Love and Other Poisons Read online

  Copyright © 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its author.

  Published by Innsmouth Free Press

  Vancouver, BC Canada

  http://innsmouthfreepress.com

  ISBN paperback 978-1-927990-04-9

  ISBN hardcover 978-1-927990-05-6

  ISBN e-book 978-1-927990-06-3

  Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison.

  The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.

  — Paracelsus

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Variations of Figures Upon the Wall

  Man in Blue Overcoat

  River, Dreaming

  Distant Deeps or Skies

  The Sea, Like Glass Unbroken

  Kissing Frost

  Enchantment

  A Handful of Earth

  Live Sho

  Translucent Skin

  Collect Call

  Shedding Her Own Skin

  To See Pedro Infante

  Kaleidoscope

  Abandon All Flesh

  The River-Hag

  Sublime Artifacts

  A Puddle of Blood

  There are a myriad of poisons in these tales. They taste like desire, dissatisfaction, indifference, and more. Sometimes there is also love — though not always of the romantic variety. And though love may be present, there are not always happy endings.

  Love and Other Poisons collects some, though not all, of my early short fiction. I used to write quite a few short stories and amassed something like 70 stories in less than 12 years. These days, alas, I write mostly novels. Three stories appeared in print for the first time in the 2014 edition of this collection: “Kissing Frost,” “To See Pedro Infante” and “Sublime Artifacts.” The rest of the stories were published in several and sundry places. The closing story titled “A Puddle of Blood” inspired my novel Certain Dark Things.

  Most of the online journals and indie magazines where my work appeared have vanished (Shimmer, for example, which gave me one of my first credits), and some of these tales have become difficult to find, a side-effect of our digital era. But here they are collected for posterity. I hope you enjoy them.

  — Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2020

  The maid slowly buttoned the dress, her hands inching along Rowena’s back. Rowena looked out the sole window in the room — a great sheet of unbroken, tinted Venetian glass — and across the desolate, green fields.

  “What was the Lady Ligeia like?” Rowena asked.

  The maid’s fingers stilled against Rowena’s back.

  “She was a harsh mistress,” the girl said.

  “How so?”

  The girl did not reply.

  After she had finished dressing, Rowena went outside to explore the grounds of the abbey, this bleak jumble of ancient stones her husband called a home. The building was stifling, crammed with odd trinkets, filled with heavy oak furniture, overflowing with tapestries, wall-hangings and the like. It was not the abode for a new bride, but then she did not think Quentin wanted a bride. Not that Rowena had desired a husband, though she bowed to her father’s wishes, but she had hoped for a gentle word, a friendly smile.

  Quentin had no smiles, his lips pressed into a firm line. He reeked; the sweet, pungent stench of opium clung to his clothes. He stared at her across the table, his eyes following the motion of her hands as she ate.

  Married only three days and Rowena already dabbled in misery.

  She walked south of the abbey and reached a square patch of shrubs and beds of thorns. A rose garden, but it was autumn and all the roses were gone. She wondered what it might be like come spring and in her fancy she imagined a woman tending to the flowers. Raven-haired, tall. Ligeia.

  She’d seen a small portrait of her in Quentin’s study. It was a poor portrait, the artist having little skill, though he’d captured the eyes. The eyes were the one element that burned, that truly lived, gazing deeply at the viewer.

  The Lady Ligeia. Her passing had left her husband in gloom.

  Anne left me, too, she thought. They all leave me.

  She found comfort in this thought, that Quentin and her might have something in common after all.

  Rowena paced around the garden, venturing back into the abbey when it began to rain, tiny droplets of water catching in her hair.

  The bridal chamber was decorated with massive tapestries of cloth of gold, spotted with arabesque figures, which produced a curious optical illusion. They seemed to shift and change, an effect probably aided by the current of wind blowing behind the draperies. Shadows danced, one in particular moving slowly, ondulating, and seeming to drift closer and closer to Rowena’s bed.

  Figures upon the walls crept towards her, then retreated. Crept and retreated. Like a tide.

  Rowena turned her head and closed her eyes.

  She awoke late, a scent of almonds catching her by surprise, though it quickly dissipated. Rowena shoved the covers aside and paused before the window, examining the slate-coloured sky.

  It had rained that morning and her shoes sank in the mud as she went round and round the abbey, looking at the aged vines extending up the grey stone walls, sliding past the high Gothic windows. The window upon the left was the one to her husband’s study, where he spent most of his nights in a dream of poppies.

  I and you, she thought.

  There was no I, nor you. It was Quentin and Rowena. No. Quentin. Rowena. Separated, bracketed, at a distance. He in his study. She in her tower.

  Like a princess from a fairy tale with no lover to ask her to throw down her hair.

  A tune, which she used to sing with Anne, returned to her.

  An outlandish knight came from the northlands;

  And he came wooing to me;

  He said he would take me to foreign lands

  And he would marry me

  Rowena walked around the abbey one more time, her right hand brushing against the ivy.

  Rowena missed the piano, most of all. She missed the ivory keys beneath her fingers, the melodies she ripped from the instrument, echoing across the room. Anne, standing by the window, listening to the music.

  Her fingers upon Anne, ripping a different kind of music from the flesh ...

  The piano. The songs. Had she been able to drag the piano into this place ...

  But not the piano. Nor Anne.

  You and I are no more, she thought. Bitter, so bitter, this abandonment.

  She could not phantom why Quentin had married her, why his eyes had paused upon her at a small gathering a few months before. She played the piano — this was her talent, her art — and when the piece was done she noticed him staring her. At her hands. Then his eyes drifted up, towards her face and he regarded her with … curiosity?

  His courtship was brief; his gifts extravagant.

  She wanted little of him, yet her parents insisted. Demanded.

  And Anne was gone, wasn’t she? And this was what she was supposed to do, wasn’t it? To meet a man of stature, to wed, to birth children.

  To be uprooted from home and transplanted — like a rose — into a different bed of earth.

  Rowena dreamt about phantasmagorical shadows dancing around her room. A shadow horse detached from the window’s curtains and neighed, a shadow rider slipping from its back.

  The tapestries shifted and someone leaned down next to Rowena’s ear, mumbling a word.

  A caress upon her brow, the cold imprint of two fingers brushing her cheek.
>
  Shadows upon the walls.

  Rowena’s fingers pressed against the table sometimes, at dinner time, trying to trace phantom notes across its surface.

  The piano, her piano. Left behind in her parents’ home, lid closed. All white and quiet.

  Quentin watched her when they dined, a smirk upon his face. He watched her, his eyes half-lidded.

  Rowena went still under his gaze, her fingers closing and resting on her lap.

  And the he laughed — his laughter like a bark — and she sat still, under the flickering light of the candelabra.

  The window in her bridal chamber could not be opened and all Rowena could do was to stare outside, to press her hands against the glass. To count the stars at night; to count nothing if mist veiled them. Or else, to run down the steps, to seek solace outside the walls of the abbey.

  In dreams she also ran, dashing across a checkered landscape of black and white. The shadows drifted up, uncoiling from the ground, stretching their arms and catching her in a loving embrace.

  Rowena tasted blackness in her mouth; the scent of almonds upon her tongue.

  She’d been abed with a fever for several days, writhing and pulling at the sheets, her body burning like an ember. Quentin walked in at different intervals and watched her with detachment, his eyes showing little concern.

  “This room is full of whispers,” she told him.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, his voice loud and gruff to her ears.

  “I keep hearing noises. And there, in the corner, that tapestry, that shadow.”

  Quentin turned his head and shrugged. He turned to look at her again. His eyes were dull and pitiless. Rowena rubbed a hand against her forehead, sighing and shifting to give her back to him.

  He cared not. He despised her.

  They all did.

  Anne too.

  There is no you.

  Rowena slept.

  The hands fastened each button on her gown one by one, fingertips whispering against her bare skin, sliding up her spine, resting at her nape. A kiss, upon her shoulder blades.

  Rowena whirled around only to find the maid on the other side of the room, busy making her bed.

  The maid glanced at her.

  “Lady? Are you well? Do you still want to go out today?”

  Rowena had been sick for nearly ten days, the fever breaking only two nights before, leaving her weak and disoriented. Going out might be a folly, but she could not remain in that chamber a second longer.

  “I am well,” she said.

  She grabbed a stick and scratched words in the mud, by the dead rose garden. She was thinking of Anne, faithless and long gone, but instead of tracing her name she wrote LIGEIA upon the dirt.

  Rowena looked at the letters for a good long while before she scrawled them away. Then she drew a tracery of flowers upon the dark earth, though the rain would erase her work soon enough.

  It always rained in this place. Always rain and cold, and the gloom of the abbey.

  Thunder crackled.

  Rowena raised her head, staring at the clouds and then, at the abbey. She glimpsed someone standing at a window, looking down at her. She thought it might be her husband, but the thick glass veiled the observer, making the silhouette anything and anyone.

  Rowena stared at the container of incense dangling from the ceiling, its light burning arabesque patterns onto the walls. The light shifted like a snake uncoiling. A snake shedding its skin.

  A kiss upon her brow, so light the lips barely brushed her skin.

  Rowena blinked. Her husband, who was sitting across from her, frowned.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Did you feel that?”

  “Feel what?”

  “I could have sworn ... ”

  Her voice trailed into silence. He grumbled something under his breath. The rain pelted the dull windows of the tower. It sounded like fingers tapping upon the glass.

  Fingers upon keys. Black upon white.

  Rowena stared into the mirror, pressing a hand against her pale neck. A swan’s neck, Anne said. Her golden hair, like the hair of princesses in fairy tales. Anne had made a crown of roses for her, set it upon Rowena’s head.

  But that had been two springs ago.

  There was no you and I. There had never been. Rowena had imagined it.

  A piano, the music. Anne’s hands falling upon her hands. Roses in a vase, upon the piano.

  She was not sure she’d ever have roses. Perhaps roses could not grow in this quiet, dark place. The roses had died and would never bloom again.

  And, as she looked at herself, she wondered what Ligeia might have thought of her, the white swan to the dark one.

  Rowena brushed her hair.

  Outside, it rained. Inside, in another room, her husband lay in an opium haze.

  And here, here in the semi-darkness of her chambers, Rowena sat alone before her mirror counting the strokes of the brush.

  Herself. Alone. I.

  If I must doff off my silken things,

  Pray turn thy back unto me;

  For it is not fitting that such a ruffian

  A naked woman should see.

  Rowena paused, frowning. She had forgotten the rest. It would come back to her later no doubt. Her skirts were speckled with mud, her hair was wet. She’d been out for ... how long, she did not know. Round and round the dead rose garden. Round and round the abbey.

  She climbed the stairs to the tower, undoing the laces of her gown and slipping out of her dirty clothes, leaving a trail of droplets upon the floor.

  She stood before the mirror, naked, but it was not a full-length mirror and it cut her off at her mid-section.

  Halves, she thought.

  Rowena fell upon the bed. She dreamt that a shadow drifted from the walls, drifted under the covers, long, lazy fingers tracing the curve of her breasts and the line of her thighs. The shadow kissed her upon the mouth and it tasted sweet. Like almonds.

  Jet black. The tapestry upon the walls was etched with figures of the blackest black. Jet black. If she closed her eyes, Rowena could see the shapes dancing behind her eyelids. Reversed. White upon black.

  “Did you sleep in the study last night?” she asked, half-rising from the ebony ottoman.

  “Yes,” Quentin said.

  He came in and out of their chamber, slinked back to his study and returned to her. What for, she did not know. What was the point?

  “I thought you might have come in. I heard voices ... and a noise.”

  He shook his head. “You always hear things,” he muttered.

  It was fruitless to speak to him. He thought her excitable and irritating. She’d gleaned as much and more, from the whispers of the servants. From his eyes, which accused her of silent crimes.

  “There is something in this house,” she said and added nothing.

  Nothing more could be added.

  Her hands were so pale. If any roses ever bloomed in the garden, they would be white. Like her skin. Like the ivory keys of a piano, a dash of black upon them. Rowena shifted and glanced at the maid, who was tending to her.

  “I must go for a walk.”

  “My lady, it is raining.”

  “I must go.”

  Rowena, though ill, stood quickly and before the maid could bar her way, she was already down the stairs. Barefoot she dashed outside the abbey, her feet sinking into the muck.

  It was raining very hard and the wind wailed frightfully. But it did not matter. Oh, no.

  She stood by the patch of roses, staring at the thorns. Hands fell upon her shoulders, fingers gentle and soft.

  “Lady, please!” the maid yelled.

  Rowena turned and saw the maid, pitifully trying to shield herself from the rain, standing under the shade of the abbey.

  She chuckled, for there was something amusing about the spectacle.

  The fever was upon Rowena again.

  They bid her change her clothes and put her to bed.

  Quentin wat
ched over her, though he did not really watch — half-dozing, half-gone.

  It did not matter to her. She did not care for him. She never had.

  A gentle hand pressed against her throat. A gentle caress. Like silk.

  I and you. You and I.

  As Rowena lay under the canopy of the great bed and heard the voice whisper, she understood. Us, together. She’d never be alone again.

  She twisted and turned. Ligeia’s lips fell upon her lips, kissing her, embracing her. Like breathing mist and moonlight.

  At last.

  I and you. You and I.

  Forever.

  Something bloomed beneath her skin, blackness traveling inside her veins. She felt it bursting forth, like a rose opening its petals.

  The white ivory key and the ebony key. One nestled upon the other. Never be apart.

  The taste of almonds upon her tongue.

  The taste of you and I, my love.

  Does the devil ride the train? Her mother says the devil comes to town on a black mare, taking care to hide his hoofs from sight and conceal the hellfire in his eyes. But if the devil is unnaturally handsome — and in mother’s dire stories, he is — then the man in the blue overcoat who just stepped off the five o’ clock train from Miraflores fits the bill.

  Eloisa forgets that she is in the station waiting for her cousins. She stands on her tiptoes, no longer scanning the crowd for signs of the boys, instead trying to catch another glimpse of the man.

  And then, there, before she can grasp how, he is suddenly stopping right in front of her and taking off his hat.

  “Good day, miss,” he says.

  He puts his hat on again, leans on a cane and she notices a metal brace running up his left leg. A war injury? Is this some former revolutionary? Or does he have the extremities of a goat, as mother warned her. Mother, who runs a small pension and never lets the boys lodging there speak to her. Mother, who threw a fit when she caught her looking at a movie magazine showing girls with short hair. Bald sluts. Bad girls.