[Part 1] Hi, Helen here. Helen with the maggot-barfing husband Henry (he’s still in the hospital). It’s been a hot minute, and some shit’s gone down. Last time I posted, I was huddling in my attic after looking through Henry’s things—I discovered that he seemingly somehow knew he would die almost exactly ten years after we started dating. Moments later, I was huddled on the floor, terrified to open the attic door after hearing a six-beat knock that could only have come from M.
As I sat there, hearing the knock, I gathered my courage, clenching and unclenching my hands. After a long moment, I crouched, got my hand around the attic door handle, and, in one terrible maneuver, flung open the trapdoor.
There was no-one there.
The six-beat knock rapped one more time, hitting just inches away from me.
There was no-one there.
I cannot describe to you the inch of ice-cold terror that slithered down my throat.
I slammed the attic door shut and stumbled backward, my butt scooting along the rough wood floor, scrabbling away from the door. I huddled around myself, hands locked around my knees like I was a child, waiting for another knock.
None came. My lungs burned from holding my breath.
But then I realised. If the thing—M—was somehow invisible, they could be in here with me.
How long did I keep the door open? How long did I keep the door open?? Was it enough time for someone to crawl in??!
I shrunk even further into myself, trembling fiercely, swivelling my head back and forth. Nothing but dry, dusty corners and scattered papers throughout the attic. Nothing stirred; nothing moved.
Then I heard the laugh.
The same rhythm as the six-beat knock. Horrible, stilted, like two wooden boards sawing against each other. Ha-ha-ha-HAHAHA.
Ha-ha-ha HAHAHA.
Ha-ha-ha HAHAHA.
HA-HA-HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA HA HA HA HA
I screamed. I locked my hands over my ears and screamed, not so much out of fear but just to drown out the sound. One long, pained, high-pitched note. As my eyes dropped to the floor, the floor buckled under me. It wasn’t a floor. It was a writhing sea of maggots.
I think I blacked out. When I came to, the laughter was gone, the maggots were gone, and the knocking at my door had transformed. The sound was no longer the six beats of hell. It was the frantic battering of a concerned friend.
Someone nearby had heard me and had come running. With trembling hands, I opened the trapdoor, let down the ladder, and climb-stumbled down out of the attic, my arms weak as water. Somehow, I made it down the flight of stairs to the front door. I saw Annie, my next door neighbor, through the peephole. I unlocked and flung open the door and promptly collapsed into her arms. I shook like a child, and she held me as I sobbed. Her arms encircled me, and for a moment I felt like she had become a tiny island of what was safe.
We got coffee. We went to a 24-hour 7/11 and bought coffee and beer, and she sat with me while I burbled and gargled my way through a version of the story. I told her Henry was sick—badly sick—and in the hospital, and I’d had a breakdown in the attic while looking through his things. It was close enough to the truth. More importantly, it got what I needed: human comfort. I had been scared out of my fucking mind. She held my hand as I rambled and cried, and I had never been so grateful for physical affection in my life. Even being held by Henry never felt real like this. I did not want to think about why that might be.
I had begun, I think, to put the pieces together. How Henry knew he would die exactly ten years after he met me. How swiftly—almost unnaturally swiftly—I fell in love with him. Like magic, I’d thought then. Like something outside of my control. Far outside of my control.
Part of me wanted to ask if I could sleep the rest of the night in Annie’s house, but I was scared I’d look like a lunatic, and besides, friendly as she was, she didn’t offer. I ended up not sleeping at all; I went back to my house and sat at the dining room table on my phone. I researched for hours. Names of demons. Powers of demons. Humans and demons. Deals with the Devil. I scrolled, jumping at the slightest sound, until rosy dawn began curling its fingers across the rooftops of the neighborhood. When it was light enough, I went for a very short jog, took a shower, and tried for almost an entire minute to convince myself it had all been a nightmare. It had all been a nightmare.
But like a rubber band, my thoughts kept snapping back to their original position: I still needed to talk to M.
I would call them in daylight, and I would call them like a demon. There’s nothing else they could be. They were not a person. I was certain of this.
“M,” I said firmly into the air. “M. Whoever, whatever you are, I call you.” I didn’t speak Latin; I didn’t know how to summon a demon; still, this was my life, my house, and my husband, and I had decided that I was not going to be terrorized out of anything that was mine.
“I call you,” I went on, crossing the floor and opening my front door until I was standing right in the center of my doorway, the threshold between within and without. “I call you, as I stand here. I call you in my husband’s name and I call you by my own.
“I call you!” I didn’t care that I must look like a freak or a fool. “I CALL YOU! I CALL YOU!”
Something crawled over my foot. I looked down. A maggot.
When I looked back up, M was in my face.
I shrieked and shoved her back, but she didn’t move. She stood stock-still, like a black marble statue.
M was an old woman.
Hunched-over, dressed in a dark grey or black tattered cloak, the clothes I always recognized her by. Only see her winkled chin and two wasted hands emerged from the fabric. She looked like an illustration, but of what, I couldn’t put my finger on. She smiled and tilted her head back, and the early morning light fell for the first time across her wrinkled, weather-scarred face. I looked away.
“Helen,” she greeted me. Deep pits and shadows played across her wizened face. “You’ve summoned me.”
“M,” I said. I swallowed. Seeing her felt wrong. Like seeing the stars out in daylight, or turning on your sink and the water flows red instead of clear. Like that way the air goes wavy over asphalt when it’s hot outside. I broke out in goosebumps. My skin crawled. I could tell, on some sub-rational, sub-dermal level, that she was something deeply anomalous. She felt like she was outside the world, outside normal time. Her clothes rippled slightly, blown by a breeze I couldn’t feel. I should not be talking to her, I thought. I shuddered and clenched my jaw.
“Tell me,” I demanded, wondering how the temperature had shot up but why I was still shivering. “Tell me what the fuck is going on with Henry.”
“I shall tell you,” said M, surprisingly amicably. “I shall tell you enough.” She smiled, and her dry lips peeled, stretched, and split. Black blood ran down her chin. She only had one tooth.
One tooth. I realised what she reminded me of. The Fates - those three Greek women who share a single eye and a single tooth, the ones who spin the string of your life, who spin the string of your life and then cut it. One of the Græae. A Phorcide. A Phorkyad.
“Tell me,” I demanded, and I opened the door the rest of the way.
M didn’t move. She held her body unnaturally still, like someone in pain. One hand was hooked like a claw, poised in midair. “I warn you,” she said, smiling wider now — I loathed her smile — “That if I tell you what you wish to know, you will hurt yourself.” Her voice was thick and wet; I could hear her toothless gums smacking together, and I suppressed nausea. A wriggling maggot crawled out of her left nostril, and she sniffed it back in. I gagged.
“Fine,” I snapped. “Fine. What do you want of me?”
“Want?” M echoed.
“Henry sold his soul to you,” I said. I’d guessed. In the hours between my time in the attic and the rising of the sun, I’d made it make some sort of sense. Henry wanted me, and he sold his soul to get me. A beautiful woman, a perfect wife. I had been bound, bargained, to love him, in exchange for his soul. “I am yours and you are mine.”
Now, he was dying, and M was coming to collect.
If this were true, it made two things also true. One, my husband was a piece of shit. Two, M was far less scary than he was.
“He did,” M confirmed.
“To make me love him,” I went on, my voice glacial. “Which is why it never felt real. Which is why it felt sick. Why he felt sick.”
“In a sense,” said M.
“A sense?” I snapped.
She looked at me with what almost seemed like pity. “I’m sorry, Helen,” she said, and she almost sounded genuine. She raised one hand, almost as if to touch me, but I recoiled and she dropped it back to her side. “But it’s worse than that.” A hint of her smarminess returned. She chuckled, a dark sound, a hollow echo of the wood-sawing laugh I’d heard in the attic last night.
“Explain,” I demanded.
“Henry bargained us his soul. In ten years, he said, we can claim it. In exchange, we gave him any woman he wished, the most beautiful woman he could imagine.”
“Imagine,” I echoed.
“We made you for him,” said M. “You, my dear, are not a real person.”
I jerked backward and slammed the door in her face. I looked at my hand, my wrist, all the way up my white arm. I’m real, I thought furiously. I’m real. I repeated it in my head, like a heartbeat: bum-BUM. I’m REAL. bum-BUM. I’m REAL.
I flung open the door to scream it in M’s face, like defiance, like rage. I AM REAL.
M was gone.
She’s not just some crazy old lady. I can tell you. Because as soon as she told me I was fabricated, I could feel the truth of it. I could feel truth, in a way I think a human can’t. A lock shutting, the closing of a door. THUNK. The finality, like a rock dropped into water. Like utter recognition. I could feel, to the false fibers of me, that she was right. That I wasn’t a complete person. That I was Henry’s. And as I looked at my arm in the early morning light, for an instant—just an instant—I could see through it. Could see right down to the hardwood floor.
I’m going to call M again. I figure this: I was made for Henry, to be his for life. Henry’s dying; he’s about to lose that life. If I’m his, a facsimile custom-made bride, logically speaking, I will cease to exist along with him.
Like hell I’ll cease to exist along with him.
Readers, I have a life and it is mine. And like I said, I am not going to be swindled out of anything that is mine. I’m going to fight, tooth and nail, to live.
I just need to figure out how.