By Morgan Champine (@_morganchampinewriter_)
Previous: "Samhain"
Son cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.
De Beranger
Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.
De Beranger
In the middle of a creeping dark wood is a house. It is normally tall and normally long, and the windows are shrouded over with black lace curtains. Every day in the house is dreary, painted by rain and clouds hung low and heavy with their sadnesses. In the mist of the evening the house seems to breathe, a rattling breath of someone out in
the cold for too long, a breath of someone with rot and mycelium in their lungs.
the cold for too long, a breath of someone with rot and mycelium in their lungs.
I saw a play many years ago about a house nearly as dreary as mine. You would know the name if I spoke it to you, recognize it as a great hallmark of gothic literature about a dreary, dripping house and a dark secret.
But as I look back on the play now, there is only one phrase that comes to my mind. These walls are my skin. This room is my heart. Besides, I have a sister.
My sister sits just beyond the living room window, the blue glass casting a strange pallor across her skin. She is bug-eyed and pale with dark hair like a one-eyed black cat. Even from outside the house, I can smell her-rotten cabbages and corpse flowers.
I sweep towards the door and knock on it, tapping, rapping, until she opens it.
She is thinner than when we last saw each other. There are marks in her neck-deep, pressing, dark marks. Her eyelashes clump over her face like spider legs, and the white dress she wears has rips and tears, moth eaten and ugly.
“Oh,” she says, voice turning pleasantly, like a maiden singing a song, “Auggie. I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Annie,” I choke, desperation drowning the sound of my voice. “May I come in? Please?”
After a moment, Annie nods, fingers fluttering at her sides. She sweeps across the room weightlessly, and into the darkness of the parlor.
The house is overcome with cobwebs. The once shining floor has been dulled down to little more than strange reflections. When I tilt my head, I see one- Annie on the stairs above me. The floor hasn’t been cleaned in many years. Annie is in the parlor.
I do not let myself linger long in the foyer, and follow Annie into the parlor. She’s perched on the edge of the sofa, dress fluttering in the breeze like the wings of a dove. When I come in, she turns, a pleasant smile playing on the edges of her lips.
“How is your partner?” she asks, voice lilting.
I sit carefully across from her, quiet and still, lest she startle and float away.
“They’re alright,” I say softly. There are bruises pressed under Annie’s eyes so dark and deep they seem like the hollows of her bones. “We’re not together any longer.”
“Oh,” Annie says. “Oh, Auggie, that’s a shame.”
“Yes,” I say softly. Voices flow on the breeze, familiar, deep voices, and footsteps in mud. Someone is digging. “They’re still digging?”
Annie sighs heavily, pressing a hand to her throat, air sinking out of her lungs.
“Some things just don’t want to be buried,” she says, and then rises to her feet. “You must be famished. Where are my manners?”
She sweeps out of the room in a cloud of dust and leaves me staring out the blue window. My reflection is startling-pale white like bone, eyes so large and heavy they seem to droop out of my face and hang near my cheekbones. My hair is dark and ratty and greasy, hanging by my ears in thick curls.
The voices are still there. The digging is still there-the telltale scrape of shovel on dirt and stone. Shoveling, shoveling.
So much shoveling.
After a moment, I hear soft footsteps and humming from the entrance, and turn. Annie’s in a different dress-something of blue silk with little bows. She presses a hot cup of tea and a plate of toast, eggs, and sausage into my hands. I blink at her.
“Annie,” I stammer, “it’s not morning. Why are you-?”
Annie’s eyes trail out the window, and I follow them. The sun is cresting on the horizon, burning me with cool morning light.
“But-” I try, but the words stick in my throat like syrup. She raises her eyebrows at me.
“You need to get dressed for the new day, August,” she says, in the tone I know too well. “You can’t just sit around in your nightclothes.”
“That dress,” I start, trying the eggs, which taste like blood, “you used to wear
that dress when we’d go picnicking. It’s your picnicking dress.”
Annie smiles like a woman under knifepoint, hands darting to her throat. “Yes,” she says. “I should change. I don’t want to go out there today.” Her eyes dart to the window again. The shoveling is louder, so much louder now- like it’s just outside of sight.
“But we could-” I say. “It’s been so long since we picnicked.”
“Mmm,” Annie says softly. “I was thinking we’d dance instead.”
She stands and sweeps out of the room, and I shove my plate aside and follow her.
In the reflection of the foyer floor, I see her near the stairs, and turn to catch a glimpse of her, but she’s not there. Just the dirty floors again. Just the dirty floors.
From the grand ballroom, a great symphony strikes up- violins and pianos and drums and all the sorts of grand instruments you’d expect from a grand ballroom. Before my feet move, I’m inside, and Annie is standing in the middle of the room in a great black dress draped around her like the wings of a raven. A crown of lilies of the valley sits atop her head, and she’s gone so pale it looks like her flesh has melted away.
The marks on her neck are deeper now, so deep they look burnt into her skin. She stretches out a hand to me, grinning with missing, rotted teeth.
“Dance with me, Auggie,” she says, and I take her hand, and let her spin me into a dance.
In the blurs of movement she looks almost alive. I can see the two of us together, hand in hand, racing about the property, reading Poe and Stoker and Shelley in the trees, jumping in the dirty pond and splashing each other with water.
I can see her, alone, in this giant house, sweeping through the halls with no one to acknowledge her, the only other eyes in the home Mother and Father’s on their painting.
A lily of the valley falls from her crown and floats to the floor, settling against the tile with the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.
I tear from her arms and my hands take skin with me. It peels from her bones with a squelch, her eyes next, her hair after. Everything falls away until the bright, lovely, smart girl in my arms is nothing but a pile of bones.
I drop her to the floor. She falls with a great crash, just like she fell the day I found her.
I turn on my heel and run to the foyer.
The noose that hangs down from the banister taunts me. It is thick and dusty and dirty, and I can see Annie’s feet limply circling around as it swung back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
I turn and shove through the front doors of the house, which slam open with a clang. Outside, they’re still digging. Digging, digging, digging, digging the spot where my baby sister’s grave will go. A raven caws at me, voice sharp and high and promising.
I run from the house, from the woods, and into the darkness of the world. My hands smell like my sister’s bones.
We loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee.
Next: "Perpetual Faith"