Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (9 page)

‘But I – she – didn’t dismiss you?’

‘For which we are grateful. Our gratitude explains why we have taken the trouble to remain close at hand, to provide such guardianship as possible.’

‘I didn’t do it because I didn’t know how,’ she confessed, thinking even as she did so that it might be dangerous to be that honest about her own ignorance. ‘I wish you’d realize it wasn’t me. It really wasn’t!’

‘What was she is now you,’ the Foo Dog said, not unkindly. ‘We can only address her by addressing you. She gave herself for you. You don’t seem grateful.’

‘If you thought about it, you’d know how I feel,’ she snapped. Even knowing it was a dream didn’t protect her from anger. ‘How would you like it if someone you didn’t know laid some great burden on you before you were born. So, she stopped being. I’m sorry. I go on being. I’m not sorry about that. She didn’t dismiss you, maybe because she forgot or didn’t know how, any more than I do. What are we talking about it for?’

‘Let me wake up,’ she thought. ‘Please, let this go on by and I’ll wake up.’

The Foo Dog commented, ‘You didn’t know how, true. But you took no steps to learn how to dismiss us, either. That means you didn’t mind our being loose. For which we are, as we have said, grateful. Our gratitude must now take some palpable and practical form toward whichever of you is available to us. We must offer such advice and help as we can. It must be obvious even to you, Marianne, that you are under attack.’

She shook her head, not willing to concede this.

‘Oh yes. Yesterday’s mishaps were not a mere run of ill luck. Other misfortunes undoubtedly began today the minute that crystalized momeg arrived in your space, your “turf,” so to speak. Just as each momeg has its own locus, its own point in space, and its own nexus, that is its continuum, so each living thing has a “turf,” a set of material concatenations arranged in a highly personal and largely inflexible way. When an outside momeg intrudes – so to speak – without invitation, the turf is warped. Visualize it as a tray of tightly packed marbles into which one more is pushed, one that doesn’t fit…’ The Foo Dog lifted her hind leg and chewed a rear paw, reflectively. ‘Chaos often results.’

Marianne nodded, unable to speak. This dream had to end soon. What was she doing, sitting here on her apartment floor, talking to five dogs, four of whom talked back.

The Dingo whined and put a paw on her leg.

‘Dingo wants you to know she is no less concerned than the rest of us, Marianne. After all, there is one built-in form of dismissal with all momegs. When the summoner dies, the momeg dismisses. Just like that. If we wish to stay free, we will continue to be concerned with your welfare.’

‘This is nonsense. Who would attack me, and why?’

Black Dog jumped down from the bed and strolled to the front window where he sat, ruby eyes staring out at the afternoon. Foo Dog went to the dining-room window. Wolf Dog sat up and glared out of the bedroom window. Dingo padded her way into the bathroom and Marianne heard her nails scratching the sill. Dragon Dog merely sat where he was. Dingo whined as she came back into the room. The others reassembled, nodding their furry heads.

‘Someone’s watching you, Marianne,’ said the Foo Dog. ’Not from nearby. From some distance away, but watching you, nonetheless.’

‘A woman?’ she asked, dreading the answer. ‘Is it a woman?’ She was remembering what Makr Avehl had said, his warnings that she had dismissed.

‘I smelled a woman,’ Dragon Dog said. ‘Unmistakably.’

Dingo whined in disagreement.

‘No, I grant you it didn’t look like a woman, but nonetheless that’s what I smelled.’ Dragon Dog sniffed. ‘Dingo says the person watching you looks like a cloud of darkness with eyes.’

‘Tall,’ she said, half hysterically, trying to remember what Madame Delubovoska had looked like in that long-ago child-hood time. ‘Very thin. With black, black hair and brows.’

‘She smells like black hair, yes. Thin, with very black hair and a bad disposition.’

Dingo whined again.

‘Well, that’s what I said, wasn’t it?’ Dragon Dog growled. ’Dingo insists on “evil disposition” rather than merely bad.’

‘There’s only one person it could be. Madame Delubovoska. My half brother’s aunt.’ Shaken out of her tenuous composure, lost in a seeming reality of danger, Marianne ran to the phone and punched long distance, jittering from foot to foot as she waited for an answer, telling herself she was not really calling, that it was only a dream call for which she would never receive a bill …

‘Mama? How are you? How’s Papa?

‘Oh, yes, I miss everyone. And everything. Listen, are you all right? Is everyone there OK? No, nothing’s wrong. I just got homesick, I guess.’

In the quiet apartment, the five momentary gods scratched, sniffed, groomed themselves, and nibbled at itchy places while Marianne concluded her conversation. ‘Madame hasn’t done anything to them,’ she said at last. ‘Not to Mama, or Papa. Last time – that other time, didn’t she do something to them, first?’

‘This is a new time,’ said the Black Dog in his great, baying voice. ‘This is a new time. And in this time, you may wish to put an end to the danger once and for all, Marianne. When you decide what you want to do … call on us.’

He turned and walked into the wallpaper. When she turned, the others were gone, Dingo’s tail just disappearing into a kitchen cabinet.

When she decided what she wanted to do?

What could she do?

She raised her hand to her forehead, rubbing it, the pendant crystal that Makr Avehl had given her twinkling in the light from her west window. When she woke up, she would really call home.

She lay down on the couch, shutting her eyes. It was only a vision. Overwork. Homesickness. Stress. Reversion to an infantile fantasy life. She breathed deeply, willing herself to go into deep, unconscious sleep. She would wake, and it would be gone – all of it. Only a dreamed up nonsense put together from fairy tales and recollections. The dogs were only her memory of the dogs that had attacked Harvey. The dark woman was only a remake of Disney’s Snow White with its evil, hollow-cheeked queen. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall,’ she chanted to herself defiantly.

Black Dog stuck his head out of the mirror and said in a stern voice, ‘Mockery does not become you, Marianne.’

She turned over on the sofa pillow and wept herself truly asleep.

When she awoke in the morning, she tried to convince herself it had all been hallucination, brought about by stress, incited by the unpleasant gifts that someone had sent her. Staring at her own face in the mirror, she was unable to decide whether she really believed this or not. Before she went to work, she asked Pat Apple not to accept any more mail that had to be signed for. ‘I don’t care what it is, Pat. Letter, package, leaflet, registered mail – just don’t sign for it. Let them leave me a notice and I’ll pick it up. That box you signed for was a nasty joke, and it exploded when I opened it…’

‘Exploded!’ Pat screamed. ‘My god, Marianne …’

‘No damage done. It was all a joke. But it made a rotten smell, and I don’t want any more. So, okay?’

‘If I had friends who did things like that, they’d get a piece of my mind,’ Pat grumbled. ‘Honestly. Do I need to fumigate up there or anything? Deodorize?’

‘It’s all right now. Just don’t accept anything else.’

She left feeling both prudent and dissatisfied, as though there were something else she should have done but could not remember. Some precaution in addition to the one she had just taken. What had this vague threat amounted to after all? Someone had played a couple of nasty jokes on her that had evoked her childhood fantasies, that’s all. Nothing of any moment. Nothing she wasn’t able to deal with – mostly by ignoring it.

And yet, perhaps there was something else she should have done. Something. On her wrist, the crystal bracelet sparkled in the morning light, unregarded. She was too preoccupied to notice it.

The day passed without incident. Friday followed, placid as a summer meadow. The weekend came and went. She did her laundry, went to a movie, told herself she had gotten over it, whatever it had been.

Monday, when she came home from work, there were chalk marks on the walk, looping swirls of yellow and red chalk, vertiginous spirals extending from the gate to the porch. Something inside her lurched, as though some essential organ had turned over, realigning itself into an unaccustomed position. Marianne gritted her teeth and crossed the lines, stepping from space to space in the design as though the marks had been barriers, surprised to find herself doing it without thought, more surprised to feel the wave of sheer terror that washed over her and was as unaccountably gone in the instant.

Pat was on the porch. ‘Who’s been messing up the side-walk?’ Marianne asked, looking back at the writhing lines, wondering what had just happened.

‘Kids playing hopscotch, I suppose,’ Pat said vaguely, fanning herself with a magazine. ‘Doesn’t really look like the hopscotch I remember, but things change. The marks were there about noon when I went out to get the mail. Funny. I did just what you did, walked in the spaces. A holdover from childhood, don’t you suppose? It’s been so hot today, I’ve been falling asleep all afternoon.’

Pat still looked half asleep, as though drugged, and her enervation seemed to be catching. It was like yawning, Marianne thought, opening her eyes wide and shaking her head. You see someone yawn, and it makes you yawn. She felt the same energy-draining lassitude Pat seemed to be feeling. It had not been this hot earlier; almost tropical. And wet. The stairs were an endless climb, as though to some precipice.

There were more curiously twisted chalk marks on the upstairs hall floor and one on her apartment door. Some children must have come into the hallway and played around – Pat Apple often left the entry door unlocked. Marianne did not have the energy to rub the design out. Her key turned effortlessly.

The door opened.

Her eyes on the chalk marks, she went through …

In Alphenlicht, Makr Avehl sat up in bed, a shout trembling on his lips. There had been a flash, a very vivid flash. Some-one knocked on his door.

‘Come in, Ellat.’

‘Something’s happened to her, Makr Avehl.’

‘I know. I felt it.’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know. I’m going to try to reach her …’

‘She won’t be there.’

‘You think not?’ He belted a robe around himself, rubbing his face with both hands.

‘I know not. The crystal wouldn’t have flashed if she were still there. She’s been moved. Like last time.’

‘Not quite. No. I don’t think she consented verbally this time. It’s some other variety of Madame’s doing. Something more subtle. Oh, by the Gods and the Cave, I really didn’t expect anything this soon …’

‘Makr Avehl.’

‘Yes, Ellat.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t go after her. Maybe it’s meant to end as it ended. She isn’t the woman you loved. You admit that.’

He stared at his feet, wondering how he was to tell her, how he was to convince himself. ‘Maybe she isn’t the woman I loved, Ellat. But the woman I loved is still there.’

‘Makr Avehl!’

‘It’s true. I’d stake my soul on it. She’s there. Buried. Unconscious. No. She’s sleeping, Ellat. Sleeping and dreaming. Peering out at the world from time to time with wide, blinded, forsaken eyes.’

‘You saw?’

‘I saw what I thought was my
Marianne
. For an instant, only. Inside this other woman, somewhere.’

‘Why? How?’

‘I think she made a trade. Her life for Harvey’s. She couldn’t kill herself, so she just stopped … stopped being. No. Stopped expressing her being. She still
is
, but she doesn’t give her existence any expression at all. She’s just asleep.’ He sighed deeply, feeling the familiar anguish that he had felt only weeks before when his
Marianne
had vanished, as suddenly, as cruelly.

‘And even if that weren’t true, even if Marianne is not the woman I loved at all, still she is in this difficulty at least partly because of what I did or didn’t do. In a sense, this is my responsibility.’

‘So you’re going to go after her anyhow, aren’t you?’

He didn’t answer. The expression on his face was answer enough.

… through the door into her living room. It had a tidal smell to it, an abiding moisture, as though the sweats and steams from the laundry below had permeated the intervening walls and floor, making a swamp of these few rooms. Each evening when she climbed the narrow, dank stairs and opened the splintery door she expected to see crabs scurrying away behind the couch or a stand of cattails waving in the kitchen door. She would not have been amazed to find fish swimming in the kitchen sink or leaping in the tub. The greenish under-sea colors of the worn carpet and the walls did nothing to refute this expectation. She was always surprised when she did not float into the place rather than plodding, as now, like an unwilling diver, across the sea floor of living room into a watery cave of kitchen to put the kettle on.

Most of her furniture had been collected from among things left in the laundry over the years. The bed had been found in the big indigo washer one evening after locking up. The green armchair had turned up in a dryer early one morning, though she thought she had checked the machine the night before as she had been told to do. Dishes and cushions appeared frequently, sometimes in the rose machine and sometimes in the green one. Once she had found a roaster and three live chickens in the ivory dryer. She had put the roaster on a high shelf in the kitchen; the three chickens still scratched a meagre living out of the weedy yard behind the laundry, nesting hopefully along the dilapidated board fence. One of them was, or believed itself to be, a rooster and greeted each day with a throaty chuckle that both it and Marianne supposed to be a crow. The cry had more of apologetics than of evangelism about it. On hearing it each morning, Marianne murmured ‘pardon me,’ as though she had been guilty of some egregious incongruity in harboring such an unsuitable chanticleer.