by Jeff Strand
Every frightful fairytale ever spoken to us as children began to flit through my imagination, and I was reminded of the cottage from the story of Hansel and Gretel, and of the witch Baba-Yaga of Russian lore. Here was a house so strange and disarming for how peaceful and pleasant it looked, hidden amidst the filth and the darkness of all that was around us. How many years had it been here? I’d stumbled upon a great mystery, and my curiosity, despite my trepidation, would not be sated.
I was about to draw closer to the strange house so that I might peer into the windows and spy upon the meeting, when the voice of a small child caused me to stop before I’d even stepped into the sunlit clearing. “Today is not your day.”
Turning around, I came face to face with a dirt-covered boy with tousled blond hair, and in his hands he held a red balloon. His overalls were covered in the grime of the alleyways. He lived here. He looked up at me with a blank, soulless expression and in his eyes I saw a seriousness that demanded I take his words to heart.
“When will it be?” I asked him.
“She only takes one a day,” the boy said and walked past me, into the sunlight. “If you want to be granted an audience with Her you must come back when you have the thing she wants.”
I thought of the present the man had offered to the darkness when he’d neared the door. “The lollipop?”
The boy shrugged. “It is different for every one. Each person’s soul is different, the gifts they offer Her are also different. Yours will be unique exclusively to you, and when you find it, you will know it is what she wants.”
“Who is she?”
The boy laughed and let his balloon forth from his hands; it floated up until it became a red dot against the sky. “She is light and she is darkness. She is a black hole that swallows stars, a distant nebula rising. She is our mother, and the eater of innocence lost.”
“Who are you?”
The child again laughed at me but did not answer. He walked to the door and opened it. The blackness ate him up, and again the door closed on its own accord.
As I crept once more back down the alley ways, towards the safety of the public streets, I kept making frequent glances behind me, watching that strange sunlit area shrink further away, until it was entirely obscured by the muck and the grime of the city’s hidden darkness. I wondered that I should find it again without my guide. Is it a place that disappears when you look for it, one of those rare things in life that you stumble upon and then it is lost forever, like a strange song on the radio, or a painting that moves you and you can’t find the artist? I dreaded it’d be one of those beautiful, unattainable things that simply becomes a memory in the back of your skull, never to resurface, gradually fading until all that you can remember is that at one point there was something wonderful and it made you feel strange and now you are haunted by the memory of something lost that may or may not have ever even existed, a dream that vanishes upon waking.
The insanity of the child’s riddle began to replay itself over and over again in my mind, but memory of the event was already growing hazy and the actual words itself were distorting and melding themselves together in my mind so that soon all I could hear inside my head was, “She is our mother. She eats stars.” And then I had emerged once more into the sad faces of humanity, every one cast in a pale shade of gray, their faces sunken and their shoulders stooped, tired and on their way to the banks to cash their checks and pay their bills. Only I could walk upright and smile, as I had with me the remnants and the traces of magic and mystery, and I promised I would return to that house and its enchanting light in darkness, even as I took a taxi-cab back to my lonely apartment building. The beauty could not, would not be lost.
There were times when I missed my old home, back before Joann left and took my son from me, and the Judge had ruled that I was not to be granted custody of my only boy. I thought of how I might like to pick him up in my arms when I walked in the front door, and tell him of the strange thing that Daddy had found, of the little boy and his red balloon, and the sad-looking man with his lollipop, all meeting in a clearing of light behind a dark alley, to see the Mother of Stars. Joann wouldn’t have liked such a story, as she preferred her calendars and her meetings and things wrapped up in briefcases and corporate conference calls that kept the money flowing. That’s why she left and stole our boy, because my delusions and dreams would set him up for heartache, and that without me in his life, he’d be more grounded in reality. Sad, dreary reality. There is no room for a poet in her world.
My son had left his bag of marbles the last time I’d seen him. They’re all I had left to look at now. I thought to give them back when he came to visit next Christmas, but that was still eight months away, and so for now I slept with them underneath my pillow every night, and would often count them to make sure they were all there: two cat’s eyes, six blackies, one toothpaste, and three oxbloods. I know them all by heart.
That night there was a marble in the bag I did not recognize, a shiny blood-ruby. You could look through it, and see your world painted in scarlet. This was it. This was my key to gaining an audience with the old woman inside the strange house.
The following day I saw a headline in the morning paper, a cop that had gone undercover to investigate a series of disappearances involving several businessmen had likewise vanished supposedly after uncovering a new lead. This did not surprise me, it is after all our city, the place of vanished souls. There’s something alive about these streets, like they’re a monster unto themselves, eagerly swallowing up anyone who might stumble upon the wrong thing. There was a picture of the cop. It was the man who I’d followed yesterday into the alleys. Any sane or smart man would have left the matter alone after that, but I have been accused of possessing neither sanity nor intelligence and so slipped the foreign blood-colored marble into my pocket and took to the streets once more.
That Sunday morning was remarkably quiet for our city, and I remember distinctly a strange fog accompanying the unusual silence pervading the city’s streets. There was not a car nor a soul to be seen, and the fog was so thick it blotted out the landscape for miles. I tried in vain to find the particular alley I’d chased my police officer down, but it seemed like the route itself had vanished.
I had prepared to call it quits and return home to wait for this unnatural fog to lift when I heard the sound of children’s voices. Across the street from me they were playing jump-rope, and singing a strange song in time to their little games: “She is light and she is dark. She is a black hole that swallows stars. She is our mother, the eater of innocence lost. Have something missing returned to you, but be warned there is a cost.”
I watched their faces. They were expressionless and pale. The intonations of their song was not one befitting a children’s game. No, it was more apt for a funeral’s dirge.
Behind them lay the alleyway, and instead of being the narrow and winding path it’d been when I’d raced down it yesterday, there was only a straight shot forwards. I could see the sun peeking through the fog behind it, and the green grass in the clearing all the way from across the street. The house was making itself known to me. It wanted to be found.
The children stopped singing as I approached them, and instead fixed me with their cold, empty stares. As I passed them and disappeared into the alley, I turned my head back to see they were still watching me, and I am certain they watched until the fog created a wall between us. Like the day before, the weather cleared and I found myself standing in front of the house, with the marble clenched in my sweaty fist. I approached the front door and knocked sharply three times, and tried to still my nervous breathing.
As opposed to the monsters that I’d expected to come to the door there was the little boy from yesterday. His face and clothes were clean, and his hair was trimmed and neat. He looked up at me and then beyond me. I turned around to see that the children playing jump-rope were standing but a few feet away, their eyes boring holes into my back. They’d followed me through the dark,
and I hadn’t heard their footsteps. I turned back around to face the pale-skinned boy standing in the doorway.
“Normally she doesn’t take them in so soon after the other, but for you she is making an exception,” he told me, his tone authoritative and haughty, “Do not offend her with your rudeness.”
I hadn’t even the chance to ask him what I’d done that he’d found so rude when he grabbed me by the hand and pulled me further into the house. I turned around just in time to see all the children standing on the doorstep, just as the door was closing behind me. They were all waving at me and staring with mournful eyes. My guide vanished into the next hallway, and I heard a kind, grandmotherly voice whispering to him.
“Oh, he is here is he? You’ve done very well. Go play with the others, I’ll take care of our guest. I’ll be fine, go on, go. No, not today. You’ve had enough sweets. Now, now, I said no. This one’s for my personal collection.”
The room was filled with a warm light from an above chandelier, revealing a quaint dining room adjacent to a small kitchen all done in brightly colored tiles of reds and greens and yellows. An old woman wearing a shawl wrapped around her, hobbling on a cane entered the room next to me, and looked up at me over half-moon spectacles with the broadest smile and the kindest eyes, all buried in a face of wrinkles that had seen much laughter. She eagerly approached me and grabbed me by both of my hands, my palms facing up. Her fingers traced the lines in my palms feverously, and then she patted the top of my left hand, and held it in her trembling grip.
“Yes, you are the right one. Someone who is seeking, yes?” she said, her voice on the brim of a tinkling laughter.
“I am seeking…something,” I said.
“I just said that, didn’t I?” She burst into that set of giggles that had been lingering on the edge of her words and then she turned around to lead me into the kitchen. “But you’re not sure of what you are seeking. The answer to a mystery yes, but what are you hoping lies in that answer? Something lost, I should say. We only look for things that are lost, I find. Is chamomile all right?”
“Chamomile?”
“Tea, child! Tea!”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
“Sit down! Sit down! I’ll be with you in a moment.” She went rummaging throughout the kitchen, throwing open cabinets, and humming quietly to herself. “And if that something is lost, then it must be something we used to have. Only because it is lost, we cannot remember ever having it. So, the key to finding what you are missing is to remember what it is you are seeking, the thing you no longer have.”
Her words confused me, and I wondered how much of this was all part of her performance, her mystique. Everything bore with it the airs and the guise of a practicing fortune-teller, like a gypsy caravan I’d seen as a child, and I’d heard similar jargon. The obvious differences of course laid in the presentation of the mystery, the gypsies were cold and frightening, and this woman burst with maternal love and affection. I felt very much like a small child in her presence, and it would have felt odd to not refer to this woman as a member of my family, Aunt or Grandma seemed more apt titles to her than stranger. What kind of product could she be selling? What service did she seek to provide?
I remembered the poem sung to me by the children. “Innocence is something that I have lost, but I will never have that back.”
She emerged into the dining room with a tray full of tea. “Innocence, yes. It is drummed out of us as we grow older, by well-meaning parents and teachers alike, and by the time we enter the real world as adults, we have been sapped dry of it. It is such a difficult thing to preserve. Fleeting and rare.”
The old woman began to pour my tea. I took it from her and she beamed at me.
“But,” she said, sitting down in a chair across the table, “It need not be lost. It need never be lost. It can be regained. You can have those things back, and can keep them forever, if you’d like.”
I did not once take a sip of my tea. “But how?”
She smiled again, and I saw something in the darkness of her eyes that resembled the night sky, and within it many stars. “The key is simply to never grow up.”
I was going to remark that by this time for me it was too late, and there was nothing that could be done to save me when I heard a series of voices from outside the window. I looked out to see the series of young, mournful faces looking at me from outside the stained-glass panes. They were singing again, their high-pitched chorus sad and eerie:
“Take heed, young sir, false prophets dwell upon those things straight from hell. You’ll want to scream, you’ll want to cry, but once she has you, you’ll never die.”
“Wicked brats! Demon hoodlums!” the woman cried, climbing from her seat and rushing to the window. The children fled the minute she stood.
“Who are they?” I asked her.
“Tormentors of mine, endless thorns in my side,” the old woman said and turned around to fix me again with the warmness of her smile. “They’re convinced I’m a witch. But don’t worry, they cannot harm us in here. And you’re wrong, anything that is lost can be found again. Wouldn’t you like something you’re missing?”
I thought of my son. I thought of Joann.
“I am missing many things,” I whispered.
The old woman pointed to a nearby hallway, and a set of stairs illuminated with a faint emerald light. “Go up into my attic. There is something there of mine that will help you. I want you to have it.”
Something you have lost…all talk of innocence and adulthood fled my mind as memories of those moments with my former wife flooded back to me. Those happier, poorer times in which money had not been a concern, and there’d only been the promise of new birth. We had our dreams and nothing else, and the stars promised to be our guides, not Wall Street or Stocks or Bonds, but each other and our million hopes. I eagerly rushed to the stairs, thinking that there was a promise to return to those days, to hold her in my arms again, and to have my son hold me as a hero in his eyes. Yes, this was innocence. This was perfection. I’d risk everything for it.
I ignored the many creakings of the steps below me, and the ominous flickering of the light overhead, rushing only upwards into the dark, and to the door to my salvation, the attic. I pushed on it, and emerged into a cobweb-ridden room of dust and decay. Old wood floors greeted me, and I felt for the first time since stepping foot into that cheery house, the monotone bleakness of gray reality. The room was filled with hundreds of dolls, porcelain and plastic alike, each staring at me with a thousand eyes. Some of them were in pieces rolling about on the floor, and some had bits of their faces shattered in after having been violently dropped, and some had no eyes at all.
In the center of the room, where light streamed in through an oval window was a small, brightly-colored box, coated in many years of grime and dust. There was a yellow star on its top, and as I neared it, I saw that it was a lid that could be opened.
Tentatively, I placed my hands on either side of the box and pulled the lid back on its hinges. There was a slight whir as the gears inside began to turn and a tinkling melody could be heard. A music-box, I thought. How is a music-box to help me regain those things I sought?
It was the last thought I would have in my current state, followed by the realization that within that box was a darkness so deep that it appeared to be an endless pit, a stygian void that threatened to swallow me whole. My mouth suddenly sealed shut, and my eyes remained fixed forwards. I saw before me as the room itself seemed to grow and expand beneath my dwindling gaze the faces of one of the many dolls in the room. The eyes were made of glass, though within them was panic and horror, and in its tiny porcelain hand, it held a lollipop with a red ribbon wrapped around its stick. I found that the blood-colored marble I’d brought with me stuck to my hand.
When the music was over, I was innocent, for I became empty.
There is nothing but darkness now. My spirit has joined the children outside, and we are bound here, trapped to this place. Our wh
ispers and songs of warning do no good, and continually there are souls drawn to Her presence who join us.
She is our mother, the eater of stars.
The Tea-Serving Doll
Mae Empson
Hikari sailed to the lumber town of Seattle aboard the tea-laden Miike Maru when she was four years old. “This will be a new life,” her father said. “Look at the fireworks,” her mother added, as they pulled into the harbor. On that day, she imagined that they would always be together, and that she would always look to her parents to guide her steps in this strange new place.
Only ten years later, in 1906, the rhythms of her parent’s routines seemed hopelessly old-fashioned to her. They rose early, and insisted that all chores be done long before sundown. “There is no hurry,” she argued, “we have electric light at night now.” Many of the houses in their wealthy merchant neighborhood in Nihonmachi—Japantown—had recently acquired this luxury.
“Some things should not be done after dark,” her mother insisted. Over time, her mother had shared many rules of this kind. Never whistle after dark, or a snake will come. Don’t cut your hair after dark, or ghosts will be able to enter your house. Don’t try on new shoes and clothes until the morning. Never cut your nails after dark, or you won’t be with your parents when they die, and it will happen sooner than it should have. “The night is cruel,” her mother warned.
Hikari thought it was ridiculous to be afraid of such things, and indulged in a midnight grooming session—trimming her hair and nails, and trying on new clothes—just to show that she was not afraid.
And so, when her parents died two months later in a boating accident and left her an orphan at fifteen, she had no one but herself to blame.
