WHITE RABBIT
When I woke up that terrible day, I saw the awful thing there on the bureau: a stuffed white rabbit. It was about two feet tall, its fur white and pristine. It was a perfectly innocuous thing essentially, yet it filled me with a weird, disjointed sense of terror. Its obsidian eyes were glassy as the surfaces of mirrors, seeming to look right at me with the most awful sense of menace.
That was silly, of course, but with its eyes glaring at me, it didn’t seem as silly as it should have.
“Mason?” I called out. “Mason?”
The silence told me that he had already left for work. Was this his doing? Was this some kind of joke? If it was, I failed to see the humor in it. Or the point. Rabbits were not my thing. I neither liked them nor disliked them. They held no frame of reference, good or bad.
I swung my legs out of bed and stood up. The hardwood floor felt cold under my feet. I stood there in lounge pants and a Forever 21 tee, feeling woozy and out-of-sorts. I wondered if I was coming down with something. I had that same fuzzy sense of disorientation generally associated with viral flu.
Then whatever that feeling was passed.
Tensing, I stepped over toward the bureau. There was my jewelry box, the Horchow catalog I’d been thumbing through last night, my Galaxy S-7 . . . and that damned rabbit.
“I’m pretty sure we never owned a rabbit,” I said out loud, trying to be funny, to reassure myself, and only succeeding in amplifying my burgeoning sense of unreality.
There was something else, too.
The bureau was moved. It was not even with the wall. One side was out about two inches farther than the other. It was nothing really, but I was obsessively anal about details. I preferred things uniform and ordered. Had Mason done it? I really didn’t think so. He knew how such trifling details annoyed me.
I pushed the bureau back in place. The rabbit teetered, but did not fall. What bothered me the most was the rut in the carpeting. The bureau must have been in that position for some time to press a rut into the pile like that.
Impossible.
I would have noticed such a thing.
Small, insignificant details like that made me uneasy. Don’t ask me to explain; I have been like that since childhood. As a girl, my report cards were filed by grade in manila envelopes and my Good Attendance awards were filed alphabetically by teacher. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep last night if the bureau had not been perfectly aligned with the wall. Good God, I even organized the food on my plate fastidiously.
Breathing in and out to calm my rising anxiety, I approached the rabbit. It was just a stuffed bunny. Completely harmless, of course, yet those hollow, reflective eyes were staring holes through me. I reached out a trembling had touch to it, as much to confirm its physical reality as to break the spell of fear it held over me.
Its fur was not soft. In fact, it felt like the bristles of a hog. Tactilely, it was unpleasant, and what made it even worse was that it was warm like the body of a living thing.
I pulled my hand away with a cry.
Enough. It was just the sun coming through the window beaming on it. That’s all it was. That’s all it could be. These were the things I told myself as I labored over my vegan breakfast of oatmeal and blueberries.
I showered and dressed, got ready for the day in an Emporio Armani skirt suit and heels, refusing to even cast an eye at the rabbit (even though I was certain I could feel it scrutinizing me). I looked good, empowered, chic, and sexy, if I do say so myself. And that was exactly the look I was cultivating. If I landed the PacSun account, I was certain to make full partner at Broders.
“I have important things to do today,” I told the moth-eaten hare, “and I don’t have time for you.”
It was moments later, as I checked Evernote on my phone that, again, I was struck by that odd sense of disorientation as if I was moving in one direction and reality (as I understood it) was moving in quite another. I felt dizzy and lost. I closed the app and reopened it. Nothing had changed:
8:15 Prep with Margaret
9:30 PacSun presentation―Nail it!!!
12:30 Lunch at Gregorio’s
* * * * * *Don’t forget your dry cleaning!
* * *Watch for him He is coming
The weight of that last note, planted me on the bed. I sat there for some time thinking, fearing that there were things I should remember, but could not. Watch for him he is coming. I had not written that. I knew I had not written that. I had no idea what it could even be referencing. Yet . . . there was something playing around the edges of my memory, an apprehensive sort of déjà vu that left me feeling troubled.
Something in my world had changed. I was certain of it. I just couldn’t put a finger on what it was.
Life becomes incoherent now, a voice in the back of my mind whispered, and I swear I nearly screamed, because for a moment there, I thought it was the voice of the rabbit.
***
The day moved on and the very unreal texture of the morning was ground beneath the wheels of the progress. The PacSun presentation was a hit, as was lunch with my boss. I was feeling pretty high and refusing to think about the rabbit or my mad morning.
Mason was already home when I got there. He had that cocky little half-grin on his face that I found so unbearably sexy and so endearing.
“You landed it, didn’t you?”
I smiled. “Yes, I did. How did you know? It was supposed to be a surprise.”
He came over and scooped me in his arms. “Because, my little Ella, I know you. When you put your mind to something, nothing stops you. That’s what I love about you: you’re strictly win-win. And look at you in that skirt . . . God.” He kissed me, letting it linger deliciously. “As much as I like you in it, I want to get you out of it in the worst way.”
We laughed and I told him all about PacSun and how I had wowed them from start to finish. There was not a single moment of the presentation when I did not feel in control. Not a single clumsy moment or breath of dead air.
“What did Margaret say?”
“Well, she paid for lunch. That should tell you something.”
“Good girl.”
“How was your day?”
He scowled. “Ah, the life of a PA. I spent the morning with two colicky twins. I had a four-year old vomit on me. And . . . oh yes . . . I accidentally spilled Dr. Bella’s chai tea and she called me an insufferable klutz . . . string of very un-pediatrician like expletives omitted.”
The very idea made me narrow my eyes. “She’s such a bitch.”
“Exactly, dear. That’s why I’m looking forward to quitting my job and being a kept man by my rich, successful girlfriend―faithful house-hubby, galley slave, and patron fuck-toy, that’s me.”
“I’ll keep you busy,” I told him, pulling him closer and sliding my tongue into his mouth.
“I look forward to it. But for now, I really need to shower. I think there’s still vomit down my collar.”
“Eww! Please do.”
“Oh . . . and I think I’m taking you out to dinner. You deserve it and God knows I need it.” He turned away, then turned back. “Oh, and I love you, Ella-kins.”
Ella-kins. Yes, I know it’s corny and perfectly ridiculous . . . yet, when he said it, I nearly melted like butter in a hot pan. I could have dripped to the floor and made an unsightly mess. But that was the effect he had upon me. Even though I was ten years older than him, I knew he belonged to me and no one else. I heard the shower running and felt overwhelmed by love. This was turning into the most spectacular day of my life . . . and to think it started with that stupid rabbit. It was laughable now. I’d ask Mason about it when he got out of the shower and the explanation would be perfectly prosaic. Probably a silly gift from one of his little patients. He’d probably left in the car yesterday and fetched it up this morning before he went in, thinking I’d get a laugh out of it. It was funny how time could change your perspective.
Still smiling about it all, I went into the bedroom and the rabbit was not on the bureau. I saw myself in the mirror, standing there, the smile etched onto my face . . . only now there was nothing happy about it. It looked positively sardonic.
I told myself either Mason had moved it or I’d hallucinated the entire business. But I accepted neither explanation. I went through the motions of looking around for it in closets, under the bed, in the spare room . . . but it just wasn’t there as I knew it wouldn’t be. And the reason for that, I began to think, is that this was a private, intimate sort of haunting. It was not to be shared.
I was overwhelmed with a sense of impending doom. It made me feel dizzy and dislocated. It was as if I could sense something taking shape around me, but could not identify it. I went over to where the rabbit had been, placing a hand there for no other reason than I thought I should. It felt warm, warm as the rabbit had felt under my fingers.
Ridiculous.
If this kept up, I’d be on the road to a full-blown psychosis.
I was tired, overworked, coming down from the raw-edged tension of preparing for the PacSun presentation. That’s all it was. That’s what I kept telling myself.
Sometimes, strict attention to trivial details can clear your mind and soothe what ails you, so I took off my earrings and put them in the jewelry box. I took off my skirt and laid it on the bed. Then I opened the drawer I kept my socks and underwear in. This is when real panic set in. I was always very meticulous about what went in which drawer and how it was organized within those confines. My underwear were always neatly folded on the right side, the socks on the left. Now they had been transposed. Frantic, I opened another drawer and another and another. I found lounge pants in the drawer reserved for tees and sweatshirts. Pajamas where my jeans usually were and―
Everything was in utter disarray.
I didn’t for a moment suspect Mason. He would never do such a thing and he was completely incapable of folding clothes with my usual precision. It was quite beyond him.
I began to wonder earnestly if I was truly losing my mind. Was I doing things contrary to myself and not remembering them? This would have been bad enough for anyone, but for me . . . dear God, it was catastrophe. I liked to keep my mind as correlated and catalogued as the rest of my life.
I forced myself into the kitchen and cracked a bottle of Strongbow hard cider. I downed nearly half of it. I was shaking so badly, I had to hold the bottle in both hands. I needed to relax and sort this out. Something was afoot, but I had to approach it logically, rationally.
The alcohol helped. Believe me, it did. Still pulling off my cider, I made my way down the hallway. Mason was out of the shower. As usual, he dispensed with vanity, leaving the bathroom door wide open. It was at this point that I would usually admire his form, but what I saw filled me with a vague sense of terror.
He was standing in front of the full length mirror, eyes glazed, mouth grinning like that of a stuffed fish. As I watched, he stepped back. Then, his arms held stiffly to either side as if he was being crucified, he began to dance with a swaying, dipping motion, moving backwards in an exacting repetitive circle. The movements were precise, almost mathematically so. It might have been comical if it wasn’t for his bulging, unblinking fish eyes and that toothy, mirthless grin on his face.
I wanted to call out to him, but I didn’t dare. I merely stood there, trembling fiercely, my eyes welling with tears because either I had gone mad or the world had.
Life becomes incoherent now.
Yes, that seemed to encapsulate the freakish incongruities of my life.
I stumbled off into the bedroom and sat on the bed. My mind was whirling with conflicting thoughts. I felt the same as I had that morning, only worse. Reality seemed to be flaking away and I was afraid what might be revealed beyond its confines. I looked about the room with a frightening, hallucinogenic clarity that made me clench my teeth. Everything seemed . . . disordered. I could not precisely say what it was, but things were different. Askew? Off-center? I couldn’t be sure, but it was if the entire room was warped subtly, distorted in a way only my very precise, manically-ordered mind would recognize.
I recalled seeing Steven Wright a few years before with Mason and Wright had said, I got up the other day and everything in my apartment had been replaced with an exact replica. That was the joke, that was the rub―if they were replicas, how could you tell?
But that was the scary thing: I could tell. I could sense the transition. It was there and yet it was not. It was as if some dire mechanism was at work around me, making and re-making all that I knew. There was a crack on the ceiling shaped like a bolt of lightning. A murky darkness seemed to be oozing from it. I knew it had never been there before; it would have offended my sense of order.
Mason stuck his head in the room, dripping wet and naked. He seemed fine. “What’re you doing?” he asked.
“How long has that crack been in the ceiling?”
“Since we moved in.”
It was at that moment that I realized that he was part of it, too, that he had been drawn into it without even realizing it. There was a wine barrel clock on the wall that his sister had given us. It always hung next to the window. Now it was on the other side of the room near the closet.
My voice would barely come. “When did you move the clock?”
He looked from the clock to me. “I . . . what do you mean? It’s always hung there.”
“No, it hasn’t, Mason. You know it hasn’t,” I said. “Just think for a minute.”
“You feeling all right?” he asked. “You look a little funny.”
Things become fuzzy at this point. He kept talking but I wasn’t listening. No, I was staring at a large dark shadow in the corner. There was nothing there to cast it, yet it seemed to be growing darker and gaining volume until it looked like a great spreading stain.
But it couldn’t have been a stain because it began to move with an undulating motion. This was where I went out cold.
***
The sense that everything was in some horrendous process of change and reality itself had been subverted did not lessen, it increased. For two days, I laid in bed sweating out fevers. I was never certain when I was awake or when I was asleep, what was real and what was a febrile dream. The only constant was Mason tending to me or talking on the phone in the hallway, his language sounding like some incomprehensible gibberish.
Of course, there was another constant―the shadow in the corner. It stood much larger than a man now, brushing the eight-foot ceiling. It had taken on an unpleasant, fearful solidity. If I watched it for any length of time, it appeared to move. I imagined more than once―or maybe I didn’t imagine at all―that it made a grunting, squealing sound like a wild boar . . . yet low and distant, as if from some faraway place. But getting closer. Oh yes, closer all the time.
***
On the morning of the second day when Mason went back to work, the rabbit returned. It sat on the bureau as before, but it had changed. Its pelt was no longer glossy white, but a dingy gray like moldering rags. Its eyes were larger or maybe it was just the sockets themselves. It had a drawn, withered appearance like a pet that had been slowly starved to death. I noticed with alarm that a few flies lit off of it.
It was getting so I could not trust what I saw. I was not sure of anything. My head was still spinning and my thoughts confused. Yet, I was certain the rabbit was just as real as the shadow in the corner. In fact, I could smell a low stench of putrescence.
While Mason was at work, I made myself get out of bed. Whether it was my illness or what was going on around me or my subjective impression of the same, I felt more disoriented than before. The world was aberrant. I began to feel unreal, as if I had never really existed in the first place. I was losing touch. I was becoming neurotic.
I sat in the kitchen, bathing in a stream of yellow sunlight, fascinated by the motes of dust dancing in it, imagining that the world, the known universe, was but one mote surrounded by countless others.
My phone was on the table. In the twisted depths of my mind, a voice that I did not recognize kept saying, watch for him he is coming, watch for him he is coming, watch for him he is coming, until I thought my head might split open. I opened Evernote. It no longer said the above. That was reassuring. Then I opened the Gallery and looked through my photos. Do I dare mention what I saw? There were shots of Mason and I in Bermuda, hiking in the Adirondacks, attending his sister’s wedding . . . all the usual stuff.
The only problem was they were different from the ones we had taken.
I mention three specifically. The first was Mason and I standing knee-deep in the crystal-blue waters of Horseshoe Bay Beach with weathered, mountainous black rocks just behind us. That much I remembered. But the titanic, seaweed-encrusted effigy rising from the surf, its arms spread as if in benediction over our heads . . . no, no, that had not been there. It was obscured by mats of yellow kelp, so what it was meant to represent is unknown. The second photo of interest was taken in the wild country above Gleasman Falls in the Adirondacks. Again, I remembered the shot . . . but not the amorphous, crooked form emerging from the forest that Mason was pointing at. The third photo I bring to your attention was a wedding shot. Mason and I, decked out in summery finery, standing near a fountain. Behind us, was a lurking figure that looked very much like the shadow I kept seeing in the corner.
As in my day-to-day life, physical reality was being altered. There were other photos which equally chilled me, but it was those taken last Christmas that scared me the worst. In each successive image, my face blurred until it was completely gone in the final shots.
Barely able to keep my knees from shaking, I went to the window and looked out over the rooftops. For one dreadful moment, I thought it was an alien cityscape of black towers and egg-like spheres, but it was only my racing imagination.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
***
I was well enough to return to work the next day. I welcomed it. Anything to get out of that oppressive apartment and its otherworldly association. There was also the very real possibility that I was edging close to some kind of breakdown.
As I crept through traffic to Broders, I caught sight of a billboard on Fifth raised high above the bustling streets. It made me smile. It was for one of my campaigns, a perfume called Sinn, which we sold unapologetically with sex. It featured a green-eyed, raven-haired beauty looking back over her bare shoulder, holding a bottle of Sinn. She was practically smoldering, her lips full, juicy, and red as ripe strawberries. It’s not what’s on the surface, it’s what’s underneath, read the ad copy. That was basically the pitch I gave the suits from Christian Dior and they ate it up.
It made me feel good, positive. I was a force in this world, not some neurotic bitch steadily fading from it. I was now. I was real. You have no idea how badly I needed to feel that way. When I parked in the garage across the street and the resident religious freak on the corner handed me one of his fliers, I even smiled at his mottled, seamed face as I stuffed it into my coat pocket.
Then work. Oh, it was a madhouse, simply chaotic. I was involved in not two, but three campaigns as project manager because Bob Silverman was in the hospital following a particularly bad bicycle accident which left him in traction. It was meeting after meeting, arguing with Creative and Development, barking orders at interns and Accounts . . . endless. As stressful as it all was, it made me feel safe. I felt insulated from the madness that was beginning to be too commonplace. It even occurred to me, that given time, I might even forget about it all. Then, just after lunch—I skipped food for two vodka martinis—the pandemonium of Broders seemed to switch gears. Everything became calm and pacific. Everyone was suddenly, miraculously, on the same page and it seemed like the agency might survive another day to fight again.
I should have known something was amiss. People all across the office began to cluster in little groups, whispering and gesturing. They had a tendency to scatter or go silent when I approached, which was strange because I had good relationships with just about everyone. But now I was being marginalized, isolated from the social flow. I did not like it. In fact, it began to make my skin crawl as if I was an enemy agent in their midst and they knew it. I began to get very paranoid. People stared at me and old friends ignored me. It was as if everyone was part of something I was excluded from and knew something that I was not allowed to know.
My anxiety increased throughout the afternoon and then eclipsed shortly after five. I went to see the copywriters about a pitch for L’Oréal they were revising. I saw four faces I had never seen before.
“Where’s Benji?” I asked.
The four of them looked at each other and then looked back at me.
“Who’s Benji?” one of them asked.
“He’s your boss if you work in this department,” I said.
“We work for Kathleen. Never heard of Benji.”
Under ordinary circumstances I might have demanded an explanation, but I could feel it just as I had at home: things were unraveling. Reality was frayed. What I had known for years was disintegrating. Feeling a mad sort of terror building in me, I went over to Creative. I wanted to talk to Joyce, Broder’s art director. Joyce was not there. Neither was Rich or Tom or Carolyn. No one had ever heard of Joyce or the others. I stormed over to Margaret’s office. She ran Broders. She was not there either. In fact, there was a supply closet where her office had once stood.
I went back to my own office.
My name was still on the door, thank God. I didn’t know what to do. My paranoia was telling me there was a conspiracy at work, that my life had been synthetic, that I had maybe been brainwashed into believing that any of it had been true in the first place. I went down on my knees, shaking and sick to my stomach. Sour-smelling sweat boiled from me in rivers. I was hallucinating. That was it. That’s all it could be.
I was clinging to the flimsiest rationale even though I knew it was a lie, a great seething manufactured lie.
With shaking hands, I tried to call Mason, but his number was no longer in my directory. I knew from the moment I saw him performing the dance that he had been appropriated like the others. Soon, I would be alone in an alien, perverse world as reality was turned inside out.
I walked from one end of the office to the other, touching the walls and desk and bookcase, the awards and plaques I had received over the years if for no other reason than to confirm that they did in fact exist.
But in my head, a hysterical voice shrieked, synthetic, it’s all synthetic. Ella Barnes never really existed. You are a nonentity, a shadow, a ghost that is about to be erased by the intersection of something immense, something cosmic and nameless—
***
I must have passed out.
When I woke much later, I was on the floor. Nearly everyone would have left, save the interns and newbies who would be sucking up the extra work of their bosses, trying to make an impression.
I checked my phone, even though I knew it was pointless.
Mason would ordinarily have called by then. He would have been worried why I was not home. But he hadn’t called. He hadn’t even texted. And that was because I no longer existed. Yes, I knew many things now and guessed at others that were literally beyond comprehension.
I grabbed my coat and right away, as I dug for my keys in the pocket, I found the flier the religious freak had given me. It had been balled-up, but now I straightened it, now I read the words printed upon it. It did not say HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED? as they always had in the past. No, now it read HAVE YOU BEEN OFFERED?
I walked out into the shadowy offices of Broders . . . except, they were not shadowy at all.
People were queued up, those I knew and those I did not. They ignored me. I did not exist for them. They were all staring with fixed, manic attention at some huge shaggy form that waited at the far end down where Margaret’s office had been.
It was the shape from the corner of my bedroom, I realized with a hot flare of panic in my chest. I tried to focus on its appearance, to finally get a real look at it, but the harder I tried, the more it blurred and became nebulous. It was dark and shaggy with spike-like horns jutting from the top of its head. That’s all I knew. That’s all I was allowed to know.
I backed away, bumping into people who rudely shoved me aside because I was blocking their vision of what waited there. One by one, they kneeled before the beast, making obeisance to the horror. What they did then and what was offered to them, I did not want to know.
I ran for the elevators, then decided on the stairs down on to the lobby. All the way, I could hear the porcine squealing of something that stalked me, exhaling hot and sour breath against the back of my neck.
***
The apartment. The white rabbit, that hideous avatar of what my life had become, was on the bureau, waiting for me. Whereas before it looked withered, now it was decaying—its fur a graying pelt, threadbare and fusty, yellowed rungs of bone protruding through gaping holes. Flies crawled over it. Yet, its huge soulless black eyes looked out at me with wrath and intensity.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve planned,” I told it.
The apartment was equally as filthy. Dust was layered over everything, dozens of flies speckling the windows. There were jagged cracks in the ceiling and walls, that squirming darkness trying to push through. My clothes were moth-eaten rags in the closet and drawers. In the kitchen, fruit in a bowl was rotted to a blue excrescence of mold.
Out of my mind, not just because of the filth and stench, but because my world, my private space, had been reduced to ruin and rot and rabid disorder, I screamed and launched myself at the rabbit. I seized its carcass in my hands and tore it into pieces, discovering that it was stuffed with graying meat and organ and hundreds of plump writhing maggots.
***
After that, I ran. There was little else I could do since my car was not where I left it. I wandered from street to street, moving down crowded avenues in a daze, looking up only once and seeing the billboard for Sinn. But the alluring woman was no longer there. Instead there was a crude image of the beast and beneath, HE’S COMING GIVE PRAISE.
The tall buildings that rose around me were monolithic and crooked, threatening to fall and crush me. I saw men with the blank, watery eyes of toads. And women, dear God, what seemed like hundreds of women, all of them noticeably pregnant.
Finally, my building.
When I reached our floor, I was nearly paralyzed with apprehension. Fear infested me, gibbering and giggling. In my dementia, I imagined some gap-toothed court jester with mad, rolling eyes living inside my skull like a worm in a hollow seed. This was what was left when reality as such fractured like a bone and the marrow of common sense leaked out.
I was not certain the key I clutched in my pale fingers would even fit in the lock. The idea terrified me. The penultimate absurdity. But the key fit and the lock disengaged. I turned the knob and stepped inside. Immediately, I was certain I was in the wrong apartment: the feel, the smell, the very psychic texture was all wrong. I was in an enemy camp and I knew it. Had that abomination from the office been waiting for me, I could have been no more horrified at what I saw.
The furnishings were all different and I sensed the decorative touches of another woman. But that was purely cosmetic. What really disturbed me were the framed photos on the wall. I recognized them. I recognized every one of them. I had been in them once, but now I had been replaced by a leggy, green-eyed redhead whose left shoulder and right arm were adorned with vanity tattoos. Mason was still in them, of course, and was it my imagination or did he look just a bit happier with her by his side than he had with me? Not only had sanity abandoned me and reality failed me, but love had betrayed me too.
Mason, Mason, Mason.
Was this the sort of girl he’d wanted all along? Some bronze-skinned, emerald-eyed, taut-thighed, bullet-titted whore who would go down on him in traffic or finger herself on the leather seats of his Escalade in a crowded parking lot?
Photo after photo of her wrapped around him, displaying her goodies, grinning with her enticing bee-stung lips and flashing eyes like hot jade . . . she made him happier in ways I never could.
There was a recent picture of her artfully displayed against a setting sun on a beach, her hands clutching a noticeable baby bump at her midsection.
I began to understand. The white rabbit, the white rabbit. Rabbits had long been a symbol of fertility to the ancients. Mason had wanted children, but my tipped uterus had left me barren. And now, it seemed, he had plowed a richer field.
The final insult was above the fireplace where a tasteful print of Monet’s “Lady with a Parasol” had hung. It had been replaced by a bronzed plaque, some revolting pagan travesty which featured a crudely-rendered face, multi-eyed, surrounded by a corona of spidery appendages that seemed to grow from it. The face was emblazoned over an inverted crescent moon that was cracked and crumbling.
I recognized it because Mason’s concubine had a similar tattoo on her forearm surrounded by spiraling letters.
Terror rose inside me on leathery wings because I knew it was the symbolic representation, the holy relic of the shaggy thing that had subverted my life and distorted the very physics of my world.
My stomach turned at the idea of visiting the bedroom where Mason and his perky little fertility goddess joined nightly, probably dancing rhythmically backwards (as he had in the bathroom that day) like Medieval witches tripping on belladonna and henbane, slitting the throats of sacrificial white rabbits and bathing in their blood to ensure fertility, before consummating the deed, well-greased like rutting hogs.
I lingered in the kitchen a bit, disturbed at the variety of unnamable spices on my shelves and the quantity of well-marbled red meat in the refrigerator. I also found a quantity of ancient-looking horn-handled knives in the cutlery drawer.
I had to leave and I knew it. Good sense demanded it. That’s when I realized I was not alone. I whirled around, expecting to come face to face with Mason’s domesticated Circe, the fire-haired Madonna of the fields swollen with child.
But it was Mason himself.
“What . . . what are you doing here?” he asked, his rugged face and dark, sensual eyes filling my knees with water.
“Wait, just wait,” I said, knowing I was a stranger to him now. “Please listen to me. I’m not a thief. Just give me a minute to explain.”
But did I dare expose the architecture of my madness? Did I dare tear my wriggling insanity out by its dark roots and let him examine it by the light of day? Yes. I poured everything into it, body and soul, to stir something in him, some shred of remembrance.
“ . . . before this awful thing happened, we were happy. So very happy. Don’t you remember? Can’t you remember?” I implored him and for one solitary, hopeful moment, I saw something shift in his eyes. It was all coming back to him. “Mason . . . please try to remember. Skiing in Aspen, that weekend with the Rosenbergs in Big Sur, the time we hiked Caminito del Rey . . . don’t you remember? The chateau in Savoie Mont Blanc? The grape harvests?”
Whatever light had been lit behind his eyes, it was now extinguished. He was lost to me and I knew it. I felt my heart clench like a weak fist.
“Listen, lady. I don’t know what your problem is or why you had to break into my place,” he said, holding the flats of his hands out to stay me. “But you have to go, okay? If you leave now and don’t come back, I swear I’ll keep the police out of this.”
I could feel hot tears spilling down my cheeks. I could barely swallow. “Oh, Mason, please. It’s me . . . it’s Ella.”
“I don’t know you. I’ve never seen you before. You need to go. I’m a married man. We’re expecting and I don’t need this kind of trouble in my life.”
Everything inside me began to boil. “Why did you have to mention her? How the hell could you bring that whore into my house and impregnate her in my bed?”
He made excuses, as he always made excuses whenever I caught him being unfaithful. He tried everything, but I wouldn’t listen. I saw the beast behind him, squealing and grunting the way she must have when he rode her, fertilizing her lush garden.
By then, one of the horn-handled knives was in my hand and I plunged it into his throat. The blood was much redder than I could have imagined. It was hot and meaty-smelling. At first, I was repulsed by it, then oddly intrigued, and finally, excited. I remember kneeling down in a hot pool of it as Mason contorted in his death throes, catching the liquid jet of blood in my hands. How like the rabbit he looked in his agony.
I have no memory of anointing myself with Mason’s blood, drawing esoteric symbols over my breasts, belly, thighs, and face.
“I have made an offering in your name,” I said to the beast as it watched. “By your hand, make me fertile and rich with life so that these loins I spread for you might bear fruit.”
What he gave unto me, I took into my mouth and did so willingly, gladly.
That’s when she came in—the whore, the Madonna, the seed-eater, the high cunt of the fields, her belly rounded and full in its eighth month. You know what I did to her and more specifically, to the demon seed she carried. I was still dancing widdershins in the old way (as the beast instructed) over their ritually-harvested remains when the police arrived. They could not understand the significance of what I had done or how I had been called as courtesan into His house.
You, of course, know the rest. I will not speak of it again, not until the stars are right. Soon now, the shaggy savior will come down from the mountain high to claim his offerings beneath the glow of the oblong moon. And I will offer unto him the seed that grows fat and juicy in my belly.