PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  Having gotten permission to remain by Iago’s side, I opened Meriel’s book and sat by the cot to wait.

  9

  15 April 1896

  We’re taking turns doing it. Every afternoon, we sit in the wash house and try our hand at calling him with our minds. Practice is vital, according to Bethan. Well, it goes without saying, she got her turn first. Sure enough, five minutes later, he appeared at the door, broom in hand, smiling sheepishly. Most of the time, he acts grumpy about that time we tied him to the chair, but when Bethan called him, he behaved as though all was forgiven.

  ‘Do you want another kiss?’ Bethan asked.

  ‘Yes please,’ he said, then shook his head, as if to clear it, and scurried away. We laughed to see him so rattled.

  When it was my turn, I pictured him kissing me like he did that day in the kitchen. I remembered the feel of his lips on mine and how hard he was breathing when he opened his mouth. It took longer for me to summon him, and when he finally came, he looked hesitant. I closed my eyes and thought of what I’d most like him to do. Boy leaned forward and ran his tongue slowly along the seam of my lips. ‘M-mm,’ he said. Then he ran away.

  Bethan pronounced it a failure because I wasn’t able to hold him there, but I don’t care. He didn’t put his tongue on her. Gwendraith made him touch her breast yesterday before he ran off but that only made her giggle. It wasn’t good like when he kissed me.

  I kissed Iago’s fevered forehead, and he opened his eyes. They were flat as circles drawn with a dull pencil. He didn’t notice the diary in my hand nor did he realize I was watching him.

  7 July 1896

  He caught me watching him reading tonight, but he wasn’t cross. He put his thumb in Song of Solomon and said, ‘I have to get away from here.’

  Sometimes I wonder if he casts spells, too, because I wanted to help him get away. I like having him around, but the way he looked at me, I would have done anything to set him free. We’ve practiced on him enough, if you ask me. Poor thing. He’s an orphan just like we are, and the world has been no more kind to him than it’s been to us. Maybe he even has his own demon out there like we have Gruenewald. In fact, madman that he is, I wouldn’t put it past Gruenewald to have locked Boy in his root cellar, too. Even though Boy is a boy, I bet Gruenewald would like him plenty.

  Bethan says it’s not wrong to want justice. Someday, when we’ve polished our craft enough, Gruenewald will get everything he deserves. I suppose we better pray that Boy never finds the strength to make us pay in kind. He used to sing while he worked. Now it’s like someone has turned off a light. Even those old rats didn’t stop him singing.

  I think my spell is working though, because when I told Boy the door to the barn was unlocked, he just nodded and asked me to lie down next to him. I could have gotten anything from him right then, but I was sure Bethan would have killed me for even lying by him like I did. I did it anyway.

  ‘What’s wrong with Bethan?’ he asked me, and I felt a stab go through my heart that he should know her name. Usually he calls us “Miss.”

  ‘Bethan is strong,’ I said. It nettled me to hear him ask about her. ‘It’s good to be strong.’

  He said, ‘There are twenty women up top the saloon on Beasley Road who can do what she does to a man. That makes a girl a lot of things, but that doesn’t make her strong.’

  He was casting spells again, I think, because this made a bit of sense to me. How do we know if the magic is coming from our craft or from our kisses? And if kisses work so well, why bother with the rest? Of course, we’ll need something a good deal more painful for Gruenewald than kisses. I wanted the boy next to me to understand this.

  ‘Bad things have happened to us, Boy.’

  He said the craziest thing then. Softly, sadly, he whispered, ‘I’m sorry for you then.’

  Damned if he didn’t look like he understood what it’s like to have your fingertips nailed to the ceiling beam.

  22 July 1896

  Today was the worst day yet. Bethan decided to think of something different. She stood barefoot in the checkerberries repeating the words KILL MOONSTONE KILL MOONSTONE KILL MOONSTONE until Boy came out of the barn. Raggity old Moonstone was stretched out in a wrinkled heap in the shade, but he looked up when he saw Boy like he knew something bad was coming. Usually those two are the best of friends, and the dog ends up with half of Boy’s breakfast. Not today. They looked at each other and Moonstone wimpered and Boy stared at him with cold fish eyes. ‘Run!” Bethan yelled and they both took off like a shot.

  I didn’t think that pooch could run no more, but he was pretty fast. Boy was fast, too, so fast, we could barely keep up. The chase wrapped around the big tree and hopped over some six logs and didn’t end until all of us were up to our knees in the creek. Moonstone was up to his chin. Boy marched through the water to where the dog was, splashing everyone, and Moonstone cried and cried. I expected Boy to pick it up and carry it home to safety but instead, he grabbed it, wrestled it to the banks, and throttled the bony thing dead right in front of us.

  I’ll say this: there’s no slower time than time that’s filled with that kind of grunting and fighting. After he kilt Moonstone, Boy sat and hugged that old dog until his shirt was ruined. He was still hugging Moonstone after supper was done. After dinner, too.

  I slipped up to the loft tonight, and we kissed. I don’t think it was because of the spell. My face got all wet because he was crying.

  The spell causes his stomach to seize whenever he tries to leave, and it doubles him over in pain. It’s better than any prison.

  “Please,” he gulped, like a dying man. He fell on his knees and wrapped his arms around my waist, murmuring my name over and over again. Like a prayer. Before tonight, I didn’t think he knew my name.

  I made up my mind to help him as we made love on top of the acorn bible.

  When Iago jumped awake, I jumped, too. Moments before, he’d been making love to someone else in the pages of a girl’s diary. It took some doing to re-focus on the prison cell and the confusion in his fevered eyes.

  “Lilabet?” he croaked. “Are you really here?”

  “I’m here, my love.”

  “I’m sorry, Lilabet. I’m sorry about everything.”

  10

  12 January 1897

  Today I pretended to patch a stocking when all the while I was really concentrating on freezing Boy’s feet to the ground where he stood. While I patched the stocking, Bethan was concentrating on calling him inside. She was working up quite a sweat, too, and growing more furious by the minute. ‘Get your fool ass in here!’ she screamed at last, and finally he came running in the door. Bethan was so trembling mad, she gave him my darning needle and told him to write her name across his ankle bone with it.

  It about killed me watching him bleed B and E shaped stains into the handkerchief as I tended his wounds afterward. Bethan believes she’s more powerful than Gwendraith, and I but I’m not so sure. For a while there, Boy had stood in the turnip patch, unable to move. I know because I could see him out the window.

  13 March 1897

  It’s dangerous for me to keep going to him, but Boy says the only time his head is clear is when we’re together. I’ve explained to him what Bethan is doing: calling him to her, making him hurt himself. I’ve told him to listen for my voice instead whenever he hears Bethan intruding in his thoughts. If we can work together to overcome what she’s doing, I think he’ll be able to leave.

  I’ve come up with a second spell to try and remove my first spell:

  Listen not to spells of old

  My love will make it lose its hold

  A helmet made up of my voice

  Locks out trouble, gives back choice

  In the meantime, I’ve made a vow to quit calling him Boy when I write about him. It will take some getting used to. His real name is Iago, and he deserves to be called by his name.

  Also, Iago really does have a girl back in Wales whom he’s promised to brin
g here. I envy her. He has majik hands.

  After ten hours of waiting for improvement, Iago sat up in the middle of the night. A storm was pressing in, and I saw his face in a sharp, brief flash. His colour was still gone, but the fever had left his skin. When the moon came up, I’d been holding a hot hand. I was holding a cool one now.

  A few paces from the cell, the night deputy pretended to clean his pistol while giving us stolen looks. Iago leaned forward and spoke softly so as to keep the man from hearing. “Go ahead and ask me, Lilabet. Ask me what happened with Bethan.”

  A crack of thunder made me jump. I felt like I’d been holding my breath for days. “What happened?”

  His eyes lifted to the ceiling as the rain began to drum. “You might not believe this, but there are witches here in Knockin.”

  For the first time in a long time, I wanted to laugh. I wanted to roll on the floor and give into the delirious, fist-beating, tears-dripping-off-your-chin laughter of the insane. I held up Meriel’s book.

  Iago took it from me slowly, grasping it as if the years within were recorded in granite rather than pencil lead. Light bloomed in the cell, and I glimpsed every disappointment, every horror streak by the windows of his eyes.

  It was pouring horror.

  Iago swallowed. “Bethan and I made a deal before you came here, but she so rarely keeps her word.”

  “What sort of deal?”

  “An ‘eye for an eye’ sort of thing, or rather, an ‘eye for one year of hell in the lives of three little girls.’”

  “Are you talking about the man you hit with the bicycle wrench?”

  “He’s gotten worse from Bethan in the time since, but yes. A fellow called Gruenewald. I knew him myself, and he was a disgusting monster. He treated them badly when they first arrived in the country, and they were out to give him his just deserts. Anyhow, I hit him good with that wrench. After that, Bethan said she wouldn’t try to keep me by her side anymore. It was a lie.” He took a shuddery breath. “I went to her house that night after I saw what she did to the front door. It was some sort of hex meant to harm us, Lilabet. I was very mad.”

  The word “mad” triggered pictures in my head, only this time they had to do with the past. The ax leaned against the stove in this brief picture I had of the past. Bethan Vevay sat in the kitchen chair. I saw my husband’s face. A great fury, cold and deadly, glistened in his eyes. There was yelling. Drinks were poured. Bethan slammed her hand down on the table. I was terrified to see what would happen next. As much as I wanted to know the truth, I wanted the pictures to go away more.

  They wouldn’t.

  “What’s wrong?” I heard Iago asking me in the prison cell, but I was seeing him in her kitchen, shaking his finger in her face, drinking, throwing the bottle at the wall. Everything was mashed together now, the bloody heart on the floor, the whiskey dripping down the tile, his foot kicking the ax.

  “I hate her,” the Iago in the prison cell was whispering in my ear.

  In her kitchen, he picked up the ax.

  “Don’t do it,” Bethan said.

  I said it, too. “Please don’t do it.”

  Iago threw the ax.

  There was a gasp just before it stuck. The gasp came from me.

  The ax landed with a terrible sound, wedging in the wooden floor.

  Iago marched from the room, and Bethan picked up a piece of laver bread and went back to eating her dinner. The ax was stuck in the floor when he left. Not her face.

  I grabbed his arm with both of my hands. “You didn’t kill her!”

  I was so relieved, I spoke too loud and the deputy stopped cleaning his gun.

  I wanted to kiss him, and I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to cheer and throw that book out in the rain. Whatever came next, my husband was innocent. I pressed my fingers over my lips and laughed at last. But Iago looked as guilt-ridden as ever.

  “What is it?’ I asked.

  He folded his hands atop the book, and suddenly I understood. My husband might not have murdered Bethan Vevay, but he knew who did, and he wasn’t about to say.

  11

  18 June 1897

  Today, when Bethan called to him in his head, Iago didn’t come. For the first time, I’m starting to have hope for him. So much so, I took him out to the backyard and patted the place by the creek and said, ‘This is the spot.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  If Bethan has her way, Iago will never leave here alive, but I told him to remember this special place where money was buried by God long ago in the form of rich black oil. I’ve seen it in my head, but I’ve never said anything to Bethan about it, because I liked the thought of having something for my own, even if it is deep underground, but I owe him for all his trouble, I should think. We’ve put him through hell these last years, behaving as though our torture deserved retribution and his deserved nothing at all, as if pain only counts if there’s someone around who cares that you’re going through it.

  ‘Do you still want that little bride of yours?’ I wanted to know.

  He was shy about saying yes, but he said yes all the same.

  I took a yellow stone from my apron and put it there as a marker. ‘When the time is right, remember this spot.’

  Beyond the window, it rained as it had never rained before. Iago was restless. He would flip through the lavender book, read a passage or two and start to speak, then rake his hair and shake his head. The past left him speechless, apparently, for he finally shut the book with a noisy crack and left it to lie in his lap.

  “Here’s the thing, Lilabet . . .” He licked his dry lips. “Bethan didn’t want me to get married. She tried to scare me into thinking I’d be useless to you as a man if I did, but then she slipped me foxglove. Everything was always off-balanced with Bethan.”

  “You believed in her powers?”

  He took my hands into both of his. “We could leave Knockin after I get out of this cell. I’ve read a great deal about California in Harper’s. They say it’s a land where the best of the old and the best of the new are rolled up into one. Knockin was my father’s dream. It isn’t mine. A new start would be so nice.” A tear leaked out of one eye and splashed onto the diary. “Our fathers got it wrong, you know? You can’t run from trouble, and you can’t keep it at bay by wearing your underwear wrong-side out.”

  “What can you do then?”

  “Ride out the storm together.”

  As the rain fell and the thunder shook the little room, the ink on the cover of Meriel Vevay’s Mirror Book commenced to bleed black tears.

  1 July 1897

  The very first minute I called, Iago came running like his hair was on fire.

  ‘Tell him to bang his head against that wall,' Bethan instructed.

  His beautiful cheeks are still scratched from yesterday when she commanded he tear off his face. I didn’t want to see him bang his head on the wall, but I kept thinking about what she did to Ceiro that last day, and I didn’t want to make her any angrier than she already was. I spoke inside his sweet trusting head, and he hammered his skull until blood poured in his eyes.

  ‘That’s wonderful, Meriel. What a good little witch you’ve turned out to be. He’ll do anything for you, won’t he?’

  Poor Iago. He was still hitting his head on the bricks. ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Bethan said. ‘Why don’t you ask him to show Gwendraith and me what you’ve been doing to him every night?’

  ‘Stop it!’ I said, fed up to my core. ‘This has gone too far. We need to let him go.’

  Bethan grabbed him by the hair to stop his thrashing. ‘Show me what Meriel does to you when you’re alone, Boy,’ she said. When I tried to block her voice, Gwendraith put my head in a bucket and held me under water. By the time she let me up, he was kissing Bethan. She made me watch this for several moments before shoving him away. Her smile was covered with his blood. ‘I want you to punch my sister in the head as hard you can now, Boy.”

  He didn’t hesitate. The first b
low struck me across the jaw. The second, crunched my ear. Between the pounding of his fists, Bethan pounded me with her words, too. ‘How dare you take him for yourself!’ she said. ‘He belongs to all of us!’

  She gave him the ax. ‘Kill her.’

  ‘No, Bethan!’ Gweny said.

  I looked at my sister who I loved. I’d followed her blindly, I loved her so. I waited for her to put an end to all of this. Iago lifted the ax, and she folded her arms.

  He swung.

  Luckily, he lost his balance and his aim was bad. I saw the tops of the fingers on my left hand come off. They scattered across the floor between us and there was a lot of blood, but I didn’t feel it.

  Iago staggered to his feet, and we all looked at Bethan expectantly. Bethan kicked the tip of my little finger across the room. ‘Lock her in the barn, Gwendraith.’

  I’ve managed to slow the bleeding by wrapping a rope around my wrist, but this is not what has me sick and afraid. If I live a thousand years, I’ll never forget the way Bethan said ‘Kill her.’ The fact that she has the power to make him hurt me, makes me wonder how Iago can ever hope to escape her. I fear we’re all doomed.

  As I sit waiting in this damned barn, the threshing floor is very still. I have no idea what’s going on out there.

  I smell smoke.

  12

  “I’m here to talk to the prisoner,” she said, her voice as rough and wrecked as ever, but decidedly strong.

  Iago sat up on the cot. Beyond the bars, the deputy stood between the scarred woman and the cell, blocking her path. “This is a prison—not a meeting house,” he said. “I’ll not have you breaking the rules.”

  “It’s about the murder,” Old Mrs. Blevens said. She was dressed in that big coat of hers and trembling from head to toe. Even I could see she was completely terrified to be standing there.

  Iago’s voice was as scratchy as hers. “I’m here.”