Sekhmet -Susan Seddon Boulet, 1981

Union: Chapter 1

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. “

“You must dream, Vincent, a sasha dream, a spirit dream,” sightless but seeing eyes beseeched him, warned him. Narcissa, the witch of nowhere, the only being who could consistently catch Vincent off guard, could be exasperating at the best of times, but now...miles to go before I sleep.

His patience for the world Below, for Father’s scolding about his health, the looks of pity from Rebecca and Olivia and the others, for the despair in Lena’s eyes, had become frighteningly short. Even around the children he could be dismissive and out of sorts. He was deteriorating, his snapping at Father tonight the latest expression. He could feel the teeth of fury prepared and quick to bite if he but slipped scarcely closer to the edge. His madness lived, pushing, inching closer, ready to use anger or desperation as its means to run again. Every day the edge sharpened, and minute-by-minute without her his sanity diminished along with hope. Only Catherine, the cause and sole cure, could hope to stave off the chaos that surrounded him.

Narcissa had caught him near the spiral stair. She never ventured to this high a level of the home Tunnels. He was just about to begin to search the night for Catherine; her halting accented words were almost more than his frayed patience could bear. “You would do better searching your past than searching the city to find your woman.”

“Narcissa, I must go. She is Above somewhere...”

“But you will never find her without a guide trooe da darkness,” she warned, and then pulled back with a blind smile, “and I have found you one, my dear boy!” She patted his arm, the way she had when he was small and she had found him a treasure in the depths of the earth.

As insane as it was, after searching for so many months without the slightest clue, without the smallest light in the dark city, he found himself wanting her help, any help. Father and the others were losing hope. Mary, Brooke, Mark...he knew what their looks meant. Father had even given the worst voice…

“Perhaps there is a reason for your inability to sense Catherine, for your loss of connection to her...”

It was only his darkest dreams spoken aloud, the ones he dare not give credence, but Father had allowed them air, and gotten a taste of Vincent’s fear and anger in kind.

Vincent found the beginning of expectancy, a promise in the old woman’s peculiarity. He prayed Narcissa spoke in truth, not madness. “I wanted to give you mine, but de would not do, oh no! De do not understand da up above city, da whites, de do not know your Cat-rine well enough,“ she chuckled,

“Narcissa, please, I do not have the time to...”

“Vincent!” she nearly shouted at him. “You must listen to me! It took me tree full turns of da mother moon, searching, always looking in da hidden places, but I found her.” She smiled again at him, wonder in her voice. “She was like...,” she paused, “...a tiny candle in the dark. She will take you. She will help you. She is so happy to do this.”

Narcissa, still holding his arm, turned him around, back towards home. “Go home, my dear one. You must sleep, and you must dream. You will dream what you fear da most. Et will allow de beast to awaken, and that will frighten even you, but da beast, it will lead you; it bites us, it changes us, but it can be good, my boy. Et is da life giver and taker. Et will do what et must to save what is lost. Listen to your dreams, and you will find da truth and your woman.” She patted his arm, and pushed him towards home.

“Narcissa..., wait, what do you mean,” he called after her as she ambled away down the tunnel, into the dark.

“Dream, Vincent...dream...” Her voice became a whisper in the dark.

Without any sign, any hint as to Catherine’s whereabouts Above, and with Father’s words stabbing, “If the worst has occurred...,” Vincent had no choice but to follow the old mystic’s words back to his chambers.

He returned to a dark chamber and did not attempt to change it. He did not need the light. The light encouraged visitors, and it was the last thing he wanted. His clothes lay where he had dropped them. His space, no longer a source of comfort, just an accommodation to catch an hour’s sleep before the dreams began, a place to wait until the safety of night to search again; less a home, more a tomb.

Of course, sleep was as elusive as his memories. He had paced his chamber trying to recall any detail, however tiny, of his illness, before her disappearance, to try and unearth some clue, however small, as to where she could be, but all his memories of that time lived clouded in the grey haze of loss. He looked about his chamber for an anchor. His things, what had been spared his sickened rages, spoke little of her, and none of his illness. Even before Narcissa’s words, he felt there must be something of that time that might lead him back to Catherine. Yet, his journals of those days contained so much gibberish, scribbled, disjointed scrawl, signifying nothing:

Hunted

Mirrors

She screams

My name...

Yours

The words meant...what...nothing!

So much of his past had been lost, he felt helpless, almost insensible. Would he soon forget her very face?

He lay in his bed, unable to imagine how he would ever fall asleep. He thought of asking Father for a sleeping draught, which he knew would be granted, happily, even with his history of poor drug reactions. Father would be relieved to not have Vincent spend his night searching, but Vincent feared that his dreams would be lost to the medicine. It must have been near the second hour of the morning before he drifted past the random thoughts of pre-sleep into a dream world.

Union: Chapter 2

“Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote.”
― James W Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

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Vincent found himself searching the tunnels, a familiar nightmare, the sepia stone stretched out before him like a prison. Mile after mile he searched, but deep within he screamed, She isn’t here, you fool! Find a way Above! There was no access, no egress, no way up. Just suffocating walls that kept him frantically moving in one direction, but not to where he needed to go! He searched and searched, but found only cold stone.

Skipping to a new internal landscape, in the way of dreams, he found himself in an area of the tunnels both strange and familiar to him. These tunnels were not man-made. The dripping walls and ragged stone spoke of ancient rivers that bore slowly and mercilessly through the rock. Incongruent to these primeval caves were scattered furnishings, all old and all beautiful. Vincent, in his youth, had been apprenticed for a time with Earl, the elderly restorer. Earl had laughingly proclaimed his workshop“the place where antiques were sent to die, but I resurrect them better than a Pentecostal preacher,” so Vincent had been well versed in dating and provenance. He recognized styles, time periods…and these objects were from a chaotic conglomeration. There were George III tea sets, Meissen statuettes, Regency clocks - in fact, myriad clocks, wall, tall, and mantel, telling him the time was rapidly passing him. There was everything a beautiful home could need: Italian cassoné, Flemish tapestries, beautifully carved French wardrobes set on 19th century Kazak rugs, lavish beds, even a cradle, almost black with age but perfectly and lovingly kept. It was new and familiar all at once. Whose riches were these?

As Vincent tentatively stepped through an opening, he saw the chamber opened wider, and there in an alcove he was drawn by a bizarre sight. On a golden-wood, carved desk in the middle of the large area full of columns, framed by an unknown light, sat a young woman, maybe twenty-five, fair - striking even - but almost faded. Her grey dress Vincent guessed was perhaps thirty years older in style - small waisted, and high-belted; it fluttered as she kicked her legs like a young girl might. She would have looked more at home in a family picnic photo than sitting on the heavy carved-leaf and turned-leg antique she posed on; it was anachronistic to say the least. She looked as if she was waiting for someone, and when she saw him she smiled, and her anticipatory tension seemed to ease with what he could only imagine was relief. He drew back reflexively and tried to hide his face.

“Oh, please, don’t worry about that, Vincent. I am so glad you are here.” The young woman smiled and jumped off the desk. She seemed familiar, but his deeper thoughts told him that could be the dream, which in itself surprised him; one usually did not recognize a dream.

“Don’t be afraid, please. We don’t have much time for explanations,” she said in a high New York accent, stressing her “S”s and enunciating with care. She knew him, called him by name, but he could not place her. He did not know this woman. “Don’t be troubled, I’ve come to help you. I know you, and I know why you’re here. You need to find Cathy.”

He moved toward the slight young woman. “Do you know where she is?”

“I do, and so can you.”

“Please, I must know,”he said curtly, his impatience to find Catherine always paramount.

“And I wish I could just tell you, but we have to take care of something first.” She swept her hands over her grey dress, dusting it off, and began walking quickly out of the furnished chambers. “Come on,” she called, leaving him behind, “we have to go, or we won’t find it again.”

Vincent followed, his long stride finally catching her. “Are you who Narcissa spoke of? Who are you?”

“That is such a very good question,” she said slowly, looking into the distance as they walked, searching for something. She barely turned. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

Vincent followed, perplexed. “Well, no, not at all.”

“Thank you,” she said, shoulders sagging, sounding relieved. She stopped, pulled a packet and matches from a pocket in her skirt, and lit a cigarette, taking a long draw, holding then blowing out the smoke. “She never lets me.” The woman smiled after taking another draw and exhaling. “Bad memories, I guess.” She tapped the cigarette with her thumb. “But my fingers,” she wiggled her open hand, “just don’t know what to do with themselves sometimes.” The woman began to walk on. “A woman of my time, I guess.”

“'She…who? Do you mean Catherine?” he asked, trying again to recognize his guide’s face. Who was this woman? Her hair was fair, shoulder length, and curled around her face. She was beautiful in a way that reminded him of Catherine. Her eyes were smaller, but she had a strong jaw and straight shoulders, and her movements, although those of a slightly younger woman, echoed Catherine’s.

The woman sighed. “When she was little, Cathy had this picture of me from at a picnic, in Larchmont or Scarsdale or someplace.” She slowed, her mind back in another era. “I can’t remember now. It was just after I was married, and in her mind that was who I was: young, full of life.” Her eyes were far away, remembering. “I was wearing this dress, although,” she looked down at her skirt, perplexed, “erruugh, I think it was pink then, not grey...” She smiled at the thought, but then said in a more circumspect tone, “Cathy’s father never wanted her to see me too sick, so he kept her mostly away when I was really ill. He had her going to the park climbing trees, or to movies, or out with friends, anything to keep her from the ugliness, anything to keep away the pain. Charles didn’t like pain, he never did - always tried to keep her smiling, but...well… then I was gone. I couldn’t be near her anymore, until now...” The blond woman looked away from him into the darkness of the tunnels as she dropped her cigarette and rubbed it into the tunnel floor.

“Most of Cathy’s memories of me were in pictures. She tried to piece together this person that she didn’t remember much, but what child can live without memories of her mother? If you don’t have them, you try to create them, don’t you, Vincent?” She took his hand and squeezed it. She was warm. He could smell her perfume under the bitter smoke. He could feel her heartbeat. It was impossible if she truly was....

“To her I’m just a song, a family story, a candle in the dark, a flower,” her slender fingers reached out to pick up the hand-made pouch around his neck, “just a memory, and maybe that is all I really am, but real or not, she was so very desperate. She brought me back, Vincent, and I’m here now, for you.” She let go of the keepsake and continued walking, taking him further down into the earth.

The woman that Vincent now believed, as one accepts facts in dreams, was Catherine’s mother went on, “You can’t feel her anymore, I know that, she told me.”

“She speaks to you?” Vincent questioned, greedy for knowledge, envious of contact.

“She does,” she answered, although she still looked ahead, still searching, “in her way. She’s positive she’s going mad. She’s always been open, you know, to the soft edges, the shadows, as much as she’s always denied it, just like you....and now...more so, but that’s beside the point. The old woman, the one who brought me here, assured me that your Bond can return, and it would lead you to her. It has to. You have to find her.” She stopped and looked at him. The girl was gone, and a mother’s eye bore into him, strong and serious.

“Vincent, she isn’t doing well.” She grabbed his hands the way Catherine had when she needed him to understand. “My girl is scared and...” Caroline Chandler, this ghost, a memory made real, choked on her words, “...when she stopped calling for you...when she had to forget...she...started calling for me.”

Caroline, after just a moment, found her strength, controlled her sadness, and went on. ”But I can’t really do anything for her, only try keep her...sane,” she sighed. “She’s all alone with the dead and the demons.” She let go of him in a gesture that spoke of her helplessness. “Maybe she called me back from wherever I’ve been since I died, or perhaps I am just that part of her soul that is‘Mother’. I wouldn’t put it past her. She always did have an extraordinary imagination.” Caroline shook her head with both sadness and pride. “Doesn’t matter, really.”

She glided close to him and brushed the hair from his face in a maternal way. “You’re lacking, Vincent. Your Bond is broken, like a bridge missing its keystone; a piece of you is missing. I took a chance, leaving her, so I could find a way in here to help.” She poked his head. “Time is running out.”

“Come on.” She abruptly pulled his hand without fear or hesitancy, familiar. “There’s something you need to see.”

The dream moved again, the location changing in an instant, and they were at The Cave. The Cave where a patricidal monster had run to forget himself, to forget his lacking, to forget even Catherine. He could hear his howls, and the shame of it was soul-killing.

He saw her, for a split second. He saw Catherine, leaving the father he once thought he had murdered, cautiously walking into the cavern where the monster had fled. Catherine’s shout reverberated off cold stone.

“Vincent!”

“No!” The Vincent next to the ghost woman howled, “Please...”

Caroline Chandler grabbed his vest. Ghost or memory, she was strong and wouldn’t let him go. She grounded him.

“Vincent, look at me!”

He didn’t want to look. He shook his head, trying to throw off this part of his life, this awful aspect of himself.

Caroline, however, would not be deterred or denied. “Vincent! Look at me!” Finally, like a child, he obeyed. “You’ve been patient, tenacious, you’ve searched and searched, trying to find my daughter, to save her, but now it is your courage that she needs most. You must go in there and retrieve the memories of this time with her. It’s the piece of you that’s missing. Once you are whole, you will find her again.”

Please, let me find her. How can I be whole until she is with me?

Caroline continued, unrelenting. “She walked into that cave for love of you, and you will do the same for her. You have to regain who you are, and you have to understand what she gave you.”

He tried to control his fear. Why am I so afraid? His deeper thoughts answered, You don’t know what you will find in that cave, because the Beast is uncontrollable, and the Beast is you.

“Vincent, if you take back these memories, I can’t tell you everything that will happen, but I know you can save her and what she’s been keeping safe from the monster that took her.”

Hope. In so many months, he had forgotten what it felt like.

“I will help you if I can, but, Vincent, if you can’t face what is in that cave, she will be lost to you, to everyone, this I know. Now, you walk into that cave,” her delicate hands shook his sweater, “and find out what kind of man you are. Find out who you are with her.” She let go of his sweater. “All right?”

This was the very essence of faith, and he had faith,...in Catherine. He slowly nodded.

“Good,” Caroline said as she brushed his pullover flat and smiled. “‘Memory is the mother of all wisdom.’”

“Aeschylus,” Vincent answered as he looked into the black.

“Very good,” she chuckled and then smiled at him, and he knew why Charles Chandler had fallen in love with this woman. Her smile was a spark of light in the dark. “Thank you, Vincent. I’m glad you found her. I’m glad she picked you. A smart one, a kind one...finally.” In an instant she became earnest again. “I have to get back to her. She is angry, and she’s afraid.” She looked away as if into another room. “He taunts her. He is a demon, Vincent. Do this, and come quickly.”

“If it takes my very soul, I promise, Caroline, I will be there...”

Vincent walked into the cave.

Union: Chapter 3

"Caught a lite sneeze / Dreamed a little dream / Made my own pretty hate machine."

– “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” Tori Amos

Quiet.

City-dark.

Fear.

Heartbeat.

Fury.

Love.

Awake.

Catherine’s eyes opened to the tan walls and forgettable furnishing that made her cell. It was still dark. Good. Dark would hide him. It would be their refuge.

Hope- A word like a whisper of spring on March’s wind. She felt it, like the ghost of a flavor long forgotten on her tongue, a memory of life.“Round the dark door that prayers nor dreams can ope.”*

It was almost over, the long days of waking to their silence, their contempt, to secrets and to fear. The fear was worst of all, fear that this day would be her last, that Vincent would never know, never know about the baby, never find them...fear that she would never get to say goodbye, the months of white forgetting of self, and it was all ending, soon.

Faith.

She had faith, in him.

“He’s coming,” she whispered, so quietly that anyone would have thought she was only whispering to herself.
___________________

*Hope and Fear by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Union: Chapter 4

The chapter rated R for sexual situations

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I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

"Sonnet XVII" - Pablo Neruda

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Vincent’s vision regressed. He saw Catherine again negotiating the last uneven steps into his self-made cage, his terrible cries reverberating off the cave walls. This time, with Caroline’s words dogging him, he followed her. He desperately wanted to stop her, but was certain his cries were powerless as breeze.

Why would Father allow this? Why would Catherine take such a risk, just because he had not hurt her in the past? Fever and insanity had never taken such a hold of him before either. He watched as she moved slowly into the dank cavern, and then a demon’s shadow hurtled towards her small form.

“No!” the dreaming Vincent screamed as Catherine simultaneously screamed his name. The monster almost struck her down, barely curbing his blow at the last instant. They never told him he had done this! Never revealed how close annihilation had come...if he had struck her....

Father and Catherine had kept this from him. The dreaming Vincent sank to his knees in fear for her. How did she survive this Terror?

In the next moment, as he saw her try to control the uncontrollable with her love, he understood. It was her, her adamant, foolish, and obstinate belief in his humanness. He had almost killed her, but somehow she stopped the Beast with the man’s name.

She was that strong.

His love was scarcely strong enough to stand next to her, but hers...resolute, unwise, unrelenting.

Vincent watched himself collapse to the floor of the chamber as Catherine tried to catch him, as she tried to revive him, a bird trying to flap her wings and make a lion live. He heard the desperation rise in her voice as she called his name, as she found no sign of life in him. This tiny woman was all there was between him and Death. How could she hope to keep it away?

“You can’t! Not without me!” Catherine screamed at him. She would follow him down to the very pit. He truly was her doom.

And then something he wished for...and dreaded.

She was kissing him.

It was more like kissing a corpse it seemed to the dreaming Vincent. He wanted to look away, to stop her; it was almost intolerable, watching her sacrifice to his dying body, but if this was what he must know to be connected to her again, he would endure even this.

What seemed like too long she pressed her lips against his, held his soiled cheek in her hand without any answer from his unmoving body, but slowly, by inches, he began to stir, and then respond. She had revived him like some twisted retelling of Sleeping Beauty, where the princess aroused the Curse.

His past self’s arms encircled her, engulfed her, as he began to return her kisses, at first ardent, then frantic, their movements, more like crashes, rushing to each other’s mouths, harsh, passionate, but, he also noted, nearly silent. They were constantly hiding themselves away, from their friends, their enemies, all the world, but they could no longer hide from one other.

Secrets give strength, she had told him, but some secrets can kill the soul.

The couple on the floor started to move past kisses. He began with removing her coat while his mouth still attacked her. She answered by removing his vest, and pressing flat hands beneath his sweater, rushing her fingers up his chest. What were they doing? Father, Mouse, and the others were right outside! This was such folly, such a foolish risk, but clearly Catherine and he were not aware of anything but one another, caught in the moment that had been too long forbidden by fears and circumstance.

They kissed, held, grasped, caressed any skin they could easily get to. He lifted her sweater above her head while simultaneously pulling her down next to him to lie in the dust. His hands, his claws, were all over her. The anger Vincent felt at his past, bestial self was only matched by his gratitude that even in this barbaric state he did not seem capable of hurting her. His hand ran down the curve of her hip while his other cradled her head, pulling her close, almost trying to consume her. Despite his mortification, the dreaming Vincent could not stop the stir of desire at her half-dressed form, her sweater now just a pillow beneath her head. Clad in only a light camisole, she had no protection against the earth’s chill but him. Catherine’s hands, at first happy just with his stomach and chest, now moved to undo his belt, she every bit his equal in passion. Vincent could not help but be envious of his former self, and angered, deeply, at his failure to remember her, to remember this.

As the dreaming man watched, he reluctantly began to grasp where this would finally, inevitably, lead. They had to claim each other, both needing assurance that they were alive. Clothes were pushed out of the way, shed only if absolutely required, giving way to lips and touches. His former self rolled over her, the Beast with its prey, triumphant. His hands pressed up the slip of silk so his lips could find her breast. She was locked beneath him with need and in silent cries passion.

When just enough clothes were cast off so that in haste and quiet he joined their bodies, she was almost unready for him. Not this! He had forced her! Both his present and former self could feel her shock, the guilt and shame almost unbearable to the dreaming man. The Beast on the floor of the cave stilled inside of her, waiting for her, watching her. She closed her eyes. Of course, the dreaming man despaired, why would she want to look at the monster that forced himself inside her, defiled her? Stricken moments passed. She finally opened her tearing eyes to look into his own, and to the dreaming Vincent's astonishment, it was not contempt or horror he saw in them, but love and acceptance. Her love lay so naked there.

She held his face in her small hands and she kissed him. She kissed him with such love, all assent, all life, were in her lips. She wanted this. She wanted him, alive, with her. She would defy death and draw him into life with her body and soul.

Catherine arched, showing him that she was now more than ready for him. Her hips pressed upward, asking, releasing him to love her, and they slowly began to move again together. He thrust a second time, a third, then faster, within her, with her. He took her as his own.

Vincent watched his former self and his beloved, and began to feel her body beneath him. The warmth of her, surrounding him, drawing him in again and again. He felt the heat of her, the soft and amazing life beneath him, her body, her love all around him. He felt her desire, her aching to be filled by him and only him, hot smooth skin under his hands, lips pressed into his own, into his neck, her teeth biting his shoulder so she wouldn’t cry out with the perfection of this. Instinct was all he had, but it was all they seemed to need.

His memories returned to him while watching his own experience; it was truly surreal.

Vincent held his love so close, there was not even a breath dividing them; they moved as one, breathed as one. He wanted all of her, her spirit. He hardened, lengthened, sought her with each thrust, reaching almost to the entrance of her womb, the beginning of life. Amidst all the death, she brought him life.

They were all, they were together. He had claimed her as part of his own body, as half of his own soul.

This love was so basic, so primal to their being. She crashed around him, drawing him in even tighter to herself, and he released all himself into her accepting body.

Her loving hands rested on each side of his head, stroking his hair. She pulled it to one side, exposing his ear to her lips.

“Yours...,”she whispered, and he knew it was the truth of all things.

Vincent awoke already running towards her.

Click here for Part Two...