The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Six

THE RABBIT-HEADED SHADOW man warned Maude on the night of Emily Crandall's birthday.
Emily had invited her as they'd been filling the condiment bottles in The Lantern. "It's kind of a happening, with a few friends."
     After sunset, Maude biked to Emily's house, past the corner theater with its neon marquee advertising Bonnie and Clyde, past the gas station where a few kids talked loudly around a thrumming station wagon. When she turned onto a tree-lined street of perfect houses, she could hear televisions, and children playing in a night filled with cricket symphonies and cooling air.
     She reached the house and set down her bike.
     The screen door clattered open. Ethan Mongoose, in jeans and a sky-blue T-shirt, smiled at her. "What are you doing here?"
     "I was invited." She moved up the steps, Emily's present tucked beneath one arm. He looked different in a house, more ordinary, less like a flower child.
     He nodded. "She always invites one new person."
     She followed him into a cluttered living room where several kids her age sprawled on the floor watching 'The Smothers Brothers' and sampling the snacks laid out on a coffee table.
     "Maude." Emily, dressed in a peasant blouse and jeans, a peacock feather in her hair, jumped up. "What'd you get me?"
    "You told," Ethan scowled, "everyone exactly what to get you. Don't act like you didn't."
     As Maude shyly watched, Emily tore away the glossy wrapping to reveal the Parker Brothers' ouija board she'd wistfully mentioned to Maude.
     "I'm her cousin," Ethan apologized, glaring at Emily as she opened the box and unfolded the ouija board. "You're not gonna use that now, are you?"
     "Groovy." A boy with long brown hair said as he took the board and set it on the coffee table.
     Ethan's voice sounded almost pleading, "Em."
     Kneeling beside the table, she looked innocently up at him. "It's almost the first of May. Don't you want to know?"
     The other three didn't seem to notice the tension between the cousins as Ethan Mongoose tucked his hair behind his ears. As he drifted to where they were all seated around the ouija board, Maude followed him. Settling beside him, she noticed the black rabbit's foot dangling from his pocket and felt a ripple of unease.
     A tawny-skinned girl turned off the lights and the television.
     "Shouldn't we light candles or something?" The brown-haired boy idly stretched his arms over his head.
     "My mom and dad'll be back by ten and I don't want the damn house burned down, so, no." Emily set the planchette on the board. She introduced Maude to the other three -- Stephen, Beth, Orrie. Maude glanced at Ethan, whose glasses reflected the streetlights.
     "Me, Ethan,and Maude first." Emily placed one hand on the planchette and Maude set hers over Emily's, while Ethan's folded over hers. Then Emily spoke in a low voice, "You were lost on this night in May, Sarah Morgan. Are you here?"
     Maude's stomach turned as she recognized the name of the girl on the Missing poster, the one whose photograph she'd found in the creepy field.
     "Em, I don't think -- what?" The boy with curly hair -- Stephen -- flinched back as the planchette shot across the board to the letter 'B'.
     "You're doing it." Emily glared at Ethan, who retorted, "It's your hand on top of the thing."
     Maude flinched as the planchette slid to the letter 'O'. Tawny-skinned Beth began to spell out the words. "Why does it say 'Boy Bad'? Which of the boys is bad?"
     When the planchette slid to the letter 'J', Maude snatched her hand back and scrambled up.
     The temperature plummeted. Someone swore. The brown-haired boy scrambled back.
     Maude felt her breathing become shrill as shadows seemed to ribbon acros the board, sweeping up into an unlit corner, forming a man-like shape with a rabbit's head --
     The radio switched on and blasted out the Rolling Stones 'Ruby Tuesday'.
     Beth screamed.
     "Maude." Ethan rose, staring at her. Their breath misted in the chill that crackled through the living room. He followed her gaze to the blackened corner, where something was making a terrible noise beneath Mick Jagger's voice, something that sounded as if it was trying to breathe.
     "...kh...kh...kh..."
     Maude grabbed the ouija board and flung it at the dark corner.
     The music went off. The choking sound stopped. The lights came on.
     Emily stood by the light switch, her face white. Like everyone else in the room, she was staring at Maude, who was shaking so badly, she had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. She said, "Why are you looking at me like that?"
     Ethan Mongoose whispered, "Maude...why was it saying your name?"
     "I don't know. I didn't hear it. I don't know." She backed away, her hands clenched. "I'm going home."
     "Maude--"
     "I'm going home."

***


(Illustration by Warwick Goble)

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Five

THE BLACK SCISSORS came this night,
and a cold, dark man was he.
My soul he stole and mended whole,
and took a faery doctor's fee.

     The girl's voice faded as a horse-drawn coach rumbled down a night road and clattered to a halt with a yell from the coachman as another horse, black as a night without stars, reared in its path. The rider, in a duster coat and tricornered hat, called out to those within the vehicle. His eyes glinted an otherworldly silver.
     Maude woke believing she'd heard hooves clacketing on the street outside. Her heart slamming, she slid up to look out the window. There was no horse, only leaf shadows and streetlight and the soft patter of rain...and the feeling that something had tried to warn her.
                                                                        ***
Maude asked Emily at the coffehouse where the Tiamats lived and Emily reluctantly told her, "Off of Nightshade Road, on Draper's Lane. Don't go there."
     The next day, Maude bicycled up a gravel path shadowed by Virginia creeper and oaks ribboned with moss. When she finally reached a clearing clotted with weeds, she breathed out. Across the clearing, hazy and unreal from the humidity, sat a plantation house, in ruins, its windows shuttered, cypresses twined into its black-streaked walls. Even at this distance, she could smell mildew and wood rot, cloying beneath the fragrance of magnolia and green things.
     She stared at the house. The glamorous Tiamats couldn't live there.
     A chill seeped through the heat. The buzz of the cicadas became frantic. The shadows around the house seemed too dark, like splashes of ink. It looked like a nesting place for horrors.
     "What're you doing?"
     She whirled, expecting Jack Tiamat.
     But the boy standing beneath an oak had hair the color of new corn. He wore bellbottom jeans and a Steppenwolf T-shirt and sunlight winked from his glasses.
     "That house," Silver bracelets glinted around one wrist as he pointed at it, "is dangerous. That's Snake Hollow. That's all swamp back there."
     She braced herself against the bike and glared at him. "Who're you?"
     "Ethan." He sauntered forward. "Mongoose."
     "Mongoose. I'm Maude Clare. I thought the Tiamats lived here -- is Mongoose really your last name?"
     "The Tiamats used to live here." His gaze slid to the sinister house. "And Mongoose is really my last name."
     She leaned against the bike. Her tripping heart had slowed. "You live nearby?"
     "Down the other side." He nodded in a general direction. "I was here, looking for something I lost."
     "Tell me about the Tiamats?" The buzz of cicadas was beginning to give her a headache. She could hear Led Zeppelin crashing faintly from a transister radio. She could smell barbecue and car exhaust and, although these ordinary things comforted her, she still felt freaked out.
     "They're a young family with old origins They're rich as anything, the best students at the university, and secretive as snakes."
     He sure spoke strange. She thought of Jack Tiamat's luminous skin and black eyes and the tricks that light and dark could play.
     Ethan Mongoose began walking and she followed, wheeling her bike through dandelions and creepers. He said, his voice carrying a faint lilt, "Don't get caught up with them. You hear?"
     Maude nodded. But this place of haunts and mysterious families made her forget other things. She'd been a little scared, but she had no intention of staying away from anyone now.

Lily's Note: The Black Scissors. I found only one reference to this name in West Virginia folklore. There was a highwayman who haunted the roads of this region some time during the 18th century. He was caught and identified as William Harrow, a nineteen-year-old tailor and indentured servant from Dublin, Ireland. He was hanged. No one ever claimed his body.
See also: Law and Crime in Colonial Virginia by Peter Saunders (Peregrine Press, 1977) Infamous Roads in Southern Folklore by Sandy Claimes (OldSmith Books, 1955)

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Four

SHE DIDN'T DREAM ANYMORE of the dark rabbit-man, but of places that were weird copies of reality; a school with scarlet windows and ghostly children; a red land with a giant moon the color of sea foam and houses filled with old books; a pterodactyl gliding past an ivory skyscraper with the silhouettes of people inside.
     In the late afternoon, Maude returned to the field behind the cemetery.
     The birdcage/dollhouse of black metal was gone. She wondered if she'd imagined that too. Disappointed, relieved, she sat beneath a tree and opened the book she'd brought and read until the sun began to fade.
     She looked up at a crow's call and a sudden chill.
     Jack Tiamat was sitting on the low wall that divided the field from the cemetery. In bellbottom jeans and a red shirt with ruby cuff-links, he seemed too elegant for his environment. She shut the book and breathed out, "I saw you at the Lantern."
     He slid down from the wall. "Walk with me?"
     "Through the cemetery? Because you're on that side now."
     "No crowds."
     She rose. As she slid over the wall, he reached out and steadied her, his hand sure and warm on her bare arm. She wanted to ask about the red-eyed boy in moldy clothes, but didn't, because she didn't want him to think she was crazy. It would be worse if she wasn't crazy, and that creature had been real.
     As they wandered among the tombstones knotted with trees she thought might be banyans, he indicated a giant that rose in the middle, its roots like massive serpents among the graves. Beneath the tree stood a mausoleum guarded by a black marble figure in a long coat and wide-brimmed hat. It held a key in one hand and, in the other, a pair of scissors that looked like a weapon. Maude gazed at the strange, sharp face. "That's creepy."
     The dusky light burnished Jack's curls as he stepped up onto the statue's base to read the inscription, "'Here lies the bride of the Dubh Deamhais. May the divine have mercy upon her soul.'"
      Leaves rustled in a sudden wind and Maude shivered as if she were standing on the threshold of a dark, ancient place. "Who is the...what you just said?"
     "Dubh Deamhais. He's called the Black Scissors." He stepped down. "He's like the Headless Horseman here, only not headless and only dangerous to some. He was a highwayman in the 1700s who made a deal with something bad."
     "The devil?"
     "No." Jack didn't smile when he said, "Faeries."
     She felt a chill, but smiled to show such a word didn't scare her. "Like the elves in those Tolkien books?"
     "No. Not like elves. He became a sort of wizard...not like Gandalf." His mouth curled and she liked that. As he moved past her, he said, "There's more."
     She followed him through shadows that seemed almost subterranean, to a part of the cemetery tangled with wood vines and ferns and prickly bushes that scratched her skin. The air was heavy with the scent of clover and the spice of magnolia. He moved toward a crypt which loomed among the broken stones, its walls rippling with kudzu, its base ringed with pale toadstools. Another statue stood here, a hooded figure of lichen-splotched granite with a large serpent curled around its bare feet. The inscription read 'Tiamat'.
     "Your family."
     "They are now." He touched the crypt's plaque. She noticed the rings he wore, how they seemed dulled by age.
     "This place," Maude drew back from the crypt built to resemble a mansion. It reminded her of the black metal cage/dollhouse. "I don't like it."
     "It is a graveyard." He turned. "I like it."
     She wanted to ask him why, but there was a powerful stilllness that prevented her. She tried not to think about what lay beneath her feet, bones and rotting matter and nothingness--
     She flicked her gaze to Jack and saw the darkness that had swallowed the whites of his eyes.  She backed up a step. His skin seemed luminous, as pale as the toadstools.
     She turned and fled through the cemetery, toward the low wall. The breath searing from her throat, she tumbled into the field and grabbed her bike.
     As she pedaled away, she looked over her shoulder once and saw only darkness among the tombstones and banyans.
  

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Three

MY NOTE: Beware tonight, May 5, because it's the Hare Moon, when Azrael Umare's people enter the world in the forms of rabbits and you don't want them to notice you. Most of the nomadic kind can either be dark or light.

IT WAS boredom that drove Maude to apply for a job at the Lantern Coffeehouse, where paintings of weird figures were hung on green walls and several people her age worked the relatively mild evening hours. She didn't want to sit in her room reading or playing records, and television seemed to be nothing but scenes of dying boys from Vietnam. With no school, she could, maybe, find out about the thing in the field behind the cemetery. Now that she was distanced from it, she'd become skeptical.
     On her first night, Jack, wearing a black suit and tie, walked into the Lantern. When he passed her without a glance, the curls falling against his sun-browned nape slid away from the tattoo of a red dragon. As he sprawled in a corner booth, Maude scowled and began clearing a table on the opposite side. If he wanted to ignore her, she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of noticing.
     A few minutes later, a girl in high-heeled shoes like cloven hooves and a black dress with fringed tassels sauntered in. Accompanied by two boys and a girl -- all with dark red hair and white skin -- she sauntered to Jack's table. As she spoke to him, she twirled a strand of pearls around her neck.
     "The Tiamats." Emily, the other waitress, nudged Maude.
     "Who are they?"
     "Weird and rich. Don't look at them. Maybe they'll go away."
     A small argument had erupted between Jack and the elegant tribe. Jack rose. He stalked out. The Tiamats drifted after. The scarlet-haired girl's Cleopatra eyes glinted silver beneath her bangs.
     Before the door shut, a wind swept through the coffeehouse, tearing at the advertisements for businesses and concerts on the bulletin board. Maude glimpsed the face of a girl among them and moved toward it. Silently, she read: Sarah Morgan, 16 years old, dark hair, blue eyes...missing since 1960.
     It was the face of the ballerina in the crumpled photograph scrawled with a poem to a fairy-tale god.