Red Song: Part Two

Read part one first, published last week.

Written when I was at university - around 2012. At the time, I was doing my dissertation on fairy tales and filling my brain with Angela Carter, Hans Christian Andersen, and many, many more and I decided to write my own mad tale. I'm very fond of this story, although I'm not sure what it means and maybe that doesn't matter (makes it less of a fairy tale though). It reads like a fever dream, which sums up what life was like at the time.

...

Moonlight striped their path.

Violet's concept of things as they had been and now were was in the process of shifting. She had not a clue what it would mean to accept things as they were so she chose to keep her gaze fixed on Wolf-Eye's vivid face and she did not struggle. She felt the cold blade of the knife and its promise of violence comforted her and all the while there was blooming within her a kernel of wonder.

For what creature was it that ran like a man, but spoke like a wolf? For that line was an absolute, was it not? It could not be blurred.

Men and wolves were as separate as the night was from day, so Wolf-Eye was a creature of dusk, where the two melt together. An infinite struggle; a perfect chaos. Between the beast and the man who would conquer or, indeed, who could possibly be the more tender.

So they ran, for what seemed like miles.

Wolf-Eye's strength both appalled and thrilled her and when he finally let her down he lay on the ground, ribs heaving.

They were before a huge, thousand year old oak tree. It had been struck by lightning in a past age and had withered into a mighty husk and in here Wolf-Eye crept, shepherding Violet before him.

He snuffled her constantly, his eyes rolling back in ecstasy so she could see their whites. She was strangely empty of fear. She wondered if she was about to die and the notion seemed rather separate from her own flesh. Death was something she had never figured to be connected with herself at all, not even when Mother had fallen prey to it.

That mortal knife was still clenched to her breast. Violet was shuddering without her coat and Wolf-Eye took great interest in her puckering skin, running his fingers along her arms as all the hairs rose up.

The inside of his den was surprisingly snug, although the wind whined through the cracks like a cat. Wolf-Eye had filled it with sheep's wool and it sweated with the smell of rank meat. She nearly tripped on a stray collection of bones.

It appeared that left to his own devices he wasn't sure what to do with her next and yet he watched her with such intensity that Violet pulled her knife. Wolf-Eye snarled lazily, a hoarse, inhuman sound from his wind-blistered human lips. His look was both wary and predatory.

“You can understand me right?”

Wolf-Eye cocked his head and grinned.

“Good. I forbid you to kill me.” Violet spoke savagely; she was no sweet girl.

As the rigid walls of her reality tumbled down, so she clung tight to her courage and strove to keep her arm straight.

“If you try and kill me I will cut off your head, do you understand me?”

Wolf-Eye slunk onto his belly, awestruck by this thin girl, barely old enough to drink the wine Mother had opened for them on weekends. Wolf-Eye began to keen to the moon through the slats of the oak. Violet took that to be agreement and she lowered her knife.

She bunched herself into a nest of wool and her domestic shuffling kept Wolf-Eye's bright gaze fixed, until he was lulled into a doze. When she'd finished, Wolf-Eye's tongue was lolling from between his square teeth.

Violet studied her reflection in the knife edge, bright with moon. She was parched and hollowed, vampiric with shock.

The night had marked her, she could see its turbulence in her eyes.

The slash of reflection was like a streak of memory and a kaleidoscope of associations streamed with it. The warm press of a mother's hand, the feel of the stranger's lips, feral eyes and wine from a tin cup and lacerating wind; all physical, all skin, she was made of blood that beat wildly in the winter's night.

Impulse took rule of her. Or perhaps it was some native instinct deep within her domesticity that prompted her to drag her pallid body over and trace Wolf-Eye's cheekbone with the edge of her knife.

His great, bloodshot eye opened and though his body shunted Violet put her hand on his lips to still him. For a moment they appraised one another and then he parted his arms and let her curl into the space there, pulling wool over them both.

He was extraordinarily warm and she felt his curious lips nibbling her hair, his tentative fingers twitching against her own as she held them to her heart.

“You are like me and yet not like me,” she told him. “We are both mad and lost.”

He ran his hands over her body and although he seemed to her the most terrifying form of maleness he did so with the hesitation of an adolescent, as if the human body was something unusual to him.

...

Wolf-Eye had not known tenderness.

His past was gone from him; all he associated the passage of time with was the periodic gnawing in his belly and the presence of the witch from the Green Cave.

She had driven him to her bed when the cold had bitten even his hardy flesh and then she had pulled from him love cries that rang, hot and hard, through the cottage.

Then her snakes bit him and he was thrown into the cold again, to kill a sheep and hunker in his hollow with the raining silver and the fire of his pitiful body.

The sapling girl smelled of youth, which he had never smelt before. She was appeal and agony.

He possessed memory only as a string of vague shadows, which pranced through his mind, needless and yet toxic, for there flickered an image of himself as stronger, leaner, furrier, made of muscle of a tougher grain and with eyes that did not blur in the wind and teeth that didn't chip against bone.

He clung onto the sapling girl as to a spar and eventually they both slept.

...

The morning was a pearl.

Frost glazed the trunk of the hollow tree and from their burrow of wool Violet's eyes peeked, astonished, to gaze at the world as if from a dream. Wolf-Eye was huffing in his sleep and she drew slowly from his embrace.

The smell of him was overwhelming; the smell of sweat and meat and decay too great for Violet's senses. She crawled out into the morning and retched from an empty stomach.

What a globe of ice and dew and wet, wet cold they were waking to.

Wolf-Eye peered from under heavy lids and in a heartbeat he had flown out into the sharp dawn. There were birds shrieking in the wood and in the glare Violet realised she didn't have her knife with her.

So she soothed, crouching low and uttering soft sounds.

From close by there came a tumultuous noise and the stranger lurched into view, bleeding from a head wound that nearly blinded him. Violet cried aloud and the stranger twisted his head, locking eyes with Wolf-Eye as the pentacle of trees around them gleamed. The light cast angel rays through the leaves and a terrible sadness dug its heavy, mauve fingers in Violet's chest.

She felt her heart thud and tear and she wasn't sure why.

She caught sight of something moving through the trees; a flash of red and white. She turned towards it and it was gone, to reappear in the corner of her other eye. Countless times she strove to pin down that streak of colour, while the two men were suspended in a moment of incredulous, raised hackles.

Suddenly the red and white materialised; the woman as strong as an ox, capering like the devil himself, wearing the painted mask.

It was white, white, innocence white, with the scarlet slash of its grin like an open wound. It threw such fear in Violet that she stumbled right over with a shriek as silly as a schoolgirl, breaking the concentration that bound the men in suspended tension.

All chaos broke loose.

Wolf-Eye went for the stranger's throat with the decision of a killer and the stranger evaded him like a naughty puppy, looping back with the nerve of one who has already sealed his fate without quite figuring why.

They tumbled together and Violet was left with the mask, swaying on top of that generous, female body.

She pointed like a mad woman, her line of sight spearing the mask along her fingertip. Cruel eyes laughed at her and then a pair of reptilian pupils in a flat face appeared in the mask's eye hole. A little tongue flickered and a snake slithered from the mask, over one high cheekbone, and pooled heavily into the woman's outstretched hands. It writhed and then disappeared up her sleeve, resigned to its steaming prison.

Violet scurried to the hollow and dug through the wool, searching, searching for her knife, while that nightmare face advanced. A face as false and real as the most vivid child's dream.

Her thumb caught the blade's edge and blood bloomed crimson. She grabbed its handle and flourished it at that face, snagging one cheek.

It carved away paint, leaving a black scar and a spattering of Violet's blood. Wolf-Eye's nose twitched and he tore free of the stranger, who lay nearly insensible between his hands; his teeth were foaming with the imminence of his death bite but Violet's blood caught the air with a sweet, ferocious scent, scattering him.

“Kill, Wolf-Eye, my darling!” the woman snarled, her voice like hardened velvet but he waited a fraction too long and the stranger had wriggled free.

The woman screamed savagely and behind the fixed smile of her outer face the sound shivered coldly down Violet's spine. In her madness the woman turned from Violet and the girl took her opportunity.

The knife had promised violence and now she sank it up to the hilt in the woman's breast.

She felt it splinter through ribs. Blood was the only thing left in the world. The witch's flailing arm hit Violet squarely round the temple and she fell.

The glittering morning ran red and then there was a little woody-green stream running and the woman's clothes had melted back into water, her flesh back into tree bark and all that was left was the human mask, perfect in its symmetry, ghastly in its deranged joy.

...

Wolf-Eye had an imperfect notion of the world. He was impulse actualised.

All at once he was a rug of a beast again.

The pentacle of trees shone with the morning sun, the moon sank away and Wolf-Eye raised his canine head to the sky and howled.

Panting on the ground lay the mongrel dog, golden fur strawberry with blood. Wolf-Eye found he had little interest in him anymore. He twitched his pointed ears and turned his yellow gaze on the sapling girl.

...

Violet dreamed she was made of fur.

It was a glorious and satisfying dream, for she was stringy and strong, with all the power she could muster coiled in her great muscles. The taste of the world was of a thousand textures. The wind had flavours that flooded her mouth and she wanted to bite into its very fabric.

She wanted to dance, coquette that she was, and such an appetite bloomed down her gullet, through her lungs and her loins that her claws themselves shuddered with the red desire of blood, of love.

Other colours were muted but red burst against her retinas.

She heard howling from far away, an immeasurable distance away and without a thought her own voice bubbled up her throat and from her came such an answering sound.

The harmony of wolf song rang out, making the wind rise and scatter the cracked pine cones.

The rainbow of the world was a soft thing behind the fierce love of her beastly heart and she shook her mane and frolicked and took up the howl again.

The other cry was suddenly, brilliantly near and in her dazed eyes, near blinded by red song, she glimpsed the shape of him. Their howls ended and she felt his rough, damp fur graze her as he nosed the length of her rugged body.

With a resounding crack the painted mask split down the middle as Wolf-Eye trod it into the ground and the gale of its destruction shook clouds into Violet's mind so that the muted colours turned black and her eyes closed.

Still the racket of red song did not stop; it rang on through the dark space behind her lids and she was free.

She felt a smaller body, of a softer fur, curl up beside her, lick her cheek and huff a sound of love into her ear and although it was so cold she was nearly dead, she smiled.

...

Violet lay on her side, blue-skinned, the mongrel dog tucked against her abdomen and the longer form of the great wolf stretched along her back, both of his paws thrust under her head to keep her from the cold ground.

Her pale flesh twitched and her eyelids quivered, thin as lilac petals. With their bodies they encased her in fur to try and keep her human body a little warmer.

They rested their heads on her and the red song raged.