Masked Indulgence

by Michelle Love

  Why the darkness of my melody?

  For the sorrow of the proud is dark,

  Why is gone down the streak of the day?

  For my young dreams could never be lark …

  Eino Leino (1878-1926), “Nocturne’

  Suomi (Finland), 1984 …

  The rail station loomed ahead of her, gothic, forbidding, inky with menace. The air tasted of metal, cold metal, that burned the inside of her nose and mouth.

  Three a.m. Lilith huffed out a long breath and enjoyed the satisfying crunch of the snow underfoot as she trudged along the road. Nobody awake. Darkness. The morning held a special kind of sadness. Her eyes flicked left and right, seeking movement, intruders into her solitude, a cat, and a night fox. Pollution from the streetlights bounced off the snow, casting an orange glow over the town, making the stars impossible to see.

  Her snow boots hit the curb, and she stumbled, knees banging, hands slapping down onto the asphalt. She glanced around, embarrassed, and quickly stood, ignoring the sting of her wounds. She brushed her gloved hands impatiently and strode with purpose towards the station. Excitement burned in her stomach.

  The station’s hollow silence was comforting. The last train to Helsinki had passed through hours ago. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, her heart thumping out a staccato beat of anticipation.

  One … two … three

  The pinprick of light began to grow through her eyelids and, as it moved towards her, lit her world pink. She marveled at the color for a beat and then, as she heard his whisper, opened her eyes.

  She smiled as she watched him glide towards her. His movements were graceful but off somehow, a tune missing a note, a badly cut film.

  It thrilled her.

  He spoke in a tongue she did not understand, soft but guttural, otherworldly, not human. The tone of it was comforting and yet underneath it, it was as if she could hear the screams of a thousand haunted souls—a scratchy sound, metal against rust.

  She felt his touch, cool, gentle. She pulled the scarf from her neck and, as he placed his fingertips on her throat, she began to hum. She had no name for the song; it just came to her whenever he was near. She watched him sway to the thrumming, dancing almost, with a childlike delight. Ecstasy. A strange, disjointed dance. Time stopped. As she sang her strange song, the pain would begin … no, not pain … an odd feeling as if something was being taken from her, something physical and yet not. A vital essence perhaps. She didn’t care. She loved him. It. Whatever he was.

  The frozen air made her cheeks flame and her lips pulse. Dawn hovered behind the pine forest, a pink haze. He took his fingers from her throat and placed his hands either side of her face. With his thumbs he closed her eyes; she felt his breath warm, delicious, on her face. Then, as ever, the cold swept in, and with a rush of overwhelming grief, she knew he had gone. Lilith sucked in a lungful of freezing air, attempting to head off the wave of lightheadedness that always followed their meeting.

  The ancient station master took no notice of the girl as he coughed his way onto duty. Night ghouls, he called them, the ones who came.

  Life was trickling onto the streets as she walked home, hitching her coat tightly around her. Market traders grumbled, ignoring her as she kicked errant vegetables from her path. Some of the more raucous men laughed as they watched the early morning drunkards pissing into the gutter, the warm yellow liquid cutting into the snow, steaming, draining down the street, freezing into rivulets. Two more streets and then she would pass the window of the Watchful One, the pretty dark-haired boy who watched her journey every night with curious eyes. Lilith liked that he watched her, that someone cared or wondered what she was doing. That someone acknowledged her existence—someone outside of her strange love, of course. The Watchful One, however, had asked nothing of her yet. She was glad of that too.

  He watched her every day. Insomnia had broken his spirit some months back. Doruk noted the time: 5:53 a.m. She had been gone for two hours as usual. He lit a cigarette and leaned his forehead against the window, trying to see around impossible corners. Thinking. If he could just leave this room. He sighed. He tapped the cast that extended up his leg and encased his hip. The day could not come soon enough that the blasted thing would be cracked and split away from him, and he would be free.

  The girl turned the corner onto his street. She was skinny; clearly, she almost never ate. Always the same clothes—T-shirt, jeans, boots. A tomboy. Strange eyes, too light, too haunted, troubled. Harsh purple lines beneath them, like bruises. Hair that never seemed to be brushed.

  He backed away from the window, shy, not wanting to scare her. She looked thinner today, almost faded. It had not been noticeable at the beginning, but lately, she seemed diminished. Oh, she looked as happy as she ever had on her return from the station, but even so there was less of her entity each day.

  He watched her gliding gracefully along the snowy path. She moved as if she were dancing, joy radiating from her skin. He sighed at her beauty. “Hello,” he whispered and to his shock, she stopped as if she had heard him call out, as if somehow the radiance inside her had heightened all of her senses.

  Sight, sound, and speech—all the clumsy senses, he called them. They were all just there, for most people anyway—he had decided long ago, and artless and ill-used. He preferred the other senses, some of them delicate and strong as a spider’s web; instinct, foresight, empathy. People didn’t listen enough to the own truths inside themselves; they were foolish, blind.

  Lilith went back to her tiny apartment and curled up on top of the comforter. It was cold, obviously, but she didn’t care—it made her feel closer to him, her ghost dancer.

  The Watchful One had spoken tonight; she had heard his whisper through the falling snow, and she had turned—but he had withdrawn into the shadows when she tried to see him, see his eyes. She wanted to stop, draw him out, tell him about her night, her ghostly friend, and share her joy with someone. She thought he might be like her; alone; solitary—open to the otherworldly scene she had discovered by accident that night all those months ago.

  It had been at her lowest point—the lowest of all her low moments. Even though she had escaped the horror of her family home in Salo. Her two elder brothers, twins, drunks and junkies, had destroyed her parents—they were her dad’s sons by his first marriage—and would have done the same to Lilith. That night they came home drunk and decided their seventeen-year-old half-sister was fair game. She heard them coming up the stairs, talking about her, calling to her. Her mom and dad had been waiting; her dad headed the boys off on the stairs, arguing with them, keeping them at bay. She knew they would shove him, sneer at him, ignore his pleas. Her mother pulled Lilith’s coat on over her pajamas and shoved a backpack into her hands. She kissed her daughter’s forehead, hot tears splashing down on Lilith’s skin.

  “Go, now. Don’t look back and don’t return until we tell you to. Everything you need is in this bag. I’m so sorry. I love you, little star.”

  She’d slid down the snowy rooftop of her home and had gone straight to the rail station. Her parents weren’t the only ones who’d made escape plans for her— she had been waiting until she was eighteen, a few months away yet—but now she knew exactly what to do. In the wood near the station, she found the tree with the red scrap of cloth hammered into its base and dug out the little metal box she’d hidden there. All her money she’d earned from the part-time job in the grocery store was there—plus some extra she’d stolen from her brother’s wallets when they were passed out drunk. She didn’t feel one iota of guilt about that.

  She bought a ticket, one way, to Kajaani in the center of Finland. She had no other reason that she’d read about the town was that six years previously; they had built a house there honoring her favorite poet, Eino Leino. The man wrote about nature, love, despair—all things that Lilith lived every day. His words made her feel so much less alone.

  When she arrived, she had known she had chosen her destination correctly. Even the
rail station was beautiful, an Art Nouveau-style building that was warmly lit and where she’d spent her first night, huddled down in one of the toilet stalls. In the morning, she’d aged herself with heavy makeup and scored bar work. By the afternoon, she’d rented her room in a shared house with housemates as private and reclusive as she was. She counted that day as the first of her new life.

  But during that first night at the station, she had slept fitfully, half-scared of discovery, half wracked with hunger. During the adrenaline of her escape, she hadn’t even thought about food or water, and now her stomach ached from hunger and her throat was raw and dry. She risked a trip to the machine she had seen in the main hall.

  Trying to appear nonchalant, she fed markka into the money slot and pressed the buttons. She tried to not meet anyone’s eye as she gathered a small feast of soda, potato chips, and candy and squirreled it back to her camp in the bathrooms. At that point, she cared little about hygiene as she shoveled food into her mouth and washed it down with the sweet, syrupy sodas.

  At three a.m., she figured she could risk some fresh air. All the sugar in the system had made her antsy, almost hyperactive. She slipped out of the door onto the platform. It was winter, the end of January, and most of the lights in the station were turned off. The last train had left hours earlier, and now only a skeleton staff remained— an old man sitting in a cold booth at the other, well-lit end of the platform. Lilith stayed in the shadows.

  She loved the night, the pure black darkness. While her schoolmates back in Salo had bemoaned the long winters, the dark nights, Lilith had loved them. It was an excuse, a way to be invisible.

  She got to the end of the platform and stepped down on the stony grassland. She stood for a long moment, taking in the cold air.

  And then she saw it … him. For a second, she thought she was either hallucinating, or it was a trick of the light; either way, it was moving irrevocably towards her and Lilith didn’t know whether to scream or run.

  In the end, she could do neither.

  Doruk knew that she was wherever she went home to now, but he still couldn’t sleep. He stood at the back window of his apartment, looking out over the small shared garden to the woods beyond. His keen eyes raked the landscape for any movement, and he smiled, grabbing his tape machine and microphone and switching it on.

  “A majestic swoop, woo-oo, over what was once open fields. Now there are factories, laboratories, and pockets of new houses. More light at night, fewer inky-black hunting grounds. The road, bathed in the orange glow of the streetlights, has fewer of the rowdy metal boxes the humans use than it did a few years ago. Occasionally a particularly noisy one screams through the silence; a thumpa-thumpa-thumpa beat rattles the night-world. Time to patrol, up a hill, a small river to the right, a field to the left.

  “A movement catches its eye. A water-rat? No, nothing. Gliding now at the top of the street, along to the church, somber and peaceful. The house opposite, curtains drawn but warm light behind them. The humans are having a secret meeting. Down to the poet’s house, overlooking the river. This time, definitely, food! A rat makes the mistake of pausing, and he’s toast. The owl dispatches him with no mercy. Replete, it completes the circuit and returns to the tree, to watch and protect.”

  He shut off the tape recorder and sighed. He had hundreds of hours of these tapes stacked on a shelf in his dad’s old room. Doruk’s father had been a collector too; of fairy stories and myths and legends. He had truly believed that most of them were real, too.

  “Take my word, son,” he often said, “history will prove me right. There’s more out in those woods than we know.”

  Doruk’s mother used to grin at Doruk and roll her eyes. She knew her husband couldn’t frighten her down-to-earth son with his tales, so she put up with it. Doruk used to make fun of his dad as much as anyone—all in good humor, of course—but something deep inside him believed him. He didn’t think it possible for humans to come up with these stories without some grain of truth to them.

  After that terrible day, the car crash that took both of them, Doruk had lived here alone. He would never forget that day. He was told his beloved mother had died instantly, but his father, rushed to the hospital, had lived long enough to tell his son, “I was right. They did this, Doruk. They caused the crash.” That’s why Doruk had believed in his father’s work all these years.

  He didn’t mind the solitude. His dad’s hefty life insurance meant he could live well enough for a long time, maybe even forever, without having to get a job, so his occupation instead was watching. Watching the day. Watching the night.

  Watching.

  Watching her.

  As his plaster cast was removed, Doruk felt the palpable relief of his skin being able to breathe for the first time in ages. His withered and wasted leg looked like a pale white work, and he grimaced. But he stood. He smiled at the sweet-faced nurse. “Thank you.”

  The nurse busied herself picking up the pieces of the broken cast and nodded at him, smiling. “Christmas Peace, Doruk.”

  He gave a start. He’d forgotten; it was Christmas Eve. “Christmas Peace,” he replied and smiled.

  Lilith had worked at the bar for as long as she could get away with it. Eventually, her boss, whom she’d liked a lot and who had adored her, asked her how old she was and where he should send her paychecks to. She never went back.

  She’d overheard one of the customers talking about how much she could make talking to men on the phone and had hung around their table, trying to understand what she meant. It became pretty clear. She’d listened long enough to find out who to contact and the day after her eighteenth birthday, the men came to install her phone, eyeing her lasciviously. She stared back at them, cool-eyed, until they grew uncomfortable.

  The dirty talk she could handle. She’d heard enough of it, working at the bar, sometimes aimed right at her, and she’d seen a couple of pornos on late night television. It amused her that she, a virgin, could bring these paying customers to orgasm just with the sound of her deep, purring voice and some well-chosen words. Some of them asked her to shout abuse at them while they jerked off and she would happily comply, screaming all of her frustration and hatred of her half-siblings— and of herself—at these anonymous men. They were her favorite clients—and the best payers because they kept coming back for more.

  Over the months, she’d whittled down her client list so that ninety-nine percent were those kinds of calls. Only the other one percent that still bothered to call wanted sex talk and Lilith gave the minimum she could muster. They never went unsatisfied.

  With the money she made, she could have moved to a nicer, bigger apartment closer to the town center where all the young people congregated and had fun living and laughing. But Lilith had no desire to be one of them. She liked her solitude, her books, and her little secret. She looked forward to the nights, visiting her love at the rail station.

  Lately, though, she began to question herself. What was she doing? This thing, whatever he or it was, wasn’t of this world. What possible good could it do to keep on seeing him? Yet the song he elicited from her was like an addiction, a shot of pure heroin through her veins.

  Tonight she felt it. A dragging inside her, a weariness. The wash of love was the same, his touch as gentle, and the ecstasy as real. But she felt a pull, a wasting away, and for once, she felt bereft for a different reason as if part of her had been taken without her permission. The world seemed less real, her brain not comprehending shapes that would normally be familiar to her. A couple of times she had to stop and get her bearings. The second time, she looked back and saw it. In the packed ice of the road, a smear of blood. No, more than a smear, a trail. Her trail. She calmly checked herself. No wounds. She walked a little farther, stopped and look back again. Blood.

  She stood for a moment, eyes closed, swaying just a little. Her mind whirled. When she opened her eyes again, the blood was still there. She turned her back on it and started to walk. Maybe I won’t go tomorrow,
she told herself, maybe instead I’ll get on a train, and go up to Christmasland, up to Korvatunturi, give her younger self the chance to do what she had never done. Be a kid for the night.

  She walked with her head up as much as she could tonight, looking in warm windows at Christmas scenes being played out. Finnish people loved Christmas Eve—it was the big event and everywhere she saw lit shapes hanging—stars, hearts, snowflake, trees. Colors and colors and colors and laughter. Decorations of tree bark and straw sat on the sills of the windows. Lilith stopped at one point and stared at the scene of a family eating dinner.

  She pushed the pain of the memory of her own family away and walked on.

  Doruk tottered down the path, the ice threatening to take his legs from beneath him. He gripped onto the fence and leaned on it to look down the street. She had just turned the corner at the end. He backed off, excited, nervous. He listened for her footsteps. She had reached the end of his fence.

  “Hello.” Soft. He bit his lip as soon as the word came out.

  She looked up at him startled, owl eyes blinking.

  “Hello.” Her voice was gruff, scratchy from misuse, rusty cogs grinding.

  He stepped forward. They looked at each other for a long moment. Everything he had planned to say evaporated. “It’s Christmas Eve.”

  A faint smile. “Yes.”

  “I’m Doruk.”

  She hesitated. “Lilith.”

  Doruk pushed his floppy black hair away from his glasses. “Hello, Lilith.” He shifted, nervous. “Would you like to come inside and have some glogi?”