Chapter 03
By the afternoon of the next day, everyone in the village knew of Lily’s gift of sight. While certainly accustomed to the workings of magic, few had seen it manifested in such a powerful way, and the result was that Lily was looked upon with a mixture of fear and awe. Those who could remember the last time such a thing had happened passed glances between themselves and remained silent, knowing as they did that speaking of such things could cause the forces that brought them into being to behave in strange and unpredictable ways. Instead they made garlands of holly leaves and dried violets and hung them on their doors.
Lily herself remained in her room, staring out at the sea and trying not to look at her hands. From time to time she picked up the mirror her father had given her and gazed at her reflection. Again she saw the bones of a woman floating beneath the smooth surface of her cheeks and the curve of her lips, and she hated what she saw. She closed her eyes, willing the woman who carried such terrible power in her hands to die, leaving behind the girl who knew nothing of death. But each time she opened her eyes and saw that the woman was still there, growing stronger with each passing day.
After three sleepless nights spent trying to drive the wild woman out of herself through sheer will, Lily decided instead that she would bury her. Leaving her room, she went to the kitchen, where she proceeded to make half a dozen pies, stuffing the shells to bursting with blackberries, peaches, apples, lemons, and pumpkin. She veiled them with sugar and painted them with egg whites and nutmeg, then baked them until the stove glowed and the entire house filled with the smell of burnt sweetness and bubbling fruit.
While she waited for the pies to bake, she roasted pans of oysters and grilled chickens on spits, pulling them hot from the fire and eating them until juice ran down her face and her fingers were red from the heat. She grabbed handfuls of potatoes from the pot and soaked them in salted butter, and she ate greedily from a steaming pile of lobsters tumbled together on a plate like soldiers fallen in battle. She sucked meat from its bones and scattered the skeletons across the floor.
When she finished, she pulled the pies from the oven and ate them, still hot, with tall glasses of cool milk, spooning bite after bite into her seemingly bottomless throat. She felt her stomach swell within her as she savored the bitter skin of lemons and the wild joy of blackberries. She gobbled up peaches and scooped up drifts of soft apples wrapped in buttery crust, devouring whole pies in a matter of minutes and licking the crumbs from the tins.
She ate for a night and a day, and when she was done she had added a new layer of fat over her bones. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw that the woman who had been half-hidden beneath her skin had been pushed back inside a little more deeply. Her cheeks were rounder, her face more that of an innocent child. She looked at her hands and felt the fat covering the fingers like thin gloves. She wondered if it would protect her from the magic, keeping it inside as wool kept out the cold of winter.
Through it all, her mother remained in her bedroom. She, too, had heard talk of Lily’s gift. Only unlike the villagers, she was certain that she knew well its origins, and she had spent her time on her knees in prayer to a god the villagers had no use for, and in fact had never heard talk of. It was the god of her own childhood, and she found herself crying out to him to remove from Lily whatever evil had crept into her soul and corrupted her in such a hideous way as to make her every touch open up a portal to death.
As she ate, Lily could hear mumbled words floating stillborn through the house, felt them trapped and smothered in the sweet-scented web of berried steam and roasted air before they could reach the ears of her mother’s god. She had no idea what her mother was doing, and was thankful only that she remained in her room and left Lily to clothe herself in a new body. She knew that her father’s death had changed something between herself and her mother, that her mother blamed her for what had happened. She knew her mother feared her in the same way she herself feared the woman moving about inside her skin, but she understood also that she would get no help in her fight.
After a week, Lily had added twenty pounds to her frame. As she was looking at herself in the bathroom mirror and thinking that maybe she was beginning to win her battle, her mother opened the door and announced that they were leaving the village that evening. She told Lily to pack one bag and to be ready to go when dusk descended and made it possible to pass out of the village.
Lily had never left the village. Few had. And only one--her father--had ever returned. He had refused ever to speak about what he’d seen, and likewise demanded that his wife never talk of her life before coming to her new home. This she had done out of love for him, although over time it had made her bitter and afraid, and in the end she had hated him almost as much as she loved him. The village she had always feared, and now that her husband was dead and her daughter possessed of evil, she longed for escape.
Like most of the people who lived there, Lily had given little thought to what lay beyond the lands she knew. Now, faced with the thought of leaving, she found herself very afraid. She feared also the urgency she heard in her mother’s voice, and the way in which her eyes stared past Lily’s face as though looking at something looming dark and dangerous behind her.
Still, she knew that leaving was what she had to do, not for her mother’s sake, but for her own. She needed to run from the village and from the sea, away from the pull of its tides that drowned men and called women to throw themselves into the waves. She knew it was the tides that had summoned the blood from between her legs and woken the woman who fought even now to claw her way through muscle and bone to lay waste to Lily’s world. The fat had done something to slow her emergence, but Lily could feel her still, the cold fingers working their way through knots of blood in a search for the door that would free her forever. Perhaps, she thought, running away from the sea would make the woman drowsy and lull her into a false sleep.
She packed quickly, filling a small bag with clothes. She put into it the hand mirror and the box with the shell, and then she was ready. She went downstairs and found her mother waiting. She too had packed almost nothing, choosing to leave behind that which belonged in the place she had been taken to by her husband. She had on the dress she had worn on the evening she’d arrived in the village, and a small hat perched on her head. Everything else remained in the house, which she left quickly and without looking back.
Once or twice as they walked down the lone road away from the village Lily saw her mother look back, as though expecting someone to be following them. But Lily knew that no one would try and stop them. People came and left the village by choice, not by force, and it was understood that no one who left ever spoke of its existence to anyone else. Even if they should, it would be impossible for someone not born into the village to find his way there.
After half an hour, they came to the bridge that passed over the river that marked the village’s easternmost edge. Surrounded as it was on the west, north, and south by the sea, the bridge provided the only way in or out of the village, not that many ever crossed it’s wide wooden boards. Sometimes the children, filled with the flighty courage common to the very young, would dare one another to step foot on it, but none ever got more than a few feet onto its expanse before turning and running back to the safety of the rocks that sat at the entrance, where they stood with hearts beating, laughing at their own fear as they looked into the fine fog that perpetually covered the far side of the bridge, even on the finest summer day.
As Lily and her mother approached the bridge, Lily’s heart began to sing wildly in her chest. With darkness nipping at their heels, she knew that they must cross over quickly or risk doing business with whatever dark creatures wandered the borders at night. The fog swirled before her slowly, turning over and upon itself like a large grey cat rolling in the grass. She looked into its grizzled center and wondered where it would take her.
Her mother started forward uneasily, her footsteps unsure as she tested the bridge, perhaps half afraid it would give way beneath her shoes. But it held, and soon they were approaching the veil of fog. Lily closed her eyes and allowed her mother to pull her into it. She felt the cool wet kiss of air around her as they passed through, and the sound of their feet became duller and somehow sadder.
Then it was over. When Lily opened her eyes again, she was standing on the other side of a bridge beneath a sky dark with night and lit by the thin breath of a moon that seemed smaller than the one that hung over the village. The air was warm, and she could not smell the sea. When she turned around, she saw that the bridge she had just crossed simply made a small jump over a trickling stream before continuing on down a dusty road.
"Where are we?” she asked her mother. “Where is the village.”
"Quiet now,” her mother said sharply. “There is no village. There never was. Now follow me.”
Her mother began walking down the road under stars, and Lily followed. She had no idea were she was or where they were going, and she wondered about the village. She wondered, too, if in crossing over the bridge she had left behind the woman she was trying to kill. She made her hands into fists, searching them for any signs of her presence, but she felt nothing but the comforting cushion of flesh plump with fat.
They walked in silence for half an hour. Lily listened to the sounds of crickets in the fields on either side of the road and to the wind rustling the leaves over her head. While every now and again she would see the shape of something creep out of the tall weeds and peer at her for a moment before slipping back into the dark, she sensed that she had nothing to fear from anything that lived in the woods whose trees rose up into the sky beyond the seas of grass.
Rounding a turn in the road, Lily saw ahead of them the lights of a town. They shone electric and harsh over the fronts of houses, filling the air with a hard white glow that hurt Lily’s eyes and made her blink. As they left the fields and woods behind and made for the streets lined with cars, she felt a strong desire to turn and run. Yet the hum of the electrical lines over her head drew her deeper in with their voices, and she found herself anxious to see what lay beyond the quite fronts of the buildings.
Her mother walked down the main street as though she’d been reborn. “It’s still the same,” she said, her voice that of a little girl seeing her first circus. “It’s just as I remember it the night we passed through.”
"Passed through?” Lily asked. “You mean when you came to the village with father?”
Her mother turned to her, her eyes dark. “I told you not to speak of the village,” she said. “If anyone asks you, we’re from Pilotsville.”
Lily nodded, afraid to say anything that might make her mother angry. She didn’t understand why the village should remain a secret any more than she understood why they were in the town, but she knew that it was important to not draw any more attention to herself than was necessary. The woman within her fed on attention, and if she was still there, waiting, Lily was determined to starve her into death.
Her mother led her to the door of a building where a bright blue sign blinked like a startled child. GOOD EATS it said, bursting into indigo life and then dying again a moment later, only to be resurrected as Lily held her breath waiting to see if each time would be the last, marvelling when it was not. She peered in the windows and saw a room filled with tables. People sat at them, laughing and talking, and a woman wearing a red and white checked apron brought them plates of food.
Lily’s mother pushed open the door and led Lily inside. To her surprise, no one looked up to stare at them, and the woman in the apron merely waved at them to take a table in a far corner. Lily sat on the red vinyl bench and slipped herself into the corner of the booth, where she could see everything in the room. The vinyl was hot and sticky against her legs, and she kicked her feet against the floor nervously as she looked around.
The people at the other tables looked much like the people in the village, but somehow smaller and less colorful, as though time had faded them in the way that repeated washings pulled the dye from cloth. Their faces showed the strain of wear, and they seemed tired despite their laughter. Still, their clothes were the clothes of working people, perhaps farmers, and that made Lily feel more at ease.
The woman in the apron approached the table and handed Lily and her mother each a piece of paper. “What can I get you to drink?” she asked.
Lily looked at her mother, unsure of what to say. “Water,” her mother said, “and two orange sodas.”
The woman left, and Lily looked at the piece of paper she’d been handed. Written all over it were the names of different kinds of foods, some of which she recognized and many of which she didn’t. “What is this?” she asked her mother.
“It’s a menu,” she said. “This is a restaurant, where people eat. Pick something from the menu and order it.”
Lily had never heard of such a thing, but the idea of being able to eat what she liked appealed to her. She ran her eyes up and down the lists of foods, trying to decide what to have. When the waitress returned with their drinks, she was ready.
“I’d like a hamburger,” she said. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it sounded good.
“Do you want cheese on that?” the waitress asked.
Lily nodded.
“How about fries?”
Again she nodded, although she couldn’t imagine what the woman would bring her. She was thankful when the woman turned her attention to her mother.
“I’ll have a tuna sandwich,” her mother said. “With lettuce, please.”
The woman retreated, and Lily picked up the glass that had been set in front of her. It was filled with orange soda, and the tiny bubbles that ran up the side of the glass fascinated her. She brought the glass to her lips and sipped. Her throat filled with the tart taste of orange, followed almost immediately by a sickening sweetness and a rush of fizzy air that filled her nose and made her choke. She quickly put the glass down and took a swallow of water. Again she choked, this time because the water tasted dead to her.
“That’s awful,” she said, thankful at least to have the horrible sweet taste out of her mouth.
“Things are different here,” her mother said simply. “You’ll get used to it. You’ll have to.”
Lily decided that the time was right for asking questions. “Where are we going?” she asked.
Her mother’s mouth was set in a firm line. “I don’t know yet,” she said.
“Is this where you came from?” Lily said. “Before...”
“No,” her mother interrupted. “I lived in a big city. Now don’t ask anything else. Just remember that if anyone asks, we’re from Pilotsville, and we’re on our way to visit a friend.”
The waitress returned carrying two plates. She set them on the table. “Enjoy,” she said, smiling. Lily smiled back. Something about the simple way in which the woman moved through the room calmed her.
She picked up the hamburger and took a big bite. She expected it to make her gag, as the drink had, but she was surprised to find that she enjoyed the taste. She ate quickly, amazed to find that she was much hungrier than she thought. She picked up a fry and bit into it. Discovering that it was just a length of potato, she delighted in eating the pile on her plate. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to take ordinary food and do such outlandish things to it, but she enjoyed it nonetheless. Besides, she could feel the food adding to the stores of fat that suffocated the woman inside her.
As she ate, Lily tried to listen to the conversations of people around her. The air was thick with voices, and it was hard to distinguish one from another, but sometimes she could pull a single thread of words from the tangle and make out what was being said. A few tables away, a man and woman were arguing, although no one looking at them could tell. The man was accusing the woman of being unfaithful to him, and she was denying it. Her voice flowed angry and hot on the air, and Lily could tell that she was lying even as she pleaded innocence and picked at her salad.
Near the door, a group of men were talking loudly. They seemed to be very happy, and accompanied their talk with much laughter. Their conversation centered around their work at a nearby factory, their wildly stupid boss, and their own unappreciated accomplishments. They appeared to be slightly drunk, and Lily found their behavior comforting in a way she did not entirely understand. Time and again she discovered herself staring at their round, reddened faces and laughing along with them.
Besides the men, the people she found herself watching most intently were a family seated across the room. A mother, father, and daughter sat eating quietly. The girl was about Lily’s age, and several times she looked at Lily and smiled, as though their similarity in years made them friends without any other commonalities being necessary. In contrast to the rest of the diners, the family said . . .
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