Magdala

From the steps of the railway station she descended from the rain, a woman like quartz, like dusk, and amber. She walked as if without true weight. Her hair, though soaked, floated about as if it, too, were water.

Her eyes—so dark—looked through me. They were the holes of stigmata within her face, black and red, then only black again as though they drew into themselves the night, as stars that die do all around them.

I stood against a wall, forgetting in an instant what I’d meant to do, or where to go. My breath was knocked from me like snow from a sill, and yet I did not notice this, felt nothing of the pushing crowd against me as I looked upon the woman on the stairs.

She wore a long dress of some black and violet stuff, taut against the narrow pears of breasts, and loose it was, waist downwards, the fabric undulating like the pulse of some cruel sea. Along her wrists ran bangles, golden in the silver rain, and though her boots had leather heels their fall upon the iron steps was soundless.

I stared like a man, and fell in love as men do all and every beautiful thing.

Had she returned that look I would have gone away, taken the train home with the memory of her smoothed in me like glass by a wave. As it was her very apathy itself enchanted me, and as she went off into the street I followed.

I could have done nothing else. I was leashed.

Her hair was the hanging fronds of a willow, a dangling, thirsting tree. It gyred and snapped at my wan face, though I stood far behind her.

I felt its tips latch on my skin; they bit like many teeth.

Over her shoulder, the woman said, “You want me. And you should not.”

Her voice— I breathed it in like myrrh, some scent, a spice—and knew that in some way she’d called me after her, a dog whistled out through the rain. And like a dog I went with her upon a chain of will.

The streets convulsed with thrusting bodies bent against the weather like the cenobites of some obscure religion. Where I was nudged and jostled by their mass the woman passed with ease, the pedestrians on either side seeming to flinch from her through instinct, being that no word or glance I saw exchanged between them.

She was a phantasm in the sodden night they did not see but sensed amongst them, a foreign entity, not human, which I had glimpsed at once. Such things I’ve sensed all of my life, the dead souls of the city and the speech of tarot cards as tangible as my own flesh to me.

And so I did not fear this woman, only ached to interpret which of all the creatures in that place she was.

Her body from behind was asp-like, thin of waist and hip, so slim my hands—not large—might well have touched had they entrapped them, and yet she was not weak. Not that. There was strength in the colour of her movement.

Arrogance and enigma, this woman, wilderness and storm; I saw it as she wound through groaning traffic down to the underpass beneath.

Saw it in the cool arch of her jaw as she looked this way and that, and from the sway of her slenderness, so certain before me.

At the lip of the tunnel she paused, her face with its mad and wonderful eyes at last upon me. She did not speak, but when again she went on into the alien fluorescence of the underpass I ran at her heels with the sudden fear that I would lose her to the mouth of the road.

Again the woman turned and stepped in close against me, driving me back against the tunnel wall without touch, only the pressure of that sense with which she’d drawn me there. She smelled of incense, and alcohol, and sex, the wet, mild musk of forests, thistle, thunder.

Electric, she was, and yet so quiet as she looked into my face that she seemed less a woman and more some hunting animal, intelligent, yet bound from the tool of speech.

I heard the rain, and my savage breaths, the crackle of her shifting hair, my heart like a pearl in my ear.

She had brought me there for some purpose, I knew: to fuck, to slaughter, to rob of what petty cash I had, and to leave bruised in the filth of standing water at our feet. Still I remained, and she laughed at me with amazement and a bitterness I did not understand.

“You’d let me do anything to you,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

There was violence in her, danger in her, but I had known that always, had put my hands out to it as though to the heat of some wayward flame. I wanted her hands, her lips upon my flesh, even should they be the end of me.

She came forth, then, came on and put her arms about my neck so we were brow to brow. Her eyes were the underworlds of past. I read in them a loneliness, the seeking of a servant, lover, pet.

I read in them the pains of her life, a woman of rain and writhing cloth changed long ago from a girl to something else by a partner that had left her cooling in the sheets of their warm bed.

If she could love again she did not know it, or so I imagined from those strange and suffering eyes.

“What’s your name?” I asked, and she said, “Magdala. Before, it was something else.”

“Mine is—” I began.

“I don’t want yours.”

The brutality of that statement stunned me, quite honest, and without want to hurt.

I thought then that she—a vampiress—would bite my neck for the salt wine of blood, but instead the dripping sheet of hair came up in eldritch flight and fell about me, her hands beneath it on my body, her dark lips a brooch on mine, all of her ingesting my essence by touch through my skin.

I drowned willing in the night tide of her, opened my thighs around her hips and let her fill me her with the current of her need.

If there was pain then I was senseless to it, knowing only the rush of her cool fingers doused at my entrance, the rhythm of her coiling mane like many hands upon my breasts, my waist, restraining me as though I did not part my limbs in giddy reception of her taking.

She had known bodies like mine, had smelted them into such soft shapes as mine; my breath in her mouth was yes, my back thrown into the shape of a fruit’s core was yes, and my head caught between her braceleted hands too was yes, and though the serpents of her living hair gnawed into me I let her drink, for all of me was the three letters of assent, and would have been so into the deathbed of time.

Her face was like a doll’s cast aside to rot in some far river, so fixed and sinister and ruinous was the beauty of it. Her eyes now were black, black as though by taking me she lifted my shadow into her as well.

Her fingers, sharp and catching in me, made me gasp in the thrill of knowing my death was but a feather in her hand, to be crushed or blown free as she willed it.

I screamed out in pleasure, and she cupped the sound in the conch of her mouth until again only the rain rang through the underpass, as though a god blew with closed lips at its entry.

She held me, Magdala, dispassionately, all the interest in me absented from her in my crisis, and whatever inward state passed as her own. Her mind and its echoes I no longer tasted, their human remnants chased away by the deadness of life she had shouldered in our coupling.

Her hair dropped like velvet curtains to her boot heels again, and her gaze upon me was as it had been in the beginning, looking beyond me, to something else.

She was sated, and like a man wanted nothing more to do with me, though presumably I would become as she was, and was now fit to follow at her side, or else behind her.

She turned with a scuff of her heel in rancid water away towards the arachnid eyes of street lights beyond, and as I wrenched myself from the wall to go after her the agony of what the filaments of teeth had done struck me down like a lover’s fist.

I doubled in half at the waist, felt my way along the filthy wall, drool suspended from my lips the colour of aspic sweeping my chest like a watch on a chain.

Still I wanted her, reached out to the dwindling scar of her silhouette, whose spurning of me was a woman’s caprice, the turning up of one’s collar against the wind that is daring to love again.

“Magdala,” I called. “Magdala, Magdala…”

But her shape—woven of witchcraft, of un-death—came apart like cobwebs in the rain until she was a part of it, alighting from me as her own sire had done, long ago.

Wretched in my abandonment I ran out into the vicious weather, crying, and then I too was lost to that hungry city full of voices like my own, to a cycle like that of water, bidden to repeat by the mad and the fantastic nature of the unnamed being that woman was, and I.