by Allyse Near
While entering the school chapel during break, Isola passed Sister Marie Benedict in her old-fashioned habit. The nun jangled as she walked, and Isola couldn’t decide if the rhythm came from her old bones scraping in lube-less sockets or from the clatter of rosary beads looped around her liver-spotted neck. Catching Isola’s gaze, Sister Marie hastily crossed herself.
Isola was alone, breathing the musty candlewax and angel-dust air, inhaling the scent of sweat from a thousand past hands clasped tightly in prayer, dirt rubbed from the knees of sinners. Isola went to look at the saints’ portraits on the chapel walls; daubed white faces turned heavenward, flanked by Raphaelite angels in full crusade garb, swords flaming from the hilt.
The school’s namesake adorned the hallways; the frail Irish girl, only fifteen, holy in her portraits and decapitated in her grave. Dymphna was the patron saint of princesses and the mentally ill – there was a lovely dichotomy at work there, and she was one of the very few things Isola liked about religion, the other being the chapel. Even at her loneliest, Isola somehow felt the painted girl on the walls was on her side.
Someone had attached a sticky-note to the frame of St Dymphna’s largest portrait. Isola peered closer. Written in a speech bubble, as though the painted girl was beseeching any student that wandered upon her, ‘Hey girl! Don’t lose your head!’
She giggled, and the sound echoed, a haunting. No wonder Sister Marie had crossed herself upon eye contact. Isola made sure not to dip her fingers into the tiny pool of holy water on the way out; if it didn’t acid-burn her skin off, it’d at least zap her good. A static charge instead of a lightning strike. Fair warning.
The bell rang, spurring a flurry of activity in the corridors, and Isola was heading to class when something black caught her eye on the third floor. A molten, tarry substance was seeping under the door of the unused bathroom. Oblivious girls stepped in it, but it did not splash or ripple; instead it merely trickled closer to Isola.
The light flickered in the hallway.
The masses of blue-clad girls were swirling, funnelling into the classrooms, while Isola stood stock-still, a pebble unmoved in a brook.
She waited until the stragglers had dispersed, then cracked open the bathroom door and remembered why it went unused. Dank and gloomy; the walls were graffitied with declarations of love, accusations hurled at other girls, and crude cartoons of the nuns. There was a great rusty bin on the wall (an old-fashioned incinerator for ‘sanitary purposes’), which smelled smoky even though it was never switched on. The ugly neon light in the room flickered too, casting horror-movie lighting upon the damp floors and the two figures in the room.
The woman in black stood with her back to Isola, gazing at herself in the spotted metallic mirror until she met the reflection of Isola’s eyes.
‘Ruslana!’ Isola said in surprise.
Dramatis Personae
RUSLANA: The third prince. A Fury and a fierce warrior, whose promises to Isola are as solemn as blood oaths.
‘Hello, Isola.’
The light bulb flickered like moth wings. Ruslana was an entity of the dark, and the light was clever enough to avoid her – even the electrical kind.
Of her six brother-princes, Ruslana was the most frightening, the most powerful. She seemed human enough, until closer inspection. Dark eyes sewn-in deeply, like pebbles fetched from the bottom of the ocean. Talons in place of fingernails. Coarse black hair she never combed, perched in a high braid. Eyes lined heavily in black, and faintly tattooed forearms. Berry-black lips, razor-edged, capable of severing a limb. Coloured jewels studded her earlobes and weapons were hidden all over her body, contoured to her shape.
She had a great oil-spill of a cloak; the edges crept about like autonomous shadows, enfolding everything they came across. She had once shown Isola a picture of the Furies in the old Greek books; bird-like crones who killed men solely because of their Y chromosome. Ruslana had a more particular purpose.
And now she stood there in her dark garb, harnessed waist, the skirt split to the thigh and the silver breastplate echoing the warrior. Not a spectre, because she had never been human, but a spirit of women’s vengeance.
But even she wasn’t exempt from Alejandro’s rules.
None of Isola’s secret brothers ever visited her at school, no matter how nervous she was about an upcoming speech, or how much they wanted to see her trip hurdles in the Autumn Athletics Carnival. Alejandro had put his foot down long ago – her life with brothers and her life without would remain resolutely separate.
‘She cannot hope to fit in,’ he’d said to them at the time, ‘if we help her stand out.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Isola tried not to sound too excited. It couldn’t be good news, after all, to warrant this unprecedented visit, but her heart still dropped when Ruslana sighed heavily and lowered her hood. The night cloak swirled around her before settling into even deeper darkness.
‘It’s about that girl,’ said the Fury in her coffee-grinder voice. ‘Alejandro showed me to the body.’
‘Did you find out what happened to her?’
Ruslana nodded solemnly. ‘The birds know,’ she said. ‘They have been spreading it to the fae, and the faeries were very, well, excited to tell me.’
‘Sounds about right,’ scowled Isola. They really could be wretched creatures; sometimes they seemed too pleased when terrible things happened . . .
‘Oh, don’t hate them, Isola,’ Ruslana gently scolded. ‘I know they’re overdramatic little things, but I don’t think they’d lie about this. It could be very well embellished, though.’
‘Tell me.’
‘There’s a witch,’ said Ruslana, ‘in Vivien’s Wood. Not a human – some kind of malevolent creature. They said she’s not been there long, but she loves music, and all the birds in the woods have fallen silent – hiding because they’re afraid of her. The witch kidnapped a girl with a beautiful voice and kept her in a cage, forcing her to sing for company. When the girl finally lost her voice, the witch left her to die.’
Ruslana leaned back further, crossing her impossibly long legs. She didn’t know it, but she had fallen into the storyteller’s cadence, altering her speech like Mother used to during her nightly performances in Isola’s room. Of course, that was a very long time ago.
‘All the birds had been listening to the girl sing for weeks, maybe months. When her songs ended, they gathered around her cage and offered to bring her seeds and beetles so she might survive until she was rescued. But she told them, “Please, pluck out my eye, and take it to my father. He is a man of magic, and he will be able to use it.”
‘The birds argued and argued, but she croaked in her bloodied, ruined voice, “You must take my eye to my father, so he can see what I have seen. Then he will know who killed me.” So the sparrows and ravens plucked out the girl’s right eye with their razor-sharp beaks, and in pity they pecked at the skin of her wrists, until they found the taut strings carrying the blood, and plucked them up like earthworms. She bled out quickly, half-blind and voiceless, and her eye was carried back to her father, the King of a small and poor county. He cried for his daughter, but he thanked the sparrows, and summoned the court shaman to perform the ritual that would allow him to see what the eye had seen. And reflected in the iris he saw the forest witch, who was also his first wife, the old Queen of the small, poor county – his daughter’s mother. He saw her string their child in the tree, saw her force their child to sing her life away.’
Ruslana tapped her talons against the cracked porcelain sink, looking terribly despondent.
Isola frowned; it was a heart-wrenching story, as all untimely girl-deaths are, but the towering Fury had heard it all before and worse. What was it that made this particular incident have such an effect? ‘What is it, Ruslana?’
The Fury crossed her lean arms over her bodice, eyes downcast. ‘It’s too close,’ she murmured after a long moment. ‘She died in Vivien’s Wood . . . I don’t understand how I could have miss
ed it.’
‘You’re not responsible for every girl in the world.’
‘I am for you. I shouldn’t have missed this. I should have sensed her pain.’
A tiny tapping at the glass jolted them both. Ruslana’s cloak had inked out the window, and she pulled the slippery material to heel, exposing the sunlight again. She went and cracked open the window. A minuscule bauble of pink light fluttered in, alighting on the Fury’s shoulder.
‘Did you tell her?’ it squeaked breathlessly.
Dramatis Personae
ROSEKIN: The fifth prince. A smart-mouthed faerie with a taste for dramatics.
‘Isola? Don’t you think it’s exciting?’ Rosekin went on, beaming. ‘A murder, right on our doorstep!’ The bright bubble of light had abated, and the miniature girl-figure stood, clinging onto Ruslana’s black braid. ‘It’s like one of those scary stories,’ the faerie added, not bothering to suppress her glee. Isola supposed she was right – it did lend itself to an air of Grimmness – but exciting was not a synonym for this.
‘Ooh! Ooh! Isola! Rusly!’ said Rosekin, tugging the Fury’s hair when Isola didn’t answer. ‘Remember, the witch is still out there, too!’
Isola shook her head, feeling slightly ill. She felt a certain possessiveness of that wood, an umbilical connection down there in the dirt and the stillness – and now she felt almost betrayed, that it would hide and harbour a murderess, that it had let a young girl swing and bleed in that birdcage without once whispering for help on the pine-needle breeze.
‘Hush,’ said Ruslana, and Rosekin snapped her fanged gob firmly shut, always and only obedient to the towering night-woman. Ruslana pulled her great seething cloak around herself, and the ceiling light bulb flickered back into a more constant rhythm. Before they both vanished the Fury gave Isola a piercing look and said in a low voice, ‘Don’t go home through the woods tonight, Isola.’
Isola had called James, her second-most trusted soul.
It’d rung out the first time; she’d redialled and he’d picked up the second call almost immediately.
‘What,’ he’d grumbled, not even posing it as a question. He had still been sore with her, and been passive-aggressive about letting her know.
‘D’you wanna hang out?’
James was now waiting at the gate as school was let out, a cigarette squashed in his scowl. All the girls stared; some even swooned, overwhelmed by the mere presence of a boy on the school grounds, even if he was only lingering at the border.
Dramatis Personae
JAMES SOMMERWELL: The second prince. Relationship status = currently kind of awkward.
This was James: nervous fingers, acne-scarred, shirts always stretched at the neck as if he had escaped a daily throttling. A lanky Iggy Pop body, muscle plates like insect shells. Isola’s oldest flesh-and-blood friend, and her second pretend-brother.
Emotions argued on his face when he saw her; an oddly intense happiness battled a forced apathy.
‘Hey,’ he muttered, apathy emerging triumphant. He’d smoked right down to the filter and crushed the cigarette butt under his shoe, leaving it like a love token by the gates of the old nunnery.
‘Where’s the sidekick?’ he asked quietly as they began walking.
‘Sidelined.’
‘Oh, yeah. I heard about that party,’ he said, scratching his whiskery cheek.
They stopped on the High Street to buy cappuccinos in flimsy paper cups from the little café. Isola went to the florist next door and, when the shop attendant was busy misting the roses, nicked a flock of purple hyacinth blossoms. She zipped them in her schoolbag and they continued walking.
James’s neighbourhood was loud and dry. A man in orange overalls was chainsawing through the last tree on the street while new houses were being built – three great raw skeletons, skinned tree-bones on display. The industrial cacophony made Isola wince, and she tried not to imagine the rattling chainsaw as the pained, frightened wails of the tree. This wasn’t Vivien’s Wood, she told herself sternly, but her pace sped up just the same.
A man atop a ladder whistled obnoxiously as they passed. All the workmen laughed.
In her periphery, Isola saw James’s neck stiffen, his fists curl. Isola didn’t pause – she didn’t want to start a scene, get him in a fury. It would take him hours to work himself out of it. She glanced over her shoulder and flipped them off.
They slipped through backyards and doubled back to the Sommerwell house, which lay sideways on an urban stretch of streets leaning into the valley below. There weren’t any trees left on this street, either.
Upstairs to James’s room. It resembled a genetic splice between a going-out-of-business record store, a movie theatre and a cosy little crack house. A python rubbed its belly on the side of a glass tank in one corner. Tarantino flicks were forever playing on the television, a glitzy pulp of moving wallpaper.
Upstairs the air was hot and thick with remembrance of her last visit.
Images unspooling like the movie reels he loved. They hadn’t spoken since. She had returned without anything prepared. No apologies, no promises to put the past behind. Another girl would have avoided James until the freshly spilled awkwardness evaporated dry. But Isola was not another girl, and she wasn’t sure if it would ever truly dissipate.
She had not thought this through.
He sprawled on the eternally unmade bed, his face coloured in the garish brights of Pulp Fiction. Isola sat on the carpet, breathing hard, suddenly nervous. What had possessed her to come here? And then she remembered, why she hadn’t walked through her forest this afternoon, why she’d felt unnerved enough to call on her childhood prince –
His hand dangled off the bed, hovering near her. Isola itched to swat it.
She got up again, plopping her schoolbag in the far corner. His room was coloured like a bruise: the windows were constantly curtained, the only light the sickly blue glow of technology. She ran her finger along the DVD stack, squinting to read the spines. She’d seen almost everything here, which meant James had seen it all ten times over. Isola wriggled her finger into the crack at the top of the python tank. The snake opened one eye lazily, then closed it again, supremely unconcerned by her presence.
She smiled, and made a resolution to be more like him. To spend more time chilled and uncaring, maybe even more time sleeping on flat, warm rocks.
‘Good advice, snake.’
‘What?’ James looked round at her. ‘What did you say?’
‘Just . . . pretending something,’ she replied. He shook his head. ‘Fuck, you say such fucking weird things.’
‘Is that still your favourite word?’ asked Isola interestedly. ‘I like “verisimilitude”. Tolkien said the most beautiful English phrase is “cellar door”.’
‘Obviously he’d never been locked behind one.’
Isola turned her gaze back to the python. ‘Got any mice?’
James raised the remote, turning down the Tarantino. ‘I might,’ he replied. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’
Isola shook her head.
‘No, nothing’s wrong, or no, you won’t tell me?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Well, what happened at school today?’
The snake lifted its head, watching the dangling ring on her necklace as though hypnotised.
‘Not much,’ she said. ‘Grape wasn’t there, obviously. I went into the chapel and had lunch under the old organ. One of the nuns actually averted her gaze when she saw me,’ she added, feigning offence.
‘Probably surprised she didn’t burst into flames,’ snickered James. ‘What did that nun call you once? A wild child, right? The heathen Wilde Child of the woods . . .’
In a breathless flash, Isola saw the trees again, heard the sorrowful creak of a cage on a rope, Alejandro’s shoes scuffling in the dirt. She heard a sparrow snap a red blood-string, an eye gobbled from a wet socket.
She caught her breath and turned back to the tank. James hadn’t noticed;
his focus was back on the film, despite the fact he’d watched it so often he could mouth the dialogue. Isola shifted the glass lid of the tank. ‘I found a dead body in the woods today,’ she said. ‘Can I take him out?’
The movie filled the silence. Nothing but the puncture bites of gunfire.
‘Isola – what?’
‘Can I take him out?’ She was already reaching in, tugging the python up by his middle and draping him round her neck like some grand grotesque scarf. The snake wound itself round and round her necklace chain, seeking a comfortable place to cling.
James lifted the remote, and this time he switched the television off. The silence stretched elastic.
‘Isola,’ he said in obvious shock. ‘A dead body? Do you . . . really mean that?’
She wouldn’t look at him. ‘Oh. Yes, I do mean that.’ She spoke more to the snake than him.
‘But, are you . . . who’ve you told?’
‘You.’
‘Isola! I – damn, are you okay?’
The snake’s curious little head disappeared down her shirt. Isola tried to fish him out of her bra. ‘I’m fine. She’s not. She was in a birdcage . . . strung up a tree.’
The words hung like stockinged legs, strange and somewhat ridiculous in the context of his bedroom. She heard a long exhale, and finally turned to look at him.
James’s ashen face seemed to relax; his glazed eyes blinked moisture back into the sockets. ‘Fuck, you nearly gave me a heart attack. And why – why do you do that?’ The shocked relief had already passed; he looked angry now. ‘Tell stories like they really happened?’
‘It did happen!’ said Isola hotly. ‘There are bodies everywhere lately, first that TV suicide Sunday night and now this. The dead girl’s still in the woods, I could show you –’
‘You saw that suicide? The fairground one?’ James sounded concerned.
‘Yes, but –’
‘Isola. Look at me for a minute.’ He formed the words with deaf lips, exaggerating the shapes. ‘Are you saying there’s really a body in the woods?’
