Page 51 of Curse of Immortality
Maeve had never heard of Gleaners until Charles explained the fate that he bestowed upon them with his venom. She was curious to meet Edith, who had been an Earthen before her encounter with him. Maeve struggled to imagine what there was about a Gleaner’s life that made Zosia pity them so much. In her mind, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the fate of Earthens living in hiding or the risk of being executed for witchcraft by humans.
When she left Charles’ office, she was tempted to hurt the butler that had turned her away, but he was surrounded by servants. Deciding it was wisest not to make a scene, Maeve left the house as quietly as she had come.
It was a drastic change to leave the idyllic street that Charles lived on and go to a part of London where no real lady would ever set foot. These streets were narrower without any trees to soften the wood and thatch that made up all the worn-down buildings. Fat rats roamed freely, and the air was heavy and smelled of sewage in this gray and depressing part of London. Maeve took in every detail as she walked down the street, from the man sitting on the sidewalk with holes in his clothes who was coughing his lungs up to the two dirty children running past her and leaving behind a smell of unwashed bodies. Their giggles made Maeve wonder what anyone living in these circumstances could possibly have to laugh about.
The feeling of someone watching her made her look to a window where a ghost of a woman, pale and with sunken cheeks, stood watching her with dead eyes. Maeve was probably the first well-dressed person the woman had seen on her street.
When Charles gave her the address, he had informed her that it was a part of London that even the city watch avoided.
Despite being immortal, Maeve still felt her instincts warn her that this wasn’t a place she wanted to be. Ignoring the curious glances from the few sad souls who stood lurking in the shadows, she walked with purpose although she wasn’t quite sure where to find the address.
Passing an alley, she saw two men with ghoulish faces and hurried along. It didn’t take long before she heard footsteps behind her. The men thought her an easy target and followed her long enough that her sharp sense of smell picked up the putrid stench of ammonia. It made her think that someone had dipped them in piss, and it made her determined to never allow their dirty hands to get anywhere near her. Her high heels clicked against the ground as she picked up her pace, but that only made the sound of the following footsteps louder as the men picked up speed as well. Just before they reached her, she turned around and hissed, “Stop!”
Using enough power to hold them back, she created a strong wind from her palm that surprised the men. Despite how much they leaned into the wind and tried to move forward, they got nowhere. Maeve stood watching the two men dressed in rags struggling to keep their balance on the cobblestone street. She was momentarily amused by the way the skin on their cheeks was pushed back, giving them a weird facial shape.
Maeve’s retracting the wind quickly made them both fall forward. Groaning on the ground, one of them looked up at her and blinked his eyes as if he couldn’t decide what to think.
“I’m looking for the Place of Piles behind Mucker’s Street. Do you know where that is?”
“Oi, what did ye do?” the shortest one, whose sunken cheeks made him look malnourished, asked.
“Answer the question,” Maeve ordered and held up her sleeve to protect her nose from the smell of their unwashed bodies.
“We don’t go there,” the taller man said and had a genuinely scared look in his eyes as he got to his feet. “It’s dangerous.”
“Why?” Maeve demanded and took a step back to create distance from their lingering odor that hung heavily in the air
The tall and skinny man looked old to Maeve with his crooked, rotten teeth and wrinkled face. In reality, he wasn’t yet thirty but had lived a brutal life with sickness and hunger. Avoiding Maeve’s direct gaze he looked away and spat on the ground before answering: “The Place of Piles is a portal to hell is what it is. Everyone knows that.”
Maeve raised her eyebrows and scoffed. “Perhaps hell is where I want to go. Now tell me where to find it.”
“You don’t want to do that, miss,” the shorter man said and scrambled to stand up. “Those that entered have never returned to see the light of day. The creature that lives there… she’s best left alone.”
With irritation dripping from her tone, Maeve repeated her question. “Where is it?”
When neither of the men answered, she slowly closed her hand, and in the process, squeezed their lungs. The dirty men didn’t understand how she was causing them physical pain from a distance, but eager to end the pain the shorter of the friends spoke in a hoarse voice. “Down… there.” He sounded like an old man on his death bed barely finding the strength to speak with lungs deprived of air.
Maeve eased her hold on him and waited for him to catch his breath.
“If you keep going, you can’t miss it. It’s just past the empty barbershop and down the alley to the left,” he explained with fright in his eyes.
When Maeve turned her back on the two men, they hurried to run back to the dark alley they came from. Maeve had shown that she was not to be messed with and they feared her… but not nearly as much as they feared the creature that lived in the Place of Piles.
Maeve carried on walking down the street, this time with only the sound of her heels rather than approaching footsteps trailing behind her. She followed their directions and soon arrived at what looked more like a scrapyard than a house. With the piles of garbage stacked outside, it was hard to see the entrance. Some of the piles went all the way to the top of the house and continued onto the roof. For a moment, Maeve narrowed her eyes, trying to understand what kind of items she was looking at but there were so many objects tangled together from worn-out shoes, pans, and clothes, to pots, wheels, pieces of lumber, and barrels. Lifting her blue dress, she carefully made her way down aisles of garbage, stepping on hard, crunchy things and a few dead rats to get to the front door.
It was impossible to imagine that anything other than rats and insects lived in this house, but Charles had insisted that it was the home of a woman named Edith who was cursed by his venom to live the miserable life of a Gleaner. Maeve didn’t bother to knock but instead opened the old creaky door that seemed as though it would fall from its hinges and turn to dust at any given moment.
Though it should have come as no surprise, Maeve’s eyes still widened a tiny bit in horror when she saw how loads of garbage inside the house were piled up to the ceiling. Everything was dark with only glimpses of light shining through the holes in the roof. The smell of decay and rot made her gag and quickly cover her nose. Moving forward, Maeve took everything in with shock and disbelief. Dead rodents lay spread around in different stages of decomposition and when she turned a corner she stopped and stared. For a second it rattled Maeve to see bones and a skull that looked like it belonged to a human, but she quickly pulled herself together and steadied her nerves. “Hello?” she called out, not sure which narrow pathway to follow in this maze of broken items and insanity.
No reply came, but from within the dark mess the sound of an object falling made Maeve look up and squint her eyes. She saw no movement but walked toward the sound.
“Edith, is that you?” Maeve called out, “Please show yourself so we can talk.”
Again, Maeve received no reply as the house remained quiet with only the horrible smell of death and the heavy energy weighing it down. Walking a little farther into the house, Maeve was suddenly spooked by the noisy sound of several objects falling to the ground as if someone were running and pushing things.
“Edith?” Maeve called and spun in all directions, looking up and down the aisle and to the top of the piles. Her biggest fear was that the whole house would crumple down on top of her, but she ignored her intuition to leave the creepy house and continued searching for the Gleaner. With a sigh, she walked in the direction of the fallen objects that now lay on the floor further down. There was a doll with no arms, a knife with a missing blade, a cutting board with a crack down the middle, and a vase that was shattered into five pieces.
“I mean no harm,” Maeve lied as she peered around every corner searching for Edith. With only the sparse daylight shining through the holes in the damaged roof, the place was poorly lit. Even with Maeve’s sharper eyesight, she moved slowly in certain places, minding her step while disgusting smells made her hold her breath.
