Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

My stomach stopped heaving. The shrieking in ‘my mind stilled. I raised my head to see Justice crouched on the corner of the bed.

“Why won’t you let me?” he cried. “I could make you happy!”

I held my head in my hands, pressing my thumbs beside my eyes to stop the pain raging there. As he reached for me I spat at him, pointing to a thread of blood trailing from my lip.

“ That makes me happy,” I snarled.

But as I spoke I reeled back as though I had been struck. My sight dimmed as something black and huge and cold loomed in front of me. I began to shake uncontrollably and choking reached for Justice.

“No—stop Him—”

But it is too late.

“ Baal is dead,” a Small Voice wails. “I have killed my brother: puissant Baal is dead.”

My hands fall back helplessly; Justice’s face ripples as though reflected in dark and quickly moving water. A cloud across the surface. From the depths rises another face, leaden-hued, soft and pallid as a salamander. As He turns to smile at me the skin droops from his cheeks. From His neck floats a rope — no, a vine — but then it too falls away, its flaccid curve tracing the outline of His mouth. His smile widens to show white broken teeth, swollen tongue, the waxen tendril of a feeding maggot.

Another Voice whispers, “No. Baal is risen; his sister Anat we take now —

“ With sword we cleave her,

With fire we burn her,

In the field we doth sow her.

Birds eat her remains,

Consuming her remains,

Devouring her remains.

Puissant Baal died;

And behold, he is alive.

And lo, Anat we take now.”

His grin is hideous. I scream, try to escape those livid eyes but He is there reaching for me. His hand beckons me and all He has to do is touch me and I will lose all this, this room and earth and the warmth of air and blood, He will take me as He took them, all of them, and I feel Him, He is inside me the blink of His eyes His mouth opening to rend me my beautiful brother in the dark—

His eyes close, his mouth snaps shut, his lips furl into new green leaves spilling from a tree where stranger fruit grows. Another boy, yellow hair plaited about a leather belt, smiling, smiling as he always does seeing me in the mirror: Emma, Aidan, Raphael, my brother, we three there …

The face that rears to gaze upon me with hollow eyes rimmed with bone is not his: not Aidan’s or the laughing Boy’s. I scream because as the belt slips from the neck it leaves no scar, no burning flesh, but instead skin soft and s mooth as Justice’s had been beneath my nails. The swollen eyes that stare from the corpse are my own.

“ Wendy. Wake.”

Dr. Harrow’s voice rings clear and strong enough to pull me from a profound stupor. Beside me Justice stirs, then moaning turns to hug a pillow. I sit up, keeping my eyes shut so that the vision is not disturbed.

I know she is not really here, not in the Paphians’ chamber where I have finally collapsed. She is a Small Voice now, but it is Emma Harrow I hear and not my own thoughts.

“Dr. Harrow,” I whisper. My hands tremble as I pull the coverlets to my breast. I can still taste the bitter residue of my brain’s own bile. “Dr. Harrow—please help me. I have entered a fugue state. Please—”

She laughs. A starburst of pale yellow light as the threads of her consciousness leap neural chasms.

“ You live in a fugue state now, Wendy.” Her voice fires along my locus ceruleus so that I begin to sweat in fear. The neural threads twist and spiral into a brilliant trail. Her sour laughter plunges into the utter darkness of regret.

“ Too soon, too soon,” she sighs. “ And now swallowed into the void Poor Wendy wanders alone now …”

“No!” I try to follow the faint spark of her consciousness as it soars and plummets through endless canyons. “Don’t leave me! Help me, Dr. Harrow—”

“ Help you?” In my mouth a faint sweetness as of old apples. “ You killed me, Wendy —”

“Not me!” The sweetness roils into norepinephrine’s cloying honey. She leaps into flame, white and blinding. I start to cry out, to press my face into a pillow so that I will not see the room and wake to lose her again. “The Boy, Dr. Harrow—who is that Boy?”

“ Ahhh

Two Voices now, two bright flecks in my spinning firmament.

“ My brother— ”

“ My sister— ”

Faint as first light the Boy’s bleak consciousness touches the rim of my temporal lobe. I groan in disappointment and terror. Already I can feel Dr. Harrow’s retreat into my corpus callosum, those gray mountains.

But Dr. Harrow lingers a moment longer. Axons whip and slash against the Boy’s first firings. I derive a numb solace from her presence, unclench my fingers from the pillow and draw a deep breath. Something had stirred her to wake me; something she would warn me of. A moment longer and she will be gone and only the Boy will remain to torment me.

“Dr. Harrow—”

A sigh echoes through the gray chasm. “ Wendy,” it breathes. “ Oh Wendy it is cold, He is so cold …”

I shiver at her anguish, but another urgency forces me on. “A brother, Dr. Harrow. Do I have a brother?”

Her consciousness wavers. A pulse of noradrenaline. Emerald novas burst to send her spinning into the shadows. A last cry soars through my mind’s abyss and I shout in pain as a blocked pathway erupts into crimson flame.

“ There is a Boy, “she cries at last. “ Our brother — Baal —”

My head pounds from the effort of trying to hold her another moment. Who is Baal? my mind shrieks. Aidan? Raphael?

Her consciousness a crimson streak as she spirals into the void—

“ He is our brother, the dying god — we woke Him and now there is no peace until He is slain —

“ ‘ But oh, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;

It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t

A brother’s murder!’

“ Find him, Wendy— ”

She is gone. I am alone with Him, the One she woke, the One who slumbers within my tangle of dendrites and neurons and axons: the One who uses me as a flail to reap His harvest, His tribute of souls. The God in the Tree, Dionysus

Dendrites. The Gaping Lord. My hands pummel the bedcovers as He strives with me. My fingers curl helplessly, then flex and open as the blood pumps into them.

I feel Him, the cold and iron pressure of His limbs within mine, my blood streaked with the raw fluids He has released within my brain. A roaring as of some vast beast freed from its prison. A cry that I know is Justice’s as he wakes, as I claw and scream and tear at the sheets.

“No, Wendy!”

I do not see Justice as I fight Him, try to keep Him from seizing Justice like an animal, until finally I fall back onto the bed, grunting as I rip the comforter into shreds.

“ Find him, Wendy!”

Her last words echoing as above me Justice hovers, in his hands some heavy object that smashes against my forehead. I hear a howl of frustrated rage, and plunge into unconsciousness.

Somehow Justice and Miss Scarlet engaged palanquins to bear us back to the theater. Justice pleaded I was ill. I recall only Gower Miramar leaning over me in our small chamber, and a fleeting impression of sunrise striking the minarets of the House Miramar as the elders carried us off.

I slept fitfully through that entire day and night, waking often from terrible nightmares. Like shades flickering in a cinematoscope the faces of Justice and Miss Scarlet would reveal themselves to me, first one and then the other as momentarily I awakened, struggling to lift my head before collapsing back upon my pillow.