Red Song: Part One

Part One of Two. A tale I wrote many years ago in response to gorging on Angela Carter's work, the great wordsmith and savage poet that she was. I'm very fond of it: a piece entirely written from reactionary feeling, rather than being thought through at all! I was also doing my uni dissertation at the time on fairy tales, skin and identity. A whole host of influences, leading to this.

Part Two published next Wednesday, March 19th.

...

In the hollow of a tree lived Wolf-Eye.

His skin was sheer as crepe paper and his eyes burnt magenta on cloudless nights. He hated pain, with the exception of bruises. He could sit for hours, pouring over those blooming mushrooms of flesh, flexing his thumbs.

His own blood, however, was detestable. The first welling of a wound would send him cowering and he would try to ignore it and it would gum over and inevitably start to stink. Then he would go to the lady in the Green Cave, who would reprimand his lack of hygiene and scrape the dead skin off, applying a salve that stung until he howled; but he never learned.

He hunted once a month. Sheep, mostly; they were dumb and soft and their oily curls of wool made wonderful bedding. Their blood he didn't mind. Their blood filled him with such euphoria that the stars would rain in the skies over his head.

Then one day he killed a human and everything changed infinitesimally and irrevocably.

She was dressed in a dirty rain mac, the sky was pregnant and the grimy evening shifted through the wood. She was middle-aged and had lost her way walking home, worrying about all the things Mothers worry about when they have teenaged daughters.

Gleaming eyes and wild hair was the first thing she saw and a quizzical expression that turned predatory as he realised she was made of flesh and blood. Mother backed away and the rain started to fall and that was that.

It was the same night that the lady from the Green Cave found a runaway mongrel dog near the forest’s edge.

The lady's eyes were curiously wide, fixing her face with a look of perpetual surprise and her hair was caramel coloured and thick as a horse's mane. She scooped the dog up, for she was strong as an ox, and she took the dog home. Wolf-Eye slunk up to her door as night closed over the wood and he was trailing the rain mac and his eyes were moons. Yet he received no welcome from the lady that night and he howled in the cold, his aria of misery.

...

In the aftermath of Mother's death, Violet dreamt of drowning. In backyard puddles, in her bath water, in a great sea wave, she dreamt she was drowning. The weight on her chest would grow and grow and her fingers would reach for light and air and then she would realise the horror of it: that she had no fingers, no hands, no arms and no legs. Just a pair of lungs and a mouth and the oppression was a delirious catharsis. Her mind would float away from her, a sad stream of bubbles, and just as the raging quiet began to settle so she would wake.

No one would tell her in exactly what part of the wood it had happened; their false smiles wore her thin. She was not the kind of girl to sit quiet, so she armed herself with a kitchen knife stuffed in her old, school rucksack and she clambered upwards into the forest of ill will.

Suspicion hung around her like a sticky patina but on she went, on and on.

A wolf, they had claimed. A rabid wolf, the same one that hunters had trapped and shot seven days after Mother's rain mac was found, smeared in blood by a stream. However, their consoling regret rang false. Violet had a knack for digging out truth and those men of authority were the falsest of all. So, on she went, as dusk crept overhead.

A noise caused her to stop, to crouch down and unzip her bag so she could reach her knife, its weight comforting and unfamiliar in her hand.

Approaching footsteps, each fall a startling thrill, and then a young man appeared. He was fair haired and dressed in a white evening shirt, neatly pressed, with cuff links attached at his nervous wrists. He had a face as finely boned as Narcissus. He caught sight of her and she hid the knife behind her back. His eyes were lit curiously.

“Oh, hello,” said Violet. Her voice had begun to rust.

He cocked his head and opened his mouth as if to speak and then he shut it again. His face softened and he beckoned her to come with him and, clutching that knife with white fingers, along Violet went.

The stranger led her haltingly through the wood, stopping to sniff the leaves, to touch all the rolled ferns and mushroom bubbles and tree limbs. When a gust of wind raced, lifting Violet's hair and stripping the weak foliage from the branches he inhaled the air with mad-eyed glee so that fear struck Violet's heart.

She brandished her knife then, under the hungover sky and the cat's cradle of half-bared branches and she knocked the stranger to the ground. Hot blooded, Violet pointed her knife at him and demanded a name, a word, a promise that he had not been the one responsible for her mother's death and upon his face bloomed the saddest, sincerest of looks.

He began to keen, pawing her with his dexterous hands and he wormed his head into her lap so that she found herself cradling him like a child, patting his head while her tears fell. Down they fell, each tear a deep, bright crystal, which pinged off his skull.

The air was thickening into a dull, purple hue; a few stars were beginning to show. A sound then, from somewhere in the catacomb of trees. A drawn out animal cry such as Violet had never heard before. Her spine crackled and she came to her senses in time to realise it was night and she was far from home.

The stranger had lifted himself as the final note of that eldritch howl fell around them. He looked at Violet wildly, made one urgent noise and took off in the opposite direction. Violet understood his wordless plea: follow me. She gathered her bag and ran after him.

He was quick as a fox and she was not. Her limbs grew heavy too soon and he had to circle back and urge her on with pawing fingers. She didn’t care where they were going.

The late Autumn thickets were crowded with poison berries and leaves were thickening into pulp on the forest floor, causing her to slip and fall, scratching flesh and drawing blood. Her cry brought the stranger careering back and then he did the strangest of things. He licked her wound, matter-of-fact as a matron, tender as a lover, and compassion and something deeper, something hot and suppressed, moved her.

Who are you, she wondered but she didn’t say it aloud. Then another howl, closer now, and the stranger seized her and pulled her on, through a blur of brown and verdure until finally they broke the tree line, before a small, thatched cottage and a running stream that tinkled like breaking glass in between the gusts of wind.

The courage that had swelled in Violet for so long had begun to bleed away, as if softer emotions had been excluded from her grief until the moment she'd mothered the stranger.

Fear was beginning to infect the shadows, the indeterminable nature of dusk that gives and takes as it pleases. It was cold as a tomb; the ground was crisping with early frost and the moon hung high. It was both beautiful and monstrous.

She clung to the stranger then, her only point of trust, and he snuffled her forehead gently. Up to the door of the cottage he led her, under the thatched eve, coated in green moss like a lichen covered root. The stranger walked in easily, as if he was King and Lord, and then the door was shut against the growing night and the howling monster was locked outside.

The inside was just as a forest cottage should be; a battered, stuffed armchair pointed towards a merry fire in the hearth. Along the mantelpiece were strung up herbs, candles welded to the wood in rivulets of their own wax, crockery of tin and clay, a polished skillet and against the wall a great, teetering bookcase, cloaked in hoops of dust.

Crammed on its shelves were discoloured bottles and jars. Onions and carrots hung tied with twine, still with mud clinging to their roots and, on a nail, there hung a very strange painted mask, with high cheekbones and a garish, red mouth.

Violet immediately hated the mask and she moved away involuntarily.

The stranger cocked his head but as ever said nothing. A large bed was to the right and such notions of corruption crossed Violet's mind, insubstantial and divine, dancing dust motes in her head.

What ideas she had of her own body were unformed and fearful, a sealed box from which she'd forbidden herself, and anybody else, access. Out of what she'd seen of the world the sexual body had grown in her mind as bewildering and monstrous and unusual a thing as she had ever encountered and so, as straight forward as a child, she had cut desire away. Yet the body was not to be ignored.

Here and now she had been tipped into sensory chaos; so intimate was the proximity of the stranger, the cosy walls tucking them both into a womb of safety. The walls were patterned with the shadows of flames and she imagined them both to be in the bowels of Hell.

The stranger put Violet in the stuffed armchair and obsequiously wrapped her in a blanket. He grinned at her dumbly, took her arm and sat at her feet. He went about cleaning her wound, sometimes with his tongue and sometimes with a pan of water that he used reluctantly as if instinct directed him otherwise.

As he worked he cast her quick, adoring glances, each a sweet puncture wound.

Her other hand clasped a tin cup of hot wine; its fumes unfurled in a heady, sweet fog. Her mind and body were clamouring. Shaking, Violet placed the tin cup on a three-legged stool and she wound her fingers in the stranger's long hair, mindless of the unclean state of him, of the smell of his flesh, the rank, underbelly of scent, and she pulled him close.

His lips were velvet, quivering with an inner tremor. She touched them with her fingertips. He gazed at her with love, an innocent creature, and her kiss began from an unfathomable depth. He tasted of milk and raw meat and honey. She felt wild in her longing and the stranger nosed in between her thighs curiously, as the night screamed and out of it came a loud rapping on the door.

So unexpected was it that Violet leapt in her skin, quivering like a maraca. The stranger had been brought to his feet, as if a cord had strung him up against his liking and he ran over as the latch rattled.

“Don't!” cried Violet, askance. “Don't let it in!” but he ignored her, throwing open the old door and falling to his knees, overcome with subservience.

In came a storm of a woman, hair as huge as the ocean, glimmering like hard toffee in the firelight. She wore clothes like an afterthought, dressed for snow to her waist but with her legs bare and bruised with cold. Her eyes were enormous and flint coloured with fury. There moved a shape behind her but the woman's voluptuous body masked it. Violet was no fool though; she had the sense to fear it.

...

Wolf-Eye. Wolf-Eye with his bright eyes and hardened feet, dressed to the nines by the witch but forever tearing his clothes on branches and falling onto all fours like a common dog.

Always, no, the witch had told him. Behave like a man.

He could smell meat. The wind was rushing into the Green Cave and bringing out the smell of innocence, of smoking logs and the witch's three-day-old rabbit stew and that smell of young flesh was unbearable to him. He moaned and his voice was lost in the rabid night; such a night. Wolf-Eye could not get past for the witch's body, so he sat on his haunches and awaited his due.

...

Violet remembered her knife and she found herself braced, pointing her weapon at this larger-than-life woman.

“What is this, my dear?” cried the woman. At first Violet thought she was addressing herself but the stranger whimpered in reply and creased his cheek against the woman's leg. Violet strengthened her grip on the knife. “Bringing mere sluts into my house? The spitting image, she is, of the other one...” the woman trailed away, a wicked knowledge alighting and Violet knew, then.

Did you? She asked, hot as a banshee in that stifling room. Did you kill my mother? Violet's feet were bare. She remembered the stranger tenderly taking her shoes off, to prop her cold feet near the grate.

“No,” said the woman, with such cruel ambiguity that Violet knew she was being laughed at. She wanted to cry but she forbade herself with a force of will that was vivid.

“My darling,” said the woman to the figure behind her, which shifted as it was addressed. “Do you not recognise our guest?” and the woman moved into the cottage to make way.

“Little girl,” she said to Violet, “Meet Wolf-Eye.” She smiled mildly. “You are not on familiar ground, my love. You are lost.”

Perhaps what Violet expected was a monster from her childhood but crouched on the ground in a stained, white shirt was a man.

It took a moment for the peculiarity of what she was seeing to settle but a man he was, hunched canine on his calves, with long hair and eyes tinged with blood. His clothes looked misplaced on him. He was both cartoon and nightmare, the ridiculous and the horrifying, his teeth slavering as they were and his red-hot gaze fixed on her like a thousand suns.

“Who are you?” asked Violet in a child's voice and Wolf-Eye let out a cry that impaled her breast with its sadness, its ferocity. An ancient mind inherited and fixed in the present, perched on the revolving pivot of time.

The stranger still huddled by the woman's feet, prisoner to her imperious touch, as she idly ran her fingers through his hair.

When she lifted her hand, he blinked as if freed. Seeing Violet he shuffled towards her and then he froze, catching the lance of Wolf-Eye's gaze. The woman watched while her caged men revolved.

Her clothes still seemed to move apart from her, even in the stillness of the cottage, and Violet realised that she was wreathed in snakes; real, live snakes that looped her neck and arms, black and green and dull, brocade-patterned ones that wound around her thighs and slithered here, there and everywhere, so that she was swarming with movement, a great slab of meat wriggling with maggots. When she smiled she revealed teeth brown with decay.

Just as the two men were ready to fight, Violet threw herself forward. “Stop!” she cried, her voice a spear that shattered the spell long enough for the stranger to regain the safety of the wall.

Wolf-Eye peered at Violet in astonishment. He was taller than she and older. He had a few lines on his face and the odd silver hair running through his black mane. His fingers were torn and scabbed and his hands shook with that habitual tremor they had when not on all fours.

The woman's eyes were coals in her head as she dealt out Violet's sentence.

“Take her from my sight and do what you will with her.”

Her voice was deep as memory and as uncompromising as death. Wolf-Eye snarled and he snatched Violet up like a rag doll. Her knife was pressed flat to her chest and he ran with her, out the door and back into the terrible night.

... to be continued ...