Rosemary

In dreams, He sometimes came back.

There had been herbs and recitations, that first time, to draw Him; now it seemed to Rosemary that He had never gone away, nor would He, the father of her only child. The boy was seven years old, and had never seen his sire beyond illustrations of His likeness, but his mother could never be rid of Him, though she had left behind as best she could the memories and loyal followers of the Devil’s clinging darkness.

Perhaps it was they that sent Him to her, in sleep, the potency of their pagan will easily cantering the miles that Rosemary had put between them, undeterred by time or distance, obeying no natural law that should have stood in the way of their malign. To them, she might as well have remained in New York, in the den they had made of its filth and smoking night.

All they wanted was the child, her Andrew, and if they could not have him, then they would wring her mind with madness until Rosemary returned him in exchange for reprieve. Of this she knew her old friends entirely capable; they had blinded an adversary of Andrew’s stepfather, driven a companion of hers to death by thought alone. Hags and warlocks, they were, these allies of Andrew’s father, and as the months passed it had struck Rosemary that her only lasting means of defence was to take up her own kind of spellwork against them.

It had seemed the inevitable step, when all other protections had failed her.
God had not saved Rosemary, nor the Catholic faith— still, there was enough ritual in that abandoned religion for her to accept a different kind, if only for the sake of her son.

There were books Rosemary had found in obscure shops that suggested worship of the earth and moon over that of the Devil, herbs that she would burn all day and night, and crystals—charged on a windowsill at night—she put under every pillow in the house, a shield against her dreams.

Andrew was too young yet to question her methods, having grown up amongst folk strange enough that he was quite accustomed to fringe religious practices.

He was a strong and beautiful child, sensitive, and thoughtful; the Bramford horrors had scarcely seemed to pass him by, though perhaps Rosemary’s adopted habits had cleansed him of its creepers.

She, however, continued to dream, sometimes of the past, and on the worst nights of new and spectacular terrors that she could not always recall, upon waking.

She did know, however, when He had visited; starting awake, Rosemary would find blood on the bedclothes, and scratches in places that she could not have reached herself. There were times that she avoided sleep altogether, sitting with gritted teeth at the window of the new, anonymous apartment, preferring the sunken exhaustion of having evaded her nightmares to the soiled aftertaste of slumber.

Still, it couldn’t be evaded forever, and so in desperation Rosemary went back to the strange little witch shop she frequented to research the obstruction of dreams, or else how to control them.

Lucid dreaming, they called it: through it, one would know that they were not awake, and could change elements of that sleeping world at whim. This didn’t seem so far removed from the spell-casting that had been the coven’s work: focusing of the mind and intention, repeated mantras, simple enough, in theory, yet daunting to Rosemary, who’d struggled enough in overcoming her learned hatred of magic to even consider making it her weapon, to begin with.

She feared what she would see, if she was successful. She feared what would become of her if she did not.

A week passed, each night drenched in the same psychic disturbance as the one before it. Rosemary recalled little from these dreams but the incisions of claws, sulphurous breath scalding her lips, a jagged whisper at her ear, the consonants all cutting percussion.

She would sit up, grave-cold and weeping, to hear Andrew’s little feet padding down the hallway, his plaintive knock at her bedroom door.

It couldn’t go on. The boy had senses of his own, a gift from his father: sometimes Andrew would answer questions that Rosemary had only thought, and not yet asked aloud, and sometimes he would talk about things that had happened before he was born quite as if he’d seen them for himself.

Soon Andrew would perceive what was happening to his mother, she was certain of it, and his innocence would be lost before he was even halfway a man.

So it was that Rosemary began to practice lucid dreaming at once, or making attempts at it, feeling rather foolish as she muttered to herself, eyes closed, failing time and time again to clutch even a grain of control. It was like having a sheet pulled out rudely from beneath her, held in her attacker’s hands with mocking laughter as He took all the pleasures of sleep.

Still, Rosemary did not relent, driven by the same aggressive love with which she had defended Andrew all his life. Without her well and at his side, he would fall back into the arms of those they’d fled: the elderly heathens and their lust for the world’s end, her estranged husband, Guy, whom—ever the actor—had perhaps never loved her, at least not so dearly as his bestial God.

With them, Andrew would become the destruction that they had groomed him towards, and their would be nothing of Earth then but charred flesh, and ash, and evils even the most torturous dream could not paint in Rosemary’s imaginings.

This could not come to pass.

On a Friday whose very night seemed to sweat in its humidity Rosemary made her preparations to seize hold of her wayward sleep. She lit four candles about her bed posts, stripped naked, and daubed herself in symbols the druids were said to have used to call on deities that were not the Devil.

She threw open her window, placed a crystalline dagger beneath her pillow, and whispered prayers and spells until the words were nonsense syllables to her ears.

Then Rosemary lay upon her bed, her pulse a metronome beat through her form, and said, three times, “I will know that I’m dreaming. I’ve done it before. It will happen again.”

Half an hour passed. Her eyes closed.

She slept.

A dream came, fading in like a cinematic frame. Rosemary was standing on a rickety wooden jetty overlooking a lake, barefoot, and dressed in the merest shift, like those she had worn when she was pregnant with Andrew. The air was moist, and noisy with the whine of mosquitos and cicadas in the grass.

Breathing in, Rosemary noted the smell of wet dirt, Tanis root, and sex, the slick, detergent stink of it, lying fog-like across the water. It seemed to stain her very hair and skin with its reeking weight; she felt acutely nauseous, and remembering the misery of being with child understood, at once, that she was dreaming.

She had done it. She was aware of herself, of the land she in. It was her dream, to do all that she wanted with.

Someone was breathing upon the back of her neck, and as Rosemary half turned to look she felt a claw’s tip trickle down the length of her spine, smarting as it opened the the back of her dress to bleed the skin beneath.

She saw only snatches of unnatural features—curved horns, grinning teeth, flesh that was all leather and hair—before she turned quickly back, not wanting to know what sort of creature had ridden her by night since she had alighted from New York, in pain and pleasures both.

“I don’t want you here,” said Rosemary. “I brought your son into the world. I don’t owe you anything else.”

Her voice was strong, though shaking badly.

Still, the Devil only laughed, a baritone guffaw that made her cry out in indignant horror.

“Why are you laughing at me? How dare you! You have no right to torment me! I’ve done nothing wrong. I don’t have to stay with your people. I have the right to raise Andrew in any way I wish.”

“Adrian,” said the Devil, and though His voice was soft and lush it was drenched with the venom of contempt.

Rosemary closed her fists tightly, staring at the lake ahead of her until waves snapped to and fro across it in the winds of her bitter will.

“That’s not his name,” she snapped. “My son’s name is Andrew, and you can’t change that. It’s who he is. He’s never answered to Adrian, even when those horrible old witches used to call him that. He isn’t like them. He isn’t like you. He’s already chosen who he is, and you can’t take that away from him.”

The creature’s hand touched Rosemary’s shoulder, the heat of it as foul as the September days had been.

“You can,” He said. “Our son will listen to you. You will be the one to mould him into the bringer of apocalypse that he will become.”

Rosemary stepped sharply forward upon the jetty, dangerously close to its creaking edge.

“Never,” she said. “I never will, no matter how many times you come here. So stay away.”

She felt the creature approach from behind, and the moisture in the air became so thick that one might almost drown in it. Sulphur, semen: the stench, repulsed her, and Rosemary understood the threat in it, the implication that this would go on until she broke, either in resolve or into madness.

She thought of the crystal blade under her pillow, and looked into her empty hand, willing the knife to follow her here, to fill her palm with its smooth weight.

“I can make it happen,” she thought. “I can do it. I will.”

The Devil was close behind her again, His forked tongue lapping the sweat condensed between her neck and her shoulderblade. Rosemary squeezed her eyes shut, focused on the cicada song, and the sound of a small boat tethered up nearby bumping against the jetty, and her own breath, short and rough.

She opened and closed her dominant hand three times, and on the final squeeze she felt the cool planes of a knife handle between her fingers.

“Stay away from Andrew,” said Rosemary, as the beast at her back pulled at her dress until the pieces fell away from her like a ship’s sail torn down by a storm. “And stay away from my dreams.”

With a stumbling pivot she slashed at the Devil’s hands, crossing his palms with the knife, and there was shock in his ochre stare as he stumbled back across the dock, his hooves striking holes in the planks.

Without having taken another step Rosemary realised that she was now sitting in the little boat by the jetty, the oars in her fists were the knife had been.

She thought, “If I row away, I’ll wake up.”

The abstraction of it made sense to her, as such things do, in dreams.

As she untied the rope from the jetty and pushed off towards the middle of the lake Rosemary saw that there were a number of naked figures crowded where the Devil had stood, all of them shouting, their words made muffled and incoherent by their speaking all at once. Rosemary recognised faces amongst them: each were residents of the apartment building she’d abandoned in New York, all of which had conspired against her, in their way.

She rowed, and rowed, until she left them behind her, until at last she woke, starting up in bed with her hands gripping the mattress as she had the lengths of the oars.

Andrew was banging on the bedroom door, calling from behind it, his voice high and wavering with fear.

“Mom! Mom, what’s happening? Let me in!”

He was such a good and loving boy, thought Rosemary, as she clambered into a robe and knotted the belt at her waist. He would grow to be like her, loving and strong, if she nurtured him as she had always done. He would be her child, alone.

She opened the door to him, and drew him into her arms, breathing in the boy smell of him that was all warm biscuits and bed.

“It’s alright, Andy,” said Rosemary. “It’s alright. Nothing’s wrong, see? I’m alright.”

She stroked his downy cheek and brushed a crumb of sleep from the corner of his eye.

Andrew looked past her, into the room, turning his head in her soft grip.

“What’s that?” he asked. “Over there— what is that?”

Rosemary glanced over her shoulder, following his gaze.

There was dark blood on the floor, the wall, the windowsill, leading out into the night. The Devil had been here, and she had injured him– she, Rosemary, who was only a mother, and human, besides, who had been nothing to the Devil, once, but a sling for His unborn child.

She trembled in the triumph of wounding such a beast, wanting to smear His blood across her face as hunters did with the gore of a kill.

In the end, Rosemary picked up a towel from the dresser and flung it across the worst of the mess.

“It’s nothing, sweetie,” she said aloud, to Andrew, and went to close the window again. “A bird flew in, and hurt itself. It’s gone away now. Go back to bed. You have school in the morning.”

Andrew looked at Rosemary for a long moment, and in that time his eyes were very strange, adult, and grave, and almost yellow in the low light, as they had been when he was born.

“Okay, Mom,” he said, and as he went away to his own room again Rosemary thought how tall he was getting, now, and how very few years she would have with him before he was a man.