It’s another fiction Monday. This one is … way odd and perhaps my closest exploration of evil. So this is what came out of reflecting about evil this past week. I’m sure that’s quite cheery for you all. Also, a note to the exceptional Jerry Hodge: with regard to the name, it was already there, as well as his fate, well before I realized the connection. So there’s the subconscious at work, for you!
Garden Party
“Thomas, do you hear how the earth is screaming? It cries out in pangs of labor, ready to give birth to the famine of our apocalypse. It has drunk the blood of the first slain and is now to avenge seven fold. Run and run again to try and hide yourself from its wrath, but it shall find you. It shall find us all.”
Véronique stared out onto the south lawn of the manor house, which was a fairyland of light and laughter as the party greeted the first hour of the early morning under the watch of the Storm moon. She wore a lavender chiffon dress, which kissed the ground when she walked, having long abandoned her shoes when she had climbed the stairs to the balcony to watch the party. Her brunette hair was pulled up, held in place by a myriad of pins with diamonds at their cap, causing her to sparkle like a fay whenever she passed by a candle or under a luminary. The young French exile pushed her hands across the stone of the balcony’s railing and felt the tense elements writhe beneath her. The earth was screaming. Somewhere in the midst of the party the string quartet began to play Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor. A glass shattered. There was a chorus of laughter.
“You’re drunk.” Thomas set down his empty scotch glass on the railing beside him as he kept his eyes fixed on Véronique’s back. “Let’s go back down to the party. It might be nice, considering what it’s supposed to be for.” Thomas placed his hands into his pockets and leaned against the wall, annoyed.
Véronique arched her back slightly as she felt a fingernail trace up the curve of her spine. “I can’t marry you, Thomas. I’ve forgotten my lines in the performance and I was never good at improvisation. And now it doesn’t matter, because it’s all coming to a terrible end anyway. There’s no point anymore.”
Thomas withdrew his hands from his pockets and pushed himself off the wall, grabbing Véronique by the arm and twisting her round to face him. “What are you saying?”
Her eyes were alight with frightened frigidity, a hare caught by the hunting dog. “I don’t love you, Thomas. I love the darkness too much.” She freed herself from his grasp and moved toward the entryway of the balcony. “It was all a lie from the start, anyway. There’s not much to say now other than that it was never going to work regardless so you shouldn’t be too angry with me for ending it before either of us were hurt.” The light from the interior room shone through the glass of the entry doors, catching in the diamonds in Véronique’s hair and surrounding her head with a dreamy glimmer. She did not face him, but looked at her reflection in the glass. It greeted her frightened resolve with a smile. Véronique blinked.
She heard the scotch glass shatter behind her and turned in time to see Thomas’s hand still hovering over the spot where it had broken, his face awash with anger. Perhaps grief. Véronique wasn’t sure she knew who he was anymore.
“I knew it would be hard, Véronique,” he seethed, “I accepted that. But when you agreed to marry me I thought we put away the business about you playing games like this. You promised me that you wouldn’t run anymore, you promised me that I would never have to chase you again.”
She worried her lower lip. “I meant it at the time.” A flutter of something flicked about her and brushed against her hair. The light burst behind her as it did behind the cheap depictions of the Lady on the saint candles sold in supermarkets, reflecting through the diamonds and crowning her with bought glory while the rest of her was awash in shadow, her cobalt eyes the only whisper of life.
Thomas drew himself back and took a deep breath. His nostrils flared slightly as he exhaled and his dimpled chin quivered. “What happened, Véronique? When I first met you I thought that all this was just some kind of cute game you liked to play. It was erotic and fun and now it’s pathetic and tiresome. Can’t you just stop, for once, for my sake, and at least pretend that you are capable of a normal emotional response to the world.”
Her eyes fluttered closed in annoyance and she heard the rushing water of the world’s agony violently breaking through the forests. She was suspended in the beautiful pain of it all and was swept along with it into the abyss. Véronique opened her eyes. “Stop trying to place everything into categories. You and your psychology, all that training to learn how to distance yourself from actually dealing with people. Labels. Compartments. Find out all the somethings that make up a person and then file each away neatly so that you never have to deal with that mess, that person, just the abstracts, the controllable, the certain.” She blinked rapidly, on the verge of tears. “But people are complicated, Thomas, and what you thought was a game is really just me. It is my true face. Don’t you understand? You fell in love with who you wanted me to be. But I’m not her. I cannot be her anymore. I don’t know how.”
“Pretend for me,” Thomas pleaded, “Is that too much to ask of you? Just pretend. You promised.”
“Would that satisfy you? To have a wife who was never honestly herself, who was a fabrication, an incarnation of your desires and her self-betrayal?”
“It’s no different than everyone else.” Thomas spoke softly. It was an admission of guilt that he had held back since he was a boy. He no longer remembered if he had been taught it or had come to it by nature, but he knew there had been a time when he hadn’t believed it, when he had in the unbridled wanting of youth thought there to be another way of living entirely. Those days were long gone; and, as he stood in his tuxedo, his scotch glass shattered at his feet, his fiancée gazing back with him with a crazed look of fright, Thomas doubted the whole game and was tempted to laugh away his culpability into the vibrancy of the night.
Véronique pulled the ring from her finger and dropped it in the space between them. It clattered on the stone floor. She felt something lick her bare hand. “You can have your thirty pieces of silver back, go and buy your field.”
Turning from him, Véronique opened the door of the balcony and stepped back into the manor house, crossing through the empty ballroom, its many furnishings draped in cloth for when the room was not in use. Light flooded the room, marking the absence of people, of the cruelty of the race. The walls trembled as the earth trembled. Véronique could hear the blood crying from the ground, the oldest indictment. She needed to flee from the terribleness of it all, the terribleness of man. But there was no escape, there had been no atonement.
A small glimpse of mirror peeked out from a drop cloth that had fallen to the side of the frame. Véronique saw herself from the corner of her eye and watched herself smile with blithe irreverence as her hands traced up to her neck and began to dig into her flesh. Véronique’s hand was on the switchboard for the lights in the ballroom as she studied herself in the act of mutilation in the mirror. Her haunted, sunken face looked into the eyes of the smiling demon and found there no soul. She could feel the scrape against her flesh. Véronique flicked off the light. The image in the mirror was herself, cast in shadow, one hand at her side while the other kept steady on the switch. She opened the door of the ballroom and stepped out into the corridor.
“There you are! André, I found her! Head back down to the party and we’ll be there shortly!” Sylvie, Véronique’s mother, called down the stairs to Véronique’s father, then turned to face her with a look of furtive concern. “Where have you been, my dear? Everyone is looking for you and Thom—” Sylvie recoiled from her daughter and then reached forward to clasp her hands. “What has happened to your neck?” She studied the thin lines of blood delicately surface where the nails had torn the fragile flesh.
“It’s nothing,” Véronique insisted, “Just a trick of the light. The light plays tricks.” The portrait of an elderly lady in formal attire and holding opera classes in her lap hanging on a wall of the corridor began to laugh. Véronique watched her chuckling and then screamed for her to be silent. Her scream echoed throughout the length of the hallway and then down the stairs, which responded with the sound of footsteps coming to inspect the situation.
Sylvie grabbed Véronique and pulled her into the room nearest them. She shut the door and, finding the key in its lock, turned it for good measure. When she looked back to face Véronique, she saw her daughter standing transfixed before a small crucifix that hung over the fireplace of the bedroom they had ducked into, but she would not raise her eyes to look upon it. She was mouthing something, perhaps even mumbling, but Sylvie could not hear. “What is happening to you, Véronique?” she demanded, crossing the room to stand between her and the crucifix. “Dites-moi, maintenant!”
Véronique blinked several times and felt the earth tear beneath her. “I’ve broken off the engagement with Thomas.”
“You’ve done what?”
“I’ve broken it off, Mother. There was no point in it. It’s all coming to end anyway, why should we only hasten along the process?” Her head was swimming. Was her neck bleeding? Surely it must be. The crucifix stretched against the wall and demanded that she look at it, but she refused to turn her gaze back. It was untrue. There had been no atonement.
There was a moment of silence between them, as the party continued gaily on outside. Then that terrible trait of niceness that her mother had dropped away and Sylvie honestly addressed her daughter. “You stupid girl!” she spat, shaking Véronique in anger. “What have you done? What have you done to me? All I ever asked of you was that you settle down and get married, to live a normal life. Why do you love to torment me?” She thrust her away, wringing her hands together and beginning to pace, a frenzy of French being whispered like spellcraft toward the floor.
Véronique screamed back at her. “Is it so very hard for you to accept me for who I am? I told you since I was a little girl that I loved the darkness! I’ve always loved the darkness!” She pulled some of the pins from her hair and threw them to the floor. “They speak in church about the Christ and I have many times proclaimed my love for Him, but each time I go back to the darkness.” Véronique could hear the rushing waters of damnation spilling into the forest. “I reject Him each time, so how can I really love Him? I am too in love with the darkness.”
Véronique felt herself stiffen and ghostly hands caressed her bare arms. She spoke softly. “I am not given over to that particular luxury of pious sensibility that you so often prayed for me to have, Mother.” Something was twisting around her leg. She stepped forward, inviting it to climb up her body, as she walked toward the door. “I have cried out to the dying earth and it has heard me. It will receive me to its breast and save me from this imprisonment. But it shall take us all down to its depths before we are reborn.”
There was a noise behind her.
“I rebuke the devil in you!”
Véronique turned in time to see her mother raise the crucifix from the wall above her head and then swing it forward to connect with her daughter’s left temple. As she fell, Véronique realized it was her own face that watched her falling, greeting her frightened certainty with dethatched joy. The blood that spilled from the wound pooled about her head and clung to the diamonds in her hair. Beneath her, the earth whispered something that made her soul rend itself. Somewhere in the distance, a rope pulled taut. Then her eyes closed.
The screaming from the hallway woke Véronique with a start.
She lay on the floor in the bedroom, alone. The crucifix hung over the fireplace, unmoved. She touched the side of her head and found it to be without gash or stain of blood. She touched her neck and found no scratches there. Véronique slowly stood. The screaming had not stopped. From the window she could see several members of the party moving toward the manor as fire swept up about them. They moved funnily, slowly, like they ran through gelatin. The fire moved slowly too. The world was coming to a stop.
Véronique tried to open the door, found it locked, turned the key, and then opened it wide, stepping through. She too was moving slowly, as in a dream. She felt herself drawing toward the ballroom along with the others who had come up the stairwell only to be held back by several men trying to keep people from seeing who swung just beyond the opening of the ballroom doors. Thomas’s body dangled, the lone chair beneath him kicked away. In the light of the room, his eyes sparkled like a fairy, having been closed with pins that had diamonds at their caps pierced through each eye.
Véronique turned from the face and made her way toward the stairs. Everything happened so slowly. The paintings on the walls watched her push through the people, descending into the light of the bottom floor. Slowly they began to turn to her, trying to stop her, perhaps to console her, but she would not be stopped, she would not be consoled. The earth was erupting in violence and the oldest strife was coming back to claim restitution.
There had been no atonement.
As she fled out onto the stone of the porch and down toward the party, Véronique felt the grass beneath her bare feet reaching up to twist about her and pull her back. Each time she fought its grasp; each time she forced herself forward. The forest was just ahead; there she would make her salvation. The fire swept before her. The earth stretched in labor and screamed out again. It whispered her name and called her to its embrace. They would all see the judgement that was to come in the darkness, but she would be united with it, she would embrace it to herself.
But everything else was quiet. People were screaming but no sound came from their mouths. Véronique was screaming too, but she was pleased by the silence.
Those who had been left behind were horrified, coming toward her, going beyond her toward the house, fleeing from the rising flames that consumed the tables and flowers, licking at their clothes and threatening to set them ablaze. The violist from the string quartet ran from the small stage as flames billowed from his body and instrument, until he collapsed in exhaustion and let himself burn.
Véronique refused to turn back, the forest was within her reach. As she stepped just beyond the tree line, her right foot caught on something and she could not move forward. Looking back, she saw that her foot was no longer there. Her left foot suddenly sank beneath her and Véronique felt her body begin to grow rigid. Her limbs stretched out and the pins of her hair began to spill out around her as her neck elongated and her frame stiffed. She cried out in the pains of labor as the splintered wood broke through her skin and tore through her dress, the bark settling onto the frame of her metamorphosed form.
The poplar swayed slightly in the evening wind, while below it the diamonds twinkled like decayed stars before sinking into the quiet embrace of the earth.
© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.
