“And do you know, Mother,” Lenore says, taking an apple from the wooden bowl near the divan, “Elizabeth is insisting her lady-in-waiting has to be Hungarian—”
“Lady-in-waiting—what’s that?” Mimi asks, deftly bringing the baby up to her shoulder for a burp, smoothing his back.
“A companion, mostly. Keeping track of social engagements—that kind of thing. Can I try for it?”
Mimi nods yes, and smiles. Lenore dashes across the room, puts her arms around her mother and the baby, trilling, “Thank you! Thank you!” Lenore takes up the baby, waltzes him gleefully around the room. “Ion, Ionny, your sister’s going to see the Empress!”
I see a trace of sadness in Mimi’s eyes. Lenore catches sight of it, too. “Oh, I’m going to miss you, miss all of you,” she says, and a little of her sparkle dims. “Of course, I might not get it, the Empress might not want me as her companion—”
Then Mimi stands up swiftly, reaching upward because Lenore is taller than she is. She lays her finger gently against Lenore’s lips. “Hush, don’t say or think such things. She may or may not choose you, but you have to try.” Lenore nods a little uncertainly. “Now, I wonder,” Mimi says, “I wonder what you should wear—something like the pale green gown Elizabeth wore this spring?”
“Oh, Mother, I’ve outgrown copying her dresses—”
“So you have,” Mimi sighs, “so you have.”
And I see now that at last Lenore has the mother she was meant to have, the mother she deserves . . . .
—the mother, my mind echoes.
And even now, I think, perhaps this vision of the future is nearer than you dream. Perhaps even at this moment, the seed is becoming a life.
And I thrust harder and harder up inside her, praying inwardly that my strength be contaged into her, that life might flow into life, make her a mother—
Above me, Mimi moans softly, hips drumming faster and faster against mine. I hear her whispering, saying, “Yes, yes. Deeper now, stronger my love, for I must make you see . . . .”
I feel her letting go, feel myself letting go. And all at once in that swift blackout that is the beginning of the end, I see deep inside her—
***
Mimi cries out. The dream-like vision begins to scatter . . . bright colors fading, as insubstantial as last night’s confetti swirling in a gutter. I open my eyes.
My wife’s dear face crumbles like a plaster of Paris mask that is suddenly crushed underfoot, and behind it—
(the mother . . . the hideous face of the mother)
—Anyeta’s ancient sly face looms.
Oh Christ, Christ! I mourn, shaking my head, feeling the giddy vision dissolve completely, leaving me sad, disoriented. And it’s Mimi I want. Where is she? My grief gives way to anger, and I think, Fucking whore! the sex brought her out!
“Ah,” she grunts, lurching upward, then back down again grinding me against her, and the movement reminds me of the jerky hop of some wizened toad.
Under the white lank hair, her onyx eyes are cold. Her hands on my chest feel leathery, and I glance down at her flesh sagging from the bones of the parted thighs, and I’m suddenly aware that her meager cunt is sharp, dry as stones in the desert.
The only moisture is a thin rill of blood leaking out of her hole. Something in me turns over; my blood or hers, I wonder. She churns and writhes against me. I cry out in pain, blood dribbles over my thighs, and I feel my cock shrinking.
“Shall I let you see her, let you see what’s left?” Anyeta’s wrinkled lips draw back grinning.
I turn away from the sight of her rotting brown teeth.
“You think she’s pretty? A little tired looking? It’s an illusion you fool! This! This is what you’re fucking!” she screams, riding me like some foul hag rocking on a broomstick, her white hair foaming around her scrawny shoulders.
An icy dread clutches me, and suddenly I remember the night in the tomb when I saw Zahara’s image melting, flickering around and through the withered face of the old sorceress-whore. There is no Zahara, she was sucked up over time, Mimi’s voice, Joseph’s voice cry out together, like dead echoes in a cold vault. “No Zahara, no Za—”
“No!” I shout in a paroxysm of terror.
“Yes!” Anyeta caws in triumph!
Now, in the blur of shifting shapes I see Mimi’s face—pallid but beautiful. Anyeta rides her, bony arms locked in a death grip around my wife. Mimi screams, a long quavering wail rising higher and higher.
Anyeta’s mouth opens wider and wider. I see the ring of fierce pointed teeth. Her huge red tongue rides out of the center of that cavernous black hole and she sucks at Mimi, consuming flesh, blood, licking the skin, layers of muscles from my wife’s face, her breasts—
I moan, and I see Anyeta turn her face up to mine. She snickers. Her black eyes glow with sickly shine, her rotting teeth are lined with blood, her fat tongue dripping.
“No, no—”
She dips her head again. I shield my eyes for a time, but her pull is inexorable, and I feel its drag, feel myself forced to look at the terrible commingling—
There is no Anyeta, I think. The sorceress waxes younger, fatter. There is no Mimi; I see her aging, turning forty, fifty, eighty . . . .to bones. There’s nothing left of Mimi but a hideous wraith, a skeleton with tortured eyes peering out from a white skull. Only her eyes still burn, and they will dim when her bones crumble into dust.
There can be no future, no cottage hearth. No child. My heart feels near to breaking; but her pain is unspeakable.
Lenore, I think, Oh sweet Christ, her childhood—her adolescent dreams, her life—will be stolen from her! Anyeta will suck up her youth until my daughter is no more than a pinch of gray ash swirling on a downdraft, scattered on the hot wind.
“No. No!” I suddenly scream, and my hands are around her throat, squeezing.
Anyeta’s eyes bulge in their sockets. Her tongue lolls between her thin lips, and in a flash, I remember, I remember! The she-demon is afraid of pain, afraid of death, and in my mind’s eye, I see Mimi slashing at her wrists to drive the sorceress deep inside, to keep the bitch at bay. My nails sink into the dirty wrinkled skin, drawing blood, and I push them deeper.
“Haaahhhhnnnn!” she croaks, seeing blood running down her sunken, bony chest, and dripping thickly over the deflated flaps of her shriveled breasts.
“Die, you bitch!” I say in a dark voice. “Mimi’s as good as gone you say? Then die!”
She bucks and rocks, her hands scrabbling madly, beating and flailing around my forearms. She tries to jerk backward out of my grasp but the blue veins and corded tendons on my arms are standing up like thick ropes and my hands squeeze, squeeze—
***
I hear a choking sound, deep coughing, rapid breathing and wild gasps filled with terrible pain. Dark hair bobbing like a mop being shaken up and down.
Mimi twists and writhes above me. My hands, throbbing and twitching, drop away.
“You know,” Mimi rasps, the mask—thin and fading, but there—is in place again. “Oh God, you do.” She sinks feebly against my chest. I put my arms around her back and, mourning a vision that never was, can never be, we hold each other a long time.
***
“Free me,” Mimi says, sitting up slowly, “what little is left. There isn’t much time. Don’t let her win, don’t send me into that eternal torment. Christ. Please. You’ve got to end it. For my sake. For Lenore’s. For your own.”
I sit up, sighing. And at last, I know, I’ve come to it. My eyes brim with tears, my hands shuffle and skitter in my lap aimlessly, not wanting to get on with what she’s asking of me.
“Mimi,” I steal a glance at her. “Please . . .”
She doesn’t answer, only gets up. She begins to get dressed.
I see Joseph’s ring, the deep graven Germanic J is dark against the gold. Imre, my son, I imagine he says, his voice a well of sorrow that tells me he knows how hard this is. Gentling is the only way.
&nbs
p; -56-
Up in the loft there are canvas summer tents, Lenore’s outgrown toys. We don’t let her go up there. It was the place Mimi hid the copper box that held the hand of the dead. My wife and I tell Lenore it’s dirty, dangerous. And it is, I think, drawing a deep breath, my chest shuddering: There are scraps of lumber, leather bands, spikes that can be hammered thin—the raw materials that are the black heart of the gentling box.
There’s enough, I think as I look around, my testicles constricting, to make a dozen of the damned devices.
A little while later I come down the stairs, my arms laden. My boots make a vacuous clatter on the steps. In the stove the embers shift, knocking down against the grate; and hearing the noise, I nearly pitch forward with sudden terror, then catch myself.
Mimi hums softly, braiding her hair. She paints her lips, and uses rouge to make a bloom on her cheeks. Her face, I think, has never looked so lovely.
I lay out the awl, the drill, the hammer alongside the rest. Then I sit down tailor fashion, and I begin my work.
In my mind’s eye, I see the wild horses running swiftly over the honey colored open field. A skinny black-haired boy with a gold hoop in his ear runs at them, arms waving, white shirtsleeves billowing in the wind, wanting them to stampede, crying out I love you, I love you, I didn’t know what it was!
Close by, a shackled horse nickers in pain, then lurches onto its feet. The blood drips in a runnel down its nose. Its eyes are dead and dumb.
I see hair and metal and leather and blood. I feel a wave of faintness, my head reels, and the black leather cap I’m sewing falls from my numb hands into my lap with a heavy fflump. I blink back my tears, pick it up again.
What’s the matter with you? Old Joseph says, his voice merging with that of my father, afterward they don’t remember. No more demons, the wildness blotted out forever. They’re bilovem. Free. And they find peace, gentle dreamless sleep and it’s endless, endless, endless . . . .
***
“Line them up,” Mimi says, and I twist the outer wooden band clockwise so its holes match those I drilled on the inner circle.
“Put them in,” Mimi says, her voice a little hard.
With a tremor, I pick up the spikes I hammered and insert them one at a time. They feel greasy in my damp fingers.
Mimi sits on the bed. Her hand is moist in mine. The ugly leather cap is tight against her skull, mashing down her hair so her head seems to have taken on an odd distorted shape. The wooden bands rise over her brow like an evil mockery of a saint’s halo. I swallow. I cannot bring myself to look at the metal spikes denting her pale skin, at the honed glinting points I sharpened until they were needle thin. I stare at her lap, at the hem of her skirt, at the tips of her velvet slippers.
I’m not a child anymore, I think, and oh God oh fucking Christ, I know what this is. My tears are hot and thick, running down my cheeks. I can hardly see, my chest is heaving with my broken sobs.
“Imre,” she says, “I believe I’ll be with Joseph and with Constantin. They’re very close now, and it is to them you send me.”
“I can’t, I can’t!” My whole body begins to tremble. “It’s death, it’s your death. Don’t make me,” I whisper.
“Think of the torment; of confusion and pain that’s worse than death—”
“It’s not even death! It’s unbeing!” I cry out. “Nothingness, nothing . . . !”
“No,” she shakes her head. “There is heart, spirit—”
“Heart and spirit are nothing without the mind!”
She gives me a thin smile, as if she had some inner secret. “Then tell yourself it’s freedom, Imre. An eternity of freedom.” She tilts her head back, gazing at a horizon I cannot see. “Bilovem,” she says.
The sound of an anticipation I cannot understand gives a lilt to her voice. I drop my head into my hands and moan.
“Look at me,” she says, and my wet eyes lift sluggishly, meet hers. There’s no fear in hers, only a hunger for peace. “Give me what I seek.”
Her body is very straight. She holds her shoulders back, her chin high. Under her dark brows her eyes have gone huge and staring, as if she were seeing into another world beyond this one.
Her hand presses mine—just once—my fingers spasm and jerk, but her touch is as light and free as a the wing of a moth.
I kiss her lips. Her mouth moves, saying, “I love you, Imre,” against mine. Her small face is wet with my tears. I cannot look into her eyes—shining violet eyes I know will soon go dead, dumb—
“Gentling,” she says. “It just needs to be done quick.” She echoes my father’s long ago words. “Then there’s no pain.”
And then, my hands come up shaking. The cold metal flanges—like the outstretched wings of dead moths—are between my fingers, my knees have gone weak and watery.
“Mimi—” I stop. There are no words in me to say all that my heart holds. My fingers ache and throb bitterly against the steel flanges.
“Close your eyes, my love,” she whispers softly, “and free me now. Quick . . . ”
“Quick,” I echo my beloved.
Then, God help me, with a single twist I turn the screws and sink the hellish bolts deep in her brain.
EPILOGUE
Gentling. It’s near dawn now. I sit on the bed. I’m still holding her hand. I’m talking to her, telling her I love her, I want her. She doesn’t answer. She is so still.
I took off the hideous cap, and it was as hard to remove those dangerous spikes from her brain as it was to force them in. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that sickening sound like a knife being pulled from the wet meat of a melon. I shiver. “Christ,” I whisper.
I sponged the blood from Mimi’s cheeks, and every now and then I carefully stroke her soft dark hair. I combed it down over those two deep holes so I don’t have to see them again.
“Oh Jesus. Gentling,” I say aloud. I glance at Joseph’s ring on my finger. It’s pale blonde in the gray light. She felt him and Constantin waiting for her—an arm’s length away. I do not.
I sit with the bloodied cap on my head, the black leather pressing my scalp, the metal points digging into my skin. I’m trying to scan the future, see beyond the earth. Mimi did it; she saw the peace beyond this time. But there’s nothing for me, no future of any kind without her, I think, dropping my chin toward my chest. On the outer edge of my vision I can see the wooden circles; a jolt of terror courses through me, my heart jerks in a painful throb.
I have a power I dare not use and do not want. My gaze flits across the room and I catch sight of the vile charm, the blackened hand lying on its bed of maroon velvet. The hand has a claim on me, I think, and unless I make certain there’s no mind, nothing left to churn, I face eternal torment.
Don’t think about the gentling, just do it! I tell myself. But I’ll never have the strength to turn those screws I think, and in my mind’s eye, I see Mimi, the light gone from her eyes, the blood that dripped and ran in ragged red lines down her face, trickled over her lips.
In my imagination I see myself, lowering my head like a bull about to charge, then running full tilt and slamming into the wall. The spikes are driven deep into my skull. The caravan rocks heavily on its springs.
And then?
Then my daughter will find my body and her mother’s. And if she creeps in silent pensive mood to gaze on us, will she find a box? A box with a hand? She will. And it will sing its siren song, and if she touches it, she will feel that low sick power, the sensation of slamming your fingers. Hot and cold and dizzying. She will be repulsed. And attracted. Again and again. Poisonous knowledge will seep into her brain.
I look at the lumpy scar on my wrist, like a thick worm fastened to my skin, my heart goes cold and I think Oh good Christ, she’ll claim it. If you’re gone, Lenore will claim it! Anyeta will win.
I lurch to my feet and rip the device from my head. It goes skittering across the room, the cap spins. The spikes fall out of the oak circles and roll back and forth on
the floorboards, chattering like bones against the wood.
Burn it, a voice says in my head. Burn all of it. Lenore doesn’t have to know about any of this, doesn’t have to see her mother’s body, broken, bleeding on the bed.
My gaze lights on the copper box, and my heart quickens with savage delight when I think of the evil charm consumed by fire. The livid scar on my wrist throbs. I ignore the pain. Instead, I begin emptying the oil lamps one by one. The fumes rise around me. In a high glee I douse the floor, splash the liquid over curtains. I race up the stairs, duck under the low ceiling. I soak the loft, hearing the oil dripping through the interstices, splattering wetly on the floor below. From downstairs, the sound of moaning rises like a dirge from the box. A banshee wail drills louder and louder when I near the mummified hand. Imre, oh Imre! it weeps. I shut my ears, drenching the flesh with greasy kerosene. I move on through the kitchen and finally return to the bed.
I look at Mimi for the last time. I want to believe, I hope she’s with Joseph and Constantin—
And then I see it. I utter a little cry, the oil lamp falls from my hand with a thump. From far off I hear it gurgling faintly.
There is a small light, a golden spark blooming in the center of my wife’s chest. Her heart, I think, mesmerized. Her heart is surrounded by rays of dancing light. Then I see hands—pale as milk—reaching for her.
A hint of ghostly grin materializes in a round face. The short squat body of a tubby man spills like moonlight into the room. I see the glimmering opal of a gaunt face dominated by piercing eyes.
“Constantin! Joseph!” I cry out.
Constantin turns and smiles at me—for just a second, I think—but their pallid gleaming faces are fixed on Mimi. Joseph reaches down inside her. Suddenly the yellow spark is a beaming mote in his hand, and then it’s as if I’m watching her climb up and out of herself. Her face is young, the face of a child, a limber elf.
The Gentling Box Page 32
