Page 30 of Vertigo Peaks

She then danced, nearly overcome with drowsiness and full of blood. Streams of slick, scarlet hands. They fell with a sickening lurch and got up; they came and knotted together like yarn; howling into the thick blanket of woods and snow; finding nothing; falling again; then finding everything.

She too grew fragmentary like a rose bud forgotten among the pages of an old book.

Mircalla pulled her up to her feet, but then the heels of their boots slipped on the blood-soaked snow and they fell, still laughing, on their backs. Suddenly, Valerie thought of her parents whom she’d never met. She was very young when they passed away from another plague, at the age when one’s knees were always peeled and hot, and quick thinking led to breathing obsessions. Did she ever want to see them again; one more sweet kiss from their gray lips, a goodbye to mark the passage of time?

She had always had a hole in her chest, longing for the other things, her heart barely true to itself. She wanted to grow less timid, upright like a sapling. Alas! All she ever did was cry in pain. All she ever was a lady on the hills.

She sat up with a sharp pang in her spine and looked at Mircalla. To return as corporeal, she needed her. She needed to taste blood.

“Hold me—tighter—tighter.”

Mircalla moved a hand down Valerie’s side and nestled her head on her chest, barely breathing. It took a while for her to notice the group’s loud cheer thundering across the woods; the thump of their feet on the frozen ground, the wind cutting out syllables and melodies. Burying her face in Mircalla’s skin, Valerie noted that there was an odd protrusion, hollow like a cavity, on the edge of her collarbones—two blunt punctures. She felt a ripple of nausea boiling in the pit of her stomach and sprang to her feet, staggering toward darkness, recoiling at the sight of the fire and the corpse and the dancing bodies.

“Where are you going?” Mircalla yelled from behind. A few seconds later, she linked her arm and nudged Valerie to lean her weight on her. She obeyed. “Here, darling. Don’t walk fast.”

When her feet could no longer carry her, she flung herself to her knees beside a tree, trying not to look back. Mircalla stroked her spine as she heaved and pulled her hair away from her face when her stomach churned and everything left her body—the foamy blood, patches of skin, and all. The midnight mist, stretching far beyond her eye could see, and the acrid smell of acid and the staleness of dirt left her fatigued.

An owl cooed in the distance, the flap of wings slashing through the clump of bellowing voices, and Valerie slid down on the snow. It was as if her heart reached its shimmering fingers into the crust of her skin, tapping at the ribs until they gave way, and the remaining pulp conjured an oscillating motion that crushed her.

Mircalla whispered, “the pain won’t last forever.” Valerie took a deep breath, the sulfurous fog and wet wood and Mircalla’s bitter breath all mixing in her lungs. The night shifted, swimming in one vibrant hue then another, flat and excessive, and Mircalla kept pulling her hair away, her voice all but soundless.

“Are you happy now?” Valerie asked, not trying to hide the resentment in her voice. She had become what Mircalla wanted her to be—a lover, hunter, an erosion hatching in the center of her world. Bent like a twig on a blanket of fresh snow, she regretted many things. Not her bare love for this huntress, but her surrender and the brief moments of not feeling fear. She should have been very afraid when their legs tangled, or her hands slipped under her clothes, or teeth against teeth, tongue against tongue, breaking her into fragments. She needed a life that wasn’t just needing her.

“What are you talking about?”

She slowly pulled her knees under her and parted her lips. “Why did you turn me into you? Why did you tear all I had and make me in your image? How can I not hold onto you now?”

This was a confession, yet not the version she thought she’d be uttering. It was a plea to be released, for she had traded one curse for the other. If there was a way out, she did not know where. If she had to stay, she demanded to love and not be good occasionally but everything else was too much to bear.

“Why couldn’t you be happy for me? You knew I struggled with my position, that I needed friends to get me through the ebbs and flows of the townspeople’s temperament. Why did you lure me here when it is one of those friends that lay lifeless by the fire?”

“Valerie,” Mircalla gasped, grabbing her wrist, “They never cared to be your friends. I apologize but I will not bring myself to tears for someone who belittled and derided you, then wore a mask of insincerity. And you were a child addicted to candy, ready to be spoiled by all the mint, fruit, greasy flavor they sell at the stores nowadays!”

Mircalla used her eyes in a provocative, conscious way; her pupils were abnormally large and a glassy film about them made for almost a ghoulish figure. As Valerie writhed slowly on her back near another tree, Mircalla followed. Her lips parted over her white teeth, defiant and insulted by her contempt. In a few moments, her face settled back into its peaceful repose, yet the set discomfort did not desert her eyes.

“Are you really resorting to jealousy to ravage my efforts? Their sneering remarks ran deep, it is true but—”

“This is not jealousy,” Mircalla blurted, insolence seeping through her words, and above all, with an air of trepidation. “I’m looking after you. With great love comes a greater responsibility. Isn’t this the point of love? To care and look after? They circle around you because you’re soaring right now! They will flock to your head and fall upon you without mercy the moment you stumble.”

Valerie had come to realize that in looking at Mircalla, she saw only her shudder of vehemence and desperation and the brazen animation in her eyes despite her stiff posture, looking wildly at her face. She approached her with an unwavering sense of defeat, the sinking feeling that was too familiar like when she climbed the stairs to her room as Vertigo Peaks groaned under her feet. Why could not she believe that these women wanted to befriend her and mend their relationship?

“If you will doom me because I love you, then so be it. But I will not tolerate your mistreatments, nor will I stand against your utterly fanciful notions. If you believe you have found your happiness, me tucked in a corner of your house, you sweeping your skirts in the town with women who loathe you, then I am happy for you. But do not ask me to be part of it or watch when it washes you away. I will not be the guest you exchange pleasantries before bed, not anymore. We’ve passed that point.”

“I will not stop you if you don’t believe what I say.”

In the moment that Mircalla turned away, it seemed to Valerie that she, too, turned. She felt herself standing up and going after her into the dark woods, toward the path they trod, into the familiar world of glistening surfaces. A gust of wind brought the snow down on her shoulders, and Valerie was startled to find that she was still on her knees; that the fire had gone out, and that the singing had stopped.

25

Mircalla was gone. Hadit been days or weeks since she disappeared in the woods? The realization of her absence settled upon her slowly, as though it was being awakened from slumber. But once it was before her, tangibly and wide-eyed, it was impossible for Valerie to look away from its translucent body. It followed her with its vacant yet shiny eyes around the house like a listless specter, ever sick and confused by what she was doing, getting heavier with each day. And she, circling around its vicinity, lost sight of herself.

The truth was that Valerie stirred her mind to such fervent inventions because she could no longer defer the blunt pain in her chest anymore. She felt no necessity but to feel; aching with what she wanted to see, to float over Vertigo Peaks’ pointed roof, to be carried away on the edge of it, away from everything. Her initial sense of weak optimism had evaporated and Valerie was left with a primal fear and void, unable to tell if she was fixed or moving because Mircalla was no longer there. A landmark of her progress, which moved her from sacrilege to holiness, and she was gone. She felt exposed, passing by faces and places with no recollection.

Still, she kept hearing the news coming from the town. Her husband was crossing from one room to another all day long, his brow furrowed in concentration; sealing one envelope after the other with words wrinkled, ink barely visible from the smudge of his perspiration on paper, and trying to eradicate these attacks that claimed more bodies with an alarming speed. Amidst all that, Cecilia Harker came to visit her almost every day, telling her in detail her preparations for the ball. She had new velvet curtains sewn and had brought eccentric materials for her servants to clean the crystals of her chandeliers. How fast the world was changing! Such advancements would surely be ridiculed a few years ago while everyone was now competing to get their hands on and keep up with the newest trend, wasn’t that so?

When she asked Mrs. Harker about Lady Catherine’s funeral, the woman’s face turned sour and she fixed her eyes on the handkerchief she held in her hand, on which her late friend’s initials were delicately embroidered. “It’s hard to carry on,” she had said, pressing the cloth to her cheek. “I’ve forgotten how to behave in her absence. It might be hard to believe, but I made sense of the world through her eyes sometimes. A part of me left with her and now I am a little less human.”

She had quickly wiped her eyes, took Valerie’s hand, and said that the ball must be had. “It’s what Catherine would have wanted me to do,” she added in a quivering voice, and although Valerie was not sure, she did not object. The next day, when they went to look at their dresses at the tailor’s shop, Mrs. Harker was holding a handkerchief with her initials in gold on it.

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