Here They Come

Here They Come

Once upon a time I was like everyone else. Innocent. Enraptured briefly by the sun rise as if something good would happen in the day’s new light. I’d look at a flower opening its petals to the sky and wait for the moment of beauty to arrive, that joyous sense of light and shape and purpose coming together, a very solid understanding of all that is meant by the simplest of words that slip off the tongue: ‘life.’ But then the bitter Crow cries, flies over you and laughs and it is hard to ignore reality when you know that the flower of your own life has been trampled and crushed beneath a heavy foot. And so you take the flower and crush it, and you tear it from the earth in spite of your simple wish. If I am not permitted to see the beauty neither will anyone else.

I didn’t fit in. I was other. Outside. Mysterious and dark. A Witch of Woman, according to the stories men told about me in the local places. They would lean back in their drinking houses half drunk, mumbling secret words as their heads drew closer together. They stared at me as they laughed and frowned as I walked by. In the streets where they met and conspired the openly called out hurling words at me: ‘a bloody murderous bitch of a woman… the whore’s child… the bastard!’

But I was simply a daily reminder of what they had done. If I walked down the lane, past their houses, every man would look at me and I’d see those nervous eyes flicker and pass over my face, wondering, just wondering if they could see themselves in me. The women shunned me, of course. But I knew they saw me. They knew I was there. I was necessary after all. Sometimes.

When I was older and stronger, in the blood, I went for their sons. Eager young men, finding me in the secret dark places. Why would I deny them? I took my fill, stuffing myself with the best of all that I could get, every one of them, the whole village, surreptitiously seeking me out, quenching their thirst at my well. And I’d imagine their father’s, as if the elders were there watching just what I was doing, trying to find the man to fill my desire and satisfy the depth of my emptiness. I consumed them, those young men, the younger the better. It was like crushing the unfolding flower of their youth. And as each new man came along, I’d wonder, What do you get out of this? Apart from the groaning. Are you just spilling yourself, or do you take anything away from this, from me?

And the women too, would silently seek me out, when their own blood was stopped. When they wanted it gone. Quickly! Before anyone knew. And I had magic then – didn’t I – oh yes! a way to make it disappear when there was no other way. And I buried each one under a white stone in the dirt.

I took all they had to offer: the men and the women. They always paid in some way, offering what they could in their finest food or the flesh of some fresh kill, which wasn’t much, most of the time.

I was using them just as they were using me, I suppose, tying men up in knots until they cried like babies themselves and whimpered. Ah, there, come to me. Come to my breast. Feed on me! And they’d smile and bare their teeth so that I’d touch their lips, run my fingers delicately over their teeth and gently touch their tongues to stop their words. They looked at me in their innocence, seeing me as an Earth-mother, a temptress, a lover, and a woman feeding their burning fantasy, fulfilling their deepest lust. And their mouths would open wide, stretch out to consume me, and I’d feel their hot tongues, insatiable as anything pushing into me.

After I’d had as much of them as I wanted or could endure, I bit back. There was always a most exhilarating and terrifying look in their eyes when I buried my teeth into their flesh, as they tuned pale as I tasted their blood. I fed on them. It was that which finally fulfilled me.

Then I’d think – There now, how do you like it?

For some I would simply wound them and then later I’d see the scars. I’d marked each one of them so that they could not pretend to forget when they bathed in the river alone and I saw their nakedness in the daylight. And I would know each one and remember how they never returned to me. I’d remember those same bodies in the dark even as they dived into the water trying to cleanse themselves of all that had been, all that they had done. As if they could remove all those generations of sin. Like father like son, or even the brothers. Here they come. As if such actions are simply something you wipe away, like dirt. As if I was just dirt.

Mother Nature is more dependable than any of us. Her heart bears fruit.

The first child simply died. She was dead at least when she fell from me onto the ground. I buried her in the woods and placed a white stone on the spot. I visit her every full moon and watch the light gently place its hand upon her stone. Aleph.

The next one was a boy. I left it at the father’s threshold, wrapped in rabbit skins, a lock of my hair plaited and tied at its wrist. But he was never seen thereafter. The father silenced its midnight cries and buried that one in the woods. I followed him, watching as he dumped the remains in a hole in the ground and turned away from it without the slightest pause. I placed a stone there too. Beth.

Three more children came.

The boys, Gimel and Daleth, were placed as before. Each one disappeared into an unseen world of men, but were moved from the father’s hearth to the church doorstep. Then I passed by and went on into another town, another place. I kept the last, the girl. I called her Luna too, when she breathed, and her round white face shone bright and full of some vague hope.

But she did not feed. She withered like a vine at first frost. He.

You get to an age when your skin does not excite them anymore, where you sag too much, and you see it when their passion droops. Men don’t want a crone dancing over them with flapping dugs, as you lower yourself down over their hard bodies. They close their eyes and I see them dream. So I build it inexorably into my performance. I bind them and give them a sweet mystery, a secret darkening, softly hiding their shame in a blindfold. And I’d tie their arms, which excites them and remove the last fear of their reluctance. They like that, surrendering to the moment is a total release for them. An exoneration of all that was happening, a submission to our utter darkness and wickedness. They would relinquish themselves and then imagine I was at least ten years younger. They could always say they were bewitched. And over time I grew to be twenty years younger. So still they came. They came. And they cried out in the night. 

So even in the darkness I created they were no longer ashamed of the abasement I was to their egos, to their dignity. I cannot easily forget the priest with his cold white flesh and ginger hairs. They’d stick themselves into me as if they were giving something to me rather than taking it, even when they couldn’t see my face or didn’t see my cold, emotionless eyes, like two white stones.

Ask any woman and she will admit that she has frozen the twinkling wonder in her eyes at one time or another. It’s humiliating to be hunted, to become the stuck pig, squealing for them as they ram themselves into you. Fucking animals. So after a while, I wanted to make them squeal too. But I didn’t want them to have to pretend. I wasn’t playing any games for them. It was all my rules. It’s perfectly natural, when you think about it, and I do think about it every time. I always wanted more than they wanted to give me, and so I took it.

Tied and blinded in black, they were easy. I’d draw a blade harder than their flesh and stab it into them, again and again, thrusting it deep into their hearts.

There. There. There.

When they moved no more, one more swift slice of the knife was left to me. I took just what was left of all they’d given to me, the slim handfuls of their shrunken rioting, such paltry pieces of men. Each piece was hung and dried in my larder. And I kept them too. My keepsakes. Shrivelled shards of flesh like dark meat strips. Each not-so-cocksure man who had bled-out on my bed then floated down the river to the sea, a rudderless bark. Food for the fishes. A soul taken and cast off for each lost child they had spawned and buried in obscurity. That’s what I thought at first.

But in the depths of winter it is cold. And Lonely. And I became hungry. Expediency cloaked me in brute objectivity. I ate what I had, what came to hand. And I remembered each one who had come to me so innocently as I swallowed.

You must realise, surely, it was simply justice, giving as good as I got. Isn’t that the way of the world? To get back for what they did to me, for the lost children, for my mother all those years ago. It’s what they’ve done to every woman somewhere for just about forever. Perfectly natural. Bastards. Animals. It’s what we are. It’s what we become, of necessity: meat.

Men. Ha! Men and their ways.

I screamed too when I was hurt. We all do. Each cut scars the mind. But it doesn’t make a difference in the end. Habits form. Scars are not invisible. They shape the final outcome. They disfigure the body and the mind. I don’t remember what it felt like before now. It’s just a blur, as if I have rejected that time, erased it, so that I can deal with what has happened since. I have forgotten that a smile can be innocent, that it can be more than bait. But I didn’t deal with it, what happened. I don’t really deal with it as you can see. It’s still dealing with me, unravelling all of us, like it does. And now the taste, the taste I now have for it floods my sense like lust, burns in my mind like desire, so that I think of a bite and salivate.

You are what you eat, they say. Well, it’s true, to an extent. I eat what I can get these days. I buy the remnant of what my life has become: a blood-craving, a desire to at least consume innocence that might cleanse me in the most unholy of communions. To eat some unadulterated flesh.

I take a knife and slice. Five slices. For each of them . . .

Aleph. Beth. Gimel. Daleth. He.

I lower my head and pray.

And then I begin to chew.

‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ The words had been on the young priest’s lips once. Even when his lips betrayed him, when he kissed me, and took me in the bloodlust of my own embrace. I remember the sudden stillness of his eyelashes, that ginger hair smeared with red. I can still hear his cries, a frenzied blooded realization, resonating on my ear like the cries of my mother that sang out in all she endured, a blood-curdling scream and an echo of her cries! Praise the Lord! ‘Father, forgive me but you have sinned,’ I whispered into his ear, as the knife found its home in his breast and his eyes widened in a new epiphany.

The taste of flesh grows. Appetite is acquired in the darkness. And you can only endure dried meat for just so long. Soon you want something tender. Something juicy and succulent. Something innocent.

I always feel stronger, younger afterwards. It is so invigorating to eat, or feed upon the young. As if each sup, each bite buys a little bit of time for me. Each morsel is a moment longer, life renewed so now I linger. It is reclaiming something that had been lost, a desire to live and breathe for another day. There is truly redemption in the blood.

I have moved into the depths of the forest now where no one can hear my calling out or, at the crucial times their screams.

And afterwards, I sit screaming at the moon lost for a moment in the long, lonely crying.

If they are wise, they do not stray here int these woods anymore, the young men. They ride on, quickly on the dark paths, their horses trotting swiftly. Or they travel in groups, avoiding the rumours of other missing youths from past days, lost decades, of all those the missing children who strayed into the forest and found my mythical house of sweet gingerbread. I am the Witch of their stories, after all.

They know better now, their mothers warn them, and even a desperate young man does not want to fall foul in the night. He does not want to shag a hag willingly if she will eat him.

But the wives still know where to bring any unwanted ones. In the lean times. When I grow hungry too. They leave them for me in the shade of the tree, an encouragement to stay away from their streets, to stay deep in the darkness. The desperate mothers bring them like offerings.

Up above me in the clearing of the trees a crow caws, dropping over the path and pecking at something on the ground. Darkness falls as if the sky has yawned and closed over the moon, whose face is saddened and dimmed. I smile. The crow opens his beak and caws, watching as two children move along the path, stepping deeper and deeper into the forest. They will struggle to find a way home now, I think. They will walk and walk until they find the dim glow of the early morning light where it kisses the white stones.

I dream once more of the delicious fruit of their flesh.

Here they come, I think as my tongue passes over my lips in the silence.