The faces in the crowds seemed, whether truly or by fret of mind, to know what she had done. To them, the red girl hurried down the street, winding in between pedestrians, keeping her head down. Making eye contact with people was not something she did at the best of times.
Great clouds rumbled overhead, smoke stacks towering above, chugging out their waste. It was late afternoon when Maris reached home, the warm lights humming out from the windows. She did not want to enter, despite the yearn for comfort. She couldn't bare to face Clyde or Wilhelm, try to hide what happened, or have it bleed out of her in confession. She closed her eyes, and for a brief moment, she felt something. Once more. The sudden shift of wind lifted her eyes open, and she was faced with the bland off-white walls of her bedroom, covered in large maps and artworks of a mysterious kind.
Her eyes were wide as she turned and looked at her expression in the mirror. Terror on her face, Maris turned around, looked at her hands, looked at the wooden floorboards, the flaking ceiling, back to the mirror, her face. Her hair. Things she had heard that day, and many before, flashed in and out of her mind. She fought to remember. "What is happening to me?" She thought in anticipation. "Who am I?"
A very traumatised, exhausted, and unprocessed mess she was, she laid down in her bed and just tried her best to sleep instead of cry.
On her floor, her bag laid guilt ridden, the blood on her skirt drying to a deep brown.
***
Maris slept soundly. A lavender and sage quilt was draped across her bed, flattened neatly underneath her, untouched, the way it was when she made it the last morning.
The light slowly crept in through the curtains as night interlaced with dawn. Shadows of hanging flowers lingered from the windows, and reflections of glistering stones came alive when hit with the sunrays. She had quite the collection, Clyde brought her home a new crystal whenever there was one dazzling enough to wow her.
Inside the deepest parts of her brain, Maris began to dream. She dreamt of people flowing mindlessly forward. In other moments, she was entirely alone, in a void of sorts. Not a blank slate of white, but the impossibly deep black of space, only there were no stars. There was no floating matter, no light emitted from anywhere. At first, she couldn't see her body when she looked down. Her eyes felt they were open, but she had none. She was one with the nothing. Then she had hands, horribly bloody and bruised hands. The pain came as sudden as the sight of them.
"Maris!"
The only thing to wipe her hand on was on the other hand. Maris watched from non existent eyes with horror as the murderous hands became entirely encapsulated in what looked like black paint. Almost blending in with the void, but not quite.
In the corner of her peripheral vision, Wilhelm appeared, and boomed; "Maris! What have you done?"
She was pulled rapidly from her sleep. Wilhelm had her grabbed by the shoulder, his expression looked like he had just been in a nightmare. She felt cold sweat gathered on her forehead, and her entire body coated thickly in it.
"Maris, you had me in a whirl." He said with full seriousness, a kind that made her feel unsettled. She never had reason to be in trouble with Wilhelm, but when it came to it, he really was a wearisome man to have upset with you. "I never thought to look in 'ere for you! I knew you'd come home, or some fin was the matter..." He softened a little, and then gave her an uncomfortably tight squeeze. His chest was rising and falling fast, gradually returning to a relaxed pace. He held her for a moment, mighty glad his endless imagined possibilities hadn't come to fruition. "Just glad you're a'right, poppet." Her hair received a gentle pat. His enormous hands fit her whole head.
She watched as his gaze turned to the floor, her crime scene of a skirt had been pulled out of the satchel. Their eyes met again, and she knew Wilhelm could see straight through any front she could try to put up. Her guilt was so loud and so blinding it was declaring itself liable, to anyone who looked at her.
"They tried to hurt me," Maris barely managed to choke it out without falling apart. "They chased me... I-..."
"WHO chased you!?" Wilhem quickly got awfully loud when he felt necessary, his voice heavy and hollowing.
"I-.. I-.. I don't—.."
"What d'they look like, Maris? Christ!! D'they tell you anything?!"
He saw tears swell up in her eyes and calmed his voice. "I'm sorry... pop. You're safe now, hear? Oh for heaven's sake, I am glad you're safe. I got'ye.. I got'ye...," he was stroking her hair once more, she let out sobs into his chest. "I'll never let you go by yer'self again. I told you, your... your'air. This 'air of yours is too bright... I told you to—"
"What is really wrong with my hair, pap?" Maris said plainly, but with the cadence of someone who had asked the question too many times to count.
"Maris..." he looked at her, and searched for the next thing to say in her eyes. "I don't know who ye'came from—"
"You say that like it's not something I know." Fury raised within her. "You say that like it is not something I carry with me everywhere I go. Every day of my life. WHO could I possibly have come from? Who could have possibly set me up to be this way? To live like this? You don't care for me? You have never even tried—"
"DO NOT say such a thing, Maris! I care for you more than WHALES CARE FOR WATER! I will not 'ave those words leavin' ye'mouth! You are the way ye'are and there's notch you can do abou' it! You are 'ere! You are a bloomin' MIRACLE! Who knows what could'a been waiting you in the other realms of possibility. You are well kept, taken care of, I'd like to say so myself!" he blurted and ranted on.
There was a silence. Wilhelm held her chin and lowered himself down to her. "Maris... I need to know if that is your blood on that there skirt."
The painfully long abyss of anticipating and staring was broken, as her mournful voice cried out; "I killed him, god. I hit him again and again. I was so afraid, Wilhelm. How can I live with this? I am going insane... what am I supposed to do? What do I do? What can I—"
"Stop. Maris stop."
A grim silence filled the room like a tank is filled with water.
Wilhelm sat with his head hung low. There wasn't any kind of expression on his face. His wrinkled eyes hung out from above his full, grey beard. He looked worn in a way Maris hadn't yet had to face in her age. Wilhelm's face had always adorned a warm smile, eyes squinted, teeth baring and eager to let out a poor joke. A sense of dread came over Maris. This was it. This was when he had finally decided to give her up, after all the trouble she had caused him. She was suffocated by her worst fears, she couldn't possibly lose Wilhelm, or Clyde. They were so dear to her; she had no one else at all.
"Please Wilhelm. Please... I am sorry... please!" She began to cry like a child, a child who's being abandoned by the only people she had ever known to love her. "Please... I don't know how it happened. I am not a killer. Please..." she wailed and her words were hard to make out, her eyes puffy and red.
"Shhhhhhh..." he brought her into him once more, rubbing her head.
"Please..."
"Maris. I 'ave to tell Clyde." Her heart was shattering like wine glasses hit with a bat.
"PLEASE!! Please, I can't live without you!"
"Shhhhhhhhhhhhh..." More sped up head rubbing. "Nobody s'going anywhere... pop. I know you're not a killer. They... were killers, .... you..." his voice was wavering, and Maris couldn't tell if he even believed what he was saying.
Their eyes were locked onto one another. They exchanged looks of loss and uncertainty. Maris wished she could say something, prove to him that there weren't sinister forces inside her. That she herself wasn't something sinister. But she was plagued with doubt.
Suddenly an intense hunger built up in her core, and she realised she had eaten no supper. Her stomach groaned loud enough for them both to hear it.
.... "How's about we get ye'some breakfast, eh?"
Confusion was wrinkled into Maris's eyebrows. The thought of moving on from the heavy confession made her feel at great ease, but she knew it would come up again, with Clyde, with herself everyday onwards, guilt haunting her always.
"Yes, please."
***
The weight of what happened hung heavy in the kitchen. Things were different, Wilhelm wasn't whistling whilst he mixed. Maris wasn't playing with Clyde and his creations. Clyde was nowhere to be seen, and the room was bleak, and lifeless.
"Where's Clyde?"
"He's in the mines. He has been since you'left yesterday. I was in a right tizzy, I was, you both bein' gone when I got home. I had someone send him a note, sayin' you 'adn't been back. Who knows if he got it. And who knows what they got him doin' down there."
"You didn't tell me he was gone? Send another! I'll go down there if I have to!" She stood up and hand her hands flat on the table.
"Oh quiet down, you." He tossed bacon and mushrooms in a pan. "You want blueberries in 'ere?" He pointed at the large bowl of pancake batter on the counter. Maris nodded and sat back down. "Of course I'll be sending another letter! Ain't the first time this has 'appened, Maris. I will be payin' a visit to the mining quarters, I will." He grabbed handfuls of blueberries from a little basket.
"Let me come with you. Please."
"Maris? 'ave you learnt nofin." He stopped what he was doing and looked at her, "You will not be goin' anywhere, you hear me? You almost DIED! I'm sure your memory is not so bad as to forget that!"
"I will never forget it."
He placed the meal down in front of her, and the smells lured her out of anything she was thinking about. She immediately had a fork and knife in hand and was cutting and shoving toasted sourdough and mushrooms and fried egg into her mouth. Wilhelm's sourdough was handmade, not tough and chewy like some, but fluffy on the inside and perfectly crunchy on the outside. It had thyme and rosemary baked into it from his herb collection.
"Slow down, you'll choke yourself!" He said. Maris stopped her fork in midair, mouth open, before much slower, continuing her breakfast. "You can come with me." Her eyes widened.
"IF. You learn some things first." Maris allowed him the space to continue. "I have never been able to tell you this, I suspect something greater than me'self was keepin' me from doin' it. My own fears too, for what it might mean for you. The strong red that exists in your hair only is found among witches. They hunted you yesterday 'cos there ain't no blood as magic as the blood of a red witch. Time has come where ye'wish to be out in this world. Where yer open to everything, or more so, everything is open to you. I tried to keep ye'safe. You 'ave something powerful, and dangerous. I never knew it would'a happened so fast. You have done somefin' that has... changed things."
"What— what are you saying?" Processing this newfound information just yet was out of the question.
..... "When you were left 'ere, as a bub, there was something I showed no one."
"WHAT?! You KEPT SOMETHING FROM ME?"
"Maris please. It ain't somethin' I could ever show a child! I didn't even know what the damn it was sayin'! You 'ave to understand me." Wilhelm went to the corner of the kitchen and opened up a hidden cupboard behind the larder, pulled out a square piece of fabric and a note. He held them out to her. Maris took them eagerly. Embroidered on the fabric were the words,
~ Await the day Marisande is let out ~
surrounded by out-of-place and eerie, quaint flowers. The note on one side just said her first name, then on the other side it said,
Only with the bloodshed of another will the veil be lifted
"What the fuck does that even mean?"
"LANGUAGE ! .... I didn't 'ave the slightest clue. But now, I think you've gone and shed the blood of another." His voice had a weird, dark, comedic tone. "Now there ain't much way to keep the truth from you, about who you are. Witches are hunted, it usually ain't long before someone gets killed tryin' to go after 'em, if they don't succeed. I've taught you to be careful. Don't say I 'aven't warned you, Maris! You know this city is as evil as death."
"Haven't warned me? Wilhelm, you kept this from me my entire life? You expect me to get over that?!"
"No. I don't. I knew that'd be the case when you found out. If I told Clyde.... that son of a.. I had to keep you."
"Does Clyde... not want me?"
"No! No Maris. Clyde could never live without you, as could I. You were jus' a bub. We didn't know how to take care of a wee babe? Anyways, that's neither 'ere nor there." He sighed and rubbed his forehead, "Maris, me and Clyde know our fair share of magic."
"You do..?" She felt ridiculous that this was all she could come up with to say in response.
"What, you think dancin' metal beetles and acrobatic squirrels made of tin are perfectly normal parts of day-to-day life?"
"He uses... magic.. to create them?" She said, grounding the fact properly within her mind.
"It's not blacksmith work he's doin'! Not throwing a bunch of scrap at the wall and hopin' something comes to life."
"What is it you do, then?"
"Well..." He looked upwards, as if searching for the correct explanation, "It's me who does blacksmith work."
"I know you do blacksmith work."
"My work is no ordinary set o' blades and pickaxes and hammers, Miss Maris." Wilhelm stopped and thought about whether this was truly the right time for all of this. He had lived comfortably under the unspoken agreement that they would keep these parts of themselves hidden from Maris. A child doesn't suddenly become old enough to be ready for the reality of their existence. It just happens before you have the chance to find a way to explain it. "People pay me to make their tools do the things they want. Unbreakable swords, shovels that dig twice as fast, axes and picks too, curse-proof shields.."
"A curse proof shield? How would that work?" Curiosity was the forefront of every teenage girl.
"No matter! Maris I am telling you this because in order for'ye to go anywhere again, I need t'start using magic on you."
"On me? What kind of magic?" Maris had simply had enough, and was already wishing she could return back to what she had known the previous morning. Being let in on this much information so fast made her feel nauseous, she didn't feel ready. She knew Wilhelm wasn't telling her because he did feel ready. She wanted him to stop but there was no way of stopping it. The floodgates had opened and she could never go back.
"I can change the colour of your hair, temporar'ly o'course, an' as long as you stay with me, you'll be a'right."
"Oh..." Maris looked down at her hair, and held it protectively in her hands. "Okay." She felt the familiar feeling of wishing to be something other than what she was. Wishing she could keep her hair's burning scarlet red without getting hunted and murdered and used for god knows what because of it.
"Thatta girl." He hugged her once more. She was too deep in thought to process it. Her hands loosely reached around his big waist. "I am so sorry you 'ave to do this, Maris." His words seemed to encompass many things.
"Thank you.. for keeping me."
He squeezed her hard and tried to keep his tears back. "No need'a thank me, pop."