Shadows

Locals say that their island was raised for the artists and the dreamers. That the slow-paced nonchalance of their days gives way to nights of bright and boneless sleep. That their clean air, their forested labyrinths and lush bracken breed the inspiration for free thinking. The living etched from the tedium of their pebbled shores is scant and humble, but it grants the space to create.  

Their rhetoric is their anthem. A lighthouse amidst a chicanery of violent seas. A lilting promise that beckons those who have only ever watched from a safer distance. Who once caught a whiff of the island’s empty hopes from across the Sound, and dared to cross that bubbling cauldron, for an hour, an afternoon, a day. Those who remained a bit too long, and began to feel that malignant gravity the residents have written in indelible ink across their bones.

A malevolent orbit that pulls at their core, that slows their thoughts and hobbles their steps too weak to wander. That might allow for a temporary abscondence to tease. To flex its power. To collect fresh blood— but will always recoil them back to their swaddle. Their binding cocoon that seals up tight and lasting. Shackles to hold them too close and loving, until they begin to forget that they ever wished for air or for wings. Until they realize that the resinous bouquets filtering through the tea houses and kitschy pubs can be more likened to the scent of decay, rather than that of fecund earth or things growing. 

For the truth is, the island may be a place for the artists and the wayward dreamers, but it certainly isn’t one in which they thrive. 

Margot had dreams once. She had long legs and pointed toes upon which she spun. Lithesome arms tipped in fingers that she held steady with a graceful tension. Curls of strawberries and sunshine, that she swept up into a knot and balanced atop her head like a story book. Once upon a time, the ewe lashed amber of her eyes saw the bright lights of big cities fall dark behind curtain calls. Saw tulle and tights and theaters of anonymous faces blur beneath the rhapsody of pirouettes and applause. 

Now they see only that cauldron. The lands she no longer lets herself long for, and him. They see him too. 

Now Margot sleeps. Sleeps to escape the lacerating ache that runs through her chest when she catches the slippery grains of sand pearling through the hourglass. Sleeps to avoid jostling her drive for sedition. To encourage the hunger that hollows her ribs and the space beneath her cheekbones. She lets her mind idyll and simmer, and dim the things she once wanted in favor of the shores that landed too easy. She sleeps. Sleeps endless and empty to make the days pass at a more bearable speed. 

But at night, Margot wakes. Margot wakes and Margot thinks, and lately, Margot has begun to wait. 

She wakes and she thinks and she waits, laying in the dark of her basement apartment, tucked beneath the mildew scented covers of her bed. Her husband sprawls beside her, his brilliance all coiled up in slumbering potential and deep breathing. The brilliance that Margot first fell for, that persuaded her to follow him back to his childhood, to this land of stagnation with stupidly eager feet. The brilliance he still spits in her ear on occasion. That he wields with the proper purpose even less. That he mostly lets slip and drool from slack jaws, to roll in wasted globules down the stunted length of his chin. Brilliance that weighs a bit too heavy. That requires a bit too much tending. That makes him look just a little too deeply at the life he knew would never be his. Not when his island called.

Margot watches his chest rise and fall. His pulse panting in reedy rhythm through the protruding veins in his neck. His eyes that remain eerily still beneath the padded lids. She loves him, she supposes. The way one loves the choices they’ve snuggled too far into. The way one loves routine and the familiar. Love that requires gentle persuasion, and the occasional touch from fresh lips to fill in the gaps. Love that won’t keep her here much longer. 

She places a hand on his belly to feel his innards gurgle and twist, and admires the comfort required for such a move to be made. The trust a man must feel, how far down his guard must have slipped, to allow him the bravery to sleep on his back. The soft flesh of his belly exposed and ready for sharpened claws and hooked daggers. For spilled tendrils of gore, and oozing, bloody ends.   

His breath doesn’t falter beneath her touch, doesn’t skip or quicken. The pulse in his throat remains steady, and this will not do. This will not sate the violence that has begun to edge on her whims. So she curls her fingers, ever so slightly, letting the rounded points of her nails dig a little deeper into bare skin.

An involuntary shudder skitters across his body and Margot freezes, feeling her teeth spike and set on anticipate edge. He gives a subtle snort that issues from the back of his throat, and moves in silent stutters through his chest and limbs. He shifts and Margot flinches. The disappointment sweeping hot through her throat as she watches him roll to his side, and safely out of her clutches. 

I guess there’s some survival left in him after all. She thinks bitterly.

Then Margot gasps. Margot brightens, and Margot smiles. As she hears the strange breeze begin pick up, just outside of her window.  

It whistles in light and taunting wisps, before breaking into a screeching howl that Margot almost recognizes, but not quite. It’s different tonight. A different call than the one she has begun to wait for, that she has begun to yearn for, ever since that first woman went missing.

Tonight, the metallic tang of blood is glinting on the wind. The air is flushed with static that makes her feel wild and irate. Tonight, she thinks, the waiting will end. 

She slips silently out of bed, creeping on those perfect pointed toes, toes long deprived of spinning. Then slides thin satin of midnight blue over her pale, moonlit skin. The chemise is one her husband selected, in favor of the cotton sweats he deemed too frumpy and unattractive. The ones that hung too loose on the bones she meticulously hollows for him. The material is slippery and cold, bares her arms and swishes around her knees at an impractical length, but it will be one last pretty thing for the eyes that find her. So it stays. 

Margot pairs the midnight blue with silver ballet slippers, which she guesses will shimmer like starlit memories beneath tomorrow’s rays. Then, she gives her husband one last obligatory glance, before stepping out into the darkness. 

The howling wind still beckons from somewhere off in the distance, guiding her steps towards a wall of towering pines. Her slippered feet find careful placement as she pads across the unkempt lawn. Through the unruly wilds of grass, wetted with gathering dew that soaks a chill into the exposed skin of her ankles. A small shiver scuttles its way up her neck, but it isn’t from the cold. It isn’t from fear either. No, it’s the tickles of alacrity alighting upon her senses. Of excitement blooming through the connecting lines of synapse across her spine. It’s the spark of something friendly beginning to return, and she welcomes it gladly.

Margot thinks of the other women then. She wonders if Trinna Ackley had felt this same stroke of glee as she made her nightly stroll. If Samantha Baylor had noted the same giddy sensation clamoring through her body. If Kelly Eller had been this sure, this content, as she walked her own path towards freedom. 

Kelly Eller had been the first, the first island woman to vanish, but Kelly Eller had not been the victim the island would have chosen as their inaugural maiden. She was a bit too plain. A bit too troubled. A bit too different. She didn’t possess the effervescence or glowing smile that would make a missing poster sing. She didn’t strike a handsome enough cap to be plastered on every telephone pole or grocery store bulletin. Her life had not been one perceived blissful enough to mourn as something lost too soon, or too surprisingly. 

She must have finally gone home with the wrong man. Had been the favored explanation. 

Something went awry with all that hocus pocus she played with. Had been the other. 

Explanations that staved off their fear. That made her death one of fault, rather than one of chance. A chance that might have befallen them too, if they didn’t have Kelly Eller to blame for her own misfortune. Explanations that allowed them to bask in their intrigue, without concern of their guilt or unease rudely sidling in. But after six more women followed in Kelly’s wake, some of whom had even been lovely, some of whom had even seemed normal, it became difficult for the island’s denizens to continue placing blame on the missing. 

The intrigue had petered off into neighborhood watches and newly locked doors. Into conspiratorial whispers of monsters and villains. The excited deviation from the routine rot had dissolved into chaos and terror, and the usually placid island was washed away into more tempestuous waters.

But Margot knew better. Margot had seen the disappearances for what they truly were. She had picked at that golden thread that linked each and every one of those seven women. The longing she had seen in their eyes when she passed them on sidewalks, or waved to them from kitchen windows. The persistent spark of defiance that smoldered on, clinging with ragged nails through the island’s vicious gravity. She had long listened to the rumors of rescue through knitting circles, tealeaf whispers, and forgotten legend. She had heard the sweetly ominous call pick up on the wind, she had waited, and tonight, she follows. 

Follows past that wall of pines, down the beaten path she’s walked on countless sunny afternoons, and the rainy ones too. To soothe the future that sang at her in too shrill a pitch, to dull the past that thumped too heavy at her skull, to endure the present she once thought she wanted, she walked. Walked with the weight of a heavy boot, but now she walks with ballet slippered ease. Follows the trail to a hollowed clearing, where the ebony boughs part to picture windows, and the moon and the stars can kiss the earth through the canopy.

The howling vanishes as soon as Margot arrives. Evaporates on a subtle exhale into the misty starlight. A soft rustling echoes through the thicket at her back, at her flanks, and just ahead of where she stands. Her heart leaps, her breath clots, her hands snap to clasped at her chest, as a figure steps silently out from the brush. 

The creature that towers above Margot is strange but undeniably beautiful, with a body that is clearly and sybaritically female. Bare, but haloed in a swirling pall that laps at her flesh in inky coils, all but enveloping her form in darkness. Her features cling to a quality that might be called human, but only barely so. Golden, upturned eyes, centered with pupils of elongated starbursts that shine just a bit too brightly through the night. Her nose and lips join at their adjacent ends, creating a structure that resembles a feline muzzle, and smiles softly. Tree branch antlers erupt from her scalp, twisting and twinning with snaking roots that form a crown of locks atop her head. Their tentacle protrusions drape regally down her back and across her shoulders, adorned by moss and lichen, interlaced with verdant shoots of life that sprout the occasional frond or indigo bud. 

The creature stands eerily steady on bowed legs, her hooved feet still and unwavering against the tumbled earth. Her head cocks slightly to the side, sending sprinklings of growth cascading off from her tendrils, landing to seed without plan or purpose or pattern. The creature looks down at Margot, studying her with beatific curiosity, as her seven shadow wolves join them in a crescent circling. Her seven lost and wayward dreamers. 

Margot ducks her chin, offering a subtle bow of awe and deference, then rises swiftly up upon her toes. Her arms are once again held out with graceful tension, floating like falling raindrops on wild rivers. Her shoulders relax, neck pulled taught in swanlike elegance. She pauses, only briefly, to scoop up the bravery that drips in sticky pools down the hollows of her ribcage. Then, finally, Margot once again spins on those pointed toes. 

She spins and she leaps, guided by the music long trapped in the depths of her clouded mind. She spins to the tempo of her pulse, newly freed from the sludging weight of boredom and monotony. Margot spins and her heartbeat races, defiantly setting its own pace and time. Its own unique rhythm, now untamed and hers alone to will. She spins until her legs buckle beneath the ecstasy of her movement, until her knees grow shaky with spiced rapture, until she falls. 

Margot drops to the sodden earth and sinks her hands deep into its belly. Lets its cool heft drench her skin to a muddy and deathly chilled. A single tear escapes to roll down her cheek, landing at the tips of her sunken fingers, and ricochets out in crystalline shards against the soil. She takes a long, shuddering breath and smiles, for she is pleased, and now, she is ready. 

As though Margot’s breath was their starting shot, the creature nods, and the shadows begin to move. Their shapes melting like smoke from smothered flames, curling into fragments of midnight that pad along on four daggered paws. Their faces stretch out long to make room for onyx fangs that slobber in blackened mist and eager pants. Low howls erupt from deep in their chests as they close in around Margot’s shape, feeding their frenzy with the elation that sloughs from her skin like dead leaves in autumn. 

Margot lets out a scream as the first wolf sinks into her flesh, gnawing its way down through the swoop at her neck. She screams as the swirling shadows of teeth and claws and mercy begin to rip and tear. As she feels herself cleave free of her skin, her bones peeling away from sinewy meat and tendon, flaying her open to the delicious, raw emancipation she craves. 

She screams decadently and round. Oil rich and cream filled screams that could be heard to the four corners of the island, if anyone was bothering to listen. Screams that might have been mistaken for agony, to anyone but the women left behind. Those still waiting beside their own cozy anchors. Those who hear the joy in Margot’s shrill, their own screams now piqued to primed and wet with need. Women who will walk their own paths, to their own clearing, on some distant, moonlit night. 

But for now, the body that was once Margot lays cold and vacant on the forest floor, and her shadow slips free of its irons. She stares down at the cage that once held her, and basks in the strange liberation she finds in the blood. In the strawberries and sunshine that spill against torn flesh and turned soil. Stares at the discarded, deadened limbs that had become too heavy and hopeless, and she smiles between newly filled cheeks. 

A warm greeting issues from the darkness, purred by the sisters who freed her. Margot dissolves willingly into their shrouded embrace, melding with their warmth and undefined mooring. They follow the creature in a swirling herd, passing back through the wall of trees, and across the cauldron to calmer waters. To lands less stale and rotted. To minds more free to dream.