by Alex Bledsoe
I stood between the two bodies for a long time, waiting for my own heart to decide it wanted to stay in my chest. Finally I sheathed my sword and sat down on the far side of the fire. My hands shook and my head hurt. The horse came around to stand near me, a gesture that I appreciated but couldn’t really acknowledge at the moment.
Sometime after midnight I tossed both corpses into the fire, followed by the deer carcasses and all the other myriad animal parts I found scattered around the area. The smell grew even more ghastly. I led the horse a short distance upwind and sat in the grass watching the fire. It faded at dawn, and by the time the sun reached the tops of the trees, it had settled down to copiously smoking embers. I figured it was now safe to search the old cottage.
I peered through one of the windows and saw the reason they’d built the lean-to instead of moving into the building. The skeletal remains of dozens, if not hundreds of dead animals had been tossed inside, and now lay in a haphazard pile that sloped down and spread from the windows and door. I saw deer, bear, beaver and a few bones I was pretty sure were human. To Paw-Paw and John-Thomas, I imagine they were all just meat for the fire. The dense, massive piles must’ve accumulated over several years, and perhaps that explained why no one had ever resettled the valley. I was almost sick again, but since this was my last obstacle, I choked it down and continued.
I kicked several deer rib cages aside and entered the old cottage. How had I felt all those years ago, doing the same thing? The experience had been so intense that even now I could imagine the place as I’d seen it then, the rot and debris replaced by Epona’s accoutrements.
I reached the old hearth, took a deep breath and forced myself to look at the place as an impartial investigator. It was difficult, but not impossible. Beneath the carcasses, all of Epona’s original belongings had decayed pretty much where I’d last seen them. Evidently Paw-Paw and John-Thomas had not bothered to loot the place before they started using it as their garbage pile. I cleared the dirt and dust from the edge of the hearth and sat in the same spot I’d occupied all those years ago, when Epona held court for me. The frame of the old rocking chair, minus its long-decayed woven seat but miraculously upright, sat like a throne awaiting the return of its queen.
That night I had continued up the trail alone after leaving Nicole, and Epona had greeted me at the door. “Hello, Baron Edward LaCrosse of Arentia,” she had said then. The words still practically hung in the cottage’s air.
NINETEEN
Hello, Epona Gray of the little house in the big woods,” I had replied, mimicking her tone. “Come in,” she said, and stepped aside, “before you catch your death of moonlight.” Her movement was languid and yet somehow entrancing. I didn’t move, but not from fear; I just couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“Don’t tell me the old village conjurer has bewitched the cynical young soldier,” she said. Her voice was throaty, her tone gentle, so the mocking didn’t grate. I saw that she was barefoot and held a wine bottle loose in one hand. “If it’ll make you feel better, call me Eppie. Eddie and Eppie; has a nice lilt, don’t you think?”
“That seems a little disrespectful,” I said. I still didn’t move. “I thought you were a goddess.”
She laughed, and I got a look at her exquisite profile against the fire. “All women are goddesses, didn’t you know that? Look into one’s eyes sometime. Really look.” Then she faced me again. “Or, since that’s beyond you right now, remember what you saw in Janet’s eyes. Not in that portrait in the palace; in the real eyes that looked up at you that night after the harvest festival.”
I went battle-cold at that comment. The fumbling of two awkward teenagers in an unused guest room—the first time for us both—was a memory I’d never shared with anyone. I couldn’t imagine Janet gossiping about it, either. I strode forward, grabbed the woman by the wrist and jerked her out of the doorway. “You goddam bitch, who do you think you are?” I snarled.
I got my first look at her gleaming, sweaty face then. It was an exquisite set of features, not so perfect as to be intimidating, yet somehow enough to make you momentarily forget all other faces. Age-wise, she seemed both a grown woman in her thirties and simultaneously a teenage girl. She had big dark eyes and brown hair that fell over her forehead. Her smile was at once rapacious and tender. “Easy, Eddie,” she said softly.
From the treetops, the mysterious night birds cried out in alarm, and big shapes rustled ominously in the nearby woods. “It’s all right,” she murmured, and they instantly fell silent.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded. I smelled wine on her breath, and another vague odor I couldn’t identify. “Why did you want to see me?”
She rubbed her eyes with her free hand, as if struck by a sudden headache. “Wow,” she whispered. “Can we continue the melodrama indoors? I need to sit down.” She didn’t wait for an answer, but pulled her arm from my grip and went inside.
I stopped in the doorway and surveyed the room. The place looked like a tavern after a long weekend. Bottles lay scattered on the floor, the chairs were in disarray and dirty clothes had been tossed haphazardly aside. The fire blazed so brightly it was like a sauna, which explained the almost sheer gown Epona Gray wore. She picked up an overturned rocking chair, placed it by the hearth and sat heavily. She took a long drink then offered the bottle to me.
“No, thanks,” I said as I undid my jacket against the heat. “I’m not worthy to drink a goddess’ backwash.”
She looked at the bottle. “Your loss. About the wine, I mean. I save this for special occasions. It’s great stuff.”
Behind a privacy curtain I saw a large bed, the covers and pillows rumpled. The kitchen cabinets were in disarray, and dishes filled the washbasin. For a goddess, she was a slob. “Are you going to tell me what I’m here for, or is there a reason?”
She ran a hand through her hair. “Reason, reason, reason. That’s a big thing for you, isn’t it? Everything has to have a reason, everyone has to be reasonable.” She turned to me. With the chair and the fire, she now looked the part of a village hedge witch. “Cathy spoke highly of you. She loves you, you know.”
I blinked in surprise. If she meant something about the previous night at the river, I didn’t believe for a minute that Cathy would tell this woman anything so personal. “I think that’s the wine talking, Eppie.”
“You people,” she laughed. “Eddie, I didn’t say she was good at it. She doesn’t have a clue how to express it. She was raped as a child, again as a teenager and swore she would never feel love of any sort again. She took back power over herself, and in the process cut herself off from every tender feeling in her heart.” She pointed at me with the bottle. “Until she met you, bright boy. But you turned her down at her most vulnerable.”
“I suppose she told you all this?” It was hard to maintain my ironic distance with all the conflicting emotions suddenly churning inside me.
Epona nodded. “Right there in that bed. Where all secrets are revealed and all the walls come down.”
Now I knew this woman was nuts. Even if Cathy was interested in women, she wouldn’t just hop into bed with some drunken tart who lived in the woods. She also hadn’t had time, since she’d barely been gone the length of a dart game. “Right,” I said disdainfully.
Epona picked up a short, straight pipe from among the debris and pulled a stick from the fire to light it. She took a deep draw, leaned back and sent a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. She smiled, her eyes closed.
“Honestly, I don’t understand why you people don’t fuck all the time. What an experience—better than drinking, or smoking, or food, or anything. I thought I was prepared, I thought it couldn’t compare with what I knew, but damn. Your world is full of so many things you can touch, but that—touching each other—oh, man, is that the best.”
I rubbed my temples. The heat and smoke were giving me a headache, and I saw no reason to endure this crap any longer. “If you’ll excuse me, Eppie, I think I’ll head back to to
wn.”
She looked up at me. Her gown fell off one shoulder, revealing perfect skin and the curve of her bosom. “You don’t believe I am what they say I am, do you?”
The sudden entrance of sexuality into the situation hit me with the force of a hammer to the stomach. I kept most of it out of my voice, though. “A goddess, Eppie? No. I don’t believe that.”
She tossed her head to get a stray lock of hair from her eyes. “But it’s true. I am a goddess. I chose to come here, to join you in this reality, to see what flesh felt like, because I love you all. I know all your thoughts, your dreams, your darkest secrets and brightest hopes. But I didn’t know what it really felt like to be clothed in flesh like you, until I decided to share it.” She nearly dropped the pipe as she brought the bottle back to her mouth. “You’re all so hungry, you have so many appetites.”
“Well, we like to keep busy.” I was annoyed, but there was an edge of sincerity to her I couldn’t explain. And I was thoroughly, almost embarrassingly aroused. To change the subject I asked, “So did you like your package?”
“Package? Oh, the trinket Cathy brought.” She looked around on the floor until she found it. “I knew it was coming. I wish it didn’t have to. But the world unfolds as it should.”
She handed it to me. It was a small, worn iron horseshoe, the kind you could find on any pony. Dirt and rust coated it. “Wow,” I said. “Lot of trouble for something so ordinary.”
“Yeah, Eddie,” she said distantly, sadly. “Andrew Reese has finally found me. Do you know who he is?”
I shook my head.
“Andrew Reese is broken to pieces,” she sang, and then repeated it over and over so that the rhyme, and the man’s name, were forever imprinted in my brain. Devils must sing it in hell.
Then she blinked, shook her head and looked up at me. “What were we talking about?”
I undid the top button of my sweat-soaked shirt. With the fire at my back and Epona before me, I felt like I might burn to a cinder. “Who’s Andrew Reese?”
She bent forward and rested her elbows on her knees. She held the bottle in one hand, the pipe in the other. “That’s why I wanted to see you. Let me tell you a little story, Eddie. Once before, I decided to walk among you. Not like this, not as one of you. But simply to let myself be seen and heard as a human being. I formed an island safely off the trade routes but near enough I might be visited. I made it a paradise, with plenty to eat and drink, but completely uninhabited. And then I waited. I had plenty of time, you understand.”
“I imagine you would,” I agreed.
“And so my first visitor arrived. Andrew Reese, a handsome young sailor who’d been washed overboard by a storm and managed to survive long enough to reach my island. I let him wander around for a while, get used to the place, until I finally decided to let him find me. I chose a form that he would like, that of a young woman beautiful by his standards.”
She grinned mischievously. “You should’ve seen me, Eddie. I was tall and willowy, delightfully fragile-looking, and yet I allowed my strength to shine through. I made my hair golden, because I knew he liked blondes. My birds attended me, always nearby but never landing. My horses awaited my command. I was such a sight, though, I don’t think he ever noticed them.” She took another puff on the pipe. “He only had eyes for me.”
“How’d it go?”
“I brought him to a cottage a lot like this one. I even put out a lavish dinner, with some of this.” She held up the wine bottle. “That turned out to be a mistake.”
“Now how can a goddess make a mistake?” I asked, convinced I’d finally caught her in a contradiction.
She was too tipsy to notice my mocking tone. “Okay, not a mistake, exactly. See, I decided not to allow myself full access to my knowledge of things. I wanted to feel surprise, to understand truly what it must be like to not know. So, because of that, I did something that, had I been at full oneness with everything, I would not have done. I gave wine to a man who should never, ever drink.”
“What happened?”
She snorted. “A drunken sailor, a pretty girl, what do you think happened? He didn’t try to rape me, exactly, but he wasn’t in the mood to take no for an answer. I finally had to subdue him, which he later put down to too much wine. After all, no mere girl could overpower him. But I did warn him not to ever again try to compel any living thing on the island to act against its wishes. My little experiment was important to me, I’d grown fond of what I’d created, and wanted to really see what this man was about.”
The gown had slipped further down. I wanted above all to kiss the line of her collarbone over to her neck. I couldn’t believe I was so monumentally, thoroughly horny; I hadn’t felt this much single-minded lust since . . . ever.
“When he sobered up the next day, I watched him in secret as he wandered around the island,” she continued. “My animals were gifted with a higher awareness than those you know, so when he spoke to them, he could tell they understood. I didn’t let them talk back to him, because I didn’t want to send him screaming for the hills. But I did want him to get an inkling of the gentleness and goodness existing beyond his normal perceptions.”
She paused for another draw on the pipe. “He understood,” she said in a cloud of smoke. “He felt it. Andrew was a decent man, with a kind heart and the ability to feel love. Until he started drinking again. This time he did attempt to force himself on me, and I let him know I was no ordinary woman. I broke his thumbs like that.” She snapped her fingers to illustrate the ease. “I told him that I’d forgive his bad manners once, but only once, and if he did it again, I’d show him just what I could do. Then I healed him. Of course it didn’t occur to him I was a real goddess, he just thought I was some well-studied magician or witch. Again, if I’d let myself know all I could know, I would’ve seen this wasn’t the best approach.”
She tossed the pipe casually into the fireplace, where it fell between two burning logs. She stood and walked to the door. “He stomped off, furious and embarrassed. He found a squirrel, who’d become his special companion over the time he’d spent with me, but he was in no mood for its compassion.”
She paused, looked outside, and when she turned back tears glittered in her eyes. “He grabbed it and tore its head off as easily as I’d hurt him, because in his drunken rage and humiliation, he had to hurt something. He threw its little corpse aside, discarded like some piece of garbage. This squirrel had been his friend, you understand, it had followed him and listened to him and kept him company so he wouldn’t be alone. It brought him nuts and placed them at his feet. And he killed it with no more thought than I just gave to that pipe.”
She took a drink, followed by a deep breath. “Whew. Sorry, it’s just all so fresh to me. That squirrel was part of me, just as you are, just as everything is. When I felt it die, I grew furious, and let my pain lash the island in a storm. I almost killed Andrew with it, in fact, but I was not about to let him off that easily. He fell asleep in the cottage I’d made for him, but he awoke the next morning back on the beach where he’d washed up. I’d wiped the island clean of everything, so that it was only a bare rock in the water.”
She walked back to me as she spoke. “I told him exactly who I was, exactly what I was, and that he was to leave. And do you believe it? He had the audacity to say, ‘And what happens if I don’t?’ ”
“What did you do?”
She smiled coldly, and for the first time since I arrived at the cottage, I felt a little hint of fear. “Oh, Eddie, I showed him just what a pissed-off goddess was capable of. I snapped every bone in his arms and legs, then pushed them up into his torso. I twisted him into human jetsam, Eddie, and cast him back to the sea.” She gestured with the bottle, sloshing wine across the room. “And I cursed him with the worst fate I could imagine; a long, long life.”
She nodded to indicate the end of her story, took another drink and fell heavily into the rocker. “He’s still alive, too. He wants to die, because the pain never
dims for him, but I’m not ready to let him. Not yet.” She finished the bottle and flung it vaguely toward the kitchen, where it shattered against the wall. “But as you can probably understand, he’s still pretty mad at me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at me with narrowed eyes, as if she’d just noticed the effect she’d had on me. “Uh-oh,” she said, her voice slurred, “I got so wrapped up in my story I forgot about yours.” She jumped up, nearly fell backward and, giggling, extended her hand to me. “Come on, Eddie. Time for your reward.”
She pulled me to my feet and over to her bed. I put up no resistance. When she pulled the sheer gown over her head, I noticed for the first time that she was deathly pale and emaciated; as ill, in fact, as Nicole had said. Not that anything, at that point, was a turn-off. She was still the most sexually arousing woman I’d ever met.
I gently lifted one of her arms. Great scabbed welts ran along the inside, almost from her wrist to her elbow. Some were red and oozy from infection. “Damn, Eppie, what happened?”
“Hm? Oh. This.” She pulled her arm free, held it up and dug her fingernails into the soft flesh. She ripped down to the inside of her elbow, and gasped at the sensation. I grabbed her before she could repeat it on the other arm. She struggled weakly in my grasp.
“Don’t stop me, Eddie, I crave this. Ripping myself open reminds me, in any weird, twisted, perverted way you want to call it, that there is life and a world to embrace.”
The blood ran in thin trickles down her arm. There should’ve been more; her illness was serious. But she sighed with almost sexual satisfaction as the pain faded. “I have visions of poking a stiletto through my cheek,” she said breathlessly. “Imagine the tear. It’s tough, the cheek. But it can be broken.”
“You need help,” I said.
She shook her head. “I need to be fucked. I need to feel it the way you do, while I can. I’ve indulged every human impulse. I’ve opened this body to everything, to everyone. And it’s killing me. I don’t have long, Eddie. Neither do you.”
