Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

Pain and blood, grief and hunger. To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.

If I can become a woman in no other way, then I shall make it this: I am an unerring general in the campaign for our social standing. No rule of etiquette is obscure to me, no occasion too difficult to host.

I must come with the London fashions of this year, 1888, and not a single thing that speaks of a moment earlier. That is what Henry bought in me: taste, refinement, high birth, and good blood.

Sheffield lies before us, mounting the slope from the river valley, a tangle of overlapping stained brick and rooftops, as though the buildings are climbing over each other to escape to the still-green peaks. It is dirtier than I remember, the noise of the foundries and steelworks louder, though we are at least a mile from any industry. I can taste metal in the air. I think of all the hundreds of people at work under every roof and behind every wall, bent and stretched over a hoard of steel, hammering and scouring, filing and polishing, to send up a fog of filigree fragments to hang ever in the air.

I remember every physical sensation, but the emotion must be so great it lies beyond memory, beyond feeling. I thought myself unmarred by the memory, but perhaps I only run from it, and in a moment like this, the lies I tell myself become all too clear.

Then, there, on a slope of nothing: a house. Low stone, turrets and crenelations, ivy smothering one side like mold growing across rotten fruit. The photographs gave nothing of its true nature. It is a mouth closed around a secret, a promise unspoken. Ancient, and unreal.

I am overwhelmed. This is more than the running of an estate. This is the salvage of a shipwreck, timbers snapping all around me as the waves surge higher. This house, Henry’s reputation, our marriage: I am responsible for it all.

There is bloodshed already. For a decade, I have carried the burden of his secret, and now he brings another hunting party to our door. How simple it is for him to bury the past. I only pray we do not resurrect it.

Carmilla sneers prettily. “A waste. Some things have no end. You pour and pour and pour your soul away, and they are always hungry.”

“It is only the past. No more than many have endured.” “And yet so much more than you deserved.”

This is foolish—I am foolish, spilling my heart as though I am still a girl in short skirts, as though anyone cares about my history. If I give in to that impulse, the need to be seen, understood by another, then I do not know what howling wave of past pain may capsize me.

I thought marriage freedom when I sought it; I thought it safety. But sometimes, when my control slips, I think there is only safety and certainty in death.

Carmilla holds an allure, like ghosting a finger around the edge of a flame: the temptation, the beauty, and the anticipation of pain. I should want her gone. And yet.

I fix the shutters closed, pausing to look through the glass, but there is nothing to see. The moon and stars are concealed by cloud, so it is as though we have been plucked from the face of the earth and set amongst some inhuman landscape of nothingness. When Lucifer fell from Heaven, was this how he found Hell? A cold, blank world into which no good thing could be born?

I learned quickly that my wants and needs were unwelcome, too great for any reasonable person to fulfill, and in time I came to agree with her. I was too much, too loud, too emotional, too clumsy, too self-involved. My existence was a burden to all involved with it, and I resolved to never make any demand if I could help it. Then, perhaps, I could be tolerated. Then, perhaps, I could be loved.

I know I should be worried about the way my body bucks and breaks beneath my hand; it is its own animal, with its own limits, that I have not cared to mind. It betrays me with its wants and needs, its pains and limitations, and I am furious to be tethered in this way. I thought us prisoners together, but perhaps we are enemies, working tirelessly to move in opposite directions.

I am fine. I have to be. I have no time for weakness.

It is a better pain. A more familiar one. One I control. In this place I know who I am, and all my suffering is mastered.

If Cora is an English rose, I am milk thistle: a weed, persistent and desperate. This is the bargain I have struck: to lose my softness in exchange for survival.

By day, I am stranded in this remote place, but by night it feels like a freedom; the world recedes, and the darkness welcomes me just as I am.

“Disappointment tells us what we truly wanted. And to want is to be alive.”

I have survived everything that has befallen me before now. I will survive this. By skill or force of will, I must endure.

For a moment, I wish to be as cold and unmovable. I am too soft and vulnerable, as the past few days have shown, and it feels as though my life is slipping through my grip like sand: the harder I grasp it, the more my control slips.

There is only the problem and how to solve it. Aunt Daphne suffered no fools, and if I had taken to bed with my grief, I would have starved there. Weakness is for girls like Cora, who know they will be met with care.

I have been happy to find security in his money, never thinking on whose backs such riches are made.

He wishes to talk over the day, and I take it, echoing his words when he wants me to, confirming his opinions. I am a mirror for him, and I have learned how to show the desired reflection. I have learned I am no more than that.

It is strange; I have heard Henry say all manner of things many times before, and yet it is only now that it strikes me as not only callous but underhand. He does not see why he should be limited, why he should not simply get what he wants. It is a cynical, selfish comment that casts the whole world to be as cynical and selfish as he is.

I think of Aunt Daphne and her sharp eye, infractions I did not know I committed until her precise, shimmering anger took me to pieces. No matter how vigilant I was, my clumsy tongue would say the wrong thing or I would give offense by the tilt of my head.

She does not eat. She never eats. Neither does Cora, but where Cora takes a little soup and makes sure all at the table know that her petite appetite could not tolerate any more, Carmilla ignores her food as though it is slop put before a queen, a meal that has no capacity to satisfy.

She is wrong. She is completely wrong. I would never want such things. I do not get angry; I am not some hysterical, selfish child. I can cope with this. I can cope with all of it. Henry, Cora, every betrayal, every abandonment—I will swallow it down, all the pain and anger and grief, and I will survive a hollow, cold, hard creature, because what else is there?

I have lost my words. What could I possibly say in response? I could fling at him everything I have seen, but I am too frightened that he will behave as he did at the factory, and I lie beneath him defenseless. Or, worse, what if I screw up every ounce of courage left to me and speak truly, and he acts as though I have said nothing at all. Denies—no, ignores—my reality, and bends the world to fit his will. In that, I would disappear entirely. So I say nothing. As always, I am nothing.

This face that I have known for all my adult life. This face I loved once, love still, I think—as best I can love the place of my deepest disappointment.

This is what Henry thinks I want. Jewelery. His attentions. Today, I unsettled him, and he is here to pull the blindfold over my eyes once more.

paying no attention to Henry’s ministrations. I wonder if this angered or frustrated him most—that for all his effort, his mighty, noble will, my body remained an uncracked fortress, the chilly mistress who cut him dead in the street. He could bring any manner of action to bear upon me, and yet it would not make my body bend to his want. Perhaps he did fear me a little, even then.

“I am a mirror to those who need it. To those who hunger but deny themselves.”

If there is one thing I can do perfectly, it is this, and so perfect it must be. If I am unwell, it is no matter. If I am weak, I must supress it. I have come this far through strength of will alone. I cannot fail now.

“Not necessary,” scoffs Carmilla. “Life is a sterile thing in your hands—all necessity and obligation.

It is our conversation in his office again. I have taken a wrong turn. No matter how hard I try, I cannot keep everything under control. I cannot master it all. No, there is always something I have done wrong, some fatal flaw in me that makes it all mean nothing.

I sink to the floor at the top of the stairs and hide my face in my hands like a scolded child. I cannot breathe; my chest is too tight and my heart hammers so hard it is painful. I don’t want anyone to see me brought so low. If I lie down here and never moved again, it would be better than facing my life.

She cannot bear not to be liked. I see that now. Her weakness.

He holds me at a distance for some other purpose. I understand something now: I hold more of Henry’s secrets than he does of mine. I have a power over him of a kind that he cannot wield over me. He does not want me to have anymore.

“No. I am not the beginning of it.” A cloud passes over her face, her features for a moment stormy and jagged. “I am the end.”

He buys me off, lies to me. Fears me. There is something not right here. I run my fingers over the glossy, angular-cut stone. I thought it was Carmilla. But perhaps I am looking in the wrong place.

Have I been wrong about Henry from the start? Or has he only become this monster by slow degrees as life worked its subtle cruelty on him?

The warning bells grow louder, a ringing in my ears that shuts out any thought. Only this image remains: the pastilles I have opened a hundred times, covered in white powder, and a paper bag with the mark of a poisoner.

I had learned upon the death of my parents that to be exposed as vulnerable, as not-knowing, was the greatest danger possible; death, at least, offered certainty; to be vulnerable meant being at the mercy of others, one’s whole selfhood at risk.

I knew that one way to ensure my future was to populate it not with people who cared for me but with people for whom it would be deeply inconvenient if I were to be absent.

A sob rose in my throat, and I swallowed it down. No. No tears. No weakness. I killed my heart, the raw beating thing that cried in horror at the monstrousness of what had just occurred. I drove a nail through it and buried it in unhallowed ground.

I am being murdered, and I am too frightened to do anything about it.

“The man you take to your bed wants you dead, and you will let him kill you. Only, no—he does not come to your bed anymore, does he? He is done with you. Aren’t you angry?” “Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know.” “I don’t know.” She mimics me and leaps up. “Poor Lenore Crowther, so terribly sad about the inconvenience of her own murder.”