Secret Sins Ch. 15

Witch

We'd gone back to the Mission the night before, each in our own cars, where she quietly suggested that I go to bed, that we'd talk in the morning. I didn't argue.

The next morning, I awoke to the sound of Donna's high heels, their confident, purposeful stride announcing her entrance before I even opened my eyes, before I was even fully awake. They brought with them the emotionally suffocating memories of events at the real Donna Liski's home the night before, and the events from The King's Crown Tavern afterward. I groaned miserably, the absence of alcohol in my system making me so fully aware of the fact that I was now a monster like her.

She was dressed and made up as she had been the night before, making me wonder if she'd even slept. Nevertheless, fixing her with an expression of revulsion, I clamoured to the edge of the bed, threw the covers aside and got my feet to the floor, having to wait out a dizzy spell while sitting there before going any further.

"There was a time," she said in a soft, somewhat hurt tone, "that waking up to me would put a smile on your face."

I didn't reply. While it did hurt me to hurt her, that hurt was miniscule in comparison to the towering reality of what she'd done. Not to mention the fact that I'd completely scrambled the mind of an innocent man for having the intellectual wherewithal to fight my attempt to take over his mind. I could only groan miserably, a cramp beginning in my gut as that image of Roman's terror stricken face came back to me once again. It was as though he was about to beg for help, only to realize that I was another monster. Hopeless, abject terror.

Lurching to my feet, I staggered naked across the hall and into the bathroom where I immediately threw up in the toilet. It wasn't so much the liquor, but simply the way I felt about what I'd become. While recovering, Donna remained in the bedroom, not joining me until I'd staggered to the kitchenette with a towel wrapped around my hips like a short skirt with a slit up the side. I was almost half done an extremely potent screwdriver before she spoke again, her careful tone bringing back to me the strange way she'd treated me the night before, after she'd given me my 'inheritance', as she'd put it.

"You're still upset."

"You murdered a person," I reminded her as explanation for this.

"Yes," she said with a regretful sigh. "I shouldn't have don't that in front of you. It's just that... well, in the excitement of the moment and all... Look, I hope you can see how that was necessary. Please know that I've been around long enough that I know what has to be done in order to stay around, and it's not like it was just me who I was protecting when I did that."

I only shook my head before finishing off the screwdriver with a few large gulps, narrowly avoiding another messy regurgitation.

"Sweetie pie, I couldn't very well have let him go like that. You must see this and, again, I'm sorry you saw it, but I only did what had to be done," she assured.

"Yes," I agreed, one hand up as though to stop any more explanation from her while I opened the fridge with the other. "I understand that."

"Then, what's the problem here?"

"What's the problem?" I repeated, vodka in hand. "Donna, you didn't just kill him, you... exterminated him! You did it like people step on bugs! Then you made Donna believe that she'd done it, and laughed when she started...! Jesus Christ, don't you see what I see?!"

She only looked at the floor, a heavy silence descending between us while I returned to the preparation of another screwdriver. For the first time, I noticed that my hands were shaking, bare nipples hard while a shiver ran down my back.

"I'm sorry," she finally said, still looking at the floor. "I told you, I should have... I just wasn't thinking about your sensitivities, and I'm sorry I've upset you. You know I love you, and I'd never intentionally want to-"

"Yes," I interrupted, "I know you love me, and I understand that you didn't purposefully upset me, but what you're not getting is that... what the fuck are you?!" I demanded, a sneer of disgust on my lips as I beheld her, beauty and all.

"I told you," she tried to reply, "I don't know what-"

"People don't do that, Donna!" I interrupted again. "People have more feelings for others, more basic respect for life than to so casually snuff it out! And look at me! Look at what I did to that poor man at the bar last night! I practically lobotomised him! For God's sake, I'm almost as bad as you, the only real difference being that I actually understand...!"

I couldn't even finish. What I was trying to tell her should have been obvious, was in fact so basic that I found it impossible to explain. However, it wasn't only this that had me so unable to verbalize my feelings. I started crying, not bawling or sobbing, but just crying. I suppose it was for the humanity that I felt I'd lost in exchange for my inheritance, however melodramatic that may sound. I couldn't even finish making my drink. Without a word, Donna stepped close, her perfumed presence an ironic comfort as she began finishing the process for me. When she took my elbow, leading me to the couch, I only went with her, sitting before taking the drink she handed me. As much revulsion as I'd felt concerning what she'd done and the way she'd done it, I didn't shrink from her proximity when she sat beside me, taking the hand I wasn't using to hold my drink to hold in her lap. She allowed a quiet moment to pass before making a genuinely shocking statement.

"I was born in seventeen-sixty-one."

I wasn't even sure I heard her correctly at first. In fact, it took a moment for the words to sink in before I looked up at her with surprise. The expression on her face told me that I'd indeed heard her correctly and that she wasn't kidding. Furthermore, in light of the other incredible things I'd come to find out about her, and an innate surety that she wouldn't lie to me about such things, I believed her. Somewhat distracted from my inner turmoil, I listened as she continued.

"This was in Markham, Ontario, though it wasn't known by that name then. This was a time before it was even called 'Reesorville', when it was called 'Lapointe', named after one of the original French settlers there. He was an asshole. All lost details of history now. Of course, pretty much everything of Lapointe has been lost to history.

"As I've told you, and as I'd been told by my adoptive parents, my birth mother was crazy. Probably schizophrenic, judging from the things that they and others told me about her and from what I now understand of that affliction, but I couldn't say for sure. Anyway, she was gone long before I was old enough to have any memories of her. She lived there in Lapointe with her husband, Armande Roy, until knowledge of the advancing English Army convinced most of the French to flee the settlement, her husband included. Without his wife. That left my mother, a beautiful, crazy, useless person rattling around her little house, often going to the fields where her husband worked to wait for him.

"Obviously, somebody had to take the time to go out there and make sure she was okay, that she was feeding herself and whatnot, so people would take the time to do this and... I do know that my adoptive father wasn't the first person to rape her. Who knows how many men did? I wonder that the women of the settlement even allowed them to go out there, that they didn't see to Marie themselves, but I guess they thought their men were more trustworthy than that. I don't know, nor do I have any idea who my biological father was. Nobody back then did and, since they all said I look exactly like Marie, there was never any resemblance to any men of the settlement to give any obvious hints, so...

"About seven months along, Marie began making wild claims that nobody paid any attention to because, at that point, nobody was listening. She'd previously been ranting about the men who'd raped her and... Well, it was a different time, Tara. These days, such accusations would be all over the media, practically as they left the victim's lips. Women's rights groups would be demanding blood and all the rest but, back then, things were different. There were no women's groups and men had certain de facto rights that were... Well, let's just say that her accusations were shameful and embarrassing, actually in bad taste. People didn't want to hear them, and it was easier to chalk them up to her condition than to actually give them any credit, despite the fact that they all knew them to be truth. As far as they were concerned, her pregnancy was accomplished by her own husband just before he abandoned her. Of course, she didn't start to show until five months after he'd left, but... whatever, right?"

"That's awful," I commented, my revulsion half forgotten in favour of my attention to her history.

"Yes, it is," she agreed. "But times were tough. And when I say that, I don't mean like how we see times as being tough. I'm not talking about rising interest rates tough, 'got laid off' tough, things like that. I'm talking, 'what you accomplish during the summer determines whether or not you and your family will live through the winter' tough. There was no time for people who couldn't hoe their own row, no time for foolishness and absolutely no time for drama from the mouth of a crazy person, be it truth or no. Pioneering was not for the weak, or those who couldn't focus on what was important. Marie Roy was nothing more than an impediment to begin with, and to get caught up in her shit only made things worse. The policy toward her- necessarily- was like this: Armande is the baby's father; we're stuck in doing what decency demands; our crops need rain; we almost have enough wood to keep us from freezing to death this winter; ignore the crazy bitch because her 'truth' doesn't keep us alive."

My expression elicited a shrug from Donna, and she said, "I lived in that settlement too, and I'd be the first to defend their attitude. It's hard for you to understand from your modern and- if you'll please forgive this- lavishly spoiled perspective, but the fact was that some of these little colonies never made it, and some of the ones that did... well, you'd be very surprised at some of the things people might do when they get hungry enough.

"Anyway," she sighed, continuing on from that dark statement, lightly tracing the cuticles of my fingers as she spoke, "aside from her rape accusations, Marie was making some other claims, the kind you might expect from an untreated paranoid schizophrenic. Among these claims was one in particular, a repeated one that the other settlers paid no more mind to than they did her others until... well, until some years after I was born. She was still going out to the fields her husband had worked, though now she was having fantasies about spending the day out there with him, fantasies that she could no longer separate from reality. Then, one day she came back from those fields and claimed that the devil had raped her.

"As I said, nobody paid any attention at the time, but this particular claim became a thing for her. She wouldn't go out to those fields any longer, stopped talking about Armande as though he were still in the settlement and soon started making claims that her baby was possessed by Satan. Still, nobody paid attention, not until she started talking about hurting her unborn baby, that being me. At that point, it was decided that Marie couldn't be left alone and that somebody had to take her in. Somebody would have eventually had to take her in anyway, and that somebody turned out to be a young French couple, Flavien and Adalie Larouche.

"They were of the few French settlers who hadn't run off before the English Army could arrive. They simply didn't have the resources to start all over again somewhere else and, as it turned out, the English never much bothered the French settlers when they eventually made their way through that area anyway.

"Part of the reason it was this particular couple who took her in was because they had no children and, since it was obvious that Marie couldn't possibly raise me herself, they would become my adoptive parents. Anyway, because of Marie's accusations, Adalie was aware of exactly how Flavien had been helping her and, badly wanting a child and well knowing that her husband could very well be the father anyway, Adalie insisted that they take responsibility for me. It was she who caught Marie trying to dig me out of her womb with a hand auger."

"A hand auger?" I asked, brows furrowed.

"Picture a long, wrought iron corkscrew with a wooden T-handle," Seraphine explained. "It was used for boring holes in wood."

"Oh my god!" I gasped, picturing this.

"Yeah, so she had one of those up her cunt, trying to dig me out of her When Adalie saw what was going on. Adalie was somewhat robust, kinda like Margie, but taller, and she clocked Marie hard enough to put her lights out. Then removed the auger. After that, Marie had to be watched round the clock and, the closer she got to term, the more often she had to be restrained for hers and my own good.

"In fact," Donna went on with a raised brow, "that's how I was born. She was tied to the bed screaming prayers, begging for God's forgiveness and such...

"She insisted on naming me. I suppose, after the less than maternal instincts she'd shown towards me up to that point, they allowed it with the thought that it was a positive sign from her. In addition, she was my biological mother and it's reasonable to assume that they wanted to grant her the right to name what she gave birth to in any case. I wish they hadn't, but that's where I got... where I got the name, Seraphine, and why.

"Seraphine," I quietly repeated, looking at her as my tongue felt out the beautiful name that suited her so well.

"Do you know what it means?" she asked, angry colours beginning to spark and dance in her eyes as her tone practiced control.

I shook my head.

"It means, 'serpent'. Yeah, my fuckin' mother named me after a snake. But, not just a snake. No, she named me after the snake, the one in Genesis that tempted Eve with the apple. She named me after Satan. So, naturally, I'd rather you didn't use that name with me."

"But, why would she do that?" I asked.

"Because she knew I was different," she ground, still holding back an obvious hatred of her mother. "And because she was a stupid, crazy little bitch."

After a moment where She visibly reigned herself in, she continued on with, "Marie was removed from the house after I was born, taken in by another of the settlers. This was a wise precaution, but one day she was able to sneak back into the house with a knife and, once again, Adalie saved my life. After that, she was kept in a little pen that the settler who'd agreed to take her had built in his barn. Well, it was a cage. They say she was so far gone that she couldn't be left to wander on her own anymore for fear that she'd sooner or later get to me, and it's not like anyone had time to be constantly babysitting a raving lunatic, which is what my adoptive parents later told me she'd become. And there she stayed until a group of traders came along one day. They were given enough money to take her back east, and that was the end of Marie Roy, at least as far as her involvement with me goes.

"So, I grew up at the Larouche farm and, for some years, everything was fine. I still remember the other settlers commenting on what a beautiful little girl I was, how my eyes were so dazzling and pretty. By the time I was about ten, I started to notice that people would sometimes act strangely different around me. At first they'd be okay, but then we'd start talking or, sometimes, they'd only look at me and then they'd get sort of distracted. At first, they themselves often didn't see that something had changed with them. Even others who were watching often saw nothing odd, no real change in the behaviour of their peers while they dealt with me. Not at first.

"By the time I was in my pre-teens, People were remarking on how similar my appearance was to my mother's. According to them, the only difference was that her hair was blonde where mine was black, and her eyes were blue where mine are hazel. And as for my eyes, I'd figured out that they were responsible for the odd way in which people would sometimes act around me. People tended to get caught up in them, especially when I stared back into theirs. They almost seemed hypnotized and, along about the same time that I figured out that this wasn't normal, I also figured out that it often helped me to get my way with people, especially with Flavien and Adalie.

"Also, I began feeling something else about myself. It's hard to explain, even after all these years, but it was something like how a child's level of consciousness evolves as it goes from newborn to age seven. Something within me was evolving. At night, I'd have these constant dreams of flying without a body, sometimes watching strange scenes on the ground. Often, these scenes were quite violent, like battles or natural disasters where many people were killed. It was of great interest to me and there seemed some point to this interest that I could never remember once I woke up.

"And when I was awake... there was this particular field at the settlement that was no longer worked... I was drawn to it. I eventually asked Flavien about that field, but he only looked at me with this strange expression. He wouldn't say anything about it other than telling me not to go there.

"But the draw of the place persisted. It was as though it was of some historical significance, like it was the sight of some monumental event that divided me from everything I knew. I kept going back there regardless of Flavien's wishes, since I often got my way with him anyway. Eventually, I narrowed my instinctual interest in this field to one spot in it. I would lay down there, eyes closed and doing what amounts to meditating, trying to grasp the spiritual significance this place held for me, but I never could. No matter how many times I went there, no matter how many hours I spent in quiet reception to whatever secret that spot held, I could never reach what constantly seemed just beyond my grasp. I knew it was important, and it almost drove me batty that my perceptions seemed helplessly out of phase with this mysterious knowledge, and I'd become so obsessed with it that I'd withdrawn from my friends and the rest of the small community.

"Meanwhile, my trips out to that field hadn't gone unnoticed, and this, I think, was what began turning the rest of the settlers against me. Of course, I later on found out why, that my biological mother's husband used to own that field and about how Marie used to so often go there to live out her own schizophrenic realities after he'd abandoned her. It was where she'd claimed to have been raped by the devil. I imagine they found it understandably odd that I was attracted to that place, disturbing that I would spend so many hours there, of all places, especially when I should have been helping out at the farm as most children were rightfully doing.

"Unbeknownst to me, my friend's parents had also begun to take note of how I did what I wanted, how Flavien and Adalie seemed to have little or no control over me, and the older I got, growing to even more closely resemble my mother, the more they began to clue in to the fact that people seemed to act different around me. When I wasn't around, I was Seraphine Roy, the odd, beautiful girl born of the crazy lady. When I was in their presence, they tended to helplessly fawn and adore me until I was once more out of their presence, once more merely the pretty daughter of the crazy lady. As I've indicated, my constant return to Armande Roy's fields drew attention as well and, along with the effects they were beginning to notice from my presence, they began to... well, they began to see me as a witch.