Page 126 of Breaking the Dark

I ask how it worked, the cream. She tells me she doesn’t know. She never knew. John Warshaw was the only one who knew how the creams really worked, and now he was dead.

I ask her about the eighties thing: Why did people under the influence of her creams and unguents became obsessed with the era’s music and movies? Why did I want to watch Pretty in Pink and sing The The songs? What was that all about?

She smiles, a small, secret smile. “That was John,” she says. “He put that in there. He had developed a way of extracting the essence of a human being from their blood, and he used my essence to make the creams and serums that drugged those girls, my super-powers, my mind control, my timelessness, but also, just…me. He loved me so much, you know? He wanted to leave a bit of me in everyone, like a— What do they call it? Like an Easter egg. So he left that in the serums: my passions, my peccadilloes, my preferences.”

I ask her about that meeting, in Harlem, what it was that led her from Portsmouth to New York all those years ago.

“His face. I saw his face, in a music paper. I never even used to buy that paper, but something made me pick it up that day, when I passed a paper shop. I didn’t know how he was going to change my life, I just knew he would. I had this power back then, long since faded, along with all of my other powers, but back then I could read people across oceans, I could access their inner selves, just by seeing a picture of them. When I saw his face, I knew that he would be able to fix me.”

“Fix you?”

“Yes, cure me of my immortality. Give me a normal life. Change my life. Finally.”

And boy did Warshaw change her life. Using his ill-gotten knowledge about blood, gleaned from years of playing with it obsessively, he was able to somehow recalibrate her DNA, excise her immortality, make her, as she calls it, normal. It was what she’d wanted for so long: to live like everyone else, to be rid of the immortality that had, for whatever reason, kept her from bearing children.

“Why was he so obsessed with blood?” I ask.

And as is so often the way with fetishes, with murderous obsessions, it began with the smallest thing. “He was driving with his family down a freeway, the traffic was backed up, cars were slowing down to see what was causing it, there was a road accident; John was about seven years old and he said he looked out the window and he saw a kid, his age, spread out on the tarmac, and all around him was this thick puddle of blood, the sun shone down and turned the black blood to maroon, made it gleam, made it shine, he said it looked like rubies, like something precious and beautiful. He wanted, in that moment, to run his fingers through it to know what it felt like, all that blood, glistening and alive, while the child lay dead in the center of it. He said it struck him as a living entity, a thing with its own life force, its own…personality.”

The results of Warshaw’s work on Ophelia’s blood didn’t happen overnight. It took years and years for Ophelia to see the first signs emerge of aging. A solitary white hair, she tells me, along her part. She plucked it out with awe, and, she says, she cried. She was pregnant not too long after that, and then followed twenty years of relative normality. Well, apart from her husband’s horrible hobby, of course.

“I sometimes wished he’d stop, of course I did. I’m no killer. I love children. I hated it really. But what could I do? I loved him, he’d given me the gift of mortality, which gave me the gift of my son. He’d made me a mother. So I left him to it. All men have their hobbies. This was his.”

No doubt the family could have gotten to the end of their years like this, just another slightly weird family—every street has one—minding their own business. They could have taken their secret with them to their graves.

But then, thirteen years ago, something seismic and uncontrollable happened to the tight-knit trio in the improbable form of a caramel-blond, five-foot-three living nightmare named Polly Devereux.

Ophelia sighs when I mention her name.

“I knew from the very first moment I set eyes on her that she’d been sent by the universe to destroy me. I knew it. And from that moment on I was waiting for her to return. And she did. But what I hadn’t expected”—Ophelia’s eyes loom large from the screen of my laptop—“was that she’d have my son in her grips. When I saw the way he looked at her, I knew I’d lost him. I was middle-aged by then, and with every year that I aged my powers waned accordingly. I tried to control her, but I couldn’t. She was so much younger than me, so much more powerful. And not in the way that I had been powerful. She didn’t have super-powers. She had a more earthly power. Polly Devereux is a psychopath. Pure and simple. And psychopathy is kind of a super-power in many ways. To not care about the effect on other people of your actions. To decide what’s important and use innocent people to achieve your goals at any cost. Bend people to your will. Polly had that crazed blind ambition. I’d never had ambition, not in any of my two hundred years. I was a dreamer all my life. All I ever wanted was love. So I let her in, and I gave her what she wanted, just to keep my son close.”

I was newly pregnant when I met Ophelia in Barton Wallop last year. I was in a bad place; I had a drinking problem, a man problem, an everything problem. But the person growing inside me, my daughter, Danielle, she was already making me try harder to be a better person, and since she came into the world, I try every day to be the sort of mother, the sort of human, I think she deserves.

Ophelia seems to want to be understood, but I tell her I find it hard to empathize with her justification for her actions. She kept three young girls drugged and controlled for over a year just to stay close to her son. She watched as two of those girls were piled into the back of a van and driven off to be buried alive. She turned a blind eye to her husband’s killing and was complicit in bringing about the terrible events of October last year when thousands of young people were put at risk of permanent damage or death. Thousands of other people’s children.

I ask her about this. How, I ask her, does her love for her son give her the right to endanger other people’s children? If motherhood has taught me anything, it is how precious all children are and how precarious and perilous parents’ existences are, each and every day. Your child is your heart taken out of your body. To harm another person’s child is to harm that person ten times over.

She sighs. “What did you give up to become a mother?” she asks.

I want to say I gave up drinking, but I know that’s not what she means.

“I gave up everything,” she says. “Literally, everything. Immortality! Do you know what that feels like? And my other powers. I gave them all up, to be a mother. And I would do anything it took to make it worth the sacrifice. Anything.”

There are so many other questions I want to ask Ophelia, but a prison official tells us our time is up. Still, I shoot in one more, just before the clock ticks down.

“Tell me about Mr. Smith,” I say.

The old woman stares at me. “My cat?”

“Yeah.”

Mr. Smith is Ophelia’s familiar. She has owned him since he was a kitten—back in 1811. Mr. Smith is still alive. The people who rescued Debra Phipps’s dogs rescued him too.

“Someone will adopt him, I assume?” says Ophelia.

“I assume.”

“And they will wonder why he doesn’t die?” She laughs wryly.

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