The World of Myth Magazine

There's no one at the door and never ever will be.

There’s not even a door but the suggestion of one. Just a broken archway leading to the semi demolished remains of a palatial monstrosity. A distant British Colonial imperialist’s crumbling memory.

I saw a woman standing upon the balustrade, in a faraway world, in a long lost moody moment.

Why was I seeing these things?

The lady swayed to the gentlest strains of an indecipherable music. Swinging to a long forgotten melody.

There was another I saw. A slender silky haired baby girl with a cherubic face floated by in a brief burst of elapsed sunshine, from one window to the next, each window black screening just as she departed, each successive image appearing more and more faded, till her residual light was spent, diffused utterly upon the bland chocolate walls.

Then, the gaping cracks in the red brick facade glistened, became maws, moist with blood, which flowed and flowed.

Compelled, through irrational terror, I stumbled in through the archway to assist the child, who was floating, flat lining, a crazy Cheshire cat in a fuzzy nightmare.

I wished I had not seen her, this Alice in scary land, but then… I recall admiring her, as an incomparable flower of childhood.

My dearest daughter. The realization came to me, unbidden.

This sudden revelation stunned, propelled me in retrograde motion through time.

Whirling episodic temporal waves in soft blackberry motion spiraled me back.

To the beginning...

I was catapulted through whirling tornado alleyways. Each brick of the house spinning in, then out of time, hurtling through me, piercing my skin and flesh, my bodily existence, flaying, skinning the blinds of my eyes, my heart, my soul.

I was set down on a green manicured lawn, where, at a distance a motorbike was parked, engine idling. A lanky, somehow familiar stranger, tipped his hat slightly as he strolled straight through me...

I lifted up my arms in terror, to protect myself, but he walked away, as my eyes stared at my wrists, shocked. I was not my race, my color, my shape...

Two slender white wrists, fine boned, blue veined... multitude of chunky gold bracelets, one with huge roughly cut, unpolished Palki Indian diamonds, a number of rings on each manicured finger, and by my dainty plimsolled feet, a silken paisley sunshade and a guitar! If this were me, then who was I? How, was this even possible? I was not a British Memsahib, from when India was a British colony, or was...I? Had I been one, long, long ago?

In my mind the echoes of the last song strummed on that guitar, played on, dilating, and contracting with the blood pulsating in my veins.

I couldn’t recall anything, but, through my tear soaked eyes, I saw her, my bright eyed baby Bonnie. My little girl whose name I knew now. I heard the song I had hummed to my child that one last time.

"My bonnie lies over the ocean

My bonnie lies over the sea

Bring back, O bring back,

Bring back my bonnie

To me... "

He walked back towards me like a demented angel. "Will" I screamed involuntarily...Apparently I knew him too! Deputy commissioner of Police William Cole.

"Did you get him to confess?", he rasped hoarsely. His enraged face reminded me of a father whose child has been snatched from him. Forever.

My daughter Bonnie was, again I knew somehow, like his own little girl, and each time he came to visit my husband, Bruce, and me, he brought her a gift.

Always a flowery box of expensive candy which without fail, he handed to me.

"Bonnie darling, your mamma will need to permit me first", he was ever so courteous, called me ma'am at the drop of his respectful hat.

I took the candy unsuspectingly, the first time, till I deftly unwrapped the box and discovered his love note inside...stormily scrawled and storming into my love starved heart. After that for many languorous hush hush months our dangerous dance of passion continued.

The day my husband found out is really inconsequential. It was bound to happen because I had saved those notes, each and every one, inside a compartment in my pastel and beige leather guitar case. Silly sentimental reckless fool.

That fateful day Bruce told me to play him our special love song, I obliged. As I played he gracefully got up and gently brought me my guitar case, showered me with love notes from another man...and left our house forever.

I waited...why? I didn't know.

Too much love had been lost between William and me...

Bruce had become the stranger.

Softly I treaded to her bedroom, as she took her afternoon nap and strummed my guitar, her favorite lullaby... wept into her blanket and kissed her. My baby girl, with her sinful home wrecking lustful mother. One last time.

My girl was stone cold, unresponsive to my guilty touch... in the depths of her own comforter she lay lifeless, blood soaked from throat down to waist under the thick coverings. Her little face blue, her frail life extinguished by twisted hideous perversion of a jealous maniac. A filthy filial desire to protect his blood from my contaminating influence. Suffocated by a madman, her own darling daddy turned death dealer.

A mother's sin visited upon innocent daughter. Poor Bonnie, who had only requested her papa to rock her to sleep. God help him, he must have first held a pillow to her face to suffocate her to senselessness, then slit her tender throat.

Will brought in charges booking Bruce for murder and led him away. That day I knew I had murdered two people and remained a survivor...to remember my guilt. No atonement was possible for child slaying parents. Direct or indirect.

I went to the burial veiled in black. The whispered taunts couldn't taint me. Nothing could! I was bathed in my baby’s blood, baptized in sin.

I noticed nothing but how the skies turned black, ageless, and timeless. Was it only for me?

At midnight I returned to pray to my Bonnie, not to pray for my soul, nor mercy, or forgiveness. I could never lighten this load.

Never, ever, forevermore. This fact I carried till my dying day, entering my grave with it.

I knew now, I had been returned to this, my past life for a reason. To my last day as the mother of my murdered baby and widow of her murderer, in the house where my child had been murdered brutally.

After burying my baby, I had set sail back to England, to a bleak future, in the bosom of my distant motherland.

The interim years were inconsequential, all I remembered of them, was a dead weight of hopelessness. And that, I had died young, a childless lonely woman to the end.

But now! I was here, back again to the last fateful day. Before I left my memories of Bonnie, Bruce, and Will forever on Indian shores and set sail for England. The air was crackling, witches cackling full confessionals of their gruesome deeds.

No that was my laughter!

Now!

Once again Will was standing by his bike asking me more questions. Yet again, with increasing urgency. “So,” He snarled, “What am I to do now that you are going away? Now that you have decided to desert me?”

"Bruce confessed, we hanged him you and I. What else can I do?" I pleaded.

"Give me back our love...I cannot lose that," he beseeched.

"You're my husband's hangman! How can I ever love you again? She died because of our love. "

Once again, he was muttering to himself in a strange fit of irrational passion.

"What else could I have done? People suspected us because you wore your heart on your sleeve you reckless woman."

A short pause then, "I could never have got you to come away with me, so I told Bonnie to show Bruce your guitar case, hoping to force a decision. I was watching in case he harmed you, but the coward ran away! She had to die! If not by his hands, by mine. That was the only way I could charge him with murder and get rid of him! I was afraid he would kill you in a rage. But he didn't. I kept watch, I thought he was coming for me...but all he did was walk away from you."

The words tumbled out in an ever maddening babbling frenzy.

"He thought he had put her to sleep before he accosted you with the love letters. He was giving his child up to you and to me. I knew you might reconcile with him, so I killed the child that linked him to you. Then I brought him in with murder charges.”

Now I was horrified! Will was inexorable! What had prevented me from seeing his demonic nature?

“A saint, Abigail, crucifies real easy, Bruce died inside once he knew his daughter was dead. But her death was by my hands. Not his. Thank you for saving those letters. But for them, I may never have proven Bruce the murderer of his own child, in a fit of jealous rage. Because you were foolish enough to keep them. Yet, you deserted me too. He should have killed you!"

He looked at my appalled face with something unspeakably horrible in his eyes.

"Do you understand?", he raged, "Why you and I had to come back here now? Why we keep coming back? I could not tell you then, I couldn't confess to killing Bonnie, you would have gone insane, or turned me in."

Still, I was silent. Dear lord, just a little bit longer, stay your tongue woman, pleaded something within me. Let the guilty speak...

"I have been bound to come back here since that day", Will went on.

"I have lived it for that lifetime and the next. I was hitched to you again, and again dear Abigail...this is the third lifetime we're together now."

"Bound in guilt,"

he rambled on,

"Thrice the key to kingdom come, Absolution...through confession...Else eternal perdition.”

“Knowing everything, Zara, Lenore, Abigail, do you forgive me.... can you?", he ended in a bloodcurdling wail of despair.

"Or else, What? We must continue our evil partnership, and with full awareness from now on, on my part as well?" My dry reptilian rasp of revulsion sent shivers into both our shriveled hearts.

"If I cannot forgive you, you monster..... How must I live with you, for how many lifetimes?" I shrieked incoherently, "How many more?"

"Till the end of time."

The reply came, gurgling, echoing, and reverberating with demonic glee. Sanity bouncing off walls of hysteria, metal garden full of sterile thorns, hell enveloping us in a smog of relentless full disclosure, full accountability.

This is why! We forget past lies, for each new birth, an English Abigail is forgotten for an Italian Lenore, the merry Italian lass, for Zara the demure Indian girl.

Softly in the background. A guitar starts strumming...what an angelic cooing!

"Mother of all my morns and night.... You come to take my leave....

By your love,

I release the spell you cast

For in your love I'll always live... Eternally in mother's love I believe

Your presence sheds such sweet relief So in peace go mother, and stay in peace..."

The singer was invisible, but her halo draped the horizon...a shimmering aura of tender mercy.

The house of horrors shimmered back into its awful shape of impotent ruination.

The sunlight was gone, but in the darkness I could see Will fading away....like everything else from that day.

How would I face my husband from this lifetime, (Jaswant/Will), when I got back home to him, my past life daughter's killer? Bonnie forgave me. Bonnie who I did not even remember an hour back in my present life as an Indian woman...who waits yet another lifetime for one visit from her mother.

Sweet memories now fossilized in bitterness of re-lived loss.

Remembrances of blood, rush on raven wings to cloud the temporal skies.

Eternal remembrance and rediscovery of loss will be my expiation.

But what of Will?

The answers greet me at my doorstep in a macabre annunciation...

Yes indeed. Third time was the charm.

Jaswant /Mateo / Will was correct.

A small note tucked in to a beige and pastel guitar case, lay on the floor.

I had seen it just an hour ago...in another lifetime.

His eyes were vacant bulging from the path he had taken, of death by asphyxiation.

I read his note before I called the police.

All it said was, "She granted my release...She forgave me."

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