“That’s it,” Lyssa whispers, her skin flushing, the lines in her face smoothing out. “Now hate him for it, Julie. That’s my girl. Hate him as you once hoped to love.”
Julie sinks down onto the rug, weeping, the dogs whining and licking at her tears. She opens her mouth but she feels emptied of words for what she feels, for the strange keening loss inside her.
She drops her head to the rug, her hands in fists by her ears, her whole body shuddering. No love. Her belly twists and rolls and she thinks she might vomit from sorrow. All of them taking from her, night after night, taking and taking and when they look in her eyes all they see is what he made them imagine—
No love no love no love
She opens her mouth and screams into the carpet, everything wild and spinning. A scream that trails off into gagging, her spit dribbling onto the carpet as she heaves and coughs. Her body turned inside-out from sobbing.
“No love for Julie,” Lyssa pants. “No name, no husband, no home. No babes at your breast. While he abandons his babies at the orphanage, while he keeps a woman and chases others.”
No love no love no love
“Hate him, Julie. Hate him for yourself, hate him for your sisters, hate him for me. Give me your rage and let me free you…”
The dogs surround her in hot fur and breath and the wet of their noses and Julie flattens completely, letting them nip at her arms and legs. Above her Lyssa is still speaking, what is she saying? The keening sorrow dying away inside her, replaced by a vigor she has never felt before.
The vast shadow falls over her and Julie looks up, yelping not in fright but in pleasure now, as Lyssa’s hand scratches behind the soft golden fur of her ears; when the scratching becomes a pinch, however, she snaps hard, baring her teeth.
But Lyssa only laughs aloud, rubbing her head once more. “That’s my girl,” she says approvingly. “No fear now, no foolish hope. Only your beautiful anger.” She points to one of the dark tunnels, and a breeze rushes over Julie, smelling of him, his sour breath and his body. She whines aloud, trembling with anticipation.
“That’s my girl,” Lyssa says again, then snaps her fingers. “Now get him.”
III.
Julie runs, faster than she ever has, even as a child she had never run so quickly, so freely. Her long legs tearing over cobblestones, splashing in the muck of the drains. She races around the legs of passerby, tearing past skirts and under carts, cutting down narrow dark alleys smelling of death and sex and shit and out into the wider streets again. Boys lunge to grab her but she is gone before they can seize her, she feels their hands impotently grazing her tail.
She runs past the brothel’s dark door, recognizing it by smell and shape, and she barks in a wild glee but she does not stop.
Beside a large coach she sees, drowsing, a fine mastiff, all muscle and sleek grey fur, and she pauses then; he catches her eye and rouses, looking her over, and for a moment she thinks to lure him away, let him take her quickly and fiercely beneath the stars. But it is not time for that, and she runs on.
She sleeps in an open field, the wind stroking her over and over like a mother, and she bathes contentedly at dawn, stretching and rolling, letting the sun warm her body into wakefulness.
She runs past the open pit of the cemetery, the bodies already reeking in the rising heat of the day, and the smell is not repugnant but rich and foetid and strangely pleasurable, and she senses, just on the edge of her perception, how there is earth in the corpses and in her own body, how there is life in the ground beneath her, how in everything there is a common scent and taste that she can just barely discern.
In the yard behind a butcher’s she wriggles through a gap in the wall and wolfs down a few sweet mouthfuls of discarded meat, tearing at it and tossing it playfully about until a stone clatters by her head and sends her running again.
She runs and runs, her breath ragged in her throat, her heart thumping as it never has before. Paris as large as the world with its bends and turns, its buildings short and tall: where might she go now, and now, and now?
Anywhere. Anywhere she wants.
What do you want, Julie? Someone was speaking—
But then she smells him, and she remembers, and stops.
He is walking away from her, one hand brushing the walls to steady himself. She falls into a trot behind him, watching. His face shadowed but his smell is as clear in her mind as his voice, as the touch of his hand, as the feel of him inside her.
Even as she follows, a young man hurries up to him, breathless: Monsieur Rousseau! And proceeds to kiss his hand, nearly weeping, while gasping out praises.
Rousseau has given voice to love.
Do you think yourself better than me? Comtesse Julie? Princesse Julie?
You profane me by loving me too much.
She feels her anger and it is clean and strong and purposeful.
He turns into a narrower street, waving the young man away. She can see now that the stumbling gait is not drunkenness but age, and she begins panting in delighted anticipation, at how easily she will take him.
Behind her there is the thunderous rattling of a carriage, rushing headlong; without looking she can sense the speed of the vehicle, the nervous sweat of the horse panicked by the cracking whip. Ahead of her the other passers-by press themselves against the walls.
Rousseau turns at the noise and she growls at him, and the fear in his eyes makes her ecstatic.
The walls are high on either side, the street is as long and tight as a chute; his escape is blocked by the carriage behind, by the stretch of unbroken walls ahead. She leaps at him and all he can do is throw his arms across his face and scream. Her teeth sink into his forearm as she rides him to the ground, snarling and tearing at his skin. His head cracking against the stones, his hot blood in her mouth, pooling beneath him. He hits at her but the blow barely grazes her head.
She feels, for the first time in her life, triumphant.
Do you think yourself better than me? she cries mockingly, but all that comes out is a frenzy of barks.
Behind them the carriage comes to a skidding halt, the horse rearing in fright. Still she crouches atop Rousseau, pinning him to the ground, snapping her bloody teeth in his face every time his eyes start to drift closed. The blood leaking from his cracked skull is dark and thick and she does not take her eyes from his.
And then a man kicks her aside, taking all the wind from her. When she lunges towards Rousseau again the man yells furiously and draws his sword, slicing a wide arc inches from her face and driving her backwards down the street. The passers-by swoop in from the walls, circling Rousseau and calling for a surgeon. The boot catches her again in the ribs, sending her clattering against the wall.
The last thing she sees is the horse, still wheezing openmouthed, meeting her eyes with a kind of grateful sympathy.
###
When Julie awakens it is to the bright midday sunlight in the churchyard. She is huddled on the front step of the little house like a beggar, her dress filthy and her hand smeared with dried blood, the edges of the wound unevenly gummed together. Her ribs throb with every breath, her ankle is so swollen it has burst through her stocking. How long has she been lying here? With a grunt of pain she makes herself move. The streets crowded now, dozens of eyes upon her at every turn; she knows how she must look, she ducks into smaller alleys to avoid the police who would surely stop her.
She had been running…but the memories are slipping away, replaced by her anxiety over the hour. She hurries blindly through the streets, trying to calm her rising panic.
At the door of the brothel she hesitates: how can she account for herself? She was attacked, robbed, she ran and fell and struck her head. Only now has she come to. She recites the story to herself until it sounds natural, then knocks at the door.
Only to come face-to-face with a girl she’s never met before. When did she get taken on? When Julie tries to step inside the girl pushes her back, a hard shove that makes her twist her
sore ankle anew, leaving her gasping while the girl hollers for Madame Travers.
And the woman who comes to the door is Travers and yet not: visibly older, the piled hair a wiry gray, her drawn face wrinkling into a sneer as she looks Julie over. “Crawling back,” she declares. “Crawling back after all these years, after all I did for you. What, did some fellow make you promises? Nice rooms and pretty dresses and Lilas all to himself? So go back to him, you ungrateful little bitch!”
And with that she slams the door, leaving Julie on the street, stunned. Travers’ face. She knocks again, frightened now, only to be met with a chorus of jeers from above; she looks up just in time to dodge the muck of the first chamber pot. All the windows swing open, the girls crowding and jostling to fling one after another at her, shouting threats and insults to the amusement of the passers-by.
Bewildered, Julie stumbles away down the street. Many of the shops have new fronts, or have changed completely. She stops before a large window, gaping at what appears to be her own face and yet not: a thinner Julie, nearly gaunt, with narrower lips and her hair kinked with white. In wonderment she touches her own cheek, feels a soft dryness that it never had—and then she turns over her hands, looking closely at them, seeing fine lines that had not been there before.
It is with a sense of dread that she looks more closely at the shop windows. Prints of a coronation she has no recollection of, portraits of a king and queen she does not recognise. Tracts about colonies in revolt—
once she had dreamt about life in the colonies—
and then she sees the gazette, the date writ large on the front, and her knees nearly give out from beneath her.
1775.
Fourteen years.
“Madame? Madame, are you ill?”
She looks up at the face of a man she doesn’t know, his wig oddly small and tightly curled, the cut on his suit not quite right…she would have thought him foreign, once.
Injury, death, a public confession, all these things will happen at their time. There are rules.
Fourteen years, lost.
He tries to take her arm but she jerks away, whimpering; he looks around then and she recognises that look. First a policeman, then a dark prison cell if she’s lucky, never to be seen again. Instead she ducks past him and hurries down the street as fast as her sore ankle will allow, clutching her ribs, fresh panic making her breath short and tight. The faces normal and yet not, the carriages a little different . . . the slight changes maddening, and she has had her fill of madness now.
The sun has just set when she finally makes it back to the churchyard. No knife, but the house is as abandoned as ever, she merely snaps off a shard of glass. A cursory wipe and she stabs her hand with it, barely noticing the new pain atop the old as she pushes the green door open, crying “Lyssa! Lyssa! Help me. . . .”
But there is only the room, the last rotting traces of the mattress. She tries again, and again, smearing door and step alike with her blood, dribbling it inside and out.
Nothing makes the darkness come.
IV.
1782
She knows how she looks. Fourteen years lost and since then only piecework and laundry—honest trades but poor ones, and the work exhausting. Her hair white and thin, her hands gnarled, cheeks hollow from pulled teeth. She has no money for a wig, or the wooden teeth that finer ladies use. She has a room and a little food and two spare petticoats, and if she loses the room she may as well be dead.
Still Julie stands now before the bookseller, silently hoping. He is studying her with overt suspicion but also curiosity, and she is betting on the latter.
“Madame,” he says, “the great Rousseau’s Confessions are six books to date, which we have impeccably bound at considerable expense. I cannot simply let any…person come in here and handle them.”
She takes a breath. “Have you read them?”
Again, he studies her, his expression softening. “I have, several times now. I am a lifelong admirer of the man. I have read every work, I had inquiries out the moment I heard he was writing his memoirs. To finally have them after so many years—”
“What do you mean?”
“You do not know?” He leans forward now, warming to his subject. “He wrote them years ago, Madame, but to his credit he refused to have them published until certain persons had passed, or until he himself was…was with his Maker.” He pauses, his eyes glistening. “I have heard,” he says in a lower voice, “that it was a dog that precipitated his demise? Some beast running loose in the streets knocked him down, he never recovered from the blow. A thousand curses on that mutt, eh? To think what it robbed us of…”
She can only stare at him, open-mouthed. She had made herself believe it was all a prolonged fit of madness, how else to account for it?
Standing over his face as he bled and bled, pinning him down as he had done to her, relishing the fear in his eyes, alive in a way she had never felt before or since—
The scars on her hand start to throb.
“A great loss,” the bookseller continues, “but that someone like you knows of his work is yet further proof of his wisdom and influence—”
“Does he mention a man named Klüpfel?”
And she sees it in his eyes: recognition. Something shifts, deep in her belly.
“Is he a relation?”
“I…in a manner of speaking.”
The bookseller hesitates; then he waves his hand at her. “Wait here.”
It is only after he leaves that she realises he has trusted her in his shop, alone. The realization makes her weep a little; she would not have trusted herself, were she in his position.
When he returns, he has two volumes under his arm. “My own copy,” he says proudly, laying the books on the counter. “I think I remember the name you mentioned…”
For a long time there is only the rustling of pages. The shop quiet, almost as if enchanted, for though crowds are thronging in the busy street not a single person opens the door.
“Here,” the bookseller suddenly declares, looking at her with a grin that makes him seem boyish. He starts to turn the book towards her, then says, “or would you like me to read it to you?”
Her hands are trembling; she presses them into her skirts. “Yes,” she whispers. “Yes.”
But as he reads she starts to cry, silently. He cannot see her around the book that he holds up to the dim sunlight, and so he reads on. Every word is like a hammer-blow, and she feels some last piece of herself crumble with each enunciated syllable, replaced first by sorrow, then a hot, dark fury.
He slows, looking at her now over the top of the book. “You poor creature,” he says softly, “are you perhaps—are you this Joan he describes?”
She opens her mouth to reply, but her whole body is shuddering, she feels about to vomit and instead she screams at him, “I am Julie!” Tearing her hair, twisting and writhing, almost blind with her tears, her rage: “I am Julie! I am Julie! I am Julie!”
The room spins and lurches. She feels the rush of air as the bookseller flings the door open, hears his hoarse cries “Help, she’s gone mad! Call for the wagon!” On her knees, sobbing, punching at the air, the floor, her fists so tight her nails cut into her palms.
He hadn’t even remembered her name.
I am Julie!
He had given her name to his book and he had given her life to some girl named Joan and no one would ever, ever know.
I am Julie!
Her body shaking as if in a fever, and she understands instinctively she must let herself feel it all, she must feel it all. Hate them as you hoped to love. Cringing under a thousand grabbing pawing hands, holding and bending her as they pleased. Hate them. All the voices in her ear, telling her what she was, who she was. All the ears that never heard her, all the eyes that never saw her. She sobs and sobs, as her haunches rise and her fingers fuse together.
I am Julie!
He had been pacing about their village square, waiting to change horses. The co
llar of a man of God around his neck. When he had looked her up and down she had blushed, and she had blushed harder when he offered to drive her home. Reverend Klüpfel. The dark, stuffy carriage, the snap of the latch. She thought they had ridden forever, when it had only been to find a quiet field where he could take her, whispering in her ear that he loved her, that he would take her to Paris, that she would never want for anything.
I am Julie!
She smells the policemen before she sees them and she dives at the first leg she sees, sinking her teeth into his thigh, his howl and the others’ startled cries like the sweetest music. They pull her off him and she bites another in the forearm and the two go spinning wildly in the bookshop, knocking over book-stands and display volumes, until she is brought down heavily on the counter and tumbles behind it, yelping in pain.
A pistol fires, sending books in all directions, filling the air with scraps of burnt paper.
“For God’s sake, be careful!” the bookseller cries. “I had a buyer for those!”
“You said it was a madwoman, not a mad dog,” one of the policemen snaps.
“A common mistake,” another deadpans, and the others laugh loudly.
Behind the counter Julie crouches, testing her sore leg, readying herself. She hears the nervousness in their too-loud laughter, she smells their sweat, she watches their shadows on the wall as they start to inch forward.
Her tongue snakes out, tasting the blood on her muzzle.
When the first one appears, his sword before him, she leaps back onto the counter, relishing the shock on their faces as she lunges forward and bites at the neck of one, the outstretched hand of another, her teeth tearing at their flesh. They shriek and cry and fall against each other, their swords swinging in loops and arcs that she easily dodges. Beneath her scrabbling paws the open Confessions starts to shred until with a snarl she kicks it away; in that moment the bookseller seizes the other volume and swings it at her as hard as he can, knocking her to the floor once more, setting the room alight in flashes of white. She howls then, long and loud and keening.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 22
