But I stopped the car.
She opened the car door. I knew she would go out there, into the dark, beyond the headlights, and nobody would be able to save her.
“You’re very sick,” I said.
She climbed out of the car with her cat and her belongings. Her hand lingered on the door handle, and her fingers quivered. I couldn’t see her mouth, and it was if she spoke from her veined eyes.
“I know I’m sick,” she said, “but isn’t it kind of fun to be damaged?”
Part Seven: Like Bursting Through a Membrane
Chapter Thirty-Two
IN THE TIME I’D been gone, my childhood home transformed into a charnel house. My mother broke all the windows from the inside and placed rodent skulls on the ledges. Roof shingles, smoked black, fell into the driveway.
The other homes in the neighborhood had long been abandoned, FOR SALE signs staked into every lawn. Phaedra’s house suffocated underneath crushing ivy, as if it’d been neglected for years. Not a single light remained on the street.
Inside the lights flickered on.
When I went inside and saw her, I knew the mother who came to me in the woods, was not the same mother who lived here. This was someone older. Someone who hadn’t felt sunlight in a long time.
She sat in the living room, in swaddling clothes, strips of blankets and knitted quilts she’d ripped apart and stitched together, the infant terrible, the mother cannibal. Joseph, Mary and savior. Kali and Jezebel and stripper-whore. She was all images of woman, superimposed on each other. She was the one who hung all my childhood memories on a tree and wore my failures on her head like a barbed crown.
She untangled herself from the snarl of blankets and rose toward me. How similar we were. In a few years, I’d look just like her, with the dark tangled hair and the eyes of a bird, with her wasp skeleton and honey skin.
“You haven’t been taking care of yourself,” I said.
“Neither have you,” she said. “But your horns are growing in nicely.”
She embraced me.
“Come upstairs.”
I brought my bag to my bedroom. The room was as I remembered it. There was the mirror the demon once used to show me how I’d grown into a woman, the macramé lamp I used to read under long after bedtime, the bed with its dusty pink coverlet. I walked through the room, running my fingers across everything.
“You’re not mad at me?” I asked my mother.
“I couldn’t be,” she said. “It’s time for you to get ready.”
I lay all of my things on the bed: the gazelle skull, my dead-thing dress, and the hunter’s bow.
I undressed. Momma laced me into the dead-thing dress and the spiders clutched my throat. She tied the skull mask into place, a black ribbon at the back of my head. The bone pressed heavy into my face.
Oh Mother, how strong you could have been; the storyteller and the goddess, instead of the divorcee who let her head fall into the sea. You could have burned your fingers in hell and come out laughing. You could have spit flame into the faces of the nurses who shoved you into paper slippers. Instead, you scrubbed your teeth with bleach, bled into the sink, and ran from window to window chasing The Nightcatcher who poisoned your brain.
Or maybe you knew she’d come for me all along and you had no choice but to wait.
“The hush place,” I said, picking up my hunter’s bow, “that’s where she is.”
Momma led me downstairs and out of the house into the dark. The door snicked closed behind us.
We walked through the fields toward the river, the same fields that Charlie and I once walked in summer heat. The dead-thing dress clacked and tugged against my skin.
The Nightcatcher tread behind us with bare feet and wherever she crushed the grass, it never grew again.
“I may not part with her,” she said to me. “I may not give her up for anything.
I felt stifled and hot underneath the gazelle skull mask. My horns bled.
“I want a new pet, and she’s so sweet. She was born to be sweet,” The Nightcatcher said.
I kept walking, hands balled into fists, my face burning.
“I could make her serve me forever,” she said, “make her kneel. I’d be good to her. She’d learn to love it.”
I snarled. It was a sound I’d never heard come from me before, a wet and throaty animal sound.
“She’s mine!” I said,
I stopped. When I looked behind me, The Nightcatcher was gone and there were about half a dozen deer a few feet away from me. More were coming out of the fog, tiptoeing gently, like hobbled women.
“Look, darling,” Momma said. “Those deer have your eyes.”
I held my hand out to the deer. I opened my mouth to speak to them.
Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.
The deer tiptoed forward and a small fawn reached out to nuzzle my hand. Her nose blue velvet, her eyes, demon eyes. Through the corner of her mouth I saw the glint of fangs.
My shoes fell apart in the grass, and my feet cracked apart. From the skin of my pale feet emerged newborn hooves, three pronged and black.
(Once I was a girl.)
And I felt my horns spiraling from my head.
(But I scratched and scratched.)
My face melting into the mask of bone.
(Scratched and scratched.)
My spine tearing my back, lapping at the back of my head.
Until I was a girl no more.
Not a transformation, but a revealing.
The deer followed us to the river where Charlie once jumped, and never resurfaced.
“I had so many questions for you,” I said to Momma as I stood at the edge of the bridge overlooking the water, “but I can’t remember now. And I’m not sure they ever mattered.”
My mother, with the bird nest in her hair, smiled, and her fingers stiffened around her throat.
I looked into the water below. Turgid waters. Water with teeth. I hesitated, took a step back, and heard the rustle of the deer stepping backwards with me.
“It’s not too late,” she said. “You could still turn around.”
“Mother,” I said.
I turned back to the waters kicking up froth. I gripped the hunter’s bow in both hands and stepped onto the side of the bridge.
“Mommy, I love her.”
I jumped down.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I HIT THE WATER and plunged downwards. I held tight to the hunter’s bow. My lungs burned. The water grew murkier and murkier until starlight couldn’t reach me.
I fell into a cave below the river. I gasped, inhaling a rush of oxygen. It was a cave where the walls whispered, quivering like a womb.
The hush place. It was a network of ancient tunnels. The town must’ve been built on top of them.
The Nightcatcher must’ve used these tunnels to appear wherever she wanted; at my mother's window to torment her with poison, to whisper like a river in my ear when I couldn’t sleep, to crawl into a meadow to set a trap for my demon and me.
I got to my feet.
The ceiling rose a hundred feet above me, made of suspended, boiling water. No going back. Yet, there were so many tunnels leading in every direction; I didn’t know which way to start walking.
I stood still for several moments, trying to slow my breathing and to make sure I hadn’t actually died on the way down, as I tried figure out which way to go. There had to be some clue, some marking, some whispering, godlike voice, to lead me in the right direction. If only I could find, on the floor, a single spider. One of the demon’s spiders. I’d recognize them anywhere.
But there were no spiders.
Then a child’s silhouette stood up in the darkness. I couldn’t see his face or any of his features masked in the shadows, but I knew he hadn’t slept in years. I recognized his frail shaking, the twitch gap-stop of his motions. He dripped water as he approached me.
I crouched down so we were eye to eye and I saw his bloated, waterlogged face. Red liquid smeared his
chin. Blood, I thought at first.
But no, it was the juice of pomegranate seeds.
He held his hand out to me, also smeared in red. I slung the hunter’s bow over my back.
Charlie led me through the tunnels.
The air, moist and hot, made it difficult to breathe. It felt like being buried underneath a volcano. Sometimes bright light streaked the tunnels and I could see the walls scratched and marked with the same symbols The Witch drew on the walls and carved on her skin.
Protection symbols, maybe.
Or maybe something transcribed to The Witch in sleeping hours, or written down in a gold-embossed tome of spells to soften the lie. The words became sigils so that the writer would forget, but the sigils never forgot.
Charlie and I walked like two dreamers, like fourteen year children, almost too nervous to hold hands. He stumbled, sleep-drunk, and on his bare shoulders I saw the scars of whip marks he’d once inflicted on himself.
Did he look at the walls and see his own broken future?
Or did he see my history etched on the walls, the golden-haired huntress with the deer lying down to sleep in my lap, the hunter’s bow played like a violin? Did he see the girl with a shadow that breathed on the back of her neck, and a mother who ground herbs into a poultice that, if eaten, could scratch the surface of the universe away?
I saw Wormwood.
Wormwood, the walls said. Your origin and your epitaph. The ambrosia flower that could make you into a goddess, or the living dead. Wormwood. It’s sweet on the back of the tongue.
We came to a long hallway where moss grew on stone tiles underneath us. I noticed child footprints, sunk into the moss, crushed and faded brown, as if he’d walked here many times before. Without looking, Charlie stepped into the imprints.
“Do you know how long you’ve been down here?” I asked.
“I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” he said. “But now you’re here, and it’s like I never waited at all.”
I followed in his footsteps. My hooves were smaller than his child’s feet.
“Did you get the cigarette?” I asked, and I laughed, because it seemed such a trivial question.
“Yes,” he said. “When you threw it down to me, I saw your face reflected in the water. You were so far away. I wanted to reach out and tell you not to worry about me. But she reached out for you instead.”
She.
“I burned her,” he said in his quiet, shredded voice, “with your cigarette. The entire river boiled. She cried out and sank back down into the darkness, and she could not grab you.”
“Did she hurt you?” I whispered.
“She couldn’t,” Charlie said. “And I’m not the one she wants to hurt.”
“I wish I could have found your teddy bear for you.”
“I don’t miss him. I have lost more than that.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t jump into the water after you.”
He turned to me. Shadows coiled around his arms. He wiped at his mouth with his free hand, but the pomegranate stain wouldn’t go away.
He grasped my hands.
“I will never forgive you,” he said. “Because I have nothing to forgive you for.”
“I was scared. I should have jumped in after you,” I said.
“Then you wouldn’t be here with me now. In this moment. And I wouldn’t give up this moment for anything else.”
He kept leading me forward, and as he did, she spoke to me through the walls.
“Lily.
“I’ve got a little something for you. Can you guess what it is?
“It’s got two arms and two legs, and can walk backwards on its hands. It eats cat’s eyes and dead birds.
“It’s a rotten thing. I wouldn’t touch it, you’ll get diseases.
“If it gives me one wrong look I’ll break every bone in its is face.”
If walls could’ve smiled, they would’ve smiled with black-winged teeth, with her mocking, sharp tongue. My jaw and brain rattled. The walls pressed closer.
“How much further?” I asked Charlie.
“This way.”
The fog rolled in at our feet, and rolled back.
We entered a brass atrium. Tunnels branched off in several directions, spiraling outward. Built into the center of the room was a dry, brass fountain. I leaned over the edge. At the bottom of the fountain lay old coins, covered in dust. Greek, maybe. Or older.
The coins transformed into broken pieces of glass that reflected my skull mask. My cracked, red eyes were veined with fear and lack of sleep.
It was the face of The Exorcist.
“You look like your mother,” he said.
I reached up to tear the skull off my face, but I stopped. Something to do with the reflection of myself, repeated over and over in fractals at the bottom of the fountain. Something to do with the way my eyes, swimming in red, could still smile.
“No,” I said, “I’m stronger than her.”
We left the atrium.
We walked through hallways so old and hot that the walls turned to glass.
We walked through haunted tunnels that whispered my name. And, oh my dear, they’d been waiting so long to call my name.
The tips of my fingers cracked and bled. The backs of my hands burst with crystals. My teeth bulged until my mouth swelled with pain.
I couldn’t tell where the gazelle skull ended and my skin began, if there still was a difference at all.
I came across a cracked part of the glass wall. Maybe the demon dragged her nails across it while thrown across The Nightcatcher’s shoulder. She must’ve carried my demon down here. I could imagine her hair, like an ocean, filling the corridor behind her in frantic waves, her legs kicking.
My aching hooves could barely sustain the weight of my body. I wanted to lay down in the middle of the dark tunnels, and rest until my feet stopped throbbing.
But I had to keep going. Nothing good ever happened in the middle of a metamorphosis. Think of all the caterpillars that died mid-ecdysis, their slick and slimy wings trapped in their own cocoon, until they died.
Think of the demon, and push forward.
We passed more claw-marked walls, the sigils that demanded my presence. Through the water-grave ceiling and the walls, The Nightcatcher continued to taunt me.
“Lily.
“Lily, your girlfriend is a bitch in heat. I’ve got her on her knees; she’s fucking my fingers.”
If Charlie could hear her through the walls, he didn’t say.
“Go right. We’re almost there,” Charlie said.
We turned a corner into another hallway and, at the end of the hallway, a golden door floated in the black, miles away.
Beneath me blew a desert. I stepped on bones that surfaced up out of the sand.
Inside me, my organs were turning rotten, like the fleshy pulp inside too-ripe fruit.
The skin on my legs split.
I had to focus on the door at the end of the hallway. Focus on the door. You won’t be buried in sand with Charlie, waiting for another girl-hero to trip over your head. You’ve got dirty blood but that blood is stronger than this. Just get to the door.
“Lily.”
The Nightcatcher again.
“Lily.”
No, it was Charlie, speaking in a voice like a child’s rattle.
“I want you to know what’s going to happen when you walk through that door.”
I took another step. Another. Charlie coughed a dirty river on the back of my hands. The next time he spoke it sounded as if his lungs were filling with water.
“She’s going to destroy you. She’s going to eat you alive, strip by strip of flesh. She’ll break your bones for fun and sit on your face as you scream. She’ll call out her monsters to pull what’s left of you apart and reassemble you into what she wants.”
We were nearly at the door. Something alive stirred underneath my hooves. A snake, maybe, slithering through the walls. Jagged bones cut into the tender parts of my legs and
snagged on the lace of my dead-thing dress. Yet I was nearly there. The golden door grew closer, with an entire mythology carved into its panels. A huntress and a deer, a woman on a Viking’s ship, a laughing pantheon of gods.
“Maybe she’ll make you forget everything,” Charlie said, “but if she doesn’t, I want you to remember this.”
“I’ll try,” I said, “as best as I can.”
“Remember that, if I were born of the underworld, you were born of flowers. You are the blood the forest feeds upon and it is you who gave the woods their dark magic. Time doesn’t exist and, in another world, I never left you. I’ve transformed your wounds into a scepter for a queen. The Nightcatcher may think that she’s had her victory - but your veins are buried in the map of the earth and she can never have you. She thinks she can own the universe because she’s enslaved gods and eaten stars, but she couldn’t even kill me, living here in her tunnels, because you protected me with your love.
“Lily. I’ve seen the way out.”
I approached the golden door.
My fingers split apart. The bones inside curled. The gold glittered, faintly incandescent, making the icons carved into it, move back and forth.
Charlie withdrew his fingers and slipped backwards, into the darkness.
“Why can’t you go with me?” I asked.
“You know why.”
Then the door opened.
I went inside where she waited for me.
Chapter Thirty-Four
THE NIGHTCATCHER SAT on a throne of crystal, underneath a domed ceiling that swirled with birthing galaxies, stars dipped in god’s blood. The great destroyer, the terrible queen, surrounded by velvet curtains and glass lamps. Oh mighty one. Oh eater of gods. When Zeus tried to rape you, you grew teeth between your legs. Jupiter couldn’t swallow you. Artemis couldn’t best you. Kali tried to choke you to death with her noose, wrapped in tiger’s skin, but you didn’t need to breathe.
The gods were there in her throne room, her slaves and pets, naked except for golden chains around their wrists.
They’d been preparing a feast before her throne on an enormous table. Aphrodite, eyes downcast as she carried silverware, her once lush golden hair, shaved away. I saw Loki setting the chairs, great trickster, the blood leached from his fingers and acid stains on his cheeks from the world serpent Jörmungandr. Ishtar, goddess of love and war, lay at The Nightcatcher’s feet, licking wine off her fingers. Thor set out steaming soups and enormous silver trays of vegetables and samosas. She’d cut his nose off. Severed his right arm.
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