art by Sonja Haskins
PENUMBRA
(Death's Daughter)
By
Kathleen Ward
aka Elizabeth AugustI know I must have dreamed him, a sullen man of quiet rage. But my life hasn't been the same since that night, so he must be real. In the dream, if that is what it was, I followed him. I would have been lost otherwise, caught between the worlds of sleep and shadow like a timeless wraith.
He led me along a stone path, clear like water, smooth as ice. Myriad shapes bled into glass streams. I could have stopped to gaze, but he warned me not to.
"Enchanted diamonds, Leah. You will never leave if you stop now."
"Does anyone else know about this place?" I asked, thinking of pirates, hidden treasure and lore.
"We are invisible."
"But I can see."
I smiled, catching onto his game. It was a thrilling dream and I was fast becoming fearless.
He went transparent again and I lost sight of him. It was impossible for
me to get through this maze alone and I called to him. Stones sparkled
like dark elixir beneath my steps as I ran forward. Lights from torches
glanced along the surface of the path, making a halo for my hair.The jeweled crypt twisted through tunnels under the sea, with no beginning
or end in sight. Diamond ceilings sloped in arches down the sides of a primitive cathedral. Tourmaline stalactites hung at crazy angles from the heights; ruby stalagmites jutted like shark teeth. I was moving through viscous air. And I was made delirious by the lights and colors.
Skulls were everywhere. White bone littered the gutters on either side of the walkway. Bleached ribs cut through the floor like pale stalks. Trembling, I moved past those grinning blooms in Death's garden.
He was only half visible while I scrambled through his unconquerable reality. My footsteps echoed as I tried to catch up, but he refracted and faded into planes and angles. Behind me, peaks and valleys sparkled with stars against the void.
Suddenly there was an explosion. The huge walls split, thick amethyst and citrine shells cracking like eggs. Gem dust bloomed and spread like blood colored fires. High above my head, the ocean cauldron split and burst. The heaving waters cascaded down along the sides; salt waves
roared into the pits like an avalanche. The cavern shifted on its foundation, throwing me to the floor, my body curling into fetal relief, my eyes clamped shut. I felt the stinging blow of millions of pinpricks
along my arms, legs and face. Almost as fast as it began, the onslaughtof daggers stopped. Silence closed over me like a dome.Opening my eyes, I saw a winged horse.
"Get on my back and I will carry you out of here," it said.
Its voice, the many-leveled tongue of the underworld, was disconcerting. There were open wounds on my hands, arms, and the pale flesh of my feet. My face was warm, wet with blood and tears. Everything hurt as if my bones were broken, my insides crushed.
"Who are you?"
"Chaos," it answered.
And I remembered that this was just a dream, with a dream's odd way of making images.
"Where is he?" I asked. "The one who took me here. The one I was with."
"Death is everywhere."
The creature lowered his body into a curl. Hugging its neck, I lifted one of my legs over rippling haunches and shimmied onto its back, wincing from the pain. Then the creature, unfurling wings, moved through the shining storm with me clinging to his mane.
Up we went, higher and higher. Chaos passed through a wall of liquid veils into the gray light of heaven. Fresh air hit in cold waves and I was free of the world of dead bones and diamonds.
But I saw Death with a girl in his arms. Waiting.
"What happened just now?" I asked the creature and in a current of voices, it answered me,
"There was upheaval in Helle." At the word 'Helle', a terrible fear gripped my soul. So it was true, after all. There was such a place and I was not far from it.
"Who did it?"
"Numberless Plagues. Death keeps them chained until there is good reason to let them roam unbound."
"Good reason?" I gasped.
"Sometimes within the equations of life and death, there is good reason."
Then Death disciplined Chaos in that strange language I had heard before. Chaos shuddered and spoke no more. The beast focused blazing eyes upon his master and followed him until a slant of land came into view on the horizon.
I knew I was passing from the dream into half sleep. I opened tired eyes, gazing through the bedroom window in a blur of confusion. It was dark outside and still tired, still curious, I let myself be drawn back into the clouds. The flying horse named Chaos came into view, bright, clear, and I was on his back, his great wings sweeping the air on either side of me. There was a pull of gravity as he began a downward spiral, swooping toward the earth beneath us.
The coast of Massachusetts took shape, the northern shore came up in dizzying sweeps; trees, roads, sand, cliffs, and boats; all grew in dimension and perspective. I watched waves crest and foam, spread across beaches, consuming the land with wide reaches. I drifted, eyes closing, the soothing motion rocking me into a lull.
When I opened my eyes again, the moon lit the scene with funereal clarity.
I stood in the graveyard on the outskirts of Gloucester. I was alone, holding the dead girl in my arms.
She was cold but uncorrupted by some accident of grace; and seemed to be asleep, her lashes curved over the round of her cheek. I leaned against a twisted oak, trying to make her warm with my breath.
"Poor baby," I said, expecting her to sigh.
"Bury it deep," said a disembodied voice behind us.
"You don't really want to do that. She is very precious; besides, you have the power to bring her back to life!"
"The dynamic is different," he said, for it was the man again, the man I'd followed through the dream. He stood in shadows behind stones of the dead.
"I don't understand your riddles."
"You don't need to. Just do as I say."
Placing the body against the tree, I began to dig into damp earth with my hands. It hurt; my fingers were numb with cold and very sore, but I did it anyway. I saw the open wounds on my arms streaming with dark blood. But as I worked through the night, a shallow grave was formed. Each time I looked at the child, she seemed too young to die. I cried softly.
The girl was like me.
Before burying the child, I took her in my arms again, light as a song. Staring into the night sky, I whispered the only prayer I'd ever known. The world took on a garment of tears. In the presence of Death, I prayed only in my mind.
'Angel of God, guardian dear, to whom God's love entrusts me here; ever this day be at my side to rule and guard, protect and guide.'
Then I buried the girl within my heart, and put the sliver of body in a cradle of rust-colored earth.
"God will set me free from the Hunter's snare," she whispered through cold lips.
I stood up and faced Death. Told him what to do, for a change. He was only a dream, after all. "I don't want to go back with you to your world. Let me stay here in the only one I've ever known."
He was impervious.
"You belong to me," he said, possession in his eyes.
"Then I will surely die! Is that what you want; do you want me dead, like her, like that?" I pointed to the stiffening corpse.
I knew I could never escape this net he'd caught me in. But he was playing me for a reason and what it was, I did not know. I was just a little fish, a means to an end in a game of chance. It was clear he
wanted what all the wealth in his kingdom could never buy. I thought about that and wondered. What could mortal woman do to please a god?He looked away, reading me, his bleak profile in black splashes against the pooling light of the moon.
"I do only that which needs to be done, and only by some hidden law of nature," he murmured.
"Let me stay here in my human world!" I begged him. "You can always come back another time, whenever you want." Hope was taking stabbing breaths inside my heart, trying to come to life.
"Follow me then," he spoke the words into soft streams of meaning. "Trust me. I have something to give you before I leave."
We walked out of the graveyard toward the old house overlooking the train yard and the sea. How I wanted to go back there, yet how terrified I was of ever encountering the mad thing my grandmother had become. But the house was all I had left of the real world. And it was back to my world that Death had brought me.
The old mansion stood gaunt and empty. There were no lights. Wildlife scurried unseen under the floorboards of the back porch as we climbed the stairs.
"Where is she?" I asked about my grandmother, remembering our life in Gloucester waiting for fishermen to come in with their hauls, mending their nets on the pier.
"Gone," he answered in a hollow way. I believed him because there was such singular finality to his words. It was not necessary to ask where she'd gone. I had images of violent flames and hidden channels under the ocean in a place called Helle. If he could chain the plagues, then Death
could contain the evil my grandmother had become. A memory burned my brain; my grandmother coming after me with blood soaked knives. Oh God, and I had to disappear when she lunged and struck. I became very small and slipped through cracks in the floor. Falling down in droplets until
he found me running in thick red streams on the beach in the night. Hetook me with him. And for a while, I played with him in the cavern beneath the sea. But that was then.Now, I was walking through my rooms at home. Our house was still the same, exuding its old loneliness. Somehow I felt relief here, like waking from a nightmare into morning. But the nightmare was standing in full force before me. He was tall, hair streaked with moonlight, eyes flashing
in the dark rhythmic crash of waters. I sensed what would happen next, even before he reached for me. I wanted it. It was only a dream, was it not? He took me by the hand and led me up the winding stairs to my bedroom. It was still waiting, with lace curtains flaring in midnight breezes and lilacs mingling with salt air.
I went with him, knowing, desiring what he would do. Slowly he lifted the shirt from my body, my arms stringing through the sleeves, my long hair full of fireflies. Discarding it, he began to undo my skirt, rolling it down over the tingling swell of my hips, my thighs. I stepped out like Venus from her shell.
With heart pounding, fresh blood distended the cusp of my maidenhead. The moon had wandered across the sky; she stood in full splendor at my window, burning coldly along the flowering waves in the sea. I saw beyond Death and beyond the rhythm of his hands while he drew me under his spell. I was sliding, gasping for air, into a place full of unlimited danger. A thing of hideous strength gripped me in its hands.
A man lifted and placed me naked on the bed.
Watching with dark liquid eyes, he sighed. Those grotesque hands feathered the length of my legs; making music along my spine, tendons, ganglia and nerves. I shivered.
"You are beautiful," he said.
Words bubbled to my lips; silver fish slipping away before reasons could be given. I stared at him through shards of watery glass, my breath coming in abrupt hitches, throat closing. I was drowning in the heat that sang under my skin.
He was no longer a spectral image but a real man now, with roped muscles and slender waist and that hard, silk-smooth shaft rising from the core of him. I was a virgin, fourteen years old, and had never seen that. To me, a man was a fearful thing.
He began to kiss me. Cool lips washed over my hungry mouth. Light as breath, petals opening in the rain, I kissed him back. Then he penetrated me with his tongue, full and rich as wine. I had thought this man, this death would rape me, but that was not his intention. He began to take me sweetly in, to someplace wilder, deeper than himself. A place I'd never been before.
My skin was bathed in sweat and moon-glow. He moved, heavy hard, his muscles, that pulsing thing between his legs, the length of him; all bore down at once. The rhythm picked up momentum, his hand between my thighs, reaching for the secret part of me, a swelling bud. His tongue sought me
hiding there. I rose to meet him in rippling surges, mounting his hips with my legs as he breathed deeper into my struggling heart. We moved closer, swam faster until in violent eruptive pulses his manhood entered into, thrusting and flooding, the cup of me. I was lost in the quickening trance of surrender as my body answered him. Seized within the wrenching spasms, I could hardly breathe and weakness brought me to the very edge of life itself.As I looked into the eyes of Death.
The room spun insanely in the quiver, pleasure escalating into a singular and profound ecstasy. I took my first breath, gagging on new air, crying out in echoing joy.
Then I folded into myself, curling like a little white flame in the hollows of his arms. He evaporated like smoke. He disappeared into the moon, into the night waters and was gone. But I did not care, for he had taken me home.
I drifted into deadening sleep and did not wake again until the sun lifted high in the sky, bringing the gift of morning to my eyes, a light I had not seen in years.
Or so it seemed. After all, I had been dreaming for a very long time.
When I woke, heart pounding, I saw the blood on the sheet. I knew what he had done. My house was warm, filled with color, and breathing. I wandered outside. Then spreading unseen wings, I fairly flew down to the sea from the porch steps. I ran across the sands into billowing foam
that mingled with his fluids, washing me clean, washing away the flow of my bloods; and in time, another life emerged from the seed.When she was born, I named her Penumbra, daughter of Death and Sorrow, for my name is Leah and I am her mother. But my daughter is not a dream. She looks like him, tall, slender, sultry; and very dangerous.