By
Feed the Bard at monkeegym@yahoo.com
http://betting-on-the-muse.com/
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Warning: Content is only suitable for mature adults, contains explicit language and adult themes, including violence, blood and gore, graphic sexual content and nudity.
Disclaimer: All stories are a work of fiction. The characters do not exist, except in the mind of the author. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
Beta Beta Beta for Me: All expressions of interest promptly answered.
Summary: "A kiss," the witch hissed in his head, Its mouth a useless puckered wound stitched tight, so It could not curse the kin of him who doomed It to all eternity in Its watery prison. "A kiss from your sister.”
Author's Note: To Lee, Rosie, Ceri, Mullaney, and Karl for Halloween.
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When Sister was young and the world was new, Brother would hold her in his arms and waltz her through the many empty rooms. Dipping and sweeping in the pale moonlight, they danced to the erratic tune that played endlessly in his head, two of them swirling in a silent world of silver and shadow. She felt his fetid breath on her cheek and heard him whisper, "Do you love me?” She thought she knew what love was then, but that was when she was young and the world was new.
I wake with a start, head throbbing, my naked body bathed in nauseating, cold sweat. That dream again. It was the house of mirrors in the old, squalid amusement park just outside the city limits. I am sure of it. Father used to bring Brother and Sister there for the dogfights years ago when Sister was little and Mother was alive. I have not thought about that place ever since... I do not remember.
I recall hearing it mentioned in passing on the radio news broadcast the night before. That place was once a popular recreational destination among families and courting couples in its heyday when, as Brother used to say, Sister was but a twinkle in Father's eye. Brother was older than Sister was, but Sister cast such a seminal shadow over Brother's childhood that even now when he was long grown, he still subconsciously marked time and space to her. In his mind's eye, Brother felt he could only transcribe tangible values to objects, places, and people relative to Sister because nothing was real unless Sister made it so.
The park's bright fairway lights dimmed over the years like other places of entertainment in the city. Victims to dwindling patronage, as spiralling urban rentals forced young families out into the low-cost housing developments springing up in the hinterlands that ringed it. Self-contained satellite towns, composed of rows of identical, single-storey, cardboard houses built on marshland with deceitfully cheery names like "Green Meadows" and "Arcadia Fields”, to fire the universal imaginations of the young, urban poor. Now decades after they shut the rides and killed the fairy lights, declaring it a safety hazard, the city is finally going to tear the old park down and build a car park facility on the site.
'Gee, just what this God dammed place needs,' I think with a shake of my sleep-tousled head. 'More people parking on my memories.'
The bed suddenly feels cold and much too big, and I reach for my love, feeling for the silk of her skin, or the lift of her breast. Where my lover's gentle sleeping form should lie, I find nothing, but empty space quietly cooling in the chilly night air, faint with the lingering smell of sex. I am unperturbed despite my love's unexplained absence. I know with a fierce intensity that the love of my life is probably just a whisper away, past the empty hallway and down the stairs, but biting my lip, I resist the urge to call out. I no longer need Mother to tell me that a hungry stomach cannot hear. We all get hungry and we all need to eat.
Brother always said we were a happy family. Sister tells me with a quiet regret that every word of his must be discounted for a lie. She remembers watching the dogs fight over scraps of rancid meat while her stomach rumbled, yet she loves Brother dearly still; it is a strange unnatural passion I cannot understand.
Our Father was a Mojo Man, known far and wide for his sly, cunning ways, and like all tricksters, he was ambiguous and deceitful with a passion for mayhem and a savage penchant for meanness. Father bred and supplied curs for the dogfights. His magic formula was part Akita, part Pit Bull, and inbred for viciousness until he was forced to cull entire litters because of their horrific deformities. Sister can never forget the day she followed the sound of whimpering to discover one of the bitches in her bed. The bitch, bloody and frantic, furiously barking to protect its stillborn litter of twisted larvae-like creatures - eyeless, limbless, and bloated - and Mother angrily shouting at Father to take the dead pups outside across to the vacant plot and throw them into a burning pyre of rubber tyres, above the sound of Sister's screams.
Father always took Brother along for the fights; said no one could handle the dogs better than Brother could. Brother was Father's pride and joy, only a boy then but already a veteran of the dog pits, and where Brother went Father made sure Sister followed. Brother called her, his little lucky charm, and the punters would see no blood spilled and no money change hands until Sister was standing by his side, hand in hand, at the very edge of the pit. Even as a child, Sister knew that although Mother hated dog fighting and Father's hard living ways, she always gave in to him in the end. Despite his vain, overtly chauvinist ways, Father was a child himself and Mother loved him more than she loved either Brother or Sister.
Pulling on my scruffy bathrobe, I smile as I recall the languorous nights my love and I spent entwined together. Our bodies locked in furious passion with neither willing to release the other from the snare of our limbs. In the soft moonlight leaking through the sole window pane of the small room, our room I tell myself (hers and mine) the deep scratches gorged into the walls helter-skelter, ceiling to floor, seem to me to look so much like the faces of monsters long dead and gone.
Monsters? Are there really monsters? Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death.
I find it strange how fragile human memory is, prone to romanticism and forgetfulness. She loves me, she loves me not. Are we not in the end all monsters who kill our mothers and fuck our brothers? Perhaps the most merciful thing in the world is our inability to correlate all events, as if there was some monster in thought, too hideous to show.
Idly, I put my face against the remains of the cold plaster wall and gently feel the cuts on its surface with the palms of my hands. The way the dry plaster crumbs away at my touch reminds me of the soft breadcrumbs that Mother used to make when we held a catfish fry. Mother standing by the old gas stove laughing, as Brother helped roll the fillets in that special mix of cornmeal and breadcrumbs, the shortening hot and splattering in the heavy iron skillet. A picture perfect memory I hold tight and close for a moment, and then release like a breath of fresh air.
I know from the state of the walls that they have been repeatedly written over with the sloppy scrawl of a woman's hand. I cannot make out the full of the symbols and notations, but instinctively know that they are scribbled with arcane descriptions of ritual mutilations and disembowelment interlaced with obscene pictographs depicting pornographic positions, female-female, male-male, and male-female. My lover's twin obsessions laid bare for the world to contemplate - death and sex.
Sister tells me with a short bitter laugh that Brother was likewise obsessed with the dogs and the bloodthirsty frenzy of the fights. His eyes shining like black liquid pearls, he would watch and smile as snapping, snarling animals tore into each other to the shouts and jeers of the alcohol-fuelled crowd. Sister was not surprised that Brother went further in his ambitions than Father ever did. Brother was after all a product of his environment and even as a boy; he was always working every opportunity to achieve his own ends.
Sister remembers how the fights often teetered on a razor moment with both animals down, slowly bleeding out on the dirty sawdust floor of a pit from injuries so savage as to defile description. The uncanny feel of a hundred hungry eyes trained onto Brother suddenly standing, straight, and tall. His clear, sweet voice cutting through the noise of the restless crowd like hot iron through fat, urging the dying dog in the pit to, “Stand! Dammit, stand!”, so he could chalk up another kill on his books .
Brother called himself a practical man. He did not cry over his dogs unlike Father who was prone to embarrassing outbursts of emotion when a favourite animal fell during a fight. He did not regard the dogs with any more affection than a grandmaster might regard ivory chess pieces on a black and white board. They were pawns in a game to use and discard, as he saw fit and he did not see the need to concern himself with their pain, or suffering once they outlived their value.
Champions got fed and patched up to fight another day; those too far gone, earned themselves a swift blow to the head with a heavy iron rod and the luck of an easy death. Losers were stacked in a heap like so many sacks of flour and left to bleed out in a pile by the side of the door. Their carcasses later sold for a few extra dollars to a man with a worn out baseball cap slung low over his face. Men of that breed were no strangers to Sister; she often saw them loitering around the dogs pits in their battered pickup trucks. They were the ever circling human vultures looking to buy “surplus” on the sly to grind up as protein filler for feed.
For every dog Brother discarded, there was a litter of pups to take its place. Life to Brother was disposable and cheap, and never special like Sister was special. Brother and Sister were unusually close as children more on Brother's insistence that Sister accompanied him everywhere than anything else. However, as Sister attained puberty, her face and body blossoming into the woman she would one day become, Brother's interest in her changed. What was once nothing more than a childish dependency began to transform itself into a creature both intense and disturbing.
Sister remembers the times Brother brought her out into the bayou country, him driving like a hellion through the small winding roads, shouting out the lines of an old song over the roar of the wind. He would stop suddenly in a quiet secluded spot where he would pull Sister out of the car and half dragging her, they would run laughing to the mirror's edge and jump fully clothed into its clear blue waters. Later, as they warmed their naked bodies by a small fire of gathered twigs and broken branches, waiting for their clothes to dry, he would pull her to him. There is only one Brother and one Sister he would say with that beguiling handsome smile of his, as he wrapped his arms around her moulding their bodies closer together, only the two and everything else is but a dream.
I shudder when Sister brings up these memories, not because I am afraid or ashamed of Brother and his excesses, but that pain and pleasure would be so interwoven for them like night and day. It was, as if they were the reverse images of the same person, son of the holy fool and daughter of the demonic clown. Sister believed that she existed not because of Mother or Father or any one singular divine entity, but because Brother willed her into being. He was the mirror in which she saw herself and she was his word made flesh.
Like his dogs, Brother saw Sister as a creature of his own making, his to mark and score along the lithe and willing lines of her body. He needed to teach her everything; how to speak, how to act, how to think. He believed that she understood that he loved her and that in time she would learn how to read the language of his love, but she never did to his chagrin and disappointment. Sister hated the blood and the senseless violence of the dog fights and after Mother's death, and Father's betrayal with the Pale-faced Girl, Sister withdrew from Brother. She shrunk from him as though he and everything he touched and loved was poisoned, and his response to her rejection was both direct and violent.
Sister recalls the last time with a frown. Brother was unhappy that she did not want to go with him to a club. Sister disliked the dark smoky interiors of the places that Brother favoured, filled with glassy eyed women strung out on sugar and Absinthe and pale young men in leathers and chains. She did not want to have to wear the sultry red dress Brother picked out for her, and those 4-inch heels that he liked.
He was drinking that night, celebrating a major win over a bitter rival and Sister's refusal to accompany him was akin to a slap in his face. He was familiar with the rumours about Sister brazenly flirting with attractive young men, and in his machismo, he bravely laughed them off. In private, however, Brother was less assured and often consoled himself that despite what others might say; Sister loved him and him alone. He saw proof as clear as day in the intimate way she spoke to him and entrusted him to fulfil her every need and want. However, the bitter seeds of doubt were sowed, and as their roots pierced and twisted themselves deeper into his heart, Brother became increasingly critical of Sister's actions, often examining them for flaws that might indicate the unwanted presence of a rival. Brother was at first fearful of what he might find, but soon became convinced that everything Sister did was deliberate in its intent to hurt and humiliate him. Brother could not see that it was this wyrm of uncertainty gnawing within him, which alienated Sister from his affections and drove a wedge ever deeper between them both.
Her sin was to say, “No” to his face as he pushed her up against the wall, and clumsily groped her thigh with a drunken leer. Pinning her neck so she could not run, he hit her hard across the face with the back of his hand, calling her a stupid, ungrateful whore. Incensed, she fought back despite his hulking build and scratched him on the cheek, drawing blood. He hit her again and she fell, curling up by instinct into a foetal position to protect her fragile body from his blows.
Sister remembers retching as the metallic taste of blood filled her mouth, and the sensation of a thousand brilliant suns simultaneously exploding in the exposed nerve endings of her brain; bright, sharp, and exquisite followed by the eventual merciful darkness. When she awoke in a pool of her own vomit and waste, Brother was gone.
That night, Brother knifed a man in a drunken brawl, brutally slashing his victim cheek to cheek across the face in pay back for an imaginary sneer. Departing the scene in a haze of burning asphalt, he laughingly led the local police for yet another mindless, moonlight car chase that ended abruptly in a mass of broken, twisted metal. Brother crashed head-on into an old cypress tree that stood on the side of a small, narrow road that wound in and out of the bayou. The same small road he travelled along a thousand times before in happier times with Sister by his side, shouting and singing along to a song on the radio.
Father was crying when Sister entered the hospital room where Brother was admitted in intensive care. Father's woman, the Pale-faced Girl, heavily pregnant with her third and looking worn and lost, was left to stand outside with her two other babies. Girl smiled by way of greeting when she spied Sister making her way down the cold, white corridor, grateful for a familiar face in a strange and alien place. It is a greeting, however, that Sister does not care to acknowledge.
Sister never understood what Father saw in the anaemic, skinny bitch with her dark lanky hair and flat, mongoloid features. Mother in contrast was beautiful, and Brother inherited her dark beauty. Unlike Brother, Sister took after Father's Mama with her fair skin and unusual watery grey eyes that assumed an almost milky translucence, like the whiter shade of pale, in the light.
The Pale-faced Girl used to live down the street from us. Her mother waited tables at a local bar that Father frequented, and often hitched a ride home with him when her shift was over. They stayed in a small, dirty house, all weathered paint and broken windows held together by rubber tape, with a string of her mother's ever changing lovers. She was only a few years older than Sister and they were close as young, giggly girls could be, often visiting each other's homes on a whim. Girl hoped that they would be able to resume their friendship after Mother's death, but Sister was cold and aloft to the idea.
Sister tried her best not to look or speak to Girl. It sickened her to think of Father fucking Girl up the ass in Mother's kitchen after the funeral like some rabid animal. She stumbled onto them going at it in an ill-starred moment while looking for Brother, and in that instance when her eyes met Girl's, she felt something die inside of her. She found Brother later in the back of his car where he crawled to cry his eyes out, and curled up quietly next to him. She never told Brother what she saw and she never spoke to Girl again.
Girl was a slut, despite eating at our table and sleeping under our roof, she was fucking Father behind Mother's back for petty cash and cheap trinkets. Sister tried telling Mother that night, but Mother would not listen. Mother was upset. They fought, and Mother fell and hit her head on the sharp corner of the dinner table. The autopsy returned a death by blunt force trauma. Mother was dead even before she hit the floor. Brother told Sister the results of the inquest as he comforted her in his arms. He told her that there wasn't anything that anyone could have done that would have rendered the outcome any different, but Sister knew otherwise. She knew she should never have asked Mother to let Girl stay over at our house when her mother's boyfriends came over. Sister knew Mother would not have died if she kept that slut away from Father.
A month after the funeral, Father moved out of the house we lived in, Mother's house, and went to live with the Pale-faced Girl in a nice, new place with a lawn and a white picket fence. It was one of those better neighbourhoods that you sometimes see out of the window of your car as you drive by, gated communities with kids playing out on the streets and old people sitting out front. Places which real estate agents were always pushing to sell, houses with attached baths and a big, fat mortgage, but then nothing was too good for Father's new family. Girl was already 3 months pregnant with her first and Father was so excited at the prospect of a baby that he shelled out round after round for watered-down drinks at a strip club to toast the new arrival. Father laughing in a room full of well-wishers as he drunkenly hugged and kissed Brother, his first-born child.
Father's eyes were puffy and red, as Sister watched him pray and plead in a low nasal voice to the Old Ones, promising smokes, whiskey, and blood for the life of his son. Father never once asked Sister about the cuts and bruises on her face from where Brother hit and kicked her, only that she swear on Mother's grave never to make Brother angry again.
The doctors declared it a miracle when Brother walked out of the hospital 3 months later with nary a scratch. There is a part of Brother that does not believe he will falter and fade like all things according to their seasons. Brother believes that if he continues the old ways like Father, offering blood, whiskey and tobacco for favour according to custom, great honour will come easily to him. Brother forgets like most ambitious men that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.
Sister was not surprised that Brother survived the crash, or that Father's connections made the charges disappear. Sister knows intimately that the Old Ones still have power in the bayou country. She tells me in a hush whisper that she has heard them calling out to her from the dreaming place, that thin snaking line where the blue of the horizon meets the green of the land, those many times Brother brought her out to swim in its green blue waters. A multitude of forked tongues some faint, others strong, foretelling events past, present, and yet to be, messages whose significance she does not understand as she warms herself by the small fire and watches silently as Brother sleeps.
I smile as I gently stroke the mass of thick, black vines which encircle the bed, and run the length and breadth of the walls and floors of the cosy room. Once this was all I ever wanted. A shared room with a shared bed filled with my beloved's warmth and presence. Our books, clothes, and toys scattered over the floor in a lovable mess. Bringing her pillow to my face, I inhale its cloyingly sweet scent. My love smells of the deep old places, of mildew and rot.
I return the pillow to its place on the bed and make my way out the door into the dark, narrow hallway. We have made our home in a decrepit house (sadly, one of many others) on the far edge of a forgotten township nearest the waterways that branch out into the bayou. Outside, strange nocturnal screams mix with the shouts and obscenities of drunken, angry young men, but here inside the walls of our own private sanctuary everything is still. There are no sounds of insects in the rooms or rats in the walls. There is only the suggestion of movement from the vibrant obsidian vines that cover the walls and floors, and fill the windows and doors with their strange phosphorescent blooms. How beautiful they are, I say to myself as my eyes slowly adjust to the interior gloom. I breathe in the perfumed air and putting my lips to the vines, I kiss them slowly, probing them gently with my double tongues as they shudder and shake with pleasure at my touch, like my beloved moaned and shuddered the first time we kissed.
I smile; our history together is so strange, so intense, and so wonderful.
Sister blushes shyly at the thought of that last Indian summer. The day Father sent Brother to his blood sister, the Conjure-Woman, bearing gifts of saltwater taffy and strong Kentucky whiskey to sweet talk the old witch into making powerful Mojo. Brother desperately needed a charm to ward off a string of bad luck that wound itself around his fortunes like a snake and was slowly choking him to death. His dogs were turning a poor showing in the fights, and despite all of Father's efforts, Brother continued losing much money and prestige to his rivals.
The Conjure-Woman stayed in a lonely, rambling house set by itself a long way out from the nearest state road. She was born there on the kitchen floor in a bed of rags, her umbilical cord cut clean with a small fish knife by an older sibling. As children, she and Father ran wild through its rooms fighting over leftovers with a score of half brothers and sisters, but as the years rolled by Father and the others left, leaving her alone to guard its secrets. There was no reason for them to stay; the Conjure-Woman was their Mama's favourite, and her unspoken heir.
Sister knew that the house stood on ground that held much power with Father's family. She was intimate with the stories about Father's Mama, snitching together bits and pieces of loose talk collected over the years from the rare occasions the family gathered to mark the dead and birth of one of their numbers. Father himself never spoke about his Mama, he was in some ways still afraid of her years after her death.
The Gift ran strong in Father's Mama. It was said that once she set her sights on a man, none could refuse her, not even a young, handsome preacher man. He was newly come down south with his soft, lovely bride to tend to God's flock and to spit the fire and brimstone of his eloquence to the wayward and the fallen. She smiled thrice at him when he came visiting one day, and serve him a cup of her best herbal tea brewed with wild rose petals. With a cry like an animal gone mad, he shamelessly took her then and there on the kitchen table in front of her babies. She had the Conjure-Woman and Father from him. He disappeared one day as if the earth opened her mouth and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. If he was ever mourned or missed, it was not by her. The woman felt no loss, she was already tired of him and his hypocritical ways, and there were younger, more virile men in her sights.
Sister knew that the Conjure-Woman inherited the Gift like Father from their Mama, but unlike him, the Gift ran stronger and darker in her blood. She did not much like the old witch, with her fat, smooth face and teeth stained black from chewing tobacco, but followed quietly along because Brother was in a nasty mood and Sister did not want to give him cause to hit her.
In the musty, dank parlour dressed up in tawdry bits of finery both red and black, the Conjure-Woman tasted the air from their coming and frowned. It tasted bitter of corpse dust and bespoke of bad hoodoo. Sister watched as the older woman took the bottle of Bourbon from Brother and with a steady hand poured out a good measure of malted gold into a dirty shot glass. Tilting her dark head back, she downed the shot in a single smooth motion and smiled. It was firewater fit for a queen. While Brother poured out another measure with a big greasy smile, the Conjure-Woman reached deep down into her Mojo bag and reverently brought out a handful of dear old Mister Jones.
Jones was the name of a bare-knuckled prize fighter, a wiry, leanly muscled man known as much for his short temper as for his vicious left hook. Like her brothers, he was a hard living, hard drinking bastard, a man who took vicious pleasure in beating his women like drums when he was too drunk to step into the ring. One day, when the Conjure-Woman had enough of his fists, she made him a special cake heavily laced with rum and arsenic and paid the undertaker coffee money to remove the knucklebones of his once lethal left hand. She wanted a taste of power over him in death much as he lorded over others in life.
Taking another swig from the shot glass, the Conjure-Woman swirled the warm, golden liquid in her mouth and expelled it in a fine mist over her open palm as an offering to the spirit of the bones. Rubbing her palms together and casting the pieces away from her, she sought to divine the answers to Brother's problem. She would feed the bones often as she questioned them, but despite having been given their share of the whiskey, the bones were difficult and the answers vague.
After a long while, the Conjure-Woman told Brother with a dramatic shake of her head that jealousy was the root of his problems. Brother's arrogance with the dogs and his success with the willing women that flocked to him earned such bitter enmity from his rivals that they cause a mighty magic man to hoodoo him. It was no ordinary spell, but one bound and stitched to the fabric of his luck, like the symbol of the great serpent swallowing its own tail. A spell so powerful, she intoned ominously, that it could only be broken by the devil's own - the witch woman who slept in the heart of the bayou.
Brother laughed at her cheap theatrics and taking a thick wad of money out of the pocket of his leather jacket, he neatly placed a tall stack of bills on the table in front of the Conjure-Woman with equally dramatic flair. Money was no object to him when it came to his luck with the dogs and his lust for women.
Brother was not afraid of an old wife's tale. He knew of no problem that a strong arm and a whiff of cold, hard cash could not resolve. The witch woman might be old and feared; there might be tales about It stretching back from the time of the first settlers. It might have come with them from across the seas in a great English ship and learnt the old ways from an Arcadian medicine man said to be the devil himself, but the stories also tell of a magic duel between the witch woman and a wily conjurer. A Johnny-come-lately wanderer whom the stories called the laughing magician, who tricked the witch woman and banished It into the depths of the bayou.
Brother knew as well as the Conjure-Woman that the Gift ran in the family from her Mama, whose lineage lived in these parts for as long as anyone could remember, and who were, it was whispered among those in the knowing, kin to the wily conjurer himself.
Picking up the stack of bills with her fat grubby fingers, the Conjure-Woman slowly counted out the notes, as Brother refreshed her drink. They were rich pickings for a day or two of her time. Satisfied with what she took to be Brother's sincerity, she made the wad of cash magically disappear down the front of her filthy dress with a pat and contented sigh. There were benefits to be had in these hard times from helping out one's own kin.
"It cannot leave the bayou, but we can invoke It on hallow ground in the old cemetery where Mama's people are buried some ways back here,” the Conjure-Woman continued as she downed another glass of that good Bourbon and smiled ruefully at Brother with glassy blood shot eyes, "but, Child, can you pay the witch's asking price?"
Brother drove Sister and the Conjure-Woman out a week later on a chilly, foggy night to the old cemetery a distance behind the lonely, rambling house. It rained that day, the water turning the soft ground into a sea of black mud making the drive both slow and difficult. Throughout that long journey, Sister wished and hoped that the wild weather would sway the Conjure-Woman into postponing the ritual. She was not keen to leave the house, but Brother was restless and agitated. His luck with the dogs was turning progressively worse with each successive fight, and he was now a ghost of his former self, impotent and choked with self-doubt.
Sister debated telling Brother that she was haunted since the last visit with night terrors. Black dreams filled with gibberish horrors with fanged mouths that dripped like rainwater into her sleep, but held back for fear of his temper. His face growing grimmer by the hour as the wind and rain conspired to thwart his finely laid plans, Sister knew that Brother was in no mood to listen to her tales of supernatural horrors. In the end, Brother was adamant in insisting that the Conjure-Woman complete the ritual before the night was over and she agreed to pacify him.
Stepping out of Brother's car, Sister wrapped her arms tightly across her chest as a ward against the biting cold that seeped under her clothes and through her skin into the marrow of her bones. Her coat was left back at the house, forgotten in their hurried departure, and Brother saw no reason to turn back for what he branded her stupid, brainless mistake. Sister was fortunate that the rain was now reduced to a fine endless drizzle and although there was no moon, she could see that the cemetery was old, and lonely in its neglect. She felt electricity that fairly sparked in the air, like a sense of long awaited anticipation, which was not natural, and made her all the more uneasy.
The arrangements were simple, a scarecrow made from a wooden cross, dressed in an old tailcoat with a black tall hat, hammered into the marshy sod of a forgotten grave. Fresh blood spilled from a black cockerel mixed with incense and bitter herbs, burnt on primitive altar of gathered stones. Offerings to the Old Ones to seek the release of the witch woman from her watery prison for as long as it took a tallow candle to burn.
Sister heard the quiet hissing of the flame as the wick caught and felt the arrival of an ill wind accompanied by a heavy, oppressive presence, ancient and malevolent. The witch came when invoked, but It was no fairy tale crone with a hooked nose and a wart covered face. It was suave, debonair, and sinister, dressed in a tailcoat without shirt and pants, Its elegant face wreath in shadows from the tall black hat. Sister heard a sharp intake of breath, which she did not recognise as her own, and felt the world turned into, onto, and of itself. The witch was beautiful. So beautiful it hurt. So beautiful that Sister fought a compulsion to run away and hide herself least Brother found the precious stain that sprouted like new life in her stone heart and in his jealousy ripped it out. The witch as if hearing Sister's thoughts turned to her with a quizzical look, which slowly became a strong, frightening gaze, and Sister felt those parts of her long thought dead suddenly stir with an intense longing that began to drip down between her legs.
Sister could feel the vast blackness of the witch woman's mind as It pressed up hard against her. She felt Its hunger, a great wanting which drew It to her and reminded her of the times Brother pulled her to him in his need. However, unlike with him, she did not struggle or fight. Sister found herself slowly opening up to Its tentative touch - cold, alien, and delicious - as she felt It taste her.
It sampled the deprivation and violence of a lost childhood spent among the filth and squalor of the pits, lingering over the stink of feces and the bitter despair of not knowing anything better. It examined the cold, hard faces of men that congregated at the edges of the dog fights, their senses numbed with alcohol, haggling over the price of skinny women with dirty faced children in tow. It tasted the hunger that rumbled in her belly and the chill in her bones. It sipped the hollowness she carried inside. A dead space so devoid of joy, sorrow, empathy, or any other emotion save fear and a primal need to survive. Finally, she felt It lick the feel of her skin from inside her, traversing downwards across her shameful, confused thoughts to the exquisite dampness between her legs, causing her hips to buckle upwards and an almost audible moan to escape her lips. Then she felt It pause.
Sister felt a strange comforting warmth as It rubbed itself like a cat between her thighs. She could feel the pulsating bulk hesitate, as if undecided before It slowly pushed Its way into her, penetrating and filling her up with Its cold, hard presence. She felt It swim through her memories and her dreams, stopping to examine each like a gem. Some It discarded as too mundane. Others, It judged flawed and undeserving of attention. Slowly she felt It rip through the walls of lies, tears, and silence, tearing Itself a torturous path down to her deepest recess where the most precious and hideous gems lay. When It finally laid her bare and uncovered her treasures, It savoured each one in turn, forcing her to relive each pain, hurt, joy, and petty happiness as It sucked her memories like marrow from brittle chicken bones and filled her with Its own dark seed.
Sister saw through the witch's eyes the great ship that brought It across the seas to a primitive settlement in a brave new world. A place where hunger sat at every table with its sister, misery, keeping company with wretched women and silent children as they watched men eat. She saw It snatch half a loaf of mouldy bread from a wicker basket in desperation, and felt Its cries as It was driven out barefoot and bleeding into the wilderness by a merciless hail of small sharp stones. Tasting the bile in the witch's throat and the inhuman rage in Its belly, Sister touched the void It nursed inside Itself, an intense plant-like hunger that forced It to seek and covert warmth, light, and life. A darkness that was not unlike the emptiness she carried within.
Opening her eyes in wonder, she saw a great star fall in blazing glory out of the night sky, putting the quiet trees to fire and ash. Wonder turning swiftly to pain and fear as the star released its cargo of ancient spores into the air, twisting and fusing human, animal, and plant alike into creatures born of nightmares. She found herself face to face with strange inhuman memories of a planet with twin suns of jade-green and balas-ruby orange where a demon flower ruled over ancient cities from vast terraces like the hanging gardens of a greater Babylon. She tasted the colour of Its tears and swarm in a sea of memories so ancient and frail she was terrified they would shatter at her touch until she could no longer tell where she ended and the witch begun.
Brother. However, was oblivious to even the howling wind and the resurgent rain, as he attempted to broker a deal with the witch that would see him restored to his former glory. Like a greedy, demanding child, he desired everything that the witch dangled in front of him like some bright, pretty bauble, but was woefully unwilling to pay Its price. It offered him victory over his enemies, but he refused to assign It the names of his unborn sons. It then offered him power over women, but he balked at giving It his desire for them. Finally, It offered him the luck of fools with an asking price that seemed to him ridiculously cheap.
"A kiss," the witch hissed in his head, Its mouth a useless puckered wound stitched tight, so It could not curse the kin of him who doomed It to all eternity in Its watery prison. "A kiss from your sister.”
The Conjure-Woman snorted in amusement as Brother roughly pushed Sister towards the witch, telling her gruffly to get down to it or feel his belt upon her hide. It was now raining a constant cold drizzle that got into his fine clothes and good shoes and made him overly eager to be done and away from the marshy burial ground. Like the Conjure-Woman, he did not notice the strange scarlet bloom upon Sister's cheeks and the quick, rapid deepening of her breathing as the witch's unworldly blue-green eyes sought her out and held her in its thrall. If Brother was not blind then to everything but his own selfish wants and needs, he would have pulled Sister away as if the witch was a serpent in a long forgotten garden least her innocence be snatched away. Brother only needed to look at Sister's face to read the dark desire stamped upon her breast, but she turned her face away from him and he never looked her way.
The witch's skin was surprisingly soft and warm, as It gently took Sister into Its arms and ran Its sharp talons protectively almost lovingly over her bare arms and back, drawing the tension between them thin and sharp like piano wire. Aroused beyond reason by the pleasure of their contact, Sister leaned forward and stifling a moan kissed the witch full on the remains of her mouth, her hand travelling eagerly upwards to comfort and caresses a swollen breast. They kissed slowly, fingers impatiently moving over bare skin, as Sister's tongue and sharp little teeth insistently probed and nipped away at the stitches. Her intense hunger gnawing its way into the witch's black gaping maw as they shuddered and moaned with pleasure, their bodies grinding harder and harder into each others in a maelstrom of lust and desire, driving both to the sharp white point of ecstasy.
Then as sudden as it begun, it was over and Sister found herself in the old cemetery, alone and cold, with the sickly yellow remains of a candle quickly cooling at her feet. Her heart rendering screams echoing the anguished cries of a lone bird as it calls out to its absent mate in the vast darkness of the night sky.
In the days and weeks after, Brother's luck returned like an evil wind, and Sister would tell herself that the witch was nothing but a dream and that she loved no one but him, and know that to be the first of many lies that she would tell herself. She found herself often restless, unable to sit or to stand. Sleep became impossible, as did eating and drinking. Brother found her distracted and it irritated him no end because she was of no use to him. She was all hands when she should have been feet and all feet when she should have been hands. Eager to escape her unbearable existence and their increasing frequent and violent arguments, Sister took to driving by herself in her car for hours and days on end along the forgotten highways and byways that ran through the bayou country, desperately seeking for a part of herself she does not even know she misplaced.
Early one morning as Sister was coming home after meandering all night, she found Brother's car parked out front in her spot. She drove out the evening before meaning to stop by the all night supermarket off the interstate for groceries, but on the return found herself drawn back out yet again into the endless back roads that criss-crossed the bayou. Sighing, Sister moved her car a distance away from the house, next to a copse of trees, and unloading the bags of groceries, walked round to enter the house through the screen door on the back porch. She found the kitchen in disarray, Mother's dining table upturned and the chairs thrown aside. Plates and dishes scattered and smashed and in the middle of the kitchen floor, a drunken Brother, naked and sweaty, cursing loudly as he frantically pumped his hips against the naked buttocks of a crying young woman, he was fucking up the ass.
Abandoning Sister to her madness, Brother found easy comfort like Father in the arms of a nubile neighbourhood Lolita. The daughter of a punter who frequented the dog pits, she was dirty and plain, but Brother liked the thought of fucking a woman he won in a bet almost as much as rubbing it in Sister's face.
Sister stood and watched Brother's ugly carnal display without a word and then putting the bags on the kitchen counter by the sink, she turned her back and left as quietly as she came. She felt no shame, nor anger or humiliation at seeing what Brother was doing in that sunny kitchen where Mother once stood and greeted them in the mornings with a smile. She felt no emotion except for the gaping emptiness she carried within, and an overwhelming loss that haunted her waking hours like the spectra of a beautiful woman with no mouth haunted her dreams.
One night, Sister returned, and let herself back into the house, walking through the silent rooms like a lost shade of the long forgotten dead. She said good-bye to Brother as he lay on his bed deep in drunken slumber, his handsome features innocent and unsullied in sleep. Father always commented on Brother's intoxicating beauty, said it was unnatural for a man to be that beautiful with high, chiselled cheekbones and long bewitching lashes. Father was nothing to look at himself, and there was always talk that it was strange that something as dark and exotic as Brother could have flowed from his loins.
Picking Brother's car keys off the floor, Sister smiled as she watched his latest conquest wrap herself tight around his neck in a choke hold, her pale skinny arms looking so much like twin snakes, and hoped that her dreams were sweet. In the half-light, Sister could still make out how pretty and fresh the young woman was despite the cake of make-up smeared on her face and the purples bruises on her thighs. In a few more years, her youth would be gone, eaten up by men like Brother and she'll be discarded for the next young thing that looks their way. Something wicked this way comes.
Leaving the quiet of the house and the sleepers within, Sister calmly disconnected the engine of her car throwing the wires into the copse of trees, where they lay hidden among the tangle of weeds. Her mind fast becoming a wild blur, Sister took off in Brother's car with his secret stash of cash. The winnings he hid in the freezer under the meat for the dogs, carelessly thrown into a brown paper bag on the front seat. She drove aimlessly through the pitch-black roads for hours on end until the beginnings of a plan started to take form and substance in her mind, and she found herself back on the doorsteps of that lonely, rambling house with a case of gin and enough whiskey in the boot to loosen the tongues of all the devils in hell. The Conjure-Woman received her back as if she was a welcomed guest, and quietly closed the door.
Leaving Brother's car by the side of an old mill road and shouldering a small backpack, Sister trekked for days through the hidden waterways of the bayou country. Close to dropping from the heat and the humidity, she finally stumbled onto its hidden heart. In a great alga crusted pool, where the Conjure-Woman told her it would be, she saw the fabled black nest. The nest was a living ball of writhing black vines, studded with wicked thorns, and in its centre, the witch woman slept and dreamt her dreamless dreams. Hiding herself in the trees, Sister watched enthralled from a respectful distance fearful of causing distress to her love. She returned the next evening and the evening after that, always moving from spot to spot, changing her position to avoid being detected. She knew that the vines would sniff her out otherwise, and dismember her as she saw them tear apart a troublesome deer that strayed too close and did not have the sense to flee.
Sister asked the Conjure-Woman once after they drunk the better part of a case of whiskey what she knew of those strange black vines that wound around the arms and body of her beloved and appeared to thrive in symbiosis with her. Her eyes glittering like polished jewels, the Conjure-Woman knew enough to tell Sister to stand clear away from them. She once saw the vines attach themselves to the skin of hunters unfortunate enough to cross paths with the black nest and watched as they sucked the blood, marrow, and fat off their poor victims until nothing remained but screaming bone-dry husks.
Sister would learn much later that the vines were a living, breathing part of her love, much loved and valued like an arm or a leg until burnt screaming from Its body by men with guns and dogs. There was no feud between the witch woman and the wily conjurer. A man without a name, he appeared one day with a male companion, both dressed in black and claiming to be soldiers come to survey the settlements for the French King. He was tall and thin, but with his easy boyish smile and his knack for banter he soon made himself a favourite of the village women. None suspected he was a witch man come to steal their children like some fairy tale piper, until the babies started dying one by one. The council of elders, old and decrepit to a man, were quick to decry witchcraft and stand aside, as the accusations flew thick and fast. Neighbour pointed finger at neighbour, and those accused gave testimony for imaginary grievances against the poor, the infirm, and those that lingered like ghosts along the fringes of polite society. The man was careful to agree that witchcraft was the source of the village's ills when pressed upon, and gallantly offered his services and those of his companion as self styled soldiers of the Crown. Their share was to be a third of the worldly goods of the ungodly, with the remaining two thirds vested in the coffers of the settlement, a generous offer which the council of elders gleefully accepted.
That season, they made certain that those accused too old and infirm to run were put to the torturer's knife and once their confessions were writ in blood, hung out like laundry to swing gently in the wind. Those that attempted to run were hunted down with guns and hounds like human game until the streams ran red, and still the accusations came. In time there were none left to blame, save a strange beggar woman who lived by herself deep in the bayou, after having been driven out years ago for stealing bread.
They came one night in a hunting pack when she was bathing in the cool green waters. A pair of grim faced men in leather masks, bearing torches of burning pitch, with their guns and their baying hounds to seek retribution for the children they claimed she bewitched away. They set the bayou on fire and burnt the black nest into the ground. When he returned alone the next night to survey the outcome of his handiwork, he found her sprawled among the remains of the nest. A blacken stump devoid of life, except for a pair of hateful blue-green eyes that shone in the dark with an eerie inhuman light. Frightened, he quickly stole the power of her breath and taking iron needle and thread in hand, he sewed her mouth shut tight, so she could not named him as her accuser. Throwing her body into the shallows of the bayou, his last act was to mark the ground with a cipher in the names of the Old Ones, sealing her in a watery prison, before fleeing like a coward into the night. It was no wonder that she hated him and his kin with a deep, bitter vengeance.
I breathe in more of that wonderful, intoxicating scent and find myself drifting in it. My beloved is floating in the very air. Following the lay of the vines, I make my way down the hallway pulling my bathrobe closer around me to ward off the chill. I am naked under the thin sheath of terry cloth and the floorboards feel like ice against my bare feet. I wonder if I should return to the room before I catch my death of cold. I pause reflecting if death would come as easy for me as it came for the goats whose throats Sister slit once upon a time on so many cold nights like this. Why is it that my memories return time and time again to blood and death?
Sister tells me with a quiet sigh that she did not mean to spill so much blood. It came to her in a fever dream, hot and vivid with the colour and buzz of black flies feasting on discarded entails amid a sea of congealing red. After 2 weeks of patiently waiting and watching, she finally realised with a desperate glee that to reach her love, she would have to feed the vines that guarded It like a ball of mating snakes.
The next morning when Sister woke, she drove back to the outskirts of the city and in the meatpacking district; she bought a live goat from an abattoir. The man who sold her the animal was a familiar face. He supplied Brother with meat for the dogs, and he was not one to ask questions. It was a rank but good-sized animal with a healthy layer of fat under its pure white coat. She told him she wanted something that would bleed well.
When night fell, she made her way along the bayou's silent paths, walking with the unwilling animal in tow into the very heart of darkness, where guarded by Its vines, her love slept waiting in an emerald lake. The vines sensed her approach long before she became aware of their presence, and she suddenly found herself cornered in a thicket surrounded on all sides by an angry mass of swaying eyeless snakes, the goat pulling and bleating in blind fear and panic.
Undeterred, she nimbly fished out a large plastic bowl from her backpack and placed it carefully on the ground before smashing the back of the goat's skull deftly with the butt of her machete. Stunned, the goat dropped silently to its knees allowing her to slit its throat in one sure stroke and collect the precious steaming liquid carefully into the bowl.
The vines retreated at first; their primal intelligence startled by the sudden act of random violence, but soon re-emerged in force to sniff the air now thick with the metallic tang of blood. She stood motionless and watched dazed by their beautiful black skins as they moved swiftly as if to strike and then pulled away at the last moment to stand dancing before her face. Tossing and hissing, they resembled rooted serpents that burgeoned forth into hydra heads, each stem ending in a sharp serrated bud that opened up like a monstrous flower into a mouth festered with stiff razor thorns.
"A gift for you,” Sister whispered. “I want to go to It. I will not harm It. I promise you. I love It like you do."
The vines hesitated, their indecisiveness reflected in their slow hypnotic swaying. They seem to argue among themselves, some stems more aggressive than others before a consensus of sorts was reached. Pushing her away to the side, they swiftly moved in to devour her quickly cooling gift.
She calmly surveyed the unfolding horror as they greedily lap up the offering of blood with their small jagged mouths before ripping the carcass apart, and dragging the remains into the bayou. Soon nothing was left of the goat: blood, flesh, skin, and bone all gone. Their hunger sated, the vines silently retreated into the green from whence them came, leaving her alone with her tears. Despite the feast, they denied her, her heart's desire.
She returned the next night with another goat and again, until she lost count of the days and the nights filled with the stink of blood and the repeated tears of disappointment. Sister remembers that as a lost and desperate time, money was beginning to run low and the man at the abattoir was cagey and unwilling to deal further with her unless she was willing to meet his new price. He told Sister clearly that the mark-up was intended to cover incidental expenses because Brother was coming around, spinning a sob story about a mentally ill sister he was trying to find, and asking too many questions.
Soon everywhere she turned, Sister found Brother's shadow looming ever closer, even at the 24-hour rest stop on the highway where she occasionally stopped to take showers and buy food. Dirty and hungry, Sister drove up in the early hours one morning just before daybreak, eager for a cold shower and a bowl of soup. As she pushed her way through the glass doors into the luminous, plastic interior of the diner, she noticed that the normally stoic man, who worked the dead shift, was unusually chatty calling out a cheery good morning and asking how she was. When he called her by her name, she ran back out into the car and drove off, gears screeching like banshees, before he could get out from behind the counter.
Brother tracked her down as far as the turnoff into the old mill road. She could hear him repeating the same old lies and pleas, that he was sorry and wanted her to come home, that he wanted things to be the way they were, as she hid in the bayou, like some frighten, feral creature. She watched quietly as he shouted himself hoarse and when he realised she was not coming out, he cursed her solid before getting back into a sleek, shiny car and driving off.
Sister knew then that it was a matter of time before Brother persuaded the Conjure-Woman to tell him what she knew for a bottle of drink and a pouch of tobacco. Once he understood that Sister loved something other than him, he would come after her love armed with cold steel and burning pitch to send the black nest back to whatever twisted hell it was spawned. Sister knew Brother. She knew him in some ways better than he did himself. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness. Desperate, Sister sunk the car deep into the dark green waters and retreated further into the bayou, hoping to draw Brother into the tangle of trees away from the black nest, and perhaps trap him in a labyrinth of her own design. She moved constantly, only permitting herself to rest in any one spot for a few hours before forcing her body, dulled by exhaustion and hunger, to move on again.
One night as she picked her way through the silent paths by moonlight, searching for roots and lichen to quiet an empty belly, she found her way blocked by a familiar figure. He would have reached out and snapped her neck, but for the wet marshy ground that caused him to stumble and slip. Frantic with terror she ran blindly back towards the black nest, hoping against hope that the vines would recognise her and let her pass.
Sister could do nothing to fight her tears when she found her way barred yet again by a wall of wicked vines, although she knew they were cognisant and able to distinguish between friend and foe, they would not yield despite her pleas. She could hear the sound of Brother rapidly breaking through the undergrowth at her back. He was coming straight at her like an arrow and when he caught her, she knew he would make sure there was all of hell for her to pay.
Slowly turning to face him, Sister saw Brother stop a short distance away and regard her with a baleful glare. She could smell the sour odour of his sweat as he stood in his filthy, grime splattered clothes. Looking wild and grizzled with stubble weeks old, he was thinner than she remembered and there were dark circles under his eyes, but he was still beautiful. Sister knew that if Brother wanted he could have his pick of willing women to warm his bed, but what he wanted was not cheap comfort but to finally break and own her, body and soul.
He laughed soft and low as he thrust his pelvis obscenely at her, his face spotting a sly, condescending smirk. The game was over and he was the victor, and to the victor went the spoils. Crossing the distance between them both, he smelled her hair as she closed her eyes and turned her face away. She felt him lean in hard against her, his hands unclenching by his side, closing into her as he kissed the nape of her neck and slowly lick the salt off her trembling skin, murmuring all the while how good things were going to be from now on in, and how fine he was going to make her feel.
With an inhuman shriek born of humiliation and rage, she shoved him hard away in disgust and ran into the wall of swaying vines. Her eyes wild and desperate, Sister faced the serpentine creepers with a mad smile upon her lips and baring her breast, slashed herself deeply with a small boning knife from collar to naval. It was an offering to love; in the fine line between life or love she made her choice. She loved and was once loved in return, and that to her was all that mattered.
Sister remembers how dark the colour of the blood on her hands amidst a crimson haze and the violent frenzy of the vines as they surged forward towards her, the horrible cacophony of a thousand jagged mouths clicking simultaneously filling her ears along with a man's shouts and curses. She watched transfixed as Brother stubbornly tried to fend off the chattering vines with his machete, unwillingly to surrender his prize to an unwelcome interloper. It was an uneven match of steel against vegetation, Brother was lean, and fit, and his machete sharp as it sliced through the stems nearest him, lopping off their heads with one fell swoop.
Then in her mind's eye she felt something familiar stir within the black nest, a presence awakening to scream its indignation. Like the hydra reborn, each stem Brother decapitated was soon replaced with two and yet another two and Brother quickly found himself boxed on all sides by walls of angry snakes spitting venomous fangs. Like a crazed animal unable to escape its fate, Brother lashed out in full force, but was sorely unprepared for the speed and viciousness of the vines.
With their razor heads, they speared him elegantly through his wrists shattering the bones, and crippling his hands so he could no longer hold a weapon up against them. Forced to run, Brother made for the undergrowth, but was a step too slow. The vines caught hold of his limbs and with a hideous crack; they jerked him into the air like a puppet on strings. Sister could not look away as the vines playfully held their limp bounty aloft like a broken mannequin, tossing and shaking it with an insane glee. She felt the warm droplets of deep scarlet rain fall and anointed her face, as she watched them slowly skewer him. Tearing and ripping through muscle, tendon, and bone alike, to his terrified screams as his bowels loosen and emptied out leaving a trail of steam in the cold night air.
She remembers muttering an apology to someone; she cannot recall whom, before closing her tired eyes grateful for the coming end, and then abruptly she felt time ripple and shift becoming a void filled with a strange sweet silence. Stupefied, Sister looked up and blinked in surprise at the vision standing before her, a beautiful woman with long wind swept hair, Its naked body draped with the rotting pelts of goats; her Venus in furs.
The vision smiled, and Sister was glad Its mouth was no longer a puckered, useless wound. She felt It carefully cradled her in Its strong bony arms, Its brilliant blue-green eyes unreadable. Sister remembers telling the vision, "I came looking for you,” and feeling the acidic burn of a long black tongue as it licked its way down the length of her bloody cut. It smelled of mildew and rot.
Sister remembers Mother smelling of lavender and peppermint sitting at the table with Father and Brother, happy and laughing, but Sister knows that her memories lie. Mother never smelled of lavender or peppermint. Mother smelled of vomit and urine passed out dead drunk on the kitchen floor. She was drinking that night, drunk, angry, and mean like always, when Sister tried to tell her about Father and the Pale-faced Girl. She called Sister a liar and a whore and slapped her hard across the face. Sister pushed Mother away in a blind white rage. Mother fell, but got up again and went for Sister screaming for blood and Sister banged Mother's head hard against the table so that hateful mouth was finally quiet and still.
Father was always too busy to care. He never wanted his second-born child. She frighten him with her strange milky eyes that reminded him too much of his Mama. His bitter, half crazed mother who could rattled doors and smashed windows with a maniacal glare, and made the man who loved him disappear on a jealous whim.
Father thought Sister a drunken mistake, an abomination, and so he left her to Brother's care. Her good Brother who made sure he exacted a pound of white virgin flesh for every crust of bread and spoonful of gravy he threw her way. Sister thought Father infinitely kinder to the dogs he bred for the pits.
She must have been born a monster to be so unloved, and then she heard It speak, that soft slithery purr in her head as It hissed soft nothings and shared comfort of being forgotten and misunderstood.
"He cut you. Made you bleed. I was too slow, too late to stop him," It whispered as she felt Its rancid breath on her cheek. “I was waiting. You took a long time coming and I was afraid I would not see you again.”
“I cut myself. I wanted to get away from him, but I didn't know how to reach you,” Sister replied softly with the quiet joy of finally coming home, but her voice was strained and worn with a tiredness she was unable to hide. “I'm sorry. I tried so hard to come to you, but I messed up everything in the end. I'm so sorry.”
“Never‚” It cooed and smiled a strange crooked smile as It gently stroked her face.
Sister felt the darkness which was the witch open up and in her mind came unbidden the lines of an old forgotten poem, ‘Come live with me, and be my love, and...'
With a shy sweet smile, Sister reached up and taking that beautifully ruined face gently in her hands, she passionately kissed the torn, ragged mouth, hot and hungry with the tang of blood.
‘...Some new pleasures prove of golden sands, and crystal brooks, with silken lines, and silver hooks.'
Does loving too deeply in one direction make us more loving in all others? Since that first night, Sister has stolen her love away with kisses and dark promises from the bayou and its emerald waters. The black vines now nest hidden from human sight in the bones of forgotten buildings where the eating is good, feasting as they do now on a diet of rats, dogs, and the occasional cat. Her love is now dressed in tailored suits of silk and wool, with a collar of brilliant stones round her neck and fine leather shoes on her once bare feet.
Yet, has anything really changed? I wonder as I make my way down the stairs into the gutted innards of our home where I know my beloved is waiting. Are we not all still monsters? Wolves decked out in sheep's clothing.
I pause for a minute as the vines deposit the crushed, bloody remains of a pigeon into my hands. The blood causing the suckers at the end of my fingers, where my fingertips used to be, to wake and click their circular saw-like mouths in excitement. It is a reconciliatory gift from the black vines and I smile, murmuring quiet thanks as they quickly move away, careful to avoid contact with my sharp-toothed lamprey fingers. I find it amusing that the vines with their vicious thorns and serrated heads that opened up into monstrous maws would be so afraid of a woman. A woman, stupid, weak, and frail like silly old Sister, but I know I have not been that woman for a very long time.
Much later after I woke from my long slumber, I left my beloved's arms and returned home to see Father. I wanted to invite him to come live together with Brother and me in our new home with my new love. I missed him and the warmth of his presence and I wanted things to be the way they used to be in the old days when we were a family. I was so happy when he came to stay, but after a while, I thought about the Pale-faced Girl and how she would be frantic with worry at Father's disappearance and how it was best that she and the babies came to live with us too. They were after all part of our family now for better or for worse, and it seemed childish to keep harping on old hurts.
In the black hall, where their desiccated remains hang suspended from the walls by ropes of living black, I take a moment to greet them and tell them how happy I am to see them all again. How beautiful they are, wreathed like kings with crowns of thorns, and dressed in the finest gowns of white blooms. I know they cannot hear me. Blind, deaf, and mute, they are the ever living dead trapped within their own fragile prisons of dust, sucked dry and nested by the writhing vines that engulf them like waves breaking over rocks on the shore.
Round the corner, the Conjure-Woman lies, her bulk hidden beneath a blanket of snowy white. She might be sleeping if not for the scream frozen into her throat and the small black vines that have embedded themselves into her once smooth face like corpulent rotting maggots. I stop a while to tease the tiny vines that worm away at my touch, and to whisper warm greetings in her ear as befits a dear old friend.
I have learnt a lot about myself in the intervening years navigating through the hidden histories of Father's Family, as I invite each successive member to come live with Brother and myself in our house of gingerbread buried deep in the fairy tale woods. Like Father, they come willingly like lambs to the slaughter in answer to my siren's call, each bearing an aspect of the Gift within them, unable to resist that taint of madness and violence that flows in our blood.
I greet them warmly as they step through my doors, and after bidding them welcome, I set them each a place of honour in my hall. They are my lovely, divine guests and I often tell them so. Sometimes in my sleep, I hear their tortured cries and gibberish pleas seep slowly into my dreams, but I find over time that I do not mind anything, anything at all, so long as I can feed my fingers to soft sensual skin and feel warm smooth flesh open under me.
The wily conjurer was a charlatan and a thief, and the Gift he bestowed on his children and their children in turn has bred out over the generations to nothing more than a heredity malaise that poisons the blood and deadens the mind. This circle of rack and ruin has come full cycle as I seek out each missing piece of the broken whole to extract and distil the fragments of a witch's stolen breath. Corruption kills all but the strongest and a witch's breath belongs to no other but a witch. My love tells me with a soulful indulgence that she has waited over a 100 years for the coming of another, but I know that one such as I is not born but made. Sister never knew the power she welded in her blood, or understood the dire warnings in the desperate voices that called out to her in the bayou. Sister is happy in her ignorance.
I do not think that the naked man with the liquid eyes huddled on his knees, prostrate upon the blood stained floor will believe me if I told him otherwise. He is still beautiful despite the passing of the years. I call out his name softly and watch him cry as the black vines lovingly caress his bloated body, tattooed with a multitude of small circular scars, and start to force-feed him the regurgitated remains of their kills. He knows Sister will always love him.
** END