I pictured the house in my head. It had a gray roof with a couple of dangling tiles. The shutters were white, and made permanent dents into the outer walls. The front door was black, without any windows.
The street it was on alluded me. Slowly, I grabbed the metal gate and pulled it open enough that I could slip out of the park. I turned right on impulse, and began to meander down the cobblestone street.
I smiled down at my legs, feeling each bone and muscle work together to propel me forward. Feeling my very spirit knock and pivot inside the shell of a body was an immense comfort—like a homecoming of sorts. I got lost in my own mechanics as I walked down the street. Houses with torrents and wrap around porches were placed in rows on either side of me. The wooden rockers that lived on their front porches were all empty of occupants.
I kept walking, watching as townsfolk emerged from their front doors, from around corners, strolling under parasols within the streets. Ladies smiled at me under the brims of their large straw hats. Men nodded their greetings, the pads of their thumbs latched onto their suspenders as they made their way into town. I tried to smile back. I tried to act as though I knew the inner-workings and secrets of the town as though I had been alive for the last five years.
Out of nowhere, a nagging feeling grew in the pit of my stomach. Something told me to look up from the dusty bricks that made up the street, and to look at the house on my left hand side. I turned, and before me stood a two story house of a rich blue hue.
Four grand white columns were lodged under a balcony on the second floor, facing the daily humdrum of the street. Large white oaks grew on either side of the white stone porch, looming over a couple of flower baskets that were placed beside the white double doors.
It was not my house—yet something compelled me to walk across the lawn and up the grey stone porch. Something told me there was somebody inside that I needed to see.
I trudged up the uneven gravel path to the front of the house. I stared down at the large doorknob, seeing my white face staring back at me from dull eyes. Not every part of me had blossomed into life again.
With a hesitant grunt, I reached for the door and turned it open, letting the door swing on its hinges across the threshold. I stepped onto the large oak floor of a foyer, with various doors and entryways on either side of me.
The wood creaked, announcing my presence before I managed to work my jaw again. “Hello,” I tried to say. A grunt issued forth on my stale breath.
With unsure steps I walked further down the hall, letting my fingers run across the thick maroon damask that had been adhered to the walls. I heard the sound of static and then a violin echo from deep inside the bones of the house.
Two bars later, and the violin was met with flutes and the crisp pounding of a timpani, imitating the way thunder sounded as it clapped over an open sea.
I followed the sounds until I reached a set of ornate wooden doors—the last set of doors on the right hand side of the grand hallway. These knobs were made of gold leaf, and curled into spirals. As I placed a hand on one I marveled at how my heart thudded against my ribcage. It was only then that I realized I was nervous.
I took a deep breath and turned the handle down, letting myself into what was a grand ballroom.
The walls were covered in a lively yellow silk. On the ceiling was a colorful fresco of men and women in colorful clothes, twirling together in happiness. And there, at the other end of the room was a familiar face.
Her eyes were wide as she crept into the room. Her red hair, once so vibrant against the dull coffin, looked lackluster against the jeweled tones of the room. During the night her cotton dress looked plain. But as she walked toward him, he could see the faintest markings of constellations stitched in the fabric with silver thread.
He had dug up a blood witch.
I only needed one look, one look to know who the man was. I had seen it once before, hovered over me in the height of passion.
The man had revived me, for which I was grateful. Of course, that hadn’t been his intention. He had acted on a singular deed, a singular need to satiate a lust he tried to hide from the world. His act had been perverse, but it had been simple. To him, I had been an object, a plaything in which his seed could be spent.
But there had been life in that seed. The energy of a hundred sperm had careened through my organs, and gave me life it did not intend. How? How had such a thing been achieved? Puzzled, I found myself staring not at him, but at my dress, etched in silver thread. I felt a smile begin to spread across my face as the fabric shone in the overhead light. Deep within the threads, I saw the whispers, the evidence of a spell that had not been mine. Etched into that fabric were the symbols for eternal life, strength, endurance, and power.
The spells were the handy work of my fellow blood sisters. I could tell based on the arrangements of the spell work they intended for the powers to carry on with me into the afterlife, into the eternal comfort of darkness, spread beyond the confines and limitations of a human body. They wanted my spirit to live forever.
But such work had dire consequences. Encased in spelled cloth, my body absorbed the man’s seed and had derived power from it. My body clung to that sense of life and livelihood and it blossomed and bloomed into life again.
But as I took in the wavering line of his lips, and the anxious crease in his forehead, I realized that I was angry.
I had been in the dark place, expanding and contrasting with the nothingness. I had slipped between the cosmos as if it had been a blanket. I had lived behind the farthest star, underneath the deepest cavern.
I had been one with everything and nothing, until this human took a shovel to my burial mound. Until the thuds of the metal reached me and lured me back into the confines of my body.
I would have lived forever in that beautiful nothingness, had this man had curbed his sexual appetite, had this man resisted the act of desecrating the holy ground in which I rested.
My blood boiled then… had roared in my ears until it coursed through every vein in my body. The prickling of magic pulsed from my palms as that man had gasped one final time above me.
I had once been one with the bays of wolves, with the hollow wind of the night. And he ruined everything.
Constance looked at me with a glint of steel behind her eyes.
She paced in front of me, the skirt of her cotton dress twirling after her as she stalked from side to side.
“Priestess, please,” I heard myself say. “I did not see the detailing of your dress.”
The bones of my kneecaps shook inside my trousers. I stared at the wooden parquet floor of the ballroom until the pattern became blurry and distorted in my vision.
Constance took a lively step forward, her fingers poised as though at any moment she would grab something precious and stash it into her pockets. Her face took on a sharp, conniving smile.
“And it would have been perfectly acceptable to defile me had I been some ordinary person?” she asked, her pale head tilted with the question.
Panic seeped into the nooks and crannies of my body as she stared at me. I could tell by her eagerness that no matter what I said, my reply would be all wrong.
She had been incoherent as he succumbed to his ritual of sin. But her memory, contained deep inside her very blood cells, had revived just as her body had done.
She could piece together fragments of their interlude as the sun rose over the cemetery. And she had known that if she ever saw the man again, she would kill him in cold blood.