Melpomone

Melpomene

The last eddy of pink disappeared, returning the ceramic to an off-white. Theo rubbed a marigold thumb against a dark mark with a squeak. It didn’t budge, and was unpleasantly sharp against his skin. Not detritus, but a chip in the sink. A dropped utensil perhaps. This was an old kitchen, both in age and style. 

It was a perfect match to the old woman lying on her back on the terracotta tiles. 

She was surrounded by a dark halo that still oozed sluggishly outwards. The circumference of the halo had a very slight smudge, a smear. Hence the shoe he had needed to scrub vigorously in her kitchen sink. He considered trying to poke, or scrape, the smudge back into place. Only that might have made it worse, and whatever he used to do it would need cleaning also. They would be along with their black lights, and every action meant a host of potential mistakes that would be painted across the room in neon, basement-clubbing blue. 

That in mind, he upended a little bleach into the sink. He had found it amongst a veritable treasure trove of half-empty cleaning product bottles tucked neatly in the cupboard beneath, those at the back lightly dusted by time and irony. He hummed gently as he set about scrubbing, making sure to give the tap and the surrounding splash board a good going over. The acrid smell suffused the room as sodium hypochlorite met albumin and globulins. 

When that was done only one task remained. Carefully, reverently, he removed the mask from the plastic bag hung over the back of a chair. Back at the beginning he had used fancy bags. Bags made of cotton, or jute. Only, they tended to stand out a little more and he suspected some enthusiastic detective had at least two or three stashed in plastic bags of their own. Bags bedecked with labels and crime scene annotations in a careful hand. So now it was just plastic for him. It was the mask that mattered. 

It had come to him by happy accident. Tucked into a box full of amateur theatre accessories bought in a charity shop. He had thought to surprise the amateur acting class that he had joined, bring himself some social capital. He knew they had considered him odd. Aloof. Unapproachable. Perhaps this find, this gift, would connect him to them in some way. He had once read that gift-giving was part of the language of love. It had not worked as originally intended, however. The box, and its contents, was labelled a ‘musty collection of crap’ by the gregarious class coach. She had smelled of cheap, instant coffee and scones. She’d looked like his Mother.

Even after she was dead. Scones. And shit. And blood. 

He remembered placing the mask carefully on her face, sunken and pale as if more than just four litres had left her body. It fitted as though made to measure, the bronze glinting in the cold phosphorescence of the church hall. It had been a winter evening, already long dark. Cold, too. No one else had made it that night, no one risked the trek through the snow. Except for the two of them, pompous teacher and disappointing pupil. 

Then he had stared at her. Stared so long that he had begun to depersonalise, breath rising in tendrils of mist. He remembered thinking that it didn’t look half bad. That if she had just bothered to try it on she would have reached that conclusion, and he wouldn’t have lost his temper so. 

The singing had brought him back to himself. 

At first it had been as if from a very great distance. The radio of a car driving along the village road outside. Only there were no cars, not tonight. This was an ancient night where only sleds and animal skin snow shoes had a place. Then it had come closer, and despite the inclement weather he had experienced a spike of fear that someone did approach. Their grisly encounter would be discovered and his life too, for all that it was, would be at an end of sorts. 

He had turned to peer out the window. The storm had abated, clouds spent, and an impossibly bright moon had brought its pitted face to bear on the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She had been perched on the edge of a desk, one of those fold out ones that ordinarily meant taking your life in your hands to even lean on, let alone sit. She was dressed in a gossamer fabric that had just enough layers to hint at, but not reveal, her curvaceous figure. Her dark hair was perched up on her head, wrapped in a crimson scarf, but dainty ringlets tumbled free and caressed her face. That face. More often than not when he closed his eyes it was all that he could see. All he could think of. He had been placed on disciplinary three times now in work for ‘failure of productivity’, as if any of the spreadsheets he was expected to churn out mattered a jot. Not when there was a face like this one in the Universe.

Her skin was unblemished perfection. Her eyes were azure, and glistened perpetually as if on the verge of tears. It was her mouth, however, onto which he often fixated. Her lips were blood red, and they moved to reveal flashes of white. Only the sound of her singing came from nowhere and everywhere at once. As if played from speakers embedded in the walls and yet only thing embedded in the walls of that church hall had been black mould. He didn’t understand any of the words, but he felt transported. Lifted. Brought to a place where sorrow and joy, pain and ecstasy, were all synonymous and he was sated. He had only had sex once, an awkward affair in his late teens that had ended swiftly. Since then shame had put a lid on desire, but her voice lifted that lid and like a pot on the hob it frothed and hissed.

The sun had risen to reveal a snowy-white vista outside that musty church hall as he stood in worship, and yet it had felt like mere moments alone had passed. Then she was gone, and all of the world faded to a sodden grey. So acute was the feeling of loss that he had doubled over as if winded, as if the very air had been drained from the room with the last notes of her song.

Now returning this room, this old kitchen, and with a small smile, beatific smile on his face he leaned over the body. She was a petite woman. Well, had been. Her face was small and round, and as dry as old papyrus. He set the mask carefully on top. Each time he had tried to watch as it adjusted itself to a perfect fit, but the process was so seamless it was as if it had always been made to measure.

Then he just needed to wait.

He knew now what to expect.

At least he thought he did. The light gradually fell until the kitchen was illuminated only by the glow of the digital clock on the microwave, that and a few glow-in-the-dark stickers on the fridge. Bestowments of a grand-child, perhaps. Silence. Unbroken, profound, empty silence. A numbness spread out from the centre of his chest and began to consume him. 

edó kai kairó eímai kalymménos sti thlípsi allá poté perissótero apó aftá aftoí oi thánatoi eínai klemménoi parakaló stamatíste aftó den eínai agápi den thélo na gíno i moúsa sou

He was so taken aback that he whirled and almost stumbled over the body. 

She stood behind him. She was not singing.

She was not alone.

By her side was another woman. This second woman held out a hand wizened with age and clad in a constellation of liver spots. On it were a number of fine threads. All bar one hung limply. Severed. The solitary, intact thread was pearlescent and stretched out into the distance. 

Distance?

The country kitchen was generous, but behind the women there was an impression of infinity. As if the room blurred into a view of the horizon as one might see it by the ocean. A hard, night horizon. It made him feel cold to stare into it. 

It took effort to drag his eyes away from where they followed the line of the thread. Why was he so preoccupied with that when she was here? 

Her face had always been seraphic, serene. Before. Now it was tight, her brows drawn down into as close to a frown as that porcelain face could approximate. He found himself no less enraptured, albeit that his adoration was threaded through with confusion. Also a little apprehension, felt as a mild nausea. 

Contrastingly, the older woman had no trouble displaying a thoroughly disapproving frown. Her thin lips were tight and her black eyes, despite residing amongst folds of skin, pierced as surely as any knife. 

Initially neither woman moved. There was an expectant stillness attached to the end of her words, as if she waited for a response. He had never understood what she sang. Between audiences, he would think next time I must pay closer attention. Try to write some of it down. Record it somehow, although he never brought his phone with him. Too easy to locate. If he was caught, then that was the end. 

Each time, however, he would forget. The song would begin and he would lose himself in reverie. Promises to pay closer attention were for after, when he descended back to the grey, flat places. 

So he just shook his head mutely. Shrugged apologetically. I’m sorry, I don’t know. 

sou eípe na stamatíseis

Where the young woman was fair, and her voice that of an angel in flight, this voice was granular. Hollow. It did not give, it took. It made his heart flicker as if the electricity that pulsed there had momentarily been interrupted. He gulped, then coughed. Spluttered. Then blushed profusely, mortified by this display of ill sophistication in front of her. She paid him no heed. Her gaze rested on the body of his latest sacrifice. Where before her eyes had merely glistened, teased with possibility, tears now flowed freely down her face. As if flowing, rather than stepping, she moved to stand beside the deceased. Beside him. That did not help the stuttering of his heart. 

She leaned over and with deft elegance plucked the mask from the corpse. It vanished into a fold of her ethereal robes, and she stepped back beside the crone.

The old woman lifted her other hand. In it gleamed a pair of…shears? 

           A noise distracted him momentarily. It was an infinitely more mundane noise. A siren. A flickering of blue and red light started up, playing upon the magnolia of the kitchen wall.

           When he looked back the shears has moved. They were poised upon the living thread. The crone did not look down at her hands, she looked him in the eye. She smiled. There was neither a single tooth, nor even a whisper of good feeling, in that smile.

óra na stamatísei

‘Police!’ A pounding on the back door. The glass pane rattled. He startled, cast frantically around the room to see what to do, or where to go. A dash, perhaps, to the hallway in the hopes of finding a window to exit from. He was not ready, yet, to relinquish the notion of ever seeing her again. He turned, and one foot slid upon the sanguine coating of the floor.

With the softest susurration the shears snipped the thread.

The officer who entered the room grunted. She had expected the body. They all had. It was one of a series with each resulting in a gradual narrowing of the gap between murder and capture. She had not expected two bodies. Or if she had, she thought the second would have been evident suicide. The coward’s way out. The sickeningly glorified exit at the end of a blazing trail of abhorrent destruction. Nothing so glamorous. Instead the young man, so unimpressive with his too-large, lopsided glasses, unkempt hair and coffee-stained shirt, lay top to tail with his latest victim. A bleeding gash on his forehead, matching the red-stained edge of the Belfast sink, was a dead giveaway to the fall that had cracked his skull. 

As further officers arrived, and the room began to bustle with the forensic activity, no one saw the beautiful woman who sat in a corner chair. No one heard her song.