Page 85 of If Looks Could Kill
Hot tears sting her eyes. It feels fitting. What kind of future can a snake girl have?
But there are so many things she wants to do. Wanted to do, even up until recently. How clearly, even yesterday, she could see the rosy future she’d painted for herself as the grateful bride of the glorious Percival Laurier. All the dear little dreams she’d envisioned. Meals at home that she would prepare for just the two of them and set out on their wedding plates. Cozy nights by a fireplace. Popcorn and games. Closeness, a sweet and thrilling closeness, a bodily desire for each other based on affection and caring and profound respect. It would be nothing like before. Her love for him, their shared love, would have healed her. She had believed that.
Maybe real life would have disappointed. Perhaps dreams are best left in dreamland.
Pearl sees her future now, if she even has one.
More than once, on the farm, she’d come upon the sight of a snake atwork, gorging on its captive dinner. The frog or lizard, still alive, breathing fast, waited in stricken terror while the snake’s jaws unloosed and its mouth climbed, swallow by deliberate swallow, over the poor beast’s legs, belly, neck, and, last of all, its terrified, fully aware face.
It’s nothing personal. The snake is simply feeding its need.
Stella’s methods, it’s true, work faster.
She is Pearl’s future now.
She will die, or she will live alone, a long life lurking in a forgotten corner of humankind, nursing grievances and spinning webs to entrap and murder men, lying in wait, fed by the sick thrill of violent power. Like Stella. And she will like it. Like Stella.
The house’s windows are dark, as are most on the block. The windows next door are boarded. It seems some work is being done there.
She’s never been out so late alone on the streets of Gotham. She is faintly surprised to learn that vile men with wicked designs aren’t leaping out from behind every fire hydrant like the big bad wolf in a fairy tale, pouncing upon innocent girls. That’s more or less what Mrs. Jessop had constantly assured them would happen if they broke the safety protocols for young women soldiers.
It’s less crowded in this part of town at this hour. The Bowery never sleeps, but here decent people are in bed for the night. Except for Pearl and the mysterious watching man.
She looks back up at the building, directly abutting both its neighbors.
Who are you? she asks the lifeless windows. What do you hide? she asks the drapes.
If this invisible man is her dark fate, so be it. There remains the irksome, mundane problem of how she is to get indoors and find him. Should she try to rent a room? She hasn’t the money for one.
She can think more on this problem in the morning. She should leave before the man at the corner grows too curious for her comfort.
But where can she go? She doubts she can retrace her steps to Miss Stella’s even if she could bear to go back. She could return to her barracks, but she dreads the thought of facing Emma and Carrie. What if her snakes emerge? What if her flatmates ask where she and Tabitha have been all evening? Or want to know where Tabitha is at this moment? What can she possibly tell them? What if more of the pimp woman’s men lie in wait for her outside her building even now?
No. She’ll slip back at some point tomorrow, during the day when no one is there, to retrieve her belongings. Her Salvation Army life is over. Pearl the Hallelujah Lass is dead. She won’t go back there tonight. But she has no friends and no money, and the night is bitter cold.
Is this what drives women into the clutches of the Mother Rosies of the world? Something as ordinary and blameless as having a cold night of no shelter and no cash?
On instinct, she reaches into her coat pocket. As if a miracle might occur and a five-dollar bill might await her there. It does not.
But a small handful of change does. A few pennies and nickels, a pair of dimes.
A block away, the Third Avenue El’s wheels grind against metal as it slows down on its trestle tracks, preparing to stop at the Ninth Street station.
She turns toward the sound of the train and leaves the sleeping city’s malignant nucleus behind her. It tugs at her. Come back. Know me. Thwart me. See my face if you dare.
She presses on, snapping the filaments that grasp at her like spiderwebs.
How can they not all feel it? How can anyone on Tenth Street sleep tonight?
Tabitha—Santy Claus(Sunday, December 2, 1888)
An arm snaked around my throat and yanked me back off the pavement and into an alley.
One second I was shaking Mike’s hand. The next, a man’s body pressed against my back, and something hard between my ribs, as around me, snowflakes spiraled down.
“Don’t move, buddy,” the voice in my ear told Mike. “Or she gets it.”
“Let her go.” Mike’s voice was low, gentle. Nonprovoking. “Don’t hurt her.”
