sisterforsaken

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RIO VIDAL 1.01 "Seekest Thou the Road"

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Come and get some Skinning the children for a war drum Putting food on the table selling bombs and guns It's quicker and easier to eat your young

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Mary: I am more than just a pretty face!

Mary: I am also a terrible person!

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Alice succumbs without much effort, her mind drawn to Mary’s siren song as soon as her sweet voice slips into her ear. An instinctual gnaw in Mary’s chest beckons her to proceed to the next step - luring her out of sight, her hunger heightened and every screaming voice inside her telling her to feed, to tear out her throat and leave her to rot. Countless others fell prey to Mary Reid, a waking nightmare, but Alice would not suffer this fate. 

Mary’s hand lowers, fingers hovering just above Alice’s chest and waving in the air as if she pulls unseen puppet strings. A shudder courses through her, enough to sicken her for a moment, the bitter taste of resistance filling her mouth like bile. She swallows and instead focuses her attention on the leering Ekon in the distance. They’re closer now, having jumped to another tree. Despite the anguished hunger radiating from their sinewy form, they wait. There is an unspoken law that keeps the other monster at bay - knowing when a stronger predator has claimed its prey. Mary uses that time, twisting her wrist to turn Alice around, her hand hovering near the small of her back now and marching her forward. 

“Just like that,” she encourages, her voice as sweet as ever, despite the cold stare fixed on the hovering ghost in the tree. “Find your way home, little bird. Do not look back.” 

But hunger cannot be abated by law. The pale beast moves fast, darting from branch to branch and soon lunges itself at Alice, teeth bared and ready to feed. Their attempt is cut short when Mary’s arm snaps forward, her fingers curled tightly around their throat and sharpened red talons at their neck. She punctures the flesh, hard, and attempts to shove the creature back. A high whine escapes its throat and it gnashes yellowed teeth, fighting against Mary’s strength just enough to claw at Alice’s arm. The shock of its strength is enough for Mary to temporarily lose her grip on Alice, the compulsion wavering. 

“Run!” Mary hisses, all sweetness gone and only a beast left behind. With her free hand, she grips the pale Ekon’s side and pulls them close, enough to sink her teeth into their throat. 

Mary's action is so sudden, so unexpected, that for a moment fear is forgotten in favor of confusion. She likes the other woman well enough -- admires her work and the way she carries herself -- but their relationship has been entirely professional up until this awkward night. Alice doesn't even have time to lament that she's made a fool of herself in front of a colleague before Mary is cupping her cheek with more tenderness than the photographer ever would have expected.

"What--"

Pale fingers find her forehead. The effect is subtle, at first. The world seems to hem in on the edges, a shadowed vignette at the peripheries of her awareness. She's never been one to drink in excess in spite of her lightweight status -- the appeal of it wore off almost entirely after being married to an alcoholic. But this feels, almost, like being drunk. Like the lull of twilight sleep when she'd gotten her wisdom teeth removed years ago. There's a part of her that fights it, that resists the way thoughts that aren't her own slip and slide across her mind like oil. That part of her mind wants to jerk away, but her muscles resist, already lax and leaning into the consuming touch.

He isn't coming for you. He left you to die here. To drown.

But Mary's firm voice pushes out the memory of the... Of whose voice? The recollection of it has already slipped away, settling back into the depths where it belongs.

"Home," she says, though her voice is so distant to her own ears it might as well be coming from someone else. Someone awake and real. "I need to... go home. Out of the dark. Back to the light." Mary is with her. She's safe. Yes, that feels right -- why was she doubting that, before?

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hello ~

Someone needed a crumb of Mary? Because I was starving 🍷

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Mary is about to dismiss her sympathy, ignore it as though it is nothing more than wind, but something in Alice’s tone gives her pause. Her words are genuine - Mary can be certain of that. If there’s anything Mary has learned in these decades of walking between the living and the dead it’s how to listen for subtle shifts in tone, pick out words unspoken and blurred between lines of falsehood, detect a quickened blood flow throbbing at the neck, the wrists, the heart. After all, she is so adept at lying herself. Her very existence is built upon it.  So instead, she settles for an acknowledging nod, hoping the act wouldn’t prompt any further questions about her son. 

Speaking about him after all these years feels wrong, a distinct and almost unnatural pull at her cold heart she hasn’t felt in decades. He is gone and addressing him in this high vaulted room would not bring him back. 

Alice shifts the conversation, bringing it back to the installation that looms above them both, ghastly and daunting. Mary’s attention is not drawn to it, like Alice’s, for she knows every brush stroke, every slice across the canvas, every stretched red-soaked fibre pushing free of two-dimensional space that splayed out like a web of arteries hovering above them. She, instead, traces a sharpened nail along the floor, leaving behind a faint scratch. 

“I prefer to keep my online presence at a minimum,” she says, the motion of her finger mimicking a small wave. “I’ve had issues with replication - theft - in the past. So I prefer my work to only be viewed in person.” 

A faint grin appears at the corner of her mouth before disappearing. 

“The human body is fascinating. It is a maze of possibility, endless threads weaving over and over again to create a tapestry of the self. The red string inside us that tells of our health, our history, our family ties, our desires, our sins, our story. We are all connected in this way... There is beauty in that. And there is horror.” 

The silence stretches for a long moment, tense and a touch uncomfortable. Alice wants to apologize again, to retract the question and shift the course of the conversation, but the words catch somewhere in her throat.

It's been months since Alan disappeared. Not quite a year but the dark anniversary looms not long in the future. The immediate time following her return from Bright Falls is a static-laced void in her memory, days and weeks blurring together when Alice couldn't even pull herself out of bed. Friends and family checked up on her -- Barry was there in the kitchen more nights than he wasn't, and her father slept on the couch for a few weeks because he didn't want to leave her alone. Slowly she pulled herself out of it, her camera a lifeline that guided her back to the waking world. Even when she felt frozen, her photos reminded her that time moved forward. People laughed and loved and cried, and observing it all through her lens started to bring reality back into focus.

But Alice worries, still, that she's never going to be normal again. Will never be able to hold a casual conversation or meet someone new without the ghosts of her past clinging to her. She bites down on the inside of her cheek until she tastes blood, the metallic ooze of it over her tongue a grounding sensation. Mary's words bring her the rest of the way back to herself.

"Oh," she breathes, self-pity immediately forgotten. A deeply sympathetic expression pins itself to her features. "I'm so sorry, that's... I can't even imagine." The loss of a mother and a lover is something she understands too well. She'd talked with Alan about having kids before everything went to shit, but time slipped away in the face of other obligations and a marriage on the rocks. Alice can't say she's ever felt some great maternal pull, but the thought of losing a child is a burden she can only begin to imagine the weight of.

Again her attention drifts back to Mary's piece, as though she's looking at the work for the first time. There's undeniable violence it, something almost exuberant in its obscenity -- but it's trying to say something too. Grief is a funny, agonizing thing that makes you feel as though you're bleeding every moment of every day. A deep wound that no one else can see as it spills and spreads and stains the world around you. Does it hurt to love, or does it only hurt to lose?

"I tried looking you up online before I came over, but there wasn't much to find." An artist wanting their privacy is a perfectly understandable thing to Alice -- the spotlight isn't for everyone, and notoriety has a way of stripping artistic integrity anyway. "Your work is beautiful in person, but I have to ask... what's the inspiration?"

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in some universe, mary is still alive

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Ergo proxy (2006)

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happy halloween - mary has dressed as a vampire on halloween for the last 105 years

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THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (2018) dir. Mike Flanagan

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Are you stronger than a mountain?

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Ohhh to be angry and covered in abit of blood

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Les deux orphelines vampires (Jean Rollin, 1997)

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mary enters your room like this wyd?

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— Frank Bidart, from “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; ‘The Third Hour of the Night’", published c. 2017.