Rick Wayne's Blog, page 74

(Fiction) A State of Immanent Corruption

You will thus understand my surprise when, after I was rescued from the attic in Whitechapel, the police informed that I had a solicitor and that he had secured for me an exit from a lengthy prison sentence. The solicitor, a Mr. Bentley, told me he was employed by another attorney, an American named Olcott. When I asked why me, he said he didn’t know, that he was instructed merely to secure my release, which he did. I was taken under police custody to a steamer ship, which I had never before seen, and placed immediately aboard. There, I was introduced to the Countess Constance Wachtmeister, a drab woman done up to her neck in stiff Victorian dress—all black, including gloves and laced boots. She was, she told me, the personal assistant of “HPB,” which is how Madame Helena Blavatsky preferred to be called, and that by the terms of my release, I was now indentured to the Theosophical Society, who were responsible for my moral welfare. She said it with gravity, and as soon as she finished, without so much as a handshake, I was swept to a small cabin, the door was locked, the ship’s whistle blew, and we set sail for India.

We stopped in Cairo. I have never been so hot. I saw the pyramids and so much more squalor than I had presumed could exist in the world. The British seemed about as interested in their empire as a dog its fleas. But of course in that, they were hardly unique. Within the week, we set sail again from a port in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, despite numerous comings and goings, no one could tell me why I was there. I was given books to read, which I ignored. When Countess Wachtmeister appeared the next day to test my command of their contents, she was positively beside herself with fury that they had been unopened. I tried to explain to her that no one had suggested there would be a test, certainly not the wordless Arab boy who had handed them to me as if they were the plague. I was scolded like a schoolgirl by a woman less than half my age. But I took it in silence. I was a stray, just then passing the straits of the greatest desert in the world. I felt it best to do as I was told—at least until I was in a position not to. I suspect also that I was beginning to learn patience. Constance Wachtmeister was a droll woman, and in that way, her opinion of me didn’t matter in the least. I read the books she provided—even correcting the Latin grammar in one, which seemed to have been written by a four-year-old—and passed her stupid test. (The subjects included, among other things, alchemy and the sacred marriage.)

It was, I later learned, a prerequisite for joining the inner circle of the Theosophical Society, of which I was now a part—whether I wanted to be or not. But it was still several weeks before I met the infamous HPB, who was already at our destination. After landing at Bombay, a great mess of a place, the Countess and I were transferred to a locomotive that took us across the continent to Madras. Some miles outside the city—a journey of several bumpy hours by carriage—was a compound that had recently been built for Madame Blavatsky and her followers, and that is where all of us lived. By the time the Countess Wachtmeister and I arrived, retinue in train, we were exhausted and at each other’s throats. Madras was as sticky as a swamp, and as such, I removed some of the ridiculous outfit in which I had been dressed, an outfit barely fitting the dreary climate of London and certainly not the tropical subcontinent. Although I showed no cleavage, the Countess was aghast at my bare neck. I tried to explain to her that across the whole of Europe a bare neckline was considered quite proper attire for a lady less than forty years before.

It is not the case that manners and mores have gotten uniformly liberal with the centuries. They have waxed and waned unevenly. Concordant with its reputation, the Victorian mind was obsessed with all things proper, but this did not mean an absence of sex. Married couples were expected to engage in the act vigorously and often, in only to populate the Empire. But still, the infamous social repression of the age was not a myth, and it found its fullest and most fecund expression in the Countess Constance Wachtmeister. She was an Englishwoman by upbringing and half by birth. Her father was French, I believe. Her parents died when she was very young and she was raised by her aunt in Surrey. She was married to her cousin, Count Wachtmeister of Sweden, at the ripe age of 27 and moved to that country, where he was Minister of Foreign Affairs. After bearing him a son, her husband died, leaving her a widow at 33. In accordance with tradition, she wore black for the rest of her life. It seemed to infect her. She was not only entirely prudish, she was also relentlessly dour, the kind of woman for whom nothing and no one was ever good enough. When I said we were at each other’s throats, I meant it literally. On more than one occasion, I thought seriously of strangling her, if only to make it impossible for her to speak.

As we approached Ardor House, Madame Blavatsky’s manor, we both bore a long list of grudges against the other, accumulated on the long journey, that we expected the Madame to arbitrate as soon as possible. Alas, she was not home. In her stead, amid the usual, constant menagerie of hangers-on, we found scads of barefoot, dark-skinned workmen hammering up the tile floor. It was a strange sight. Ardor House was brand new, radiant even, having been recently built by the wealthy leader of a sister society in India expressly for our glorious leader, whom he greatly respected. What’s more, there seemed to be nothing wrong with the thing. The floor was a bit stark for my taste, being made of black and white marble tile. But it was perfectly flat and quite cool to the touch.

“Admirable qualities in a floor,“ I told the Countess. “Not a person.”

Apparently, HPB had had a fit at the sight of it, taking it as a great insult. She didn’t set a single foot on it, which means she had not actually entered the white-walled manor that had been built for her and made it clear she never would as long as it required treading such a travesty. Then she left to join the mendicants and gurus perambulating around the town.

The issue, I would come to understand, was doctrinal rather than material. Ardor House had been designed from flag to foundation on the principles of spiritualist magic promulgated by the Society and its cohorts. In the ceiling of the foyer, for example, was a fresco adorned in gold leaf that depicted the fundamental forces of the universe—sun and moon to the north and south, woman to the east, man to the west. In her hands was a chalice. In his, a dagger. To enter the foyer, one had to pass through seven white arches corresponding to the seven faces of the divine. The arches bisected a narrow nursery—it being the tropics, much of the building was open to the air—planted thick like a white witch’s garden. And on it went like that: the grand library was in the shape of a star, the baths were oriented to the poles, crystalline windows in the ceiling traced the path of the sun whose rays seemed to penetrate every corner. If there were shadows in Ardor House, they were faint. The floor, the very ground on which one walked, was checkered to represent the our place in the cosmos, a view that HPB expressly rejected.

Men have always understood—and HPB would’ve agreed—that we can discern the nature of the universe from the facts of our circumstance: that we spend half of each day in darkness, for example, and that correspondingly there is both suffering and joy in the world. For all pre-modern thinkers, it was impossible to conceive of the world as existing anywhere but on the border between great warring realms—stuck, as it were, in the middle. For the Norse, Earth was Midgard, the middle realm, just as in China, it is the Middle Kingdom, with heaven above and darkness below. So, too, in Christianity and Islam. Hence the stark, black-and-white tiles of the floor were the stage on which every drama of the house would take place—a reflection of the universal condition.

Madame Blavatsky asked how anyone could know this. After all, the scholars of antiquity believed that the earth was a bowl or a plate or sometimes a marble covered in a shroud of fixed stars, like a canopy through which holes had been poked so as to let the divine light peek through and remind us even here of the glory of God. Yet, once it was clear that was not the case, that each of those tiny twinkling lights in the sky was not a pinprick but its own distant sun, our ancient conception of ourselves being in the middle of things was never updated. That view was, like that old canopy, fixed in place. It was also, HPB noted, quite psychologically pleasing. Being in the middle suggested that everything was in some way about us, that we were the focus of the great conflict, that we were the star players and the earth the field of sport upon which every gaze in the universe was fixed.

Hardly, she said. The night sky was not a shroud but a seemingly infinite well of darkness—cold and barren and immeasurably vast. We didn’t seem to be in the middle of things at all. We seemed quite far flung in fact. True, our planet was tilted and turned every day between light and dark, which certainly suggested a struggle, a fact born by the common occurrences of suffering and joy. The earth seemed to be neither heaven nor hell, as the old religions assumed. But if our planet were the focus of the conflict, she said, if we were the front of the war, why could we not see the forces of light? Instead, there is only darkness. Darkness on all sides. An immeasurable quantity of it. Our planet was swimming in an ocean of darkness. What’s more, what grace there was seemed only to come by our hand. This, she said, was the problem of evil. It seemed quite direct. Evidence of malice was patent and universal, while evidence of grace was scant and indirect. If the divine were acting on earth, it was only very weakly.

But the crown jewel of her argument was what she called the state of immanent corruption, whereby life survived only by consuming other life. Anything that remained still, that took no act, as the gurus in India urged, inevitably succumbed to rot, and that this applied even to the mountains and rivers. All things not only suffered, they degraded. Where then was the influence of the light? The divine was incorruptible and unchanging. It’s power flowed from itself. Everywhere on earth there were agents of evil. One tripped over them outside the door. Yet, how rare was the saint? How rare were his qualities: knowledge, love, courage, wisdom, and compassion?

The truth, she argued, was that we were not the middle kingdom. We were not the center of everything and never were. Neither was the earth in Hell, which is specifically a house of torture. It was instead in the realm of corruption. It was in the realm of the dark lords. Adrift in some distant corner, we had cast off their shackles some thousands of years before, just as the ancient texts had taught us, but we had not been strong enough to embrace the light, which is why things stand as they do, where the earth spends half of every day in light and half in darkness. But earth is not the focus of the fighting. Earth is not on the front. It is a dismal little planet well behind enemy lines. Which means we are the resistance. And that is why, throughout our history, it has been so easy to question the existence of the divine, for the forces of light do not erupt here as they do elsewhere in existence. Being so far removed, they can do little but slip us help from time to time, as through pinpricks in a canopy.

Although HPB wouldn’t live to see it, science would eventually come to vindicate her view of the universe, at least in its significant facts. Our lady’s views on “immanent corruption” presaged the laws of thermodynamics, which were being formulated at the time but of which she had no knowledge. She also suggested that the distant dots of light in the sky were, like our sun, symbolic of acts of rebellion and that the true nature of a dark universe must be cold, bleak, and unradiant—what we now call dark matter. And in as much as our cold, dark universe had been created—forged was the word she used—by the lords of night as a font of suffering from which they could power their universal aims, that suggested it had a violent beginning, a big bang. This latter observation is especially important since it contradicted the prevailing, chauvinist view of the time that the night sky was the reflection of God: glorious, eternal, infinite, and unchanging.

Such arguments about the fundamental nature of the universe had been raging for decades both between members of the Theosophical Society as well as between the society and its peers. Some of them had gotten quite heated. By the time HPB arrived in India, there was considerable bad blood, and in typical Blavatsky fashion, she would not be bested and took no quarter. To tread that checkered floor, certainly to live on it, was a tacit admission of defeat. She simply walked away.

The Countess and I found her in a cramped apartment in the city lounging on a pillow wearing nothing but a single loose gown.

 

from the opening of Bright Black, the fifth and final installment of my full-course occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

cover image by Chris Cold

(Fiction) The mizzen and the spyglass

My body was recovered, along with two others, by a young mizzen—nominally, a practitioner of “street magic,” by definition, bits of illusion and conjuring mixed with hexes and holistic alchemy. In truth, mizzenry was as much pickpocketing, sleight-of-hand, opportunistic theft, and con artistry as much as anything magical. But despite their reputations, the mizzen had the honor of thieves and the nobility of the poor, and they took it upon themselves to collect and bury the bodies of witches and sages that were hung by the authorities, rescuing them from the unsanctified communal plots where they were discarded. I would come to learn that had at least as much to do with scavenging as honor. The recently dead have value—the eyes, the pineal gland, and the foreskin were all meagerly valuable in trade with gypsies and night maidens. But the bodies were buried properly after they were raided, and always with attending rites.

It was at this time that I slipped through the cracks of society. I had tried to make my way honestly in the world, twice, and it hadn’t worked to my favor or liking. I had been driven from two homes, shot, betrayed, abandoned, and hung, and with each death, the patent terror of a life without end, which is a life without meaning, became ever clearer. There were many days when I would not eat. I simply stared out at the world in a coma of existential dread. Occasionally, I might open my hands and try to feel the passing of moments, as if time itself were a steady rain, and I would say “This is it. This is what it will be like.”

I eventually came to know a mizzen named Durance Reynard l’Argentière—or at least that’s what he called himself. I doubt it was his real name. But I suspect he was in fact from the mountain town of Argentière, near Mont Blanc in the French Alps, for he had the rugged constitution of a man raised in the high country. He wasn’t especially tall or muscular. In fact, he was quite lean. But he seemed carved from alpine rock. He had been flogged, shot, hung (briefly), poisoned, pilloried, and stabbed more times than I can recall. And he had the scars to prove it. After lying together, I would trace one gently with my finger and he would tell me the story of how he got it. The tales were never the same, although occasionally some detail would be repeated. So too of the events that took him to Paris. He once mentioned he had been wronged by a “blue man,” who he described in such brief but exacting detail that I knew he must be a figure of truth.

Durance was mizzen in name only. He knew no magic. He had instead a spyglass that allowed him to see through solid objects, including clothing. I caught him examining me with it at our first encounter, although I did not know its purpose, nor was I the only object of his gaze. That spyglass was the secret of his success and the reason why the small crew that followed him were so intensely loyal. Durance delivered the goods, and at far less risk than most robbers of his time. By knowing in advance what was in a man’s pocket, or his home, Durance avoided the petty job, but also the government official. He targeted men with worthwhile sums who were not exorbitantly wealthy and therefore not likely to be highly connected. He could also rule out men who were armed as well as those who bore papers in their back pocket revealing them to be gendarme in disguise.

I don’t want to give the impression that Durance and his people were pickpockets or petty thieves. Of course, they were not above such things and resorted to them when necessary, but their stock-in-trade was the confidence trick, which is why I was recruited—over the strenuous objections of Lucille, the crew’s only other woman—for I could effect the mannerisms of the upper class, which you must understand was more than simply carrying a genteel air. An education was required. One had to understand the offhand Latin aphorism, for example, or casual allusions to the heroes of Greek myth—all the things any good blue-blooded aristocrat was expected to know. But we did not target the aristocracy, which had then begun its long wane across Europe. In their stead rose the industrial class who had pretensions of status and who were therefore enamored of all the things they did not have: old names and old mansions and old art.

The permutations were practically infinite, but the usual course went as follows. The team would identify a possible target, often by staking out the markets and train stations. Some of us would then follow the gentleman to his home where Durance would use his spyglass to confirm that everything was as it appeared and that the house contained suitable pickings. Many times it did not, or else Durance saw something that displeased him, and we would move on. The moment of his decision was always met with considerable suspense, not just because of the crime that might then be completed, but because he offered us each a bounty. It was meant to encourage us to keep our eyes open at all times—and also to justify his larger portion of every take. It worked. Besides the monetary reward, informal score was kept whereby members of the crew competed with each other for the crown of best “catcher.”

I didn’t play. Lucille, who considered herself my rival, assumed it was because I thought myself above them. In truth, it was a kind of moral armor by which I satisfied myself that what eventually happened, the crime, would have happened regardless of my involvement and that therefore I was not significantly culpable. As excuses go, it was paper-thin, like gift wrapping, but it gave me the pretense I wanted, for I could say that none of the gentlemen had been chosen by my hand.

If what Durance saw in his spyglass pleased him, we set immediately to work. First, the gentleman was tailed for a period of three or four days. Next, based on his schedule and inclinations, a suitable meeting was arranged. I might, for example, bump into him on the street, knocking him down and apologizing profusely in broken French. By my dress, I would appear to be the daughter of a wealthy foreign noble. Besides being the distant truth, it was also a common fact of life in those days since many such girls were sent to Paris to finish their education prior to being married to their cousin (so as to retain the family wealth) or to some baron twice their age (so as to increase it).

Alternatively, if circumstances permitted, we might feign an attack whereby I would be set upon by Hugo, Durance’s hulking henchman, during a casual stroll in the park. Hearing my plight, the gentleman would of course rush to my aid and drive away my attacker with his cane. I was always sure to give him a glimpse of my undergarments in the process, and with trembling hands and a stunned visage, I would thank the gentleman and offer stammering praise for his courage and virility. I did this in a heavy accent, despite that I spoke French (and later English) quite well. If the gentleman called for the police, I would excuse myself quickly on the excuse that I was not supposed to be out alone, without my chaperon, whom I would grudgingly admit had fallen ill or quit unexpectedly or otherwise left me completely vulnerable in that big foreign city, and what was I after all but a simple girl from a country manor in Bohemia, or Tyrol, or wherever?

As I turned to leave, I would spin round again and chide myself for my manors and ask that I be able to call on the gentleman again in order to thank him properly. At this point, I might offer him some perfumed token, a ribbon or some such, and watch whether or how he took it. If he refused the token, or if he invited me without ceremony to his home, then I knew he was a faithful man who would see me only in the company of his wife. If, on the other hand, he suggested we meet “in public”—on the pretense that it preserved my honor—then my companions and I would move to the third stage. Almost all of the gentleman fell into the latter category. At the time, I was sure that was proof of the overwhelming infidelity of the male of the species. Since those days, I have realized our success rate was less the result of constitutional weakness than it was Durance’s careful estimation. I suppose he could tell by the man’s wardrobe and private spaces, by his toilet and shoes, whether he was fond of his wife or not, or perhaps whether the crucifix in the hall was hung from faith or mere propriety, and so on.

Suffice it to say, within two or three meetings, I found myself alone with the gentleman in question. I would always make it known that I preferred to see him at his house. I might even insist on it. This did not raise alarms. A young noblewoman such as myself would not seek a tryst—understood to be her last, perhaps only, before marriage—in some high street hotel, like a common whore. So it was the man’s wife and children, if there were any, were sent away for the weekend on some pretense or other, and I was invited to dinner. At the appropriate time, after excusing myself to use the bathroom, I would open the door to my companions, who entered with heavy batons and tied the surprised gentleman and any remaining servants to their chairs. Lucille, dressed as a parlor maid, would pretend to have stopped on the sidewalk in front of the house on her way home from work in order to fix her dress or shoes or something and so keep watch from the street. Meanwhile, Durance, Hugo, and I would relieve the gentleman of his easily salable possessions.

We did not, as a strict rule, take heirlooms, custom works of art, or so much as to send the gentleman to the poor house. On this, Durance was adamant, and I had heard that he had “dismissed”—by which was meant murdered—at least two men for breaking the rule. If a gentleman lost so much that he had nothing left, then he would easily go to the police. If, on the other hand, we took just enough to embarrass rather than impoverish him, then we could usually rely on his discretion. After all, it’s discomfiting to admit to the authorities that one had been taken in by confidence tricksters, which makes one look the fool. But also, in so doing, the police asked all kinds of inconvenient questions about the factual circumstances of the theft—for example, how it was the thieves had gained entry to the house without force. All but the most dimwitted of wives and family members would be able to ascertain the truth, especially when it came time to give a description of the crew. If the losses were relatively modest, it was always easier to blame the servants, or the gardener, whom the returning wife would discover had already been dismissed, taking with him all first-hand knowledge of the real events, and so normal life in the household would resume.

This, in conjunction with the spyglass, is how we avoided the police for years. Indeed, it wasn’t the gendarme but the sudden appearance of the blue man which finally drove us from France. We went first to Germany, where the hot-tempered Hugo was arrested for brawling in a beer hall. Rather than risk a police inquiry, the rest of us left him there. We went immediately to Amsterdam, but finding it a poor climate, left soon for London, where business was good but also very risky. We were all foreigners in England, which made us immediately suspicious. We also discovered that, unlike in France, where the police generally despised the new industrial class and so took no special precautions to preserve their good name, in England, they were seen as the backbone of the Empire, and the police were only too happy to keep certain relevant details quiet for the sake of the gentleman in question. Suddenly we had to be very selective indeed, despite the ocean of potential targets—more by far than in Paris, for the English had taken to industrialization with a much greater zeal.

Durance replaced Hugo with a Yorkshire man named Baxter, who got Lucille pregnant. He was powerful and brutish, and she had hopes of arousing Durance’s jealousy. It seems she and Durance had been sleeping together at one time, which I had guessed. I didn’t care in the least. I liked my Frenchman well enough—he was an excellent lover and taught me most of what I know of the art of pleasure—but I was not any more faithful to him than he was to me. But Lucille was convinced we had secretly married and that we were planning to ditch the lot of them and disappear with a horde of cash, which she was sure Durance had failed to share. For that reason as well, she needed Baxter to be her ally in the coming confrontation. But fortune didn’t favor her. When he discovered she was with child, the brutish Baxter beat her severely, as if she’d done it on purpose, and we never saw her again.

Around the same time, on the pretense of expanding our crew, Durance and I began to haunt the city’s numerous opium dens, which were then everywhere in London. It is sheer irony of fate that we succumbed to the stuff, for it was imported from China by the very industrial class we had made a career of robbing. For me, the languor of the poppy was the perfect salve to the anomie of years, and my habit, more than Durance’s, became a serious liability. It not only drained the cash he and I had saved during our years in Paris, it also began to take its toll on my physical appearance. I looked sickly, and when finally I was refused help by a gentleman, who pretended not to see Baxter assaulting me during our usual charade. Only then it wasn’t a charade. Alone with him in the bushes, I dared the man to rape me for real, suggesting by my tone that perhaps he wasn’t virile enough. He was. I think the idea was to arouse a fight between the two men on the hopes of claiming the winner, who might then ravish me. But honestly, the drug had perverted my mind so greatly that do not waste time for a rational explanation.

Durance, watching from afar, did nothing as Baxter stuck his sausage fingers under my pantaloons. I was barely able to get the man off. Strung-out and afraid and looking to blame anyone but myself, I demanded Durance kill the Englishman. When he smartly refused, looking at me all the while as if he didn’t know me, or didn’t want to, I called him a coward, questioned his manhood—both literally and figuratively—and left. I awoke later to find I had been taken from the opium den to which I’d retreated and was tied to a chair in the bare A-frame attic of some old house in Whitechapel. My only companion was the blue man, still in his long, high-collared revolutionary coat. I told him I was immortal and that killing me would do no good. I told him also that Durance didn’t care for me at all and so I was useless as bait. In one rambling sentence, I explained the entire circumstance of our parting, right down to my own ridiculous motivations. But the stranger simply smiled, as if amused, and never spoke.

To my surprise, I was very much wrong about Durance, who did come for me despite the obvious trap. Whether it was simply his advancing years and subsequent fear of being alone—by then, it wasn’t quite as easy for him to charm the young ladies as it had once been—or whether he had developed true feelings for me, I couldn’t say, but the blue man knew him well and had taken exactly the thing he most prized. I was stunned, but not nearly as much as when the blue man revealed himself. He was also Durance. He removed his coat and hat and I saw it was the same man. Not a twin. Not a doppelganger. It was the very same man with whom I had been intimate for years. How or why, I never knew. I knew only that he intended to kill the other version of himself.

When my Durance appeared, I watched, gagged and bound to a chair, as the two men argued in a language similar to French but which I guessed was much older. Argument turned to aggression and so began a breathless struggle at the end of which I knew one of them was sure to die. No sound rose into the attic from the street, and in the quiet, I heard every panicked shuffle of their shoes, every grunt through held breath, every drop of sweat that darkened the wood under their feet—until suddenly it was done. There was no preface to the ending. No warning. With movement no different than what had preceded it, a blade found its target, and Durance—my Durance—was dead. His blood spread out, thick and red, before disappearing into the space between the floorboards.

The blue man left me there. He took his coat and walked out. He was haggard from the kill but at the same time seemed fifty pounds lighter. I never knew what accident of science or magic had split them. I never knew why Durance Reynard L’Argentière fled his home, nor why he also spent his entire life chasing himself, intent on revenge. But I had a clue. I noticed that the blue man wore a wedding ring on his finger. He looked down at it as he left, as if that ring alone could bear witness to the significance of the killing that had just taken place.

I starved to death in that attic. I screamed for help for hours through my gag until my throat was hoarse and my every swallow stung. I went unconscious and died and rose on the third day, still tied to the chair. Durance’s body had begun to rot. I threw up from the stench, and the withdrawals,  and the milky vomitus covered my chest. It tasted faintly of opium. Flies buzzed in the room. They landed on the vomit. On my face. In my hair. I screamed for help. Wriggling maggots ate out Durance’s eyes and I screamed more. I died again, came back, and died a third time. And each time I rose, the corpse looked more and more like a ghoul. It stared up with hollow eyes and a lopsided grin. Hours and hours and hours turned to days and days and I died a fourth time. I began to earnestly believe the body would rise. I swear I saw it move. It was getting ready, I was certain, and very soon it would struggle to its feet and hobble over to me, mouth agape. And then it would eat me, starting with my feet. With my toes. Or perhaps it would bite into my head like an apple. In some of my visions, it raped me with a rotting member.

Some part of me knew I was going insane. It was all the happier for it. I would’ve surely finished the job, too, if not for Anna. She appeared to me in that attic, just as she had before with Jakub. She looked so sad. Even now, in my memory, it seems as if she came for just a moment, but honestly, my mind was so far afield that time then seemed less like a river than a knot. She could’ve been standing there for days, holding my rapt attention. All I know is that I blinked and she was gone. In her place, a pair of young street urchins slipped cautiously around the corpse to untie me. I was aware then just how emaciated I was, for my dress—the one I had chosen to accentuate the curves of my body—hung loose from my shoulders. I had lost most of my hair as well. My scalp looked like the base of a half-finished wig. When I finally saw my own reflection, I realized I was as much the ghoul as Durance. My skin hugged my skeleton. My pelvis and knee bones protruded. My eyes had sunk. I was too weak even to stand.

After I had recovered enough to walk with the help of a cane, the police gave me a choice…

 

from the opening of Bright Black, the fifth and final installment of my full-course occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

cover image by Qissus

 

Xuan Loc Xuan

Vietnamese artist Xuan Loc Xuan wants to brighten your day. Click below for a larger image.

 

(Fiction) Sisters of the strange

I’m not sure I could impress upon you the effect this nameless boy had on me. After being flung by tragedy from all that I had known, from high nobility and a life without care, I saw in his daily contentment the truth that there is a place for each of us, and that solidified my growing conviction that I could not keep moving from manor to manor forever, and that if I were to find my place, wherever it was, I would have to go looking for it. I suppose that is a way of saying it was in Austria where I became a woman in full.

But change comes slow. Despite my revelation, I had not the immediate courage to leave, nor the funds. Besides, I cared deeply for my two young wards, who were just at the age where a parting would have wounded them permanently, and my lord was a decent if somewhat feckless man. It wasn’t until he died and his male heirs were called into the army that my choice was made for me. War, like politics, is always local. The campaigns of Napoleon never touched me directly. It was the smaller wars, the ones between princes so often overlooked by history, that set me on my path. I became a soldier—quite unexpectedly—when the fighting fell upon the town where I had taken refuge, and I took up arms to defend it. I killed an Italian mercenary and was killed in return by his comrade—stabbed with a bayonet. I awoke in a shallow grave amid a tangle of arms and legs, many of which were no longer attached to their owners. I panicked but was immediately calmed by the tiniest voice, like the song of a bird. I was coaxed from the ditch by the most delicate hands. We had to hurry, she told me, for they would return soon to burn the bodies.

She was such a frail thing. Not short, mind you. And not graceful. Merely fragile, like a China cup made too thin and so discarded, simple and unadorned. She was also very shy and completely, utterly filthy. Her dark, greasy hair hung in strings past her shoulders. She said her name was Anna, and on our flight, after I asked of her history, she said only that she had been exiled from her home. I admitted the same, and, sensing more to her story, told her of my curse. In return she hesitantly but excitedly admitted she was a medium and that she had sensed rather than seen me—sensed someone living among the tangle of corpses and had come to free them before the whole lot was incinerated. At my gentle urgings, she explained that she had been expelled from her home by her father because of the visions that plagued her, which were assumed to come from the devil, visions that she neither asked for nor wanted. In that way, we found each other kindred spirits and decided to travel west together as “sisters of the strange” in the hopes of escaping the fighting.

It was several weeks before I realized she was pregnant. She never said it, but I was certain she had been raped by one of the soldiers. Which side hardly mattered. War was reason enough for any of them. The following week, I found her prone on her back, blood both between her legs and covering the hay on the ground. She had tried to end the pregnancy with a farming implement, which still protruded from her, and I had to nurse her back to health, which kept us from our dreams of reaching Paris. It took her another seven months before she could get out of bed, for she was weak and sickly and, as it happened, had failed in her aim. The metal was sharp and moved through her easily. Knowing nothing of her own anatomy, she had thrust to far to the back. Of course, her subsequent ill health precluded another try, and at the end of her term, she gave birth to an undersized baby boy, whom she named Jakub.

Whether due to his mother’s botched attempt, to her subsequent illness, or to other factors entirely, Jakub was born with a defect: one of his legs was significantly atrophied and remained weak his entire life. Otherwise, he was a bright, able boy, if a little melancholy. But then, by his intelligence, I’m sure he appreciated how his difficulties were magnified compared to the other boys his age. Anna remained in poor health—all the poorer for childbirth—and her visions became rare. But they did not stop. Each time, she was struck with apoplexy, and I would tend her. Most of them were completely strange, like a window into someone else’s dreams, full of portent but devoid of meaning. A few of them became clear to me only in retrospect. Although she would never know it, Anna predicted the use of the atomic bomb on Japan more than a century before it happened. That haunted her for months, for she saw its effects as if strolling through the streets of Hiroshima in the moments before the attack. She described a flash, as if the sun itself had exploded. Children, the lucky ones, turned to dust before her. The rest, covered in burns and sores, destined to die of painful cancers, wailed amid the fallen bodies of their parents and siblings.

Anna saw also that men would land on the moon—as well as distant worlds as-yet unnamed. But of her visions, there was only one—again, lost on me at the time—that is worth mentioning. I did not witness it. It must have happened some time I was away. She was scrubbing a pot at the drain in the floor, for we had no sink. She dipped a rag in a tub of water and scraped bits of food free and glanced at me once, then twice.

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head. It took several minutes of gentle coaxing before she explained. Anna never wanted her gift and didn’t enjoy the conversation it invited.

“You must go with him,” she said meekly and without meeting eyes. She was so shy. “You won’t want to,” she said. “Because you’re stubborn. You’ll want to go home. To your garden. But you must.”

“My garden?” I scoffed. “You must be confused, my darling. I have never tended the earth in my life and shouldn’t want to start.”

She shook her head slowly as she went on scrubbing. “You have to,” she said. “Promise me. Please.”

I was annoyed. I didn’t like the suggestion that unseen powers had sway over me. That was for other people. Lesser people. I was in those days still very much the aristocrat I was born. And I particularly didn’t like the suggestion that I would become the kind of lady who kept a garden—partly because working the land was indelibly associated with peasantry in my mind, but mostly because it suggested a frailty of character that I, someone who would never do such a thing, could be so inconstant as to change my habits entirely. Since leaving home, I’d had so little to grasp. Just then it seemed Anna wanted to take away even that.

It took only a moment for me to realize how my rejection had hurt her. She had opened up to me—me, who knew what a difficulty it was. And I had treated her the same as all the others.

“Who am I to go with?” I asked finally.

When she didn’t answer, I sat near her and spoke softly. “I’m sorry, my darling. I truly am. Please tell me. Who must I accompany?”

She hesitated. Then she looked to me as if to make sure I was in a mood listen.

“The man with no hair,” she explained. She looked away then as if there were more to say but she couldn’t find the words. “He’ll change everything,” she said in a whisper.

Anna died the next morning. I think she knew it was coming. That’s why she told me, finally. She couldn’t put it off any longer.

Jakub was seven, and I faced a choice: leave the child with the church, where he would eventually be taken to an orphanage—a work house; basically, a prison—or else raise him on my own. It would be romantic to say the choice was easy. In truth, I left the boy at the nearest church. I consoled myself that I was a poor substitute for a mother and in no position to provide, and that some meals were better than the none that would flow from me. And anyway, we all had to find our place in the world. He would have to find his, just as I was eager to find mine, now that I was finally free to do so.

I returned to the church in the spring, by which time Jakub had been taken away. They’d kept and fed him for many days, or so they said, but when no one came to claim him, sent him to a work house, just as I’d predicted. I had to purchase him from the fat crone who managed it. I bought a child as if he were livestock. He was eager to see me, but he was not the same. Whatever had happened to him during my absence had amplified his melancholy, which he drug behind him the rest of his life, just like his leg.

We went to Paris, which only seemed fitting since it was his mother’s dream. There, we lived as auntie and nephew. I had been a governess, so I took it upon myself to give the boy an education. In this, I was both assisted and stymied by none other than Anna, who appeared to me at odd times looking every bit as real as when she was alive.

It is not easy to be a surrogate mother. Doubly so when you are being haunted by the real thing.

For his part, Jakub couldn’t accept that I could see his mother where he could not. It was easier for him to believe I was lying to him. At first, I think he believed it was a misguided attempt on my part to ease his loss, but by adolescence, that changed. One day, while walking home, Jakub was pushed to the street by some local boys who shouted insults as they ran by. Jakub was helped to his feet by the elderly priest of the local church, whom we had met before. The priest told Jakub not to worry, that Christ loved him, limp and all, and after discovering that the boy could read, which was not common, gave him a Bible. Our lives, which had slipped into an awkward but familiar routine, were never the same. Jakub found solace in its pages, which promised a great reckoning whereby the wicked would be punished and the meek rewarded. Religion was not my medicine and never had been. I was deeply suspicious of it, in fact. But it seemed cruel to discourage it, to take away the salve of faith. Or perhaps it was just my guilt over abandoning him. Either way, I should have acted on the warnings of my heart. But I didn’t. It was a cruel lesson.

When Jakub was 16, he began to notice certain facts about my appearance. What I had told him of Anna, of her visions and afterlife, always left him deeply suspicious. He knew I was harboring secrets—such as why I spoke Russian in my sleep. On top of that, he suspected that I raised him out of obligation rather than love, even though I was by then very fond of him, and the seed of his fears, planted in the soil of his perpetual melancholy and watered by the natural rebellion of the teenager, blossomed in full after I contracted consumption—tuberculosis, as we call it now. Jakub was scared at first. Scared to lose another mother, even such as I was. As I lay dying, he fled to the church, where he found exactly what he needed in the Holy Virgin, a mother who would never—who could never die.

But I did. I made him swear not to bury me, not for three days, and he assented. When I rose on the third, Jakub consulted the priest, first out of joy. God had granted him a miracle, he said, dragging the elderly father to see. The old man of course had a different interpretation, and very quickly Jakub’s awe turned to disgust, and from disgust to hate, and I found myself accused of witchcraft by the very boy I had sacrificed everything to raise. There was, I think, some measure of self-loathing in it for him, for in my delirium before death, I had told him of his mother and her visions, and of his paternity. He was old enough, I thought, to carry the burden of truth. For truth is a burden, always. But it proved too much for him. By my words, he lost a father as well. He had always imagined his to be a nobleman—a brother of mine, perhaps, which would have made us exactly the aunt and nephew we pretended to be. In his mind, his father had loved his mother, but due to the requirements of his station was unable to marry her. Or perhaps he was a brave soldier who died in the battle that brought his mother and I together. By my words, his father became a coward and a rapist.

I was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured for the first time. I was given a series of tests—devised by The Masters, I would discover later—to determine whether the accusations were true. I failed and was hung in accordance with the law. (In truth, very few witches were burned.) For Jakub, this was an act of mercy. He believed, as the righteous always do, that pain is cleansing, and that by releasing me from the Devil’s hold, he was saving my everlasting soul. All the while, the Holy Virgin, his new mother, smiled serenely down at him from her perch over the pulpit and told him what he was doing was right and good.

I never saw him again. His mother, however, continues to haunt me.

My body was recovered, along with two others, by a young mizzen—nominally, a practitioner of “street magic,” by definition, bits of illusion and conjuring mixed with hexes and holistic alchemy. In truth, mizzenry was as much pickpocketing, sleight-of-hand, opportunistic theft, and con artistry as much as anything magical. But despite their reputations, the mizzen had the honor of thieves and the nobility of the poor, and they took it upon themselves to collect and bury the bodies of witches and sages that were hung by the authorities, rescuing them from the unsanctified communal plots where they were discarded. I would come to learn that had at least as much to do with scavenging as honor. The recently dead have value—the eyes, the pineal gland, and the foreskin were all meagerly valuable in trade with gypsies and night maidens. But the bodies were buried properly after they were raided, and always with the proper rites.

It was at this time that I slipped through the cracks of society…

from the opening of Bright Black, the fifth and final installment of my full-course occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

cover image by Anna Dittman

The colorful art of “Breathing”

Jian Guo, known as “Breathing,” is a Chinese-Australian artist and illustrator whose colorful works seem almost like stills taken of bright swirling contraptions — stained-glass orrerries that turn and twirl and clatter like old mechanisms. It’s not surprising then that he’s done a number of Chinese-edition book covers of classic “cosmic fantasies” like Lord of the Rings and Gene Wolfe’s Book of The New Sun. Click an image below to enlarge.

You can find more of his work and buy prints here: https://www.deviantart.com/breath-art

New Work by Hell’O Collective

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Art by Marcel Mercado

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Methinks he doth protest too little

The fluid comic art of Loïc Locatelli-Kournwsky

This French artist is best known for his graphic novels Persephone and Pocahontas: Princess of the New World. His bright colors and fluid lines give his work vitality and make it seem as if his work is running from the page.

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Jaw-dropping work by Inka Essenhigh

“It looks like fantasy art because it comes out of my head. I rarely go and look at what anything actually looks like.”

Interview with the artist at the Smithsonian American Art Museum:

https://americanart.si.edu/videos/meet-artist-inka-essenhigh-49921

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