Candle in the Attic Window(58)
Martha Hubbard lives on an island in the North Baltic Sea. For 1000’s of years a place of strange gods, mysteries, tragedies and wonder, Saaremaa Island provides the perfect bed-rock for a writer of dark fantasy. Previously she has been a teacher, cook, stage manager & drama-turg in New York City’s Off-off Broadway community, a parking lot company book-keeper and a community development worker. Recently she put aside some of these activities to concentrate on her writing, but is still the Consulting Chef for the local Organic Farmers Union. Her story “The Good Bishop Pays the Price”, appears in Innsmouth’s anthology, Historical Lovecraft.
Elizabeth on the Island
By Joshua Reynolds
In the sea was an island. And on the island was a house. And in the house was a woman. And in the woman was a secret. But, like all the best secrets, the one upon whom it centred was completely unaware of its existence.
Her name was Elizabeth and she had never seen her face.
Elizabeth had been born out of the sea, like Aphrodite. A classical allusion that she clung to in order not to think about the circumstances of her birth – the cold fangs of rock that she had clung to all unknowing, and the hard scrabble for the grim, grey shore through the freezing waters. Bloody and dripping, she had emerged from the womb of the sea to stagger onto land and into the house that seemed so familiar, despite her inability to recall how or why.
Shuddering and weak, she had reached out to touch the door and it had swung inward, as if in welcome. Inside, there were a table, chairs and shelves of books. All of it waiting for her. All of that and her name, as well, inside a locket that lay forgotten in a pile of clothing covered in stains.
On the back of the locket were the letters ‘V’ and ‘F’, and when she had opened it, a woman’s face had returned her stare. There was a name opposite. ‘Elizabeth’. Her name and perhaps her face, though the angles she traced with her fingers did not seem to fit those of the woman in the picture.
She lived hard, eking out an existence on the barren rock, at night hunting the innumerable rats that scampered out of the island’s guts when the lightning ripped wide across the black sky. With the rats, she ate the moss that clung to the rocks and, once, a seabird that drew too close to her.
Elizabeth had strong hands. She wielded rocks and driftwood with all the dexterity of a Norman knight swinging his sword, but, often as not, she relied only on her fingers and stalked through the scrub of the island’s high places on ten toes. She did not cook the meat she caught, but felt no ill effects from chewing it raw. Indeed, she could not imagine dousing the taste of the flesh through fire.
She had clothes which she did not wear for fear of ruining them. There were trousers and a shirt, neither of which truly fit her, perhaps having been meant for a child, and an apron which stank of chemicals and other, less pleasant things. The latter she rolled into a ball and buried behind the house.
In truth, the constant rain that drenched the island felt good upon her skin and her nakedness became more about comfort than consideration. Her flesh was invariably flushed with an unrelenting heat when it was hidden from the air. Sometimes, when the lightning curled and coiled, it burned as well.
There were two other houses on the island, besides hers, but they were both ruins now, broken and empty. In the evening, as she gorged on rat, she wandered among them, exploring their secrets.
By day, she read. She read the anatomy texts and alchemical treatises that filled the shelves of the house to bursting, and when those grew dull, she gorged on Byron and Shelley and Voltaire. Of those, she preferred the latter. There were twenty-seven books in the house and she had read them all, in random order, seven times apiece. That some were in Latin and others in Greek, French and Arabic did not matter, for she could not tell one language from the next. It was all the same to her.
When she had finished the last book and waited to begin the next rotation, she would sit on the rocks outside her door and stroke her arms and legs, which ached sometimes in the oddest places. It was as if she were filled with old hurts and ancient wounds that her eye could not see and fingers could not reach. A bone-deep itch that scuttled through her at lonely intervals, dragging with it images to her mind’s eye.
Some of those images were comforting. Others made her pull out her own hair and drum her heels against the rock. Once, possessed of a rage that echoed out of a glimpse of a memory of mismatched eyes, she had bounded across the island, screaming and howling and flailing at the lightning with a club of driftwood.
Only when the club had broken, and her fists had been rendered bloody and bruised from battering the unheeding stones, did she at last return to sensibility.
Her wounds healed, and quickly, if the medical texts were to be believed. She watched the bruises lighten and fade over the course of hours, the golden skin returning to its normal sheen.
The scars never healed in the same way as the bruises. They remained, but then, they had always been with her. They were thin strands of pale yellow that stood out against the gold of her flesh, rising and falling across her arms and legs and belly and elsewhere: a latticework of marks that she could not recall the origins of, nor, indeed, did she wish to.
Sometimes, when she touched them, she got the strangest sensation that she was waiting for someone. The true owner of the house, perhaps. She touched the locket and traced the initials carved on it. Who was ‘VF’? Was that whom she was waiting for?