Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

by Paula Guran

  The sun had not set when my son, the steward of my lands, came into the room as soft as if on a cat’s paws and my thoughts scattered like birds before . . . but no, I banished all thoughts of slitted green or yellow eyes. These were the stuff of nightmares and left for sleep alone, not to be seen when I was awake, the ruler of my lands and family. None should know that my nights were haunted.

  He paid no heed to my distraction, asking instead those questions that he had asked on the dozens of Sabbath eves that had gone before. Did the countess his mother keep to her chambers this day? Would she do so after the king arrived? Always he spoke this way though I suspected that he knew the answers and asked only to torment me.

  Each day for three years, he had spoken to me thus: first, of harvests and kingdom, and last and oh so softly! of my lady wife, his mother. Naught but praise had he for her wisdom, her goodness, but some emotion that I could not fathom hung on his every word. Why did his mother keep to her chamber each sennight? Surely she had told me, and he as my son had the right to know. But perhaps I could not tell him.

  Then he would begin again on another line of questioning. His words hissed from his lips like a serpent’s. “How well my father bears with his wife’s absence! How patient you are with her woman’s moods. But surely, my lord, my father, you know what she does in those apartments whence even her maids and the children are barred? It cannot be forbidden to you.” And again. “She will not keep to her chamber thus when the king is here, depriving him of her beauty and wise counsel, no, surely not. My lord will need her by his side.”

  His words broke against the wall of my thoughts, just as his hatred roiled beneath their waves, though I failed to hear it at first. I loved him not and had but little faith in him, however I tried to conceal it. That day in my folly, I heard only one word of the many he spoke: forbidden.

  The fury of a fool swirled within me as I remembered what she had told me when we wed twenty years ago. Each sennight she was to keep to her chambers and I might not see her until Sabbath morn. Forbidden. That was the word she used, my countess, my own.

  True, there were softer words around it, set to lull and soothe but there it remained, cold and hard in the midst of them all. Was I not Raymond de Colombiers, master of these estates and vassals, and indeed, of she who shared my bed? How could my wife’s bath be forbidden me, I who loved her more than gold, than kin, than life itself?

  I tired quickly of my son’s presence and tried to let my anger leave me for these were not thoughts that I might share. Moreover, what use had I for kings when I had such a one as she who lay in a dark green pool some corridors away? My skin still bore the marks of her pleasure from this very morning and my fingers found them while I thought only of her as a man enchanted. My steward spoke on though it was clear that his father’s mind was elsewhere until I could bear it no longer. My hand waved him hence though neither king nor pastures would wait upon my pleasure.

  My ring I gave him to place my seal on such judgments as he needed to make. I gave it away as if it meant nothing, as if I could not see the hunger for power shining in his eyes like the gold he craved. He cast me one look over his should as he went, a glance filled with scorn. But I watched him leave and cared not.

  True, after he departed I thought more on the coming of the king, as he had surely intended. Here was my lord come to see his demesne for the first time since my father’s death. Surely he would be pleased. The people prospered, the merchants were rich, the land flowered. They said it was due more to my lady wife than to me but what cared I for that? They whispered too that she was an enchantress who held me in thrall and right they were.

  Right I was also to be held for I was determined to be happy thus. I had even removed the old priest when the simpleton began to speak of dark powers yet drew up short of the word “witch.” The new priest understood his place better, speaking well of both lord and lady. I would let nothing come between us, neither God nor king nor man.

  But that day doubts assailed me anew and I wondered if I was as sure of my lady’s heart as I believed. What of the king? What power had I to prevent him from conquering hearts where he chose and commanding what I might prize most? Would the king be forbidden my wife’s chambers as I was this day or would she welcome him with parted thighs and soft gasps? If it were so, would he take her with him when he rode away? My heart screamed with rage.

  These visions of the fool I was danced before my eyes and I forgot that she loved none but me. I remembered only that I owned, that she was mine and no other’s. My steward, for I will not name him my son, not now, yet his words had burned in my mind even when I thought I paid him no heed. They planted my fears one on top of the other and lit the tinder beneath. Still I cannot blame him for all of it: my jealousy rose from myself alone and I can blame no other for the results.

  On that day of happily ever afters that might have been, my thoughts turned unceasingly on the King and my lady wife. My jealousy knew no truth. Why should I be barred from what the king, if he so commanded, might enjoy? Why should I not go to my wife, my Melusine, and feel her beneath me, floating in fire-warmed waters? I must know that she loved no one but me. I had conquered where others feared to go and that victory must remain mine and mine alone.

  At this thought, I rose in anger with the word “forbidden” ringing in my ears. It sped my steps through the corridors to her chamber. The stone halls echoed behind with my passage and the guards stood straighter and taller when I passed. But they were as nothing to me.

  A turn, a stair, a few strides more and I stood still before the oaken door. From within I fancied I heard the water slide caressingly over her limbs and the gentle sound of her breath. I rested my head a moment against the solid beams of the door, weighed down by a sudden fever that made my hands tremble.

  Then I thought I heard another sound, one I dared not speak of aloud. My loins burned with fire, until I trembled against the wood of the chamber door. My breath rose and my heart ran like a deer pursued by the dogs. I entered my dreams even as I stood there, awake in my own hall and I felt the scales of creatures unseen slide across my own flesh. I felt their forked tongues and fangs taste of me while I gave them all that I had, surrendering even as I took them in unholy union.

  Forbidden she had said it was and forbidden it should be that a common man should lie with such as she. But I had known her touch both waking and sleeping and I was no common man. This I knew even as my knees trembled beneath me. I would know all the King might know, all the secrets that my beloved held. Like an idiot, I thought, too, that I would love her still, that I would desire whatever I found on the other side of the door, no matter what that was.

  With that, I threw it open and went in to greet my beloved, my Melusine. There I found the substance of my dreams, and my downfall. Even so, had it not been for the tip of her tail draped over the side of the bath, I might have denied the monster she was. As it was, her slitted eyes met my own and she hissed a single word through transformed lips and tongue, “Husband?”

  I will never know if there was love in those eyes; I only know that in my rage and my desire, God help me, I took her. I embraced her in her other form as I would the creatures from my dreams, though my soul cried out against it.

  When I woke on the Sabbath, I looked upon she who lay beside me and I ordered the executioner to my steward, her son’s door. There would be no more words, no more cunning. I thought then to erase what had come before, to return only to the sweet days we had known when we were first wed. I knew the crime I had committed after the words were spoken, after it was too late, and my son lay dead in the grave. I knew that I had killed him with my fears, my jealousy, as surely as if I had swung the blade myself.

  But even this was for nothing. Now each night I go and lie beside her to stare open-eyed at the ceiling above our bed so that none will know me for a coward. When I sleep at last, I know only the hard cobbles beneath my scales and the ache of being absolutely alone.

  Each mornin
g I beg her to enchant me again, to make me forget what I know and each day she says only one thing to me, “There are many kinds of monsters here.” Then she turns away, hatred in her eyes and leaves me to sit and watch the candles burn before the tapestries. Here I remain, unable to go or stay, knowing that my beloved remains at my side only to send me the dreams that fill my mind with horrors. Such is my punishment. For this, too, is how the story ends: with an open door and a man gazing at the unclean depths of his soul.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised what you can do if you want to badly enough.”

  She’s Not There

  Pat Cadigan

  There was once such a thing as a single, as in music, as in rock ’n’ roll, as in hear it on a radio with a speaker that made it sound like listening to music over the telephone. Didn’t matter—if the speaker was small, the music was big. Big. What made it big could reach out through that fuzzy-muzzy speaker and change the world, change the universe. At least change your life.

  Don’t you remember how music changed your life? Of course not, why am I even asking? You couldn’t remember, even though you were there.

  How would you know, why would you care . . . ?

  That’s not how you remember the line, I know. But that’s how it was originally sung. Not by a group of young guys who managed to chart one more near-miss before passing into nostalgia, but by a young woman who committed suicide the day after it hit number one, cementing her place in the pantheon of rock music deities for all time and sending a good part of the civilized world into a mourning that eclipsed the deaths of Buddy Holly, Elvis, and John Lennon combined.

  You’ve never heard of her.

  It was a dirty little town. I mean that literally. Grimy little industrial town, blot on the New England landscape. There are those who even now will tell you that it was and is a pretty town, but they probably lived up on the west side or out on Summer Street. I lived where the dirt settled.

  Kathy didn’t. The Beaver would have been at home in her neighborhood. In mine, we’d have mugged him for his lunch money, and then made him pay protection so we wouldn’t do it again. And then we’d have done it again anyway, just to see the look on his face. That’s right, kid, there ain’t no justice in this world.

  You think that’s bad—punching out a harmless, mediocre little kid like the Beav? Well, it was. But the Beav got over it. He had a nice home to run to, June kissed his boo-boos, Ward taught him a few boxing moves, and he never walked through our turf again anyway.

  And just for the record, I never laid a glove on him. I wasn’t even there that day. I was in my room, studying. Because there were three things I knew better than anything:

  There’s no justice.

  There’s no Santa Claus.

  I was getting out.

  Kathy was the first one who ever believed me. Believed in me. We were little girls in Catholic school; navy-blue jumper dresses over white blouses and sky-blue bow ties, with kneesocks and saddle shoes, marching two by two into school in the morning. People would say, Bet you hate it, all that Catholic school stuff, all that regimentation, all that praying, those uniforms. Yeah, sure, all of it, except the uniforms. I secretly loved the uniforms even while I pretended to hate them. When you had a flock of kids in identical uniforms, you couldn’t tell who was from Summer Street and who was from that patch of blight just two blocks down from the church. You couldn’t tell unless you already knew. Kathy knew; she was from Summer Street. She didn’t care.

  She was always solemn, one of those skinny, paper-white girls you figure will grow up to be a professional neurotic. Because she was so brilliant. Brilliant. One of the Smart Kids in the class.

  I was Smart, too, but they made me fight for it. So I fought like I was mugging the Beaver taking everything he owned. Because it was supposed to be useless for me—my kind didn’t go to college, dirt didn’t get out. They said.

  The music told me different. Listen, you think a fuzzy-muzzy transistor radio is silly thing to hang on to? It was the music, really; when there was no radio, I played it in my head. Anything on that list of Things They Can’t Take Away From You, what you know and what you hear in your head, that’s what I hung on to. Maybe you’ve got something better. If you do, don’t go walking through my old neighborhood with it.

  Then I heard Kathy sing, and I knew what she was hanging on to.

  I hit the eighth grade the year that Kennedy hit the White House. A Catholic makes president—that must mean there’s a God, right? Well, there was something; maybe it was a pony. My face was breaking out; my breasts were breaking out, God help me. And Kathy was getting thinner.

  She was the only one doing that that I could see. I keep thinking it got cold early in the fall of 1960, but nobody else remembers it that way. No one else remembers it being especially cold or hot or anything else. An unremarkable year except for the election of the first Catholic president in history, which was supposed to mean something good to all us women in uniform, good little Catholic girls and the nuns who taught us.

  Every autumn, that’s what I think of—those weeks leading up to the election and after, the air growing cold, the last of the leaves falling off the trees, and, in spite of everything, in spite of where I was, what I was, and how it was then, I feel that same happy-sad feeling that comes with remembering really good things you don’t have anymore. But then, I guess that about sums it all up, doesn’t it?

  By the time we were all saying a rosary in class every day to thank Holy Mary for interceding with her Son to make Kennedy president, I had already heard Kathy sing. One afternoon over at her house, up in her room, she’d suddenly jumped up off the bed in the middle of some forgettable conversation, put a record on her record player, and then just stood in the middle of the room and sang. It was some folk song I’d never heard before, but if she’d been singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” it would have been something I’d never heard before. She didn’t just have a voice, she had a voice, a voice. The Voice. Two seconds and I’d forgotten what a strange thing it was for her to do, just get up and perform. I was just so glad she’d done it for me, that I could hear it. And after she finished, I’d been going to make some kind of weak joke about getting her to sing at my wedding to some movie star or other, except that when she was through, I couldn’t say a word. I remember feeling like the sound of my voice would profane the quiet left after hers. I remember that it was quiet, too, very quiet, because there was no one else in the house that day.

  That didn’t happen often, that there would be no one home at Kathy’s. Her mother was a licensed practical nurse who worked at a convalescent home mostly and sometimes filled in at Tri-County General Hospital, usually around the holidays when the combination of vacations and sick leave would leave them shorthanded. Her father was an electrician or something, and I figured he made his own hours, because there wasn’t any pattern to when he was home and when he wasn’t. Kathy’s older sister, Sarah, was in high school, a place that was as mysterious to me as Timbuktu or Cleveland. The younger sister, Barbara, wasn’t home either—good thing for her, because Kathy was always chasing her out, telling her to go find something to do and some friend to do it with. I didn’t really understand that, because the kid never bothered her. She was okay, the kid; I’d have let her stay and even hang around us, but Kathy wouldn’t hear of it. One time I asked her why.

  “Because I can’t miss her if she won’t go away,” she snapped. It should have been funny, but Kathy really wasn’t much for humor. There’s only one joke she ever told me, so long ago, two lifetimes ago, but I still remember it. Because it was not the sort of joke I’d have expected her to tell me and I didn’t get it at the time. It went like this:

  Kathy: Do you know how to use the word “pagoda” in a sentence? Me: There’s a pagoda in Japan?

  Kathy: My father said, “Kathy, go to your room” and I said, “Pagoda hell.”

  I’d get it now. A lot of people would. But in 1960, at the beginning of the first American Catholi
c administration, nobody got it.

  “Does anybody else know you can sing?” It took me two days to get up the nerve to ask that question because I had the feeling she was pretty sensitive about her singing. Now that I had, it sounded so damned vapid.

  Kathy only twisted her shoulders in an awkward shrug. “Anyone like who? Sister Mary Aloysius? Mrs. What’s-Her-Name, the choir director? Dick Clark? My father?”

  She looked away. We were standing just inside the doors of the public library protected from the raw pre-Christmas wind (though not the damp, which was creeping up my ankles from my toes), watching the bus stop for our respective buses home. I took the Putnam Park Via Water Street; Kathy rode the less frequent Lunenburg Via John Bell Hwy. It was getting dark fast, earlier every day. I’d always hated the darkening descent to the Christmas season. Even though the days started getting longer just before Christmas Day, it never felt that way to me. I found winter depressing; so did Kathy, as far as I could tell.

  “Did you ever think of—you know, doing something with your, um, music?”

  “You mean, singing in front of people?” She turned to look at me, and I thought she’d be irritated with me—she’d sounded irritated—but the expression on her face was more frightened than anything else. “How? Where? And for who?”

  “The Glee Club? Or the choir?” Her eyes might have been boring two holes through me, “The Shangri-Las?”

  That made her smile, but it was a small one, sad and fleeting. “I don’t want them to know.”

  I waited for her to say something else, to say she thought that kind of thing was a big waste of time, that she didn’t want to sing moldy old show tunes and hymns, but she just kept staring at me, chewing on the inside of her lower lip. Waiting, I realized, for reassurance from me.