The girl is beautiful. Blonde hair, dark eyes, soft skin against a green backdrop. A cherry tree, a sad smile. Right away I know that I loved her. Love her.
“Carolyn,” I tell the old woman. “Her name is Carolyn.”
She reaches over and takes the picture from my hand.
“That’s not Carolyn,” she says. “I’m afraid you’re too late.”
She drops the photo into the flames. I watch it wither and curl and turn to ash. She gives me another slug of the whiskey. I drink it down.
“The River flows to Nowhere,” she says, and turns away from me. She caresses the surface of the black suitcase, which seems to throb as if breathing. She might be sobbing. It’s hard to tell.
I force myself to stand up. My head spins. The parking stub says there’s a vehicle waiting for me somewhere. I stagger away from the woman with the black suitcase, wincing with pain at every step. My belly feels hollow, empty, but I know better than to eat city food. Anyway, the emptiness feels deeper than hunger. I’ve lost something. The city has taken it from me.
I follow the address on the stub and regain my wheels. I drive away from eternal night and endless rain, putting distance between myself and a thousand secrets.
And I swear I’ll never go back.
I hate the city.
Behind the Eyes
They say the eyes are windows to the soul. I can tell you this old sentiment is true beyond any doubt. As a passerby inspects a luxurious home by peering through its lucid panes of glass, a man studies his lover’s soul by gazing into the liquid depth of her eyes. But every window has two sides. The house’s owner looks out at the world through those same windows. Here the analogy ends: the door of any house provides entry and exit for its owner each day, but the door that permits a soul to leave its body opens only at death. However, there are exceptions to this rule. Times when doors and windows open and close blindly. Times when something terrible looks out from behind those glassy, blood-veined orbs.
Despite her legendary strangeness, I never truly believed that my grandmother was a witch. I first went to stay with her as a six-year-old, my mother driving me along a winding dirt road until we reached the dilapidated farmhouse. Granny Armaya was my father’s mother; the father who had left us when I was a few weeks old. He’d grown up here, on this farm that had seen better days. There were only a few cows and a single horse left on its twelve acres of thinly wooded hills. We drove by a ramshackle structure that used to be the barn, now a slowly dissolving mass of rain-rotted wood. It reminded me of a piece of candy I’d left lying out in the sun the week before, melting in upon itself until it became a shapeless lump of nothing.
Barbed-wire fences enclosed the farm, and I saw a pale horse chewing the grass of a sun-browned hillside. Granny sat on a wooden porch swing, watching as my mother parked her station wagon. She wore big, horn-rimmed glasses, the first thing I noticed about her. That and her hair, still black as night in her old age — a persistent reminder of her Romany heritage.
Granny was a full-blooded gypsy, I learned later. Mother said she had come over from the Old Country in the thirties, her family spending the last of its European wealth to buy this little farm. Her husband, the grandfather I never met (just like my father), died less than a year after their immigration, leaving his wife and three sons to work the farm. One by one they slipped away, like restless shadows heading for the city, and the farm fell into ruin. Now Granny lived alone in the old house, surrounded by a family of crooked, black trees. Sometimes her other two sons would visit, but my father never came back to the farm. Not even my mother knew where he had gone. To her he was only the coward who left her to raise an infant alone in the city.
Although she was strange to me, I did not fear Granny Armaya. She welcomed me with a warm smile and a hug, and won me over with fresh-baked cookies. She let me run about the farm all day, playing among the twisted trees and trying to coax the horse near enough to let me pet it. My mother left me there all summer while she went back to the city to finish earning her college diploma. She would be the first one in her family to graduate from a university. Fifteen years later, I would be the second.
Granny Armaya cooked big meals for me, with plenty of sweets. Sometimes we fished in the little creek that ran through her property. But the most enduring memory I have of my time with her is when she took me up into her attic. My young brain reeled at the cluttered antiquity on display here.
Animal skulls hung along the walls, dried herbs swung like black chains from the low rafters, a thousand candles of all shapes and sizes sat across the floor, strategically placed among painted images that boggled my mind. Granny showed me her cauldron, an iron pot sitting on a hot-plate, the place where she brewed medicine to cure her arthritis. I watched her work among the candlelight, fascinated by the weird environment. Often I wondered about, combing through ancient chests full of velvet fabrics, antique clothing, gypsy-carved dolls, trinkets, jewelry. Occasionally I found a grainy, yellowed photograph of some sharply-dressed ancestor. Granny could name anyone whose picture I found in these trunks, but their names were Romany and I could not pronounce them. Several of them wore old-world military garb, with spiked helmets and curved sabers held against their chests. Once I squealed to find an ancient war dagger, preserved in a sheathe of moldering leather. Granny said it belonged to my great-great-grandfather, and she let me keep it.
The potions she brewed in the attic smelled horrible, but I didn’t mind. There was so much to discover in that dust-blanketed treasure trove. By the second week of my summer vacation I spent more time browsing through the attic than playing in the fields. There was only one area of the attic that was off limits to me. It was a small alcove, or closet, in the very back of the room, closed off with a curtain of dark purple velvet.
“What’s back there?” I asked Granny. She was stirring up the medicine in her iron pot, adding a pinch of something like powdered bone. At my question, she ambled over to me, grabbed me by the arm, and brought her wrinkled face close to me. She smelled minty, like the ointment she rubbed on her joints at night.
“Don’t ever go back there, Stefan” she said, pointing to the curtain. Beyond its hem I saw a sliver of blackness peeking through. “That’s where the eyes are.”
She reached out and pulled the curtain aside with one liver-spotted hand. Inside was a visible nothingness: a rectangle of infinite darkness, where the candlelight could not go. A few days earlier I had stared into the black depths of the farm’s stone-rimmed well, and could see no trace of the water that must lay far below. But this darkness was deeper, more solid, more impenetrable than even the subterranean gloom of the well. I felt that I might stumble and fall into that alcove, into that absolute dark, and I realized that I wasn’t breathing. I sucked at the smoky attic air.
Before Granny let the curtain slide closed, I saw two orange pin-points of light staring out from the darkness. Narrow, burning things that made my skin crawl.
The eyes.
I was crying then, and Granny scooped me up into her arms. I sobbed into her shoulder as she carried me downstairs. “It’s all right, Stefan,” she whispered into my ear. She carried me out onto the porch, where the brilliant sun fell on my face, dried my tears. I sat on the swing watching a light breeze play through the leafy branches of the trees, and she brought me cold lemonade and a slice of cake. Soon I was my old self again. We never spoke about the alcove, or the eyes, again.