Rags & Bones Read online

  Inside the castle, it looked like oblivion—if oblivion looked like fog, Theo thought. Fog, billowing aimlessly toward nowhere in particular. That was how he’d become used to feeling; it was also how he felt, standing in the central courtyard of the Castello Aragonese.

  Isabella didn’t wait for him. She took off into the shadows, while Theo felt like his feet had been somehow glued into the very foundation of the Castello itself. Frozen in place.

  He looked up at the soaring stone walls that rose into the darkness around him. One floor, two, three, four—the many stairwells connecting the castle turrets to each other were largely hidden from sight now. He could see Isabella only from a distance now, a glimpse here and there as her T-shirt caught the moonlight on the stairs.

  “Isabella! What are you doing? Come on, now—”

  She didn’t answer, and she didn’t stop. She was heading for the castle roof, Theo knew that much. He recognized the path she was taking; he’d taken it himself, the night they shot the death scene, with Pippa and Sir Manny.

  With Connie, and all the blood.

  Fake blood, he reminded himself. No use freaking out about it now.

  Then he started up the stairs after her.

  He wasn’t scared.

  He kept his eyes on his feet for no particular reason, other than that it was difficult to go up the stairs in the pitch-dark.

  Thinking this, he stopped and drew a lighter from his pocket, flicking it open.

  The small splotch of light spluttered into an unsteady, pale glow.

  I’m not scared.

  “Isabella, wait!”

  I’m not.

  That’s what he thought, when he mounted the final stair to the Castello roof.

  That’s what he thought, when he passed the dark falconieri, the small alcove where the falcon trainer usually slept, when a scene called for birds on set.

  That’s what he thought, when he saw Isabella standing on the edge of the stone roof, holding on to a thin, iron rail that rose from the blocky floor like a silver antenna.

  That’s what he thought when the wind whipped her long black skirt, fanning her hair out into the sky behind her.

  “Oh my god. Come here,” she said, without turning to Theo. “Come see. You have to see.”

  He took a step closer, like someone in a dream, in a trance. “What, Isabella? What are you saying?”

  He reached out for her hand, and she took it, twisting her head toward him.

  Bringing her lips to his.

  She kissed him, sweetly, as if no one in the world existed, except the two of them—not even the two of them.

  I love you, he thought. I love you, and you’re real, and I’m not scared. My father’s not down there, and neither is yours. Connie isn’t dead, and I’m not here, and we’re on a train, he thought. We’re on a train to Rome.

  We’ve escaped.

  That’s what he was thinking as he stepped up next to her, a giant black bird circling in the air around them.

  We can escape.

  That’s what he was thinking as she took his arm, silver in the moonlight, and the black feathers blew in the wind, surrounding them.

  We—

  V. Il Falconieri (The Falconer)

  In the distance, a bird shrieked. It sounded like a scream, like a child crying. It didn’t matter; the sirocco wind took the sound away—that sound, and every other sound the moonlight and the midnight hid between them.

  No one was listening.

  Not anymore.

  The boy from the café and the girl from the train lay unconscious on the cobblestone, far beneath the parapet. Only a few black feathers to break their fall.

  No one noticed.

  Not yet.

  No one except the Elephant Woman, who stood on the blood-stained rocks near the harbor, below the castle, below the empty trailers, below the deserted set.

  Holding out her hand, waiting for the black-feathered creature to return.

  He had done well, Dante, her faithful. He was the lord of the castle, not anyone else. By sunrise, he would lose his feathers and his true shape, and return to his human form once again. Just as he had been for hundreds of years now.

  They would go now, the americani. The two of them would be left alone—as they should be. That was their birthright, just as it had been her mother’s, and her grandmother’s, and her grandmother’s grandmother before that. They alone were the Keepers of the Castello, Keepers of the Curse.

  The Castello Aragonese would be locked again, and soon. It would never belong to anyone but the two of them, not really.

  “Dante! Dante, bravo ragazzo! Bravo!”

  When she smiled, her teeth were ivory and gold.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE …………………………………

  The first time I read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, I was a graduate student. The second time, I was on my way to the real Castle of Otranto itself, as part of an artists’ colony for the month of June. The Castello Aragonese, as it is locally known, is the only castle in the ancient, walled city of Otranto, a truly quirky town in a largely rural part of Italy known as Salento, or Puglia. This land, with its ancient shrines and churches and rocky sea caves and mysterious Stonehenge-like dolmen, is an old, old place—a mystical place, where things start and grow, where anything can happen, and where the sun colors everything it touches with a kind of earthy truth. As Otranto was where I began to write what would become my first completed novel, I now regard The Castle of Otranto as not just the first Gothic novel, but as the cousin of my own Gothic first novel. In the preceding pages, my Otranto has been recast for a modern setting, inspired by not just Walpole’s Otranto, but by a love of all things Gothic and Southern Gothic, a recent brush with the world of film production, and, of course, four blissful summers at the Castello Aragonese itself. So, in that ancient southeastern light, I leave you with my modern spaghetti Gothic, “Sirocco.”

  The Shaving of Shagpat by George Meredith (1856). When the publication in 1704 of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights proved immensely popular, it was followed by more collections (Turkish Tales in 1707 and Persian Tales in 1714), which proved to be just as commercially successful, and the exotic oriental fantasy was here to stay. Meredith himself became a prolific author of serious contemporary love stories and of sonnets, but it is for his first book that anyone interested in fantasy literature remembers him. He was twenty-five when he wrote it, a newlywed with a young child, and was perhaps hoping to catch the coattails of the boom in orientalism that so captivated the Western world. Whatever his hopes were, the novel flopped badly, and it quickly made its way to the remainder stalls, and Meredith never wrote another fantasy. His tale, though, is lovely, teeming with colorful supernatural events and monstrous jinn, lush with oriental scenery and vivid characters. The adventure gives us a heroic barber who seeks to follow the seemingly helpful advice of the sorceress Noorna bin Noorka, and shave the celebrated and revered Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son of Shoolpi, the son of Shullum, “a veritable miracle of hairiness.” There is a profusion of “jeweled cities far,” and enormous armies that raise the desert into crimson dust, withered crones with joints as sharp as a grasshopper’s, and a lofty mountain “by day a peak of gold, and by night a point of solitary silver.” Through it all, Meredith’s ironic wit is a pure delight, rewarding the reader’s time with a singular vision of a world that never actually existed.

  —Charles Vess.

  Awakened

  MELISSA MARR

  Tonight, unlike every other night I have walked on the shore, a man stands on the beach near my hiding place. I can’t pass him. He lifts his hands, palms open, and holds them out to his sides to show me that he is harmless. If he weren’t looking at me so fixedly, I might believe him, but I don’t think I should trust this one.

  He is young, maybe nineteen, and fit. In the water, I could escape him, but we are standing on the sand. He has dark trousers and a black shirt; the only lightnes
s is his pale blond hair. I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t seen him, until I was almost upon the crevice. Until this moment, until him, I’d been singing along with the steady rising and falling of the waves as they stretched toward the sand and fell short. Now I stand bare under moon and sky on a beach, and this stranger stares at me with a look of hunger.

  No, I do not believe he is harmless at all.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he lies.

  Something in his voice feels like it wants to be truth, but I shiver all the same. I hadn’t expected anyone to be on the beach at this hour, and I’m not sure what to do about the man who stands watching me with such intensity that I want to flee. Men do not look at you like that without wanting something, and in their wanting, they often hurt. My mother told me that truth long before I ever set foot on the shore. It is why I am careful when I come here.

  Waves lap around my ankles as I try to think of a solution. I wish I could jump into the water and escape, but I am bound by rules as old as the ebb and flow of the water at my feet. I cannot leave without the very thing that he is preventing me from reaching. The best I can do is to avoid looking at the shadows of the crevice and hope he has no idea what I am.

  “Are you alone?” he asks. His gaze leaves me then, sliding away. The moon is only half full, but it is enough to cast the light he needs. The beach has few barriers, nothing to hide others. It takes only a moment for him to determine that I am isolated, that I am trapped.

  As his gaze returns, traveling over the whole of me as if to weigh and measure my flesh, words feel too complicated. Everything feels complicated. He is waiting for my answer, so I nod to indicate that I am alone, confirming what he already has discerned, showing him that I am truthful and good. Maybe that will spare me. Maybe goodness will make him turn away. Still, I tug my hair forward, hiding myself as best I can. Dreadlocks don’t cover me as truly as untangled hair might, but I am in the waters too much to have any other sort of hair. The thick tendrils drape over my shoulders like so many ropes hiding my bareness.

  “I’m Leo,” he says, and then he walks over to the shadows and eliminates any chance I had of escape. He pulls the carefully folded skin from the crevice where I had hidden it. He is careful, knowingly handling it as if it were a living thing. It is, of course, but I do not expect land-dwellers to know that. Not now. Not in this country.

  Then he walks away, his arms laden with the part of me that I’d hoped he wouldn’t see, and I have no choice but to follow. He who holds it, holds me. It is as an anchor, and I am tethered. The sea would swallow me whole if I tried to return with my other-self still here on land. I’m trapped more truly than if I were in a cage. This man, Leo, has my soul in his hands.

  “That’s mine,” I say. “Please give it back.”

  “No.” He stops then, turns, and looks at me. “Since I have it, you are mine.” He strokes the skin in his arms as he stares at me. “Tell me your name.”

  “Eden,” I say. “I’m called Eden.”

  “Let’s go home, Eden.”

  I cannot go home. Instead, I have to obey him. It is the order of things, and so I walk away from my home. “Yes, Leo.”

  He smiles, trying to appear kind, pretending he means me no harm. Hate ripples through me like the waves during a storm as he leads me farther onto land. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling. I hate many of the humans who spill their refuse into my sea, who leave their rubbish on the sands, who desecrate my world with their noise and filth.

  I whimper at the weight of loss, at the freedom that might never be mine again.

  His gaze falls to my bare feet. “Would you like me to carry you?”

  “No,” I manage to say. He is carrying part of me and that is the reason I am trying not to weep. I cannot say anything to change this: while he keeps my skin in his possession, I, too, am a possession. I am bound to obey the words he speaks, trapped under his whim and will.

  Leo is quiet as we walk. I study him and find that he is strangely beautiful in that way that the very assured often are. He’s taller than me, but he looks to be only a bit older. He’s young and handsome. In times long gone, he would’ve been the sort of man a selchie felt lucky to have as a captor, but I never expected to be a captive. I believed that they had forgotten how to ensnare us. When a selchie woman’s skin is found, she has no choice. Many husbands could be unsightly or brutish, but a selchie must follow, must stay, where her skin is kept. Once one of them takes your other-skin, your soul, into his arms, you are his.

  I want to weep; I want to run from him. I can’t do either. All I can do is wait and hope that he will slip, that he will do one of the two things that will set me free. If he strikes me three times in anger or if he allows me to have possession of my other-skin, I can return to the sea. I hope that he does not know the truths, that his ignorance will lead to my escape, that I will be whole again one day, that I will not lose myself in captivity. I know my history, but most of the land-dwellers have forgotten that we are here. Their ignorance is our safety.

  But I am following a boy who owns me now, and I think that he was watching for me tonight. Those of us who live in the waters look much like the land-dwelling—at least when we are wearing only this skin. He glances at me, and I know that he sees only the part of me that looks like I belong on land. Other men have looked at me that way. I’ve walked on shore, and I’ve known men. None of them knew that there was another shape to me. They saw only this skin.

  Leo knows more, and so I am trapped. The sea calls out, beckoning as waves do, but Leo leads me away. There is nothing more I can do.

  Yet.

  He says nothing more as he takes me to his home, a house that sits on an otherwise empty stretch of beach. It’s a large squatting thing, a building of so many rooms that I become lost and sit weeping in the darkness until Leo finds me. After he chides me for foolishness, he leads me back to the room that he’s assigned me. He does not want me to share his room. This, I think, is for his own reasons, not as a kindness to me.

  As he stands just inside the doorway, he kisses me. It’s a soft peck upon the top of my salt-heavy hair. “Silly girl,” he says, but there is affection in his words.

  Perhaps all will be well. Perhaps I will be able to convince him to free me.

  Over the next few days, I realize that Leo can be kind. I am grateful for this. There are moments when I don’t feel as if the world around me is too bright, too harsh, too alien. They are few, but they are present. He tries to make me smile, and sometimes I do.

  Leo’s home is comfortable in a way that invites silence: the carpets are thick; the counters are polished; the furniture is heavy with age and importance; and the staff is ever present with mute efficiency. I am lonely here, but before I am allowed to be out among Leo’s friends, I must learn the right words—as well as the right forks.

  Time passes as I learn all I must in order to be what Leo wants. He has already told me that the two most important qualities—beauty and obedience—are well met. He tells me that he’d watched for me, selected me especially, because of my looks. I understand from the way he stares at me so intently that I am expected to be pleased by his words, and because of what he’s stolen, I cannot disobey him. I murmur, “Thank you.”

  “You’ll be perfect, Eden.” He beams at me. “Once you learn, you’ll be the wife I should have, and you’ll never leave me. Everything will be perfect. We’ll be happy, you’ll see.”

  I dip my head meekly as he likes. I have already learned quickly that he is happiest when I show him modesty and obedience. “I will try.”

  “My father never uses this house,” Leo says. “He’s away in Europe all the time. No one will know about you until we’re ready. You can stay here and keep up your lessons when I go back to university, and then in a couple of years we’ll be married. I’ll come to you on every break.”

  I keep my gaze down to hide my fear of such a life. I want passion, true love some day in the distant future with a man who is so overcome with love tha
t he’ll accept me for who and what I am. I want a man who did not trap me, who will not keep me in a cage. There is no happiness inside a cage, no matter how gilded.

  The man in front of me breaks my heart as he stares happily at me. When he grows tired of smiling at me, Leo motions to the table. “Which one would you use for the salad?”

  I select a fork. I know this answer, have learned these useless things because it is his desire that I do so. His desire rules me now.

  “For lobster?” he prompts.

  I stare at the utensils arranged in front of me. Nothing seems right, and this question hadn’t been in the last drill. It is a trick. I look at him, hoping my anger is better hidden than it feels. “The staff will bring that … utensil.”

  Leo nods, and at first, I think that he hasn’t heard the pause in my words or the fury in my mouth. Then he frowns, and I see that even if he doesn’t know what it was, he has heard something. He gives me a tight smile that already I am coming to understand means that I will be punished, and he asks, “Did you practice the phrases in the folder?”

  “Yes, Leo.”

  He watches me for a moment, and then he sighs and tells me, “I don’t think there will be enough time to walk tonight, Eden. You’ll need to practice more. We can try again when I get back from my swim.”

  “Yes, Leo,” I say quietly, careful not to let him see my envy that he still swims in the sea every day while I am trapped on the shore. Even when we walk on the beach, I am not allowed to swim. I am permitted to watch him, but I am not allowed to touch the sea without his hand holding me fast.

  And so the days pass. We practice all the things I am to learn. Leo explains my new life, what I should and—more important—should not do. I learn how to appear as if I belong in his world, how to eat at his table and sit at his side. I dress in the clothes he’s brought for me (because I am not yet allowed to go to stores with him), and I try very hard not to cry as he cuts off all of my hair. The thick twisted locks fall to the floor with soft thumps, and I am left with close-shorn hair.