Chapter 3 The Outside World #2
When I first arrived, I listened to every passing stranger’s tale, eager to find some knowledge, some understanding of what had happened to my beloved sister.
Even just a name for the monster who stole her.
For I had not stopped seeing the very real beasts and creatures of the otherworld.
Spirits clustered gloomily in the brothel.
At the busy well in the village, a tiny dragon-like creature often sunbathed on the rocks.
When a man described the Alp, the horrifying beast that crept into houses and sucked the blood from sleeping breasts, I barely slept for weeks, determined to catch the creature should he dare to come.
But no Alp appeared, and Josef nearly threw me out, so I eventually went back to sleeping.
A man once claimed he’d seen Lord Death’s home, an uncanny valley with a strange black chateau like it had been burnt and left covered in soot.
That seemed promising—would the monster have taken Rochelle to Lord Death?
But then, during the night, he went mad and cut out his own tongue and I felt I could not trust his words.
As time went on, I realized every traveler with a fantastic story was either a drunkard, a lunatic, or a fanatic.
I often wondered if perhaps I was mad.
Once, during my first year, Josef sent me on an errand, and my road briefly turned through the Black Forest. It was summer and the heat oppressive, threatening a rain that never came.
I went quickly, afraid to be caught in the forest at night, afraid that my very presence called the darkness to me.
I was very nearly past when I saw through the trees a tall man, all on fire.
At first, I only thought of his suffering and the danger of the mountainside turning to blaze in the heat and flew off the path to help him. But just before my foot fell across the boundary of the trees, I caught myself.
The forest was silent. No sound of crackling branch.
No screams. The heat and its silence pushed on me on all sides.
At that moment, the man turned and stared at me.
His black, empty eye sockets, licked in flame, fixed to me, as if he could peer into my soul.
I backed away. Resumed my path, hands shaking.
He followed me to the edge of the forest, but no farther.
By then I discovered there was some truth to the old woman’s wisdom—having faced such a creature in the twilight and kept my head and my feet on the path made me realize I could live alongside the otherworld, so long as I ignored it.
I could not control my sight, but I could control what I noticed. I could smother my terror into apathy.
ONE NIGHT, A WOMAN ARRIVED AT OUR brOTHEL DRESSED AS a rangy soldier, with her hair cropped short and with her small breasts bound tight to her chest. She had a sharp light in her eye, a kind of knowing that thrilled me when her gaze swept us.
It was the first time I intentionally tried to use power for myself.
I wanted her. I wanted her to want me. I was never quite beautiful, but I had learned how to use the dim light of the room, to skim along the top of my roiling soul and use that trace of night to wrap around myself—calling like unto like and pulling it down in my bed to make a lover of it.
Several of the girls flocked to her, but it was me she chose, pulling me into her lap when I poured her beer. With her, I discovered the pleasure of sweat-sleek bodies moving together and felt something hungry and longing open inside of me.
When she left, Dacia wouldn’t look at me for the next week—but neither could I face her, knowing my expression would betray both desire and knowledge.
It had always been there, perhaps. Dacia was my light in hell, and even from the first day, I felt like a moth, drab and fluttery, drawn to her flame.
Of course she was beautiful—with long, sun-golden curls that cascaded down her back, always escaping her veil, eyes as blue as a clear summer sky, and luscious curves that never seemed affected by Josef’s stinginess with bread.
But it was more than just her beauty. It was that she always smelled like rain-washed lilies and the musk of something erotic and sun-drenched, and despite her halo of purity, the quickest way to make her laugh was a coarse joke.
She was unfailingly kind to everyone, even when we did not deserve it.
And when she got angry, she could only manage to sputter curses, her cheeks bright red in frustration.
Her only flaw, as far as I could tell, was that she was rather pious, but she held me in high regard for the fact that I’d been raised in a convent and could read Latin and knew all the prayers and much Scripture from memory.
I offered to teach her to read them simply to be close to her.
My feelings for her felt like something too sacred to name, for once it was named it could be taken.
But now they were a specter of their own between us.
I thought I hid it well, but soon after, one of the other girls laughed and said I followed Dacia around like a bitch in heat.
Dacia heard, but pretended not to, and I went outside to lick my wounds in embarrassment.
She came out an hour or so later, after the sun had disappeared behind the ridge, and under a shivering beech tree, kissed me softly—a honeyed buzzing kind of kiss that was utterly unlike anything I’d ever experienced and made my body feel as if it would collapse with longing, like a drenching summer thunderstorm.
But just as quickly, she let me go. The air was cold on my mouth, and Dacia said quietly as the stars pricked into life over the Vosges, “Lovers leave. Sisters are forever. Please, Salomé, love me like a sister.”
I could never do as she asked—I had a sister and she was gone and this was not that at all.
But the wind gusted, and somewhere I could smell the rich, warm death of the leaves deep in the Black Forest. I swallowed and, my throat so tight and pained I could barely get the words out, said, “As you wish.”
After that, we were perfect friends. But my desire for her never lessened, no matter how deeply I buried it.
Over time, my careful blindness toward the otherworld, and the drudgery of money and men wore me down into a kind of stupor.
I thought of Rochelle every day—wondering about the monster who had taken her, imagining her tortured or lost or waiting for me—but I did nothing, could do nothing.
There was no woman more invisible than a whore, and I felt a kind of safety I did not want to risk, tucked into that invisibility.
My debt to Josef, the proprietor, deepened at a rate that consumed me, my despair crowding out my fear of gods or their monsters.
Eventually I started remembering Rochelle as I remembered the dead. This too was part of my curse.
I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not died.