Death Masks in Her Youth

1.
At the moment of her hysteria Daniel was standing by the buses. He liked to watch the girls at the front of the school, they smoked cigarettes and spat out the ashes. Lips inched closer to burning ends. But Lucy came out the double doors with her mom and started screaming. An entire panorama of school children gravitated to her trauma: she stood there struck and sobbing. He thought one of them had hit her the way she held her face, and looked around for the assailant but saw other girls pointing at the sky. Her mom had her by the neck like chaining a dog, it was to drag her from their laughter. The girls were relentless with the laughter, animal and chemical, till Daniel couldn’t stand it anymore. He tried to see where they had pointed, through diesel emissions to a red flickering star. Hanging in the sky like you would never notice. Reflecting brighter in her puddles toward evening.
Before that day, Lucy had been the awkward girl who’d moved to his neighborhood. She walked the same street as him to school. He knew the purple house where she lived, had found it by sneaking through the woods along the bike path to where he could see down into her yard, a screen door shrouded in bushes. She was thirteen and abnormally tall. Whether haunted by pubescence or such height he always saw her burgeoning in those long sad dresses that matched her hair and eyes. Sometimes at school he’d round a corner to where she was backed against the wall, the other girls teasing her as their boyfriends tugged at her quilted dresses. In those moments Daniel stayed, participated in the choir of freak, and strained his voice like shouting down the devil for a chance to be heard.
It didn’t matter Lucy was prettier than them. What attributes they mocked and distorted into flaws a greater sphere of influence called beautiful. As if a child’s body had purged up this womanhood amalgam worth fearing, laughing at, tempting him to its precipice as into the bushes of her backyard; but after looking into her desperate face that day it mutated into something monstrous. No more could he glance at her sockless ankles, the stubble up her shins when she sat on the steps. Now it was into her eyes.
The day was January 8th. Earlier the sun had shone through the constellation Sagittarius: cosmic death faces in theory had been blinded. From their strawberry lips he could still taste the sour exhalations of their laughter. Lucy and her mom fleeing back into the school, the clang of the double doors. The humorous reenactments. But Daniel was more invested in the red pinprick in the sky. He could not relate to interest in the stars nor fear of them, they blinked no differently than these girls grinding their cigarette butts into his formative years, who twinkled impervious to love or heartache, loneliness or pride, the poet or young man bleeding out on some battlefield. Yet he stepped into Lucy’s human moment beneath that same violent sky. The puddles of her urine warm. The sharp pain of his infatuation for it.

2.
In infancy Lucy’s affliction had been difficult to diagnose. Her mom exasperated by what she told doctors was her child’s irrational fear of the dark. “I carry her to the car and if it’s late out or sometimes she sees the window through her crib when it’s dark and she screams, wailing nonstop, clawing at her eyes.” Other nights, to complicate these perceptions, Mom found baby between the bars perfectly relaxed, eyes focused on all that clouded dark through the glass. Hopeless exhaustion led her to seek out prominent child psychologist Dr. Danvers, who agreed to a consultation. And it was during the initial meeting that the doctor determined a correlation between Lucy’s panic attacks and the cosmos. He reinforced his findings by playing a short educational clip on the monitor, called Let’s Take a Trip to Proxima Centauri, that in its narrated monotone reduced the child to bawling, clinging to its mother for respite.
“It’s rare nowadays but I promise you it’s real. Astrophobia. Fear of celestial bodies and outer space. It was more common decades ago. I treated quite a few of its manifestations, this would’ve been in the 1980s, during the renewed fear of alien abduction…I was the one who connected that hysteria with the Challenger disaster. Cow mutilations stopped almost immediately. Anyway, our country has overdeveloped since then, with massive amounts of light pollution from coast to coast, hell, most people can’t even see the stars anymore. So yes, old school but very real. Though the more pressing question, if you were paying attention, is not the validity of the phobia but the reason for its hooks in your daughter.”
To this, Mom had no answers.
“Phobias are not birth’s accompaniment,” Dr. Danvers wagging a hairy finger as the child burrowed deeper. “These are learned behaviors. Typically the result of trauma. We must dig up the traumatic experience if we are to cure the child.”
So Dr. Danvers agreed to take on Lucy as his case study. Even if it meant driving in from the city to meet her and her mother at an ill-equipped outpatient facility. Even if it entailed rigorous monthly installments of what he called “exposure therapy of intense application.”

3.
Daniel slithered off the bike path between the trees. Her yard was empty.
On a quiet afternoon he was crouched there, daydreaming ways to save her, when the back door tossed open and she stepped out into the yard. He choked himself to keep from giving his position away. She wasn’t wearing shoes. He watched her come down into the dead-swept grasses walking over black patches where the previous owner burned leaves. She stood looking at the sky for a long time. It was a bright towering day, abnormally warm for winter. Her long hair swirled her shoulders like a veil. He didn’t know what he feared more, the girl or the silence, and considering the answer he stood from his hiding place and stepped out onto the bluff.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“To say hi.”
But he didn’t say it and instead came down the declivity into her yard. Up close her face was pale, hints of freckles in patterns. She regarded him with irritated curiosity.
“You wanna walk the bike path with me?” he asked.
She combed her hair from her eyes with long fingers. “Sure, okay.”
Together they climbed onto the path ragged, into the ruts of last year’s bicycles. Daniel was careful to step over the mudded piles where dogs had defecated, and he watched Lucy’s bare feet trace lines in between. She was more invested in how the pines yielded jagged portions of the sky.
“Is it true you’re scared of stars?”
She showed her teeth. “What a riot.”
He didn’t know how to say her crying had haunted him. Silence down the path felt infinite. Eventually she said, “you’re too young to understand.”
“I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“It’s not a secret. This happens every year.”
So many piles of dog shit he avoided without knowing that on these nights rose Aldebaran, burning eye of the animal. Prince of Animality herded its influence along the paths. All marching toward various ends of depravity, masters and their slaves. Neighborhood dogs bayed and shat because they were afraid.
“You wanna be my friend?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you have to learn the answer. I can give you a whole education on it. But it’ll change you in bad ways. It’ll hurt you.”
He said he wanted to know.
“And when you see it you won’t recognize your little life anymore, you’ll piss and shit yourself, you’ll become something else.”
He couldn’t understand this sudden anger the closer her face came to his, how his wide eyes did not yield the way she wanted them to.
“And at the end you’ll die, and it’ll all be for nothing.”
But he wasn’t afraid. Now that her face hung as on the day he saw it through the crook of her mother’s arm: the wounded lamb.
“I still want to know,” he said. Lucy grabbed both his arms near the ball joints, effectively restraining him. She squeezed and tears came out of her eyes.
“Then I’ll show you. It’s gonna be a bad year.”
He wanted to ask permission to walk with her to school, but she turned and ran. Near evening he walked back the path to look for her, traced animal piles smeared into the long footprints of her retreat.

4.
It was after Lucy’s fifth birthday that Dr. Danvers administered the first exposure session. She would remember how the florescent lights off sterile linoleum hurt her eyes. Sitting perfectly upright in that medieval chair, her torso forced by bodice strap, with legs kicking beneath a white table whose vast surface felt immovable. The arm restraints remained unlatched, however, and she sat there scratching her neck while the doctor prepared his stack of laminated images.
“These pictures are going to scare you,” he said. “Don’t look away. Focus on the bad feelings. Tell me each terrible thing you see.”
He slid the first photograph in front of her. Columnar dark. Infrared image of the Funnel Cloud Nebula. She shivered, though he could not tell whether from the image or the binding. Next, the Pleiades Cluster. Dr. Danvers frowned waiting for something to happen. He scribbled his disappointment on the notepad. Flipped the next photo, stars of the constellation Capricorn, whose haphazard arrangement seemed to indicate the scaly curve of a goat fish. The child recognized it immediately. “That’s Prince of Surcease,” she said.
“Beg your pardon?”
She traced the lines with her finger to show him.
“And why do you call it that?”
“It’s the time for rest. After the bad things pass.”
“Okay…” fumbling in his drawer for an ink pen. “Draw it for me.”
He watched her tiny fist with the pen connect the stars into two rising arms.
“Who taught you to see this shape?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you making this up or have you seen it before?”
“I look away most times. But he doesn’t scare me.”
The doctor pulled out a particular photo, his favorite. “What about this one?” No answer. “Do you know it?” pointing at a speck of dust hovering over the horizon. She shook her head. “This is Mars. It’s currently in retrograde. Only time in a three-year span. Symbol of the God of War. Right here next to Virgo. Invigorating, don’t you think? That we can witness something so powerful with the naked eye. A God no less.”
“That’s Prince of Phallic Love,” she said.
“What. Virgo? Show me.”
Lucy drew a new image: the rapture over the maiden.
He jotted on the notepad: bastardization of the zodiac no little girl could invent.
Soon they were only considering images on the ecliptic plane.
“And this?” He showed her Aries.
“Prince of Canon,” she replied. With the pen she traced a spine from which formed the gilded pages of an open book. “When it all starts at the beginning again.”
“Here’s a question, Lucy…are you listening? What’s the point of all this? Why these drawings? What do you hope they accomplish?” His own roots in Freudian manipulations could not reach the depths required, when primitive man sat on his haunches and feared the stars. They made fire on the ends of wood against them, tried in vain to block out the patterns that spelled in a subconscious language their doom. Great competitors rose and fell with the seasons. Influences tore them to shreds. Soon there was no choice but to revere it, to worship them on the way to becoming bones.
Dr. Danvers set out another photograph, of the constellation Sagittarius. In its direction one can see the center of our universe. Lucy glanced at the photo and shrieked, spit in the doctor’s face. He studied her animal surges against the binding. Violent defecation. The pen rolling on the floor.

5.
It was the season to be young: influenced by the Lovers holding hands.
After school Daniel rode his bike around the block and up to the purple house. Horrible sounds inside kept him from waiting out in the open. Lucy and her mother were fighting. Curse words, smashed glass. She found him hiding between the cars.
“I need away from her,” she said.
They went up the road together, the bike between them. She pulled a lighter from a pouch in her dress, familiar territory, but without a cigarette. Instead she held the flame to the skin between her finger and thumb. Nothing hurt anymore, she said. Daniel didn’t believe it yet he watched the blue flame disappear into her cold hand.
“Are you afraid to die?” she asked.
The willows that lined the road ruffled silver-leafed despite no breeze.
“I dunno.”
“What if I told you it didn’t matter because it’s repeating? Every bad thing that happens to you will happen again?”
He cringed not knowing how to answer her.
Lucy told him she would stop the cycles if she could. Earth’s orbit, the tilt of seasons. The cycle of her body. “You’re too scared to talk to me.” She stopped in the road to study the inchoate focus of his eyes. But Daniel couldn’t see beyond bright atmosphere into the heart of the matter, her compound layers of darkness folded as time. For him it was her lips and teeth, the hint of her tongue. A pale face that had become circumpolar to his meager life.
“Lesson one,” she said. “Roll up your sleeve.”
He did as asked, giving her his arm. Hidden muscles twitched at her touch like a shameplant. She leaned in and he could feel the hot breath of her mouth opened wide against his arm. She sunk in then. Tears welled in his eyes but did not spill. Her teeth felt like needles. When she let go, saliva pulled away with her mouth like weblines. He wiped his tears before she could see them. They both hovered over the blooming ache for a long time. A jagged elliptical imprint on his arm. Spittle from her tongue at its center.
“See what I mean?” she said.
Blood began to pool along the rim.
“I do.”
Her incisors went the deepest. Perforation lines were the back molars. Furtive tears made no difference to her influence.
That night, in the safety of his bedroom, he peeled back his sleeve and held the teethmarks up to the nightlight. The spreading bruise was amazing. He rubbed along the molded curve with tense fingers hardening. Over and over the pain erupting until he felt her entire mouth on him. Into its center where her tongue had been. He learned his lesson that Lucy was the universe.

6.
In response to nonsensical findings, Dr. Danvers read his notes aloud.
“Patient refers to her fears as Princes, in emulation of the twelve zodiacal constellations. Forces that have control over the people. And when the sun shines between us and each, its influence becomes null. A horoscope in negative. Do I have this right?”
“Let me out,” Lucy cried.
“Thirteenth constellation cause of the patient’s astrophobia – located behind Sagittarius, calls it Prince of the Faces of Death. Gate to the galactic center. Our inquiry point.”
“I want my mom.”
“Perverse echolalia or cultish incantation?”
Her loud bursts and flailings to free her arms caused him to throw the notebook in sweaty exasperation. “We’ve been through this how many times so listen good. You will answer my questions. Then I will bring in your mom. It’s the only way this works. So I’ll ask again: who taught you to say these things?”
He watched her face clamp, ruddy grunting against the bodice.
He lumbered to retrieve his notepad:
“Patient has difficulty pronouncing specific words, an indication of mimicry – when asked to explain the meaning of “Surcease’ ‘Phallic’ and ‘Avarice’ she could not. Has no knowledge of planets or aspects of our solar system that is taught per grade school curriculum. Deeper fascination with outer space, aspects of the cosmos not typically comprehended by students her age. Again indicates mimicry.”
“I have to pee bad.”
“Observation period – patient chews her tongue hard enough to bleed. Hitting of face, ears, and head. Outbursts of profanity and incontinence.”
“I need out.”
He scribbled at the bottom: consider Lucy initiated into cult activity. Set up meeting with mother, heretofore record all conversations.
“Okay, Lucy,” he said putting away his notes. “I can let you go. But first you must answer one question. Who coached you really? Was it your mom? I need to know because you’re in real danger. You’re the lamb, Lucy. The one that’s always scarified in the end.”
“No.” Her head struggled against her tired neck.
“It’s true. That’s why I’ve gone to these extremes. It’s to save you.”
“No.”
“So it’s for your own good when I say that if you can’t tell me the source of this nonsense, then I think we need to take a little trip, you and me. How does the center of the galaxy sound?”

7.
Night succumbed to Pride: an emblazed Y in whose heart swarmed a cluster of bees.
Daniel’s silhouette against the porch light appeared from out his throne of trees. He came down into her yard carefully, cracking the frostbitten mud, into darker shadows of dead azaleas where he crouched and rubbed his cold hands. She was there in her bedroom window. His vaporous breath gave him away. While waiting for her to come out he watched the stars, familiar stars that seemed to blur in ways his eyes could hint at but never define – instinctively he knew the duality of such stars, that they belonged to binary systems and were actually two stars in perpetual orbit appearing as one. Something Daniel would’ve misinterpreted as belonging to the same system as her, waiting here in the cold occultation of her shadow. Lucy came outside in her mother’s ratty coat. She stood calm, monolithic waiting for him to show himself.
Daniel emerged from behind the bushes and she laughed in his face. “You’re hoping I’m scared, huh? That I’ll freak out or something.”
“What? No. I can hold your hand if you want.”
“I’m not the helpless girl you think I am.”
He held her hand anyway.
“Lesson two,” she said and led him out into the yard.
They faced the southern horizon. She gestured with her hand as she spoke. “If we stayed here forever they’d rise from those houses over there. Lift right up in front of us.” Self-illuminating bodies at first struggled to assert themselves against the draw of porch lights. “Today’s the last day of March. See behind the crescent moon…that’s Prince of the Young. The couple holding hands. But their time is over. Next to them, that’s Pride. And further over, you see that hook coming up?” Daniel craned his neck and saw nothing at first. But pedestrian lights pulled slowly back and it became clear, a finger-like hook developing from its body. He saw shapes within its shape, the fires as she described them.
“That’s Prince of Violent Thought. Its time is just beginning.”
That anyone’s phobia could center on a phenomenon so concomitant with planetary life seemed hopeless, more than bacteria in the body or ultraviolet sun. One can come to grips with catching a cold or being burned. But the implacability of stars remained faceless. Exposing Lucy to her fear was the twelve-year-old’s logical conclusion. Yet the look in her eye now, which he caught the glinting surface of, confused him. Far from that day at school, the cosmic dread he’d caught the full flush of. He stood with Lucy in the dark to save her, but now he didn’t know what he was saving her from.
“I feel you trying to influence me,” she said.
“Who?”
She turned to face him. “You came here to kiss me.”
Daniel shivered, though it was the lesson he’d yearned for. He stood tall so that his face could meet her face, but she shoved him away. Unable to see her scowl he took the push as playful, came back to her smiling, into the warmth of her mother’s coat when she struck him. His ear splashed in pain, the left side of the world went blank. The youth in him still expected the joke, to see her good humor appear from behind the curtain. So he stepped into her again. Then she had his face in her hands and pried his mouth open with long fingers. Said to him that he was a devourer, stretched his jaw until it cracked. He fell to the ground crying, not saying anything, not trying to run away. She came down on top of him and manipulated his mouth some more, calling him names, consumer, devourer, and gagged him with long fingers. His lips split in the cold. Eventually she left. He covered his face until he heard the back door close. The stars crawled ever slowly, seemed to move or were actually moving. He sobbed for a long time at what he saw there.

8.
The doctor secured the bodice, wrists and ankles; he tightened a strap across her forehead. Lucy sat perfectly upright but half asleep, which worried him. He shut off the lights. The glow of the monitor coaxed them into it. He asked her some perfunctory questions, but Lucy wouldn’t answer. Mom in the waiting room said she didn’t have to talk about it.
“Prince of the Faces of Death,” Danvers reminded her. He pressed play.
The images unraveled to a cosmic vacuum of sound. Like a train in reverse. Behind Sagittarius lay the galactic center. Dark nebula faces stretched to fit its contours, eye holes and open mouths, death masks made from scores of the proud, human turned animal, all corruption of life. Danvers peered into these images just as intently as the child. Only now did she ask for help.
“How do we penetrate the dark cloud,” he posed, “to get at the heart of the patient’s fear, a thing that beats twenty-six thousand lightyears away?”
Lucy tried to wiggle her hands free from the straps.
“It’s called infrared. It allows us to see into the dark.”
They entered under gilded arches, prickling lights. To this vapid cold their hot breath lit ahead of them. The doctor leaned in entranced. At its center he saw stars eating other stars. Cannibalism in its heart. Small bodies were gutted, left to bleed out on empty battlefields. No unity in suffering. Each left alone to die.
Lucy couldn’t stand it and cried out to him. “Doctor!”
But she was to call him Master from now on.
Dying shapes of so many colors lit the child’s eyes in fear but tinged the doctor’s a different way. In his widened irises, heavy as the bags beneath the glare, balanced the gamut of creation and destruction. Its influence in negative. The supermassive black hole at the center of the universe. It drags everything into it. Stars pulled from the arms of other stars and devoured. Protostars swaddled newly born, struggling in infancy, only to be torn to shreds. Stardust entrails sprayed back with every bite.
Lucy thrashed against her bindings, arms nailed down. Soaked with urine, defecating through her red dress and white stockings. She tried calling out to higher orders than him but none would save her.
“See, child,” Danvers rising out of his chair, warpaint across his face. “How you draw attention to yourself. It must see you. If the thing you’re so afraid of is real, then it sees you now, pissing and shitting yourself. Understand? The great cosmic cruelty for little girls who keep their secrets…that the insignificance you rail against is the only thing that could’ve saved you.”
Lucy struggled to the detriment of the bodice, was able to tip the chair. Her head cracked off the linoleum and she went silent. Dr. Danvers, his face coming into the glow, paused the video. He stepped over the mess and flicked on the lights. Silence pervaded. He lifted the chair by its apparatus with the child’s head lolling on top. He told her she was going to be all right, the human qualities having returned to his eyes. But her hair matted in the blood to her face indicated otherwise. That the diplomas on his walls one by one would be smashed. That no one was going to save him. He ripped out the pins at her wrists and her ankles, held her head getting blood on his cufflinks. “I can bring you back,” he said. “We go in and come out together. That’s the deal.”
But the child was dead.

9.
Despite his best efforts to remain hidden, Daniel saw Lucy sometimes at school. Now she flowed around the corners between the boys who followed her, their black jackets ready to lay over the mud for her. She looked back at Daniel sometimes, to smile or bare her teeth.
In summer two things happen simultaneously: Corruption, the forgotten Prince, bows to the north and Prince of Disremembering, now called Scorpius, curls itself around the path. The bite on Daniel’s arm became infected. Hot summer nights spent hiding the wound from his family – only in the seclusion of his bedroom would he remove his long sleeves so that the yellowish discharge could breathe, bubble into shapes no longer her tongue or teeth. To cope he tried holding a lighter against the arm, but the flame burned and he cried instinctively. These nights his bedroom window was nothing but stars. What watched him tear old memories to pieces, page after page from his notebooks, drawings of animals or superheroes, the family pictures hanging on the walls, he tore them all down and set them on fire and hid the ashes in a shoebox beneath his bed.
One evening in August he heard the phone ring and thought nothing of it. Mom said it was for him.
“Daniel.” Lucy’s solemn voice on the line. “You remember what tonight is?”
“No.”
“It’s what we’ve been waiting for. Lesson three.”
He hadn’t walked the bike path for months. The woods by dark seized the path till he no longer recognized it. As the trail rose to the contours of the earthmound he saw dark faces rise above the trees, their eyes and mouths wide open. He plunged deeper to where he heard the crackling like his shoes through the brush that had grown in his absence, down her declivity into the heat of the fire. The purple house by this time was consumed. Neighbors in bathrobes and plush slippers gathered on the street to watch. Willows that lined the street behind them whipped in fire’s breath. Daniel crept as close to them as his prickled skin would allow, he watched the house crumble like her body, which he swore he saw in the melted outline of her window. Traumatic words she said to him now he heard. Crumbling like sad wilted dresses and burning hair. Leaving these great furrows of smoke ancient and columnar dug across the sky, that blotted out whatever tempted him, at least for another season.

***

Jay Charles is a writer out of rural Pennsylvania. He won multiple awards for his undergraduate writing at Penn State. Currently, he lives in the Susquehanna Valley where he writes fiction. His stories have appeared in Kalliope, Liquid Imagination, The Chamber, and Medium Chill 7 & 8. You can find him on Twitter @JCharles000.