Black raincoat, dense goth boots, quick smoke. Then out into the chaos she goes. You said she wouldn’t dare defy you but you’re wrong. You with your terrible ways, your gut rot love, and your logic. You have turned her awful with resentment and now a sick fire fuels her. She rages into the brutality of the night. The wind is cruel, her resolve is crueller. Storms like this don’t just roll in.
See – she’s been busy since you left. Left as in faded slowly, removing your cloying hands from her life with the same pace of black mould growing in a basement. She’s been learning magic. She’s been cursing the damned. She’s been mapping the weather, and this storm is the eye of her plan. Let it bruise me, she thinks, let it give me all that I can take.
She’s been living alone and dealing with herself, furiously, constantly dealing with herself. She’s been reading books, rolling dice, lighting candles. Apparently you can shuffle a deck of cards and they will tell you as much as you can handle, an act which never ceases to amaze her no matter how many reversed aces she flips. She has predicted her own Death, watched the Hierophant invert, accepted the cold hand of Justice. The Tower of her mind is a crumbling wreck, but she’s strong enough now to leap from it.
She grasps at the handle of her bag, a squat vintage suitcase that she plundered like treasure from a charity shop. It’s made of leather to repel the elements. It has thick gold buckles and an indifference to its own weight, not caring to be light as most bags do. It contains her supplies. The items she’s collected are very particular: interesting rocks stolen from river beds and gutters, stinking herbs dry and medicinal, a little jar of apple seeds spat from her own mouth. Four candles: two black, one white, one red. A letter opener she saw on someone’s sideboard and stole without knowing why. It has a green marble handle; its blade is sharp and curved. It looks like a serpent if a serpent was a sword.
Hair from the crown of her head, her chest, her pubes, her legs. Every part that drives the crimson of her urges. A pouch for toenails, fingernails. A bubbled vial of her spit. A tiny jar of menstrual blood and a little one of piss. She even has her own cum, once viscous now dried luminescent, collected on a silk handkerchief. She gathered it last night beneath the cave of her covers. It was the easiest orgasm she’s ever fucking had.
Then the sacrifice. A wretched pain that will forever churn in her memories. She has collected her own back tooth. She paid three hundred pounds for a tall man to punch it out of her and, though bewildered, he thought her price was fair. She claimed it was a sexual thing and after that there were no more questions. She remembers the sound of it, the whine of an oncoming train, a sick squelch, then ringing. Little birdies tweeting all around her head. A lot more blood than she’d figured she’d bleed. The hollow scream. Unfathomable searing ache.
She did not resist the pain at all. It was hard even to think.
He left, as agreed, while she was still dazed on the ground. She used the splatter of her blood to find where her tooth had landed. She tucked it away in a matchbox. She’s been sleeping with it under her pillow.
Now she’s marching through sleet rain with the tooth held in her mouth. The sharp and gnarly nub of it. She’s rolling it around with the tip of her tongue. The wound is so fresh and the pain, when the tooth catches the pulp of its former dwellings, is unholy. Yet to carry it in the matchbox did not seem quite right. Her prophesying mind imagined losing it, her hard-won power whisked away down the drain. No. Her mouth is safer, warmer. The pain of the tooth in the wound is a humble reminder of what is truly at stake.
The rain on her face is vindictive. It despises her. It’s so cold she can’t feel her features, can barely see for the water in her eyes. There’s something about weather like this that feels personal, that plunges three swords through the tragedy of her heart. Her willpower threatens to crack, turn her back, running home, but then lightning strikes and her pulled tooth hits the pulp of its wound. Good fucking lord, the pain sends her staggering. She veers from the pavement into the centre of the road. The world needs to know who the fuck it’s dealing with. If she gets hit by a lost car, then so be it. She throws her arms out wide.
She cheeks the tooth to scream, ‘COME ON THEN YOU MOTHERFUCKER,’ or at least she thinks she does. The sound is pelted away by the wind, the words mangled into white noise. At first this theft of her voice makes her furious, then she realises what an opportunity this is. In the city, people live all stacked up together. If she dares make a sound any louder than a tight cough, her neighbours bang the walls with their fists. She takes a deep breath and almost chokes on the tooth, before releasing her agony in a howl. All the rage and resentment that has been festering inside her comes up from the depths of her bowels.
Then she sees the rowan tree, the one you once held her beneath, murmuring into her hair: this is how things are going to be and they won’t be any more or any less. Or maybe you didn’t say it in such blatant words, but that was the truth, that was the meat on those starving bones. When you say I love you, you mean, and that will have to be good enough. When she says I love you, she means, I will drink a terrible sedative and let you stab me repeatedly in the gut. She would have done anything for you. You, the hard-fisted Hierophant, who couldn’t even fake an apology when she told you she was in pain, pain that you had caused - her who was not just some ratty girlfriend, but was actually to your own flesh and blood. Now here she is in the dregs of it all, with your features and your DNA, helixes coiling tightly in her body and mutating into incandescent rage.
The rowan tree bends and throws its berries to the ground. Not all of them – it knows what’s worth saving. It knows exactly when and how to let go. That is why she has chosen this place, the last that you saw her and, as she has decided, will ever see her. She hops the padlocked fence, catches her foot, and falls hard into the puddled front garden. Harsh breaths propel her to reclaim her suitcase, crawl through the undergrowth. The thick rowan roots break the ground beneath her palms. She kisses the rough roots, the trunk, the fallen leaves, and the tree throws red berries at her spine. Tap-tap-tap. She feels each one. Ancient communication. Divine.
The rowan tree grows in front of a hulking old tenement, five stories stacked up high. There is a warning sign on the gate that claims the building is de-commissioned, commanding all civilians to keep back. Apparently, it’s unsafe - should not be leaned on, let alone lived in. No one has dwelled in this place for years. It is a pillar of empty thoughts and percolating dust. It is a hole in the city, deleted.
While she knows this city well, she never noticed this building until you left her that day. Had to get a taxi to the airport – wasn’t that always your way? You’d fly in, cast your praises and your judgements, then in half a moment, you were gone. Her role was to beg you to stay, or better yet, beg you to sense her yearning and move back. Your role was to enjoy the whimpering begging and enforce the emptiness that coursed through her veins. Decades worth of unrequited love, sewn into her very nervous system, bubbling through the fluid in her brain. Didn’t it seem silly an adult woman should cry this way for her father – but that was the kind of love you wanted. The only love to which you responded.
Then the car door closed, and you were gone, your business-like scent still lingering where your well-pressed shirt didn’t. Biting back her stinging tears, struggling to swallow the same pill she had been attempting to swallow for years, she stood on the pavement stock still. Eventually she noticed the world around her, gaze wandering past the branches of the rowan, to the sight of the decrepit building.
She peered into the room behind the murky windows. There was no furniture. It looked silent. One of the windows had been perfectly smashed in. There was something strange about the jagged hole. Something that told her to remain, to wait. That day, while you drove yourself home, she spent a long time fixated on this window. The long exposure left a photographic indent in her memory. It was as if she already knew what it would be for – but, of course, she could not, still so lost in the illusion of your romance. Still compelled by this idea that she needs you to be whole. At that point, she knew nothing of demons and chaos and spells. She’d never flipped a card to decide something important; never bought a beautiful rock just because. She worshipped you, your immense power to create misery. Your latest hurt atop a lifetime of bleeding swords. Yet she decided to remember this window.
It would take two years until its memory brought her back.
What can be said? The body knows what’s good for it.
Her bones are numb. The rain has climbed up the sleeves of her anorak and seeped through every layer of her clothes. Her hair has come free of her hood – probably a long time ago, she realises, from the weight of it slopping around her neck. Locks like dirty washrags swing to slap her cheeks, the force vicious on her freezing skin. The cold hurts her like it knows her and it hates her. She claws at the bark of the rowan, uses the trunk to haul herself up. Her tongue licks the scum of the sacrificial tooth. She must climb inside that hole.
She counts herself in: One, two, three–
She hurls one leg up onto the window ledge but doesn’t feel the ache of her muscles. She throws her suitcase through the hole but doesn’t hear the low thunk of its landing. If jagged glass cuts her when she wriggles through the window, then she doesn’t feel the heat of blood or pain. The whole moment of hurling is imperceptible, drowned out by the fury of her will.
She falls into the room beyond the windows but is too cold to break her own fall. She lands like a dumped carcass. She cannot catch her breath and it scares her. She lies back, chest heaving in surrender. Rain water bleeds from her clothes and her hair, forming a freezing puddle around her. She shivers and it cleanses her bones.
The storm softens. The wind howls through the lips of the smashed window, but otherwise withholds its rage. She is safe in her battlements. Her ears ring as they discover strange silence, cavernous, dusty, and feral. The taste of iron returns to her tongue, then the angular sensation of the tooth.
In time, she crawls to her knees. The room can only be seen in gasps, between cracks of lightning and echoes of thunder. Peeling wallpaper, long outdated. Not a single chair or piece of furniture. No lightbulb hanging from the ceiling – in fact no plugs or sockets. A sealed room, free of fixtures. It is a cave, disconnected. A hole.
She stands and removes her sopping clothes, deciding she will be warmer naked. The hole will understand her better. The rowan tree will see. There is a door at the back wall. She decides it is locked. She unbuckles her suitcase. She sets the candles at four points around the room, then fumbles to strike a match.. She withers eight of them black before the flame finally sticks. She readies her strange jars of cum and blood and hair – she kisses each one sweetly. Then her wiggly letter-opener. Then her apple seeds.
‘Fuck, I forgot to bring a vessel.’ But the air of the room pulses once. She looks around and finds a few beer bottles discarded in the corner, one amongst them still capped, sealed, and full. Molar stowed beneath her tongue, she cracks the bottle with the good side of her teeth. She takes a long swig of the fragrant liquid. The beer tastes like leather, grain, and sweat.
It turns to froth in the tension of her stomach. She wipes her mouth with her bleeding hand.
Her nipples are freezing. Her jaw is mottled and swollen. Her stomach hangs pale for the rowan tree to see. Is this really who she has become? Yes, she decides, with a shaky breath. It’s much too late to doubt that now.
She prepares the offering. Into the bottle goes the hairs, the lashes, the pubes, the nails, the blood, the piss. The cum-stained handkerchief doesn’t want to be poked down the bottleneck, so she strikes the bottle against the wall – a tinkling crescendo – and creates a more appropriate hole. Through this jagged mouth she feeds each apple seed. Dried rose petals. Sage and lavender. Then she hesitates a moment, before forcing herself to go get it. Something she doesn’t want to surrender.
At the bottom of the suitcase there is a ring you once gave her, humble gold with a simple garnet. You gave it to her when she was ten years old, but her fingers haven’t grown past the size of it. Until yesterday, she wore it every day, on her left-hand engagement finger. Would twist it when she yearned for your hurt. Now here it is, gleaming gold through the thick gloomy darkness. The final part of you in the palm of her hand.
She considers keeping the ring, like a kind of weird talisman, but the wind howls – her new mother calling out for it. You can give up a tooth but not a ring? The ring holds undeniable power. She puts the garnet in her mouth to join the tooth, then spits both into the cracked jaws of the bottle. Tiny tinkle. Smell of roses. Taste of anguish. The part of her that grieves is bitten by the part that is vicious. This is how it ends. Now is the hour.
Across the continent, you are asleep.
She raises a toast, calling to the four candle flames: ‘Spirits of the North, South, East and West – I summon you here. Spirits of Fire, Water, Wind, and Earth – I summon you here. Goddess Lilith, Dark Mother, Divine Destroyer, Mother of All Demons – I summon you to this hole in the earth. I implore you to hear my plea!’
She swings the bottle around the room, casting a haphazard circle, spilling dark droplets upon the floorboards.
‘Lilith, this ache has made dust of my bones, I have felt it for far too long. He has spent my time and perverted my devotion. He has forced his pain into my body, moulded it like clay. Now I am a disaster, dysfunctional and mournful. Now I am rotten with his pain. But no more! Sweet Lilith, Night Hag, so Evil and Rapacious. You know what it’s like to have the one who made you hate you. So, destroy my foul attachments! Avenge my aching bones!’
She stamps her foot on the ground and the pain rings in waves through her body. She takes up her wiggling blade and carves a circle through the air.
‘In return I present to you an offering. His gift, this ring. My body, blood, and essence. The seeds of fifty-eight apples. My back fucking tooth. Lilith, I will give you anything, any bruise, any wound, any agony – just draw your blade and release this demon from me. Free me from the Garden of Eden! Restore my free will! Renew me in your name!’
Filled with sudden passion, she strikes her arm with the letter opener, a fine slice across the opposite wrist. She raises the bottle to the moon as blood bubbles down her arm, warm rivulets awaking the flat cold of her skin.
‘Lilith, I love you. Do you hear me? Are you listening?’
She waits, panting. What does she expect? Savage lightning, screaming wind, explosive thunder? Instead, the storm falls quiet. The rain holds back the full force of its terror, the wind softens to a whisper, the thunder falls to silence once again. Even the cold seems to settle upon her limbs, fitful shivering falling still, her muscles slowly relaxing. Her body is an oxymoron. She is naked, drenched, dripping.
‘Lilith?’
She breathes slowly through her cold-shocked iron windpipe. She knows it is vital she remain calm. In the midst of great suffering, that is where the strongest magic works. She wants this. He leaves me. He’s leaving. He’s gone.
And just when she thinks her spell may be final, sealed, completed, done – Lilith laughs, a rumbling bellow, as if to say, you tiny idiot, you thought what? Lightning cracks like a whip, the wind remembers her rage, the boom of thunder is so impulsive, so impressive, it causes the foundations of the building to shake.
This sudden rushing of energy is enough to frighten her, to cause in her a paralytic flinch. Her hand slips around the short neck of the bottle and it jumps up and scrapes a long cut down her face. She drops it and shatters across her arms, diamonds exploding onto her naked feet. Burning, screaming, beads of glass scattering – she steps, and they are embedded into her skin.
Lilith smiles at her slaughterhouse howl, glass cradling her lovingly as she keels over and weeps. The goddess claims the fluids, the ring, the pulpy tooth. Sleep now, she commands the woman. Lie down and let go.
Nightmares plague you across the world, but when you wake to a clear day you think nothing of it.
🦷
She will, eventually, return to her consciousness. She will feel bruised and afraid and everything about her will have changed infinitesimally. She will be coated in her own blood. Her many wounds will sting, pain clanging like bells across her body – and she will wonder if it was worth it. If anyone was listening. She will not be able to find her tooth amidst the glass. She will smash a new hole through a different window because you cannot create a new beginning going back the way you came. She will return home, limping. She will be fevered, freezing and sickening. She will go out to work anyway because she needs to earn a living. The pain in her jaw will get infected. She will continue to live and to chew.
You will find yourself suddenly and inexplicably unable to stop calling her.
She will not pick up the phone.
🩸🦷
