Chapter One
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The moonlight was blazing. White and clear, it burned indigo streaks across the black and starless sky, flowing softly over the clouds and spilling through the boughs of the Hawthorne trees that crowded along the river's edge. The bright sound of running water carved a path through the night, carrying cool air and fragments of reflected moonshine through the hushed woodlands. No wind stirred the trees under the canopy. She lay on her back, staring up at them. Their long branches locked like intertwining fingers: white blossoms, red fruit.
"I'm cold," she heard herself saying. Her voice sounded so small, so far away. As far as the stars she couldn't find.
The answer—a hushed whisper—came from the crook of her neck. "We wouldn't have need to be out here if your father approved of our meetings," he said. When he spoke, his lips brushed against the space beneath her chin. She shivered. "We can go indoors if you wish. But I'm afraid I shall have to say 'goodnight' if that were the case."
There was black humor in his voice. He knew she wouldn't leave—that she couldn't leave. The finality of his tone overwhelmed her.
"You're sly!" she moaned, twisting her head away in frustration. She fixed her eyes upon the low-hanging branch of a magnolia tree. Its flowers had yet to bloom, the moon-colored petals coiled tightly around the promise of a golden stigma, still and untouched. She imagined for a moment that it looked like a pale girl with her arms curled around herself, looking somberly on. "And I despise you for it," she added, pouting.
He chuckled quietly at this. His body tensed suddenly as if to stand up. "I beg your pardon," he mused, "Shall I go?"
Her head snapped forward again, their eyes locking. A shaft of white moonlight tumbled down through the leaves, spilling across flushed skin. Her eyelashes cast shadows like jagged black scars down her cheek. She spoke no word but grabbed him roughly by the collar, pulling his lips down to meet hers. Their muffled sighs and laughter were lost among the steady rush of river water.
By and by, the moon rose. A sound echoed through the hushed landscape. Though shrill and distant it was nonetheless arrestingly beautiful, like the call of a rare bird. To the girl sprawled on the wet grass, it sounded like her heart—not beating but speaking, and calling out in a strange new voice. She no longer minded the cold.
"I love you," she sighed.
"And I—what in hell was that!?"
The sound echoed again, and it reached their ears this time not as a remote and anonymous resonance but as a dissonantly rapturous warbling howl. Even as they took pause it built in intensity. Up and up it crescendoed into a keening wail. It was so aberrant that even the noise of the river seemed like the sound of water running away rather than merely running. No longer high and thin like a bird's call, it bellowed and crashed through the stillness of the air like a bull charging through paper.
"Someone is screaming," she breathed. All the tiny hairs along the back of her neck were erect.
"That's not a person," he insisted. "It's probably some kind of animal—"
"It's like someone being murdered," she said. Her voice was low and tense: she was done with being a lover and ready to become an animal who flew at the sound of an approaching predator. He grasped her firmly by one wrist.
"No one's being murdered, Josephine." He stroked her hair like she was a frightened child, but her body did not relax. He cupped her chin in his hand, tilting her face up to meet his. "Calm yourself. It's probably a wolf with its leg in a trap. It'll stop soon enough."
Crash. They both froze, staring off in the direction of the din. Crash. This time closer. The air smelled like lightning.
She started up, snatching blindly at her belongings. "I'm leaving, Adelaide. I should never have come. If my father finds us out he'll beat you within an inch of your life! Truly, I have no idea what I was—"
The crack of a huge tree branch snapping off the trunk splintered through the countryside. It was far closer this time, and the terrible wailing was inexorably following. It ghosted through the orchard, drawing towards them at an impossible speed. She turned and fled.
"W-wait! Josephine, wait! You forgot your…apron?" he tried, waved an abandoned garment after her. It was white cotton, with ribboning straps dangling from the sides. "Or possibly some manner of…undergarment?" he finished weakly. She made no sign of turning back. The warm yellow lights of her father's plantation house glowed a quarter-mile away. He lingered only long enough to catch one more wild shriek before taking off after her. Seconds later, a breeze soughed through the stillness of the glade. In the darkness under the trees, no human eye could have caught site of its origin: a small girl with night-dark hair running like it was all she was born to do.
Mary Alice Brandon was tearing through the white-blossomed orchards on the east side of the Tchoutacabouffa River, and she was screaming. Blood spat out of a deep gash just above her clavicle, heaving out with every heartbeat and splattering down the front of her dressing gown. Her bare feet flew through the undergrowth, ignoring the weeds and clinging vines and logs that would have tripped her up the day before; the hour before; the breath before. But now everything was changing. Every panting mouthful of air she drew changed the world just a bit more, and she expended every molecule of oxygen in long, unbroken screams of white terror.
Her screams were beautiful and terrible, and although they were disturbing, they were not unnatural. On the contrary, it was the most natural sound to ever escape from any throat. It was the sound of endings smashing headlong into beginnings; the sound of the quotient of opportunity devouring the quotient of security; the sound of flowers blooming in Mississippi; the sound of an infant being ripped from the warm safety of the womb and being pulled, kicking and screaming, into life and all its uncertainties. Mary Alice Brandon was being born, and it hurt like hell. Pain and potential were hers tonight as she ran screaming, knocking stray branches from her path with enough force to split them from their sockets.
Whatever she had known of life before that cool spring night in 1928 was being erased by the burning sensation of poison overtaking her body and mind. Everything old was being made anew before her eyes, as if someone had pried open her skull and was a doodling fanciful new world directly onto her brain. She knew the moon had never shone like this. She knew the air had never smelled like this. She knew she had never moved like this. And as her pistoning heart drove the venom through every vein and artery and capillary, saturating every muscle with pain and power, she knew that she had never felt so alone.
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"I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart:
but the saying is true 'The empty vessel makes the greatest sound'."
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Author's Note
Well, there you go. A little over-written, but it's still a decent first-chapter prelude-type thingamajig. You know the drill—please respond with your thoughts. Positive or negative criticisms are always equal in my eyes—I love improving as a writer, and I shall never do that without a little help.
(By the by, I hope I fooled you at the beginning. Who's neckin' out it the woods, eh? Is it Edward and Bella? Is it? Nah, it's just some random plantation types! Naughty kids… Not to mention total throwaway characters. I'll write some E/B type stuff in this story, but not for a bit. Hope you're excited about a little Alice-centrism. Lord knows the girl deserves some attention.)