That old man. He'd traveled for years from end to end of the town, walking very slowly, and periodically he'd stop, take a piss, or drink a coffee, and then move on. He'd never cared whose stoop he pissed on. He'd never cared whose coffee he drank. He took cups right out of people's hands, and when you looked into his eyes, you saw his lack. Look at him: an abyss.
There was only one man in town who'd not joined the funeral band, and that man was the bookseller.
The bookseller walked toward the house to pay his respects to the old man, who'd been a customer of the bookstall for years. Rather other than a customer: he'd been a person who stood at the corner of the stall and petted the books, though he could no longer read them. Heartless, the old man had been left without a story, and though he sought one, he couldn't find the one he'd been born with.
The bookseller knew the dead man's goats too. They liked hide glue, and often needed to be chased away, but he allowed them entrance when the old man came. All the way to the house, he was accompanied by trotting goats, insisting on vengeance.
They wanted the widow, and they wanted Mr. Doornail, and they wanted to trample the house down to the cobblestones and eat it up.
This was the nature of goats: loyal, vicious, insubordinate. The goats were a herd and they accompanied the bookseller, informing him of his need for knives and witchcraft. The bookseller didn't understand how to speak with goats, however, and so he came bearing a bouquet of flowers instead, a present for the youngest daughter of the house.
The bookseller, it may be mentioned, was a fool to imagine that the youngest daughter could be wed. She was, of course, the property of Mr. Doornail, and any husband of hers would be Mr. Doornail's property as well.
But the bookseller was only a man, no expert in magical mortality, and the goats were not his army. On they came, over the cobbles, fifty furious goats on their way to the villa. They missed the old man, and the sound of his daughters shouting in the upper story of the house was enough to make them want to climb the roof and remove the roof tiles, drop through the roof beams, and eat the universe.
Goats wanted things just as much as anybody else, perhaps more. Goats had no concerns about monsters. Goats were equal to the task at hand. They'd listened to the house, and they knew where the keys were.
They came for Mr. Doornail, hoof by hoof.
Who among us has not tried to keep goats out of the house? Goats cannot be kept from their desires. If a goat wants to come down the chimney, it does so. If a goat wants to roost in the eaves, it does so. If a goat wants to eat an automobile, it will eat the automobile, even if that automobile is a Model T Ford, and painted white, with tin cans trailing behind to announce a wedding. The goats will eat the cans. The goats will eat the streamers. The goats will move into a house like bridesmaids who've murdered a rival bride, and there will they stay.
“Come lace me, wretched sisters!” Bernardine's eldest daughter shouted down the stairs. Anguish was thirty-nine. Who'd name a daughter Anguish? A mother who named each daughter after the pains of her labor.
The second eldest daughter, Arch, came from her own bedchamber. “She made me dye even my gloves black,” she said and flexed her illegally lacquered red nails.
The third and fourth daughters, Ache and Fever, followed, both grim. They came from the dye pots, their newly blackened hair parted in the center, twisted into coils at the napes of their necks. All the clothing had been dyed in the bathtub in the yard, the black poured into the soil. Next year, the lettuce would be blue, and the kale gray. The hair was dyed in the sinks, and even the cracks in the porcelain had gone to black.
The daughters’ dresses were still damp. Whenever they sat, they left shadows of themselves, shadows shaped like ghosts, the curve of bustle and bone, hips caged by black brocade and wet wool stockings. The dye turned their skin, and each of the daughters was now dove-colored from throat to thighs, striped with inky lines and speckled with daubs of dark. They were too hot, and too wet. The daughters each had a trousseau of pale pink silk, embroidered with tiny butterflies and birds, but none had worn any of the pieces. A bad old tomcat named Bite nested in the trunks of knickers and petticoats, chemises and soft lace brassieres, purring triumph.
“Why black?” lamented Ache. “We'll be worse off than we were.”
“She wants us to be proper,” said Fever. “We have a reputation to protect.”
“We have her reputation to protect,” Arch corrected.
The fifth daughter came into the room. She was still young and beautiful, and she was sure that was all that mattered. She was only twenty, and of the names, she'd gotten the best one, Tear. She was convinced that her trousseau, at least, would be used.
Tear wore her green dress beneath her black dress, tissue silk embroidered with blades of grass and beaded with golden crickets, but this was a Hadeian household now. The black dress had previously been lavender muslin and embroidered with orange blossoms. Now it had gray flowers, and all that work was in vain. She was melting beneath the layers, but she would not surrender. Tear fingered the lacy edge of her greenest petticoat and thought about a spring wedding. She thought about the man she'd met, the one with the pompadour and the floral cologne, the one with the mouth that spoke secrets into her ear.
He was a secret himself, he with his volumes, he with his vest.
The five sisters stood in a line, and each sister pressed her foot into the spine of the next sister, and pulled her corset strings.
What could create a woman like their mother? It was hard to say. Perhaps she'd been made with a chisel, her body wrested from the shale that surrounded the estate. Their mother was lava encased in lace. There was nothing to be done about her. The daughters were prisoners of spite and spiders. It was the mother's house, and she was the law.
“It is no reputation we are protecting,” muttered Ache. “It is only Mr. Doornail.”
“Only? Mr. Doornail is more than an only. In eight years of mourning, I'll be forty-seven,” said Anguish.
“And instead of taking care of your own children, you'll be taking care of Mr. Doornail,” said Fever. “That will be your task when Mother dies. You know it will.”
“She'll never die,” said Anguish. “Just look at her. And look at Grandmother.”
Indeed. The grandmother, who lived in the attic, and whose name was Maria Josepha, had little business still being alive, but she persisted, her hair twelve feet of silver white glory. She was tiny and fragile, but she carried knives in her belt. Sometimes she braided her hair and hung by it to prove her mettle, and when she did, she smiled an evil smile.
She had six gold wedding rings, amethyst bobs for her ears, giant necklaces of emeralds. Her jewels weighed her down and she refused to make a will. The old woman danced in a witchy circle in the top story, and her hair trailed behind her, picking up dust. Floors below her, the servants looked up and sighed at the sound of her clicking heels.
She was strong enough to kill anyone with her braids alone, and, in fact, she'd killed six men that way in her life. A hundred and twenty-two years, and she'd gotten weary several times. No man imagined he'd be strangled in his sleep by the braids of his wife.
Though he should have.
No man ever imagined his heart might get fed to a monster.
Though he should have.
Now she left her hair loose. One of her husbands had called the hair her glory. It wasn't. It was the mane of a wild white horse. Her jewels came from all the men, and from broken bottles too. She wore glass as well as she wore emeralds. She still had all her teeth.
Mr. Doornail was the only one who'd ever been strong enough to love her. In the attic the great grandmother put on her amethyst bobs. Her hair unfurled behind her like a train.
Who among us has not tried to keep an elderly relative in the house? They cannot be kept in. They make their way into the streets, buy luxurious provisions without their purses, throw oranges at newsboys, swear at police. They find new loves in the form of other elde
rly lost souls, and then they marry strangers in the courthouses, and all the while, their children hunt, unable to capture them. The elderly, like monsters, like bats, will not be caged.
Some people thought that Bernardine was a monster. Perhaps she was. Though she'd fed her own husband's heart to Mr. Doornail, she had a perverse desire to deny the monster now. There were all these daughters, and none of them were wed. She would certainly not marry again. She wanted more power, more of something, a reward for the difficulty of finding men for her horrible daughters. The daughters were nothing nice. The men in the town were nothing nice either. They ought to offer gifts, money, land. Instead, they averted their eyes when she passed, unless they required a spell.
Mr. Doornail was beginning to wonder about its next meal. It was beginning to call to men, to send out the scent of perfume, to bypass Bernardine, who disliked the bypassing. The locks were sound and the chains were strong, and Bernardine imagined she controlled everything. She imagined her spells were solid.
They were not. No spell ever is.
Who among us has not tried to keep a daughter in the house? They slip out of the cracks in the windows, slither out through the bottoms of the doors, and everywhere, everywhere, there are futures waiting to meet them in dark corners, present them with flowers, kiss their throats. As for virginity, well. If you live in a village such as this one, you know it's all a game of pretend in the end, the insistence that only a virgin can be a proper bride in white. We all know those spells too, the ones for making something look like something else.
Anguish had her own lover in the house, and whose business was it that her lover was the assistant cook who stole meat and salt and fat, who made feasts in the village for all the orphans and all the cats? It was no one's business but Anguish's own that she often knelt in the kitchen with her knees in flour and sugar, spending afternoons with her tongue under a girl's apron, her fingers pressed into hips like she was kneading dough. Anguish could fit each of her kneecaps into a serving spoon, and her skin had been pressed with rolling stamps, embossed with the flowers that normally would decorate tea cookies.
Anguish was not the least bit lonely, witch's daughter though she was. Her mother's spell had applied only to men. To anyone who was not a man, Anguish was permeable. There was no shortage, not for this house's daughters. This was a house of eighteen women in total, and none of them were meant to be the wives of men, with the lone exception, perhaps, of Bernardine, who had neatly rid herself of her husband. Fever, Ache, and Arch felt just as Anguish did. There were women all over the village, visiting scholars, a traveling salesman in a suit who was, beneath the serge, not as he appeared. There were persons in the village who had no gender at all, persons whose actuality fell outside the edges of the spell. Fever cared not for love at all, but for the heavens, and at night she looked out her bedroom window and numbered the stars, plotting the course of eclipses. And then there was Tear, the only one who wanted anything to do with husbands. Her sisters looked at her and grimaced. That green dress. That hair falling out of its braid. The rest were peaceably living in this house, their affairs their own, the spells of their mother nothing to do with them.
The spell was old fashioned and foolish, as spells often were, deceived by tongues and whispers outside window frames, deceived by love letters wrapped around the scaly ankles of doves. Who among us hasn't tried to use a spell such as this one?
Mr. Doornail sent a scent of sea, of fried dough and pickled peppers, a waft of salted chocolate, and the grandmother danced.
Mr. Doornail liked hearts and it liked tears, and it liked Maria Josepha, because long ago, she'd met it on a beach and drawn it up out of the surf, a terrible thing contained inside a copper vessel covered in barnacles. Someone had thrown the monster into the deep, but monsters float.
The grandmother was a young girl then, in a white dress embroidered with eyeballs. She had never been at all nice. She did her own needlework, and she was training in secret with the witch of her own village, training to be trouble.
Maria Josepha had unusually large eyes, a pointed face like the face of a fox, and hair the color of midnight. She kept her hair in a corona to cover the fact that she'd stolen some stars from a neighboring witch's workshop to decorate it.
When she found the copper vessel she rapped her little fist smartly on the exterior.
“What are you in there, then?” she asked it, and smiled when it whispered back at her.
“A wonder,” said the thing inside the vessel, and that was all Maria Josepha needed to know to go to her father, borrow his hatchet, and slice open the soldering that had kept the monster dry in its voyage.
Mr. Doornail emerged hungry, ate Maria Josepha's father's heart, and then she was quite at liberty, a daughter on the loose.
“We'll live here together, you and I,” she said, taking down her braids. Mr. Doornail had been quite comfortable enclosed in the central courtyard of the house, for a hundred years and more, periodically hungry, periodically fed on husbands’ hearts. There were plenty of husbands and there were plenty of hearts. Mr. Doornail had grown fat and lazy there behind the door, comforted by bones, and the house grew to accommodate it.
Now it was hungry again.
Mr. Doornail used one tentacle to peer through a keyhole, at the daughters. The monster pressed itself to the wood, experimentally. It called out into the house, swelling, but the locks held.
“I hear it,” said Ache.
“It's calling again,” said Arch. “Horrid.”
A tentacle quested beneath the door like a worm after a storm. The daughters shuddered, and Anguish rang the servant bell.
Outside, the goats marched in formation, making their way, bringing the bookseller with them. Or perhaps the bookseller brought them. In any case, there was a rattling in the earth, and a trampling, the running of the bulls or a religious pilgrimage, but seen through the eyes of the goats, sideways light, glittering warfare. The goats trotted toward the villa, each one with its own plans.
The sisters trooped down the stairs. The house smelled of garlic, which one of the servants had festooned over everything, perhaps to mask the smell of the corpse, perhaps as an insult to their mother.
Bernardine wasn't a vampire. Witches paid garlic no mind, nor lilies, nor stakes. It wasn't as though the house had ever smelled nice. The monster exuded a particular odor.
Anguish held her handkerchief to her nose, and tried not to look at the body of the old man. This old man had left nothing to anyone. He'd eaten his holdings at some point in the last years, coin by coin, paper bill by paper bill, and then shat it all into the yard. It was still buried out there, and no one wanted to retrieve it.
The five daughters sat down across from the flat old man, on their designated formal sofa, the one upholstered to itch, the one with no swan's-down. They felt humid and dark as storm weather, waiting for the town to come and pay them respect.
Mr. Doornail waited too.
Tear had climbed out of her bedroom window one night and run across the rooftops until she saw her future husband below her in the street, selling books at a stall, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a pair of thick wire-framed glasses, a vest made of paisley silk. There, she thought. There is my husband.
“Look up here,” she called, and he looked. She lifted her skirt to show first her ankles, then her knees, then her thighs, and then she tucked the skirt between them to show him the plump shape of her ______. The man's eyes widened.
“Who are you, then?” he asked.
“The witch's littlest daughter,” Tear said, and toyed with her schoolgirl braids. She pretended to be rather nicer than she was. She was not so nice. She'd been in her mother's workshop and eaten a great deal of a marzipan that could turn her into an owl. If she merely spread her skirts, she'd be able to fly down to him, but she did not. It was no good to reveal all of one's skills on a first meeting. She didn't want to frighten him. She could see that he was a man of good breeding, and his stall was fu
ll of books with fine leather bindings. He had a horse of his own, and his family owned a large house with marble floors. He was not only a bookseller. He was a man worthy of her time.
She lifted her skirt an inch higher and showed him a set of bloomers decorated with slender green serpents, each one embroidered with silk floss and lifelike enough that they seemed to slither.
Months had passed since then, and Tear had been waiting patiently for a proposal. Not for mourning. She did not have time for this.
The grandmother burst from her bedchamber and ran down the stairs, a tiny thing made of fury. She stamped, and the sisters sighed.
“Grandmother is dancing again,” said Fever.
“Grandmother enjoys the funeral band. It kept me awake last night until my eyeballs were parched,” said Ache.
“I haven't slept in ten years,” said Anguish, with superiority. “Put on a cloak, Tear. I can see the edge of your green. You think it's a secret, but it's not.”
“I have to have something for myself,” said Tear.
“I'm wearing a red ribbon,” said Ache.
“Where?”
Ache smiled and refused to answer. The rest of the sisters snorted. Ache had always been Ache, and they had always been themselves.
“Grandmother cannot be loose again,” Tear announced. “She'll damage our reputation. None of us will ever find husbands.”
Her sisters looked at her. She was the only one with a reputation. She was the only one who wanted a husband. The rest had decided this was not a viable plan. They had no interest in the care and feeding of Mr. Doornail, and they thought their sister was a fool to imagine her husband's heart would not be used for dinner. Tear was a romantic, and the rest of the sisters were pragmatists. They were well accustomed to working around the difficulties of spells.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 54
