Dark and Deepest Red(22)

Emil


Emil threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. When he couldn’t sleep, he usually went out to the old shed that had become his sort-of lab. An hour focusing on something that hard, looking at a flame through cobalt glass or sketching the jagged rainbow of bismuth crystals, was usually enough to wear out his brain.

Outside, he found his mother tugging an old sheet over the vegetable garden.

Emil took one corner and bunched it under the pumpkin vines.

“What?” his mother asked. “No wisecracks?”

Emil’s guilt stung. He’d barely concealed his skepticism at his mother covering the pumpkins and melons, shielding them from the moon. His great-aunt had told stories about the full moon felling herbs from their stems, withering violets to the ground, splitting open melons and pumpkins so that, in the morning, blood streaked their rinds.

It wasn’t that Emil didn’t believe these stories. He did. Sort of. He believed that melons could break open and flowers could fall away from their stems overnight. He believed there was blight or infection, sudden frost or tiny parasites no one could see. He believed that whatever it was, a sheet holding back the light of the full moon probably wouldn’t stop it. And that held true whether it was chemistry or bibaxt, misfortune finding its way into their garden.

His mother unfurled another sheet. This was one of the few traditions their family held to. Flour and water in a bowl on the windowsill. The fortuitous meaning of certain days. Lemon and pepper and cabbage. He had never quite figured out the pattern of what they held on to and what got lost, what stayed, and what got cleared away, like his mother reordering her desk every Sunday night.

Emil helped with one side of the new sheet.

“What’s gotten into you?” his mother asked, snapping the corner over the Moon and Stars watermelons.

He ignored the question and tapped a knuckle on the deep violet rind. “These are gonna freeze before they’re ready.”

“All the more reason to cover them,” his mother said. “And that was not a rhetorical question. What’s going on with you? You usually roll your eyes over this so hard I’m afraid you’ll lose them in the back of your head.”

He couldn’t argue. But tonight there was some kind of turning in the air, a stirring. It was the smoky smell even though no one nearby was burning leaves. It was the shadows lengthening so quickly. It was the jack-o’-lanterns leering out from their porches, soft pumpkin mouths looking ready to make some snide remark. (And around here, you never knew if they might. Mrs. Carrington swore it had happened a few years before Emil was born, the carved pumpkins spouting Poe and Dickinson at one another.)

“Bonne nuit,” his mother said, setting a hand to his shoulder on her way inside. “Don’t stay up too late.”

“I won’t.”

He went for neatening up his lab bench, because he’d been putting it off, and there were few tasks more boring than that. After fifteen minutes, he’d be half-asleep.

He pulled the overhead string in the shed. The single bulb threw light over the forgotten garden tools that shared space with his secondhand bench and the rusted paint cans that he kept at a healthy distance from his burner.

Emil went hard at the beakers and flasks, something he always put off when the weather got cold because the sink out here didn’t get hot water. It took a combination of patience, prayer, and banging on the pipe to get it started. It would only run for a few minutes before he had to do the whole thing again. It always encouraged rushing, as evidenced by the lace of salt residue he was now scrubbing off the glassware.

He moved on to relabeling vials and bottles, fixing the tops and spouts where the plastic had split.

A tuning-fork hum vibrated the air, like the far-off charge before a storm.

Emil’s hands stilled.

The feeling of someone touching his shoulder sent a rope of cold down his back.

“Maman?” he said, more a hope than a guess. He could hear the tension in his own voice, the shock of the unfamiliar.

He turned around, losing the sense of both his body and his hands. He lost them so completely that it took a few seconds for him to register the sound and wet feeling of mislaying his grip on a bottle, and acid splashing out over the bench and his hands.





Strasbourg, 1518


Tante brushes away any talk of attending the great dance. Folly, she calls it. Superstition.

But Lala wouldn’t be surprised to catch her covering the melons in the garden, the rinds ice blue and not yet ripe, so that they won’t bleed in the light of the next full moon.

Tante shows no sign of knowing the oath Lala swore. But even looking at her still brings the taste of the hyssop in Lala’s mouth.

Enneleyn leads Lala toward the dance. Her hair flows against the pale satin of her gown, green as early June flax. With each step, the noise grows.

The animals have been moved out to graze, and the whinnying of mares and braying of mules is replaced by shouts and music. The grain markets and two guildhalls have been cleared for the dancers. Hired guards block off the streets, and pen in the afflicted. The raw grain smell of barley water thickens the air, the drink recommended to any afflicted who will take it.

The scene is bright and loud as a carnival, the sight matching the high music. Many wear dyed stockings, adorned buckles, shirts trimmed with lace. The ruffled edges of scalloped sleeves hang wide to show silk linings. Striped and checked cloth flashes one shade, then the next. Men strut about in pointed shoes, or in codpieces of bright color and comical size.