Advent (76 page)

 
Jen felt a queasy mix of relief and fear. She’d been so sure it was Andy sneaking back, wasted or high, a thirst for revenge boiling behind his hard eyes, that she couldn’t help smirking at the sight of some old bum blundering out of the woods and getting caught up in the woodpile. But this one seemed to have brought the woods with him. He was big, really big, wide like a bear, a big head hunched on heavy shoulders. And the coat was . . . She squinted. The coat was covered in stuff. Like leaves and twigs, except they clinked, and bits reflected the light.

 
The face was completely hidden in shadow.

 
A voice called out to the window where Jen watched. A crabbed voice, an angry old woman voice. She shrank back into the bathroom.

 
Now she was only frightened.

 
She could cope with Mom, pathetic as her mother was. She could cope with her brothers and her baby sister. She could even cope with Andy drooling over her boobs like a dog in heat. What frightened her – really frightened her – was new stuff. When things changed they got worse.

 
The front door shook.

 
Crystal began to grizzle, but Jen ignored the baby. She headed for the phone in Mom’s room, trying to remember whether she’d seen Mom using it recently, which would mean the bill had been paid.

 
There was a tinkle of glass and the porch light went out.

 
The house was suddenly pitch dark. Panicking, Jen grabbed for the phone. She knocked some stuff over onto the floor. The phone went down with it. She knelt and scrabbled around. The door downstairs banged hard, and there was a rough shout.

 
In the kids’ bedroom Cody began screaming.

 
Jen swept her arms over the floor, scattering empty cans. She found a cord and hauled on it. A shape that felt like half the phone came into her hands.

 
The bum was kicking the door. Each kick made the whole house shake. Window screens rattled. Cody’s screaming drilled through her head like a car alarm. She fumbled at the thing that might have been the phone and dropped it.

 
There was a mighty crack from downstairs, the sound of the door breaking open. Jen cringed on the floor. Carl was awake now too. Through the wall she heard him yell at Cody to shut the fuck up. Get the phone, just get the phone, Jen thought, though now the shouting and the screaming and the banging made it too loud to think straight. The crotchety old voice was shouting as well, shouting up the stairs. Things crashed around in the front hall like a moose was stuck in there. The whole house was coming down around her ears.

 
She gagged as an unbelievable reek flowed into the room, a stench of rotting fish and sea-filth. The bum was shambling up the stairs and the fouled air flowed in front like a bow-wave. Next door Carl was yelling at Cody. ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ freak!’ He always tried to shout louder than the other kids could scream, as if that would stop them. ‘Jen!’ She heard him roll out of bed. Her hands were twisting round and round the cord that might have been attached to the phone.

 
‘Hey fat boy!’ croaked the stranger’s voice, mean and mocking, at the same time as Jen heard Carl open their bedroom door and holler, ‘Mom! What the fuck are you doing down there? Jen!’ She put her hands over her ears and curled up on the floor. The smell was like sharing the hood of her coat with a dead bird.

 
‘You! Fat kid! You listening? You got ears on you?’

 
It was a woman’s voice for sure, a big, bullying cackle. It had a husky, old-fashioned accent to it. Somehow Carl was totally ignoring it, all of it, the smell, the rattle, the huge thing in the stairway, he didn’t seem to know it was happening. She heard him go into the bathroom, still shouting for her, looking for her to clean up the mess, to get everything straight, but this time she couldn’t. She was holding the phone to her chest like a doll. She no longer had any idea what it was for.

 
‘You deaf, asshole?’ the voice spat. ‘You!’ It was upstairs now, right outside the bedroom door. Carl came thumping to the top of the stairs and yelled, ‘Jen! What the fuck! Jen!’

 
‘Asshole’s deaf as a brick,’ growled the voice, and then shouted, ‘Who’s listening? Someone here’s listening. Hey! Out of my way, asshole.’ Carl’s shouts changed to a screech, and with a sound like the roof falling in he tumbled down the stairs. Jen couldn’t stop herself letting out a horrified cry.

 
‘Who’s that?’ the voice barked. Cody went on screaming. Jen could picture him, sitting up, knees hugged to his chest, banging his head with his hand, screeching, screeching, while the baby squalled beside him. She curled tighter.

 
Slats of light swung through the room. Headlights turning into the yard. They let Jen see that the bedroom door was opening.

 
‘Oho!’ A massive shadow filled the doorway. ‘Oho! Hey! Look what I found.’

 
From outside, Mom’s shout, shrill with stupid panic: ‘Jen!’

 
The shadow mumbled. Its coat clicked and rustled as if it were alive, like rats in the roof. A sharp hiss, a flare. It had struck a match.

 
The invader was a huge old woman with sneaky little eyes like a whale’s set in a cracked face the colour of mahogany. Her cheeks were chalked a smudgy white. She rattled as she moved because her coat was sewn all over with beads, bones, feathers, copper discs, knots of deer hooves bunched like tassels; so were her stiff hide leggings. A ring of bone pierced her nose. The miasma radiated out from her, rancid, blubbery, unspeakably foul. She hunched, holding the match out in fingers so filthy they looked completely black.

 
‘This one’s not deaf and blind, huh? Hey? Oho! A girlie!’ She grinned, exposing brown teeth tumbled around as if there’d been a landslide in her mouth.

 
‘Jen!’ Mom cried out from downstairs. Then she shrieked. She must have seen where Carl had fallen. The chorus of screaming vibrated in Jen’s head.

 
‘Wasn’t looking for a girlie,’ the crone cackled, apparently pleased. ‘But I guess the girlie come looking for me! Come up off there, girlie.’ She motioned. ‘You found what you looking for.’

 
‘Jen! Cody!’

 
Jen found her tongue. ‘Mom! I’m here!’

 
The crone pushed further into the room, reached out and slammed the door shut behind her.

 
‘Just you and me, girlie,’ she said, backing against the door. The match had burned right down to her fingers. She hissed in surprise and spat on them, then scraped around somewhere in the flaps of her coat and lit another.

 
‘Jen!’ Mom was running up the stairs.

 
‘Mom!’

 
The bedroom door shook, but the crone had got her bulk against it. ‘Let me in!’ Mom cried. She slapped on the door. ‘Open it!’

 
‘You gonna listen to me, or you gonna listen to that?’ the old woman said, her eyes glinting. ‘Hmm?’

 
‘I can’t, Mom!’ Jen shouted.

 
‘What’s going on? Open up! Jen!’

 
‘You gonna crawl around here an’ let these assholes keep you down, girlie? You gonna live your days eating up their shit? Or you gonna learn killer-whale dance and go dancing away? Get on your feet!’

 
‘Jen!’ Both palms pounding on the other side of the door. ‘Jen!’

 
‘You got white-girl name, girlie? You got white-girl spirit? You wanna go deaf and blind like the fat asshole?’ Her face creased with disgust. ‘Up!’ she barked.

 
Jen stood up.

 
‘Gotta stand on your feet for killer-whale dance.’ The reek and the shouting and banging chaos made Jen’s head swim. The second match burned out and in the darkness she thought the shape blocking the door had become a whale, a massive domed whale head thrusting up from the floor. She staggered to one side.

 
‘Gotta open your mouth to sing killer-whale song. Open your mouth, girlie.’

 
‘Huh?’ she said.

 
‘Open your other mouth, girlie. Not the one you use for eating shit. Open it. Gotta say my name. What’s my name, girlie?’ Everyone was shouting; everything was shouting. She squeezed her hands over her ears but none of it would stop. ‘What’s my name? You know it, girlie. I don’ come here otherwise. I don’ come out to your shithole unless there’s killer-whale dancer here. Firs’ time in a hundred years! What’s my name?’

 
‘
Ma’chinu’ch
!
’ Jen screamed, her ears ringing.

 
The shadow screeched delightedly. ‘Killer-whale girlie!’ It swayed, waking the skeletal music in its coat. ‘You own the clan house! You gonna dance the dance!’ The dried hooves clacked, the strings of beads skittered together. ‘You better learn it quick, girlie!’

 
‘
Ma’chinu’ch
!
’ Jen shouted. People were shouting back at her from the other side of the door, but she couldn’t hear them. ‘
Ma’chinu’ch
!
’

 
The vast shadow whooped. ‘Not anyone sees me but you! Not anyone hears me but you! You finished eating shit, girlie. Killer-whale song come down your mouth. You gonna tell them all what’s coming.’

 
‘It’s coming!’ Jen cried. ‘It’s coming!’

 
The blind darkness filled with dead things chattering. ‘Orca boy coming! Coming the long way round. Orca boy got oceans to cross. But he’s coming, and he’s bringing the world.’

 
‘Orca boy’s coming!’ The ocean girl threw back her head and ululated to the stained ceiling. ‘Orca boy’s bringing us the world!’ Her mother and her brother heaved at the door, crying and hammering. The prophecy soared above their pandemonium, an eagle over a churning sea. ‘He’s finding his way home. Light the hearth. Open the door of the house. Let the ancestors in. The world’s coming back! The world, the world!’

Author’s Note

Like the tale
of King Arthur, the Faust legend is one of those stories that exists mostly in outline. All they need are a few essentials: in Arthur’s case, the sword in the stone and the Round Table and Guinevere and Lancelot and Merlin. The bones of the Faust legend are even simpler: the bargain, the interval, the final payment coming due. All the rest is flexible, which is why Arthur stories range from
Le Morte d’Arthur
to
Excalibur
, and why the two best-known Fausts – Goethe’s and Marlowe’s – are likewise about as spectacularly different-looking as Malory’s romance and John Boorman’s film.

 
One of the few details we know for sure about the magician’s adventures is that he once demanded to see Helen of Troy, renowned for centuries for her beauty. We know this because it’s the only inessential narrative detail that Marlowe and Goethe agree on. Their source is the cheerfully sensationalist sixteenth-century biography called (in its English translation)
The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor Iohn Faustus
. From chapter 55:

. . . wherefore he called his Spirit
Mephostophiles
, commanding him to bring him the fair
Helena
of
Greece
, which he also did: Whereupon he fell in love with her, and made her his common Concubine and Bed-fellow; for she was so beautiful and delightful a piece, that he could not be one hour from her, if he should therefore have suffered Death, she had stolen away his Heart . . .

Goethe, of course, knows there’s more at stake in this relationship than celebrity sex, and has Helen stand for an ideal of pure classicism against which the magus has to measure his Romantic ambitions. Marlowe’s Faust, much less wise, gets nothing from the encounter at all, unless you count two of the best pentameters in English: