The Blue Moon Rule

Death metal pounded and pulsated from the state of the art speakers that were strategically placed in every corner of every room. Every room, not only the ones where you’d expect to find speakers - the lounge room or the dining room or the bedroom, rooms where one might like to bring some music in to sooth savage beasts or to lull a baby to sleep or to aid digestive juices or to set a romantic mood or to saturate the atmosphere with the sex-charged hypnotic notes of a saxophone. Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing springs to mind.

The noise was so guttural, so from that deep-down, way-down-deep place in the belly, where intestines twist and turn on themselves, like tortured paths penetrating twisted minds, that it putrefied the sugary smell in the kitchen, caramelising the air so it took on the thick, sickly sweetness of a rotting corpse. Ragnarok lowered the knife and the glow grew even brighter. She stared at it with an intensity grown as dark and as poisonous as the air she breathed in short inhalations, like a bull enraged by sharp points prodded into its hide as the crowd roared for blood and death in a hot Spanish arena, the day full of white dust and white heat.

She snarled. Reverberations bounced from her throat to the knife to the stone walls, sounding like they emanated from an ancient beast chained to a stone wall by a rusted chain turned slippery by water seeping from an underground stream. Impossible to distinguish her voice from the death metal growls emanating from the speakers, echoing from one corner to another, from one room to another, up the stairwell and then down again, creating a vortex of noise that threatened to slash the slender thread of sanity Ragnarok grimly held on to.

The knife grew even brighter, its light crawling up Ragnarok’s arm, trickling along nerves, creeping towards her brain, a sudden rush of electricity at each ganglion as it leapt from one synapse to the next. There were rusty patches around the handle of the knife where she’d not honed it to razor sharpness, where ancient wood met metal. It was an old, old knife passed down to her through the generations, from old woman to young woman, from adolescent to newborn. In woods and in forests, wherever there was green and moss and mist, cold air and soft earth and worm-eaten wood. She went barefoot at these times, when she felt that her skin needed to touch the earth, to reconnect her body with the body of her mother, when she knew it was time to bring into being the ancient ways of the world that had birthed her.

This was that time. Now was that time. A blue moon. Back in 2007, Skywatcher Joe had speculated that the Blue Moon Rule originated from belewe, the Old English word meaning 'to betray’, because the extra full moon betrays the usual perception of one full moon per month. Skywatcher Joe had later recanted, saying sheepishly that his speculation had been innovative but wrong. Ragnarok preferred his speculation to fact and every blue moon, she gathered together all her betrayals into an overflowing pile of malevolence and worked on them one by one. She polished the dull, rusty patches on each betrayal, however slight, polishing them with sighs of satisfaction and a gleam in her eye, whistling tunelessly to herself. She magnified them, recalling to mind the time, the place, the person, the pain. She put each one under a harsh light and peered down at them as if she were still there but removed, having an out of body experience, floating in the air, up close to the ceiling. She always imagined high ceilings in grand houses with opulent cornices and scrolls and plaster cherubs trailing the cloths of heaven in their chubby little hands, from which to look down at all the betrayals in her life. She felt that this was apt and added to the gravity of the past, all those times in which she had been wronged and cheated and accused unjustly, been abandoned and unloved.

‘It doesn’t count if you’re already planning your defeat,’ Ragnarok snarled into the semi-darkness, fondling the heart-shaped locket around her neck. The fires outside raged with a ferocity that dried the air around her. She backed away from the window, her feet slipping on the stone flagstones. The window panes shimmered hot and fierce, threatening to implode, explode, she didn’t know which way they would blow, just that when they did, they’d slice through her like shrapnel from a bomb blast. All she did know was that she’d started something she had no control over now.

And she smiled at that thought, the one that gave her permission to wreak havoc, but with no sense of responsibility. None whatsoever. She wasn’t wired that way. She’d tried, when she was much younger, when she’d wanted to fit in and be accepted by her friends.

Friends! What a joke. Cowards and second-rate people, all of them. Running at the slightest whiff of trouble. Or of smoke. An acrid catch at the back of her throat, sharp like a shard of glass, as if a burning ember had entered her airways, drew her back out of herself and her bitter musings.

Defeat! Un-bloody-likely - not with this unholy conflagration of flame and wind and heat, a match thrown into leaves, bushes, trees, on dry parched earth that hadn’t seen a drop of water for seven years. The only thing that had kept her sane over that time was the thought of what she would be able to do once her apprenticeship was over.

Skywatcher Joe had chosen well. Someone on that edge of bitterness, of simmering hatred for past wrongs, not yet sure what to do with all the poison she’d stored for half her lifetime but stockpiling each small slight, each act of othering, nonetheless.

He’d taken note of her qualities, the ones he valued most - the quick, unchecked temper that flared like a flame when she was crossed. Oh, she tried, he noted, tried hard to be patient with those she considered so far beneath her that she barely registered their existence. Until they crossed her. And then she had no hesitation in cutting them down, negating their existence, moving on with swift strides, nary a backward glance. Cancel culture, that fit-for-his-needs 21st century phenomenon, that Skywatcher Joe valued so highly.

He valued what she tried to hide. He admired the mask she wore to disguise the festering of something left to stew and curdle for way too long, the resentment she’d stored up and was almost ready to harvest.

Skywatcher Joe chose well when he chose her. He smiled to himself, remembering. She’d still had a small vestige of innocence when he stumbled upon her in the backstreets. She still had small shreds of dignity and self-respect. He’d let her hold on to them for a little while, as they became friends. He had a timeline to work with that had been finely honed over centuries. And a method that was almost always foolproof. Except for that one time, that one who escaped his clutches, who slipped out of the net he cast, rejected the line he used to draw them in. Fine lines, silken lines.

Perhaps he’d been too sure of himself, he thought. A lesson in humility perhaps. Yes, he’d put her in that category - a life lesson, something for him to learn from. After all these centuries, he liked that he could still learn something new, that his taste and palate were not so jaded from constant success that he underestimated some of his prey.

Flames lapped at the window sill like storm waters breaking their banks. She wondered about the elements - fire, earth, air and water, all the strange interconnections, the relationships, how one could become the other. Water turned into steam if enough fire was present, steam was merely air interspersed with water droplets. Water droplets in the air was the mist that travelled down the Hawkesbury River some mornings, looking like white dragon’s breath reaching out over the ocean. If you threw water on fire, the fire went out - that’s if there was enough water, if the fire wasn’t so big that it had created its own micro-environment in the sky, its own wind tunnels that sucked flames higher and higher into the stratosphere. If the fire had managed to become that big, then buckets of water or even high pressure hoses were like pissing on a volcano, expecting it to calm down, expecting your own puny human power to be any match for its volcanic eruptions.

She imagined Satan himself, standing there on the lip of the volcano, cock in hand, pissing a steady stream of rocket fuel into the mouth of the volcano like he’d been saving it up for a millennia or two.

That’s what the Black Summer fires were like in Australia in 2020. And then in California, that same year. Like the devil had been waiting quietly in the background until he had exactly the right partners in crime and had manoeuvred them into positions of power, like some master chess player moving his kings and queens, that inbred bunch of Royals, his rooks and and paedophile bishops, around the Black-lives-matter and the White-privilege squares of his board. He’d aligned governments with mining companies, education and health systems with Big Business and Big Pharma, religion with small, self-obsessed minds. He’d married evil to greedy, stupid to power and sat back to watch what those unholy alliances could come up with.

All he’d needed was the heart-shaped locket he’d forged in the fires of Hell, the one he’d fashioned from all the souls he’d bought and sold, trading up, trading down. It hadn’t taken much really - some time, some energy, a little forethought, picking the right humans in the right places. This one, here in the kitchen, fingering the locket, was his prime pawn. Destined for Queendom, he’d told her, a castle and some horsemen and her very own peasants to do her bidding, to shiney up all her grievances when her arms grew tired.

©Karen Adler 2021