#coming out should be comfortable and joyous and sometimes a big old celebration | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ojoboy · 4 years

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han seungwoo babyfever au

genre: han seungwoo x reader, fluff, domestic bliss

word count: 4k

plot: Your cousin asks you to babysit his children (14 y.o. Dongpyo & 13 months old baby sister Dohye) to celebrate the anniversary with his wife. Your boyfriend volunteeringly helps you out. Oh oh looks like you two are about to catch baby fever.

a/n: I finally decided to watch Broduce during quarantine although I already knew the outcome because I was too moved by some videos of Yunseong and Jinhyuk :( Anyways when Seungwoo said that if he had a son he’d like him to be like Dongpyo, I was like: say no more! (I hope you don’t mind that I made Dongpyo younger for this)

from: capt. seungwoo <3 [3:17pm]

wanna do something later? i miss u :(

to: capt. seungwoo <3 [3:19pm]

it’s been only two days... but i miss u too :(

and i don’t know if i have time today. i’m babysitting Jaesung’s children tonight because they are celebrating their anniversary and might come back late

from: capt. seungwoo <3 [3:19pm]

i could come by and help you out?

i’m meeting seungsik now but i definitely can come right afterwards!

to: capt. seungwoo <3 [3:20pm]

yeeess, i’d love that!

—

5:07pm. The streets are filled with cars rushing home and it almost looks like they are following the sun, eager to come home and finally rest. You just finished stowing away things in your small apartment that could be possibly dangerous around babies, now lazily scrolling through your Instagram feed and liking every other post. Then the doorbell finally rang and you rushed to the door to buzz them in. Almost a minute later there was a family of four standing in your living room.

“Sorry for being late,” your cousin said as he carefully put his bag down, “traffic, you know.” “It’s fine,” you replied and crouched down and shook little Dohye’s hands, beaming at the baby in the stroller. “Well, someone’s in a good mood today, aren’t you little sunshine?” Whether she did understand you or not, the little girl simply responded with a cheerful giggle that could melt anyone’s heart.

“She’s been energetic all day long. I hope she won’t give you a hard time,” her mother told you while undoing the buckles and taking the small child in her arms. Dongpyo was already sitting down on the couch next to the big black bag, seemingly busy on his phone.

“Everything you need for Dohye is in the bag. Diapers, baby food and even some toys to keep her entertained.” Your attention diverted back to your cousin who was going through the bag to check all items. “All right, thank you.”

After checking the final things with you, Hyejin took your hands in hers and squeezed them tightly. “Thank you so much for doing this!” “Yes, thank you. You are the best!” Your cousin engulfed you in a hug and then walked over to his children. “Behave well and help Y/N out, okay?” he playfully ruffled Dongpyo’s hair and bent down to kiss the little girl on his lap, followed by his wife showering the two with affection. A little annoyed like most teenagers in puberty the young boy told his parents off.

Halfway through the door Hyejin turned around to say, “Call us if there are any problems!”

“Don’t worry, Seungwoo is also coming. I’m sure we’ll manage,” you reassured them while ushering them out, “Just enjoy your anniversary!” "Oh, say hello from us then, yeah?” Jaesung waved one last time before the door closed.

“Finally!” the fourteen years-old exclaimed, making you chuckle. Seeing how his sister started squirming in his lap and hitting his face, you offered to take her while Dongpyo dutifully laid out her blanket on your floor and set up a few toys. “So, your boyfriend is also coming?”

“Yup, I think you’ve only met him once. Remember when we picked you up from dance practice because your mom was in labor? He drove us to the hospital.”

“Oh yeah, but isn’t he too cool for you?”

“Hey, wouldn’t be the other way around?” You played along. “Dohye agrees with me.”

“Nah, he really looked cool driving with one hand and calming you down while you were nervous as a cat.”

Just when you were about to retort the doorbell rang again as if your boyfriend knew you were talking about him. “Dongpyo can you get that, please?” Without further ado the boy got up from the comfy spot and buzzes Seungwoo in. A few moments later he enters, dressed in black ripped jeans and a white tee which was mainly covered by the purple The Rolling Stones hoodie (you got it for him as a birthday present and he claimed it was his favorite piece of clothing ever since).

“Hey guys, I brought some cake!” Seungwoo proudly lifts the white bag with his usual endearing smile. He fist-bumped Dongpyo and walked over to press a chaste kiss on your cheek before he set the cake down on the kitchen counter.

“You should marry him,” Dongpyo’s ogling eyes followed your boyfriend first, then his body. Eager to have some cake, his hands were already reaching out for the white bag when you stopped him. “Dongpyo stop. Let's save the cake for dessert, alright?”

With a pout, the boy looks up at the older guy in hope of him being able to convince you otherwise but the latter apologetically shook his head, “Sorry pal, you heard the boss.” He then proceeded to carefully stored the cake in your refrigerator as Dongpyo dramatically put his head between his hands.

—

About half an hour into the babysitting you were sitting down on your floor, watching Dohye grabbing colorful wooden bricks and stacking them on top of each other. Sometimes she would even chuck them in your direction as if to tell you that you should do the same.

Meanwhile the two boys sat comfortably on the couch as Dongpyo showed some of his dance covers on his phone but also a few viral video clips he saw on social media, both unable to hold back their laughter. By now they have become close mentally - as well as physically. They were leaning onto each other, leaving no space between them, and Seungwoo had one of his arms draped over the boy’s narrow shoulders. It was a position you were very familiar with.

“Hey Y/N, have you seen this video of a ferret dancing? It’s soooo cute,” Dongpyo leaned down from the couch to show you his phone screen whereas Seungwoo held onto his shirt so he wouldn’t fall down. Mimicking the ferret’s movements with Dohye’s rattle in your hand, you answered, “Yes, I replayed it so, so many times and even sent it to Seungwoo.”

Enticed by the rattle, the little baby dropped the blue brick and started crawling towards you. With open arms you welcome the girl as she climbed in your lap, willingly handing the rattle over. Immediately Dohye aggressively shook the toy and filled the room not only with rhythmic rattling but also joyous laughter.

Feeling your lower back starting to hurt from sitting on the ground, you scooted over to lean against the couch with Dohye safely pulled against your front. “Wow, this is funny haha!”

When you craned your neck to see what Dongypo was laughing about, you realized that Seungwoo’s eyes had been set on you. It seemed like he was in a daze, the way he smiled so fondly at the sight of you holding and playing with the baby.

The image of you and him having a baby of your own crossed his mind ever since he walked through the door today and saw you two together and truth to be told he liked it - a lot.

His hand then slowly reached out for your head and gently stroked your hair, careful not to get any strands tangled with his rings. Enjoying the calming feeling, you returned his sweet gesture with a genuine smile that made his heart flutter like the first time he met you.

This intimate moment didn’t last long, though, as Dohye suddenly began to cry. “Oh no, what’s wrong, Dohye?” You picked her tiny body up and smelled her diaper. “Well, it doesn’t seem like you need your diaper changed.”

“I bet she’s hungry, Y/N” Dongpyo said as he put his phone down. “Can you get the baby food from bag, please?” You slowly got up from your place and rocked the girl back and forth in hope of calming her down. “Shh, don’t cry. Your big brother is getting your food right.”

“I got it! It says that it needs to be heated up in the microwave for a minute to a minute and a half,” the boy read the instructions and walked over to your kitchen. However, he struggled to open the glass so Seungwoo offered to help him, “Here, let me.”

He then opened the little glass on his first try and proceeded to put it in your microwave as he already knew his way around your kitchen. “Oh, I think this might be a little too hot?” Seungwoo worried after taking the glass out and rolling it between his hands.

“Let’s stir the heat out and wait a little then... Dongpyo, is there perhaps a baby bib in the bag too?”

All of you made your way back into the living room, you sitting down on the couch with a still crying baby and joined by Seungwoo while Dongpyo looked for the baby bib. Tying it around her neck turned out to be a bit harder than expected since she started to squirm around.

After finally succeeding, you decided to switch with Seungwoo so you could feed the little girl. You carefully blew on the small spoon as Dohye watched you with big eyes and drool coating her mouth already. Ten minutes later the glass is empty and a big content smile grazed the girl’s lips.

“Wow, you eat really well, huh?” You wiped her mouth with the bib and booped her little nose. “You come after your dad, I guess.”

—

“Are you sure you don’t need me to help you cook?”

“I’ll manage. Just watch the kids, honey” You couldn’t help but giggle at your own cheesy words and squeezed his muscular arm before sending him back into the living room. As soon as you calmed Dohye down, the next kid started to complain about being hungry. This whole situation made you feel like it was your little family.

Before you could indulge further into your imagination, you diverted your attention to the ingredients in front of you to cook pasta. While the noodles were boiling, you were busy cutting onions and carrots for the sauce when suddenly a pair of arms wrapped themselves around your middle. Shortly after his head hovered next to yours, “Looks good, babe.”

“There is nothing to see yet,” you playfully nudged him, yet he pulled you closer against his body. “Wasn’t talking about the food,” Seungwoo then cheekily pressed his lips against the side of your face and proceeded to steal a few slices of carrots, running back before you could stop him.

Looking over your shoulder you saw that he was sharing the stolen goods with none other than Dongpyo, both a giggling mess. In your eyes the two were like a real father-son duo and you began to wonder what it would be like if you two were to start a family. A blush bloomed on your cheeks, yet you pushed the thought back to focus on cooking again.

As soon as you served the pasta, Dongpyo came rushing and very eager to dig in. You left the TV on and put on a children’s show to entertain Dohye while the rest of you enjoyed dinner.

“I’m so fuuuuull! Thank you for the meal, Y/N,” Dongpyo said as he lazily rubbed his tummy and closed his eyes for moment. “Too full for the cake, though?” Seungwoo asked the boy across him, raising his eyebrow. At his words, Dongpyo’s eyes opened with a twinkle in them, “Never!”

While you put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, Seungwoo was already taking out new plates and of course: the long-anticipated cake. “I hope you like cherries, Dongpyo,” your boyfriend presented three chunky pieces of cake covered in pink and white frosting with little cherries on top. “Voila, the cake is really delicious. I tried one piece with Seungsik today,” he winked at you and forked a bite-sized piece, raising it to your mouth.

You welcomed the sweet taste as the frosting melted on your tongue, humming in agreement. Just when the three of you sat down on the couch again, the baby started crawling towards your boyfriend and grabbed his sturdy leg to pull herself up, her eyes set on the pink and white delicacy. Seungwoo quickly put his plate on the coffee table and picked the girl easily up.

“Aigoo, do you want some?” You two only laughed when she stretched her short arms towards your plate and almost lunged at it, only to be held back by your co-babysitter. You scooped a small amount of the frosting on your pinky and placed it against her plump limps which she gladly took.

“Oh Y/N, be careful of her-”

“Ouch!”

Dongpyo’s warning came a little too late as you massaged your poor finger, while Dohye somehow managed to giggle innocently yet diabolically at the same time (in that moment she reminded you a lot of her brother).

—

“Do you want to see my new dance routine?”

“Weren’t you too full to move just now?” You questioned the young boy.

“It’s all good now. I don’t think I will throw up.”

“Well, that’s very reassuring.”

Soon your small living room turned into a stage as Dongpyo prepared several dance covers of girl groups. His little sister started to jump up and down on the couch, with Seungwoo holding her arms, to cheer him on. He even managed to persuade Seungwoo to join him who acted hesitant at first but matched the teenager’s energy once he got up.

You and Dohye clapped as soon as the little showcase ended. The two guys plumped down on the couch, slightly out of breath. Seungwoo wasted no time to strip himself off his purple hoodie, leaving him in his loose white tee. The tattoos adorning his milky skin caught the younger one’s attention, “Wow Seungwoo, you have tattoos? Y/N, your boyfriend is soooo cool!”

He then put his index finger under his chin, “I think I’m getting tattoos, too, when I’m older. They look so cool on you.” At this you two couldn’t stifle your laughter, earning a confused look from Dongpyo. But who could blame you? It was very hard to imagine such a sweet, baby-faced boy to get tattoos inked on his skin.

“Sure thing, buddy,” Seungwoo ruffled the boy’s hair, unable to hold back his smile.

“Oh, but it hurts a lot, right? Maybe I won’t get any after all...” Dongpyo leaned back against the couch, hugging the cushion tighter.

—

You didn’t know how much time had passed when you took care of the mess in your kitchen but when you returned to your living room, you discovered a sleeping baby lying on top of your boyfriend’s chest. Your heart melted at this sight and the corners of your mouth immediately tugged upwards. Wanting to capture the sweet moment, you took your phone out and wasted no time to get a few shots of the two, careful not to disturb them.

Just when you crouched down next to the couch to get an up-close shot, your knee joints betrayed you. The pop seemingly woke up your boyfriend from his slumber as his eyes slowly opened and you were met with warm, brown orbs.

Catching you red-handed, Seungwoo cracked a smile and whispered, “What are you doing, babe?”

“You two look so adorable, I just couldn’t resist!” You smiled sheepishly and began to stroke his hair with your free hand, pushing a few strands away from his eyes.

“Mh, as much as I’m enjoying this, I think my back might kill me soon,” he softly spoke with his eyes closed again, welcoming your gentle touch. “C’mon, let’s put her in my bed.”

Seungwoo clutched the little girl closer to his chest and slowly got up without making any noise. He pushed her a little upwards so she could rest her head on his shoulder. You walked ahead, opening the two doors for him, and pulled the blanket aside to let him put Dohye down. Then you tucked her safely in and placing your stuffed bunny, which Seungwoo had won for on your first arcade date, next to her.

The two of you sneaked out of your bedroom, leaving the door ajar just in case she woke up. Now standing in the small hallway, Seungwoo wrapped his arms around you from behind, putting just a little bit of his weight on you. “My back still hurts from your small couch; you should carry me like this,” you could basically hear his pout above your head.

“Shut up, my couch is not that small. It’s just because you are stupidly tall!” You hushed him as you wriggled in his arms to turn around and playfully pinched his cheeks. There was a shift in his eyes; usually he would retort that you were ‘stupidly small’ but this time he just gazed at you, eyes filled with adoration.

With your chests pressing against each other, you were not quite sure whether it was your heart that was racing or his. Maybe it was both of yours but it didn’t matter, anyways.

“What are you thinking about?” You asked in a small voice, your index finger now tracing his dimple instead.

“I was just wondering, what it would be like if we had a baby,” Seungwoo confessed and smiled innocently at you. Heart skipping a beat, you were slightly flustered by his unexpected answer and felt your ears heat up.

“You would be a great dad.” Before he could react, you got on your tiptoes and simultaneously pulled his face a little bit down to meet him with a brief, yet sweet peck on the lips.

Once you released his face and let your hands slide down to the juncture between his shoulders and neck, you felt his arms tighten around your body and tugging you even closer to him. Being not satisfied with the peck, he leaned in for another kiss.

His warm lips melted against yours and you felt the butterflies erupt in your stomach like it was the very first time. As your lips moved against his, you could feel him smiling into the kiss. There was still a faint taste of cherries lingering on his lips adding to the sweet and addictive kiss. For a moment you forgot about everything because being in his arms just felt right.

“Wow, it’s like my parents never left,” a sudden voice exclaimed from behind you. The two of you shyly pulled away from each other and looked at the intruder. “Don’t mind me, I’m just going to use the bathroom.”

With that being said, Dongpyo quickly disappeared into your bathroom. You were slightly embarrassed by getting caught but to make you blush even more, Seungwoo then said, “I want to have a kid like him later, haha.”

—

Their parents came back around 9pm. Dohye was still fast asleep in your bedroom, by now cuddling with your stuffed bunny, while the three of you watched an episode of Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bokjoo.

“You guys came back early! How was your dinner?”, you asked them as you let the couple in. “Oh, it was wonderful and the food was really delicious. You two should check out the restaurant sometime,” Hyejin gushed. “Anyways, we called it a night early because I missed my babies too much.”

She wasted no time to pull her son into her side and ruffle his fluffy hair, eliciting a soft whine from him.

“Ah, I almost forgot! We’ve got you a little gift,” the woman nudged her husband who pulled out a small white box from his paper bag. “It’s from our favorite chocolatier. But it’s only a small gift so whenever you have time, come over and we will make you a nice meal to thank you properly, yeah?”

“Alright, let’s go home now. I think we’ve bothered you enough for tonight,” your cousin chimed after putting his little girl in her carrier and giving the two of you a hug.

Once you closed the door behind them, Seungwoo pulled you into his arms again. Just before he could say anything, a yawn escaped his mouth.

“Are you tired?”

“Mhm, just a little bit.”

He rested his forehead against yours, eyes lovingly gazing into yours again like earlier.

“Do you wanna stay the night?”

“Sure, I’d love to.”

Seungwoo rummaged through your closet, looking for a comfortable shirt amidst all the t-shirts that you’ve either got or stole from him. Finally, his eyes set on a grey oversized tee which you actually could wear as a dress. Stripping off his slightly sweaty shirt, he welcomed the new soft fabric that no longer smelled like his cologne but by now had picked up your sweet scent.

When he joined you in the bathroom, you were already brushing your teeth whilst scrolling through your Instagram feed. He made his way behind you, smiling at your reflection in the mirror because the pink shirt that he’s been missing for the past week just happened to be engulfing you in that moment. But how could be upset when you looked like an angel to him?

Before you could grab your hair yourself, Seungwoo gently pushed them back and held them for you so they wouldn’t get in your way until you were finished with your routine. Once he started with his routine, you sat down on the edge of your bathtub. Waiting for him, you went through your gallery and took a look at the photos from earlier again.

“What’chu shmiling at?” He asked you with a mouth full of foam, watching through the mirror.

“Just the pics of you and Dohye sleeping together. They are really cute, I think I’m gonna post one of them!” You excitedly stood up and stayed by his side, holding your phone in front of him whilst swiping and showing him your favorite snapshots.

After he was done with his own routine, the two of you wasted no time to snuggle up in the comfort of your bed. Like every other night you rested your head on his shoulder with his arms secured round your frame as if you could easily slip away anytime. A pleasant silence fell over you, only your shallow breaths were audible.

Your eyes were fixated on a sliver of light that shone through your blinds, unable to close your eyes and succumb to the sweet promise of sleep yet. The image of Seungwoo and the kids wouldn’t leave you alone. Sure, you’ve seen him plenty times playing with his own nephew already but today felt different.

“I was just wondering, what it would be like if we had a baby.”

His words kept repeating and repeating themselves in your head.

“What’s on your mind?” Seungwoo spoke so softly, it was barely a whisper. He started gently stroke your hair as he slightly turned his head towards you, his lips now almost brushing your temple.

“Just thinking about what you said earlier...” You tilted your head, meeting his eyes in the dark. “You know, what it’d be like if we had a baby, and I can’t stop thinking about it – but in a good way!”

If you had looked a little bit closer, you would have seen that his gaze softened even more at you rambling about how he would spoil the baby to death or you two dressing up your child like a model, making it the most fashionable baby out there.

“The thought of a baby really doesn’t scare me anymore. Especially when I have you by my side,” you confessed. Instead of teasing you for corny confession, he pushed his body off the bed and hovered above you, his head already diving in to claim your lips.

Seungwoo didn’t say a word during your ramble but he put all his feelings into the kiss and you knew – he didn’t need to say it aloud because you knew he felt the same. His right hand caressed your face, thumb going over the apple of your cheek.

“I really like the sound of that,” his lips stretched into a smile before the landed right on your temple.

Suddenly his smile turned smug, “We could try making one right now.”

“Oh, shut up!”

—

The next morning you checked your notifications only to find yourself chuckling at them.

ssunhwa: oh I didn’t know I was an aunt already

pyopyoson: huh is that black mob of hair mine? anyways, I want pics with him too

seungsmile_: just get married already

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whenrockwasyoung19 · 4 years

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It’s Time to Talk about a Bespectacled Elephant in the Room

I’ve been in the Beatles fandom for 8 and a half years. I have had a Beatles blog for the entirety of those 8 and a half years, and I have watched as discourse about these four men evolve. The discourse inside and outside the fandom has become so toxic that I don’t think I can engage with it in the same way that I could before. Let me explain.

When I entered this fandom 8 and a half years ago, it was in 2012, quite an infamous year in tumblr history. That was the pique of “”cringey”” fandom culture. The Beatles fandom was as steeped in fandom culture as any other fandom. I know this because I was part of two of the top of fandoms at the time, Doctor Who and Sherlock. Believe me, I have seen cringe.

The fandom at the time was totally aware of the John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s flaws as individuals, but most fans tended to simply enjoy Beatles fandom as if it were the 60s. Some might call it ignorant bliss. If you asked me at the time, I’d have said it was self-aware ignorant bliss--if that even makes sense. At the time, there wasn’t a person with a Beatles icon who hadn’t heard the line “John Lennon beat his wife.” Everyone knew it, but everyone also knew the real story, and so everyone just made peace with it. As a result, people didn’t think about every bad thing the Beatles ever did on a daily basis. It was more like a once-a-month kind of thing. Otherwise, fandom discourse was quite fun and relaxed. There were no shipping wars, no one fought over who was the best Beatle, everyone gushed over the Beatles wives, and we all just had fun with fics and fan art.

Of course, in this period, people engaged in conversations about one bespectacled Beatles problematic behavior. These conversations usually came from outside of the fandom. It was usually randos coming into the tags or into someone’s ask box and ranting about John Lennon’s violent behavior. Some of it came from within the fandom. Some people really didn’t like John and gave others shit if they listed John as their favorite Beatle. A lot of the discourse boiled down to: ‘hey, I see you like John Lennon. You should know that he beat his wife. And now that you know that, you should feel bad about ever liking him in the first place.’ And the response was often, ‘Actually, John Lennon didn’t beat his wife. They weren’t even married at the time. And also he didn’t beat her, he slapped her once in the face, and then never did it again.’ No one’s minds were changed. The fans had made their peace, and the antis came off as cynical and pretentious.

When Dashcon happened, and Tumblr took a hard look at its cringey fandom culture, the Beatles fandom evolved as well. The fandom became, frankly, less fun. It no longer felt like a group of people who found the Beatles decades after the 60s and were fangirling like it was 1965. There was still some of that left, but a lot of it kind of faded. So, most fandom interactions were reblogging pictures of the Beatles from the 60s and various interview clips and quotes. But the barrage of antis never really went away, and the response didn’t evolve.

Then, the advent of cancel culture came on. I always waited for the Beatles to get, like, officially canceled, but I also felt they were uncancel-able at the same time. Let me explain. I have been a Beatles fan primarily in an online space, rarely engaging with fans in real life. But I have met fans who are life-long Beatles fans, people who are a lot older than us and who’s fandom isn’t tied to the internet. They don’t give a shit about any of our discourse. They may or may not have heard it before, but they seem totally indifferent to all of it. I’m sure most of them have never heard ‘Mclennon’ before. These are the people that flock to see Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in concert (and pay astronomical prices for it). These are the people who go to record shops and buy vinyl. These are the people I run into at flea markets who buy up all the Beatles merch before I can even arrive (true story). So, the Beatles will never be canceled because there will always be people who love the Beatles and don’t engage with online discourse. Rarely said, but thank god for Gen-X.

As cancel culture took over the internet, fandoms changed. It’s not as noticeable in fandoms without problematic favs. For instance, I’m also steeped in the Tom Holland fandom, and that boy is a little angel who has done no wrong. No one has discourse about the unproblematic boy who plays an equally unproblematic character. But in fandoms with ‘problematic favs’ the mood has shifted. I’m also in the Taron Egerton fandom. Taron Egerton, for those who only follow me for my Beatles stuff, is a genuinely sweet and kind person who has had zero scandals in his six year career. There were some rumblings when he was cast as Elton John, and some people took issue with the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay man. This discourse seemed to die quickly as a whole lot of straight people played gay people in that same year (Olivia Coleman as queer Queen Anne, Emma Stone as her queer lover, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury). Why jump on this boy who at the time was still technically on the rise. He’s not exactly the same target as someone like Scarlett Johansson who has her pick of roles. Taron doesn’t have quite that some power in Hollywood, and I think most people made peace with the fact that this was a big role for him, and it’s not really fair to take that away from him. So, all in all, the closest thing to a scandal was something that died pretty much on arrival.

That was until this summer when everything changed. When George Floyd was murdered, celebrities flocked to social media to mourn his loss. Taron’s social media account was silent. For weeks, Taron said nothing about Black Lives Matter or Floyd’s death. This caused outrage in the fandom. Many raced to defend him, starting a hashtage #IstandwithTaron. Others sought to tear him down and anyone who supported him. The kind of mania this one incident caused tore through an otherwise peaceful fandom. What I saw was two sides in a total panic. The antis were people who once had faith that Taron was a good person and were now questioning that. Andthe defenders were people who desperately wanted him to be a good person and were afraid that he wasn’t. In essence, both sides could feel Taron about to get canceled. The defenders wanted to stop it, the antis wanted to ride that wave.

What this long drawn out Taron example is meant to convey: is that cancel culture has put fandoms on edge. One’s fav has to be perfect, otherwise it can jeopardize the existence of the entire fandom. I’ll admit, I was afraid that I’d be some kind of pariah for standing by Taron through all of this. My actions were to basically reason with the antis but still defend Taron. I defend him mostly because I felt that his silence was the result of a needed social media absence and that trying to shame him back onto social media was an invasion of privacy. But I was genuinely afraid that he would get canceled, and the fun of the Taron fandom would be lost.

In the Beatles fandom, it often feels like the Beatles, mainly John, have already been canceled. I see this coming from two different sources: antis from outside of the fandom and antis within the fandom. The outside antis are just the same as the ones from 2012. These are people who like to drop in that John Lennon beat his wife, posting this in the tag (which violates an ancient tumblr real by the way--no hate in the tags).

The antis outside the fandom speak to a larger anti-John Lennon sentiment online. I see references to John Lennon ‘beating his wife’ on Tiktok and twitter. The tone of anti-John Lennon posts has shifted. Before, it felt like the antis were being smug but also argumentative. They wanted to have a conversation about this bit of info they read on Reddit with no context. Now, “John Lennon beating his wife” is practically a meme. It’s a running joke online that John Lennon was a wife beater. I can’t look on my instagram explore page because every so often a John Lennon beats his wife meme will pop up amongst the other, normal, memes.

This change in discourse suggests that the internet has just accepted this as fact now. I should note that back in 2012, it seemed as if few people knew this fact. The fandom knew it, and these random antis knew it, but few others did. Now, because of how common these memes are, it seems to be widespread knowledge.

Consequently, the Beatles fandom, who used to ward off attacks from antis, seems to have given in. I recently saw a post from a Beatles blog (had the URL and icon and everything) that confessed they felt guilty for listening to the Beatles, and I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed in the fandom. People tend to put disclaimers in posts about John or even all four that John is an ‘awful man.’ It seems like the self-aware ignorant bliss has completely gone away. Occasionally, I still see posts joyously talking about Mclennon or reblogs of old photos from the 60s. But the culture has shifted.

Online, it no longer feels comfortable to be a Beatles fan. It feels like you have to own up to 8 decades of mistakes by four men you’ve never met. And, I should note, this is kind of how it feels to be a fan of anything right now. Taron is not canceled today, but he could be tomorrow. It’s this pervasive feeling of guilt that the person you’re supporting may or definitely has or is doing something wrong.

I’ll admit this uncomfortable feeling has expanded into other parts of my fandom life. I listen to their music, and I feel elated--the way I always have. Then, I get these intrusive thoughts which sound like all the worst parts of Twitter combined. It wasn’t always like this. Back in 2012, when I knew almost nothing about them, I saw them as four young men who were full of happiness, love for another, and talent. Back then, listening to their music was exciting and joyous. Sometimes, I fear that I can never feel that way again. Next year, when I finally go to Liverpool, will I be filled with excitement or guilt?

I say all this for a few reasons. One, I love John Lennon. I appreciate all the good he did for the world not just as a musician and an artist but also his advocacy and charity work. I love him, and a part of me will always love him, but observing the change in discourse has enlightened me as a historian. Part of my job is to observe people’s legacies, and John’s is perhaps the most interesting legacy I’ve ever observed. When he died, he was hailed as a saint. But tall poppy syndrome set in, and the antis started. This culture grew and grew to the point where it seems to, at least among the younger generation, taken over the sainthood.

But as a historian and a fan, I have never seen the saint or the devil. I’ve only seen the man, the incredibly flawed man. The thing that these antis never understand is that John Lennon was painfully aware of his own flaws to the point where it made him all the more self-destructive. In essence, his past mistakes caused him to make additional mistakes. But John, aware of his own flaws, always tried to change and was often successful. I’ve talked about this before, but John demonstrated that he was capable of being a good person, like properly so, again and again. After he struck Cynthia, he never hit her again. His shortcomings as a father to Julian weren’t repeated with Sean. He worked on his drinking, his drug addiction, and his anger, trying to overcome those demons till the day he died. By all accounts, the John Lennon that died in 1980 is not the John Lennon who struck Cynthia Powell at school. That John Lennon was living a cleaner, healthier life. He was a better father to both his sons by that point, and was trying to repair his relationship with Julian. He was a good husband to Yoko and saw himself living a long and happy life.

John Lennon cannot and should not be boiled down to just his flaws. It’s one thing as a fan to acknowledge that John is a flawed human being (news flash: they all are), but he is also much bigger than that.

So once again, why am I writing this long, rambling post, once again talking about John Lennon’s virtues? Because if I can’t engage with healthy discourse about the Beatles and John Lennon, then I can’t engage with discourse on the topic at all. So, I probably will post less Beatles stuff because I find it hard to go through the tags or even my dash (well, I can’t really go through my dash anymore for other reasons I’m not going to get into right now). If any of my followers have noticed a lot of Taron posts lately, it’s not just because I love Taron, it’s because Taron’s tag is pretty much the only location on tumblr I feel 100% comfortable in. Any foray into John or the Beatles tags becomes uncomfortable and guilt-ridden quickly.

So, I probably will post less about the Beatles until I can find a blog or a tag that doesn’t give me bad vibes. My fandom will likely outgrow tumblr and the internet. I have a ton of Beatles books; maybe I’ll rely on those. I am doing official scholarly research on them now. Maybe that will be my outlet. I’m sorry if I post less about them now, but it’s really for my own well-being.

#John lennon #the beatles

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mintchocolatechipnut · 4 years

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kirishima's wedding

Note: This is for my sunshine boy, he deserves all the love in the world and what better way to show that through headcanons for his and his s/o’s wedding? I was inspired mainly by flash mobs and wedding dances, in particular this one, so here you go!

Tags: pure fluff, dancing, Kirishima is a sentimental man, I was projecting a little too much on this

Word count: 2.0k

To be honest, it isn’t that Kirishima isn’t interested in his own wedding

It’s more like he’s interested in marrying you

And at this point, when you’ve already given him the green light when you said yes to his proposal, he really couldn’t ask for more

So he’s actually pretty content with letting you pick out most things

His being one of the top 10 heroes (see: big bonuses) is just an added perk that he’s grateful for

You want that dress you saw in that top-grade wedding magazine? Sure. You want a multi-cuisine buffet for your reception? Go for it.

Boy’s honestly just really ecstatic that you’ve agreed to marry him

Though, if you did want input from him, just say the word and he’ll offer his ideas

He wants the best for you, but if you’re adamant on wanting this wedding to be a two-person thing, he has no qualms against that

However, it’s just that his schedule doesn’t really allow for all-day wedding planning—people still need saving, reports still need to be made, it ain’t the honeymoon yet, sweetheart!

But he’ll do his best to contribute in whatever ways he can, be it the direct planning or supporting you from the sidelines by attending wedding dress sessions with you, or checking out the venues you have in mind

Heck, he even makes sure you’re eating three full meals a day when you lose track of time planning

Meanwhile, people at work have been congratulating Kirishima for becoming an engaged man

And with so many warm-hearted regards, not just from his co-workers, but even his fans (Red Riot has the best fans ever), it’s hard not to stop him from looking forward to his own wedding even more

So from then on he finds little breaks in his routine so he can help you out

His favorite part about the entire process, though, was learning your first dance

You’d asked him if he was up for learning a fun little routine as your first dance during your wedding

Now Kirishima isn’t a great dancer by any means, but he is eager to please, so he said yes quite readily

Only when he saw the video did he blanch a little

He’d thought it’d be a sweet sensual waltz that wasn’t too hard to learn (based off what he heard from others), but you’d instead chosen a fast-paced, twisty sort of dance

What was it called again? Lindy hop? Swing? He’s not sure, but the song is catchy and cheesy enough for him to tap his foot to

But oh no. He can’t dance, he thinks. This is going to take a while

And it did. You enrolled the help of Mina, who graciously extended an offer to teach you an improvised routine for the likes of you and Kirishima despite her own busy schedule

Mina’s a strict teacher. Kirishima doesn’t know why he has never thought that before. Probably because he hadn’t danced under her tutelage during the cultural festival, but whatever

She pushes him to the limit, making sure he isn’t stiff with his movements, and to coordinate with you on timing and movements

The first class is a little of a disaster though. You end up stepping on each other’s toes a lot, and Kirishima feels unnatural and awkward as he dances

This wasn’t on his resume! He’s not cut out for this kind of agile, flexible movement. In fact, all he has to do sometimes during his hero work is stay in place as a shield. He doesn’t have it in him to twist and jive like you and Mina!

You can see that Kirishima is a little discouraged, and suggest a break

Kirishima’s quiet for those few minutes, staring down at his toes and flexing them, wondering if he can ever really do this right

It’s not like you don’t notice, but Mina is busy teaching you how to improve your own steps

When he sees you dance all on your own though, a surge of pride wells up in Kirishima because you’re doing your best even though this isn’t your territory

But you’d wanted to do it, and here you were putting your back into it

And—technically he wanted to do it too, right? Since he’d agreed.

Kirishima then realises that he hasn’t been giving this his all, considering he never thought it was in his nature, or part of his expertise, to do this

But there’s always a first time, right?

You feel a tap on your shoulder and turn to see a grinning Kirishima, holding two thumbs-up to say ‘Let’s go!’

After that practice goes a lot more smoothly, with Kirishima finally getting the rhythm in his veins and you two even having successfully danced through the first verse on just memory

When you get home, Kirishima’s so eager to get it right all over again that you have to tell him to tone it down because you yourself are aching all over from Mina’s spartan training

You begin having weekly sessions with Mina, always practicing in between when the both of you have the time, because it’s not like it’s the same when you practice on your own individually

And Kirishima realises he likes doing this with you, taking big new steps together out of your comfort zones, to do something different

Just like how you were soon to be taking a whole new big step into the future as husband and wife

And suddenly all these private dance sessions with you he brings a little closer to his heart

For one he’s never one to pass up the chance to practice with you, and what’s more, he thoroughly enjoys himself when he twirls you around the room and see the endless joy in your tired, satisfied smile at the end of it

Pretty soon he’s wanting to make sure that you put on the best performance for wedding day

He’s even resorted to bopping and doo-wopping in his office sometimes, even when Bakugou comes around for work things

In which he snorts and tells Kirishima he’s acting like a total idiot and should get off cloud 9 real quick, or else he’s gonna make him

But Kirishima really can’t bring himself to care, because he just knows that he’s going to make you proud on that day with his moves

When the day finally rolls around (or perhaps a few days earlier), Kirishima’s getting the wedding jitters

To which he copes with going out with his friends from high school, and to which Kaminari and Sero decide to hold a stag party for him

Just him and the boys, after so long

He has a great time of course, and forgets about his worries for a little while, but when he comes home and noticed you’ve gone to sleep without him, he’s brought back to thinking about the day you’ll finally sleep in the same bed as husband and wife

And there he goes again

It takes a good nag from Bakugou that ‘you don’t need to worry about a thing, Shitty Hair, or else she’ll be embarrassed for you’ for him to regain his spirits

It’s really not that he doesn’t want to marry you, but his insecurities, having just found an outlet in you, have resurfaced once more to plague him with the idea that he doesn’t deserve you

But maybe it’s precisely because he doesn’t deserve you that he’s got to do everything he can to make you happy, so you don’t regret this choice you made with him

Wedding day finally arrives, and Kirishima’s got the nerves again

But the good kind this time

You can have his hair done however you like, but I like to headcanon that he wears it down in its natural state, with half of it done up in a ponytail like how Aizawa occasionally wears it. It’s a tribute to how he’d shed his old self to be a new version of Crimson Riot, with the vibrant red hair, but also not forgetting his roots and origins

He waits nervously at the altar, where Bakugou crosses his arms impatiently to his side (because of course Bakugou is his best man)

He sees all the guests you’ve invited: pro heroes, mutual friends, your own colleagues, and of course, your families

Not to mention some of the press are lingering outside the venue in order to get some photos in for the news of Red Riot tying the knot

And he’s terrified and thrilled at the same time by the prospect that the two of you will be joining together as one in front of so many witnesses

When you finally walk toward him in a dress as radiant as your smile, Kirishima sheds a few tears

He definitely cries. He can’t help it! When you take his outstretched, trembling hand and stand next to him, you decide to tease him a little

You whisper, “What? Already can’t handle the prospect of marrying me? Are you going to break it off?”

“No!” His outburst is loud enough for the people in the front pews (namely your families) to hear, which startles you, but when you turn to face each other, both of your hands held in his, he leans forward and whispers, ‘No. I’m never going to let you go from now on.’

‘Come on Eiji, we haven’t even said the vows yet.’ But he can’t stop the tears, and it takes a few embarrassing yet endearing moments for you to calm him down and proceed with the ceremony

In the end, your first kiss as husband and wife at the altar is, as he tells the boys later, ‘indescribable’

There are just so many feelings running through him when he kisses you that he’s tempted to cry again

But the cheers all around you remind him this is a joyous occasion to be celebrated, and Mr and Mrs. Kirishima make a run down the aisle while petals are being thrown and congratulations echoing around them

It finally comes down to the first dance, and Kirishima’s got adrenaline pumping through his veins even before the music starts

He’d had a few glasses of champagne earlier to calm his nerves but the alcohol hasn’t been kicking in and it’s almost time—

He feels a hand clutch his and the moment he looks at you, all inhibitions fade

He’s ready to kill it on that dance floor with you

Needless to say, the dance goes superb and gets rave reviews from the guests, if the whoops and the whistles are anything to go by

By the end of it everyone is up and dancing and Kirishima just can’t keep the beaming smile off his face

The second time Kirishima cries is when he’s dancing with you to a ballad, as he holds you close to him, feeling every inch of your body against his and having your wonderful, beautiful self so close

You notice the silent tears dripping down his face and place a hand to his cheek, ‘What’s wrong, Ei?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. That’s just it. Everything’s so right in this moment that I feel I’ll never experience this ever again.’ And since he’s not so sober at the moment, he blurts out the whole of what he’s really thinking. ‘I just think about how I got here, with you, and I don’t know if I’ve unknowingly traded all my life’s happiness away for this one day.”

He waits for the usual pep talk you always give him when he tells you he doesn’t deserve you or any of this, or a ‘don’t be silly’ kind of logical dismissal he might expect from Bakugou, but you look him in the eye, and through his blurry vision your smile is still as bright as it was on the day you first met

‘Well, even if you’re forever sad from now on, I know I can only feel eternal happiness after this. So I’ll be nice and share some of that happiness with you, because we’re one now.’

This time the tears really come pouring lmao

Everyone mocks him for being such a crybaby afterwards but all Kirishima can think of is now that he’s given you his last name, he’s going to continue giving you all the happiness in the world

#bnha x reader #kirishima x reader #kirishima eijirou x reader #eijirou kirishima x reader #mha x reader #bnha headcanons #mha headcanons

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sarcastic-sunshines · 5 years

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Letters for my Love - Chapter 4

A/N: I just wanted to wish everyone a happy school year! I officially start this week as well. I wish all of us nothing but growth in knowledge and 4.0 GPAs

Pairing: T’Challa x Black Reader

Chapter 1 I Chapter 2 I Chapter 3

My Love,

I do not know where the time has gone, but somehow, our daughter is graduating from kindergarten. It seems like just yesterday I was nervous about her beginning school, now Nono is off to Year 1 in a few months. Sometimes it feels as though she is growing up too fast for me to soak in all the memories. I am blessed to have a child who sees me as her best friend and lets me experience all her happy moments with her, though I am not sure how long that will last. Everyday it seems her friend Fatou gets closer to stealing my spot. Perhaps Nobomi is more independent than I would like to admit. Perhaps admitting my daughter is growing into her own little person will also force me to admit that I am still struggling to formulate my own life outside of her.

I have tried to take baby steps, just like the therapist suggested, but evidently my progress is slow. Having Erik home more has been helpful, his presence always pushes me to explore myself outside of being King and a father. His teasing however, is not always appreciated when it comes to the fact that I have made no actual attempt in befriending Akina. After how things ending with Ayesha, I was sure it wasn’t the right time, but now I am not sure. It is as though Bast is playing a trick on me. I went from never seeing her to suddenly bumping into her almost everywhere I go. I am hoping to get to talk to her more at Nobomi’s graduation.

The little girl has invited almost everyone that she knows for her special day. And it is hard to say no when I see the excitement on her face. You should have seen how big her smile was at the seamstress as she took her measurements for her graduation dress. It reminded me so much of you, I still find myself longing for your presence in these special moments. For you to get to experience how much our daughter holds your spirit. How much it brings me comfort to see you glimmering through her. Though I know my morning glory is always with me, I still long for the love that we once shared. Some days it feels like the void your death brought will never be filled, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It helps no one to dwell too much in what could have been, instead I will focus my energy on planning a ‘super duper fantastic’ graduation party for Wakanda’s graduating princess. I am not sure what exactly counts as ‘super duper’ to a six year old but I am excited to find out.

Yours Forever,

T’Challa

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T’Challa sat with his cousin on the couch, as they waited for Nobomi to try on her dress for her graduation. He hadn’t thought too much about the whole event, until realizing how excited his daughter was for reaching her first educational milestone. She couldn’t stop talking about the day, making her excitement contagious. So when she asked for a new dress, he had no choice but to say yes. Somewhere along the planning, he had been persuaded into hosting 20 six year olds for a party to celebrate the end of their kindergarten years. Planning had not been easy, considering event planning was not his forte, but again Nobomi’s excitement was worth it.

T’Challa nudged Erik awake once he heard little shuffles coming towards them. They both turned their heads to look at Nono as she strolled in like the princess she was. Her smile went passed her eyes, which held a twinkle that reminded T’Challa so much of her mother, it felt like a constant reminder that she was always there. T’Challa felt himself getting emotional watching his daughter twirl in her dress wishing his wife was here to see the beautiful strong willed child they had brought into the world. He cleared his throat and wiped at his eyes before speaking.

“You look so pretty Nono, and your smile makes your dress even better.” he said opening his arms to allow her to hug him, though she didn’t stay for long, quickly going back to twirling.

“Yeah baby girl, you sure you're not heading to a runway and not graduation.”

“No uncle Erik! You are so silly” she said still giggling at his comment, her four missing front teeth open to the world to see.

“ I didn’t know serving looks was a requirement to graduate from kindergarten” he replied tickling her while littering her face with kisses.

“Baba said I get to wear Mama’s hair pin so I get to look extra pretty and have my good luck charm” The pin had belonged to his wife’s grandmother. She had always planned on giving it to her child, so T’Challa did just that when he found it again. Nono somehow understood the importance of the gift and only asked to wear it during special events.

The seamstress came from the back quickly with a needle and thread in hand “ Nobomi sweetie, I have one more adjustment to do at the sleeve please. You were supposed to go and come back” she bent down to the little girl’s level as she used some pins from her pincushion to have the sleeve fit as perfectly as she wanted.

“Imani, you really outdid yourself this time. She looks amazing”

“Oh I cannot take credit Kumkani, your mother had been working with a local designer named Akina, she owns a dress shop closer to end of the city. Nobomi had insisted on having one of her dresses. She entrusted in me in doing the final fitting” Imani stood back up leading Nobomi to the back to carefully take off the dress without the pins hurting Nobomi.

This was all new information to T’Challa. He had left every detail of the dress to his mother who had gone to every fitting prior to this one. He would always ask Nobomi how the fitting went but she insisted she wanted it to be a surprise. He only ever got a ‘good’ or a ‘fine’. He hadn’t even known that Akina was a designer. It just proved how little he hadn’t gotten to know her.

Erik turned to make sure that Nobomi and Imani had gone to the back.

“I didn’t know your lady was a designer”

“I didn’t know either, and she is not my lady” he said with a little nervous stammer

“ That’s shocking, you shoulda seen the way your eyes lit up just by her name” T’Challa frowned as Erik laughed. “ Man, it has been literal months, if you don’t ask her out soon I’m gonna have to.”

T’Challa’s expression became a glare that even Erik felt a cold chill from “Chill, it was a joke. But seriously, you need to step up , because home girl is definitely crazy about you. Look at the dress she made for your daughter, she really didn’t have to. And the added bonus is baby girl already likes her so there is no sign of there being an Ayesha situation. Just use Nono’s party as an excuse to casually talk to her. ”

T’Challa thought about Erik’s words for the rest of the day. For a while he had been sure that his feelings were not reciprocated, if anything, he was sure he was imagining the connection he felt between them. Every interaction he had with her had been a stuttering mess that was either interrupted by Nono needing his attention or her having to leave. He was convinced Akina was being polite because of how much she liked Nono and the fact he was still the King.

Erik was right though, she didn’t have to make Nono a dress, and it was strange she never mentioned it. Maybe this was actually a gift from Bast, seeing as now he had something to talk to her about at the party. He just hoped he wouldn’t get lost in her eyes as he always did. He prayed her beauty wouldn’t distract his brain from the words that he was supposed to form.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

T’Challa looked around the auditorium, waving at some of the parents he recognized. There were all smiling faces as the crowd prepared to see their young ones walk across the stage for the first time. Erik looked at his cousin trying to hide his laugh. It may not have been obvious to the passing eye, but Erik could see that T’Challa was waiting for Akina to slip in. Adanna had explained her sister may be running late, but that didn’t stop T’Challa from looking at the door every time he heard it open. The lighting in the auditorium suddenly dimmed, leaving a spotlight on the stage, where the headmistress stood, welcoming friends and family to the joyous moment. Just as the headmistress walked to her seat on the side of the stage, Akina snuck in taking the empty seat next to her sister. Her eyes connected to T’Challa’s as they both smiled at each other, only looking away when the name of the first graduating pupil was called. T’Challa’s smile however, did not fade, he was ashamed to admit, but he was sure Akina gave him butterflies. He hadn’t felt anything close to this since his wife, it scared him a little that another could make his heart so vulnerable.

His mind cleared as he heard Nobomi’s name called, there was his princess with her big smile, walking so her dress could sway as she made her way across the stage. Her hairpin glistened in the light. The pin really did match her outfit, he was just proud that Nono wanted a piece of her mother with her on this special day. Despite the fact the headmistress had asked for applause to be kept until the end, T’Challa and Erik shot up from their chairs clapping loudly, T’Challa let a tear slip as he watched his little girl grow up before his very eyes. Akina watched from the end of the row, completely mesmerized by the dedication the man had towards his child. It made her heart yearn for him, the feeling seemed so foreign, it had been so long since she truly felt this way. And for the King, it felt so wrong, yet whenever she caught him looking at her, she knew it was right.

Erik’s whistling and yelling of “Okay baby girl! Show them you didn’t come to play!” broke Akina out her thoughts. She watched as Queen Mother reached over to pinch her nephew harshly, urging him to sit down, while he brought T’Challa down with him. She let out a giggle, much louder than she thought, T’Challa’s head turned to her again, before they both watched as Nobomi joined her class. She was the second last, so not long after, the auditorium rose to applaud the graduating class. T’Challa smiled at Nobomi as they mouthed ‘I love you’ to one another. He caught the kiss she blew at him making sure to hold it to his chest for her to see. What would he do without the gift that was his daughter. He thanked Bast for the moment, hoping to bask in it for a moment longer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Shrieking, that was all T’Challa could hear. The shrieking matched the scene of twenty tiny humans running around the palace garden engaging in a variety of games. He sat by Erik and Shuri, not listening to a word either was saying. His concentration went on Nobomi, making sure the little girl was having fun. And she appeared to be, she had gotten her face painted, just like she wanted. He had watched her jump in the bouncy castle with Fatou, letting their screams and giggles ring through the party. They had just had her favourite chocolate cake, made by her maternal grandmother and she was allowed to eat as much as she wanted. Nobomi was on cloud nine, he could tell, by watching her on the dancefloor with Fatou. They seem to be recreating a dance they had done at their recital. He watched them with a slight smile on his face, her growing personality was always so fun for him to see.

He looked away for a second, surveying the grounds, his eyes landed on Akina talking to one of the parents. Their eyes met for a moment before T’Challa looked away shoving cake into his mouth. Erik noticed and kissed his teeth.

“What happened to talking to her today, or are y’all just gonna keep staring for the rest of your lives”

“Brother is scared” Shuri chimed in steal icing from T’Challa’s cake “I have seen him this nervous since he was proposing to Nono’s mama”

“I am not nervous, or scared. “

“If you not scared go up and talk to her once she’s alone. We all know she is waiting for you” Erik said cocking his head towards Akina before downing his drink. He turned to his cousin and lowered his voice before switching to Spanish so only T’Challa could here.

“Plus I bet your sister 500 dollars you could do it and I don’t plan on losing” T’Challa rolled his eyes before passing the rest of his cake to Shuri.

“That’s not fair Erik! You cheated!” Erik smirked patting T’Challa’s back as he nervously stood, he watched as the mother left Akina to tend to her child. Their eyes connected again, T’Challa took the opportunity to head to the tree Akina was standing under, his eyes never leaving hers. He made it to the tree, but didn’t say anything, it was happening again, he was too mesmerized to speak.

Akina saved him, letting out a breathy “Hi”

“Hello” he said, his voice an octave higher than he would have liked. He cleared his throat before trying to speak again.

“I just wanted to thank you for the dress you made Nobomi. I had no idea you were the one working on it this whole time.” he said with a smile, he pocketed his hands to stop fidgeting. He watched her own smile grow with every word he said.

“Oh that wasn’t an issue Kumkani, I was honoured Nono wanted me that bad. And she wanted to surprise you so it was our little secret” he nodded

“Well considering she hasn’t stained it yet, I know she really does love it” they shared a laugh “So thank you anyway, I really do appreciate”

“Then you are welcome Kumkani”

“I thought I said we could drop the formality?” He said with his charming smile. Akina could feel her face heating up as she nodded acknowledging his words.

They kept talking, conversation flowing naturally like they had known each other for a long time. T’Challa learned Akina was quite sarcastic, her humour fit so naturally into the conversation, he found himself having to stop to laugh every time. Without even trying, the distance between the two of them began to disappear. Both of them forgetting there was a whole party going on around them “By the way, what is the name of your shop, I don’t think I know it”

“Do you know every store in Birnin Zana? I didn’t realise that was part of your job” She said with a smirk, T’Challa was surprised by her sarcasm but appreciated it, letting out a chuckle to go with it.

“Funny, well I would love to see it some time, especially considering how much Nono loves it”

“That would be nice, I rarely do men’s clothing but I think I could make an exception for you” her eyes looked at him longingly, they lingered on his lips before going back to his eyes.

“I would love that, a king can never have too many Kaftans”

“Especially if he hasn’t had one of Akina’s yet” He smiled, taking a large breath before saying what he wanted to say. Akina could sense he had something else to say, she waited with her heart beating fast, hoping he would say what she wanted him to.

“Perhaps, after we could- “

“Baba!” instantaneously, the moment was gone, and both of their attention was turned to Nobomi who came running towards him. She slowed down when she noticed Akina was also standing by the tree. “Are you busy Baba?” she asked meekly smiling at the both of them

“ I am never too busy for you Nobomi wam. What can I do for you darling?” he asked, squatting to her eye level. Akina watched admiringly, the father daughter duo always warmed her heart to see.

“I want to jump in the castle with you?” T’Challa put on a shocked expression making Nobomi laugh.

“Me?! Are you sure? Where is Fatou?”

“Fatou is playing, but I don’t want her I want my Baba” she said with a pout to match her big brown eyes. Just like her mother, T’Challa thought to himself. He turned to Akina, apologizing with his eyes and a nod towards Nobomi. She smiled shrugging the moment off.

“We can talk a different time, but bouncy castles are very important issues that should be handled with urgency, right Nono?” Nono nodded her head excitingly at Akina. The simple interaction warmed T’Challa’s heart. He stood up, apologising once more to Akina before running after Nono.

The pair spent the rest of the party running around the bouncy castle. Nobomi’s laughter took away his disappointment of not getting to ask Akina out on a date. It was her day, so saying no to his little girl was not an option. He didn’t mind though, these moments of just the two of them were becoming more rare as time went on. She was not going to be this little forever, so maybe it was okay if he decided to create more of his own life outside of her. As always, he took in every moment of them jumping the castle, both their boisterous laughs ringing through the garden. It might have been his favourite part of the day, things always seemed simpler when it was just them.

Guest had started to leave, but the two of them laid in the castle, taking a break from jumping. Nobomi cuddled into her Baba’s side. He could tell her sugar rush was dying down, and soon she would be ready for bedtime.

“Did you have fun today Nono”

“It was the best day ever” her hands shooting into the sky to emphasize her point. T’Challa felt accomplished. His only goal for the party was for her to be happy.

“I am glad, that was all I wanted to hear” he closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them again when he felt Nobomi’s little hands on his face. She leaned in and gave him a kiss on each of his cheeks. She snuggled back into his side and whispered. “I love you Baba”

He wrapped his arm around her and whispered back “I love you more Nobomi”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The streets of Birnin Zana were busy, it was the end of the working day and traffic began to pick up leaving and entering the Golden City. All that could be heard was the sound of hover car engines as people hurried to get back to their families. T’Challa had chosen to walk, not telling anyone other than Erik where he was going. He entered the shop quietly, but was let down by the bell that sat on top of the door.

“We’re closed!” Akina yelled from the back, she was packing up ready to end her own workday. She did not have time to deal with any new customers, and quite frankly she was starving.

“Really? Even for special order kaftans?” T’Challa yelled back. Akina stopped what she was doing to peak to make sure she wasn’t hearing things. She patted down her Afro to even it out, she made sure her dress was smooth before emerging from the back. Her smile gave away the excitement that she was feeling, which was fine seeing as T’Challa’s matched hers. She moved slowly towards him.

“I think we have time for measurements.”

“Great, but that isn’t the only reason I am here. This is a bit overdue, but I think my heart is pointing me to the right place.” he ended reaching for her hand, her fingers closed around his so perfectly. He kissed their entangled hands moving them closer to each other.

Barely above a whisper he asked “ Would you like to come to dinner with me?”

“I was waiting for you ask me.” She let out a giggle which T’Challa found himself falling in love with. “And you came at the right time, I am starving”

They turned towards the door, their hands still entangled. T’Challa led them down a path to his favourite restaurant that hid them from passersbys. It felt instinctive to be this close to her at all times. He never thought he would feel anything close to this again, but now that he was, he was glad it didn’t feel forced, and overall, it was something that he really wanted to work. He was excited to see what the future held for him and Akina.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My Love,

What a busy week it has been. I got to see our little girl walk across the stage and she did so with so much swag. It reminded me of you my love. How I wished you had been there to see the excitement on her face. But as always, I know you were there and Nono does too. Her insisting to wear your pin made it clear to me that she understood the importance that you hold in her life and that is all I can really ask of her. It makes me feel like I am doing a good job.

I must be if our little girl is ready to move on to Year 1 and start ‘big girl school’, as she calls it. I am just focused on keeping her busy through the summer. Speaking of summer, this may be an interesting one for me as well. Things with Akina have progressed even more than I had hoped. It was hard not to really. I am not sure if it will ever be like the love that we once shared, and I am not even sure if I want to replicate that. But whatever I feel for her now makes me excited for what the future holds. I am ready to give this a try, and what a perfect time. This summer may lead to self growth, not just for Nobomi, but for myself. I am ready to let love back in my life, and knowing it is with someone who gets along with Nobomi calms my heart. She may be my first thought always, but I am ready to start making decisions that keep me happy as well, just as you would have wanted. As always, I ask that you guide us as we venture into new territory. I know with my morning glory as my guardian angel everything will be fine.

Yours Forever,

T’Challa

_______________________________________________________________________________

Taglist: @writingmarvellousimagines @chaneajoyyy @ghostfacekill-monger @abrunettefangirlnerd @ashanti-notthesinger @mellowjellow6 @fonville-designs @royallyprincesslilly

#T'Challa #t'challa x reader #sunshinewrites #black panther fanfiction

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demyrie · 5 years

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On Synchronicities, or 'Winks from the Universe'

Hello from semi-hiatus! Things have been intense lately, very up and down and faith and despair and AAAAAA, so I wanted to go woo again and talk about synchronicities, or “winks”.

I call them winks because that's what it feels like -- remember when you were in a guessing game or a mystery, and you tentatively said something and got a wink in response? Remember that jolt of excitement, or celebration, or confidence like YES I WAS RIGHT? At least in USA culture, a wink means keep going, yes, you're getting it.

Turns out, the universe can wink at you, too!

The universe works on harmony or disharmony, frequencies or vibrations, in which our frame of mind plays a huge part, and often produces “synchronicities” -- the seemingly random or unlikely coincidences that catch your attention. When you align with your highest path, other things around you will align to show you: yes, this is it! You're getting it! You're in the swing of things, you're dancing to your own tune!

Winks are different for everyone. Me, it's numbers, which uhhhh makes sense with my profession, but the whole world is a canvas for synchronicities to show up on. Some people see certain animals more often whenever they're “dancing in tune”, and I know I always feel a warm hand over my heart when I see a squirrel doing something cute -- one of the advantages of having a very, very common spirit guide! But that's just … nice. Winks are discrete and joyous reminders to be in the moment and TRUST, and though I'm not much into strict numerology, they mostly appear to me in numbers.

For example: Whenever I'm counting medication and I pour a perfect amount, I always make a point to remember what I was thinking about when I poured. Have you ever had to count 63 tablets, and got EXACTLY that weird number with two shakes of the bottle? Trust me, it feels good. It felt good to the universe, too, and you're sharing a moment of perfect timing, belonging and allowing. You didn't shake too much. You didn't double guess yourself.

You just did, and it was perfect.

Winks say, go with your instincts. Winks say, trust yourself, keep going, good job. Winks say, this is how it is. You can have this.

This morning, I was on my way to a work location that was a) very far away and b) I’d had a stressful experience at last time and c) my cars engine had been acting a little funny, so it was not a calm voyage. I was worried. I was worried about my shift, my car, and deeply, especially worried about my books. It was one of those days where you step back and look at this thing you've poured so much time and love and WANT into, and pick it up by the ears and ask “is this trash?”

It's not a productive kind of worry. It's gross and sad and debilitating and an exorcism of deeper fears of worth -- because if I make trash, what does that make me?

So, even though I almost talked myself out of it, I stopped into Wawa for some food before my shift (because I'm an hour early, because anxiety).

(TW: eating disordered thinking)

I'm a mess in my head, so naturally I'm a mess in the Wawa too. I'm grabbing things left and right, mostly sweets, but when I get to the counter and see some mostly-healthy (or at least FILLING) breakfast sandwiches, I have a burst of regret.

Should I get one? Was it too much? Ah, FUCK, should I put everything back because I don't deserve any of it?? Maybe I don't deserve breakfast, maybe I'll just keep myself in line until lunch.

It's easy to see how my thoughts spiralled into what I was really feeling, projecting like this into a goddamn gas station sandwich, but I grab one.

Fuck it, I'm an adult and I have money and I need to eat, I thought, and when the cashier rang up my sporadic collection of anxiety sweets and borderline breakfast, the total was $11.11.

I instantly smiled. It was a stupid, happy, sheepish smile, and my shoulders dropped. It was a wink from the universe, or in this case a nudge.

The message wasn't: “buy sandwiches forever and you will never struggle with your self-worth and purpose!”.

It was this: “Shhh. Eat. Take care of yourself. The thoughts that led you to get the sandwich -- in PERFECT combination with every other random thing you grabbed -- are correct. Even these little wild decisions are correct, no matter how lost you may feel. You are deserving. Also eat the goddamn sandwich.”

Now, just an hour or two ago, when I was teaching a tech how to do data entry, I looked up and it was 11:11am. I love teaching and I love helping others. It's definitely part of my path. I smiled again, and plunged forward into my day with enthusiasm and love, knowing I was supported.

It's amazing how just that mindset can change the way your whole day progresses! Trust is a hell of a thing.

It's even funnier when you start to share wink languages with people. My starmate was having a heated text conversation with me re: creativity. When she boiled over and came to the conclusion of “I think we just need to DO US, you know??”, the timestamp was exactly 4:44 -- a number of completion, stability and home. When I alerted her to it, she flipped, but not in the good way. She's been getting nudges and winks like this so long it sometimes feels like a smug or even nagging mother and she poured out an alphabet soup of frustration, like I KNOW OK?? AAAA!

Being magnificently and fearlessly yourself is easier said than done, sometimes. “OKAY, universe!” is a common phrase of ours, as bratty as we possibly can make it :) with love in our hearts of course! Sometimes there's a bit of freedom and humor to be found in playing up our roles as children in this big old sandbox, and whining is totally accepted… as long as you plan to pony up in the end.

In that vein, I had one or two nights where the energy was VERY high and I would wake up at every synchronicity on the dot: 3:33am, 4:44am, and was very tired and grumpy as a result even as I knew the universe was pulling out all the stops to pat me on the back. I'm just a human, this is great and intense and magical and all but I. Need. Sleep!! (Pearls before swine, clearly…)

Another time, I was having another crisis of faith regarding family, and love that doesn't come easily to me. There wasn't any particular trigger, but I was angsting vaguely and even worrying about secretly being a sociopath -- and then I got a customer with a birthday of 11/11, and their change? $4.44!

Obviously I get certain numbers more than others, but the message is always the same: You're doing great sweetie.gif!

You're doing what you're supposed to be doing. It's okay. You're okay. Keep your chin up. Breathe. Allow.

Winking can be a comfort, a reminder that you are loved and supported in all things -- especially feeling your feelings as they are, not as they should be.

So, winks are cool. Once you find your wink language, catching one is like a burst of pure energy: a ringing endorsement from Your Biggest Fan, the Universe 💕🌠

The one thing I would caution with winks, however, is not to look for them.

I know it's difficult, but it literally defies the premise: stressing about being perfect immediately breaks your perfection, like sports players who get the “yips”. The little miracle is you looking up at the clock at EXACTLY that time, because you were meant to, because your perfection is too much to go uncommented on. NOT getting winks doesn't mean you're doing poorly, but those of us with negative mindsets may suffer from what is essentially just another thing to miss out on. Which, again, mindsets and expectations.

Sometimes I'll catch a 3:34 and feel disappointed, and that's just silly. It's not about math. It's about the moment, and there are thousands of moments in any given day. Just do you. Just rock, and hope, and reach for the things that make you glow inside.

It's a cherry on top. Sprinkles. A high five. The more and more you fall into your own perfect stride -- that isn't so much flawless as it is PERSONAL, purely you in a way no one else can manage and a little piece of what you came here to Do -- the more the universe will wink at you, celebrate with you, and urge you on.

I hope you can move just a little further into believing in yourself and your path today, even if it's just buying the goddamn sandwich. Remember, you are deserving. You're doing just fine.

😉

#magic #woo #synchronicities #metaphysical #numerology #i hope you get a wink from the universe today!#demyrie incants #witch #pagan #healer #energy

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waytoomanyinterests · 5 years

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Christmas calender day 2

Prompt: Traditions

Fandom: Lok

I will be stepping away from canon in this au (probably in all christmas prompts about Atla and Lok) so don’t chew me out for not getting it correctly

Random info so you can understand this au (hopefully);

- christmas = celebrating the winter solstice (since christmas as christmas doesn’t exist)

- biggest in the poles because it’s the longest night of the year and waterbenders (they celebrate both the spirits and waterbending)

- it’s around 21-23 december in the north

- around 20-23 june in the south

- other nations celebrate it, but it’s because of the spirits

- so this was a big thing for the air nomads

- earth is kinda like meh

- some take it seriously and some don’t, but that’s mostly depending on conditions and how you were raised etc

- fire just downright despises it, because longest night = shortest day and hardly any sun

- they instead celebrate the summer solstice because that’s the longest day (maybe that’s like Easter or something? Midsummer?)

I think you’ll understand how I thought, but it’s not 100% done yet - anyway, enjoy this! (and the name for the holiday is also in progress, just saying)

“Wow, I’ve never seen the winter solstice this celebrated” Asami says in wonder, looking around the market.

“Yeah, me neither!” Bolin chimes in while Mako settles for a nod in agreement.

“Well, that’s probably because you’re all half fire nation and half earth nation; the fire nation kind of despises the winter solstice since it’s the shortest day of the year while the earth nation is indifferent to it. In that kind of family combination it more often than not results in Spiritiem not being celebrated” Korra explains with a shrug of her shoulders.

“Sorry, the what now? Spritem?” Bolin asks confused.

“Almost - Spiritiem. Freely translated it means ‘day of spirits’, which is what we in the water tribes call it. Or at least I think that’s what my mother said it means” Korra ponders, her eyebrows pushed together. “Oh whatever, something like that. To me, that’s not the best part! The greatest part about Spiritiem is the waterbending, hands down. And maybe the presents too” the almighty Avatar grins in excitement, and Tenzin whom just walked by frowns at his pupil.

“Korra! You of all people should appreciate the spiritual part of Spiritiem” he scolds her but Korra ignores him.

“Sure thing Tenzin, but do you know where Katara and my mom is? Katara’s in charge of the waterbending and mom’s fixing the presents”

Knowing it’s useless to try and convince Korra otherwise right now, Tenzin just sighs and points the way.

Quick as a rabbit-weasel she grabs Asami’s arm and speeds away, intent on shaking presents and try to guess what she’s getting.

“Uhm Tenzin? What’s this about waterbending?” Mako inquires, the first words he’s spoken all day. In all honesty, he does not want to be here - this day is usually spent inside, not doing anything but maybe exchanging a present with his brother. The solstice makes his body shut down to preserve heat, meaning he’s about as strong as a five-year old with a cold and a fever.

At the question a soft smile lits up Tenzin’s face and he looks toward the town square.

“You’ll see. But I can assure you it will be worth being here for”

Once Korra and Asami rejoins them, the group spends the next few hours wandering around the market, stuffing their faces with food, trying all the different games and just enjoying the holiday.

All of a sudden lights go off around the town and Korra gasps in excitement.

“Come on, the show’s starting!”

Without further ado she grabs ahold of her friends and tears off towards the square, the friends in question yelping and stumbling to not fall.

Once they reach the square she stops short, makes her friends sit down and then tears off again.

Dazed and confused Asami, Bolin and Mako glances at each other.

“So what now? Do we wait or...?” Bolin asks, scratching his head.

“I suppose we do” Asami answers and makes herself comfortable.

Korra could sometimes have a few wierd antics, and while they often managed to surprise her Asami has long since gotten used to them and knows it’s best to just wait; the explanation will come eventually.

More and more people come to the square, talking animatedly and looking excited.

The 3/4 of team Avatar spend the time waiting just looking around and enjoying the warm and happy feeling of the festival.

After a few minutes a hush settles over the crowd, and soon it’s so quiet you would hear an otter-penguin out on the tundra.

Small movements in her peripheral vision catch the attention of Asami and when she turns her head she sees people in what she guesses is traditional clothing, slowly wiggling their gloved hands.

She rises an eyebrow at the people, wondering what exactly they’re doing.

They slowly start to increase their movements, catching the attention of the others in the audience as well. While everyone looks fascinated, they also look confused.

What are they doing exactly? Nothing’s happening.

Soon the wiggling has turned into a full waving motion, and the first gasp is heard. It is however soon joined by others as everyone notices what looks like crystals, shining and shimmering in the air.

“Waterbenders!” Asami exclaims, looking on with curiosity. She feels intrigued. She has watched Korra practice many times throughout the years, but this isn’t a move she recognizes.

“Wow, it’s so pretty!” Bolin breathes out in awe, and Asami and Mako can only nod as they continue to watch the shimmering crystals.

With everyone distracted, the waterbenders slowly slip away into the shadows to prepare the next part of the show.

Bolin on the other hand leans closer to one of the crystals, wanting to have a closer look, only to yelp and fall on his butt when it suddenly explodes into snow.

More yelps and shouts of surprise is heard as tiny ice spikes implode the crystals, turning them into snow that’s gently falling down.

Well, until it starts to swirl at least - faster and faster.

Entranced the audience follow the snow with their eyes, eventually landing on the waterbenders on the stage whom are beckoning the snow to them.

Once they have it where they want it they turn it into water and begin a set of bending forms that are so fluid it looks like a dance.

With their faces hidden behind a mask and their hair under a hood, all that is visible is their ceremonial clothes and their movements.

The sound of a beating drum appears next, the tempo slow and matching the benders. It goes on, the drums beat almost being reflected by the water pulsing and moving, the tempo going faster and faster and the benders following suit. Other instruments join in, bringing an ethereal but joyous feeling to the bending performance - perfectly representing the feeling of Spiritiem. The tempo increases even more, reaching it’s crescendo and all that is visible is a flurry of blue from the ceremonial coats and the water moving around them. Then they take a step backwards, their hands and water following and suspension hanging in the air as they linger a millisecond before they jump forward with a shout.

Everything stops abruptly. The music cuts off, the benders freeze and the water is back in the air as crystals.

Then in a last synchronized move the benders relax, wave their arms backwards in a large circle and the crystals are once again snow that’s gently falling.

The cheers are defeaning and the benders all take a bow, removing their masks in the same second and throwing them to the audience as they go up again.

Seeing one that’s heading her way Asami reaches up and manages to grab it, triumphantly looking to the stage again.

Only to stare Korra right in the eyes.

Her girlfriend is shining with sweat, and her face is redder than ever but with the huge smile lighting up her face and eyes gleaming with happiness she has never looked more beautiful to Asami.

Asami can’t help but snort and chuckle.

She should have known Korra would be in it.

It’s just a Korra thing to do.

So she claps and cheers with the rest of the audience, showering the benders with her praise.

A quick look with Mako and Bolin whom are looking as amazed and happy as she is, confirms what Asami has already concluded.

It’s time for a tradition change.

#lok #christmas calendar day 2 #waterbending #holiday au #avatar au #lok au #legend of korra #au

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morsmordrehasbeensaved · 6 years

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CONGRATULATIONS JESSIE, YOU HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED AS REMUS LUPIN WITH THE FACECLAIM OF ALFIE ENOCH!

Jessie — you know I think you’re an actual angel already, but for bringing us Remus and completing the Marauders? I didn’t know it was possible but I love you even more now. This was such a beautiful application and you really managed to capture his essence and character. I’m super excited to see him on our dashboards again!

Check out our acceptance checklist right here on what to do next!

♔ OUT OF CHARACTER INFO ♔

NAME/ALIAS: Jessie aka The WifeTM

AGE: 22

PREFERRED PRONOUNS: She/Her

TIMEZONE & ACTIVITY: EST, the bEST timezone. Activity is the same as normal!

TRIGGERS: REMOVED.

ANYTHING ELSE: REMOVED.

♔ IN CHARACTER INFO ♔

FULL NAME: Remus “Moony” John Lupin

BIRTHDAY AND AGE: 10 March 1960, 17/18 in game! I think we should celebrate.

PRONOUNS: He/Him

SEXUALITY/ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Bisexual, Biromantic

EXTRACURRICULARS: Prefect, Charms Club, Dueling Club, and Magical Creatures Club are all perfect!

PERSONALITY TRAITS:

(+) Loyal — Afraid of the world turning its back on him, Remus holds his friendships dear. There is nothing he wouldn’t do for his friends. They have overlooked his greatest flaw, and so he does the same in return.

(+) Empathetic — Knowing what it’s like to live as the outcast, Remus can’t bring himself to make others feel as such. Though he takes no part in belittling others, to step in and stop such strife takes a courage he does not yet possess.

(+) Persevering — Even in his darkest moments, he remembers that there is also light. So much tragedy befell him at such a young age, but he has remembered that sometimes the most difficult tasks bear the sweetest rewards.

(+/-) Intelligent — Remus has a natural intelligence coupled with a studious nature that allows him to excel in his schoolwork.

(-) Reserved — Often quiet, he has learned to be content on his own. If everyone knew him to be the monster he was they would quite quickly shut him out. The pain of rejection has taught him to keep guarded and treasure the few friends he has already.

(-) Eager to please — His condition, though a big part of who his is, is not what Remus has chosen to define himself by. He has so much more to give and he is eager to prove that he is more than his condition.

(-) Insecure — Remus has known judgement and fear from a young age. Even those who assure him they see past his condition can find that Remus doesn’t always believe them.

BIOGRAPHY:

Trigger warnings: Self-harm, Depression

Remus John Lupin, even from a young age, had known of the evil that lurked in the shadows, the sounds and stories of the dark creatures who stalked the earth, and he knew of the mystery that shroud the things that go bump in the night. His father was an expert in such things after all, and what was there to be afraid of when your father, your hero, knew the secrets of every last monster and assured you that you were safe from them all? Perhaps that was why he slept so soundly that night, even at the tender age of five years old, when Fenrir Greyback slipped into his room from the window and changed Remus’ life forever. His own screams and the sting of claws in his skin and the bite on his shoulder were some of the most vivid memories he had of his childhood and they were the memories that replayed in his mind each night of the full moon where he became the monster of his own worst nightmares.

His condition had a name; lycanthropy. At least, according to some. Others termed it werewolfry, but Remus didn’t much care what it was called. Though his father could explain every facet and nuance of the condition to a scared and confused Remus, who now jumped at the very sight of the moon in any phase, Lyall Lupin, the famed expert in dark creatures, could not cure him. Neither could the hundreds of healers the Lupins took their son to, desperate to reverse the effects. Spending nearly everything they had and coming up empty-handed, it was devastating for Lyall and Hope when they finally accepted that there was nothing to be done and that their beloved son would be forced to live with this condition for the rest of his life.

Hope Lupin handled the news surprisingly well, though Remus suspected this was partly because she didn’t quite understand the condition as well as Lyall, but she always did have a particularly optimistic attitude even at the darkest of times. Her arms were always open, ready to pull Remus into a hug or sneak him bits of chocolate when he was feeling especially low. But despite her warmth, she could never fully ward off the chill deep in his bones at the approaching full moon. Still, she encouraged him to count his blessings and to find the silver lining behind every grey cloud and promised him that he was no monster.

Lyall Lupin had handled the news of his son’s lycanthropy much harder. Perhaps that was because he knew of the discrimination his son faced in the wizarding world, and the trials of his future. How could his son ever complete a proper education, find a job, or even someone to love him? Remus’ lycanthropy turned his father into a bitter man, the weight of his own guilt crushing as he took the blame for the attack when his son was so small. If only he hadn’t spoken out so publicly against Fenrir Greyback, if only he had placed additional protective charms over the home, then perhaps his son would not suffer from the monster he held inside. It broke his heart each night of the full moon to pull his frightened son out to the shed and lock him inside, listening to his screams as his sharp teeth and claws tore at his own flesh in his frustrations at the transformation and the confinement.

Each morning after, Lyall would unlock the doors of the shed, pull his son into his arms and weep with him before taking him inside to tend to his wounds. Hope would be just inside, dark circles under her red eyes from a sleepless night of listening to her little boy’s screams. Remus could see the burden resting on their hearts and at first welcomed their loving embraces, their gentle hands tending to his self-inflicted wounds, and the small pieces of chocolate they gave him with the promise that it would make him feel better. After a few years, however, he grew tired of the routine. Out of pain, fear, and confusion he would push their gentle hands away and lock himself in his room. A monster in a cage, he supposed. That’s what he was, wasn’t he? It was what he saw in the mirror anyway. He hated it, he hated the monster and the bitter resentment building inside of him. The shattered mirror couldn’t bring him seven years of bad luck when he was already living in hell.

Receiving his Hogwarts letter was not the joyous experience his classmates gushed about now and then when they recalled their fond memories. He only remembered his father’s hand on his shoulder, a choked apology, another warm hug from his mother and the bitter disappointment of losing something that he was supposed to have. Lyall promised homeschooling, that it would be safer and he would teach Remus everything he knew, but they all knew it wasn’t the same. The real joy came with Professor Albus Dumbledore’s visit where he assured the Lupins that Remus would be able to attend as any normal boy, with a few special accommodations to address his condition. Normal. Remus Lupin could be normal. With a chance for a fresh start amongst peers who knew him as nothing more than another student, Remus had eagerly promised Professor Dumbledore to do whatever was necessary to ensure the safety of the other students in order to attend.

Remus knew he was different from the other boys in his dorm or the rest of the students sitting around him in the Great Hall, however, and the weight of his secret was heavy on his shoulders. The fear of how his friends might react should they realize what he was, was even heavier. In second year, when Peter, James, and Sirius uncovered his secret, Remus had feared his time at Hogwarts was over. It wouldn’t be long before everyone knew what he was, parents would write to the school to have him removed, and he would return home to his lonely isolation. It had come as a shock to him when the other boys didn’t run from him in fear, nor did they share his secret with anyone else. Instead they carried his books when his arms were too weak to lift them himself, they shared their notes when he fell asleep in class out of exhaustion from being up so late, and they covered for him when other students questioned his frequent absences or the marks on his skin.

Never before had Remus Lupin had friends like this, who saw his condition as nothing more than the occasional ailment. They overlooked his greatest flaw to see him for everything else that made him who he was. He did like charms class, and of course he knew what that creature was on the DADA exam. His favorite color was blue, and he didn’t think pumpkin juice was gross. He was a person, maybe a little different, but wasn’t everyone? Even the Prewett twins who were absolutely identical in looks had their own unique personalities and struggles as well. It was at Hogwarts that Remus Lupin realized that his struggle, though apart of him, didn’t have to define him.

In fifth year when his friends, his brothers, managed an incredible magical feat to become animagai did Remus find that the monster within could be tamed. It was only when locked away in isolation did his condition lead to frustration and rage, which manifested itself in the wounds he suffered for years. But with the company of his friends, and the freedom of the grounds of Hogwarts in the moonlight, he found that he was much more in control than he had ever believed he could be. Of course James and Sirius were able to keep his actions in check should they stray too close to the village, but after countless nights roaming the grounds and without a single fatality or injury caused by Remus, he found he was growing more comfortable in what was once his dreaded form and thus more confident in himself.

Remus had found his silver lining. For too long he had merely been coping with his condition, enduring the worst of it and trying to move on with his life otherwise. He had been successful in such endeavors, able to find happiness and peace despite his condition. To realize his friends had embraced his lycanthropy, and found a way to celebrate what made him different, well Remus realized that he didn’t have to merely cope any longer. For once, he didn’t dread the nights of the full moon, he looked forward to them. What had been his greatest fear for so long was something he actually enjoyed. Moving forward with a new confidence and a sense of true belonging, Remus flourished at school. He joined clubs, made other friends, he was even appointed as a Prefect. If he could do all of that, he supposed anyone could and he dismayed at the way the muggleborns and his fellow half-bloods were treated. He’d known discrimination for far too long and resolved to fight against it, eagerly joining the Order with his closest friends. After all, if his differences could be accepted and celebrated, shouldn’t everyone else’s?

ADDITIONAL INFO: If there was a way to attach my undying love for this rp and all of you to this app, I totally would.

#morsmordre accepted #remus lupin #hp rp #marauders rp #hogwarts rp

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unsettlingshortstories · 4 years

Text

The Bloody Chamber

Angela Carter (1979)

I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

Are you sure, she'd said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress he'd bought me, wrapped up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallized fruit. Are you sure you love him? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, finer than anything she'd worn since that adventurous girlhood in Indo-China, daughter of a rich tea planter.

My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I?

'Are you sure you love him?'

'I'm sure I want to marry him,' I said.

And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluctance that she might at last banish the spectre of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table. For my mother herself had gladly, scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a cigar box full of medals and the antique service revolver that my mother, grown magnificently eccentric in hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case--how I teased her--she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocer's shop.

Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds as if the railway company had lit up all the stations through which we passed in celebration of the bride. My satin nightdress had just been shaken from its wrappings; it had slipped over my young girl's pointed breasts and shoulders, supple as a garment of heavy water, and now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs as I shifted restlessly in my narrow berth. His kiss, his kiss with tongue and teeth in it and a rasp of beard, had hinted to me, though with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress he'd given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously deferred until we lay in his great ancestral bed in the sea- girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination ... that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny.

Above the syncopated roar of the train, I could hear his even, steady breathing. Only the communicating door kept me from my husband and it stood open. If I rose up on my elbow, I could see the dark, leonine shape of his head and my nostrils caught a whiff of the opulent male scent of leather and spices that always accompanied him and sometimes, during his courtship, had been the only hint he gave me that he had come into my mother's sitting room, for, though he was a big man, he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet, as if his footfall turned the carpet into snow.

He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behind me with his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his box of marrons glacés, lay his offering upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a Debussy prelude. But that perfume of spiced leather always betrayed him; after my first shock, I was forced always to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed.

He was older than I. He was much older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane. But his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures have been eroded by successive tides. And sometimes that face, in stillness when he listened to me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underneath this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the face in which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a face unsigned by the years.

And, elsewhere, I might see him plain. Elsewhere. But, where?

In, perhaps, that castle to which the train now took us, that marvellous castle in which he had been born.

Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said: 'Yes,' still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy composure of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra- headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very gravity.

He had the ring ready in a leather box lined with crimson velvet, a fire opal the size of a pigeon's egg set in a complicated circle of dark antique gold. My old nurse, who still lived with my mother and me, squinted at the ring askance: opals are bad luck, she said. But this opal had been his own mother's ring, and his grandmother's, and her mother's before that, given to an ancestor by Catherine de Medici ... every bride that came to the castle wore it, time out of mind. And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them? asked the old woman rudely; yet she was a snob. She hid her incredulous joy at my marital coup--her little Marquise--behind a façade of fault-finding. But, here, she touched me. I shrugged and turned my back pettishly on her. I did not want to remember how he had loved other women before me, but the knowledge often teased me in the threadbare self-confidence of the small hours.

I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis had been married before, more than once, and I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me. Indeed, was he not still in mourning for his last wife? Tsk, tsk, went my old nurse.

And even my mother had been reluctant to see her girl whisked off by a man so recently bereaved. A Romanian countess, a lady of high fashion. Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating accident, at his home, in Brittany. They never found her body but I rummaged through the back copies of the society magazines my old nanny kept in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet worldly thing whose natural habitat must have been some luxurious interior decorator's jungle filled with potted palms and tame, squawking parakeets.

Before that? Her face is common property; everyone painted her but the Redon engraving I liked best, The Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night. To see her skeletal, enigmatic grace, you would never think she had been a barmaid in a café in Montmartre until Puvis de Chavannes saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elongated thighs to his brush. And yet it was the absinthe doomed her, or so they said.

The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva; I had heard her sing Isolde, precociously musical child that I was, taken to the opera for a birthday treat. My first opera; I had heard her sing Isolde. With what white-hot passion had she burned from the stage! So that you could tell she would die young. We sat high up, halfway to heaven in the gods, yet she half-blinded me. And my father, still alive (oh, so long ago), took hold of my sticky little hand, to comfort me, in the last act, yet all I heard was the glory of her voice.

Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widow's child with my mouse-coloured hair that still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so recently been freed, my bony hips, my nervous, pianist's fingers.

He was rich as Croesus. The night before our wedding--a simple affair, at the Mairie, because his countess was so recently gone--he took my mother and me, curious coincidence, to see Tristan. And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached so during the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him. Yes. I did. On his arm, all eyes were upon me. The whispering crowd in the foyer parted like the Red Sea to let us through. My skin crisped at his touch.

How my circumstances had changed since the first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such a charge of deathly passion in them! Now, we sat in a loge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided, bewigged flunkey brought us a silver bucket of iced champagne in the interval. The froth spilled over the rim of my glass and drenched my hands, I thought: My cup runneth over. And I had on a Poiret dress. He had prevailed upon my reluctant mother to let him buy my trousseau; what would I have gone to him in, otherwise? Twice-darned underwear, faded gingham, serge skirts, hand-me-downs. So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts. And everyone stared at me. And at his wedding gift.

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.

After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who'd escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera comes back to me even now ... the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood.

I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I'd never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

The next day, we were married.

The train slowed, shuddered to a halt. Lights; clank of metal; a voice declaring the name of an unknown, never-to-be visited station; silence of the night; the rhythm of his breathing, that I should sleep with, now, for the rest of my life. And I could not sleep. I stealthily sat up, raised the blind a little and huddled against the cold window that misted over with the warmth of my breathing, gazing out at the dark platform towards those rectangles of domestic lamplight that promised warmth, company, a supper of sausages hissing in a pan on the stove for the station master, his children tucked up in bed asleep in the brick house with the painted shutters ... all the paraphernalia of the everyday world from which I, with my stunning marriage, had exiled myself.

Into marriage, into exile; I sensed it, I knew it--that, henceforth, I would always be lonely. Yet that was part of the already familiar weight of the fire opal that glimmered like a gypsy's magic ball, so that I could not take my eyes off it when I played the piano. This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies, the wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and Worth, his scent of Russian leather--all had conspired to seduce me so utterly that I could not say I felt one single twinge of regret for the world of tar-tines and maman that now receded from me as if drawn away on a string, like a child's toy, as the train began to throb again as if in delighted anticipation of the distance it would take me.

The first grey streamers of the dawn now flew in the sky and an eldritch half-light seeped into the railway carriage. I heard no change in his breathing but my heightened, excited senses told me he was awake and gazing at me. A huge man, an enormous man, and his eyes, dark and motionless as those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi, fixed upon me. I felt a certain tension in the pit of my stomach, to be so watched, in such silence. A match struck. He was igniting a Romeo y Julieta fat as a baby's arm.

'Soon,' he said in his resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival head. Then the flame died, the cigar glowed and filled the compartment with a remembered fragrance that made me think of my father, how he would hug me in a warm fug of Havana, when I was a little girl, before he kissed me and left me and died.

As soon as my husband handed me down from the high step of the train, I smelled the amniotic salinity of the ocean. It was November; the trees, stunted by the Atlantic gales, were bare and the lonely halt was deserted but for his leather-gaitered chauffeur waiting meekly beside the sleek black motor car. It was cold; I drew my furs about me, a wrap of white and black, broad stripes of ermine and sable, with a collar from which my head rose like the calyx of a wildflower. (I swear to you, I had never been vain until I met him.) The bell clanged; the straining train leapt its leash and left us at that lonely wayside halt where only he and I had descended. Oh, the wonder of it; how all that might of iron and steam had paused only to suit his convenience. The richest man in France. 'Madame.'

The chauffeur eyed me; was he comparing me, invidiously, to the countess, the artist's model, the opera singer? I hid behind my furs as if they were a system of soft shields. My husband liked me to wear my opal over my kid glove, a showy, theatrical trick--but the moment the ironic chauffeur glimpsed its simmering flash he smiled, as though it was proof positive I was his master's wife. And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, orange of tiger- lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from a florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream.

Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea--a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being continuously on the point of melting. A landscape with all the deliquescent harmonies of Debussy, of the études I played for him, the reverie I'd been playing that afternoon in the salon of the princess where I'd first met him, among the teacups and the little cakes, I, the orphan, hired out of charity to give them their digestive of music.

And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day ... that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!

The tide was low; at this hour, so early in the morning, the causeway rose up out of the sea. As the car turned on to the wet cobbles between the slow margins of water, he reached out for my hand that had his sultry, witchy ring on it, pressed my fingers, kissed my palm with extraordinary tenderness. His face was as still as ever I'd seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over, yet his lips, that always looked so strangely red and naked between the black fringes of his beard, now curved a little. He smiled; he welcomed his bride home.

No room, no corridor that did not rustle with the sound of the sea and all the ceilings, the walls on which his ancestors in the stern regalia of rank lined up with their dark eyes and white faces, were stippled with refracted light from the waves which were always in motion; that luminous, murmurous castle of which I was the chatelaine, I, the little music student whose mother had sold all her jewellery, even her wedding ring, to pay the fees at the Conservatoire.

First of all, there was the small ordeal of my initial interview with the housekeeper, who kept this extraordinary machine, this anchored, castellated ocean liner, in smooth running order no matter who stood on the bridge; how tenuous, I thought, might be my authority here! She had a bland, pale, impassive, dislikeable face beneath the impeccably starched white linen head-dress of the region. Her greeting, correct but lifeless, chilled me; daydreaming, I dared presume too much on my status ... briefly wondered how I might install my old nurse, so much loved, however cosily incompetent, in her place. Ill- considered schemings! He told me this one had been his foster mother; was bound to his family in the utmost feudal complicity, 'as much part of the house as I am, my dear'. Now her thin lips offered me a proud little smile. She would be my ally as long as I was his. And with that, I must be content.

But, here, it would be easy to be content. In the turret suite he had given me for my very own, I could gaze out over the tumultuous Atlantic and imagine myself the Queen of the Sea. There was a Bechstein for me in the music room and, on the wall, another wedding present--an early Flemish primitive of Saint

Cecilia at her celestial organ. In the prim charm of this saint, with her plump, sallow cheeks and crinkled brown hair, I saw myself as I could have wished to be. I warmed to a loving sensitivity I had not hitherto suspected in him. Then he led me up a delicate spiral staircase to my bedroom; before she discreetly vanished, the housekeeper set him chuckling with some, I dare say, lewd blessing for newlyweds in her native Breton. That I did not understand. That he, smiling, refused to interpret.

And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home, with the gargoyles carved on its surfaces of ebony, vermilion lacquer, gold leaf; and its white gauze curtains, billowing in the sea breeze. Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on all the walls, in stately frames of contorted gold, that reflected more white lilies than I'd ever seen in my life before. He'd filled the room with them, to greet the bride, the young bride. The young bride, who had become that multitude of girls I saw in the mirrors, identical in their chic navy blue tailor-mades, for travelling, madame, or walking. A maid had dealt with the furs. Henceforth, a maid would deal with everything.

'See,' he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. 'I have acquired a whole harem for myself!'

I found that I was trembling. My breath came thickly. I could not meet his eye and turned my head away, out of pride, out of shyness, and watched a dozen husbands approach me in a dozen mirrors and slowly, methodically, teasingly, unfasten the buttons of my jacket and slip it from my shoulders. Enough! No; more! Off comes the skirt; and, next, the blouse of apricot linen that cost more than the dress I had for first communion. The play of the waves outside in the cold sun glittered on his monocle; his movements seemed to me deliberately coarse, vulgar. The blood rushed to my face again, and stayed there.

And yet, you see, I guessed it might be so--that we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothel. Sheltered as my life had been, how could I have failed, even in the world of prim bohemia in which I lived, to have heard hints of his world?

He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke--but do not imagine much finesse about it; this artichoke was no particular treat for the diner nor was he yet in any greedy haste. He approached his familiar treat with a weary appetite. And when nothing but my scarlet, palpitating core remained, I saw, in the mirror, the living image of an etching by Rops from the collection he had shown me when our engagement permitted us to be alone together ... the child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb.

He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations. And so my purchaser unwrapped his bargain. And, as at the opera, when I had first seen my flesh in his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself stirring.

At once he closed my legs like a book and I saw again the rare movement of his lips that meant he smiled.

Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.

And I began to shudder, like a racehorse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom in great glass jars, those undertakers' lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.

This scene from a voluptuary's life was now abruptly terminated. It turns out he has business to attend to; his estates, his companies--even on your honeymoon? Even then, said the red lips that kissed me before he left me alone with my bewildered senses--a wet, silken brush from his beard; a hint of the pointed tip of the tongue. Disgruntled, I wrapped a neglige of antique lace around me to sip the little breakfast of hot chocolate the maid brought me; after that, since it was second nature to me, there was nowhere to go but the music room and soon I settled down at my piano.

Yet only a series of subtle discords flowed from beneath my fingers: out of tune ... only a little out of tune; but I'd been blessed with perfect pitch and could not bear to play any more. Sea breezes are bad for pianos; we shall need a resident piano-tuner on the premises if I'm to continue with my studies! I flung down the lid in a little fury of disappointment; what should I do now, how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband beds me?

I shivered to think of that.

His library seemed the source of his habitual odour of Russian leather. Row upon row of calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spines, the octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco. A deep-buttoned leather sofa to recline on. A lectern, carved like a spread eagle, that held open upon it an edition of Huysmans's Là-bas, from some over-exquisite private press; it had been bound like a missal, in brass, with gems of coloured glass. The rugs on the floor, deep, pulsing blues of heaven and red of the heart's dearest blood, came from Isfahan and Bokhara; the dark panelling gleamed; there was the lulling music of the sea and a fire of apple logs. The flames flickered along the spines inside a glass-fronted case that held books still crisp and new. Eliphas Levy; the name meant nothing to me. I squinted at a title or two: The Initiation, The Key of Mysteries, The Secret of Pandora's Box, and yawned. Nothing, here, to detain a seventeen-year-old girl waiting for her first embrace. I should have liked, best of all, a novel in yellow paper; I wanted to curl up on the rug before the blazing fire, lose myself in a cheap novel, munch sticky liqueur chocolates. If I rang for them, a maid would bring me chocolates.

Nevertheless, I opened the doors of that bookcase idly to browse. And I think I knew, I knew by some tingling of the fingertips, even before I opened that slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside it. When he showed me the Rops, newly bought, dearly prized, had he not hinted that he was a connoisseur of such things? Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held. The picture had a caption: 'Reproof of curiosity'. My mother, with all the precision of her eccentricity, had told me what it was that lovers did; I was innocent but not naïve. The Adventures of Eulalie at the Harem of the Grand Turk had been printed, according to the flyleaf, in Amsterdam in 1748, a rare collector's piece. Had some ancestor brought it back himself from that northern city? Or had my husband bought it for himself, from one of those dusty little bookshops on the Left Bank where an old man peers at you through spectacles an inch thick, daring you to inspect his wares ... I turned the pages in the anticipation of fear; the print was rusty. Here was another steel engraving: 'Immolation of the wives of the Sultan'. I knew enough for what I saw in that book to make me gasp.

There was a pungent intensification of the odour of leather that suffused his library; his shadow fell across the massacre.

'My little nun has found the prayerbooks, has she?' he demanded, with a curious mixture of mockery and relish; then, seeing my painful, furious bewilderment, he laughed at me aloud, snatched the book from my hands and put it down on the sofa.

'Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn't play with grownups' toys until she's learned how to handle them, must she?'

Then he kissed me. And with, this time, no reticence. He kissed me and laid his hand imperatively upon my breast, beneath the sheath of ancient lace. I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to the carved, gilded bed on which he had been conceived. I stammered foolishly: We've not taken luncheon yet; and, besides, it is broad daylight...

All the better to see you.

He made me put on my choker, the family heirloom of one woman who had escaped the blade. With trembling fingers, I fastened the thing about my neck. It was cold as ice and chilled me. He twined my hair into a rope and lifted it off my shoulders so that he could the better kiss the downy furrows below my ears; that made me shudder. And he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he intoned:' Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery.'

A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.

I was brought to my senses by the insistent shrilling of the telephone. He lay beside me, felled like an oak, breathing stertorously, as if he had been fighting with me. In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the orgasm; I had bled. And perhaps I had seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity.

I gathered myself together, reached into the cloisonne cupboard beside the bed that concealed the telephone and addressed the mouthpiece. His agent in New York. Urgent.

I shook him awake and rolled over on my side, cradling my spent body in my arms. His voice buzzed like a hive of distant bees. My husband. My husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an embalming parlour. Those somnolent lilies, that wave their heavy heads, distributing their lush, insolent incense reminiscent of pampered flesh.

When he'd finished with the agent, he turned to me and stroked the ruby necklace that bit into my neck, but with such tenderness now, that I ceased flinching and he caressed my breasts. My dear one, my little love, my child, did it hurt her? He's so sorry for it, such impetuousness, he could not help himself; you see, he loves her so ... and this lover's recitative of his brought my tears in a flood. I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it. For a while, he murmured to me in a voice I'd never heard before, a voice like the soft consolations of the sea. But then he unwound the tendrils of my hair from the buttons of his smoking jacket, kissed my cheek briskly and told me the agent from New York had called with such urgent business that he must leave as soon as the tide was low enough. Leave the castle? Leave France! And would be away for at least six weeks.

'But it is our honeymoon!'

A deal, an enterprise of hazard and chance involving several millions, lay in the balance, he said. He drew away from me into that waxworks stillness of his; I was only a little girl, I did not understand. And, he said unspoken to my wounded vanity, I have had too many honeymoons to find them in the least pressing commitments. I know quite well that this child I've bought with a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts won't run away. But, after he'd called his Paris agent to book a passage for the States next day--just one tiny call, my little one--we should have time for dinner together.

And I had to be content with that.

A Mexican dish of pheasant with hazelnuts and chocolate; salad; white, voluptuous cheese; a sorbet of muscat grapes and Asti spumante. A celebration of Krug exploded festively. And then acrid black coffee in precious little cups so fine it shadowed the birds with which they were painted. I had Cointreau, he had cognac in the library, with the purple velvet curtains drawn against the night, where he took me to perch on his knee in a leather armchair beside the flickering log fire. He had made me change into that chaste little Poiret shift of white muslin; he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, each one, with a pink eye open. But he would not let me take off my ruby choker, although it was growing very uncomfortable, nor fasten up my descending hair, the sign of a virginity so recently ruptured that still remained a wounded presence between us. He twined his fingers in my hair until I winced; I said, I remember, very little.

'The maid will have changed our sheets already,' he said. 'We do not hang the bloody sheets out of the window to prove to the whole of Brittany you are a virgin, not in these civilized times. But I should tell you it would have been the first time in all my married lives I could have shown my interested tenants such a flag.'

Then I realized, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him--the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Terrasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a piano with keys of ether. You must remember how ill at ease I was in that luxurious place, how unease had been my constant companion during the whole length of my courtship by this grave satyr who now gently martyrized my hair. To know that my naivety gave him some pleasure made me take heart.

Courage! I shall act the fine lady to the manner born one day, if only by virtue of default.

Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great, mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket--key after key, a key, he said, for every lock in the house. Keys of all kinds--huge, ancient things of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes. And, during his absence, it was I who must take care of them all.

I eyed the heavy bunch with circumspection. Until that moment, I had not given a single thought to the practical aspects of marriage with a great house, great wealth, a great man, whose key ring was as crowded as that of a prison warder. Here were the clumsy and archaic keys for the dungeons, for dungeons we had in plenty although they had been converted to cellars for his wines; the dusty bottles inhabited in racks all those deep holes of pain in the rock on which the castle was built. These are the keys to the kitchens, this is the key to the picture gallery, a treasure house filled by five centuries of avid collectors--ah! he foresaw I would spend hours there.

He had amply indulged his taste for the Symbolists, he told me with a glint of greed. There was Moreau's great portrait of his first wife, the famous Sacrificial Victim with the imprint of the lacelike chains on her pellucid skin. Did I know the story of the painting of that picture? How, when she took off her clothes for him for the first time, she fresh from her bar in Montmartre, she had robed herself involuntarily in a blush that reddened her breasts, her shoulders, her arms, her whole body? He had thought of that story, of that dear girl, when first he had undressed me ... Ensor, the great Ensor, his monolithic canvas: The Foolish Virgins. Two or three late Gauguins, his special favourite the one of the tranced brown girl in the deserted house which was called: Out of the Night We Come, Into the Night We Go. And, besides the additions he had made himself, his marvellous inheritance of Watteaus, Poussins and a pair of very special Fragonards, commissioned for a licentious ancestor who, it was said, had posed for the master's brush himself with his own two daughters ... He broke off his catalogue of treasures abruptly.

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.

A log fell in the fire, instigating a shower of sparks; the opal on my finger spurted green flame. I felt as giddy as if I were on the edge of a precipice; I was afraid, not so much of him, of his monstrous presence, heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us, the presence that, even when I thought myself most in love with him, always subtly oppressed me ... No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet--might there not be a grain of beastly truth hi them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.

Here is the key to the china cabinet--don't laugh, my darling; there's a king's ransom in Sèvres in that closet, and a queen's ransom in Limoges. And a key to the locked, barred room where five generations of plate were kept.

Keys, keys, keys. He would trust me with the keys to his office, although I was only a baby; and the keys to his safes, where he kept the jewels I should wear, he promised me, when we returned to Paris. Such jewels! Why, I would be able to change my earrings and necklaces three times a day, just as the Empress Josephine used to change her underwear. He doubted, he said, with that hollow, knocking sound that served him for a chuckle, I would be quite so interested in his share certificates although they, of course, were worth infinitely more.

Outside our firelit privacy, I could hear the sound of the tide drawing back from the pebbles of the foreshore; it was nearly time for him to leave me. One single key remained unaccounted for on the ring and he hesitated over it; for a moment, I thought he was going to unfasten it from its brothers, slip it back into his pocket and take it away with him.

'What is that key?' I demanded, for his chaffing had made me bold. 'The key to your heart? Give it me!'

He dangled the key tantalizingly above my head, out of reach of my straining fingers; those bare red lips of his cracked sidelong in a smile.

'Ah, no,' he said. 'Not the key to my heart. Rather, the key to my enfer.'

He left it on the ring, fastened the ring together, shook it musically, like a carillon. Then threw the keys in a jingling heap in my lap. I could feel the cold metal chilling my thighs through my thin muslin frock. He bent over me to drop a beard-masked kiss on my forehead.

'Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife,' he said. 'Promise me this, my whey- faced piano-player; promise me you'll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you. Play with anything you find, jewels, silver plate; make toy boats of my share certificates, if it pleases you, and send them sailing off to America after me. All is yours, everywhere is open to you--except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you ventured there. Oh, and you'd find it such a dull little room! But you must promise me, if you love me, to leave it well alone. It is only a private study, a hideaway, a "den", as the English say, where I can go, sometimes, on those infrequent yet inevitable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.'

There was a little thin starlight in the courtyard as, wrapped in my furs, I saw him to his car. His last words were, that he had telephoned the mainland and taken a piano-tuner on to the staff; this man would arrive to take up his duties the next day. He pressed me to his vicuña breast, once, and then drove away.

I had drowsed away that afternoon and now I could not sleep. I lay tossing and turning in his ancestral bed until another daybreak discoloured the dozen mirrors that were iridescent with the reflections of the sea. The perfume of the lilies weighed on my senses; when I thought that, henceforth, I would always share these sheets with a man whose skin, as theirs did, contained that toad-like, clammy hint of moisture, I felt a vague desolation that within me, now my female wound had healed, there had awoken a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food, for the renewal of his caresses. Had he not hinted to me, in his flesh as in his speech and looks, of the thousand, thousand baroque intersections of flesh upon flesh? I lay in our wide bed accompanied by, a sleepless companion, my dark newborn curiosity.

I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me.

Were there jewels enough in all his safes to recompense me for this predicament? Did all that castle hold enough riches to recompense me for the company of the libertine with whom I must share it? And what, precisely, was the nature of my desirous dread for this mysterious being who, to show his mastery over me, had abandoned me on my wedding night?

Then I sat straight up in bed, under the sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me, riven by a wild surmise. Might he have left me, not for Wall Street but for an importunate mistress tucked away God knows where who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl whose fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by the practice of scales and arpeggios? And, slowly, soothed, I sank back on to the heaping pillows; I acknowledged that the jealous scare I'd just given myself was not unmixed with a little tincture of relief.

At last I drifted into slumber, as daylight filled the room and chased bad dreams away. But the last thing I remembered, before I slept, was the tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water.

Coffee and croissants to console this bridal, solitary waking. Delicious. Honey, too, in a section of comb on a glass saucer. The maid squeezed the aromatic juice from an orange into a chilled goblet while I watched her as I lay in the lazy, midday bed of the rich. Yet nothing, this morning, gave me more than a fleeting pleasure except to hear that the piano-tuner had been at work already. When the maid told me that, I sprang out of bed and pulled on my old serge skirt and flannel blouse, costume of a student, in which I felt far more at ease with myself than in any of my fine new clothes.

After my three hours of practice, I called the piano-tuner in, to thank him. He was blind, of course; but young, with a gentle mouth and grey eyes that fixed upon me although they could not see me. He was a blacksmith's son from the village across the causeway; a chorister in the church whom the good priest had taught a trade so that he could make a living. All most satisfactory. Yes. He thought he would be happy here. And if, he added shyly, he might sometimes be allowed to hear me play ... for, you see, he loved music. Yes. Of course, I said. Certainly. He seemed to know that I had smiled.

After I dismissed him, even though I'd woken so late, it was still barely time for my 'five o'clock'. The housekeeper, who, thoughtfully forewarned by my husband, had restrained herself from interrupting my music, now made me a solemn visitation with a lengthy menu for a late luncheon. When I told her I did not need it, she looked at me obliquely, along her nose. I understood at once that one of my principal functions as chatelaine was to provide work for the staff. But, all the same, I asserted myself and said I would wait until dinner-time, although I looked forward nervously to the solitary meal. Then I found I had to tell her what I would like to have prepared for me; my imagination, still that of a schoolgirl, ran riot. A fowl in cream--or should I anticipate Christmas with a varnished turkey? No; I have decided.

Avocado and shrimp, lots of it, followed by no entrée at all. But surprise me for dessert with every ice- cream in the ice box. She noted all down but sniffed; I'd shocked her. Such tastes! Child that I was, I giggled when she left me.

But, now ... what shall I do, now?

I could have spent a happy hour unpacking the trunks that contained my trousseau but the maid had done that already, the dresses, the tailor-mades hung in the wardrobe in my dressing room, the hats on wooden heads to keep their shape, the shoes on wooden feet as if all these inanimate objects were imitating the appearance of life, to mock me. I did not like to linger in my overcrowded dressing room, nor in my lugubriously lily-scented bedroom. How shall I pass the time?

I shall take a bath in my own bathroom! And found the taps were little dolphins made of gold, with chips of turquoise for eyes. And there was a tank of goldfish, who swam in and out of moving fronds of weeds, as bored, I thought, as I was. How I wished he had not left me. How I wished it were possible to chat with, say, a maid; or, the piano-tuner ... but I knew already my new rank forbade overtures of friendship to the staff.

I had been hoping to defer the call as long as I could, so that I should have something to look forward to in the dead waste of time I foresaw before me, after my dinner was done with, but, at a quarter before seven, when darkness already surrounded the castle, I could contain myself no longer. I telephoned my mother. And astonished myself by bursting into tears when I heard her voice.

No, nothing was the matter. Mother, I have gold bath taps. I said, gold bath taps! No; I suppose that's nothing to cry about, Mother.

The line was bad, I could hardly make out her congratulations, her questions, her concern, but I was a little comforted when I put the receiver down.

Yet there still remained one whole hour to dinner and the whole, unimaginable desert of the rest of the evening.

The bunch of keys lay, where he had left them, on the rug before the library fire which had warmed their metal so that they no longer felt cold to the touch but warm, almost, as my own skin. How careless I was; a maid, tending the logs, eyed me reproachfully as if I'd set a trap for her as I picked up the clinking bundle of keys, the keys to the interior doors of this lovely prison of which I was both the inmate and the mistress and had scarcely seen. When I remembered that, I felt the exhilaration of the explorer.

Lights! More lights!

At the touch of a switch, the dreaming library was brilliantly illuminated. I ran crazily about the castle, switching on every light I could find--I ordered the servants to light up all their quarters, too, so the castle would shine like a seaborne birthday cake lit with a thousand candles, one for every year of its life, and everybody on shore would wonder at it. When everything was lit as brightly as the café in the Gare du Nord, the significance of the possessions implied by that bunch of keys no longer intimidated me, for I was determined, now, to search through them all for evidence of my husband's true nature. His office first, evidently.

A mahogany desk half a mile wide, with an impeccable blotter and a bank of telephones. I allowed myself the luxury of opening the safe that contained the jewellery and delved sufficiently among the leather boxes to find out how my marriage had given me access to a jinn's treasury--parures, bracelets, rings ... While I was thus surrounded by diamonds, a maid knocked on the door and entered before I spoke; a subtle discourtesy. I would speak to my husband about it. She eyed my serge skirt superciliously; did madame plan to dress for dinner?

She made a moue of disdain when I laughed to hear that, she was far more the lady than I. But, imagine-- to dress up in one of my Poiret extravaganzas, with the jewelled turban and aigrette on my head, roped with pearl to the navel, to sit down all alone in the baronial dining hall at the head of that massive board at which King Mark was reputed to have fed his knights ... I grew calmer under the cold eye of her disapproval. I adopted the crisp inflections of an officer's daughter. No, I would not dress for dinner.

Furthermore, I was not hungry enough for dinner itself. She must tell the housekeeper to cancel the dormitory feast I'd ordered. Could they leave me sandwiches and a flask of coffee in my music room? And would they all dismiss for the night?

Mais oui, madame.

I knew by her bereft intonation I had let them down again but I did not care; I was armed against them by the brilliance of his hoard. But I would not find his heart amongst the glittering stones; as soon as she had gone, I began a systematic search of the drawers of his desk.

All was in order, so I found nothing. Not a random doodle on an old envelope, nor the faded photograph of a woman. Only the files of business correspondence, the bills from the home farms, the invoices from tailors, the billets-doux from international financiers. Nothing. And this absence of the evidence of his real life began to impress me strangely; there must, I thought, be a great deal to conceal if he takes such pains to hide it.

His office was a singularly impersonal room, facing inwards, on to the courtyard, as though he wanted to turn his back on the siren sea in order to keep a clear head while he bankrupted a small businessman in Amsterdam or--I noticed with a thrill of distaste--engaged in some business in Laos that must, from certain cryptic references to his amateur botanist's enthusiasm for rare poppies, be to do with opium. Was he not rich enough to do without crime? Or was the crime itself his profit? And yet I saw enough to appreciate his zeal for secrecy.

Now I had ransacked his desk, I must spend a cool-headed quarter of an hour putting every last letter back where I had found it, and, as I covered the traces of my visit, by some chance, as I reached inside a little drawer that had stuck fast, I must have touched a hidden spring, for a secret drawer flew open within that drawer itself; and this secret drawer contained--at last!--a file marked: Personal.

I was alone, but for my reflection in the uncurtained window.

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.

I could have wished, perhaps, I had not found that touching, ill-spelt note, on a paper napkin marked La Coupole, that began: 'My darling, I cannot wait for the moment when you may make me yours completely.' The diva had sent him a page of the score of Tristan, the Liebestod, with the single, cryptic word: 'Until...' scrawled across it. But the strangest of all these love letters was a postcard with a view of a village graveyard, among mountains, where some black-coated ghoul enthusiastically dug at a grave; this little scene, executed with the lurid exuberance of Grand Guignol, was captioned: 'Typical Transylvanian Scene--Midnight, All Hallows.' And, on the other side, the message: 'On the occasion of this marriage to the descendant of Dracula--always remember, "the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil". Toutes amitiés, C.'

A joke. A joke in the worst possible taste; for had he not been married to a Romanian countess? And then I remembered her pretty, witty face, and her name--Carmilla. My most recent predecessor in this castle had been, it would seem, the most sophisticated.

I put away the file, sobered. Nothing in my life of family love and music had prepared me for these grown-up games and yet these were clues to his self that showed me, at least, how much he had been loved, even if they did not reveal any good reason for it. But I wanted to know still more; and, as I closed the office door and locked it, the means to discover more fell in my way.

Fell, indeed; and with the clatter of a dropped canteen of cutlery, for, as I turned the slick Yale lock, I contrived, somehow, to open up the key ring itself, so that all the keys tumbled loose on the floor. And the very first key I picked out of that pile was, as luck or ill fortune had it, the key to the room he had forbidden me, the room he would keep for his own so that he could go there when he wished to feel himself once more a bachelor.

I made my decision to explore it before I felt a faint resurgence of my ill-defined fear of his waxen stillness. Perhaps I half-imagined, then, that I might find his real self in his den, waiting there to see if indeed I had obeyed him; that he had sent a moving figure of himself to New York, the enigmatic, self- sustaining carapace of his public person, while the real man, whose face I had glimpsed in the storm of orgasm, occupied himself with pressing private business in the study at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room. Yet, if that were so, it was imperative that I should find him, should know him; and I was too deluded by his apparent taste for me to think my disobedience might truly offend him.

I took the forbidden key from the heap and left the others lying there.

It was now very late and the castle was adrift, as far as it could go from the land, in the middle of the silent ocean where, at my orders, it floated, like a garland of light. And all silent, all still, but for the murmuring of the waves.

I felt no fear, no intimation of dread. Now I walked as firmly as I had done in my mother's house.

Not a narrow, dusty little passage at all; why had he lied to me? But an ill-lit one, certainly; the electricity, for some reason, did not extend here, so I retreated to the still-room and found a bundle of waxed tapers in a cupboard, stored there with matches to light the oak board at grand dinners. I put a match to my little taper and advanced with it in my hand, like a penitent, along the corridor hung with heavy, I think Venetian, tapestries. The flame picked out, here, the head of a man, there, the rich breast of a woman spilling through a rent in her dress--the Rape of the Sabines, perhaps? The naked swords and immolated horses suggested some grisly mythological subject. The corridor wound downwards; there was an almost imperceptible ramp to the thickly carpeted floor. The heavy hangings on the wall muffled my footsteps, even my breathing. For some reason, it grew very warm; the sweat sprang out in beads on my brow. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea.

A long, a winding corridor, as if I were in the viscera of the castle; and this corridor led to a door of worm-eaten oak, low, round-topped, barred with black iron.

And still I felt no fear, no raising of the hairs on the back of the neck, no prickling of the thumbs. The key slid into the new lock as easily as a hot knife into butter.

No fear; but a hesitation, a holding of the spiritual breath.

If I had found some traces of his heart in a file marked: Personal, perhaps, here, in his subterranean privacy, I might find a little of his soul. It was the consciousness of the possibility of such a discovery, of its possible strangeness, that kept me for a moment motionless, before, in the foolhardiness of my already subtly tainted innocence, I turned the key and the door creaked slowly back.

'There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer,' opined my husband's favourite poet; I had learned something of the nature of that similarity on my marriage bed. And now my taper showed me the outlines of a rack. There was also a great wheel, like the ones I had seen in woodcuts of the martyrdoms of the saints, in my old nurse's little store of holy books. And--just one glimpse of it before my little flame caved in and I was left in absolute darkness--a metal figure, hinged at the side, which I knew to be spiked on the inside and to have the name: the Iron Maiden.

Absolute darkness. And, about me, the instruments of mutilation.

Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had inherited nerves and a will from the mother who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China; My mother's spirit drove me on, into that dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst. I fumbled for the matches in my pocket; what a dim, lugubrious light they gave! And yet, enough, oh, more than enough, to see a room designed for desecration and some dark night of unimaginable lovers whose embraces were annihilation.

The walls of this stark torture chamber were the naked rock; they gleamed as if they were sweating with fright. At the four corners of the room were funerary urns, of great antiquity, Etruscan, perhaps, and, on three-legged ebony stands, the bowls of incense he had left burning which filled the room with a sacerdotal reek. Wheel, rack and Iron Maiden were, I saw, displayed as grandly as if they were items of statuary and I was almost consoled, then, and almost persuaded myself that I might have stumbled only upon a little museum of his perversity, that he had installed these monstrous items here only for contemplation.

Yet at the centre of the room lay a catafalque, a doomed, ominous bier of Renaissance workmanship, surrounded by long white candles and, at its foot, an armful of the same lilies with which he had filled my bedroom, stowed in a four-foot-high jar glazed with a sombre Chinese red. I scarcely dared examine this catafalque and its occupant more closely; yet I knew I must.

Each time I struck a match to light those candles round her bed, it seemed a garment of that innocence of mine for which he had lusted fell away from me.

The opera singer lay, quite naked, under a thin sheet of very rare and precious linen, such as the princes of Italy used to shroud those whom they had poisoned. I touched her, very gently, on the white breast; she was cool, he had embalmed her. On her throat I could see the blue imprint of his strangler's fingers. The cool, sad flame of the candles flickered on her white, closed eyelids. The worst thing was, the dead lips smiled.

Beyond the catafalque, in the middle of the shadows, a white, nacreous glimmer; as my eyes accustomed themselves to the gathering darkness, I at last--oh, horrors!--made out a skull; yes, a skull, so utterly denuded, now, of flesh, that it scarcely seemed possible the stark bone had once been richly upholstered with life. And this skull was strung up by a system of unseen cords, so that it appeared to hang, disembodied, in the still, heavy air, and it had been crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace, the final image of his bride.

Yet the skull was still so beautiful, had shaped with its sheer planes so imperiously the face that had once existed above it, that I recognized her the moment I saw her; face of the evening star walking on the rim of night. One false step, oh, my poor, dear girl, next in the fated sisterhood of his wives; one false step and into the abyss of the dark you stumbled.

And where was she, the latest dead, the Romanian countess who might have thought her blood would survive his depredations? I knew she must be here, in the place that had wound me through the castle towards it on a spool of inexorability. But, at first, I could see no sign of her. Then, for some reason-- perhaps some change of atmosphere wrought by my presence--the metal shell of the Iron Maiden emitted a ghostly twang; my feverish imagination might have guessed its occupant was trying to clamber out, though, even in the midst of my rising hysteria, I knew she must be dead to find a home there.

With trembling fingers, I prised open the front of the upright coffin, with its sculpted face caught in a rictus of pain. Then, overcome, I dropped the key I still held in my other hand. It dropped into the forming pool of her blood.

She was pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes, this child of the land of the vampires who seemed so newly dead, so full of blood ... oh God! how recently had he become a widower? How long had he kept her in this obscene cell? Had it been all the time he had courted me, in the clear light of Paris?

I closed the lid of her coffin very gently and burst into a tumult of sobbing that contained both pity for his other victims and also a dreadful anguish to know I, too, was one of them.

The candles flared, as if in a draught from a door to elsewhere. The light caught the fire opal on my hand so that it flashed, once, with a baleful light, as if to tell me the eye of God--his eye--was upon me. My first thought, when I saw the ring for which I had sold myself to this fate, was, how to escape it.

I retained sufficient presence of mind to snuff out the candles round the bier with my fingers, to gather up my taper, to look around, although shuddering, to ensure I had left behind me no traces of my visit.

I retrieved the key from the pool of blood, wrapped it in my handkerchief to keep my hands clean, and fled the room, slamming the door behind me. It crashed to with a juddering reverberation, like the door of hell.

I could not take refuge in my bedroom, for that retained the memory of his presence trapped in the fathomless silvering of his mirrors. My music room seemed the safest place, although I looked at the picture of Saint Cecilia with a faint dread; what had been the nature of her martyrdom? My mind was in a tumult; schemes for flight jostled with one another ... as soon as the tide receded from the causeway, I would make for the mainland--on foot, running, stumbling; I did not trust that leather-clad chauffeur, nor the well-behaved housekeeper, and I dared not take any of the pale, ghostly maids into my confidence, either, since they were his creatures, all. Once at the village, I would fling myself directly on the mercy of the gendarmerie.

But--could I trust them, either? His forefathers had ruled this coast for eight centuries, from this castle whose moat was the Atlantic. Might not the police, the advocates, even the judge, all be in his service, turning a common blind eye to his vices since he was milord whose word must be obeyed? Who, on this distant coast, would believe the white-faced girl from Paris who came running to them with a shuddering tale of blood, of fear, of the ogre murmuring in the shadows? Or, rather, they would immediately know it to be true. But were all honour-bound to let me carry it no further.

Assistance. My mother. I ran to the telephone; and the line, of course, was dead. Dead as his wives.

A thick darkness, unlit by any star, still glazed the windows. Every lamp in my room burned, to keep the dark outside, yet it seemed still to encroach on me, to be present beside me but as if masked by my lights, the night like a permeable substance that could seep into my skin. I looked at the precious little clock made from hypocritically innocent flowers long ago, in Dresden; the hands had scarcely moved one single hour forward from when I first descended to that private slaughterhouse of his. Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning.

And yet the time might still be my friend; at that hour, that very hour, he set sail for New York.

To know that, in a few moments, my husband would have left France calmed my agitation a little. My reason told me I had nothing to fear; the tide that would take him away to the New World would let me out of the imprisonment of the castle. Surely I could easily evade the servants. Anybody can buy a ticket at a railway station. Yet I was still rilled with unease. I opened the lid of the piano; perhaps I thought my own particular magic might help me, now, that I could create a pentacle out of music that would keep me from harm for, if my music had first ensnared him, then might it not also give me the power to free myself from him?

Mechanically, I began to play but my fingers were stiff and shaking. At first, I could manage nothing better than the exercises of Czerny but simply the act of playing soothed me and, for solace, for the sake of the harmonious rationality of its sublime mathematics, I searched among his scores until I found The Well-Tempered Clavier. I set myself the therapeutic task of playing all Bach's equations, every one, and, I told myself, if I played them all through without a single mistake--then the morning would find me once more a virgin.

Crash of a dropped stick.

His silver-headed cane! What else? Sly, cunning, he had returned; he was waiting for me outside the door!

I rose to my feet; fear gave me strength. I flung back my head defiantly. 'Come in!' My voice astonished me by its firmness, its clarity.

The door slowly, nervously opened and I saw, not the massive, irredeemable bulk of my husband but the slight, stooping figure of the piano-tuner, and he looked far more terrified of me than my mother's daughter would have been of the Devil himself. In the torture chamber, it seemed to me that I would never laugh again; now, helplessly, laugh I did, with relief, and, after a moment's hesitation, the boy's face softened and he smiled a little, almost in shame. Though they were blind, his eyes were singularly sweet.

'Forgive me,' said Jean-Yves. 'I know I've given you grounds for dismissing me, that I should be crouching outside your door at midnight ... but I heard you walking about, up and down--I sleep in a room at the foot of the west tower--and some intuition told me you could not sleep and might, perhaps, pass the insomniac hours at your piano. And I could not resist that. Besides, I stumbled over these--'

And he displayed the ring of keys I'd dropped outside my husband's office door, the ring from which one key was missing. I took them from him, looked round for a place to stow them, fixed on the piano stool as if to hide them would protect me. Still he stood smiling at me. How hard it was to make everyday conversation.

'It's perfect,' I said. 'The piano. Perfectly in tune.'

But he was full of the loquacity of embarrassment, as though I would only forgive him for his impudence if he explained the cause of it thoroughly.

'When I heard you play this afternoon, I thought I'd never heard such a touch. Such technique. A treat for me, to hear a virtuoso! So I crept up to your door now, humbly as a little dog might, madame, and put my ear to the keyhole and listened, and listened--until my stick fell to the floor through a momentary clumsiness of mine, and I was discovered.'

He had the most touchingly ingenuous smile.

'Perfectly in tune,' I repeated. To my surprise, now I had said it, I found I could not say anything else. I could only repeat: 'In tune ... perfect ... in tune,' over and over again. I saw a dawning surprise in his face. My head throbbed. To see him, in his lovely, blind humanity, seemed to hurt me very piercingly, somewhere inside my breast; his figure blurred, the room swayed about me. After the dreadful revelation of that bloody chamber, it was his tender look that made me faint.

When I recovered consciousness, I found I was lying in the piano-tuner's arms and he was tucking the satin cushion from the piano-stool under my head.

'You are in some great distress,' he said. 'No bride should suffer so much, so early in her marriage.' His speech had the rhythms of the countryside, the rhythms of the tides.

'Any bride brought to this castle should come ready dressed in mourning, should bring a priest and a coffin with her,' I said.

'What's this?'

It was too late to keep silent; and if he, too, were one of my husband's creatures, then at least he had been kind to me. So I told him everything, the keys, the interdiction, my disobedience, the room, the rack, the skull, the corpses, the blood.

'I can scarcely believe it,' he said, wondering. 'That man ... so rich; so well-born.'

'Here's proof,' I said and tumbled the fatal key out of my handkerchief on to the silken rug. 'Oh God,' he said. 'I can smell the blood.'

He took my hand; he pressed his arms about me. Although he was scarcely more than a boy, I felt a great strength flow into me from his touch.

'We whisper all manner of strange tales up and down the coast,' he said.' There was a Marquis, once, who used to hunt young girls on the mainland; he hunted them with dogs, as though they were foxes. My grandfather had it from his grandfather, how the Marquis pulled a head out of his saddle bag and showed it to the blacksmith while the man was shoeing his horse. "A fine specimen of the genus, brunette, eh, Guillaume?" And it was the head of the blacksmith's wife.'

But, in these more democratic times, my husband must travel as far as Paris to do his hunting in the salons. Jean-Yves knew the moment I shuddered.

'Oh, madame! I thought all these were old wives' tales, chattering of fools, spooks to scare bad children into good behaviour! Yet how could you know, a stranger, that the old name for this place is the Castle of Murder?'

How could I know, indeed? Except that, in my heart, I'd always known its lord would be the death of me.

'Hark!' said my friend suddenly. 'The sea has changed key; it must be near morning, the tide is going down.'

He helped me up. I looked from the window, towards the mainland, along the causeway where the stones gleamed wetly in the thin light of the end of the night and, with an almost unimaginable horror, a horror the intensity of which I cannot transmit to you, I saw, in the distance, still far away yet drawing moment by moment inexorably nearer, the twin headlamps of his great black car, gouging tunnels through the shifting mist.

My husband had indeed returned; this time, it was no fancy.

'The key!' said Jean-Yves. 'It must go back on the ring, with the others. As though nothing had happened.' But the key was still caked with wet blood and I ran to my bathroom and held it under the hot tap.

Crimson water swirled down the basin but, as if the key itself were hurt, the bloody token stuck. The turquoise eyes of the dolphin taps winked at me derisively; they knew my husband had been too clever for me! I scrubbed the stain with my nail brush but still it would not budge. I thought how the car would be rolling silently towards the closed courtyard gate; the more I scrubbed the key, the more vivid grew the stain.

The bell in the gatehouse would jangle. The porter's drowsy son would push back the patchwork quilt, yawning, pull the shirt over his head, thrust his feet into his sabots ... slowly, slowly; open the door for your master as slowly as you can ...

And still the bloodstain mocked the fresh water that spilled from the mouth of the leering dolphin. 'You have no more time,' said Jean-Yves. 'He is here. I know it. I must stay with you.'

'You shall not!' I said. 'Go back to your room, now. Please.'

He hesitated. I put an edge of steel in my voice, for I knew I must meet my lord alone. 'Leave me!'

As soon as he had gone, I dealt with the keys and went to my bedroom. The causeway was empty; Jean- Yves was correct, my husband had already entered the castle. I pulled the curtains close, stripped off my clothes and pulled the bedcurtains round me as a pungent aroma of Russian leather assured me my husband was once again beside me. 'Dearest!'

With the most treacherous, lascivious tenderness, he kissed my eyes, and, mimicking the new bride newly wakened, I flung my arms around him, for on my seeming acquiescence depended my salvation.

'Da Silva of Rio outwitted me,' he said wryly.' My New York agent telegraphed Le Havre and saved me a wasted journey. So we may resume our interrupted pleasures, my love.'

I did not believe one word of it. I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge.

The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. Lost at that charade of innocence and vice in which he had engaged me. Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner.

His hand brushed my breast, beneath the sheet. I strained my nerves yet could not help but flinch from the intimate touch, for it made me think of the piercing embrace of the Iron Maiden and of his lost lovers in the vault. When he saw my reluctance, his eyes veiled over and yet his appetite did not diminish. His tongue ran over red lips already wet. Silent, mysterious, he moved away from me to draw off his jacket.

He took the gold watch from his waistcoat and laid it on the dressing table, like a good bourgeois; scooped out his raiding loose change and now--oh God!--makes a great play of patting his pockets officiously, puzzled lips pursed, searching for something that has been mislaid. Then turns to me with a ghastly, a triumphant smile.

'But of course! I gave the keys to you!'

'Your keys? Why, of course. Here, they're under the pillow; wait a moment--what--Ah! No ... now, where can I have left them? I was whiling away the evening without you at the piano, I remember. Of course! The music room!'

Brusquely he flung my négligé of antique lace on the bed. 'Go and get them.'

'Now? This moment? Can't it wait until morning, my darling?'

I forced myself to be seductive. I saw myself, pale, pliant as a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, a dozen vulnerable, appealing girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me. If he had come to me in bed, I would have strangled him, then.

But he half-snarled: 'No. It won't wait. Now.'

The unearthly light of dawn filled the room; had only one previous dawn broken upon me in that vile place? And there was nothing for it but to go and fetch the keys from the music stool and pray he would not examine them too closely, pray to God his eyes would fail him, that he might be struck blind.

When I came back into the bedroom carrying the bunch of keys that jangled at every step like a curious musical instrument, he was sitting on the bed in his immaculate shirtsleeves, his head sunk in his hands. And it seemed to me he was in despair.

Strange. In spite of my fear of him, that made me whiter than my wrap, I felt there emanate from him, at that moment, a stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly, as if the lilies that surrounded him had all at once begun to fester, or the Russian leather of his scent were reverting to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed. The chthonic gravity of his presence exerted a tremendous pressure on the room, so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea, beneath the waves that pounded against the shore.

I held my life in my hands amongst those keys and, in a moment, would place it between his well- manicured fingers. The evidence of that bloody chamber had showed me I could expect no mercy. Yet, when he raised his head and stared at me with his blind, shuttered eyes as though he did not recognize me, I felt a terrified pity for him, for this man who lived in such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die.

The atrocious loneliness of that monster!

The monocle had fallen from his face. His curling mane was disordered, as if he had run his hands through it in his distraction. I saw how he had lost his impassivity and was now filled with suppressed excitement. The hand he stretched out for those counters in his game of love and death shook a little; the face that turned towards me contained a sombre delirium that seemed to me compounded of a ghastly, yes, shame but also of a terrible, guilty joy as he slowly ascertained how I had sinned.

That tell-tale stain had resolved itself into a mark the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card. He disengaged the key from the ring and looked at it for a while, solitary, brooding.

'It is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable,' he said. His voice was low and had in it the timbre of certain great cathedral organs that seem, when they are played, to be conversing with God.

I could not restrain a sob.

'Oh, my love, my little love who brought me a white gift of music,' he said, almost as if grieving. 'My little love, you'll never know how much I hate daylight!"

Then he sharply ordered: 'Kneel!'

I knelt before him and he pressed the key lightly to my forehead, held it there for a moment. I felt a faint tingling of the skin and, when I involuntarily glanced at myself in the mirror, I saw the heart-shaped stain had transferred itself to my forehead, to the space between the eyebrows, like the caste mark of a brahmin woman. Or the mark of Cain. And now the key gleamed as freshly as if it had just been cut. He clipped it back on the ring, emitting that same, heavy sigh as he had done when I said that I would marry him.

'My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for martyrdom.' 'What form shall it take?' I said.

'Decapitation,' he whispered, almost voluptuously. 'Go and bathe yourself; put on that white dress you wore to hear Tristan and the necklace that prefigures your end. And I shall take myself off to the armoury, my dear, to sharpen my great-grandfather's ceremonial sword.'

'The servants?'

'We shall have absolute privacy for our last rites; I have already dismissed them. If you look out of the window you can see them going to the mainland.'

It was now the full, pale light of morning; the weather was grey, indeterminate, the sea had an oily, sinister look, a gloomy day on which to die. Along the causeway I could see trouping every maid and scullion, every pot-boy and pan-scourer, valet, laundress and vassal who worked in that great house, most on foot, a few on bicycles. The faceless housekeeper trudged along with a great basket in which, I guessed, she'd stowed as much as she could ransack from the larder. The Marquis must have given the chauffeur leave to borrow the motor for the day, for it went last of all, at a stately pace, as though the procession were a cortege and the car already bore my coffin to the mainland for. burial.

But I knew no good Breton earth would cover me, like a last, faithful lover; I had another fate. 'I have given them all a day's holiday, to celebrate our wedding,' he said. And smiled.

However hard I stared at the receding company, I could see no sign of Jean-Yves, our latest servant, hired but the preceding morning.

'Go, now. Bathe yourself; dress yourself. The lustratory ritual and the ceremonial robing; after that, the sacrifice. Wait in the music room until I telephone for you. No, my dear!' And he smiled, as I started, recalling the line was dead.' One may call inside the castle just as much as one pleases; but, outside-- never.'

I scrubbed my forehead with the nail brush as I had scrubbed the key but this red mark would not go away, either, no matter what I did, and I knew I should wear it until I died, though that would not be long. Then I went to my dressing room and put on that white muslin shift, costume of a victim of an auto-da-fé, he had bought me to listen to the Liebestod in. Twelve young women combed out twelve listless sheaves of brown hair in the mirrors; soon, there would be none. The mass of lilies that surrounded me exhaled, now, the odour of their withering. They looked like the trumpets of the angels of death.

On the dressing table, coiled like a snake about to strike, lay the ruby choker.

Already almost lifeless, cold at heart, I descended the spiral staircase to the music room but there I found I had not been abandoned.

'I can be of some comfort to you,' the boy said.' Though not much use.'

We pushed the piano stool in front of the open window so that, for as long as I could, I would be able to smell the ancient, reconciling smell of the sea that, in time, will cleanse everything, scour the old bones white, wash away all the stains. The last little chambermaid had trotted along the causeway long ago and now the tide, fated as I, came tumbling in, the crisp wavelets splashing on the old stones.

'You do not deserve this,' he said.

'Who can say what I deserve or no?' I said. 'I've done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.'

'You disobeyed him,' he said. 'That is sufficient reason for him to punish you.'

'I only did what he knew I would.' 'Like Eve,' he said.

The telephone rang a shrill imperative. Let it ring. But my lover lifted me up and set me on my feet; I knew I must answer it. The receiver felt heavy as earth.

'The courtyard. Immediately.'

My lover kissed me, he took my hand. He would come with me if I would lead him. Courage. When I thought of courage, I thought of my mother. Then I saw a muscle in my lover's face quiver.

'Hoofbeats!' he said.

I cast one last, desperate glance from the window and, like a miracle, I saw a horse and rider galloping at a vertiginous speed along the causeway, though the waves crashed, now, high as the horse's fetlocks. A rider, her black skirts tucked up around her waist so she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnificent horsewoman in widow's weeds.

As the telephone rang again. 'Am I to wait all morning?'

Every moment, my mother drew nearer.

'She will be too late,' Jean-Yves said and yet he could not restrain a note of hope that, though it must be so, yet it might not be so.

The third, intransigent call.

'Shall I come up to heaven to fetch you down, Saint Cecilia? You wicked woman, do you wish me to compound my crimes by desecrating the marriage bed?'

So I must go to the courtyard where my husband waited in his London-tailored trousers and the shirt from Turnbull and Asser, beside the mounting block, with, in his hand, the sword which his great-grandfather had presented to the little corporal, in token of surrender to the Republic, before he shot himself. The heavy sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal.

When my husband saw my companion, he observed: 'Let the blind lead the blind, eh? But does even a youth as besotted as you are think she was truly blind to her own desires when she took my ring? Give it me back, whore.'

The fires in the opal had all died down. I gladly slipped it from my finger and, even in that dolorous place, my heart was lighter for the lack of it. My husband took it lovingly and lodged it on the tip of his little finger; it would go no further.

'It will serve me for a dozen more fiancées,' he said. 'To the block, woman. No--leave the boy; I shall deal with him later, utilizing a less exalted instrument than the one with which I do my wife the honour of her immolation, for do not fear that in death you will be divided.'

Slowly, slowly, one foot before the other, I crossed the cobbles. The longer I dawdled over my execution, the more time it gave the avenging angel to descend ...

'Don't loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel ... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!'

He raised the sword and cut bright segments from the air with it, but still I lingered although my hopes, so recently raised, now began to flag. If she is not here by now, her horse must have stumbled on the causeway, have plunged into the sea ... One thing only made me glad; that my lover would not see me die.

My husband laid my branded forehead on the stone and, as he had done once before, twisted my hair into a rope and drew it away from my neck.

'Such a pretty neck,' he said with what seemed to be a genuine, retrospective tenderness. 'A neck like the stem of a young plant.'

I felt the silken bristle of his beard and the wet touch of his lips as he kissed my nape. And, once again, of my apparel I must retain only my gems; the sharp blade ripped my dress in two and it fell from me. A little green moss, growing in the crevices of the mounting block, would be the last thing I should see in all the world.

The whizz of that heavy sword.

And--a great battering and pounding at the gate, the jangling of the bell, the frenzied neighing of a horse! The unholy silence of the place shattered in an instant. The blade did not descend, the necklace did not sever, my head did not roll. For, for an instant, the beast wavered in his stroke, a sufficient split second of astonished indecision to let me spring upright and dart to the assistance of my lover as he struggled sightlessly with the great bolts that kept her out.

The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as if he had been watching his beloved Tristan for the twelfth, the thirteenth time and Tristan stirred, then leapt from his bier in the last act, announced in a jaunty aria interposed from Verdi that bygones were bygones, crying over spilt milk did nobody any good and, as for himself, he proposed to live happily ever after. The puppet master, open- mouthed, wide-eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves; the king, aghast, witnesses the revolt of his pawns.

You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice. And my husband stood stock-still, as if she had been Medusa, the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs.

And then it was as though a curious child pushed his centime into the slot and set all in motion. The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury, and, wielding the honourable sword as if it were a matter of death or glory, charged us, all three.

On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head.

We lead a quiet life, the three of us. I inherited, of course, enormous wealth but we have given most of it away to various charities. The castle is now a school for the blind, though I pray that the children who live there are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, crying for, the husband who will never return to the bloody chamber, the contents of which are buried or burned, the door sealed.

I felt I had a right to retain sufficient funds to start a little music school here, on the outskirts of Paris, and we do well enough. Sometimes we can even afford to go to the Opéra, though never to sit in a box, of course. We know we are the source of many whisperings and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it and mere chatter can never harm us. I can only bless the--what shall I call it?--the maternal telepathy that sent my mother running headlong from the telephone to the station after I had called her, that night. I never heard you cry before, she said, by way of explanation. Not when you were happy. And who ever cried because of gold bath taps?

The night train, the one I had taken; she lay in her berth, sleepless as I had been. When she could not find a taxi at that lonely halt, she borrowed old Dobbin from a bemused farmer, for some internal urgency told her that she must reach me before the incoming tide sealed me away from her for ever. My poor old nurse, left scandalized at home--what? interrupt milord on his honeymoon?--she died soon after. She had taken so much secret pleasure in the fact that her little girl had become a marquise; and now here I was, scarcely a penny the richer, widowed at seventeen in the most dubious circumstances and busily engaged in setting up house with a piano-tuner. Poor thing, she passed away in a sorry state of disillusion! But I do believe my mother loves him as much as I do.

No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he cannot see it--not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart--but, because it spares my shame.

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sugarcyanide · 7 years

Text

God Among Men

This was going to be a submission to an anthology. My life tumbled and changed and I never submitted. I am posting it here to share, for now.

A God Among Men By Sugar Cyanide

Sometimes you don’t choose your Gods they choose you…

I should preface this with a little background information about myself. I have always been a rebel without a cause and become more of a rebel when given a cause. When everyone is turning right I must go left, usually, the reason is arbitrary at best. The more someone pushes me to go with the herd the more I will fight them and I do enjoy a good fight.

Many moons ago when I was a young Gothling, a wannabe Baby Bat. I had just graduated from high school and was living on my own. While attending the local community college I fell into a group of outcasts. (As one social outcast can only find another.) I soon found what was affectionately called Freaks Corner a section of the cafeteria where all of us misfits hung out. We were there in between classes, during classes and some of us didn’t even attend school there anymore. It was here in Freaks Corner where I graduated from a research Pagan to a practicing Pagan. Freaks Corner was my Mecca, it was everything I always fantasized about in the French Revolution cafes, where writers like Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas met till the wee hours of the morning drinking and debating, right there in modern Suburbia. It was here that I met my first real-life Pagans. People who knew about the things I was just learning and not some faceless screen name half a world way via an internet connection.

They were some of the very worst kind of Pagans that I could have fallen in with. I learned much during my time there everything except what I was taking classes on. In between LARPing Vampire the Masquerade and playing Magic the Gathering was discussions on Nietzsche, Satanism, and Anarchy. This is also where I met my first Unofficial Teacher.

I say unofficial because she refused to teach me. She had taken many a student under her wing but always refused my requests. Finally, she told me that she only teaches those who are not naturally gifted. That she was the “Special Ed” teacher. I never fully accepted this flattering refusal and figured that there was another reason she would never tell me. As one who was never easily deterred, I learned much from her by simply watching and observing.

In this group of people, there were those who dabbled in things they shouldn’t. Soon their eyes started to gleam with a sheen that is a characteristic often associated with movie villains. Everyone in the group started to go off their hinges a bit and the rumors ran rampant. There was talk of demon summoning and animal sacrifice, none of which I was a part of nor saw. I shrugged most of it off as vicious gossip and did my best to not get involved.

My life took a turn as it does and I was pulled away from the group. I would not run into any of them until years later. I had just come out of the Broom Closet to my then husband and was looking for those of like mind that I could share my beliefs. I ran into the old group from Freaks Corner who had graduated to taking up space in a local coffee house. Upon running into my old mentor this time I was drawn into the web like that of a fly to a spider. She had a habit of holding court at a friend’s place around the corner where she would proceed to channel and let herself be ridden by the spirits of her choice, much to the awe and amusement to those in her audience.

At the time the things I experienced in that room was extremely convincing and scary. The things I took part of in my own ignorance. Looking back now I do wonder how much of it was real and how much of it was a great manipulation, an answer I shall never know.

It was during such a session that the name of Set was brought up. She had stated that someone in the group had caught his attention and that he would be watching them. At which point my eye was drawn upward and what did I see? It was like a great ripping of the fabric of reality someone one had pulled way the ceiling and was peering in. With big eyes and a Cheshire grin staring right at me.

Now understand I am not an Egyptian reconstructionist and never was. I did not know who Set was at the time and didn’t really know the Egyptian Pantheon. I was still searching and that was simply not a direction my quest had gone. While I am thankful for those who research and preserve the Egyptian traditions it was simply a path I had yet to cross.

That moment of meeting Set was in the fall. The following was a year of hell. Set was literally invoked into my life and he literally destroyed everything that was not needed. For those that read Tarot, it was like getting the Death card and the Tower card in the same reading. I was completely stripped bare of everything that I had built up from before that time and had to completely start over from scratch. I lost my home, my business, divorced my husband and became seriously ill. He was a sandstorm that came into my life and stripped me down to my bones. His only response to my pleas for mercy was. “I like my children strong you will survive or perish. Anything else matters not.”

I have learned that Set is the epitome of Tough Love. Sink or Swim. I do not regret that time. I learned so much in such a short time. While the learning process was painful one does not forget those lessons because the pain has etched them into your memory. And the rewards of survival the rewards of succeeding after such tribulations are great. My reward was Rocky.

Set is still apart of my life. Sometimes he visits and drops wisdom bombs into my life. Other times he just shows up for a chat.

My God comes to me at night. He whispers in my ear, “Come, you must tell my side of the story”. I pull my overly tired body from the warmth of my bed. Sitting down at my desk, I proceed to transcribe his words as they are dancing the air. He sits beside me on my beat up cat fur covered couch in a suit cut to fit like a glove. Dark royal blue with a soft slate gray pinstripe, a crisp white shirt underneath with the collar open at his throat. His carrot orange-red hair is swept off his face as his finely woven dreadlocks fall to his waist. He smiles at me with a big toothy grin. Chewing on his cigar the gold rings flash on his fingers. It is a cross between corporate executive and old school mobster. Just enough thug, as they say, to know he doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. “Write my story,” he says his voice a low rumble next to me, “tell my side.”

Today, I have a story to tell. My brother’s name has been known across the millennia and I with it, as his murderer. While his story has been told and retold across the centuries, mine has been lost. I have played my part and done my duty, but the world has changed and our names have become mere echoes of the past. My duty is over and now it is my turn to share my tale.

Several millennia ago when the world was a much simpler place, a Tribal King celebrated in the news that his Queen would give birth to twin sons. It was a joyous occasion indeed, for one son was a blessing but two was a gift from the Gods. The King was most joyous for He was a hardened man and had fought many battles. Life was difficult and many died young. Having two sons was a great boon indeed for Him and His kingdom.

The day of birth came and the Queen was in labor for hours. Eventually, Her first son arrived, he was small, smaller than normal. He barely fit across both of the King’s palms. The Midwife feared he would not make it through the night. Shortly thereafter, the next baby was born. He was significantly larger than his brother and his skin was as pale as fresh milk, his hair was bright reddish white and his eyes shone red as blood. The Midwife almost dropped the boy out pure shock after she pulled him from his mother. Seeing the mother passed out from exhaustion, the Midwife laid the babe down in his cradle and fled. She was afraid that the King would blame her for this Demon Child, (and rightfully so for that boy was me.)

It took the King’s men a matter of days to hunt her down. She gave herself away by sharing her knowledge of the King��s Demon Child. It was only natural for the King to blame her. He couldn’t blame Himself and certainly not his Lady Love. Someone had to take the blame. I wasn’t quite old enough to shoulder that responsibility, just yet.

Despite my Father’s distaste for me and my Mother’s horror, I grew up in the comfort of love that only one twin brother can have for another. We protected each other; him, me from Father’s wrath and I; him from all the larger boys that would dare bully him. We were polar opposites. I was overly large, pale, red-eyed and haired, sensitive to the sun while he was smaller, dark complected with skin as dark as night and loved to bask in the sun’s afternoon rays. Our differences didn’t matter, we loved each other. Until one day that all changed.

I always felt, that my place was at my brother’s side as his protector. I knew that he as the elder of the two would ascend the throne of our Tribal Kingdom. I felt him no envy. It’s a tedious job being King and much simpler being a soldier. I was willing to give him my life for he was the only one that loved me.

One day a Great Wise One came down out of the mountains. Upon arrival, He demanded to speak to the King. ( In my ignorance, I was surprised that such a meeting was allowed. ) He came bearing a tale of a great slithering beast that would devour us all. I merely thought he was a mad old man but my Father clearly knew better. When the Great Wise One produced a scale that was the size of a chariot and reflected the colors of dawn, I knew He told no madman’s tale. The Wise One demanded a tribute: my Father’s best soldiers to fight the beast. My Father said He would send aid under one condition. The Wise One must find a suitable wife for his eldest son. The Wise One chuckled, saying he would do better and bring wives for both his sons. At this, my Father exploded into a rage, denouncing me as his son, saying that a demon such as I could have never come from his seed. I had always known my Father’s disdain for me, but there is knowing and then there is displaying it for the whole world to see. My Father sent me with the Wise One saying he could spare no one else, fully expecting me not to return.

After having prepared for the journey; shoring off my waist-length locks, burning them as was custom. The Wise One and I set upon our journey and I said farewell to the only home I have ever known, in full acceptance of meeting my death. Alas, that was far from happening. Shortly into our journey, The Wise One revealed his true glimmering nature. He was no old and feeble wizard but a God. He told me that it was true that I was not my Father’s son and to my surprise nor my Mother’s child. Neither was my brother, he said with a toothy grin, " I created you both from Earth and Sky, my children, and implanted you both into your Mother’s womb. Come, my child, let us fight this beast like the Gods that we are."

We had walked miles and traversed much ground. We traveled in a way no human can truly fathom. As you put one foot in front of the other, the whole earth spins, traveling miles in one stride. At the time I was so in awe of my new situation, I was quite dumbfounded and could not properly begin to take in everything that was happening. We eventually arrived at a place in-between. It was neither of the heavens nor of the earth and yet as above so below, so the landscape mirrored what was known to me. We had journeyed into the Underworld and boarded a sailing barge.

The Shining One had said we would find the One That Slithers in the deepest of waters. So I stood at the prow of the barge with my spear ready. At the first sign of the large iridescent scales, I struck without hesitation. The battle ensued for what seemed like hours. As I became covered in the beast’s gore, my muscles grew sore and the ship rocked in the mighty turbulence of the waters. ( I felt myself growing weaker and started to fear I would fail when the Shining One cast his light upon me giving me a strength I never dreamed possible. )

When I thought all was lost, with one final blow, a great sound was released from the beast and the waters trembled no more. I had won, I had defeated the beast. The Shining One looked at me with a sadness in his eyes, “You have defeated the Great Evil and have saved the world of man for yet another day but this victory comes at a price,” as a tear slid down his cheek.

I took the head of the Great Serpent as my victory trophy. We returned as we came, the light of dawn’s first rays lighting our way. I carried the head of the Great Serpent received much attention. When we had returned to my home we had a great entourage with us creating a spectacle upon my Father’s doorstep. My Father came out to investigate what all the excitement was about. Upon seeing the head of the Beast in my hands I saw pride for me in his eyes for the very first time. “Son,” he said loudly, "you do our family a great honor.”

It was in that moment that I had gained my Father’s love that I had lost my brother’s. The Wise Shining One kept his word and brought twin sisters from the Kingdom in the lower lands. Shortly thereafter, we were wedded. After a short while of peace and celebration, I was once again called upon to defeat the Great Slithering Beast. I parted sadly with my new bride, unsure if I were to return.

Alas, duty called and I was the only one with the strength to do what was needed. This soon became an endless cycle, for this beast was of no earthly making. It would soon recover from its most grievous injuries and I would be called away yet again. My wife grew tired of my absences and she started looking for companionship elsewhere.

My brother, having never forgotten how I replaced him in my Fathers eyes, plotted to replace me in my wife’s. I never blamed my sweet wife nor her calculating sister. I had been gone a particularly long time and my wife was fat with child. I was tired when I returned, but seeing her full of life made my heart soar.

It wasn’t until later that I learned that I wasn’t the only possible father. After a while, it began to eat at me that my brother had taken the only thing that had ever meant anything to me. I still continued to battle the beast, for it was a never-ending war. In time, our Father passed and my brother took his place. I realized one day that the Battle Of The Beast was the only thing I had that my brother hadn’t taken from me. After a while, I could not bear to touch my wife, which drove her even more into the arms of my brother. As my son grew I could not see myself in him.

I came to a place where I didn’t want to fight the Demon Beast anymore and the Demon spoke to me during one of our many battles. He told me to build a vessel fit for one person and bring my brother to him. The Beast will take it as a sacrifice and I would be free of my brother and his greediness.

I was weak, I was hurt and when I came home and found my brother in bed with my wife, I did as the Beast spoke. I crafted the finest vessel, gloating how it was made for me. When my brother sought to take it, as he had taken everything else, he was trapped. I gave him to the demon serpent, who drowned him and rent him to bits. I was free from my brother or so I thought…

The Beast did take my brother to the Underworld, where he eventually rose to be King, while I united the upper and lower Kingdoms and created peace in our land. Until my brother’s son wanted revenge for the loss of his father and the cycle started all over again.

For I am Set, and this is my story of how I became a God among men.

#set #egyptian #kemetic #upg #pagan #spirituality #witch #personal path

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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Animorphs/Wicked

@miraculoussparrow requested more information about an Animorphs and Wicked fic I speculated about a while ago. My idle thoughts turned into a whole mini-fusion, so here’s part one of two—I divided it in half for the sake of sanity. [You do not have to be familiar with Wicked to follow, although I do recommend the soundtrack strongly.]

No One Mourns the Wicked Some small part of Cassie is perversely grateful when she steps up to the podium at Rachel’s funeral and never gets the chance to utter a single word. She’s already choking on fear, desperate to get this right and devastated by the knowledge she won’t be able to—and then she’s drowned out by the sudden and devastating poppoppoppopBANG of fireworks that rattles the graveyard with a horror of sound.

Someone, somewhere across town is having a parade. Because of course. Because the war’s over, and this is a happy occasion. She can hear them singing, in the silence left between explosions. The graveyard itself is silent, the mourners shellshocked into stillness.

Later she’ll stumble away into the city, tear-blind, inadequate eulogy a crumpled wad of paper in her pocket, and a total stranger will pull her into a hug so suddenly she starts morphing in surprise. After she registers what the woman is saying—it’s a babbled string of gratitude and joy, nearly incoherent—she pulls away more gently. Later that night someone will thrust a bottle of wine into her hands; someone else will gently place a pileus on her head. Five more total strangers will shake her hand; sixteen will recognize her long enough to shout thanks or praise. It’s the single largest celebration their small city has ever seen.

Surrounded on all sides by singing and clapping, wearing a crown of yellow flowers she doesn’t remember receiving, Cassie thinks back to the last sight she saw before leaving the graveyard. Jake was silhouetted against the last light of dusk, shoulders hunched and shaking as he stood over the far headstone two rows down from Rachel’s, smaller and unadorned but part of the Berenson family plot all the same. They both deserve better than this gaudy horrorshow. All of them do.

One Short Day The first time Cassie suspected that girl Rachel she knew from camp was going to be her best friend, they were on the playground in third grade. Rachel had marched over to where a fifth-grade boy was making fun of Cassie’s shoes to shove her face up against the older boy’s. “Yeah, Cassie’s got old sneakers,” she said brazenly. “So what?”

Amazing the power of those words, so what, to shut down anyone who criticized their clothes or their voices or anything about them. Cassie never learned to say them with the confidence that Rachel used, but she learned to hold her head up high all the same.

Rachel was the one who taught Cassie about the sheer power that came with not caring—or at least appearing not to care—what other people thought. They were both weird, both not quite perfectly aligned with what the other girls in their class thought they should be. Rachel kicked all the boys’ butts at soccer in gym class and shouted out correct answers without bothering to raise her hand, even though girls were supposed to scorn sports and wait their turn before speaking. Cassie wore jeans with bird poop and cared more about equestrian health standards than My Little Pony dolls, even though she was supposed to wear pink dresses and fantasize about horses without actually owning any. The thing was, Rachel could get away with being the wrong kind of girl, because she was joyous and unapologetic in her rebellion, able to laugh in the face of anyone who had a problem with the way she acted. Cassie could get away with it too, because when you were friends with Rachel there was pride rather than shame in standing out from the crowd.

What is This Feeling? Dearest Daddy and Mom, Rachel wrote in her best penmanship. (Given that she was seven years old, the best that can be said is that it was legible.) Sleepaway camp has a lot of fun things. Today I made a friendship bracelet and learned how to tie a knot. The only thing is my bunkmate. Here, Rachel chewed on her pen in thought, trying to come up with a way to describe the weird girl with the overalls and the boyishly short hair without being mean. It wasn’t like there was anything wrong with Cassie, after all. She just didn’t know anything about Limited Too or Boys 2 Men or Nintendo. And she had the weirdest stories. She’s weird, and her clothes are awful, but she’s the best in camp at woodcrafts which is dumb, Rachel wrote at last. I miss you guys. Please write back.

Hi Dad, Cassie scribbled on camp stationary. I hope you and Cinnamon and Misty and Star and Blaze and all the other horses and the sick crow and the baby foxes and also Mom are all good. I am not good. Camp is stupid. Our cabin leader is super old, like 15 or 16, but she STILL doesn’t know the difference between ash leaves and elm leaves. My bunkmate is the stupidest part. She thinks ponies are a type of horse and paints her nails before we go pick up bugs in the woods and wears dresses on the jungle gym. She brought 5 pairs of sandals to camp and wears more hair clips than anyone I ever saw. Just because she’s the best in camp at gymnastics doesn’t mean I like her. Please please please please please please please come pick me up.

Walter didn’t come to pick Cassie up, and good thing too: later that week she and Rachel beat every single other pair of bunkmates at the Nature Fun Time Obstacle Course, working together to rush through the activities (and across the rope bridge, and underneath the zip line, and all over the Fun Facts Path) in record time. They won tickets to free ice cream at a shop downtown for the entire summer. But it meant far more to Cassie when Rachel ran up on their last day, friendship bracelet in hand, and tied it around Cassie’s wrist.

For Good Cassie always knew that Crayak would find a way to get revenge against Rachel and Jake for the way they’d hurt him. She just never imagined it would come like this: the sharp whistle of a rock in the air followed by a hideous wet crunch of gristle and bone. She never knew the fallout could be this bad, Rachel’s skin so pale it has gone a dull grey color except for the places on her hands where David’s blood seeped between her fingers. Rachel came out of the warehouse silent and shaking, and Cassie couldn’t find it in herself to say anything.

Not until, a hundred yards down the sidewalk, Rachel drew a sharp breath and started crying in near-silence.

“You’re right about me,” Cassie blurted, for something to say. “I’m not strong enough. I can’t do it. I can’t be like you. I’m sorry.”

Rachel whirled around, grabbing Cassie by the arm. “That’s a good thing. Don’t be sorry. People like me would be nothing without people like you.” She shook herself off. “No. Worse. Without you…” She made a sharp gesture back to the warehouse. “I’d be him.”

“That’s not…”

“I know myself.” She barked a laugh. “You’re the only reason I’m still a halfway decent person.”

Cassie did her best not to notice the splotch of David’s blood that had transferred to her arm. “You realize it goes both ways, right? Without you, I’d have quit years ago and left the rest of you to die.”

Thank Goodness People cry during weddings, Cassie reminds herself. It’s perfectly normal to be crying on her wedding day. So what if she happens to be crying for entirely the wrong reason?

It’s the dress. It’s the long cakelike frills of the dress and it’s the fact that when she looked in the mirror after the stylist was done with her veil, all she could think of was what Rachel would say to see her so swankified. It’s the way that Ronnie is so patient and kind and loving, so willing to wake Cassie from nightmares and hold her close every year on Christmas, on Victory-Earth Day, on the anniversary of the date Marco and the others were officially declared Missing Presumed Dead. It’s the fact that he is so good to her, in a way no one else ever has been… and she still can’t bring herself to love him.

Ronnie has never lost patience, has never stopped being devoted and sweet. He’s also never killed someone to save her life. He’s never stood shoulder-to-shoulder and flank-to-flank with her as they marched into battle. He’s never committed a terrible crime so that Cassie herself wouldn’t have to, and he’ll never know the terrible crimes Cassie herself has had to commit anyway.

He never tore a piece of her heart out, either. He never went and died on her because she couldn’t find the words to keep him here.

Cassie lowers her veil to hide her tears, and she picks up her bouquet. She’s as ready as she’ll ever be.

Not That Girl “And then,” Rachel said, “he showed me this spot downtown where they’re putting new tar down on a parking lot, and my god.” She whistled between her teeth. “You can just coast up and up until you’re miles off the ground, and then you dive… And he just figured this out, all on his own. He’s, like, some kind of genius at this.”

Cassie shifted to a more comfortable position on the end of her bed, trying to look like she was enjoying this conversation. She got it, really she did. Tobias had those big soft eyes—well, sometimes—and that sharp sense of humor and that knack for picking up new skills on the fly… He was sweet but also practical, melancholy but willing to be sarcastic too.

It didn’t stop her from wanting to cry sometimes when Rachel talked about him.

“Anyway, how are you and Jake?” Rachel asked, flopping over in her sleeping bag to look Cassie in the eye.

Cassie laughed, looking down. She and Jake were experimenting. Feeling each other out. Hoping for a spark that would probably never come. They were friends, and she loved him as a friend, but... But she wanted what she couldn’t have.

Because if she had it her way, Jake wouldn’t be the one who held her hand and tried to work up the nerve to kiss her goodnight. Tobias wouldn’t be the one that put that starry-eyed smile on Rachel’s face. Rachel wouldn’t be on the floor during their sleepovers, she’d be right next to Cassie in the bed—

“Enough about boys,” Cassie said quickly, shocked by the direction of her own thoughts. “You want to go get some of my dad’s hot chocolate with chili powder?”

The Wizard and I During the war, sometimes, Cassie would think back to the call she got late one night in eighth grade. Rachel had been almost laughing as she spoke, enthusiasm bubbling through in every word. It took Cassie a while to parse what Rachel was talking about, but finally she figured it out: Melissa’s dad had given them the number of this new organization in town, and the new organization was willing to sponsor any young athletes who joined it.

Sponsor, in this case, meant just about anything. Mr. Chapman had assured them that student athletes who joined the Sharing could access its full resources for buying uniforms, connecting to coaches, and even meeting the big names in the field. (“Dominique Dawes! Amy Chow! Kerri Strug!” Rachel said, and Cassie made noises of agreement like these names meant anything at all.) She might not have understood some of what Rachel was gushing about with competition levels and professional trainers, but she found herself grinning anyway. It was always so cool to hear how amped Rachel got about everything from sales at Express to WNBA results, because Rachel was the kind of person who could make anything brighter or more special with the way she saw it.

They’d taken a shortcut home through the construction site the very next night. Cassie thought of that phone call, sometimes, as the last time their future had been clear and bright and easily understood.

Part 2 Here

#animorphs ficlet #animorphs au #long post #wicked fusion #wicked #miraculoussparrow #mama nature #Xena: Warrior Princess #rachel berenson #songfic

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bluebeards-wife · 6 years

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The Bloody Chamber

Written by Angela Carter (1979)

And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the concert programs I'd abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughter's wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife. Are you sure, she'd said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress he'd bought me, wrapped up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallized fruit. Are you sure you love him? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, finer than anything she'd worn since that adventurous girlhood in Indo-China, daughter of a rich tea planter. My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I? 'Are you sure you love him?' 'I'm sure I want to marry him,' I said. And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluctance that she might at last banish the specter of poverty from its habitual place at our meager table. For my mother herself had gladly, scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a cigar box full of medals and the antique service revolver that my mother, grown magnificently eccentric in hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case--how I teased her--she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocer's shop. Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds as if the railway company had lit up all the stations through which we passed in celebration of the bride. My satin nightdress had just been shaken from its wrappings; it had slipped over my young girl's pointed breasts and shoulders, supple as a garment of heavy water, and now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs as I shifted restlessly in my narrow berth. His kiss, his kiss with tongue and teeth in it and a rasp of beard, had hinted to me, though with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress he'd given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously deferred until we lay in his great ancestral bed in the sea-girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination ... that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny. Above the syncopated roar of the train, I could hear his even, steady breathing. Only the communicating door kept me from my husband and it stood open. If I rose up on my elbow, I could see the dark, leonine shape of his head and my nostrils caught a whiff of the opulent male scent of leather and spices that always accompanied him and sometimes, during his courtship, had been the only hint he gave me that he had come into my mother's sitting room, for, though he was a big man, he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet, as if his footfall turned the carpet into snow. He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behind me with his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his box of marrons glacés, lay his offering upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a Debussy prelude. But that perfume of spiced leather always betrayed him; after my first shock, I was forced always to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed. He was older than I. He was much older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane. But his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures have been eroded by successive tides. And sometimes that face, in stillness when he listened to me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underneath this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the face in which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a face unsigned by the years. And, elsewhere, I might see him plain. Elsewhere. But, where? In, perhaps, that castle to which the train now took us, that marvelous castle in which he had been born. Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said: 'Yes,' still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy composure of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very gravity. He had the ring ready in a leather box lined with crimson velvet, a fire opal the size of a pigeon's egg set in a complicated circle of dark antique gold. My old nurse, who still lived with my mother and me, squinted at the ring askance: opals are bad luck, she said. But this opal had been his own mother's ring, and his grandmother's, and her mother's before that, given to an ancestor by Catherine de Medici ... every bride that came to the castle wore it, time out of mind. And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them? asked the old woman rudely; yet she was a snob. She hid her incredulous joy at my marital coup--her little Marquise--behind a façade of fault-finding. But, here, she touched me. I shrugged and turned my back pettishly on her. I did not want to remember how he had loved other women before me, but the knowledge often teased me in the threadbare self-confidence of the small hours. I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis had been married before, more than once, and I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me. Indeed, was he not still in mourning for his last wife? Tsk, tsk, went my old nurse. And even my mother had been reluctant to see her girl whisked off by a man so recently bereaved. A Romanian countess, a lady of high fashion. Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating accident, at his home, in Brittany. They never found her body but I rummaged through the back copies of the society magazines my old nanny kept in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet worldly thing whose natural habitat must have been some luxurious interior decorator's jungle filled with potted palms and tame, squawking parakeets. Before that? Her face is common property; everyone painted her but the Redon engraving I liked best, The Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night. To see her skeletal, enigmatic grace, you would never think she had been a barmaid in a café in Montmartre until Puvis de Chavannes saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elongated thighs to his brush. And yet it was the absinthe doomed her, or so they said. The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva; I had heard her sing Isolde, precociously musical child that I was, taken to the opera for a birthday treat. My first opera; I had heard her sing Isolde. With what white-hot passion had she burned from the stage! So that you could tell she would die young. We sat high up, halfway to heaven in the gods, yet she half-blinded me. And my father, still alive (oh, so long ago), took hold of my sticky little hand, to comfort me, in the last act, yet all I heard was the glory of her voice. Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widow's child with my mouse-coloured hair that still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so recently been freed, my bony hips, my nervous, pianist's fingers. He was rich as Croesus. The night before our wedding--a simple affair, at the Mairie, because his countess was so recently gone--he took my mother and me, curious coincidence, to see Tristan. And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached so during the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him. Yes. I did. On his arm, all eyes were upon me. The whispering crowd in the foyer parted like the Red Sea to let us through. My skin crisped at his touch. How my circumstances had changed since the first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such a charge of deathly passion in them! Now, we sat in a loge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided, bewigged flunkey brought us a silver bucket of iced champagne in the interval. The froth spilled over the rim of my glass and drenched my hands, I thought: My cup runneth over. And I had on a Poiret dress. He had prevailed upon my reluctant mother to let him buy my trousseau; what would I have gone to him in, otherwise? Twice-darned underwear, faded gingham, serge skirts, hand-me-downs. So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts. And everyone stared at me. And at his wedding gift. His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat. After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who'd escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera comes back to me even now ... the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood. I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I'd never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away. The next day, we were married. The train slowed, shuddered to a halt. Lights; clank of metal; a voice declaring the name of an unknown, never-to-be visited station; silence of the night; the rhythm of his breathing, that I should sleep with, now, for the rest of my life. And I could not sleep. I stealthily sat up, raised the blind a little and huddled against the cold window that misted over with the warmth of my breathing, gazing out at the dark platform towards those rectangles of domestic lamplight that promised warmth, company, a supper of sausages hissing in a pan on the stove for the station master, his children tucked up in bed asleep in the brick house with the painted shutters ... all the paraphernalia of the everyday world from which I, with my stunning marriage, had exiled myself. Into marriage, into exile; I sensed it, I knew it--that, henceforth, I would always be lonely. Yet that was part of the already familiar weight of the fire opal that glimmered like a gypsy's magic ball, so that I could not take my eyes off it when I played the piano. This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies, the wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and Worth, his scent of Russian leather--all had conspired to seduce me so utterly that I could not say I felt one single twinge of regret for the world of tar-tines and maman that now receded from me as if drawn away on a string, like a child's toy, as the train began to throb again as if in delighted anticipation of the distance it would take me. The first grey streamers of the dawn now flew in the sky and an eldritch half-light seeped into the railway carriage. I heard no change in his breathing but my heightened, excited senses told me he was awake and gazing at me. A huge man, an enormous man, and his eyes, dark and motionless as those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi, fixed upon me. I felt a certain tension in the pit of my stomach, to be so watched, in such silence. A match struck. He was igniting a Romeo y Julieta fat as a baby's arm. 'Soon,' he said in his resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival head. Then the flame died, the cigar glowed and filled the compartment with a remembered fragrance that made me think of my father, how he would hug me in a warm fug of Havana, when I was a little girl, before he kissed me and left me and died. As soon as my husband handed me down from the high step of the train, I smelled the amniotic salinity of the ocean. It was November; the trees, stunted by the Atlantic gales, were bare and the lonely halt was deserted but for his leather-gaitered chauffeur waiting meekly beside the sleek black motor car. It was cold; I drew my furs about me, a wrap of white and black, broad stripes of ermine and sable, with a collar from which my head rose like the calyx of a wildflower. (I swear to you, I had never been vain until I met him.) The bell clanged; the straining train leapt its leash and left us at that lonely wayside halt where only he and I had descended. Oh, the wonder of it; how all that might of iron and steam had paused only to suit his convenience. The richest man in France. 'Madame.' The chauffeur eyed me; was he comparing me, invidiously, to the countess, the artist's model, the opera singer? I hid behind my furs as if they were a system of soft shields. My husband liked me to wear my opal over my kid glove, a showy, theatrical trick--but the moment the ironic chauffeur glimpsed its simmering flash he smiled, as though it was proof positive I was his master's wife. And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, orange of tiger-lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from a florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream. Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea--a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being continuously on the point of melting. A landscape with all the deliquescent harmonies of Debussy, of the études I played for him, the reverie I'd been playing that afternoon in the salon of the princess where I'd first met him, among the teacups and the little cakes, I, the orphan, hired out of charity to give them their digestive of music. And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day ... that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place! The tide was low; at this hour, so early in the morning, the causeway rose up out of the sea. As the car turned on to the wet cobbles between the slow margins of water, he reached out for my hand that had his sultry, witchy ring on it, pressed my fingers, kissed my palm with extraordinary tenderness. His face was as still as ever I'd seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over, yet his lips, that always looked so strangely red and naked between the black fringes of his beard, now curved a little. He smiled; he welcomed his bride home. No room, no corridor that did not rustle with the sound of the sea and all the ceilings, the walls on which his ancestors in the stern regalia of rank lined up with their dark eyes and white faces, were stippled with refracted light from the waves which were always in motion; that luminous, murmurous castle of which I was the chatelaine, I, the little music student whose mother had sold all her jewellery, even her wedding ring, to pay the fees at the Conservatoire. First of all, there was the small ordeal of my initial interview with the housekeeper, who kept this extraordinary machine, this anchored, castellated ocean liner, in smooth running order no matter who stood on the bridge; how tenuous, I thought, might be my authority here! She had a bland, pale, impassive, dislikeable face beneath the impeccably starched white linen head-dress of the region. Her greeting, correct but lifeless, chilled me; daydreaming, I dared presume too much on my status ... briefly wondered how I might install my old nurse, so much loved, however cosily incompetent, in her place. Ill-considered schemings! He told me this one had been his foster mother; was bound to his family in the utmost feudal complicity, 'as much part of the house as I am, my dear'. Now her thin lips offered me a proud little smile. She would be my ally as long as I was his. And with that, I must be content. But, here, it would be easy to be content. In the turret suite he had given me for my very own, I could gaze out over the tumultuous Atlantic and imagine myself the Queen of the Sea. There was a Bechstein for me in the music room and, on the wall, another wedding present--an early Flemish primitive of Saint Cecilia at her celestial organ. In the prim charm of this saint, with her plump, sallow cheeks and crinkled brown hair, I saw myself as I could have wished to be. I warmed to a loving sensitivity I had not hitherto suspected in him. Then he led me up a delicate spiral staircase to my bedroom; before she discreetly vanished, the housekeeper set him chuckling with some, I dare say, lewd blessing for newlyweds in her native Breton. That I did not understand. That he, smiling, refused to interpret. And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home, with the gargoyles carved on its surfaces of ebony, vermilion lacquer, gold leaf; and its white gauze curtains, billowing in the sea breeze. Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on all the walls, in stately frames of contorted gold, that reflected more white lilies than I'd ever seen in my life before. He'd filled the room with them, to greet the bride, the young bride. The young bride, who had become that multitude of girls I saw in the mirrors, identical in their chic navy blue tailor-mades, for travelling, madame, or walking. A maid had dealt with the furs. Henceforth, a maid would deal with everything. 'See,' he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. 'I have acquired a whole harem for myself!' I found that I was trembling. My breath came thickly. I could not meet his eye and turned my head away, out of pride, out of shyness, and watched a dozen husbands approach me in a dozen mirrors and slowly, methodically, teasingly, unfasten the buttons of my jacket and slip it from my shoulders. Enough! No; more! Off comes the skirt; and, next, the blouse of apricot linen that cost more than the dress I had for first communion. The play of the waves outside in the cold sun glittered on his monocle; his movements seemed to me deliberately coarse, vulgar. The blood rushed to my face again, and stayed there. And yet, you see, I guessed it might be so--that we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothel. Sheltered as my life had been, how could I have failed, even in the world of prim bohemia in which I lived, to have heard hints of his world? He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke--but do not imagine much finesse about it; this artichoke was no particular treat for the diner nor was he yet in any greedy haste. He approached his familiar treat with a weary appetite. And when nothing but my scarlet, palpitating core remained, I saw, in the mirror, the living image of an etching by Rops from the collection he had shown me when our engagement permitted us to be alone together ... the child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations. And so my purchaser unwrapped his bargain. And, as at the opera, when I had first seen my flesh in his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself stirring. At once he closed my legs like a book and I saw again the rare movement of his lips that meant he smiled. Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love. And I began to shudder, like a racehorse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom in great glass jars, those undertakers' lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you. This scene from a voluptuary's life was now abruptly terminated. It turns out he has business to attend to; his estates, his companies--even on your honeymoon? Even then, said the red lips that kissed me before he left me alone with my bewildered senses--a wet, silken brush from his beard; a hint of the pointed tip of the tongue. Disgruntled, I wrapped a neglige of antique lace around me to sip the little breakfast of hot chocolate the maid brought me; after that, since it was second nature to me, there was nowhere to go but the music room and soon I settled down at my piano. Yet only a series of subtle discords flowed from beneath my fingers: out of tune ... only a little out of tune; but I'd been blessed with perfect pitch and could not bear to play any more. Sea breezes are bad for pianos; we shall need a resident piano-tuner on the premises if I'm to continue with my studies! I flung down the lid in a little fury of disappointment; what should I do now, how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband beds me? I shivered to think of that. His library seemed the source of his habitual odour of Russian leather. Row upon row of calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spines, the octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco. A deep-buttoned leather sofa to recline on. A lectern, carved like a spread eagle, that held open upon it an edition of Huysmans's Là-bas, from some over-exquisite private press; it had been bound like a missal, in brass, with gems of coloured glass. The rugs on the floor, deep, pulsing blues of heaven and red of the heart's dearest blood, came from Isfahan and Bokhara; the dark panelling gleamed; there was the lulling music of the sea and a fire of apple logs. The flames flickered along the spines inside a glass-fronted case that held books still crisp and new. Eliphas Levy; the name meant nothing to me. I squinted at a title or two: The Initiation, The Key of Mysteries, The Secret of Pandora's Box, and yawned. Nothing, here, to detain a seventeen-year-old girl waiting for her first embrace. I should have liked, best of all, a novel in yellow paper; I wanted to curl up on the rug before the blazing fire, lose myself in a cheap novel, munch sticky liqueur chocolates. If I rang for them, a maid would bring me chocolates. Nevertheless, I opened the doors of that bookcase idly to browse. And I think I knew, I knew by some tingling of the fingertips, even before I opened that slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside it. When he showed me the Rops, newly bought, dearly prized, had he not hinted that he was a connoisseur of such things? Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held. The picture had a caption: 'Reproof of curiosity'. My mother, with all the precision of her eccentricity, had told me what it was that lovers did; I was innocent but not naïve. The Adventures of Eulalie at the Harem of the Grand Turk had been printed, according to the flyleaf, in Amsterdam in 1748, a rare collector's piece. Had some ancestor brought it back himself from that northern city? Or had my husband bought it for himself, from one of those dusty little bookshops on the Left Bank where an old man peers at you through spectacles an inch thick, daring you to inspect his wares ... I turned the pages in the anticipation of fear; the print was rusty. Here was another steel engraving: 'Immolation of the wives of the Sultan'. I knew enough for what I saw in that book to make me gasp. There was a pungent intensification of the odour of leather that suffused his library; his shadow fell across the massacre. 'My little nun has found the prayerbooks, has she?' he demanded, with a curious mixture of mockery and relish; then, seeing my painful, furious bewilderment, he laughed at me aloud, snatched the book from my hands and put it down on the sofa. 'Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn't play with grownups' toys until she's learned how to handle them, must she?' Then he kissed me. And with, this time, no reticence. He kissed me and laid his hand imperatively upon my breast, beneath the sheath of ancient lace. I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to the carved, gilded bed on which he had been conceived. I stammered foolishly: We've not taken luncheon yet; and, besides, it is broad daylight... All the better to see you. He made me put on my choker, the family heirloom of one woman who had escaped the blade. With trembling fingers, I fastened the thing about my neck. It was cold as ice and chilled me. He twined my hair into a rope and lifted it off my shoulders so that he could the better kiss the downy furrows below my ears; that made me shudder. And he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he intoned:' Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery.' A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside. I was brought to my senses by the insistent shrilling of the telephone. He lay beside me, felled like an oak, breathing stertorously, as if he had been fighting with me. In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the orgasm; I had bled. And perhaps I had seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity. I gathered myself together, reached into the cloisonne cupboard beside the bed that concealed the telephone and addressed the mouthpiece. His agent in New York. Urgent. I shook him awake and rolled over on my side, cradling my spent body in my arms. His voice buzzed like a hive of distant bees. My husband. My husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an embalming parlour. Those somnolent lilies, that wave their heavy heads, distributing their lush, insolent incense reminiscent of pampered flesh. When he'd finished with the agent, he turned to me and stroked the ruby necklace that bit into my neck, but with such tenderness now, that I ceased flinching and he caressed my breasts. My dear one, my little love, my child, did it hurt her? He's so sorry for it, such impetuousness, he could not help himself; you see, he loves her so ... and this lover's recitative of his brought my tears in a flood. I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it. For a while, he murmured to me in a voice I'd never heard before, a voice like the soft consolations of the sea. But then he unwound the tendrils of my hair from the buttons of his smoking jacket, kissed my cheek briskly and told me the agent from New York had called with such urgent business that he must leave as soon as the tide was low enough. Leave the castle? Leave France! And would be away for at least six weeks. 'But it is our honeymoon!' A deal, an enterprise of hazard and chance involving several millions, lay in the balance, he said. He drew away from me into that waxworks stillness of his; I was only a little girl, I did not understand. And, he said unspoken to my wounded vanity, I have had too many honeymoons to find them in the least pressing commitments. I know quite well that this child I've bought with a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts won't run away. But, after he'd called his Paris agent to book a passage for the States next day--just one tiny call, my little one--we should have time for dinner together. And I had to be content with that, A Mexican dish of pheasant with hazelnuts and chocolate; salad; white, voluptuous cheese; a sorbet of muscat grapes and Asti spumante. A celebration of Krug exploded festively. And then acrid black coffee in precious little cups so fine it shadowed the birds with which they were painted. I had Cointreau, he had cognac in the library, with the purple velvet curtains drawn against the night, where he took me to perch on his knee in a leather armchair beside the flickering log fire. He had made me change into that chaste little Poiret shift of white muslin; he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, each one, with a pink eye open. But he would not let me take off my ruby choker, although it was growing very uncomfortable, nor fasten up my descending hair, the sign of a virginity so recently ruptured that still remained a wounded presence between us. He twined his fingers in my hair until I winced; I said, I remember, very little. 'The maid will have changed our sheets already,' he said. 'We do not hang the bloody sheets out of the window to prove to the whole of Brittany you are a virgin, not in these civilized times. But I should tell you it would have been the first time in all my married lives I could have shown my interested tenants such a flag.' Then I realized, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him--the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Terrasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a piano with keys of ether. You must remember how ill at ease I was in that luxurious place, how unease had been my constant companion during the whole length of my courtship by this grave satyr who now gently martyrized my hair. To know that my naivety gave him some pleasure made me take heart. Courage! I shall act the fine lady to the manner born one day, if only by virtue of default. Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great, mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket--key after key, a key, he said, for every lock in the house. Keys of all kinds--huge, ancient things of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes. And, during his absence, it was I who must take care of them all. I eyed the heavy bunch with circumspection. Until that moment, I had not given a single thought to the practical aspects of marriage with a great house, great wealth, a great man, whose key ring was as crowded as that of a prison warder. Here were the clumsy and archaic keys for the dungeons, for dungeons we had in plenty although they had been converted to cellars for his wines; the dusty bottles inhabited in racks all those deep holes of pain in the rock on which the castle was built. These are the keys to the kitchens, this is the key to the picture gallery, a treasure house filled by five centuries of avid collectors--ah! he foresaw I would spend hours there. He had amply indulged his taste for the Symbolists, he told me with a glint of greed. There was Moreau's great portrait of his first wife, the famous Sacrificial Victim with the imprint of the lacelike chains on her pellucid skin. Did I know the story of the painting of that picture? How, when she took off her clothes for him for the first time, she fresh from her bar in Montmartre, she had robed herself involuntarily in a blush that reddened her breasts, her shoulders, her arms, her whole body? He had thought of that story, of that dear girl, when first he had undressed me ... Ensor, the great Ensor, his monolithic canvas: The Foolish Virgins. Two or three late Gauguins, his special favourite the one of the tranced brown girl in the deserted house which was called: Out of the Night We Come, Into the Night We Go. And, besides the additions he had made himself, his marvellous inheritance of Watteaus, Poussins and a pair of very special Fragonards, commissioned for a licentious ancestor who, it was said, had posed for the master's brush himself with his own two daughters ... He broke off his catalogue of treasures abruptly. Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect. A log fell in the fire, instigating a shower of sparks; the opal on my finger spurted green flame. I felt as giddy as if I were on the edge of a precipice; I was afraid, not so much of him, of his monstrous presence, heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us, the presence that, even when I thought myself most in love with him, always subtly oppressed me ... No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet--might there not be a grain of beastly truth hi them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption. Here is the key to the china cabinet--don't laugh, my darling; there's a king's ransom in Sèvres in that closet, and a queen's ransom in Limoges. And a key to the locked, barred room where five generations of plate were kept. Keys, keys, keys. He would trust me with the keys to his office, although I was only a baby; and the keys to his safes, where he kept the jewels I should wear, he promised me, when we returned to Paris. Such jewels! Why, I would be able to change my earrings and necklaces three times a day, just as the Empress Josephine used to change her underwear. He doubted, he said, with that hollow, knocking sound that served him for a chuckle, I would be quite so interested in his share certificates although they, of course, were worth infinitely more. Outside our firelit privacy, I could hear the sound of the tide drawing back from the pebbles of the foreshore; it was nearly time for him to leave me. One single key remained unaccounted for on the ring and he hesitated over it; for a moment, I thought he was going to unfasten it from its brothers, slip it back into his pocket and take it away with him. 'What is that key?' I demanded, for his chaffing had made me bold. 'The key to your heart? Give it me!' He dangled the key tantalizingly above my head, out of reach of my straining fingers; those bare red lips of his cracked sidelong in a smile. 'Ah, no,' he said. 'Not the key to my heart. Rather, the key to my enfer.' He left it on the ring, fastened the ring together, shook it musically, like a carillon. Then threw the keys in a jingling heap in my lap. I could feel the cold metal chilling my thighs through my thin muslin frock. He bent over me to drop a beard-masked kiss on my forehead. 'Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife,' he said. 'Promise me this, my whey-faced piano-player; promise me you'll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you. Play with anything you find, jewels, silver plate; make toy boats of my share certificates, if it pleases you, and send them sailing off to America after me. All is yours, everywhere is open to you--except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you ventured there. Oh, and you'd find it such a dull little room! But you must promise me, if you love me, to leave it well alone. It is only a private study, a hideaway, a "den", as the English say, where I can go, sometimes, on those infrequent yet inevitable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.' There was a little thin starlight in the courtyard as, wrapped in my furs, I saw him to his car. His last words were, that he had telephoned the mainland and taken a piano-tuner on to the staff; this man would arrive to take up his duties the next day. He pressed me to his vicuña breast, once, and then drove away. I had drowsed away that afternoon and now I could not sleep. I lay tossing and turning in his ancestral bed until another daybreak discoloured the dozen mirrors that were iridescent with the reflections of the sea. The perfume of the lilies weighed on my senses; when I thought that, henceforth, I would always share these sheets with a man whose skin, as theirs did, contained that toad-like, clammy hint of moisture, I felt a vague desolation that within me, now my female wound had healed, there had awoken a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food, for the renewal of his caresses. Had he not hinted to me, in his flesh as in his speech and looks, of the thousand, thousand baroque intersections of flesh upon flesh? I lay in our wide bed accompanied by, a sleepless companion, my dark newborn curiosity. I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me. Were there jewels enough in all his safes to recompense me for this predicament? Did all that castle hold enough riches to recompense me for the company of the libertine with whom I must share it? And what, precisely, was the nature of my desirous dread for this mysterious being who, to show his mastery over me, had abandoned me on my wedding night? Then I sat straight up in bed, under the sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me, riven by a wild surmise. Might he have left me, not for Wall Street but for an importunate mistress tucked away God knows where who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl whose fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by the practice of scales and arpeggios? And, slowly, soothed, I sank back on to the heaping pillows; I acknowledged that the jealous scare I'd just given myself was not unmixed with a little tincture of relief. At last I drifted into slumber, as daylight filled the room and chased bad dreams away. But the last thing I remembered, before I slept, was the tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water. Coffee and croissants to console this bridal, solitary waking. Delicious. Honey, too, in a section of comb on a glass saucer. The maid squeezed the aromatic juice from an orange into a chilled goblet while I watched her as I lay in the lazy, midday bed of the rich. Yet nothing, this morning, gave me more than a fleeting pleasure except to hear that the piano-tuner had been at work already. When the maid told me that, I sprang out of bed and pulled on my old serge skirt and flannel blouse, costume of a student, in which I felt far more at ease with myself than in any of my fine new clothes. After my three hours of practice, I called the piano-tuner in, to thank him. He was blind, of course; but young, with a gentle mouth and grey eyes that fixed upon me although they could not see me. He was a blacksmith's son from the village across the causeway; a chorister in the church whom the good priest had taught a trade so that he could make a living. All most satisfactory. Yes. He thought he would be happy here. And if, he added shyly, he might sometimes be allowed to hear me play ... for, you see, he loved music. Yes. Of course, I said. Certainly. He seemed to know that I had smiled. After I dismissed him, even though I'd woken so late, it was still barely time for my 'five o'clock'. The housekeeper, who, thoughtfully forewarned by my husband, had restrained herself from interrupting my music, now made me a solemn visitation with a lengthy menu for a late luncheon. When I told her I did not need it, she looked at me obliquely, along her nose. I understood at once that one of my principal functions as chatelaine was to provide work for the staff. But, all the same, I asserted myself and said I would wait until dinner-time, although I looked forward nervously to the solitary meal. Then I found I had to tell her what I would like to have prepared for me; my imagination, still that of a schoolgirl, ran riot. A fowl in cream--or should I anticipate Christmas with a varnished turkey? No; I have decided. Avocado and shrimp, lots of it, followed by no entrée at all. But surprise me for dessert with every ice-cream in the ice box. She noted all down but sniffed; I'd shocked her. Such tastes! Child that I was, I giggled when she left me. But, now ... what shall I do, now? I could have spent a happy hour unpacking the trunks that contained my trousseau but the maid had done that already, the dresses, the tailor-mades hung in the wardrobe in my dressing room, the hats on wooden heads to keep their shape, the shoes on wooden feet as if all these inanimate objects were imitating the appearance of life, to mock me. I did not like to linger in my overcrowded dressing room, nor in my lugubriously lily-scented bedroom. How shall I pass the time? I shall take a bath in my own bathroom! And found the taps were little dolphins made of gold, with chips of turquoise for eyes. And there was a tank of goldfish, who swam in and out of moving fronds of weeds, as bored, I thought, as I was. How I wished he had not left me. How I wished it were possible to chat with, say, a maid; or, the piano-tuner ... but I knew already my new rank forbade overtures of friendship to the staff. I had been hoping to defer the call as long as I could, so that I should have something to look forward to in the dead waste of time I foresaw before me, after my dinner was done with, but, at a quarter before seven, when darkness already surrounded the castle, I could contain myself no longer. I telephoned my mother. And astonished myself by bursting into tears when I heard her voice. No, nothing was the matter. Mother, I have gold bath taps. I said, gold bath taps! No; I suppose that's nothing to cry about, Mother. The line was bad, I could hardly make out her congratulations, her questions, her concern, but I was a little comforted when I put the receiver down. Yet there still remained one whole hour to dinner and the whole, unimaginable desert of the rest of the evening. The bunch of keys lay, where he had left them, on the rug before the library fire which had warmed their metal so that they no longer felt cold to the touch but warm, almost, as my own skin. How careless I was; a maid, tending the logs, eyed me reproachfully as if I'd set a trap for her as I picked up the clinking bundle of keys, the keys to the interior doors of this lovely prison of which I was both the inmate and the mistress and had scarcely seen. When I remembered that, I felt the exhilaration of the explorer. Lights! More lights! At the touch of a switch, the dreaming library was brilliantly illuminated. I ran crazily about the castle, switching on every light I could find--I ordered the servants to light up all their quarters, too, so the castle would shine like a seaborne birthday cake lit with a thousand candles, one for every year of its life, and everybody on shore would wonder at it. When everything was lit as brightly as the café in the Gare du Nord, the significance of the possessions implied by that bunch of keys no longer intimidated me, for I was determined, now, to search through them all for evidence of my husband's true nature. His office first, evidently. A mahogany desk half a mile wide, with an impeccable blotter and a bank of telephones. I allowed myself the luxury of opening the safe that contained the jewellery and delved sufficiently among the leather boxes to find out how my marriage had given me access to a jinn's treasury--parures, bracelets, rings ... While I was thus surrounded by diamonds, a maid knocked on the door and entered before I spoke; a subtle discourtesy. I would speak to my husband about it. She eyed my serge skirt superciliously; did madame plan to dress for dinner? She made a moue of disdain when I laughed to hear that, she was far more the lady than I. But, imagine--to dress up in one of my Poiret extravaganzas, with the jewelled turban and aigrette on my head, roped with pearl to the navel, to sit down all alone in the baronial dining hall at the head of that massive board at which King Mark was reputed to have fed his knights ... I grew calmer under the cold eye of her disapproval. I adopted the crisp inflections of an officer's daughter. No, I would not dress for dinner. Furthermore, I was not hungry enough for dinner itself. She must tell the housekeeper to cancel the dormitory feast I'd ordered. Could they leave me sandwiches and a flask of coffee in my music room? And would they all dismiss for the night? Mais oui, madame. I knew by her bereft intonation I had let them down again but I did not care; I was armed against them by the brilliance of his hoard. But I would not find his heart amongst the glittering stones; as soon as she had gone, I began a systematic search of the drawers of his desk. All was in order, so I found nothing. Not a random doodle on an old envelope, nor the faded photograph of a woman. Only the files of business correspondence, the bills from the home farms, the invoices from tailors, the billets-doux from international financiers. Nothing. And this absence of the evidence of his real life began to impress me strangely; there must, I thought, be a great deal to conceal if he takes such pains to hide it. His office was a singularly impersonal room, facing inwards, on to the courtyard, as though he wanted to turn his back on the siren sea in order to keep a clear head while he bankrupted a small businessman in Amsterdam or--I noticed with a thrill of distaste--engaged in some business in Laos that must, from certain cryptic references to his amateur botanist's enthusiasm for rare poppies, be to do with opium. Was he not rich enough to do without crime? Or was the crime itself his profit? And yet I saw enough to appreciate his zeal for secrecy. Now I had ransacked his desk, I must spend a cool-headed quarter of an hour putting every last letter back where I had found it, and, as I covered the traces of my visit, by some chance, as I reached inside a little drawer that had stuck fast, I must have touched a hidden spring, for a secret drawer flew open within that drawer itself; and this secret drawer contained--at last!--a file marked: Personal. I was alone, but for my reflection in the uncurtained window. I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one. I could have wished, perhaps, I had not found that touching, ill-spelt note, on a paper napkin marked La Coupole, that began: 'My darling, I cannot wait for the moment when you may make me yours completely.' The diva had sent him a page of the score of Tristan, the Liebestod, with the single, cryptic word: 'Until...' scrawled across it. But the strangest of all these love letters was a postcard with a view of a village graveyard, among mountains, where some black-coated ghoul enthusiastically dug at a grave; this little scene, executed with the lurid exuberance of Grand Guignol, was captioned: 'Typical Transylvanian Scene--Midnight, All Hallows.' And, on the other side, the message: 'On the occasion of this marriage to the descendant of Dracula--always remember, "the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil". Toutes amitiés, C.' A joke. A joke in the worst possible taste; for had he not been married to a Romanian countess? And then I remembered her pretty, witty face, and her name--Carmilla. My most recent predecessor in this castle had been, it would seem, the most sophisticated. I put away the file, sobered. Nothing in my life of family love and music had prepared me for these grown-up games and yet these were clues to his self that showed me, at least, how much he had been loved, even if they did not reveal any good reason for it. But I wanted to know still more; and, as I closed the office door and locked it, the means to discover more fell in my way. Fell, indeed; and with the clatter of a dropped canteen of cutlery, for, as I turned the slick Yale lock, I contrived, somehow, to open up the key ring itself, so that all the keys tumbled loose on the floor. And the very first key I picked out of that pile was, as luck or ill fortune had it, the key to the room he had forbidden me, the room he would keep for his own so that he could go there when he wished to feel himself once more a bachelor. I made my decision to explore it before I felt a faint resurgence of my ill-defined fear of his waxen stillness. Perhaps I half-imagined, then, that I might find his real self in his den, waiting there to see if indeed I had obeyed him; that he had sent a moving figure of himself to New York, the enigmatic, self-sustaining carapace of his public person, while the real man, whose face I had glimpsed in the storm of orgasm, occupied himself with pressing private business in the study at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room. Yet, if that were so, it was imperative that I should find him, should know him; and I was too deluded by his apparent taste for me to think my disobedience might truly offend him. I took the forbidden key from the heap and left the others lying there. It was now very late and the castle was adrift, as far as it could go from the land, in the middle of the silent ocean where, at my orders, it floated, like a garland of light. And all silent, all still, but for the murmuring of the waves. I felt no fear, no intimation of dread. Now I walked as firmly as I had done in my mother's house. Not a narrow, dusty little passage at all; why had he lied to me? But an ill-lit one, certainly; the electricity, for some reason, did not extend here, so I retreated to the still-room and found a bundle of waxed tapers in a cupboard, stored there with matches to light the oak board at grand dinners. I put a match to my little taper and advanced with it in my hand, like a penitent, along the corridor hung with heavy, I think Venetian, tapestries. The flame picked out, here, the head of a man, there, the rich breast of a woman spilling through a rent in her dress--the Rape of the Sabines, perhaps? The naked swords and immolated horses suggested some grisly mythological subject. The corridor wound downwards; there was an almost imperceptible ramp to the thickly carpeted floor. The heavy hangings on the wall muffled my footsteps, even my breathing. For some reason, it grew very warm; the sweat sprang out in beads on my brow. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea. A long, a winding corridor, as if I were in the viscera of the castle; and this corridor led to a door of worm-eaten oak, low, round-topped, barred with black iron. And still I felt no fear, no raising of the hairs on the back of the neck, no prickling of the thumbs. The key slid into the new lock as easily as a hot knife into butter. No fear; but a hesitation, a holding of the spiritual breath. If I had found some traces of his heart in a file marked: Personal, perhaps, here, in his subterranean privacy, I might find a little of his soul. It was the consciousness of the possibility of such a discovery, of its possible strangeness, that kept me for a moment motionless, before, in the foolhardiness of my already subtly tainted innocence, I turned the key and the door creaked slowly back. 'There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer,' opined my husband's favourite poet; I had learned something of the nature of that similarity on my marriage bed. And now my taper showed me the outlines of a rack. There was also a great wheel, like the ones I had seen in woodcuts of the martyrdoms of the saints, in my old nurse's little store of holy books. And--just one glimpse of it before my little flame caved in and I was left in absolute darkness--a metal figure, hinged at the side, which I knew to be spiked on the inside and to have the name: the Iron Maiden. Absolute darkness. And, about me, the instruments of mutilation. Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had inherited nerves and a will from the mother who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China; My mother's spirit drove me on, into that dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst. I fumbled for the matches in my pocket; what a dim, lugubrious light they gave! And yet, enough, oh, more than enough, to see a room designed for desecration and some dark night of unimaginable lovers whose embraces were annihilation. The walls of this stark torture chamber were the naked rock; they gleamed as if they were sweating with fright. At the four corners of the room were funerary urns, of great antiquity, Etruscan, perhaps, and, on three-legged ebony stands, the bowls of incense he had left burning which filled the room with a sacerdotal reek. Wheel, rack and Iron Maiden were, I saw, displayed as grandly as if they were items of statuary and I was almost consoled, then, and almost persuaded myself that I might have stumbled only upon a little museum of his perversity, that he had installed these monstrous items here only for contemplation. Yet at the centre of the room lay a catafalque, a doomed, ominous bier of Renaissance workmanship, surrounded by long white candles and, at its foot, an armful of the same lilies with which he had filled my bedroom, stowed in a four-foot-high jar glazed with a sombre Chinese red. I scarcely dared examine this catafalque and its occupant more closely; yet I knew I must. Each time I struck a match to light those candles round her bed, it seemed a garment of that innocence of mine for which he had lusted fell away from me. The opera singer lay, quite naked, under a thin sheet of very rare and precious linen, such as the princes of Italy used to shroud those whom they had poisoned. I touched her, very gently, on the white breast; she was cool, he had embalmed her. On her throat I could see the blue imprint of his strangler's fingers. The cool, sad flame of the candles flickered on her white, closed eyelids. The worst thing was, the dead lips smiled. Beyond the catafalque, in the middle of the shadows, a white, nacreous glimmer; as my eyes accustomed themselves to the gathering darkness, I at last--oh, horrors!--made out a skull; yes, a skull, so utterly denuded, now, of flesh, that it scarcely seemed possible the stark bone had once been richly upholstered with life. And this skull was strung up by a system of unseen cords, so that it appeared to hang, disembodied, in the still, heavy air, and it had been crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace, the final image of his bride. Yet the skull was still so beautiful, had shaped with its sheer planes so imperiously the face that had once existed above it, that I recognized her the moment I saw her; face of the evening star walking on the rim of night. One false step, oh, my poor, dear girl, next in the fated sisterhood of his wives; one false step and into the abyss of the dark you stumbled. And where was she, the latest dead, the Romanian countess who might have thought her blood would survive his depredations? I knew she must be here, in the place that had wound me through the castle towards it on a spool of inexorability. But, at first, I could see no sign of her. Then, for some reason--perhaps some change of atmosphere wrought by my presence--the metal shell of the Iron Maiden emitted a ghostly twang; my feverish imagination might have guessed its occupant was trying to clamber out, though, even in the midst of my rising hysteria, I knew she must be dead to find a home there. With trembling fingers, I prised open the front of the upright coffin, with its sculpted face caught in a rictus of pain. Then, overcome, I dropped the key I still held in my other hand. It dropped into the forming pool of her blood. She was pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes, this child of the land of the vampires who seemed so newly dead, so full of blood ... oh God! how recently had he become a widower? How long had he kept her in this obscene cell? Had it been all the time he had courted me, in the clear light of Paris? I closed the lid of her coffin very gently and burst into a tumult of sobbing that contained both pity for his other victims and also a dreadful anguish to know I, too, was one of them. The candles flared, as if in a draught from a door to elsewhere. The light caught the fire opal on my hand so that it flashed, once, with a baleful light, as if to tell me the eye of God--his eye--was upon me. My first thought, when I saw the ring for which I had sold myself to this fate, was, how to escape it. I retained sufficient presence of mind to snuff out the candles round the bier with my fingers, to gather up my taper, to look around, although shuddering, to ensure I had left behind me no traces of my visit. I retrieved the key from the pool of blood, wrapped it in my handkerchief to keep my hands clean, and fled the room, slamming the door behind me. It crashed to with a juddering reverberation, like the door of hell. I could not take refuge in my bedroom, for that retained the memory of his presence trapped in the fathomless silvering of his mirrors. My music room seemed the safest place, although I looked at the picture of Saint Cecilia with a faint dread; what had been the nature of her martyrdom? My mind was in a tumult; schemes for flight jostled with one another ... as soon as the tide receded from the causeway, I would make for the mainland--on foot, running, stumbling; I did not trust that leather-clad chauffeur, nor the well-behaved housekeeper, and I dared not take any of the pale, ghostly maids into my confidence, either, since they were his creatures, all. Once at the village, I would fling myself directly on the mercy of the gendarmerie. But--could I trust them, either? His forefathers had ruled this coast for eight centuries, from this castle whose moat was the Atlantic. Might not the police, the advocates, even the judge, all be in his service, turning a common blind eye to his vices since he was milord whose word must be obeyed? Who, on this distant coast, would believe the white-faced girl from Paris who came running to them with a shuddering tale of blood, of fear, of the ogre murmuring in the shadows? Or, rather, they would immediately know it to be true. But were all honour-bound to let me carry it no further. Assistance. My mother. I ran to the telephone; and the line, of course, was dead. Dead as his wives. A thick darkness, unlit by any star, still glazed the windows. Every lamp in my room burned, to keep the dark outside, yet it seemed still to encroach on me, to be present beside me but as if masked by my lights, the night like a permeable substance that could seep into my skin. I looked at the precious little clock made from hypocritically innocent flowers long ago, in Dresden; the hands had scarcely moved one single hour forward from when I first descended to that private slaughterhouse of his. Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning. And yet the time might still be my friend; at that hour, that very hour, he set sail for New York. To know that, in a few moments, my husband would have left France calmed my agitation a little. My reason told me I had nothing to fear; the tide that would take him away to the New World would let me out of the imprisonment of the castle. Surely I could easily evade the servants. Anybody can buy a ticket at a railway station. Yet I was still rilled with unease. I opened the lid of the piano; perhaps I thought my own particular magic might help me, now, that I could create a pentacle out of music that would keep me from harm for, if my music had first ensnared him, then might it not also give me the power to free myself from him? Mechanically, I began to play but my fingers were stiff and shaking. At first, I could manage nothing better than the exercises of Czerny but simply the act of playing soothed me and, for solace, for the sake of the harmonious rationality of its sublime mathematics, I searched among his scores until I found The Well-Tempered Clavier. I set myself the therapeutic task of playing all Bach's equations, every one, and, I told myself, if I played them all through without a single mistake--then the morning would find me once more a virgin. Crash of a dropped stick. His silver-headed cane! What else? Sly, cunning, he had returned; he was waiting for me outside the door! I rose to my feet; fear gave me strength. I flung back my head defiantly. 'Come in!' My voice astonished me by its firmness, its clarity. The door slowly, nervously opened and I saw, not the massive, irredeemable bulk of my husband but the slight, stooping figure of the piano-tuner, and he looked far more terrified of me than my mother's daughter would have been of the Devil himself. In the torture chamber, it seemed to me that I would never laugh again; now, helplessly, laugh I did, with relief, and, after a moment's hesitation, the boy's face softened and he smiled a little, almost in shame. Though they were blind, his eyes were singularly sweet. 'Forgive me,' said Jean-Yves. 'I know I've given you grounds for dismissing me, that I should be crouching outside your door at midnight ... but I heard you walking about, up and down--I sleep in a room at the foot of the west tower--and some intuition told me you could not sleep and might, perhaps, pass the insomniac hours at your piano. And I could not resist that. Besides, I stumbled over these--' And he displayed the ring of keys I'd dropped outside my husband's office door, the ring from which one key was missing. I took them from him, looked round for a place to stow them, fixed on the piano stool as if to hide them would protect me. Still he stood smiling at me. How hard it was to make everyday conversation. 'It's perfect,' I said. 'The piano. Perfectly in tune.' But he was full of the loquacity of embarrassment, as though I would only forgive him for his impudence if he explained the cause of it thoroughly. 'When I heard you play this afternoon, I thought I'd never heard such a touch. Such technique. A treat for me, to hear a virtuoso! So I crept up to your door now, humbly as a little dog might, madame, and put my ear to the keyhole and listened, and listened--until my stick fell to the floor through a momentary clumsiness of mine, and I was discovered.' He had the most touchingly ingenuous smile. 'Perfectly in tune,' I repeated. To my surprise, now I had said it, I found I could not say anything else. I could only repeat: 'In tune ... perfect ... in tune,' over and over again. I saw a dawning surprise in his face. My head throbbed. To see him, in his lovely, blind humanity, seemed to hurt me very piercingly, somewhere inside my breast; his figure blurred, the room swayed about me. After the dreadful revelation of that bloody chamber, it was his tender look that made me faint. When I recovered consciousness, I found I was lying in the piano-tuner's arms and he was tucking the satin cushion from the piano-stool under my head. 'You are in some great distress,' he said. 'No bride should suffer so much, so early in her marriage.' His speech had the rhythms of the countryside, the rhythms of the tides. 'Any bride brought to this castle should come ready dressed in mourning, should bring a priest and a coffin with her,' I said. 'What's this?' It was too late to keep silent; and if he, too, were one of my husband's creatures, then at least he had been kind to me. So I told him everything, the keys, the interdiction, my disobedience, the room, the rack, the skull, the corpses, the blood. 'I can scarcely believe it,' he said, wondering. 'That man ... so rich; so well-born.' 'Here's proof,' I said and tumbled the fatal key out of my handkerchief on to the silken rug. 'Oh God,' he said. 'I can smell the blood.' He took my hand; he pressed his arms about me. Although he was scarcely more than a boy, I felt a great strength flow into me from his touch. 'We whisper all manner of strange tales up and down the coast,' he said.' There was a Marquis, once, who used to hunt young girls on the mainland; he hunted them with dogs, as though they were foxes. My grandfather had it from his grandfather, how the Marquis pulled a head out of his saddle bag and showed it to the blacksmith while the man was shoeing his horse. "A fine specimen of the genus, brunette, eh, Guillaume?" And it was the head of the blacksmith's wife.' But, in these more democratic times, my husband must travel as far as Paris to do his hunting in the salons. Jean-Yves knew the moment I shuddered. 'Oh, madame! I thought all these were old wives' tales, chattering of fools, spooks to scare bad children into good behaviour! Yet how could you know, a stranger, that the old name for this place is the Castle of Murder?' How could I know, indeed? Except that, in my heart, I'd always known its lord would be the death of me. 'Hark!' said my friend suddenly. 'The sea has changed key; it must be near morning, the tide is going down.' He helped me up. I looked from the window, towards the mainland, along the causeway where the stones gleamed wetly in the thin light of the end of the night and, with an almost unimaginable horror, a horror the intensity of which I cannot transmit to you, I saw, in the distance, still far away yet drawing moment by moment inexorably nearer, the twin headlamps of his great black car, gouging tunnels through the shifting mist. My husband had indeed returned; this time, it was no fancy. 'The key!' said Jean-Yves. 'It must go back on the ring, with the others. As though nothing had happened.' But the key was still caked with wet blood and I ran to my bathroom and held it under the hot tap. Crimson water swirled down the basin but, as if the key itself were hurt, the bloody token stuck. The turquoise eyes of the dolphin taps winked at me derisively; they knew my husband had been too clever for me! I scrubbed the stain with my nail brush but still it would not budge. I thought how the car would be rolling silently towards the closed courtyard gate; the more I scrubbed the key, the more vivid grew the stain. The bell in the gatehouse would jangle. The porter's drowsy son would push back the patchwork quilt, yawning, pull the shirt over his head, thrust his feet into his sabots ... slowly, slowly; open the door for your master as slowly as you can ... And still the bloodstain mocked the fresh water that spilled from the mouth of the leering dolphin. 'You have no more time,' said Jean-Yves. 'He is here. I know it. I must stay with you.' 'You shall not!' I said. 'Go back to your room, now. Please.' He hesitated. I put an edge of steel in my voice, for I knew I must meet my lord alone. 'Leave me!' As soon as he had gone, I dealt with the keys and went to my bedroom. The causeway was empty; Jean-Yves was correct, my husband had already entered the castle. I pulled the curtains close, stripped off my clothes and pulled the bedcurtains round me as a pungent aroma of Russian leather assured me my husband was once again beside me. 'Dearest!' With the most treacherous, lascivious tenderness, he kissed my eyes, and, mimicking the new bride newly wakened, I flung my arms around him, for on my seeming acquiescence depended my salvation. 'Da Silva of Rio outwitted me,' he said wryly.' My New York agent telegraphed Le Havre and saved me a wasted journey. So we may resume our interrupted pleasures, my love.' I did not believe one word of it. I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. Lost at that charade of innocence and vice in which he had engaged me. Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner. His hand brushed my breast, beneath the sheet. I strained my nerves yet could not help but flinch from the intimate touch, for it made me think of the piercing embrace of the Iron Maiden and of his lost lovers in the vault. When he saw my reluctance, his eyes veiled over and yet his appetite did not diminish. His tongue ran over red lips already wet. Silent, mysterious, he moved away from me to draw off his jacket. He took the gold watch from his waistcoat and laid it on the dressing table, like a good bourgeois; scooped out his raiding loose change and now--oh God!--makes a great play of patting his pockets officiously, puzzled lips pursed, searching for something that has been mislaid. Then turns to me with a ghastly, a triumphant smile. 'But of course! I gave the keys to you!' 'Your keys? Why, of course. Here, they're under the pillow; wait a moment--what--Ah! No ... now, where can I have left them? I was whiling away the evening without you at the piano, I remember. Of course! The music room!' Brusquely he flung my négligé of antique lace on the bed. 'Go and get them.' 'Now? This moment? Can't it wait until morning, my darling?' I forced myself to be seductive. I saw myself, pale, pliant as a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, a dozen vulnerable, appealing girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me. If he had come to me in bed, I would have strangled him, then. But he half-snarled: 'No. It won't wait. Now.' The unearthly light of dawn filled the room; had only one previous dawn broken upon me in that vile place? And there was nothing for it but to go and fetch the keys from the music stool and pray he would not examine them too closely, pray to God his eyes would fail him, that he might be struck blind. When I came back into the bedroom carrying the bunch of keys that jangled at every step like a curious musical instrument, he was sitting on the bed in his immaculate shirtsleeves, his head sunk in his hands. And it seemed to me he was in despair. Strange. In spite of my fear of him, that made me whiter than my wrap, I felt there emanate from him, at that moment, a stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly, as if the lilies that surrounded him had all at once begun to fester, or the Russian leather of his scent were reverting to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed. The chthonic gravity of his presence exerted a tremendous pressure on the room, so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea, beneath the waves that pounded against the shore. I held my life in my hands amongst those keys and, in a moment, would place it between his well-manicured fingers. The evidence of that bloody chamber had showed me I could expect no mercy. Yet, when he raised his head and stared at me with his blind, shuttered eyes as though he did not recognize me, I felt a terrified pity for him, for this man who lived in such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die. The atrocious loneliness of that monster! The monocle had fallen from his face. His curling mane was disordered, as if he had run his hands through it in his distraction. I saw how he had lost his impassivity and was now filled with suppressed excitement. The hand he stretched out for those counters in his game of love and death shook a little; the face that turned towards me contained a sombre delirium that seemed to me compounded of a ghastly, yes, shame but also of a terrible, guilty joy as he slowly ascertained how I had sinned. That tell-tale stain had resolved itself into a mark the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card. He disengaged the key from the ring and looked at it for a while, solitary, brooding. 'It is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable,' he said. His voice was low and had in it the timbre of certain great cathedral organs that seem, when they are played, to be conversing with God. I could not restrain a sob. 'Oh, my love, my little love who brought me a white gift of music,' he said, almost as if grieving. 'My little love, you'll never know how much I hate daylight!" Then he sharply ordered: 'Kneel!' I knelt before him and he pressed the key lightly to my forehead, held it there for a moment. I felt a faint tingling of the skin and, when I involuntarily glanced at myself in the mirror, I saw the heart-shaped stain had transferred itself to my forehead, to the space between the eyebrows, like the caste mark of a brahmin woman. Or the mark of Cain. And now the key gleamed as freshly as if it had just been cut. He clipped it back on the ring, emitting that same, heavy sigh as he had done when I said that I would marry him. 'My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for martyrdom.' 'What form shall it take?' I said. 'Decapitation,' he whispered, almost voluptuously. 'Go and bathe yourself; put on that white dress you wore to hear Tristan and the necklace that prefigures your end. And I shall take myself off to the armoury, my dear, to sharpen my great-grandfather's ceremonial sword.' 'The servants?' 'We shall have absolute privacy for our last rites; I have already dismissed them. If you look out of the window you can see them going to the mainland.' It was now the full, pale light of morning; the weather was grey, indeterminate, the sea had an oily, sinister look, a gloomy day on which to die. Along the causeway I could see trouping every maid and scullion, every pot-boy and pan-scourer, valet, laundress and vassal who worked in that great house, most on foot, a few on bicycles. The faceless housekeeper trudged along with a great basket in which, I guessed, she'd stowed as much as she could ransack from the larder. The Marquis must have given the chauffeur leave to borrow the motor for the day, for it went last of all, at a stately pace, as though the procession were a cortege and the car already bore my coffin to the mainland for. burial. But I knew no good Breton earth would cover me, like a last, faithful lover; I had another fate. 'I have given them all a day's holiday, to celebrate our wedding,' he said. And smiled. However hard I stared at the receding company, I could see no sign of Jean-Yves, our latest servant, hired but the preceding morning. 'Go, now. Bathe yourself; dress yourself. The lustratory ritual and the ceremonial robing; after that, the sacrifice. Wait in the music room until I telephone for you. No, my dear!' And he smiled, as I started, recalling the line was dead.' One may call inside the castle just as much as one pleases; but, outside--never.' I scrubbed my forehead with the nail brush as I had scrubbed the key but this red mark would not go away, either, no matter what I did, and I knew I should wear it until I died, though that would not be long. Then I went to my dressing room and put on that white muslin shift, costume of a victim of an auto-da-fé, he had bought me to listen to the Liebestod in. Twelve young women combed out twelve listless sheaves of brown hair in the mirrors; soon, there would be none. The mass of lilies that surrounded me exhaled, now, the odour of their withering. They looked like the trumpets of the angels of death. On the dressing table, coiled like a snake about to strike, lay the ruby choker. Already almost lifeless, cold at heart, I descended the spiral staircase to the music room but there I found I had not been abandoned. 'I can be of some comfort to you,' the boy said.' Though not much use.' We pushed the piano stool in front of the open window so that, for as long as I could, I would be able to smell the ancient, reconciling smell of the sea that, in time, will cleanse everything, scour the old bones white, wash away all the stains. The last little chambermaid had trotted along the causeway long ago and now the tide, fated as I, came tumbling in, the crisp wavelets splashing on the old stones. 'You do not deserve this,' he said. 'Who can say what I deserve or no?' I said. 'I've done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.' 'You disobeyed him,' he said. 'That is sufficient reason for him to punish you.' 'I only did what he knew I would.' 'Like Eve,' he said. The telephone rang a shrill imperative. Let it ring. But my lover lifted me up and set me on my feet; I knew I must answer it. The receiver felt heavy as earth. 'The courtyard. Immediately.' My lover kissed me, he took my hand. He would come with me if I would lead him. Courage. When I thought of courage, I thought of my mother. Then I saw a muscle in my lover's face quiver. 'Hoofbeats!' he said. I cast one last, desperate glance from the window and, like a miracle, I saw a horse and rider galloping at a vertiginous speed along the causeway, though the waves crashed, now, high as the horse's fetlocks. A rider, her black skirts tucked up around her waist so she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnificent horsewoman in widow's weeds. As the telephone rang again. 'Am I to wait all morning?' Every moment, my mother drew nearer. 'She will be too late,' Jean-Yves said and yet he could not restrain a note of hope that, though it must be so, yet it might not be so. The third, intransigent call. 'Shall I come up to heaven to fetch you down, Saint Cecilia? You wicked woman, do you wish me to compound my crimes by desecrating the marriage bed?' So I must go to the courtyard where my husband waited in his London-tailored trousers and the shirt from Turnbull and Asser, beside the mounting block, with, in his hand, the sword which his great-grandfather had presented to the little corporal, in token of surrender to the Republic, before he shot himself. The heavy sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal. When my husband saw my companion, he observed: 'Let the blind lead the blind, eh? But does even a youth as besotted as you are think she was truly blind to her own desires when she took my ring? Give it me back, whore.' The fires in the opal had all died down. I gladly slipped it from my finger and, even in that dolorous place, my heart was lighter for the lack of it. My husband took it lovingly and lodged it on the tip of his little finger; it would go no further. 'It will serve me for a dozen more fiancées,' he said. 'To the block, woman. No--leave the boy; I shall deal with him later, utilizing a less exalted instrument than the one with which I do my wife the honour of her immolation, for do not fear that in death you will be divided.' Slowly, slowly, one foot before the other, I crossed the cobbles. The longer I dawdled over my execution, the more time it gave the avenging angel to descend ... 'Don't loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel ... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!' He raised the sword and cut bright segments from the air with it, but still I lingered although my hopes, so recently raised, now began to flag. If she is not here by now, her horse must have stumbled on the causeway, have plunged into the sea ... One thing only made me glad; that my lover would not see me die. My husband laid my branded forehead on the stone and, as he had done once before, twisted my hair into a rope and drew it away from my neck. 'Such a pretty neck,' he said with what seemed to be a genuine, retrospective tenderness. 'A neck like the stem of a young plant.' I felt the silken bristle of his beard and the wet touch of his lips as he kissed my nape. And, once again, of my apparel I must retain only my gems; the sharp blade ripped my dress in two and it fell from me. A little green moss, growing in the crevices of the mounting block, would be the last thing I should see in all the world. The whizz of that heavy sword. And--a great battering and pounding at the gate, the jangling of the bell, the frenzied neighing of a horse! The unholy silence of the place shattered in an instant. The blade did not descend, the necklace did not sever, my head did not roll. For, for an instant, the beast wavered in his stroke, a sufficient split second of astonished indecision to let me spring upright and dart to the assistance of my lover as he struggled sightlessly with the great bolts that kept her out. The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as if he had been watching his beloved Tristan for the twelfth, the thirteenth time and Tristan stirred, then leapt from his bier in the last act, announced in a jaunty aria interposed from Verdi that bygones were bygones, crying over spilt milk did nobody any good and, as for himself, he proposed to live happily ever after. The puppet master, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves; the king, aghast, witnesses the revolt of his pawns. You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice. And my husband stood stock-still, as if she had been Medusa, the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs. And then it was as though a curious child pushed his centime into the slot and set all in motion. The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury, and, wielding the honourable sword as if it were a matter of death or glory, charged us, all three. On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head. We lead a quiet life, the three of us. I inherited, of course, enormous wealth but we have given most of it away to various charities. The castle is now a school for the blind, though I pray that the children who live there are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, crying for, the husband who will never return to the bloody chamber, the contents of which are buried or burned, the door sealed. I felt I had a right to retain sufficient funds to start a little music school here, on the outskirts of Paris, and we do well enough. Sometimes we can even afford to go to the Opéra, though never to sit in a box, of course. We know we are the source of many whisperings and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it and mere chatter can never harm us. I can only bless the--what shall I call it?--the maternal telepathy that sent my mother running headlong from the telephone to the station after I had called her, that night. I never heard you cry before, she said, by way of explanation. Not when you were happy. And who ever cried because of gold bath taps? The night train, the one I had taken; she lay in her berth, sleepless as I had been. When she could not find a taxi at that lonely halt, she borrowed old Dobbin from a bemused farmer, for some internal urgency told her that she must reach me before the incoming tide sealed me away from her for ever. My poor old nurse, left scandalized at home--what? interrupt milord on his honeymoon?--she died soon after. She had taken so much secret pleasure in the fact that her little girl had become a marquise; and now here I was, scarcely a penny the richer, widowed at seventeen in the most dubious circumstances and busily engaged in setting up house with a piano-tuner. Poor thing, she passed away in a sorry state of disillusion! But I do believe my mother loves him as much as I do. No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he cannot see it--not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart--but, because it spares my shame.

~Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979)

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