heart clench when he disappeared from view.
Dizzy, I let myself sink down along the wall. I wiped slime from the corners of my mouth and tried not to give in to the intense feeling of loss that washed over me. Maybe it hadn’t even been Matt. Maybe not.
But I need you.
And then I saw the dark form in the nook by the rough shape of the chimney. I swallowed, spat, panted. I told myself that it couldn’t be her, that it wasn’t possible, couldn’t be.
I crawled to the corner on all fours. I wiped my eyes, which kept clouding up, groped and left a little layer of sludge behind on the child’s knee-high socks.
She hadn’t gone home and her mother hadn’t gotten angry. There would no longer be any home, not after all the many years that she must have been here.
Her skin was colored black and had become as stiff as parchment. Her flesh – hadn’t it still been there when she’d sat beside me? – was rotted away until it looked like scraped asphalt. The black eyes stared upwards but no longer saw anything.
Used up.
I looked at my hands and the dried slime on my fingertips. Was my skin dryer than before? I wiped my knuckles along my slippery mouth. Were my lips thinner?
His voice in my head. ‘Be a little kind to yourself.’
I had to get out of there.
My trembling hands on the door handle. I fumbled at it, tried to pull it, but there was hardly any strength left in my body. It seeped out like a snail excreting slime to propel itself. But the door opened – had she forgotten to lock it? – and I saw the staircase, although it spun before my weary eyes.
I stepped. Stumbled. Fell.
My body crashed, thumped, clattered, knocked against the steps. My muscles screamed. I remained lying at the bottom of the stairs, fighting to get myself under control. Get up, Tara. Run!
But then she was there.
Had she always been so tall? And hadn’t her eyes been cloudy blue instead of filled with dark fire? The woman who was approaching from the hall, who stood before me and towered over me, was Mrs. Gottlieb, but at the same time I felt someone else.
Mahabhaya, a voice whispered within me. It was a name, I knew; I recognized it with that deep human instinct with which we can fathom the unknowable.
‘Get up, dearie,’ she said.
It was as if the sound alone was enough to lift me up, and I rose until my face was the same height as hers. I saw the liver spots on her cheekbones and her forehead, the deep wrinkles that creased and folded every inch of her skin. The drooping eyelids, the fuzzy gray of her hair. And yet . . . yet there was power in this body, life in her eyes.
Prana.
‘Kiss me,’ she said.
She stretched her wrinkled hands out and I allowed her to place them on my cheeks. I smelled her breath and allowed it to fill my lungs. And then her lips closed over mine and licked the slime from my mouth. I let my life flow into hers, so that her body would not die.
She took my free will.
No . . . that’s not right. My will is intact, but the ability to act on it is gone. How she did it still isn’t clear to me. Maybe it’s the figure that lives behind her eyes, that makes use of her voice: Mahabhaya, the Fearsome One.
She told me, after my prana had brought the light back in her eyes, after I had bent over her husband – Antonie – and he had drunk my life with unwilling gulps.
That as the wife of a missionary she had followed her beloved to a little village in the heart of India. That she’d had to watch as the devastating cholera took him within the span of a month. How his body rotted away and his piss turned black from the blood.
That was the moment she had turned away from the god who had chosen to take away her beloved before he had celebrated his thirtieth birthday. That was also the moment when the villagers introduced her to their divinity, which until then had lain hidden in the folds of her reality.
And there, concealed from the eyes of Westerners who think they know everything, she found Mahabhaya, the Fearsome One, who protects against old age, liberates from fear, and knows the secret of eternal life.
She had done what was necessary. She had recited Her name – Mahabhaya – te
n thousand times, sitting on a mountain of bones and with the ash of countless cremations strewn on her head. And when She came, after hours and days, and granted mercy, she had greedily accepted.
But mercy has a price.
I am that price, the child was that price. Even Matt, who will never see me again, is part of that price. And in the end her beloved Antonie is too.
He too has been deprived of his will. In his eyes lives despair, in his hands a fatigue that is deeper than I can comprehend. His voice is regret.
I can’t get him out of my head, that faltering supplication when I still had the strength to walk away, or to refuse. The desperate flutter of the dried-out wings against the bars of the cage.
The cat’s eyes.
I turned back towards the attic room, obedient to a single look, a word. She is mighty, the Fearsome One, even if she looks through the eyes of an old woman.
Suddenly I wondered whether that was really her name, whether even for her eternity had already lasted longer than she had wanted.
Once out of her presence, my strength returned. I rattled on the shutters of the roof windows that were too narrow for a child to get through, let alone an adult, and I peered out, where I could see the road.
A car with the logo of the home care service. A tractor.
I fumbled at the door, banged on the wood. I pulled at the paneling around the fireplace in the hope of discovering an opening that would offer me a way out, any way whatsoever, onto the roof.
I shouted to the rafters and kicked at the walls. I was Tender Tara. I was the one who did volunteer work, who was socially minded, who fought to do what was good until my dying breath.
I sat motionless beside the desiccated remains that had once been a young girl and which now foretold my future. A future that I had to face alone.
I petted Dante, who had slipped upstairs with me. His aggressiveness had vanished. The bloody scab above his eye was nearly healed, but the look in his eyes was unchanged.
And then I heard the rumbling of a car on the road. A rattle that slowly grew louder and suddenly stopped.
I knew that rumble, that familiar rattling. Matt? Had he figured out where I was? Come to get me?
‘Matt!’
At the beginning of the garden path stood Matt’s red Volkswagen Polo. I heard his voice – urgent, though I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
And I heard her voice, with the innocent tenacity of a very elderly person who has nothing left to lose.
Again I shrieked at the top of my lungs, but the sound died against the wall of silence that surrounded me. I cried, sobbed, when I heard the door shut, when I saw Matt, my Matt, walking down the path to his car.
I pounded on the window, banged with my fist. I . . .
Broke the window.
Shards on the ground. Sharp cuts on my hands. Blood on my fist. And again I screamed. ‘Matt!’
I heard a little sound by my feet and saw Dante and those large, golden-green mirrors.
What are you trying to say?
Did he know how scared I was? Of loneliness? Silence? Judgment?
What do you mean?
In a cat’s eyes you can read whatever you want. Compassion. Understanding.
I lifted him up to the window, which even he couldn’t easily reach. I pressed him against me for a moment as I loosened the collar from his neck. I pushed him through the hole in the glass and it didn’t matter that the glass cut into his fur. He wormed his way further, through the hole and up onto the roof.
By the road the car door slammed shut. An engine started.
A black bolt flashed down over the shingles, leapt into the tall alder by the house. Disappeared in the bushes underneath.
The Polo began to drive. Slowly. Then faster.
The black spot shot out from under the bushes and then towards the bend in the road.
Matt sped up. Dante did the same.
Then the sound. Screaming brakes. Dull thud.
And the outline of Matt, who hurried out of the car, knelt down on the cobblestones.
He remained sitting motionless for at least twenty heartbeats. Then he lifted the limp body from the cobblestones and laid it in the grass on the side of the road. Carefully. Lovingly.
He stepped back into his car, started the engine.
I closed my eyes, just for a moment. But I didn’t see Dante’s eyes anymore.
Translated from the Dutch by James D. Jenkins
Ariane Gélinas
Twin Shadows
For many years, the horror world in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec has been dominated by Patrick Senécal, a prolific novelist sometimes compared to Stephen King (though apparently only one of his novels has so far appeared in English). Recently, though, horror fiction in Quebec has begun to grow into more than just a one-man show, as evidenced by the 2017 anthology Horrificorama, which features stories by fifteen Quebecois horror writers, including the one featured here. Multi-award-winning author Ariane Gélinas (b. 1984) has published five novels and numerous short stories, some of the best of which, including the following tale, were collected in Le sabbat des éphémères (2013). The publisher of that volume describes Gélinas’ work as existing at the crossroads of the Gothic and the fantastic, with forays into science fiction. The author’s first publication in English, ‘Twin Shadows’ is an eerie tale that fits squarely into the Gothic tradition, a story about two sisters with a strange secret living in an isolated mansion. It will surely leave readers wanting to see more from this talented young author.
Time passes in slow motion in the silence of the sleeping house. That’s what I used to repeat to Floriane when we would talk, after dark. I grew used to these conversations, which broke the monotony of my anonymous existence. The rest of the time, I felt only the coldness of our vast residence, which had become familiar to me over the years. Only my sister deigned to look after me, often discerning my presence when I was hidden in the darkness of a hallway or lurking in a corner of her bedroom. And since we were identical twins, she possessed an innate ability to anticipate my intentions, predict my reactions.
Her devotion to me had been remarkable during our early youth. It is true that, unlike Floriane, I did not have the benefit of our parents’ attention, nor anyone else’s. Aside from their concern when they would catch her talking to me after midnight, they ignored me, letting me wander alone through the corridors of our centuries-old home, built well away from the city.
To keep me close to her, my twin decided, shortly before we turned five, to arrange her closet to suit me. Although I had always made do with only a little space, she insisted on removing her clothes from the closet, preferring to put them in her dressers. Our parents were surprised at first by this whim, which they came to consider as a simple childish caprice. Floriane kept only the metal rod, from which she had noticed I liked to hang, upside-down. She had laid several cushions on the floor, where she would come to lie beside me almost every night. She would wait until our parents had reached their room at the other end of the hall. She would then slip in to the back of the closet with a thick blanket to keep warm. I would let go of the bar to join her on the pillows, even though their comfort meant nothing to me. It was a different story with my sister’s warmth, which aroused little tingling sensations in me. I knew it wasn’t the same with my parents or their guests. Everyone except Floriane was impervious to me. I consoled myself going to sleep night after night in the arms of my twin, among the shadows of the closet.
I always awoke with the impression that time had stood still, that I had only just submerged myself in my sister’s invigorating embrace. Unfortunately, for her part, it was time to get up and have breakfast at the family table, where three places had been set. I would close my hand one last time over her burning one, after she had assured me that she would come back to me as soon
as the meal was finished. She would then hasten to get ready before closing the door of the wardrobe, where I would remain awaiting her return. During that time, I would invent quivering shapes on the walls or try to stick my fingers into the closet’s partitions, which seemed to elude me when I tried to touch them. In any case, I had never liked to venture to the ground floor, which inspired a peculiar dread in me. I only felt safe upstairs, near my parents’ bedroom, where Floriane and I had been born, or close to my twin, whose presence could always calm me. Outside seemed even worse to me, since everything there was a blinding white as far as the eye could see. So I was careful to stay away from the windows, whose formless brightness attacked me, like an immaculate grave, where I often felt the urge to destroy myself.
A diffuse light filtered through the slats of the wardrobe, illuminating the cushions and toys that Floriane had given me. So that I would feel less alone she had given me several stuffed animals as well as three of her dolls, which sat lined up against one of the walls, looking at me with their dead eyes. All of them had names, unlike me, which had always made me sad. Sometimes I would avenge myself on Floriane’s dolls when the loneliness became too oppressive. A savage energy would take hold of me, pushing me to do violence on whatever was around me. Spurred on by anger, I would pick the toys up and shake them until their eyes rolled back in their heads and their joints threatened to break. Then I would cry for a long time in the darkness, hugging Olga, an old, worn-out plush toy whose eyes had been torn out and whose stuffing was coming out all over.
Every day I would relieve my boredom by long hours of dancing in my twin’s room. I had always loved moving gracefully, fluttering over the floor tiles after performing several ethereal twirls. I would sketch movements worthy of an elite ballerina, like our mother when she gave private classes in the dance studio that had been set up upstairs. I would imagine myself on a stage, like the dancing stars I loved to admire on my sister’s television when she watched athletic competitions. Like them, I would be cheered, dressed in a shimmering leotard that made my supple body more beautiful.
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Page 21
