by Unknown
‘…in Central and Eastern Europe people have already been awake for two to three hours, and we are already seeing an increase in sales of something like four hundred percent.’
‘That soon?’
He grinned and nodded. ‘Those wacky Slavs who dreamed of the Maiden at any point after two in the morning their time will have seen her wearing your face and heard her singing your song. They won’t remember it, of course. They’ll have woken up with a snatch of tune going through their heads which they’ll hear again on the radio going to work, or they’ll have seen your photo on a website somewhere, and they’ll have said to themselves “Yeah, I think I’ll download that.” It’s a bit late for China and Australia, but the States is rocking up behind us in five hours and then the ratings are really going to go mental. Hey, do you want to see your Life Plan File?’
‘Are you allowed to show me that?’
‘I am now, honey.’
He took her to a side office and from a filing cabinet produced a thick folder which he handed to her. It was labelled:
Avatisation Cand: ‘Kerys Willow’ Iteration 1.
Class & trope: anima/maiden/cinderella (var. 4b)
She looked at him. ‘Cinderella?’
‘Of course! You are the classic rags-to-riches story. Girl from the estates with nothing going for her but her magical voice. No Dad, sick Mum, why, it’s even better than Princess Di, and she was pretty bloody damn near perfect. Have a look at where we’re taking you.’
She read the rest of the file, which mapped out the course of her life over the next several decades. It was all there: the early rise to fame, collaborations with established stars whose agents had already signed, the dalliance with a gorgeous but unreliable young man (a shortlist of names was appended), the inevitable crash and breakdown, the addiction, the rehab and relapse and rehab again, the triumphant comeback, the celebrity marriage sponsored by OK! Magazine, and then final recommendations for further avatisation into other tropes more suitable to an older, wiser woman. The timescale was eerily detailed, even to the final death of her mother and the funeral. From the notes, bidding had already been secured for the photo rights from several celebrity gossip channels.
‘What does it mean, Iteration 1?’
He flapped that away. ‘Contingency plans, honey. Nothing you need to worry about.’
‘But I will be famous, yes?’ she demanded.
‘Kerrie, have you not been listening? Fame is for has-beens. Your music is going to be played and covered and sampled and remixed for ever. Your image is going to be on student bedroom walls decades after you’re dead. Hell, we even have plans for the making of your biopic and the star who’s going to play you hasn’t even been born yet. You are the Maiden now. You are the walking embodiment of the Cinderella archetype. You, my dear, are legend.’
‘Well in that case I think I’ve earned the day off, don’t you?’
5
Given the rare luxury of a day completely to herself, Kerys decided to go exploring.
The Neville Institute was accommodated in a Georgian mansion set in acres of manicured and landscaped grounds. It was hard to believe that only a few hundred yards away lay the bustle of city streets. Harder still to believe that this place had been doing the same business for centuries. The mansion’s lower corridors were a gallery of portraits of the rich and famous. Individuals who were instantly recognisable world-wide: politicians, religious figures, rock stars. The Institute had gone by many names in its history, and it filled her with pride to think that hers would one day be joining them in immortality. For the moment, though, she was tired of seminar rooms and focus groups and people wittering on about mythological archetypes in the human collective unconscious. It was a clear April morning and she just wanted to sit in the grass in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops and make some daisy chains.
She saw the young man sitting on a stone bench next to an ornamental pool in which golden koi carp drifted lazily. He was dark-haired and clean-shaven, and reading his own Life Plan File in the sun. She smiled, pleased at having found some company, and plonked herself down beside him.
‘Hello Prince Charming,’ she smiled.
He closed the folder and smiled cautiously in return. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Oh nothing. Don’t mind me. Just going a bit stir-crazy, is all. This place really messes with your head after a while, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose it does.’
‘Kerys,’ she said, offering her hand.
He shook it. ‘I know. I saw you on TV. That was quite some performance. Well done.’
‘Thanks. I’m sorry, I should probably know your name.’
‘Oh, that’s alright. It’s not surprising. I’m in politics. Grassroots at the moment, but you know this place,’ he waved his file with an ironic little flourish. ‘Tipped for bigger things. Philip Leythwaite. Charmed, if not exactly Charming.’
She laughed. As she did so, a small bird whirred out of the bushes and landed on her knee. It had bright splashes of yellow on its wings and red around its face. It cocked a beady eye at her, opened its mouth to unfurl a ribbon of the most beautiful birdsong she had ever heard, and took off again.
‘My god!’ she gasped. ‘Did you see that? I think that was a goldfinch.’
Leythwaite was just as amazed. ‘Whatever’s riding you, it’s got some power behind it, that’s for sure.’
Frowning, she turned to him. ‘What do you mean, whatever’s riding me?’
‘You, know, like voodoo?’ In the face of her obvious confusion he added: ‘When a voodoo priest invites one of the Loa – that is, the spirits – to possess him, it’s described like he’s being mounted, or ridden by it. You never heard of that? You need to do your research.’
‘The only voodoo I’ve ever heard of is Voodoo Child by Jimi Hendrix.’
It was his turn to laugh, and she saw that he really was very attractive, with his dark hair and his smart jacket and tight jeans. She felt like the pool: brimming and bright with life.
‘So, Philip,’ she said, lowering her voice and looking directly into his eyes. ‘What’s riding you?’
He smiled and leaned a little closer, about to reply, but as he did so a mobile phone began to ring in his jacket pocket. He checked the display and made a face. ‘Sorry, I need to get this. You’re not going to believe me, but it’s the Home Secretary.’
‘Ooh, get you, Mister Big-pants Politician.’ She waved him off and he wandered a little way down the path, talking quietly.
Leaving his file behind on the bench.
Kerys looked down at the file and back at Leythwaite, engrossed in his conversation and walking away from her, almost to where a bend in the path took it behind some bushes. It wouldn’t take more than a few seconds to just flip the file open, grab a quick glance at the précis, and close it again before he came back. She wouldn’t even need to pick it up. It was lying right next to her.
A carp slapped its tail against the water. The goldfinch shouted at her from the bushes. Kerys ignored both of them and opened the file.
As she read it she completely forgot about taking a quick glance. Her eyes widened in horror.
It was all there, mapped out for him just as her life-narrative was for her. The meteoric success in local party politics, feted by big business (the arms industry, notably), mentored by the most influential political figures of the twenty-first century, and all of it leading inevitably to Number Ten. Then came the law and order crackdowns, the foreign policy pogroms, a popular nationalist movement called ‘One State, One People’, probability calculations for at least two assassinations, projected figures for labour camp populations, and ‘acceptable attrition’ death rates for a range of ethnic and religious minori—
‘That’s confidential material, you know.’
She screamed, and jumped away. Leythwaite had been behind her, looking over her shoulder as she’d read the secrets of his future. From his expression, it wasn’t hard to guess what kind o
f mythological archetype was riding him: the kind that made people wake up screaming.
‘In fact, I’m pretty sure reading that is a form of treason. Do you know how many countries in the world punish treason with the death penalty?’
‘Now, wait,’ she started, backing up.
‘No, I don’t know either.’ He followed her. ‘But once I’m running the country it will be one more, that’s for certain.’ He picked up a rock from the flowerbed and hefted it. He grinned, and for a moment it seemed that his teeth had been filed to sharp points.
Kerys ran.
She fled down the path, back towards the house, screaming for help, knowing that any help would almost certainly come too late.
Whatever was riding him was also incredibly fast. It caught up with her in a circular patio area dominated by a large brass sundial on a pedestal, and fetched her a blow across the back of the head which sent her reeling against the stone column. Dazed, she slipped around, hanging onto the brass blade of the sundial’s central gnomon for support.
Something dark capered behind his face; something which grinned with sharp teeth hungry for blood. She wondered how many people in history had seen something like that leering at them from the faces of Hitler, or Pol Pot, or even their own fathers. Kerys could feel her own blood streaming down the back of her neck and matting her hair – blood and hair which she had mixed into her homunculus and offered to the Goddesses.
The glaring face of the shadow-eyed woman came back to her from the dream, and she remembered that there were all kinds of Goddesses.
‘If it helps,’ Leythwaite cackled at her. ‘Try to think of yourself as a trend-setter, my little voodoo child.’
In response, something just as dark and powerful welled up inside her, filling her as fully as the brightness had just a moment before. She stood, wrenched the gnomon from its place in the centre of the stone dial as if it were no stronger than tinfoil, and pointed it at him.
‘I know you,’ she said. The words seemed to be coming simultaneously from deep inside her and a million miles away. ‘You are the Brother-Killer, who sets neighbour against neighbour, and bathes in the blood of its loved ones. You are Set, and Romulus, and Cain. I name you, and curse you as you have ever been cursed since the earliest of days.’
It quailed from being recognised, then rallied, roared, and sprang at her afresh. She stabbed with the dagger-like point of the gnomon, piercing its belly and ripping upwards. Even as it died it struck at her, and she chopped with the brass blade until it stopped moving. But the thing that was riding her would not be satisfied with simply killing its enemy; the oldest of myths demanded more.
When the staff from the house finally came running in response to the screams, they found a scene which sent many of them backpedalling in horror, some vomiting at the sight.
She sat amidst the red ruin of her prey, whom she had dismembered and strewn about the stone pedestal, on top of which she had placed his blinded and tongue-torn head.
6
‘I’m sorry I ruined your Cinderella story,’ Kerys said to Tim through the visiting-room screen. Her voice was thick with the plastic mouth guard which she was forced to wear at all times. There was no pretence at privacy. Three burly guards stood close by; though not too close. In the short amount of her very long prison sentence completed so far she’d displayed frequent and extraordinary violence towards inmates and guards alike, and had already killed two. Her head was shaved, and she was shackled wrist-to-ankle.
‘I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that,’ he replied. ‘I have something you might like to see.’ He showed the file to the guards who satisfied themselves that there was nothing like staples or paperclips which she could use as weapons before placing it in front of her.
He flinched a little when he saw the state of her hands as she turned the pages. Her fingernails, even cut short, had proven too dangerous, and so been pulled.
She read what was there, and laughed. The sound made his flesh crawl.
Some of it was news clippings: front-page headline stories about ‘Britain’s Deadliest Diva’ and her shocking transformation from girl-next-door to psychopathic killer, murderer of a man who had been tipped as one of the nation’s emerging political elite. She was routinely compared with the likes of Myra Hindley, Rose West, and Joanna Dennehy. Feared not so much for what she had done as for the fact that there was no simple reason to explain it. They never used her image as she was now, with her shorn head, ragged fingers and blunt teeth. It was always the glamour shots they used, as if the death which rode her now was inseparable from the chaste sexuality that rode her before.
Her projected chronology now included eventual parole, several novels, and the inevitable movie.
Underneath her name, the file was subtitled: Class & trope: anima/devouring mother/morrigan (var. 1)
‘I told you we had contingencies,’ he explained. ‘You’re still going to live forever.’
And the Goddess behind her face smiled at him.
La Vouivre
By Sarah Ash
‘So what brings you to the Loue valley, M’sieur? Walking, perhaps? You young ones usually like to go exploring up in the steeper parts, climbing Mont Poupet. Or fly-fishing? I can tell you where to buy a permit.’
Lucien was the only guest left in the little dining room. It was a slow night in La Vouivre pension. He had no skill with small talk and Madame La Patronne seemed keen to enliven her evening with a chat. He didn’t mind eating alone, in fact, he preferred it, but Madame had obviously decided that he must be lonely and in need of cheering up. Soon she would probably tell him that she had a son, or even a daughter, his age; although now that he saw her closer to, he noticed that perhaps she might be younger than he had assumed at first. Good cheekbones...
‘The pôchouse was delicious,’ he said, carefully placing his knife and fork on the empty plate.
She beamed. ‘Freshwater fish from the Loue; you can’t beat them for a good pôchouse. But you’re not here for the fishing...’ She took the plate from him. ‘Dessert or cheese?’
‘Oh, I don’t think I could—’ Lucien began
‘A slim lad like you? You need feeding up.’ It was obvious that she was not going to take ‘no’ for an answer. ‘The Île flottante is good, though I say so myself; I always add a dash of kirsch to the crème anglaise. Or how about sampling the local cheese? There’s Bleu de Gex ... or Cancoillotte. Although that’s something of an acquired taste.’
‘Some cheese to go with the last of the wine, then.’ He poured what remained in the pichet of red wine into his glass. ‘And an espresso afterward.’ That would keep her busy for a little while.
Having talked him through the local cheeses on the cheeseboard, she was soon back with his espresso and a shot of local liqueur, Pontarlier anis, greeny-gold in colour. ‘Oh the house, M’sieur. With my compliments.’
He thanked her, raising the glass to her good health, and took a sip. It was fiery, with a clean after-burn that had a tang of bitter herbs. He blinked as he swallowed, hoping it would not make him cough.
‘Won’t you join me?’ he heard himself asking. Was it the anis loosening his tongue? It wasn’t as if he had a full evening ahead; there was no point sitting around, waiting in vain for a call or a text that was never going to come. That chapter in his life was over. And in his confusion and misery, he had just grabbed his backpack, and taken the first train out of Paris going south.
‘Well, thank you; I won’t say no.’
She put the bottle of spirits on the table, brought over a glass, and poured herself a shot before sitting opposite him. In the muted light of the panelled dining room, it was hard to tell how old she was; her hair, a dark amber, with the odd thread of metallic grey, was swept up in a spare yet elegant chignon that accentuated the strong curves of her cheekbones. ‘Bonne santé, M’sieur Dupuy.’ She raised her glass to his so that he was obliged to chink and take another mouthful.
‘Do you get many visitors in su
mmer?’
She gave a little shrug. ‘Some years are better than others. Most people want sun, sea, and sand in August. But there’re still a few, like your good self, who don’t care to battle down the autoroute to the south. So, was it the legend – or the film?’
‘I – I’m sorry?’
She gestured to a framed lithograph on the panelled wall which he hadn’t paid much attention to before. It depicted a dragon with a woman’s head and bare breasts rising on hooked wings over a waterfall to attack a fleeing man. ‘La Vouivre.’
He shook his head.
‘And you haven’t even seen the film? Or read the novel? By Marcel Aymé? Oh well, it’s a few years back now, you’re probably too young to remember it. La Vouivre is our local legend. They say if you walk along the banks of the Loue at twilight, you might see her fly down to bathe. She has a brilliant jewel, a joyau, in her forehead, and she removes it and hides it carefully before stepping into the water. And the instant the jewel is out, she assumes her human form: a beautiful young woman.’
‘That would be worth seeing,’ Lucien said, nodding. His words sounded a little muzzy in his own ears. Am I drunk?
Madame leaned forward across the table. The jewelled pendant she wore caught the light, gleaming between her breasts. ‘Ah, but there’s the problem. So many young men have said that and lain in wait for her. Some have even tried to steal her jewel so she can’t change back. Because they say that the joyau is worth a great deal of money. But she doesn’t like to be spied upon. Neither does she look so kindly on thieves who take advantage of a woman while she’s bathing. She turns the tables on them – and they drown.’
‘So she’s never fallen for any of these peeping toms?’
‘Perhaps you’re not aware of the name given to this area? It’s called the Val d’Amour, the valley of love.’
Was she hitting on him? Best to make excuses and retire. Lucien glanced at his phone, pretending to check the time. ‘It’s late.’ He rose. ‘And it’s been a long day.’ No new texts.
