Speaking to Skull Kings

by Emily B. Cataneo

  What if I leapt overboard, disturbed minnows and ship-wrecks as I swam through the harbor, then emerged on dry land, stole dyes from the textile factories I can see from the ship’s deck? I could dye my bones red and yellow, blue and chartreuse, then leap into a hot air balloon and rise above the harbor, floating far, far away from the Grand Duke, off to another life where I could slip my feet into satin shoes and twirl across a stage, ribbons trailing from my ankles.

  The deck is empty behind me. The ship idles in the harbor.

  I wrap my hands around the railing, slip one foot between its bars.

  “There you are.” The Grand Duke emerges from a glassed-in patio. “Whatever are you doing?”

  “I—” I keep my back to him, watching the hot air balloons. “I told you. I don’t want to be your dancer anymore.”

  I smell his pipe-smoke, and feel his breath on my neck. He whirls me around, takes my hand in his tapered fingers and kisses it.

  “I do apologize for our quarrel earlier,” he says. “You simply must become reaccustomed to life, darling. When we return to Petrograd, you’ll remember, you’ll see.”

  Even though I speak Russian again, he still doesn’t know my language.

  He herds me onto a cherrywood staircase leading below deck just as the ship’s whistle bellows. I cast one long look back at the hot air balloons, floating free above the harbor.

  He’s clenching my hand, and I know escape will be difficult. But not impossible. I will become a dancer again, but not the Grand Duke’s.

  * * *

  In the church in Munich, all incense and shadows, he leads me up the aisle to a cowled line of monks. They stand before a set of footprints in the stone.

  “I understand you are interested in resurrection,” one of the monks says.

  “I heard at the Russian court that this church was founded by a man who struck a deal with, ah, with someone with dark powers,” the Grand Duke says, touching his mustache.

  “With the devil,” the monk says.

  “Well, yes, and they say...they told me if you stand a skeleton in the footprints, the devil will build the bones back up, restore flesh and skin to them, the way he built this church.”

  The monks are silent.

  The Grand Duke drums his fingers on my wrist, twists his thin lips. He’s a man of pocketwatches and train schedules, not a man who strikes deals with the devil in smoky churches.

  But he nods curtly at the monks.

  They scoop me up and set me down on the footprints. My feet wobble in the indentations.

  The monks chant and wave their censers. I sway in the footprints as the church hisses cold breath onto me, colder even than the moment I died, and I open my eyes and the Grand Duke and the monks are dulled by the light of the devil before me.

  He’s white, so luminescent I can’t discern his features. He wears an icicle crown and I think feathers might limn his arms.

  He extends his long fingers towards my heart.

  “No,” I say, in Russian. The devil pauses, white light trailing from his fingertips.

  The Grand Duke shouts my name, but I face the devil.

  “My name is Marina,” I say, “and I want you to take me with you to the Underworld. I don’t want my body back. I’m not the Grand Duke’s dancer.”

  I feel, not see, that the devil smiles. The fog from his fingertips snakes out, curls around my fingerbones, my wrists.

  “Sergei, please forget me. Go back to your world, the world of the living.”

  The Grand Duke is shouting, but I close my eyes and let the devil take me.

  * * *

  The Underworld is an endless network of caverns, blue caves filled with honey, with stacks of Marseille cards, with hunched skeletons whose white bones reflect the blue lights dancing overhead.

  “You are a dancer, you say?” the devil asks as we hurry through these caverns. He speaks in a strange dialect of the dead, with a stilted accent I’ve never heard before.

  “I was prima ballerina of...”

  I trail off as we step into the largest cavern I’ve seen yet, a space whose ceiling reaches into infinity, where rows of granite-and-velvet ottomans stretch to a raised stone platform hemmed in by leathery curtains. Skeletons on their hands and knees polish the floor with live birds that shriek and howl as their feathers smush on stone, and other skeletons bend over the leathery curtains with curved bone needles, inspecting a hem.

  The cavern is even larger than Mariinsky Theatre.

  “Here is where we conduct our folk reels and our fire dances,” the devil says, flicking his feather-lined tongue. “You will play a role in the folk reel company, and if your dancing proves compelling, perhaps we will place you in one of the fire dances.”

  “But....Perhaps I could teach some of the others ballet, and we could—”

  “No.” The devil’s white light pulses around his icicle crown.

  “You will dance in the folk reels, which we hold every third night when the wolfsbane blooms. Other nights you will be one of my chambermaids. Now come with me, and Leonora will instruct you in your duties.”

  The devil turns his back on the theatre, strides towards the passage to the other caverns.

  I did not journey to the Underworld to become the devil’s dancer.

  I lunge towards him, grinding my teeth as his white light floods against my bones, then reach my fingerbones up, up, standing on my tiptoes to snatch his icicle-crown from his head.

  I stumble backwards from the weight of the crown, but I stay on my feet. The skeletons behind me gasp and one of them shouts, “A coup, another coup after only a century,” and the devil shrieks. His feathers molt from his arms and tongue and fall like snow, and he shrinks away from me, smaller, timid.

  I balance the crown on my head and it clamps against my cranium. Then I turn to the hushed skeletons in the hall. One by one, they fall to bended knee and bow their skulls.

  “I am the Queen of the Underworld,” I announce. “And I’m going to start a dance company.”

  * * *

  I spend weeks training my dancers, instructing them on the arabesque and the battement. It’s more difficult than I expected to teach my pupils how to land properly on metatarsals and talus-bones, how to hold the femur and humerus so as to evoke the elegance of swans. The Underworld has seen countless kings and queens, my pupils tell me, and none of them have ever attempted to start a dance company here.

  But I am determined to stage Tchaikovsky in the Underworld’s theatre, and so we practice for long hours behind the rawhide curtain, until my skeletons are as graceful as my former colleagues in the Ballet Russes.

  On opening night, I stand in the wings wearing blue tulle and my icicle crown, watching my company of skeletons move in perfect harmony across the stage. The orchestra swells and I pas de chat from the wings. My rawhide ballet shoes squeak over powdered bone as I turn, slowly, arms spread above my skull. Blue lights play over the enraptured faces of the thousands before me.

  I am the Queen of the Underworld. I am a dancer. I am no longer, never again, the Grand Duke’s.

  But something curious happens. As I pirouette, then leap across the stage, my eyes rove the audience and in one dark shining moment I only wish to see one face there.

  Perhaps the dead cannot change.

  Perhaps neither can the living. Perhaps I spent so long watching for the Grand Duke in the audience, smelling his roses and feeling his fingers squeeze my foot, that I am his dancer after all, now and forevermore. First he gave me the right to dance and then he rebuilt my body and then, then he even gave me this passage to the Underworld. I only dance, I only move, I only rule by his grace.

  I plié across the stage, and yes, this absence in the audience, the Grand Duke's missing seat, is tucked into my body, just as much a part of me now as my metatarsals and talus bones.

  And yet there is this: my shoes are rawhide, not satin, and the powder on the stage is crushed bone, not resin. I dance as Queen of the Underworld. When
I leap again, proud and true across the stage, I land perfectly on the pointed toe-bone of my left foot, and the landing sends shock-waves through my femurs, and the pain, the powdered bone, the resin, the crown—it's mine. All of it is mine.

  I keep dancing, a dance meant to spin a pretty story that this is true.

  THE GHOSTS OF BLACKWELL, MAINE

  “They really make very good companions,” Jo tells her mother. “You hear bad things about them, you know, about how they’ll get into your bedroom at night, shake their chains at you, howl and drape themselves in moss and all that, but really, that’s more ghosts down south or in Europe or wherever. But my ghosts, they’re not like that. They’re respectful, restrained. They love me. I love—”

  “It’s all right, Josephine,” her mother says. “Not everyone has a career. Not everyone has children. It’s all right.”

  The heat rises on Jo’s neck. She makes her excuses, hangs up the phone and peeks out her pane-glass patio window.

  Outside, shimmering figures play hopscotch behind the nine-by-twelve barbed wire fence that hems in the crumble-stone graves in her backyard.

  * * *

  Jo always pulls on her shearling-lined duck boots before she treks into the graveyard at this time of year—early spring but it feels like dead of winter, the puddles still frozen with dirty ice. But she won’t let the nasty weather stop her from heading outside. She’s never noticed the cold the way some people do—she was born here, after all—and after her latest conversation with her mother, she needs to be among her girls.

  She hikes round back of the house, past the tiny weathered-wood shed where she stores the candles and the Ouija board in winter. She unlatches the gate and squelches into the pen. Adie is running her bitten-nail fingers along the Christmas lights strung on the chicken wire fence. The lights aren’t plugged in, but when Adie’s index finger touches each of them, it pops with a silvery light that hurts Jo’s eyes if she looks at it too hard.

  Adie’s prodding the lights urgently, running her other hand over her patched dress. Her single playing card, the Queen of Spades, is shoved into the top of her boot. Jo crouches, pulls a white candle out of her oversized coat pocket, lights it, and screws it into the mud next to Adie’s broken boot. Adie examines the candle, then returns to popping the Christmas lights on and off.

  Adie was the first ghost Jo found, back when she was sixteen and had biked Old Route 17 to photograph an abandoned mill for a school project. In the mill, Jo found Adie hanging from the rafters, a tangle of hair and patched dress.

  Adie whimpered and swung down, tugging on Jo’s coat-hem and ruffling her hair. Jo tried to shake Adie off, but the ghost followed her. As soon as she hit the cold air outside, Adie disintegrated, losing her form and drifting into smoke. Jo panicked, found a glass root beer bottle in her backpack, and scooped Adie right inside. Her hand trembled around the bottle all the way home. How was she supposed to care for a ball of vibrant cold energy quivering in glass?

  Jo decided to wing it and trust her instincts: she loosed Adie in the small Puritan-era cemetery behind the family house, and there the ghost has lived happily ever since.

  But now, Jo doesn’t know why Adie’s ignoring her. She sinks to the still-frozen ground, the conversation with her mother clenching at her again, ignoring the cold seeping through her jeans.

  * * *

  The next week, Jo runs into her cousin Marcie in the grocery store parking lot in Blackwell.

  “I need to talk to you about something.” Marcie leans on the handles of her shopping cart, which is overflowing with boxed macaroni and cheese and apple juice bottles. “We, um...” Marcie licks her lips, avoids Jo’s eyes. “We want to sell the house.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Um, well, me, my parents, Becca, Jerry. Even your mom said—”

  “So everyone? You mean everyone?”

  “My mom and your mom talked, and they think it’s for the best. We all could use...I mean, I have three kids, Jo, and this economy...our moms said we could split the profits, even though Grandma left the house to them.” Marcie smiles with all her teeth and not with her eyes. “I’m sorry, I know how much you love it there, but, it’s time.”

  * * *

  Jo dreams of skyscrapers that night—their lights are hard, and yet she can’t look away from them. Where would she put her >18th-century armoire, her china cabinet with the one wobbly leg, her Governor Winthrop desk, in those steel monoliths?

  Then Jo wakes up fully in her sleigh bed, shakes off the skyscrapers, and settles back into this house and clearing, comfortable as the suede quilted coat she’s worn forever. This is her place, among the pines of winter and the whispering Queen Anne’s lace of summer. She’s stood here in this clearing her whole life, watching a parade trickling out of the house: Mom to Florida. Becca to Chicago. Jerry to Boston and Grandma to the Catholic cemetery next town over and Marcie away from their girlhood of hair braids and catching frogs in the creek to her family life in one of the developments near Main Street.

  Now it’s just Jo and her ghosts, the girls, Adie and Em and Prudence and Samantha, and now Marcie and Mom want to take them away from her, too.

  * * *

  It’s March, but it’s still sleeting the day Marcie sweeps into the house without knocking.

  “Oh Jo,” she sighs. “Oh boy. We have our work cut out for us, don’t we?”

  Marcie’s nose wrinkles at the lumbering stacks of books, the four gleaming bottles Jo used to cart her four girls to the house, the Polaroids of her girls strung up on white string in old picture frames. Marcie runs her finger along the wide wood farmhouse table and examines it. “At least it’s not filthy.”

  “I’m not a child, you know,” Jo says. “Although you’d probably be nicer to me if I was.”

  “I’ve arranged for a real estate stager to come through, straighten all this up. Mom and Aunt Carrie are thinking of putting the house on the market next month. Does that give you enough time?”

  Jo scoots herself up onto her counter, swings her legs against its wooden siding like she has since she was a little girl. “I don’t want them to sell it.”

  Marcie plunks her purse on the table, slaps her hands against Jo’s knees, bends down to try to force Jo to look her in the eyes. Jo ducks her head.

  “We need the money,” Marcie says softly. “We all do.

  And—you need to get out of here. Come live with us for a while, till you get on your feet. You know you’re always welcome with my family.” Marcie shoves off Jo’s knees, surveys the room. “Look, I’ll help you pack. It’ll be fun.” Marcie reaches towards the wobbly china cabinet where the girls’ four gleaming bottles sit, and Jo has time to bark out half a warning before Marcie grips the shelf, the cabinet shivers, and Adie’s bottle teeters and smashes on the cedar-plank floor.

  For some reason, as the remnants of the bottle bounce over Jo’s wool-socked feet, a line leaps through her head, something she read a long time ago, or maybe wrote herself—who can remember? But the line went: In New York City, ghosts drift through the streets like steam through manholes.

  And something lifts from Jo’s shoulders, the tiniest lightening lift.

  Then Jo’s back in reality, shoving away that New York City line, shaking glass off her socks, glaring at Marcie, who’s saying, “I’m sorry, Jo, but come on, you can’t bring all this stuff with you.”

  Marcie sweeps up the remains of Jo’s oldest bottle and throws them away, and Jo brews some tea and defrosts some blueberry pie to change the subject. But the whole time Marcie’s there Jo can’t stop thinking, I won’t need to bring all this stuff with me, because I’m not going anywhere. This is my home.

  Those girls are my life. I need them. They need me.

  After Marcie leaves, Jo slides open the trash can, where the shards of Adie’s bottle gleam among soggy teabags and the empty pie tin. Jo stares at them for a minute, imagines tying up the tops of this green plastic trash bag, hauling it out to the curb, never seei
ng that bottle again. She extracts the tea-slick shards out of the trash, one by one, and lays them on the counter.

  Then she pulls on her trapper hat and hurries into the graveyard. The girls are huddled together, their long silver hair tangling as they whisper among themselves.

  “Girls.” Jo shuffles forward, her hands deep in her pockets.

  The girls turn, raise their eyebrows. “I have—Marcie—you remember her? She used to live here, a long time ago?”

  The girls snort and shuffle. Of course they remember Marcie, who would never come into the graveyard, who scoffed when Jo asked her to leave candles at the gate.

  “You know what she wants to do, don’t you? Well, I want you to help me,” Jo says. “I want you to help me stop her.”

  Four pairs of eyes on her: Em’s, dancing with the bared-soul emotion of her hefty book of poems; Adie’s, scared and confused; Samantha’s, unreadable; and Prudence. Prudence’s eyes are angry: her eyebrows two silver lines, one hand balled in a fist. Jo hasn’t seen that expression on Prudence’s face since the All Hallows’ Eve ten years ago when Prudence gripped Jo’s hands and with the pressure of her ghostly fingers communicated to Jo the pain and rage of dying young.

  “We’ll be able to stop her,” Jo says, “if—”

  Something cold and rough explodes across her cheek.

  Prudence crouches with one arm cocked back, mud dripping from between her shining fingers.

  “Prudence, what—” Jo starts forward, reaches out a hand, but Prudence snarls, her long braids swinging as she crab-crawls backwards. Adie examines her playing card. Em flips through her book. Samantha simply glides away.

  All afternoon, Jo tries to get their attention. She places planchettes just inside the gate for them, and they turn their noses up. She sets down cups of tea, her hand shaking so porcelain rattles on porcelain, and they skitter away. They whisper and glance at her, but whenever she raises a hand to them they veer away and race to the far side of the pen.