04 the final: gods, ghosts, and monsters
Whenever I see Angela, I think of winter, like it has folded itself up inside her slender frame and, like an animal, sleeps there when the rest of the world would be summer. Her hair is sunlight on the snow, her skin pale apart from the rare rouge of lips or blush of cheeks, her eyes are storms of ice and midnight. She is beautiful in a frightening way; the way that makes you afraid to touch her, like her skin is electric; to raise your eyes to hers because you cannot be sure of what you will see- they are icebergs or an endless tundra and in them- dark histories, secret lives, your own reflection. It is impossible to know. What frightens people most about Angela is not her eyes, or the winter inside her- it is her stillness, her silence- and that she has not always been this way. Most people say it was when her mother died in the accident on the lake that Angela stopped speaking, as though ten years ago her world shuddered to a halt on its axis, as though sound was a distant memory from a formless dream- something she could no longer recall, no longer dared to remember. But I know, somehow, it began before that.
The mortuary, like a monster, where marble arches and columns glitter like bones in the moonlight, crouches on a knot of land. Where once a splendid house had stood: now a tomb, now the house of death. Where once silks and velvets had swept the floors in dance: now a maze of smiling coffins, eagerly awaiting their dead. Only upon the second floor, where Angela and her father still live, can the beauty of the past be resurrected- though now tainted, though coated in cobwebs and lace, shuttered to keep the light out, to keep out things like love and truth, the vestiges of a once glorious life glimmer occasionally. Her father is a tall man, though I am still taller. He has dark eyes with darker circles, like black crescent moons beneath, as though he has not slept in years. His skin is sallow and faintly smells of chemicals and blood-metallic, distant. I have sometimes seen his hands perch, like spiders, upon the shoulders of his daughter-they are thin and cracked.
-+-
It is a secret between Angela and I that she is not always silent, that she is not stone within her skin. Something still moves, still beats within her and I see it there, buried, forgotten. Sometimes, during the closed, the dark hours, we sit in the open coffins and talk from across the room, listening to our own echoes rise and fall like tides. We pretend we are like the bodies her father carves; lifeless, empty and unafraid. Outside, it is pouring, a torrential kind of flooding where the sky has been torn and is bleeding, dark and grey.
I wonder what she is thinking and so I ask, "Angela, what are you thinking?" even though I am almost sure I know. Even though I do not really believe she will answer. The question lies there between us, gnawing at our bones, slowly deteriorating in the quiet.
She is silent for days and years, centuries, it seems, and I cannot see her face because she is lying down; only her small hand rests on the lip of the coffin, elegant and still. "My mother, mostly, and the funeral. Like this day. I remember mostly how the sky broke open and in the rain, it looked like everyone was crying- a communal sadness and I wasn't alone. I think it was the last time I was happy." Her voice is small and high, like a bird, like a child or else just something delicate and unused.
"The last time you were happy was at your mother's funeral?" I lie back in my own coffin, surrounded by black satin and mahogany, with my arms crossed on my chest in the imitation of my own death.
"That's wrong, isn't it?" she pauses. "Maybe it wasn't happiness. Maybe it was just that it wasn't loneliness." It is my turn to be silent.
In the stillness there is a break in the rain, a hush that resembles an end- or like existence pausing for breath- and we are somehow stuck inimitably in that moment, as if time is folding back into eternities, like mirrors that reflect infinitely into the distance, except, upon close perlustration, there are only one or two. A breeze blows through the room, the birth of a quiet echo that, replicating on itself, intensifies, multiplies until it is a piercing scream and not an echo at all. I make to move, because I cannot tell if it is Angela screaming or if I have simply gone mad, but the coffin lid snaps down with a sickening finalization.
There is a sort of terror, then, that is not easy to comprehend, like a caged animal tempted into sudden fury, into wretched desperation. Though the lid is closed and there is no light, a wind shifts over my body, like invisible fingers pressing lightly, touching and invading, and a song plays, a low and sweet melody. I hear Angela let loose her voice, high and violent, in a scream that overwhelms the idea of sound itself- the coffin lid clicks open and I climb feverishly out onto the cold, hard marble of the floors. Angela is sitting on the floor, a bouquet of little violet flowers clutched so tightly in her hand, the flesh of her fingers is stretched thin and white over the bones. She is whispering softly, frantically, and as I draw near only the word 'mother' falls to my ears.
She looks at me then, and I have to look away because I know that her eyes are like mirrors, like heaven and hell colliding, and I cannot bear to see myself in that instant, not terrified and humiliated as I am, trembling on the marble next to her.
"Forget-me-nots," she says, so softly that I nearly do not hear her and she is watching me so strangely, so intently. "You have a scar, there, on your forehead, like a little flower." And she reaches her hand forward to brush away the shock of dark hair, which partly covers it.
"I fell when I was young, six or seven, on a rock in the forest. I don't really remember, actually, but that's where I was found-I just, Angela, what happened? What was that?" But Angela's tongue is unmoving in the tomb of her mouth.
There is a click of a coffin lid, followed by another, reverberating sinisterly through the long and barren room. Angela's father walks along the rows of coffins, shutting the lids one by one with his hands like spiders- the dark pools of his eyes never waver from our crouching bodies. We do not move until he has reached us and when he does we stand, both unsteady on our feet, and he says simply, "Go home, boy," with his eyes falling all over her and he runs a hand through the snow and shadows of Angela's hair. Her gaze falls on me, like screaming and glass and pleading. I quietly meet her eyes because that is all I am brave enough to do.
-+-
"Play for me, Angela," I say and she sits at the piano with her fingers poised, arching over the keys. The lids of her eyes meet and she tilts forward, as if she is sitting at the edge of the world, so that her hair falls across her face like a sheet of ice, like a screen between her and the things she cannot bear.
The room is expansive and ornate. Though the chandelier is in disrepair and the black velvet of the draperies, climbing continuously across the western wall, has been the feast of ten thousand devouring moths, there is a soft violet light, which, persevering in the forbidding darkness, blossoms through the holes. Angela begins playing- Greensleeves or a lullaby which I cannot remember-and in the dusty room the notes ricochet off mirrors obscured by filth, antiques with legs that curl into vicious claws, and vases where the skeletons of flowers, caught at the height of beauty and bloom, still rest, now fragile and faded. There, hanging over the piano, is a portrait of Angela's mother, though for all I know it is a mirror too because Angela is the very image of her mother-from the porcelain skin to the midnight in her eyes, the smatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose like dark petals blown across the bark of a birch tree. The only memory I have of Angela's mother is her standing in a blue-violet dress at the edge of the lake; slender and solemn, with the water rushing up to worship at her feet and dash away again capriciously.
The notes keep rising and falling, lull after rush and high after low. Slowly, though, it melts into only rush, only high, and fast and furious and Angela's fingers are striking the keys like lightening, possessed of their own life and will. The velocity of my heartbeat excels to meet each note. In an instant the song shifts and it is a low, sweet melody and I have to ball my fists to keep my hands from trembling because I know the song; I have heard it before, playing with the wind in the coffins. Angela's eyes snap open, wide and distressed, and she tears her fingers from the teeth of the piano, but the song keeps playing- playing- echoing like a chant, a prayer, until it fades, leaving us in a disastrous silence. In the wake of the echo, the rigid silence, a cold wind howls. The picture of her mother falls from it's wall, crashing onto the piano and shattering.
"I don't know that song. I don't know how to play that song; it was my mother's," she murmurs, holding her hands away from her, looking at them with horror and wonder, as though they might reach their fingers about the milky white of her throat.
"Perhaps it was just luck, that your fingers recalled what your mind could not?" I suggest, even though I do not truly believe it. Yet, there is some memory that stirs in the recesses of my mind and I see the lake, a vision of fire and silver-the grave of Angela's mother-but a sudden sound breaks me from my reverie.
Angela's father, with his eyes like ominous pools of wildness or rage or maybe fear, stands at the door, and says only, "Go home now, boy." His voice is rough, like knives sharpening against each other.
-+-
Behind the mortuary, there is a grassy slope with a winding path that wanders downwards until it reaches the threshold of the lake. On either side, the woods threaten to invade, retreating only at the battlement of the shores. There is a small dock and a small boat, which float gently on the ripples of the water. I often sit on a rock, which lies behind the brink of forest and overlooks the lake. At sunset, the water explodes into silver and fire, like blood and mercury.
I am disturbed in my meditations by the sound of someone coming down the path, but it is only Angela. A flowing blue dress fits the small curves of her body and for a moment I am six or seven again, and she is her mother, with the wind playing in the folds of her dress like a small child. Angela carries a spray of violet flowers-forget-me-nots, I remember-pulled from the garden with bits of root and dirt still clinging. Her eyes are steady on the lake and I realize it must be the anniversary of her mother's death; she lays flowers on the lake each passing year, for I know she cannot bear to lie them on the empty grave in the cemetery-her mother does not rest there; she waits, still, beneath the beauty of the lake.
When she reaches the shore, Angela pinches the petals apart and lets the wind carry them onto the waters. I cannot see her face, but her shoulders tremble and I know that she is crying-something I have not seen her do since the day her mother died. The last violet petal is caught on a drift and it spirals up and up and up until it blends with the sky and, like a feather, sways back down unto the surface. I am so wrapped up in watching her that I do not see her father until he is nearly upon her. My hand reaches subconsciously to the scar, the white-skinned flower, on my forehead and in that instant, incomprehensibly, rapidly and intensely, a memory floods back clear, vivid- a woman at the dock, a man following her with a rough rope swinging from pocket to pocket, his hands plunged into each separately, weighing them down heavily. They are quarrelling violently, though I cannot hear them speaking. Like a tiger, a mad beast, the man's hands fly from his coat and he is strangling her with the rope. There is a brick at each end-her body hits the water with a splash and in the memory I am turning, running as fast as my seven year old legs can carry me until I trip and all is black and fades again to the present.
Angela's father is shouting, raving madly, his face contorted like a monster, and he is inevitably pushing her forward towards the edge of the dock. "You little slut! You bitch, with that boy!" he spits each word like a dagger. "And I know- I know about the song you played and how you look like her, so much like her. She wanted to tell. She wanted to hurt us all; I had to. Don't you understand, precious? I have to."
She is stumbling back and crying, pleading with her eyes and her voice is small and frantic. "Daddy, no. Please, daddy-I don't know what you mean. I won't tell, I won't talk at all. Please."
It is the desperation in the last plea that drains the lead from my bones and with a quickness I did not know I possessed, I am running to the shore, to the end of the dock. I push the man, the madness, the monster, with all my strength and he trips over Angela while I land at her feet. Together, Angela and I see, bursting forth through the petals of forget-me-nots, a hand, pale and shining, which grabs the coat of her father and pulls his struggling body under until it disappears beneath the depthless waters. Later, we would find out that he had bricks in his pockets, connected by a rope, and that is what the police would write on their report-but Angela and I, though we cannot offer any reasonable explanation, we believe differently.
We burned down the mortuary within the year so that all that was left crouching on the knot of land was a charred skeleton, grinning in the last rays of sunlight, with all it's haunting sorrows and violent rages, it's mysteries and darkness. Amidst our catharsis, Angela left the last of the forget-me-nots on the water for her mother and in the fury of the fire, the beauty of the lake, a song played on the wind, low and sweet.