Arcane II (11 page)

Maybe it would, if she weren’t cursed to live here. At the top of the endless staircase—which was not as endless as she thought, for otherwise it would let her wander into eternity—the door to
her
cabinet was open. On the table lay Grandfather Grigory, his corpse grayed by light dilated in the darkness. Had she walked the whole night?

It was the one question that didn’t hurt her, that didn’t turn the air into thorns with each intake. How could she cut him? How could she raise a knife and tear him? How, how, how...

He was cold when she laid over him. She didn’t know how Grandmother killed them, but Tatyana hoped that her heat would wake him, that the stains from her tears would wash away death from his skin, that her kiss on his cracked and wooden lips would fix him, that the breath she locked in her chest to keep her from crying would remind his lungs how to breathe again, how to constrict and expand. But all her hopes remained infertile and Tatyana resumed her soundless cry.

***

“Silly, lazy girl!”

Tatyana was woken by Grandmother’s yelling and the end of the broom, lacerating her skin with its twigs.

“I didn’t leave you here to sleep. Work! Do your chores! Sleeping with the dead...” Grandmother was a storm, a summer monsoon, shaking her head as if sleeping with those dear to the heart was somehow worse than eating them.

Grandmother grabbed Tatyana’s arm and yanked until she was on the floor, pain blossoming from the small of her back.

“I want out!” Tatyana screamed. “I want out in the cities. Out with other people. I want my mother, my father. I want a lover. I will not stay here. I want outside!”

“You!”

Tatyana froze as she saw grandmother’s face flicker on and off, smudged in some kind of light.

“Will!”

Her face was like light breaking into many colors.

“Never have a lover! You will never live outside. You don’t have a mother, nor a father. You will be a grandmother. You will be Baba Yaga, just like me. Now cut!” Grandmother commanded.

Tatyana, however, could not stop looking at Grandmother and she thought she had been looking at a pike swimming just below the surface of a lake all along. Such beauty had been stretched over something as grotesque as Grandmother revealed herself to be.

Tatyana whimpered when she took the knife herself without her mind’s consent. Her hand was not her own anymore as it slithered and stroke like a serpent, gashing and tearing and shredding. Soon Grandfather Grigory’s beauty drowned in thick red and innards. When she was done with the whole ritual, Grandmother laughed, her dead, hollow thing of a laugh.

“You have always been interested in snakes. I should have known that you would cause headaches, once you got interested in a man’s snake.”

Grandmother laughed again. Then she lowered her hand into the cauldron with the organs and slowly raised it back, revealing Grandfather Grigory’s manhood pinched between her thumb and index finger.

“Yes, rather unfortunate, but not uncommon for your age.”

Grandmother proceeded to stretch and twist the organ in her fingers. To her it must have been nothing, just flesh, one of the many bits and pieces Grandmother had carved in her day. Tatyana’s feet trembled at the sight.

“It will pass, my dear.”

Grandmother huffed and tossed the shriveled, bloodied thing back in the cauldron. Her lips pressed together, her mouth curled like an earthworm.

“Today you will find the bathroom locked.”

With that Grandmother walked away. Tatyana heard the sound of her broom scratching at the floor, a sign that she had left her alone in the hut. Tatyana remained standing for a few more minutes before she retched like she did the first time she’d seen Grandmother do her work. Her limbs shivered and she felt as if those wounds she delivered were hers and that inside she hemorrhaged.

The room was bright with day, but it was a still, dead light, one which could not reach Tatyana. A light that was not quite there. Tatyana was red on the outside, but dark on the inside. Dark as if the monster in the waters inside her had swum up and reclaimed the surface. It was a disgusting demon that filled her. Tatyana was empty until it filled her like a glove. And now with it came a lust, impure, selfish and vengeful.

Tatyana was scared that she was becoming a monster, a Baba Yaga.

***

She left the room and lay still and nude in her bed, staining the sheets as they wrinkled and sucked on her sticky skin. Between her legs she burned with a rash, one without equivalent. She rubbed herself and panted as her fingers slid in, wet with Grandfather Grigory’s blood.

How monstrous was she? she thought in between moans. To sleep with death? To consummate her lust with death’s sloppy, bloodied kisses on her skin? Imagining that a dead man attended her quaking needs? The bed creaked, when she found her hips grind against her fingers, faster and faster.

The hurricane outside roared and the windows shook with its excitement. Tatyana heard the taps, but they were so frantic that she couldn’t understand them.

Then the hole she filled with wood down by the bedpost broke free and the winds snared the air, tendril after tendril licked at Tatyana’s body. Massing and colliding and slithering, a snake nest on her belly and breasts. Tatyana whimpered in pleasure, the monster that she accommodated in her chest hungered for more.

“I love you,” the hurricane whispered with a man’s voice, but Tatyana didn’t startle. It did not surprise her to hear a hurricane talk. At that moment, it was the most welcome thing.

“I am a monster. You won’t love me, when you see how much of a monster I am.”

“I love. I could never love you more. I am made for love and only you can love me.” The man’s voice crackled in desperation. “I want you to love all of me. All of the hurricane.”

“I will... love, love, love.”

“Then escape with me.”

“How? She has those red shoes on, which keep you prisoner. She never takes them off and even if we escape, she will find me. I am like her. I am hers. There will be no escape.”

“Then what will we do?”

“I will sleep and think of a solution.”

***

In the days to come Tatyana did her best to play the penitent granddaughter. She cleaned and tidied and cooked and smiled with glee. Glee stolen from the future, from the freedom that Tatyana would steal for herself. She smiled at Grandmother and talked with chirps and flutter, while she inhaled the curses that bred in her mind at night, but she’d learned from Grandmother—no, Baba Yaga—that patience was the winner’s counselor, so she waited.

Baba Yaga thawed her displeasure and grew Tatyana’s hair back, so that she could braid it. All the while Tatyana looked at Grandmother’s face, waiting to see if the hideous crone would show herself underneath.

It was at that time that Tatyana noticed that mirrors did not like Grandmother. Silver ones became wick with blemishes, the metal corroded when Grandmother’s reflection crawled over. Glass ones splintered. Hair-thin cracks raced along the glass, cutting Baba Yaga’s face. Maybe the mirrors didn’t want to see the image.

Tatyana sympathized with the mirrors, but she wanted to see what they were hiding. What was Grandmother’s biggest secret?

“I will show you, when she takes to her broom to fly outside,” the hurricane said, and true to his words, when Grandmother grabbed her broom and exited through the house, the hurricane tapped.

“Look, this is how Baba Yaga really is.”

The wind whined once again as the layers of the hurricane split. It was as if an eye opened and there was Baba Yaga, on her broom, her figure of birch now swollen to that of a rock, hair of cobwebs and her grin a fissure.

A monster that deserved an end unlike any other. Tatyana wanted to carve her, strangle her, hollow her skull with a hammer, but she stopped at something more sinister.

In Baba Yaga’s cabinet she gathered vials, and with a grin she cooked borsch. In a second cauldron she boiled a fresh pot of the brew that allowed people to stay inside this hut. In a third she boiled water and kept it bubbling.

When grandmother returned, Tatyana welcomed her with borsch. She watched as Baba Yaga ate and commented how delicious it was. Then she fell into sleep so deep it rose like a wall that could smother pain. Tatyana grinned a sickle grin as she dragged Baba Yaga to the third cauldron with boiling water and toppled her inside. Baba Yaga did not scream or wake. It was only her breathing that speared the air in pain.

“Sleep well, Grandmother,” Tatyana whispered and stripped naked.

Her skin stuck to the hot metal as she climbed into the second cauldron with the brew. Tatyana screamed as her skin turned cherry red. She took a breath, dunked beneath the liquid surface, and then she drank as much of the scalding liquid as possible. Pain as electrifying as an eel snaked around her. When she emerged, her first breath was a gasp of pain. She should have been dead, but vengeance kept her moving. She saw through slits, her eye lids had swelled into blisters.

She was red, boiled, her hair shedding, but it was the only way her beloved would not harm her. Tatyana took Baba Yaga’s broom and then put on Baba Yaga’s red shoes, made of human skin and boiled in blood. Now she had command over the hut, and it shuddered in acknowledgment.

“I will not be Baba Yaga,” her voice barely left her throat, so badly scalded was she, but Tatyana continued, “witch of the hut with four chicken legs in the hurricane, I will be witch of the hurricane. I will be wife of the hurricane. I will be the hurricane!”

With those words, all the windows shattered, and the hurricane’s thousand arms stormed into her waiting arms, into her waiting lungs.

Lakeshore Drive

Joanna Parypinski

The roads were treacherous, slicked with black ice and peppered with the snowy graves of roadkill. As the evening darkness settled over the horizon like frost, Susannah drove through the falling snow that swept against the windshield.

Her cell phone buzzed on the dashboard, glowing neon blue and skipping a few centimeters to the left. She ignored it, hands clawed around the steering wheel, staring through the glass into the sea of black bombarded with spots of white. The wipers intermittently swished across the surface, and finally the phone went dormant once more.

She had to get home.

Suddenly the back end of the car in front of her appeared in her headlights, and she gasped as her foot crushed down on the brake. The car fishtailed, the tires spinning for purchase in the building snow—Susannah shouted as the front end swerved, the phone slid off the dash, and her seatbelt cut into her neck like a noose. Everything jerked to a stop, Susannah’s car sitting slantways in the middle of the expressway.

Horns blared in the silence. All the cars were stopped.

“What the hell...?” she murmured, slamming her palms down on the wheel. “Move, assholes!”

The snow fell quietly on the windshield. The wipers swiped it away. She ran a shaky hand through frazzled hair. Somewhere at the foot of the empty passenger’s seat, the phone buzzed again.

“Stop it,” she snapped, checking her composure in the rearview mirror, pulling off a clump of mascara and taking a few eyelashes with it. She tilted the mirror so she could see out the back windshield, but it was already a sheet of white.
Snowpocalypse
, she thought, the term floating up from the recesses of her mind—something she’d heard as coworkers had speculated about the impending storm that was sure to close down schools and businesses. The blizzard had rolled into Chicago just as she’d gotten onto the highway, but she’d hoped she could beat it home. Too bad, too late. Now she was stuck on the inexplicably immobilized Lakeshore Drive.

Amid the swish of the wipers and the whoosh of the wind, the phone stopped buzzing.

***

Virginia’s body was found a crumpled mess on the street, having parachuted from the roof of a 36-story building. A nameless driver had been unable to swerve around the fallen object and spun her corpse over like a cycle of laundry. She no longer resembled Susannah’s sister; now she was just a twisted collage of blood and broken bones.

The police found the suicide note in the printer tray nearest her cubicle, the document still sitting on the sleeping screen of her work computer. When Susannah got the call, she sat in the parking lot behind the building for fifteen minutes before pulling around the block to the front, where she stood, shell-shocked, in front of the caution tape and told them she’d been at their apartment already and that Virginia was working late.

They asked how long Virginia had been working at the insurance company.

“Five years,” said Susannah. “She got the job right out of college.”

They asked if Virginia had been depressed.

“Yes,” Susannah lied.

***

Through the snow piling thick and fast outside the window, Susannah could see shapes moving around, so she stepped out of the car into the icy sting of night. Snow licked her bare hands like cold cat tongues. “Hey!” she shouted. “What’s going on?”

Two people emerged from the car to her right and trudged closer. They were wrapped entirely in winter coats and scarves; only a strip of flesh showed where their eyes were squinting against the violent wind.

“No idea!” called a woman’s voice.

The masculine figure beside her said, “Must have been an accident! Just an accident!”

The wind blew a hollow, tuneless note in Susannah’s ears, sucking the air from her lungs and pushing her away from the couple. “I have to get home!” she shouted.

“What?” called the woman.

Horns blared in the distance. The man yelled something that Susannah couldn’t make out, and the couple retreated to their car. Susannah followed suit. Once the door slammed shut and the wind muted, Susannah warmed her reddened hands against the heating vent.

She switched on the radio, hoping to catch a traffic report. Most stations were only static. As she turned the dial, she caught only snippets of voices. “
Severe... power... the...
” said the radio through the crackling static.