Proudest Spirits*

The lights were off. The window curtains were drawn closed. But Powder's eyes locked onto the little door in the corner. As Powder took a step inside the pitch-black drawing room, something large and heavy moved and set itself in front of the little door. Something that scuttled on hairy legs and its polished armor-like exterior looked shiny. Then the thing began to glow…

It was the cabinet that belonged in the drawing room, but it had a round head with antennae and a body like a mechanical beetle. It too even had button eyes.

Other things in the room started to glow neon colors. It wasn't just the cabinet; the other furniture had changed into mechanical-looking bugs with glowing insides. The furnace by the window looked like a fat, blue caterpillar that moved around the room. The tall lamp that belonged in the corner looked like its light bulb was the bottom of a firefly, but its lamp shade were the stained-glass wings that twitched and fluttered occasionally.

The walls were purple like blacklight. The wallpaper pattern was no longer flowers, but bugs. The windows were draped with deep red curtains, cut out in the shape of great horned beetles, and lined with gold. The fire in the fireplace burned bright red as rubies.

Then the couch suddenly moved. It turned to face Powder, with hundreds of little legs like a centipede.

"They say even the proudest spirit can be broken…" the other mother giggled, sitting on the couch, "… with love."

She wore the same brown dress from the night before, not a wrinkle out of place.

Before Powder could think of what to say, a chair with a hard shell back and a head with floppy antennae like a cockroach scooped up Powder from behind her legs and brought her closer to the coffee table, which now looked like a green cicada, its jeweled wings like stain-glass supporting the surface of the table.

"Of course, chocolate never hurts. Like one?" the other mother asked, holding out a box of chocolates as if nothing had changed.

Expecting it to be a toffee or a butterscotch ball, Powder looked down. The box was half filled with large, shiny, black beetles, crawling over each other in efforts to get out of the box.

"They're cocoa beetles from Zanzibar," she said proudly.

She carefully picked out a particularly large and black beetle, pulled off its legs, which she dropped neatly into a big, glass ashtray on the small table beside the sofa, and popped the beetle into her mouth. She crunched it happily.

"Yum," she said and took another.

Powder wanted to gag as she chewed on its head. Steeling herself, she raised her voice.

"I want to be with my real family. You have to let me go."

The other mother scowled her red lips for the first time, putting her hands on her hips. "Is that any way to talk to your mother?"

Powder scowled back. "You aren't my mother."

The woman scoffed like she was hurt. "Apologize at once, Powder…"

Powder looked her in the eyes and shook her head. "No."

The other mother narrowed her eyebrows. Deeper lines drew groves under her button eyes.

"I'll give you to the count of three…"

Powder crossed her arms in her chair, not moving.

The other mother sneered, leaning forward. "One…"

She stood up, and up, and up. She seemed taller than Powder remembered. Powder thought her face was contorting more and more sternly, but she soon realized the other mother's face was stretching. Powder wasn't just shrinking from close perspective. Before Powder's eyes, the woman's body started to grow.

"Two…"

Powder's courage faltered as she watched the other mother's face stretched thin until sharp angles of her bones protruded out and her head nearly brushed the ceiling. The red of her lips and nails disappeared, darkening to black. Her lilac hair seemed less soft, yet more angled and sharp, with streaks of gray.

"Three!" she screamed.

With a hand like bone, she grabbed Powder by the arm and dragged her out of the chair, out of the drawing room. Powder fought back but the woman had surprising strength as well as sharp, black nails that threatened to dig into her skin.

"Ow! What are you doing? Let me go!"

She pulled Powder back into the hallway and advanced upon the mirror at the end of the hall. Powder saw herself in the reflection, getting dragged toward it by a woman whose head was cut off by the mirror.

In front of it, the other mother suddenly lifted Powder clear off the ground. Powder closed her eyes as she expected to be thrown against the glass. But she felt an icy chill wash over her and then the impact of a stone-cold floor stinging her palms, elbows, and knees.

When Powder opened her eyes, she saw she was on a stone floor. It wasn't a place she'd ever seen before in the house. She turned around and faced the other mother.

"You can come out, when you learn to be a loving daughter," she hissed before she tapped the glass once more and her image faded away. The glass turned into a stone wall.

Powder launched herself at the wall, screaming in anger and petrifying fear as the darkness closed around her. But the wall didn't change. After a while, Powder had to give up pounding and kicking at the unyielding stone.

Somewhere inside her, Powder could feel a huge sob welling up, and then she stopped it before it came out. She took a deep breath and let it go.

She thought she heard a whisper behind her and turned sharply. "Who's there?" she demanded in the dark.

The space was a lot smaller than she realized. A rusty, iron bedframe and a moldy mattress sat in the corner. A light seemed to emanate from underneath a thin bedsheet, draped over something huddling on the bed.

Then a small voice whispered into her ear, a voice so faint it was barely there at all, a gentle wispy nothing of a voice so hushed that Powder could almost believe she was imagining it.

"Hush and shush, for the Beldam might be listening," a child's voice whispered in the back of Powder's mind.

Shivering, Powder hesitated to come closer, but the fear in the voice sounded like her own.

"You… You mean the other mother?" she asked quietly, her heart slowing.

The huddle didn't answer at first, seeming to huddle even more. Powder slowly stepped forward, taking the closest corner of the bedsheet in her hand. She gently pulled back the old sheet and let the fabric fall away.

Her eyes were beginning to get used to the darkness. Now, Powder saw, or imagined she saw, three shapes, each as faint and pale as the moon in the daytime sky. They were the shapes of three children, about her own size, huddled together.

They were wearing something like tattered clothes, something she couldn't fully see, not from this era. Their skin glowed but their shapes were translucent. The pale figures pulsed faintly. She could imagine that they were nothing more than afterimages, like the glow left by a bright light in your eyes after the lights go out.

And they, too, had buttons for eyes.

"Who are you?" Powder found her voice to ask.

A small boy wearing overalls floated from the bed. He was barefoot and had tiny freckles on his cheeks.

This ghost had short, bowl cut hair. Powder could almost imagine it to be red or copper in color. But with the hollow cheeks, Powder wasn't certain if the child was a boy or a girl. They were dressed like a kid from black and white photographs. The kind of kid that wore overalls and a white shirt because it was the only thing they had growing up, working in a mine, or a factory, or a farm. She wondered if the child knew who they were anymore either.

The second was a girl. She wore a dress that ended at her knees. Her hair was pulled back and woven into cornrow braids with two ribbons. There was something birdlike about her face, her head titled to the side like a staring raven. Not hostile, just curious, as though wanting to hop closer to Powder without scaring her.

"I think I had a sister," she said, suddenly, her lips not moving.

"What?" Powder asked.

"She looked like me, but… she was everything I wasn't… That's all I remember," she said, sadly.

"We don't remember our names," the boy said, his mouth not moving from the sad pout on his face, "but I remember my true mommy…"

The third, a shape of a taller girl, put an arm around his shoulders. She wore a tattered dress and a sunhat that covered part of her face.

Her voice was gentle. She said, comfortingly, "I still keep pictures in my mind, of my governess on Sunday morning, carrying my hoop and stick. And the morning sun behind her. And all the tulips bobbing in the breeze… But I have forgotten the name of my governess, and of the tulips too…"

"I don't think tulips have names," said Powder, "They're just tulips."

"Perhaps," said the voice sadly, "But I have always thought that these tulips might have had names. They were red. And orange. And red and red and orange and yellow, like embers in the nursey fire of a winter's evening. I remember them…"

Powder never thought of flowers that way before. The voice sounded so sad that Powder put out a hand to the place the voice was coming from. And she found a cold hand, squeezed it tightly.

"Thank you," she said.

"Why are you all here?" Powder asked.

The three of them answered as one, "The Beldam."

The girl with cornrows drifted around Powder's shoulder and explained, "She spied on our lives through the little doll's eyes."

"And saw that we weren't happy," the boy added.

The tall girl let go of Powder's hand and sighed, "So, she lured us away with treasures. And treats. And games to play…"

The ghosts swirled around Powder in a circle, floating higher and higher, reaching their hands up to the endless black ceiling.

"Gave all that we asked. Yet we still wanted more…" they said in unison.

"So, we let her sew the buttons."

In the blink of an eye, the tall girl appeared in front of Powder's face, and Powder realized for the first time, that the girl's face was contorted in a permanent scream. The girl floated right in front of Powder's nose, then floated straight through her.

For a moment, Powder felt agony and panic that wasn't her own. It was horrible. It happened both extremely fast and very slow. The cold sucked out the warmth from her bones. Her face opened involuntarily into a scream like the tall girl's and her eyes felt numb. Like voids.

As quickly as the cold came, it left Powder's body and her warmth returned, but the pins and needles didn't go away. In the absence of the coldness, Powder felt grateful it was over, but terrified at the idea to feel it again.

The ghosts floated side by side, crossing their arms over their chests, to lay upon the bed. Their voices layering like a creepy chorus.

"She said that she loved us. But she locked us here. And ate up our lives…"

"She will take your life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog."

"She will take your joy. And one day you'll awake, and your heart and your soul will have gone."

"A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten…"

Then their forms touched down on the rotting mattress, and the bedsheet moved on its own, covering their forms until they faded away and the bedsheet deflated in their absence, flat to the mattress.

Alone, Powder gripped the bars of the bed frame at the foot of the bed like a prisoner, biting her lip.

"Well… she can't keep me in the dark forever," Powder said, standing up and turning to touch the cold wall where she was tossed in with her hand. "Not if she wants to win my life…"

There was a small glow and Powder looked around at the ghost kids who reappeared, floating a short distance away. It made her sad that they were barely her age. Younger than her, even.

"Beating her is my only chance…" Powder said.

The sweet girl with cornrows floated closer. "Perhaps if you do win your escape, you could find our eyes."

A pang hit Powder in her heart that she did not expect. It was unfair. It was cruel.

"Has she taken those too?"

"Yes, miss. And hidden them." The girl covered one of her buttons with her transparent hand.

"Find our eyes, mistress. And our souls will be free," said the little boy.

Powder looked to the ground. She barely had any idea about escaping this closet, but she nodded to the ground anyway.

"I'll… I'll try."