Page 46 of If Looks Could Kill
Tabitha—Acclimation(Sunday, December 2, 1888)
Life presents you with moments when you wonder if you’re losing your grip on reality. On sanity. When you doubt your senses and wonder if what you’ve feared all along is true—that something is actually desperately wrong with you.
But what can you do? At moments when every instinct tells you to faint or to flee, and when neither is an option, you sit, breathing hard, on your creaky metal bed, in your tenement bedroom, with its drab gray walls, its scratched furniture, and you watch the girl who was your companion, and sometimes your enemy, become something else entirely. You watch the snakes on her head stroke themselves across her cheek like a caress. You watch her lips murmur as she talks to them, to her own hair, to the snakes that are her hair.
You behold what must be impossible. What has to be impossible. What belongs squarely in myths and dreams. You see it, and there it remains.
And in spite of itself, your traitorous pulse calms down somewhat. It must.
Would anyone else see what I am seeing? you wonder.
You think of the cabbie.
Slowly, you become used to the sight before you. The sight of a once-pretty girl now roving about your bedroom, picking up ordinary objects and studying them from odd angles. Scenting them with her nose. Probing them, even, with a brush of her flickering tongue. Murmuring to her snakes and them hissing softly back.
Impossibly, you can grow acclimated to even such sights and sounds as that.
At length, I tried again to engage with her. With it. “Who are you?”
She looked at me strangely. “We told you. We are Pearl. And we are Medusa.”
I gulped. “And who am I?”
“You are Tabitha.” She crinkled her nose, as if I stank. “We don’t like Tabitha.”
Tabitha Woodward, you’re a fool, I told myself even as my eyes burned. A fool to care what a head full of snakes thinks of you. I knew Pearl didn’t like me much. But I thought we’d begun to be, if not friends, at least comrades of a sort. This truth, spoken more directly than even blunt Pearl ever voiced, pierced my heart with humiliated pain.
My Salvation Army companion had turned into a murderous monster, and I was worried about myhurt feelings.
“What do you do every day?” I asked Pearl.
She seemed to struggle to answer this one. She looked around the room as if for help.
“We work,” she finally said.
This seemed promising.
“We work at punishing the men.”
Not so promising.
“The men who hurt women,” she added, sounding more sure of herself.
I’m not saying there aren’t trainloads of men who deserve every formof punishment. Dante’s lowest hells might not be hot enough for them. But one thing I felt fairly sure of was that men did not take kindly to being punished. Certainly not by women.
But there was no reasoning with this creature, any more than one could reason with a cat. If there was any chance of it working, I had to try to bring her back to being Pearl.
“Do you remember the work you did before you became Medusa?” I asked her.
She turned and gazed at me through narrowed eyes. Without warning, she swooped closer until her hideous face was inches from my own, her green and yellow eyes burning red, her corona of serpents lunging at me until I cried out in terror.
“Too many questions,”she hissed.
My vision closed in around me. I fell, helpless, back upon my bed. As darkness closed in, the last thing I could make out was watching Pearl twist the key, open the door, and leave.
Lower East Side, ManhattanWelcome Back, Jack(Sunday, December 2, 1888)
Jack sits in the dining room at his boardinghouse, unable to stomach the pork chop and potato his landlady sets before him. The hideous voyage is over. Terra firma and the familiar cacophony of Manhattan streets welcome him home. But he feels no welcome at all.
