Twice Cursed, page 10
She wanted me dead. I am certainly not alive.
* * *
The silver-backed brush flashes, shooting stars through the ebony night of my hair. He insists on a hundred strokes before bed; it is his pleasure to perform the task. His hands are gentle yet deft. I see his reflection in the glass, the pride on his face, the dawn of his arousal.
Could I have loved this man, were it not for the shadow between us?
The candlelight dips. Our eyes meet in the mirror. At least, that is what he must see: my own eyes, wide and frightened as they always were. I am forgetting their true colour.
“Why did you choose shoes?”
His expression flickers. “I beg your pardon?”
“For the evil queen’s punishment? What made you think of the hot iron shoes?”
“Ah.” He comprehends, now, and his chest swells with pride at the memory. “Did you not understand? It was a fitting end for a vain woman. She wanted to be the belle of the ball, the lady every man watched, and I granted her that wish. Fine gowns and shoes were her delight. I let her own apparel stand in judgement upon her.”
There is a poetry to his justice I cannot deny. I wish that it had worked. My husband thinks he avenged me, and I allow him to go on believing, as if somehow that could make it true.
“Was it wrong?” he asks humbly. “Do you think me too cruel?”
I am honest. “Nothing was too cruel for her.”
He nods and returns to his strokes. They say he kept my coffin with him always: while he ate, while he slept. I wonder if he ran his fingers through my dry, dead locks.
I must keep talking – at least it is still my voice. “She tried to kill me with a brush, once. I suppose it was more of a comb. I still feel the poison, leeching deep into my scalp with the teeth.”
He is appalled. His face drops, the brush falls slack in his hand. “I had no idea. I thought it was only the apple.”
There are things I should never tell, things I can never forget. No one wants to hear of a princess’ pain. She is to dismiss the past and live happily ever after.
He keeps watching me in the glass. The spark of desire has been snuffed like a candle flame, replaced with shock and pity.
“It was not only the apple,” I say, by way of brevity.
He places the brush on the dressing-table, turns me around and kisses my forehead. It is better to see him as he truly is, instead of reversed.
“You have been through such great hardship, my love, but you are safe now. I shall let you rest.”
He is the perfect prince, the perfect king, he wants the perfect queen. I smile as if I am the doll he bought and there is not something rotten lurking at the core of me.
“Then I will wish you good night.”
He bends in a practiced, courtly bow. His cloak swings as he turns, creating a draught that sets the candle wavering. I swivel back to the glass, stare deep into the hectic, flashing image, hoping to find myself. This is no magic mirror. Yet when I look into it, or any other in this castle, I see only her wicked face.
* * *
It is always the same dream.
Warlocks and wise-men used to visit Mother and instruct her in the dark arts. Although I was never permitted near them, I used to hear their voices, bouncing off the stone walls and travelling down to the damp bowels of the castle where I was kept. One man articulated more clearly than all the rest. He spoke as if each sentence were a summons from another realm. “Every dream,” he said, “has its stem in a memory. Good or bad, whatever we see behind our closed eyelids was already there, inside.”
The dream that haunts me night by night is no exception. The events really did take place.
It goes like this. Sunlight blazes into the cottage. Birds twitter through the open window and the air is flavoured with the scent of baking pastry. A woman crosses the threshold, her shadow stretching before her. She is my mother, though she wears another’s face.
Laces dangle from her gnarly fingers, each string as lurid and tempting as a venomous snake. I never see the trade take place, never hear the chink of coin. In the blink of an eye the lace is threaded through my bodice and the woman is pulling tight, tight.
I see myself turning blue. Empty lungs burn inside my chest. Yet I can also sense the laces taut in my hands, silk squeezing blood from my fingers as the girl bucks and writhes beneath me.
I do not know if it is her memory or my own.
The image melts, as it always does, into the present day. Still I cannot breathe. I am laid beneath the canopy of my sumptuous royal bed, a swan-down coverlet pulled up to my chin.
Mother is sitting on my chest.
The weight of her is unbearable. My ribs seem to crack and cave in. The same hands that pulled the laces worm beneath the coverlet to seize my throat and choke what is left of me away.
She leans in, close, her breath warm against my cheek. It tastes of rotten apples.
Darkness begins to draw in. I would welcome its release. More than anything I want to return to the coffin of silver glass where I rested, finally at peace. But, of course, I start awake.
There is no sweat on my skin, no pounding of my heart and I do not pant for breath. My body is still a corpse, untouched by my emotion.
I left the candle on the dressing-table. It has dwindled to a stub drowning in its own wax, but it burns valiant, still. A flicker refuses to die. I take courage from its light.
Struggling out of bed, I make my way to the dressing-table stool. Her image rises once more from the depths of the glass. This time, I will strike back.
I grip the silver-backed brush and smash it into the mirror. Fractures spread in a spider-web. The last thing I see before she shatters into a million pieces is her wicked, wicked smile.
A glass shard sparkles in the candlelight. I drive it deep into my cheek. The pain is dulled but still there, making me gasp as though it were pleasure. Again. Skin catches as I drag the point heavily across my forehead. The blood that wells up is as warm and red as any mortal’s.
At last I feel. The panic and the horror are sweet.
This is what she wanted all along, what I should have done years ago. It was not really my heart and lungs that Mother wanted, but my face.
Blood loss makes me giddy. A roaring fills my ears and dark spots threaten my vision. I lie back on the bed and watch apple-red bloom across the white sheets. Her poison is finally spurting out, she is trickling away.
I close my eyes, luxuriate in my warm, crimson, coppery bath. At last, I think I shall sleep without dreams.
* * *
Daylight plays across my closed eyelids. I hear sounds of the forest and for one delightful moment I think myself back at the cottage with the miners. Maybe that was heaven after all – or as close to it as I shall ever draw.
But then there is a jolt. The same jolt as when the prince’s servants dropped my coffin and dislodged the apple from my throat. I start awake.
Blood has dried in rusty stains across my nightgown. When I shift, I leave a russet imprint of myself on the bed. There is no pain, now. Not until I raise a hand and cup it around my cheek.
The skin does not hurt; rather, the pain comes from deep down within me. A shriek somewhere at the bottom of a well. For my face is smooth: soft, cold and untouched.
Shambling out of bed, I pass to the mirror and of course it is flawless. Both the glass and my flesh have been magically repaired. My mouth hangs open as I drop onto the stool to see her smiling still.
“Why won’t you die?” I hiss.
Then I remember she whispered this to me.
We are bound together, always. My mother formed me from a simple wish upon blood and snow. We shared a body as I grew and now… now it is my turn to carry the burden of her.
* * *
I walk up on the battlements. This is a fight I shall never win, but it feels better to be out in the air, away from my husband, away from mirrors.
The kingdom stretches out golden and green before me, a land of hills and tall pine. Somewhere to the east it joins with the country in which I was born. There is peace, at least for the people, and that is no small feat. My suffering serves some purpose.
We all thought the apple was meant to kill me. I know better now. Her dark power was deeper and more cunning than even I imagined. The white half for her, the red half for me. She made the apple so she could live.
The wind is a distant cackle in my ears. As it sweeps up my hair and fans it behind my back, I turn to the north where they say there is another princess who sleeps. Time does not touch her. Years pass but she remains the same, forever captured in the moment she pricked her finger and fell into an enchanted slumber.
Someone must have loathed her as thoroughly as my mother hated me. I should feel a connection with this princess, but all I have left in my heart is envy for her.
The leaves on the trees below me will drop and fall. These battlements, already hazed with moss, will gradually crumble away. My husband will die, cobwebs will form and everything will decay.
In the end, who will be left apart from me and this other, deathless princess?
She may sleep comfortably on.
But I am awake, chained to the wickedest woman of all, and there shall be no rest for me.
PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW
BY CHRISTINA HENRY
Maura’s left eye was gone.
“Oh, no,” Terry said, dropping the mail. She took Maura’s face in her hands. Terry’s hands were liver-spotted, the blue veins under the skin protruding. “Oh, no, what happened to you?”
Maura didn’t respond. Her right eye – frozen, shiny, gleaming with some secret sorrow – stared back at Terry. Her mouth, a faded pink Cupid’s bow, was parted slightly as if Maura were about to speak. No words came out. Maura couldn’t explain this catastrophe.
Terry released Maura’s face, brushed her fingers over Maura’s lace dress and scanned around for the missing eye. She had to find it. Maura was the first line of defense, Terry’s best soldier.
Terry shuffled forward, her shoulders hunched inside her brown cardigan. Her slippered feet kicked the mail aside, heedless. She squinted at the ground. She’d left her other glasses in the kitchen, the distance ones, and the readers tucked in her cardigan pocket wouldn’t do her any good. She’d taken the readers so she could look at the mail, but bills and junk didn’t matter now. Putting Maura back together was the only thing that mattered.
If Maura can’t look out for me then all my soldiers might fall, and then what?
Terry clutched at the pendant she always wore, day or night. It was a small silver molded hand and wrist, the second and last finger forked while the other fingers folded in – the sign against the evil eye. Harold had given it to Terry years ago, warning her to never take it off. She never had – not when she slept, not when she showered. She knew what would happen if she did.
It had been the least Harold could do, really, considering he was the reason she was in this fix in the first place. The vengeful spirits should have dissipated when he died. He was the one they’d wanted. But apparently such spirits believed that guilt rubbed off on those in proximity to the guilty. Not that Terry was completely sure that Harold had done all those terrible things, never mind what the news said. Everyone knew those TV anchors lied. He’d always been so sweet to her, the best husband in the world.
Terry’s foot nudged a stack of bundled papers under Maura’s chair. Something gleamed there – was it the precious glass she was looking for? She bent her knees, just a little, because there was always the terrifying possibility that if she knelt on the floor she wouldn’t be able to get up again. In the last few years her body had started to break down, break off, an old car rusting bit by bit. It was humiliating to rely on other people to help her, to feel that she couldn’t manage things on her own.
Worst of all was the nagging sense that her son and her two granddaughters thought that her brain was rusting too, that she was “confused” or “mixed up”. Terry hated the way they spoke to her like she was a child who didn’t comprehend language. Well, Jessie didn’t, not all the time. But still. There was nothing wrong with her mind.
The muffler might be scraping the ground but the engine is just fine, she thought. She did acknowledge, though, that she probably shouldn’t have mentioned the spirits to her family. That had triggered some sideways glances they thought she hadn’t seen. But they would keep asking her about her soldiers, as if it were anyone’s business but hers what she kept in her own house.
They were all there, lined up on three shelves that ran along the hallway wall behind Maura’s chair. Lots of porcelain dolls all in a row, mostly Madame Alexander dolls that Terry had kept for years and years. Tiny little porcelain faces with wide glass eyes fringed by long lashes, eyes that watched and warned. All her little girls, all her brave girls in their dresses, all her soldiers. All had their eyes turned toward the front door, the most dangerous potential breach.
There were some dolls in the kitchen, too, noses pointing toward the back door, and two at every window, perched on the sills. They stared out into the world, frightened the spirits away. Spirits feared clear sight, feared the gaze of the innocent, and Terry’s soldiers all had that. But Maura was the best – she was the oldest, and the strongest. She’d been Terry’s friend and companion all her life. Terry needed her.
Terry put a hand on Maura’s chair as she lowered closer to the ground. The chair wasn’t meant to hold much weight, not even Terry’s own slight pressure. It was made of some lightweight wood and the seat was wicker weave, perfect for Maura but nobody else.
The chair wobbled a little as Terry hunched, scrabbling at the place where she’d seen that marble-like gleam. Her fingers groped around the newspapers, little puffs of dust following in their wake. Terry reached back further, sure that Maura’s eye was just out of reach. A thin-legged spider scuttled over her hand, its touch lighter than air, and Terry whispered an apology for disturbing it.
The chair wobbled again, the feet scraping the floor as it shifted.
I should just go get my glasses from the kitchen, Terry thought. But it always took her so long to get from point A to point B, her arthritic knees only capable of shuffling steps, her already-once-broken hip stiff and unyielding. It would be faster just to reach, just to feel around until she found the eye.
Besides, she couldn’t leave Maura with a blind spot for even a few moments. The spirits could sneak in that way. Once they’d breached the perimeter it would be harder for her to defend against them.
Harder, but not impossible. Harold had left her with a few other things besides the evil eye pendant. Again, the least he could do after leaving her behind to deal with this curse.
She bent her knees a little more, wished she was able to take ibuprofen for her arthritis pain. It wasn’t good for her stomach, though, and the ice compresses that her doctor recommended were for the birds. They didn’t do a thing, as far as Terry was concerned, except make her knees cold.
He’d also recommended that she try Tai Chi and she hadn’t been able to control her eye roll. Terry was not going to stand in the middle of a public park with a bunch of old people and practice waving her arms very slowly.
She bent her knees a little more, her grip tightening on the edge of Maura’s chair. Had she just felt the slip of glass under her fingertips? Maybe it had rolled behind the newspapers and gotten caught under the pages.
The chair shook. Terry felt her knees buckling beneath her. The wood seemed to disintegrate under her palm, a cracking thunderclap of doom. A splinter slid underneath her skin, pricking blood.
Terry saw Maura tip to the side, her white face falling in slow motion, the Cupid’s bow mouth now hanging open in surprise. Terry’s shoulder slammed into the floor and she cried out, but it wasn’t her own pain that concerned her.
Maura crashed into the ground as Terry watched in horror. A web of cracks appeared in Maura’s cheek. Her remaining eye rolled away.
“No,” Terry moaned, reaching for Maura. “No, no. Don’t worry. We can fix it. Don’t worry.”
Terry felt bile in the back of her throat, a curdling of saliva on her tongue. Something skittered over her face – no light-footed spider this time, but something that felt like a touch of draught.
Her skin iced beneath that touch. She knew what it was.
One of the spirits had breached the perimeter. Maura had fallen, and now this.
Someone knocked on the back door, three hard knocks. There was only one person in Terry’s life who knocked that way, sure and clear.
Jessie, Terry thought. Thank God. Jessie will help me. Jessie will understand.
She liked Jessie better than her other granddaughter, Erin. Her son, Harry, said that she shouldn’t say such things, but it was true. Erin wore her contempt for Terry a little too openly, made it clear that her love was an obligation to be met. Jessie might be secretly worried that her grandmother was losing her marbles, but she hid it better than anyone else. And Jessie really seemed to love Terry as Terry loved her.
And because Terry really loved Jessie the first thought that followed Jessie will understand was No, Jessie, don’t come in. They might get you. They might hurt you.
Three knocks sounded again, and Terry thought of fairy tales, of three wishes and three nights to weave straw into gold and three bears and a cock crowing three times and all the magic hidden inside three, for good or ill.
Once more three knocks, three times three, and Terry closed her eyes and hoped that Jessie would be protected, that her granddaughter had sealed herself against harm. Because Jessie was coming inside and Terry couldn’t stop her. She heard the key turning in the back door lock.
“Grandma?” Jessie’s voice, as strong and clear as her knock, floated through the kitchen and into the hall.
Terry tried to sit up but the pain in her shoulder stopped her. She whimpered, looking from Maura to the doorway. She had to get Maura’s eyes back in and get her on the chair. It was the only way to stop further incursions. Jessie had to be kept safe.
