Madwoman in the Attic

[toujours_nigel]

The first night she came as pale Hecate, and the sickle moon glowed in her hand, and around her neck a string of full moons.

The eldest girl rises from the bed and, still sleeping, walked to her as she stood waiting.

In the morning the howling of the dogs led them to her, and they found her cold on the cold earth, and the stars in her eyes burnt out, and her blood a sickle moon across her pale throat.

They brought her weeping into the house, and laid her out on her bed cold in her absence, and scraped the earth from her skin, and anointed her in fragrant oils, and burned her meagre body, and consigned her bones to the earth whereon they found her.

They blamed a betraying lover for so slaughtering her, and some of them blamed a rival in love for leading her with friendship’s honeyed words so to her death.

They blamed their dogs for their treacherous silence in the darkness when she was butchered, and their red tongues so greedily lapping her blood in the red dawn.

And in the way of despairing humans, they blamed the gods for allowing the death.

***

The second night she came as Queen Mormolyce, and her peplos was blood, and in her ears were rubies, and on the hilt of her dagger, dark in the cold light of the half-moon.

The son of the house went to her waiting in the courtyard, and put his breast to her blade.

In the morning the screaming maid led them to him, and they found his heart in the mouths of two dogs, and his body cold, and a last smile frozen on his dead face.

They beat the dogs to tear his torn heart from their drooling mouths, and put it bleeding back into his body, and covered his gaping chest with flaps of skin and folds of wool. They put coins on his eyes and in his mouth for the ferryman’s fare.

With his bones in the urn in their hands, they asked their neighbours what strangers they had seen, and, her oath on his bones, one told them she had seen only a great dog leave their house.

And again they blamed their dogs and blamed their gods.

Nights they stood guard before their doors to hold safe the children within, and days they guarded them.

***

On the third night, on the third month of nights she came in Lamia’s night-dark guise, and the stars of the moonless night glittered in her eyes.

The youngest children helped each other climb from their beds, and made their way, hidden from their father’s eyes, to her arms.

In the morning the sobs of one pulling at his mother’s skirts led them to the other lying spilled on the ground, and his guts spilled from his body and the dogs quarrelling ownership, his blood on their muzzles, and their eyes mad.

They beat back the dogs and whipped them till they let fall the chewed innards, and, rushing to rescue his liver from one found it licking the hands of a woman, black-robed and belted, her eyes as mad as its.

With their hands on the hilts of their swords they let the woman walk past them, and watched her smile at her husband and kiss his lips with her blood-smeared mouth.

They did not kill her then, as they had not when she had first run mad, bereaved.

They burnt the dead child, and buried his bones with his brother’s, and consigned them both to their sister’s care.

***

On the fourth night they stayed all awake in a single room, their one child with them, and waited for her to come to claim even him.