stevieqgray

Well, it's been a while (2008 got off to a pretty crazy start for me), but I'm back, and the set I shot at the end of last year should be submitted pretty soon. My lovely and talented photographer is just doing the last bits of cropping and 'shopping, and then it'll be good to go, so watch this space.

I figured I'd post the first part of a twisted little fairy story I wrote some time back, for the benefit of anyone who cares to read it. I'll throw the rest of it up here, one bit at a time. Hope somebody out there enjoys it.

It's called Inviscera, and it goes like this...

Part I - Entrails

There was blood on the snow. In a circle, ten or so feet across, the snow was churned and crimson, like a bite-wound torn from the side of the white landscape, like bridal sheets on a wedding night. Beyond the gash in the snow, the greystone cottage squatted low and ugly, its shadow streaming long and dark behind it. The winds that so often screamed their rage and wailed their loneliness across these lands for now were calm, and a column of thick grey smoke rose from the cottage chimney in an almost vertical, barely disturbed line. Smells carried, knife-edge sharp on the icy air: the iron tang of the recent slaughter, the sweet-tin almost-taste of more snow to come, the odd but familiar aroma of pungent herbs and spices burning, their bitter and exotic scents borne on the smoke, speaking of distant lands and marvelous secrets, of the deep, dark places under the earth.

I pushed against the door of the cottage. The door was made of oak, but time had blackened and toughened the wood, so now it was harder than the stone into which it was set, and it would not budge under my hand. I muttered a string of syllables under my breath, and the door creaked gently inwards.

Smoke stung my eyes as I stepped over the threshold, and it took a few moments for my vision to adjust to the gloom inside the cottage.

The three old women were here, as I had known they would be, their heads, one dark grey, one pale grey, one pure white, hunched over the copper bath tub about which they had positioned themselves. One stood, one knelt and one was seated on the only chair in the cottage. Virgina, Genetrixa and Anicula, their eyes down-turned, their faces fixed, each woman intent on the contents of the copper tub, which gleamed in the dullness of the building's interior and was by far the most opulent thing they owned.

None of them remarked upon my arrival, but I knew that they had noticed. They noticed everything.

'There will be an ending,' intoned Genetrixa, in what she thought of as her mystic voice.

'What? Where does it say that?' Anicula peered closer into the tub and I craned my neck to see what the old women were looking at. Coils and gobbets of entrails lay in the bottom of the bath, steeping in a soup of bile and blood. Even with the heady fragrances of burning herbs and spices, there was an unpleasantly organic edge to the air.

A dirt-brown finger nail pointed at a something in the red and purple wetness. 'Here, see that, the way that loop is severed? An end. Unmistakeable.'

'Of course it's severed,' chided Anicula. 'The way you were flashing that gutting knife around, we're lucky to have ten fingers apiece and more than a heap of minced pig offal. I told you to take more care with it.'

'Darkness,' said Virgina softly, hesitantly, 'moving in from the North.'

'It looks to me like a pile of pig's guts,' I said, peering over their shoulders.

Anicula sniffed her disapproval, but said nothing.

Virgina prodded a glistening red-brown lump which wobbled unpleasantly. 'It's all so vague,' she said. 'Something bad is coming, but I can't see what it is.'

'We already know something bad is coming. We all felt that. We wouldn't have cut a pig open if we thought all was well.'

'See this bit here?' continued Virgina, indicating a glob of gristle. 'That could be a funeral or a wedding...'

'We could do a summoning,' suggested Genetrixa hopefully. 'Invoke a demon, get some proper answers. Guts are all very well, but they can't speak when you ask them questions.'

'Hah!' spat Anicula caustically. 'Demons is a prideful lot, acting all clever, talking in riddles. And summoning them is one thing, but sending 'em back is another. You know where you stand with entrails, and there's a good meal in them when you're done.'

Genetrixa sagged a little, looking deflated. She liked her summonings. On rare occasions when Anicula and Virgina would go out, leaving the two of us alone together, Genetrixa would tell me, with a distant and toothless smile on her old, doughy face, of past invocations. She would speak of great and powerful demons with eyes that burned like suns and skins the colour of obsidian, of demiurges, pale and insubstantial as moonlit smoke; mighty and malevolent beings, old as the dark, who had seen empires rise and fall, cities vanish beneath waves, and entire galaxies coalesce from dust; creatures of utter darkness and infinite desire. Of course, she would say, with a wistful, faraway look in her milky eyes, she had been much younger then.

'Fair enough,' she murmured a little sadly, almost to herself. 'Entrails it is, then.'

'Couldn't you have gutted a fish instead?' I asked, looking at the mass of bowels and blood and bile. 'There'd be a lot less mess.'

Anicula silenced me with an icy look.

'Sometimes, my dear,' said Virgina, her eyes never leaving the bath tub, 'the future's too big to fit in a fish.'

The women were silent for a while.

'There,' said Anicula suddenly, in a voice as brittle as ancient bones breaking. She reached into the copper tub and stirred the visceral mixture around, once, twice, three times, with her left hand. Her old, gnarled fingers closed around what looked like it might be a heart. It could have been my imagination, but for a brief moment I was sure I saw it beating in her grasp.

Her eyes were closed and she raised the organ to her lips. Her tongue darted out, long and shockingly pink in her colourless face, and licked it slowly, then took a tiny dainty bite from its side, as though from an exquisite fruit. She bit down hard, three quick, decisive bites, and swallowed. Her eyes snapped open.

'Hunger comes on four legs and on two,' she said.

A hush descended briefly as this statement was digested.

'From the north...' mused Virgina.

'You mean the wolf-clans?' said Genetrixa.

Anicula tossed the partially eaten organ back into the tub. There was a daub of red on her thin lips, which she wiped away with the back of a blue-veined hand.

'I don't mean anything,' she said. 'But it could well be what the entrails mean.'

'Wolves?' I queried. 'We've dealt with wolves before.'

This was true enough. When the harsh cold seasons ravaged the land and food became scarce, the packs would drift nearer to our settlements, picking off livestock. Occasionally one would hear stories of wolves coming into the villages, savage and murderous, devouring infants in their cots, bringing down grown men. I recalled the previous winter, the wolf that had stood between me and the cottage, one of our goats clamped in its jaws by its broken neck. I remembered the goat's dead eyes, the hideously lolling head, and I remembered the weight of the shovel as I hefted it in my hands, the sickening crack as it connected with the wolf's skull. I had acted out of panic, and out of anger: something had sought to take what was ours. Yet the creature that lay slain on the ground had been no monster. It was a pitiful beast, starved and sickly, just a handful of bones wrapped in shabby wolfskin.

'Yes, little wolf-slayer. That we have,' said Anicula. 'But these are more than wolves.'

'You mean...?'

'Lycanthropes,' said Genetrixa. 'Shape-changers. And believe me, you'd need more than a shovel to put these devils down.'

'Werewolves?' I asked. 'But they're just myths, fairy stories.'

'Of course they are,' snapped Anicula. 'Just as good you told us. We'll know not to worry now,' and she muttered darkly to herself, words too low for me to hear.

'Things,' explained Virgina gently, slowly, carefully, as though searching for the right words, 'can be fairy stories and real at the same time.'

'All of the best fairy stories are real,' said Genetrixa, 'or at least, they were once. They change in the retelling of course, some of the nasty bits get left out, or the tales get given happy endings, but the sense of the stories, the bleeding, beating heart of the story... that lives on.'

All eyes turned to the eldest woman, and Virgina gave voice to the question that hung in the heavy, smoky air.

'What shall we do, Anicula?'

The white-haired crone looked very old all of a sudden, and very tired.

'Tonight,' she said, 'we will eat pig, and we will sleep. And tomorrow,' she turned to me, a long, bony finger pointed in my direction, 'tomorrow, you will go to the castle. The Prince is said to be wise and kind. You will speak to him. If he is all they say he is, he will help. If he doesn't... well, then he must answer to the wolf-clans also.'

And then we ate pig, and we slept.

That night, I dreamed confused, winding dreams, of a tree hung with apples that were not apples, but hearts which pulsed and glistened amidst the branches. I dreamed of a bed, vast and freezing, spotted with blood, of mirrors and moonlight and reflections that were not my own, of a thousand, a hundred thousand different futures written in the viscera, writhing into possibility; dreams of tooth and fur and eyes that shone golden in the darkness. I woke once, slick with sweat and shivering, and believed that someone had called my name. But there was only the stuttering crackle of the fire slowly dying and the wind outside as it howled its mournful litany to a dormant world. Then these sounds too receded as I fell back into sleep's dark embrace, or else perhaps, as sleep rose once more to claim me.

To be continued...