by Allyson Bird
Enough preposterous stories, Ambrose demurred though his voice shook, as if he understood more than Frederick had spoken. Ambrose pushed Frederick’s trembling hands away and said perhaps I was a selkie, for they shed one skin for another as easily as people did clothes, appropriating delectable shapes of women as components of their mischief, even though they remained beastly beneath and would do anything to once again inhabit their natural skins. It could be a skin might yet be discarded upon these crusted shores, but long as we looked no skins rested upon the ragged sulfur shores or within the foul waters. I thought I found one, torn and sodden and clinging to the edge of a steaming sulfur pool, but in the end it was only seaweed between my fingers, rotting and slick.
By the time our search concluded, I in my tattered shift was shivering as icy rain streamed from the clouded pewter sky. The men guided me out of the sickened world and into the heart of the city they sought to rebuild. Within the city’s salt-streaked walls, there beat the heart of a virtuous civilization yet; despite the ruin that battered its doors nightly, here the people made to recover and return to the world they had once known. Women and men and children like I had never seen, each with business somewhere, most paying me no mind as I was taken deeper into the city. This was a city of cobble, pieces that often had no rhyme or reason pushed into something attempting to be new and glorious. The stones that made the houses had been blackened by fire, but the people did scrub them with brush and soap, even if the black could not be stripped. The black stones gleamed strangely as we walked past and through them. Within the mayor’s house—Ambrose himself, the house as tidy as his mustache—warm drawing rooms with even warmer cakes and cooler ales awaited; small bedrooms with salvaged iron tubs and clean-swept fireplaces; soft linens strange to my hands, even as I found them familiar once I curled within.
I did not, however, spend much time within the bed or its linens, usually discovered by displeased servants curled into the bottom of the iron tub beside the fireplace. There, I listened to the echo of the world beyond the walls of this room, distant voices trying to unknot the problem of me, me who did not even have a name. (Of course I had a name (and beyond a name had a song), but they had not asked, for knowing the name of a thing, even of a person, makes it genuine and true and whole.)
Whatever might we call her, Ambrose wondered to his men over precious drinks and cigars, other than a Distinct and Terrible Problem.
Such a Distinct and Terrible Problem would I delight to explore at great lengths—and depths, Frederick said. (For much worse, I would cut him from thigh to throat, but it was always those first words I remembered, the way his rough hand branded my knee, the way his soft flesh gave way beneath the hard heel of my sulfur-crusted foot.)
When these conversations became tiresome, and they quickly did—how could they mean to determine the fate of a person upon whom they had no claim?—I opened the faucet to unleash the stream of water hidden within the old pipes, but not even this was wholly satisfying. The water held the tang of brass and did not taste as sweet as waters I remembered. What waters I remembered, I could not yet say, but opening my mouth to the flood of faucet water earned me only a deeper longing and the disapproval of the maid assigned to me. Ladies did not behave thus, she told me; was I a lady, then? Not mermaid, not selkie, not lady. And what had Frederick said—a queen of Carcosa and I would do.
Even though my origins were unknown, the Kowals allowed me to roam. The house was as unfamiliar and strange to me as I was to the Kowals. Ambrose watched me when he thought me unaware, his wisp of a wife afraid to come within arm’s reach of me. She drapes herself in blue, for the Mother, she says, and makes a strange sign with her trembling and pale hands whenever I pass. I cannot decide if it is pleasure or pain I experience at the sight of such things; it delights me in a way I think it should not.
For what is to be made of a woman found in a sulfur lake near the edge of the world where none do wander? And why did those men wander, in that place upon that very day where I so happened to be. Why did those men wander into the ruined world, I asked Lady Kowal even as she backed away. She shook her head, her teeth worrying her bottom lip as her fingers traced strange patterns into her blue skirts. She was certain she did not know and could not say—but not knowing and not saying were two wholly different things, and when I told her such, she gave me a look that might have sent others running. Her eyes ran with venom, her throat drawn in tight lines that would allow no words passage. She fled me then, a skittering bug, her skirts frantic across the polished floors.
The house with its straight walls and narrow entries holds no consolation for me; everything closes a person away from the world, and no matter how ruined and desolate since the plagues that carried everything away, I miss the skies and the crumble of ground between my toes. This house the Kowals have so carefully constructed is terrible in its geometries—until I wander to its tapering apex and discover the yellow room. It is not a room, cousin Angelica makes sure to explain, as if I am a child and simply do not know.
Angelica says it is only a space allotted for leftovers, where boxes and crates may be stacked into piles to molder and die in the shadows, where the discards of the household are placed so no one must look upon them. So that none must admit the ageless and transcendent portrait of the woman called The Violet, whom Pascal so loved he filled (and here Angelica blushed so fiercely that even within the yellow room’s shadows, I could see the way it flooded her thin cheeks)—Whom Pascal so loved, he filled her with a child even as he withheld one from his proper ladywife. A space created so none within proper rooms would be faced with the evidence of years having passed at all.
Everything was coated in dust, the exact opposite of the water I dream. Powder beneath my fingers, it was unbearable, as dry as the shell of the past it lives within. But the paper—
Once, this not-room was papered in yellow; now, only fragments cling to the walls, as if they have also attempted to shed their pasts. In the darkened corners, where wall meets wall in a soft kiss, the paper holds fast, refusing the idea of going. Time has come? Time does not matter, the paper says, and glows distinctly gold in the dim light.
Within its yellow expanse, there are roads and rivers and people and places not yet travelled. My fingers trace them from afar, but know every curve and dip, and though the paper has flaked completely away from the edge of the door, my fingers remember an undulation of hip and waist and breast held within. I can close my eyes and picture that form, woman and river both, and I can travel.
When night comes, I unbutton my skin and leave.
Beyond the flaking yellow paper, I am what I have always been. I have no need of skin, of features that eyes can caress; here, none will feel the need to regard me as anything other than what I am. Not mermaid, not selkie, not even woman in this place. I reach beyond every word, something wholly other and pure. Beyond definition, even if I have a name.
There are no pathways I may describe so that any might understand, and yet my feet know the way. Every step brings words to my lips, words long known and forgotten both. Beyond the clouds, where the waters of the lake of Hali suck the sulfur from my feet, beyond the diming light of Aldebaran, where misted air curls as hands around my bare flesh, I find another who is much like me.
This Other stands in arched and twilight shadows and has no face within the hollow of its tattered cloak. Even as my fingers slip over cheekbones and lips, there is no face beneath them. I know every ridge and valley and they are not there. I can taste the sulfur in the mouth, but there is no mouth. I open my mouth and the nothingness floods me, cold and sharp as it glides over tongue, down throat.
Much shall be done, it is said, and there is no voice, but for the vibration in my bones. This voice has tasted me, even as there is nothing to taste. It has found me cold and sharp in return, black and silted like the bottom of the clouded lake.
Thy will be done, I promised, no matter that there is no will. It shall be done, and when I return to the yellow
room that is not a room, I finger my skin back into place. A line of small black stars like buttons bleed up through my skin to mark the inside line of my arm, and I breathe as if I have never breathed before. The breath of the Other moves within my body. I sink into evening-cool sheets, black stars reel overhead, and Ambrose wonders over another cup of brandy what he might do with me. To me.
Come morning, in the east dining room with its slanting sunlight, cousin Angelica opens every raspberry as though she is looking for something. She pulls the scarlet fruit from its stem, and slides her thumbs into the hole left behind. She pries the tender berries apart, spreading the flesh flat between her fingers before consumption. Her fingers are sticky wet and red, fragrant in the otherwise sterile sitting room. Her mouth puckers.
The longing to tell her about the yellow room overwhelms me. I want to tell her of the paths, but find every word stolen before I may speak. I swallow the desire as she does the berries and my own mouth purses. I drown the truth of my journey in bergamot and lavender tea. It never happened, I tell myself. I never left that bed, that iron tub. Never unbuttoned my skin.
Beneath the table’s edge, I ruck my skirt up my thighs; I press every finger into my exposed flesh, and there is no evidence of buttons or buttonholes but for the stars which line the inside of my arm. One does not require evidence to have a truth be known, of course, but I look, and see the dark line across my wrist, where I may be opened.
My flesh has been unbuttoned and touched and rebuttoned and covered.
Angelica tells me how terrible it is to live here. She cannot bear the narrow hallways and the low sky and the way life never changes. Even as life does change here—for they are building an Empire! Ambrose tells her—she says it never changes. Nights hang endless above her bed and she wakes feeling as though she has never slept, as if she has spent the whole night wandering. Her eyes meet my own.
This is a doorway, but I do not cross the threshold. I do not tell her of the yellow paper, because—
The yellow lake, she says. (In those days, the lake’s designation was under continued discussion and debate, a vote being brought to bear upon the citizens of this new settlement as they hastened to create what could not be destroyed as all that had been before, even though the waters had a name, possessed and singular, wholly its own even if unspoken.)
She wants to go, having only heard of the way I was found. Ambrose won’t tell her a thing about me and she hates him. Hates him. The yellow lake, she presses.
I don’t have to close my eyes to picture its ragged shape; the taste of sulfur still rests within the corner of my mouth, despite the tea. I cannot take her there, I tell her. She would be devoured, I do not say. The lake, sucking my feet clean. Sucking my skin off.
Angelica presses herself more deeply into her chair and stares at me, as if she can compel me to terrible acts. Her eyes are the color of the black stars that flood in a river between my legs every night and within the hollow of her throat, I see another echo of the black stars, something just beneath the skin that moves—
Ambrose enters the room and Angelica sits as straight as a board, as if she has been skewered beneath the table with a knife. All color bleeds from her skin, and she is a shadow, if a shadow could be thin enough to allow sunlight through its black body, illuminating the rags and bones of her heart. When she flees the room, I’m surprised she doesn’t trail blood from a wound. I can smell it, even though it does not exist.
My tea grows cold as Ambrose sits across from me. His own tea steams warm between us, his hands loosely cupped around the china. I wish you to come to me, he tells me; I wish you to tell no one, for there are matters between you and me and these things must be laid plain. Bare. If you are such a queen, he says.
But he cannot seemingly say more than this; he looks ill at the very idea he has questioned it. I spread my hands flat upon the table and beneath my fingers, the ivory lace of the cloth runs black. It is stars that bleed into the lacework, stars that creep their way toward Ambrose who wants to withdraw, but cannot. I watch as if from a distance as this blackness lifts itself in a gentle cloud and swallows him. His mouth notches open in a silent horror and the stars rush in and down and I envy his mouth, I envy his lungs, at the way the darkness expands him, makes him more than he just was, as it fills every lacking part of him.
I wish the darkness to tear Ambrose open the way Angelica does her raspberries—who knows such sweet things in the midst of ruin and rebuilding—but the darkness knows patience and knows when the time will be right for such things. For now, the darkness withdraws and Ambrose shudders and slumps to the table with a sodden, broken sound. I leave the table and encounter his ladywife in the narrow hallway—taken by surprise, she stands so close to me I can feel the chill that rolls from her; it is not yet winter, yet she carries it on her skin, much as Angelica. She gasps softly, as if she means to draw away from me, but her attention is beyond our close encounter; I glance behind, to find Ambrose righting the teacup he has overturned and broken, the tea spreading a sepia stain into the lace cloth. Lady Kowal rushes to his side, to make all things better.
The stains scatter like stars and I take my leave of the Kowals, wandering as I will, always and ever upward, to the yellow room that commands my interest. Today its flaking walls are not vacant; Nicholas kneels upon the floor in his salt-stained suit, his tie already undone. His head is thrown back, arms limp at his sides, palms staring at the low ceiling. The boxes are thrown about as if some great beast were only just romping among them. He does not move when I approach, but for his fingers curling inward to kiss palms.
I circle him, slow but sure, and when I look upon his face—his eyes yet closed, his lips parted—he speaks without having to look upon me. In this place, none will feel the need to regard me as anything other than what I am. His tongue wets his lips and he speaks my name, and the world falls apart. There are no paths we may speak of, yet we travel them by the four winds, the clouded waters of lake Hali sucking us free of our skins as we go. Nicholas screams, for some part of him yet doubted I was the thing he sought; there was only ever a king, part of his mind says, a king aging and tattered, and all have gone mad. All have gone—
Nicholas grows silent under the touch of my hands. Through the woods, where the trees are tall and strong, rising from the dark floor of the world, I take him in hand and guide him to that place from which he cannot return. And he goes willingly, calling me nymph, daring me to bring the rain, and so it rains in hot sheets that obscure the twin suns. Beneath us, stones rise from the ground, broken and round as if they were once bodies and not stones at all. Moss riots over them, soft and dark between each stone; Nicholas rakes his fingers through the green and is covered, pulled into the ground, and devoured. The seeds of him scatter in the dark, burst, and grow, and it is my king who at last enfolds me from behind, in vaporous arms as he shows me the hole within the world, the place where everything turns to sand and spirals inward, as if down a drain. Everything falls to black stars, I have only to bring him, bring him to the shore. Nicholas was but the seed.
Come morning, in the east dining room with the windows now covered, darkened, cousin Angelica opens every raspberry as though she is looking for something. Her hands shake and she cannot dislodge the berry from its stem. She allows me to help, but as my hands enfold her own, we are drawn somewhere else entirely.
The yellow lake, a handful of years ago. A slim and pale body spread in the waters, clinging to the ragged edge. This could be me, but it is another; it is Angelica drawn from the sulfuric water by three pairs of hands that have never worked a hard day in their life despite the longing for a rebuilt empire. They are already rebuilding an empire—just one none shall know exists, an empire existing to serve and fulfill their needs above all others. They draw Angelica from the sulfur, her skin burned and ragged, but Ambrose knows ways to make her whole again, he promises. He knows how to mend a sick body, enough so that one might once again carry a child, a creature born of this broke
n world, from a body others discarded; a creature that might reach across worlds, might draw down the light of Hyades and make it shine once more.
But oh my King we never ceased shining—what do they mean to do?
Angelica tries to pull her hand free, but time only stutters and carries us into the yellow room, toward the thing Angelica does not want me to see. There are no boxes, nor dust, only a small and tidy room with a golden draped couch in its center. The walls are perfectly papered, every river and body hidden within intact. With her eyes, Angelica follows one long line around the room as the shadow falls over her, as her body is parted by three sets of hands like a raspberry. She begins in the northwest corner, an innocuous curl that looks like a leaf, but this leaf becomes a hand that she slides her own into. This hand is cool and not warm like those working her; this hand lifts her from the couch, from the terrible yellow room, straight into the color itself where all is good and glorious. Here, Angelica consumes lemonade and yellow apples until she feels she might burst. She pockets each and every apple seed, saying that one day, she might need their special poison. One day. And Frederick’s seed stirs within her now, burrowed into her womb—
—whom he so loved, he filled her with a child even as he withheld one from his proper ladywife—
Angelica wrenches from my touch, the raspberry between us gone to blood on my fingers, bright and startling in the shadows of the room. Angelica staggers backward, and I think that it was not Frederick I was meant to bring and there is a pain within me sharp as the look on Angelica’s face. She shakes as do autumn leaves, wishing me to keep my distance, and I want to tell her I know and now understand, but I realize then that to know the name of a thing is not always to know what it is. Speak his name, I tell her, but she has no need. I know down to my bones. It was not Frederick alone, nor Ambrose or Nicholas, but these three in collusion; these three who held my legs, who called me mermaid and selkie and knew all the while what I was, what they hoped to tame.
