From the Chronicles of Lupa Volume 1 - Ruby Tuesday

by P. Julian

Full text version for access by AI - Section 2

Revised edition produced 2017

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From the Chronicles of Lupa Volume 1 - Full Text Section 2

Chapter 5 - Sandra Lee

SANDRA Lee Megiddo was born in the very dark of the moon, the point where the moon was most swallowed in darkness. The world also was dark and her soul crept there amongst the bones of the living. It found itself admitted to a birthing suite and it waited hunched there in the gloom, ready to cast out the soul of the child who was to be born into the deep shadow of that night.

The woman who bore Sandra Lee was a loving but frail woman by the name of Lina. She howled and grunted and she endured a hard labour, for there was a struggle within her womb that she could perceive but never hope to understand. She laboured long into that night, and when she had birthed the child she was spent and she lay back on the bed and wept, for sheer exhaustion but also the blessing that after all of that struggle her child, the little soul she had so carefully nurtured, was safely out into the world.

When Lina Megiddo lay with her first child on her breast she expected to feel all manner of tenderness, especially the unconditional love that she had read about and so longed to feel. But when that soft skin touched hers she felt a violent surge of repulsion and she began to cry out for the baby to be taken away. Each time the nurses brought the child back Lina would refuse to touch it. She became increasingly agitated, demanding to know what the hospital had done with her real child.

Eventually a psychiatrist was called. Lina told the psych in great detail about what had happened, how her real child had been stolen from her and replaced with a child that had the devil in it. The psych was gentle and intent and asked her a number of questions, and in the end could have no doubt that Lina should be treated assertively for post-natal psychosis.

Lina did not recover. She refused the medication that was offered and soon would not eat or drink. She was moved to the specialist maternity psychiatric unit, where despite good intramuscular medication and the care of the maternity nurses she continued to deteriorate. Lina wept and begged for the nurses to believe her, and when she was not believed she grew in her conviction that the child had placed a curse on her, that worked even in its absence, and all of this continued to spiral in her mind until one morning, despite the special obs they conducted, poor Lina Megiddo was found hanging by a bedsheet knotted to the television stand at the opposite wall to her bed. There was no note of explanation.

After the arrangements had been made the baby Sandra Lee went home with her broken-hearted father. She lived with him until she was sixteen years old. From an early age she had severe temper tantrums, and when she flew into a rage she became possessed of an immense strength that belied her tender age. She left her father feeling concerned and then increasingly terrified as her strength increased. He told friends and family of his fears and they scolded him, insisting that a dear sweet child could not possibly do such things, could not have any other intention but to love and be loved. They tutted and told him that if he just came from a Place of Love, as they called it, then all of these behaviours would resolve themselves in time.

Sandra Lee never made any friends. She would sit in the school playground silently all lunchtime, and then she would go back to class and sit there silently too. Her teachers worried about her but her grades were not too bad, and in any event they could never get her father to focus on these issues or take the necessary remedial steps. Sandra matured early but she showered irregularly, her hygiene was poor and she began to reek, but although she was increasingly alienated at home and at school nobody had the courage or the inclination to intervene or to help her. Such help that would have been scorned in any event.

When Sandra was eight years old she knocked her father out from behind with a shovel while he was knelt down weeding some onions. When he came to she was on top of him, straddling him, her hands around his throat trying to choke the air out of him. He managed to get up but only after she had put her face close to his and hissed: You Tell No Body.

The poor man obeyed and remained silent and terrified from that point onwards, enduring increasing violence and indignity until on the day of her sixteenth birthday, her sweet sixteenth, Sandra Lee Megiddo sat sullen on the lounge room floor amongst a mess of broken plastic, while in his bedroom her father lay dead from choking on the body of a Barbie doll, his neck arched backwards, two dainty plastic feet still sticking out of his mouth.

On her sixteenth birthday, having murdered the father who raised her, Sandra Lee showered perfunctorily, packed a small bag with some clothes, and left home. Although the flames that rose from the house were soon fierce and spectacular she did not pause to savour them, or even to glance backwards at them. She hitched rides for a thousand miles and more, and when she arrived in the Great City she bought a hard packet of cigarettes and headed straight to the red-light district, turning her first tricks that same day.

The first few times she was mildly fascinated at the way men moved and grunted on her, as she lay there and smoked and felt the ugliness and cowardice of these creatures. She felt their sinister weight, she felt the lies they had told to their wives and she was gladdened and aroused by these dreadful things. Although she did not move or respond still they pushed themselves inside of her as if she were something dead or inhuman. She smoked and she smiled at this violence and degradation, which so agreed with her own conception of the world.

Sandra soon tired of being passive. She started to toy with the men who came to use her, and visit her own degradation upon them. She did not harm the ones who were violent to her, who tried to subdue her, in fact she would encourage that by affecting the weakness and frailty that she had seen in her mother those first times she had touched her and made her recoil.

But the gentle men, who were there for intimacy or relief, these she despised and she would assail them in sickening ways. She would clench her muscles and twist and they would cry out in pain, and she learned to do this in such an expert way that she caused frightening damage to the parts they put inside her.

This savagery fed upon itself and soon Sandra Megiddo was engaged in all manner of depravity. Men would be found slain in cheap motel rooms with their genitals stuffed in their mouths, or in the back seat of their cars with their pubic bones crushed in, their ears and noses bitten off.

Sandra knew that these acts would inevitably lead to sanction, and that the authorities would be closing in, but she knew with her special sight that there would be many more occasions for cruelty before she was apprehended.

She also slavered at the possibilities that would open to her once she had been detained, all of the opportunities for degradation and vileness that her years in the prison system would provide to her. Free or incarcerated, she slavered at the possibilities.

***

On a warm moonlit night Sandra Lee was waiting on her usual corner when a car pulled up and a woman called out to her from the driver’s side window. Sandra went up to the vehicle and saw two lovely women who told her that they were mother and daughter. Sandra was intrigued by that, and by the older woman’s explanation of what they wanted her for. A price was negotiated and money was produced, and the two women drove Sandra to a plain hotel back up towards the airport.

When they had closed the door to their room the younger woman produced a looped length of soft rope, part of the game they wanted her to play. Sandra sat and allowed herself to be tied to a wooden chair. She knew that she could break the rope easily if that was required, but for the moment she was interested to see where this game might go. She liked that there was some prospect of her own indignity and suffering, which to her was as enjoyable as suffering meted out to others.

Having tied her to the chair the women then lifted Sandra with sudden and effortless strength, depositing her on to the small balcony that was attached to the room. The slack rope they had tied her with suddenly clinched tight around her and began to burn. With her dull curiosity Sandra supposed this was from friction, but as the full moon beamed down on her she saw its power taken up into those tight lines, searing through her skin and her flesh to burn her bones right through to their marrow.

The ropes burned and burned. The fire also spread out from those containment lines and slowly burned off Sandra’s skin, consuming her hair and her sebaceous glands in a putrid, bubbling burn. The fire reached her neck and then her face, and as it spread there the vitreous parts of her eyes boiled and ran down her cheeks, a terrible effigy of tears. As Sandra burned the chair that she sat on remained completely untouched, the ropes also remaining tight and unaffected as the whole substance of her stolen body was burned away into cinders.

As her life in this body was extinguished there was no horror for Sandra Lee. She regretted that her desire to roam the earth would remain unsatiated for some time, that some potential victims would now remain unscathed by her. She felt some pain but no sorrow, as such human emotions had no place within her.

As she was devoured Sandra did wonder about her tormentors, surprised that there should be such vengeance upon the earth. She had gorged on human weakness and human venality, and she could not comprehend these strange women who stared at her and chanted quietly as she burned away to nothing.

As the fire consumed the last of her skin Sandra shrugged her shoulders and began to laugh. She laughed louder and louder and soon she was quaking with laughter, the first mirth she had ever experienced in her short journey through the world. The fire though would not be mocked and soon even her laughing was burned away, as the body that hosted her spirit fell apart and the ropes fell slack against the cool timbers of the chair, the fire resolving itself back into moonlight with nothing further to burn.

***

The body of Sandra Lee was consumed but that merely released her soul once more, casting it back into the shadows. The soul of Megiddo was restored to the creeping thing that it had been, waiting in contempt for the next poor body that might house it.

As the soul of Megiddo was released it oriented itself to the gloom, looking carefully around. It began to creep quietly past the source of its release, seeking to escape the further sanction of these women by way of the lines of inert matter that thread their way through the bright places of the world.

As the soul slouched onwards it was halted. It found its way blocked by a strange barrier that swirled around it, suddenly appearing everywhere at once, a fast eddy current conjured by these women from the strange circular chant they began to intone.

The soul lurched forwards again but the chant denied it any forward movement. The words then began to grab and twist the tendrils that the soul felt its way forwards with. The words began to twist tremendously around the soul, and in the grip of those swivelling lines the soul began to twist also, and then spin with increasing velocity. The soul cried out to be released but that merely wrenched it further into motion, as the spin imparted to it mounted incessantly. The soul was spun faster and faster, crushed by its dire pirouette into a smaller and smaller corner of the world.

And for its sins was the soul of Megiddo confined, in a prison of a terrible singularity. It continued to spin there, faster and more sickened and horrified, packed smaller and smaller into that one tiny corner of space and time where there could be no quantification. The spin was then released and made absolute and the desolation of this soul was assured. It was cut off from any forgiveness, for it had no claim to mercy, merely the destiny to be forever damned to its tiny prison where it would continue to spin, spin.

Chapter 6 - Jesse James

Jesse Quinn had a hard birth but was a smiling baby, at least at the beginning of his life. He brought into the world some talents and some weaknesses but there was nothing very special about the way he saw the world, save for his constant feeling that he stood slightly to the outside of things, and that try as he might he could never reach the central place where the major parts of life were conducted.

As a child he was baptised Jesse, with James as his middle name, and thus was his father before him named. But it was a short lineage, of such redolent names, and Jesse’s grandfather had not been so named, nor the many men that had gone before him. These earlier men were not marked out either to cause suffering or to save, but there was such a mark upon this child Jesse, bluntly obvious to those who were properly informed. Amongst these there spread a ripple of excitement when he was born into the world, a hope of a major victory on both sides of the ethical equation.

Whatever the destiny of this child there was a terrible bitterness that had guided his mother Naomi in the choice of his name. Jesse’s father JJ had been a dashing man, and in his brighter moments could focus intense love on the people he chose to favour. But he fell mostly in love with himself, as his life grew longer, especially with his own image reflected in the soft eyes of the women he caused to desire him, and the fickle men who both admired and envied him for the spell he could cast on women.

This weakness was an inheritance, rather than JJ’s birthright, and as weak men have done throughout the ages he always pleaded this fact in his defence. This false and venal man had been brutalised by his mother, who was not ashamed at her brutality for he was, so she would say: a bad child, a bad seed. And although JJ was not in his turn brutal he was weak and unreliable and loved only those people he could control. Increasingly his main satisfaction was in neglecting and denying his wife Naomi, and elsewhere bleeding and manipulating other people, multiplying his own iniquity and sending it out into the world.

Jesse’s mother Naomi might these days be described as a complex woman. Along with everything else that had assaulted her, every other insult she had to bear, there was awful difficulty in giving birth to Jesse and she was not able to have any more children after him. All of these things merged and submerged in creating bitterness in her heart, which then coursed out on to the head of her only son, trading hardship for that particular tenderness that he needed his mother to give him.

Was this the fault of Naomi? It is pointless to ask. Did her name expose her to the triumph of bitterness? It is pointless to speculate. Naomi was what she became, a sad and distorted woman, and she found devastating ways to press those distortions home. She focussed her scorn and resentment on her son Jesse, and was thus able to present a preternaturally sunny disposition to other people. Your mother is a wonderful woman, people would say. You are lucky to have her. As this deception worked Jesse’s wounds ever deeper in him.

If Jesse ever queried this reality people were resolute and disparaging. Your mother loves you, they would say, some of them spitting those words at him. All mothers love their children. They would deny his reality and turn it back on him, saying that it was wickedness to suggest anything else. How dare you, they would say. Ungrateful child, to question the love of your mother.

With parents like these there was no hope for this boy Jesse James. He was raised on a diet of bitterness and self-abnegation, and like his mother, like his father in his turn, Jesse turned his bitterness and his rage upon others. Continuing as he did so the great chain of evil suffered and evil inflicted, reaching back endlessly through the vast circle of time.

Jesse became cruel. He hurt animals and smaller children and he would kill things for the satisfaction of it, and in his cruelty and his rage he was transformed into precisely the child that his mother needed him to be. The man that her bitterness had demanded from her flesh, the man who would prove to her those lies that were stored in her heart.

See what he does to me.

Even the son of my own body.

See what he is.

This is the Truth.

This is not my fault.

But the story changes, here.

Before Jesse was a man, without any shadow of a beard on his face, he began to experience snatches of horror and heart-sickness at the terror he was dealing into the world.

When these fits took him Jesse tried to crush them down. But the accusations within him would not relent, even when he turned his face away. At such a young age his conscience rose and overwhelmed him, witnessing the dire nature of his actions and their ugly fruit.

Jesse was dismayed by these things and the more he reflected the more he felt ashamed. He thought of his small cousin Laura, hardly old enough to walk, and how he had left her behind in an empty street because she could not keep up with him. He saw the tears on her dark lashes as he recalled his harsh words and his taunts and he was assailed by tremendous shame and grief. Even though his heart offered him further ways to avoid these feelings he let his feelings come, and they seared into his mind and heart. He saw his other cruelty, saw his mother’s little dog shy away from him whenever he approached. Jesse knew the reason for that, the beatings and abuse he had dispensed, and suddenly tears came into his eyes, burning, stinging tears of self-reproach. They burned and he saw through them into the ugliness of his actions: the suffering they had created, the suffering they had maintained.

You should know: this is uncommon decency. For a boy so young, still nothing like a man, to turn away from his own iniquity, to be pricked by the stern reproach of his conscience without shifting the blame, without implicating even his mother in the disease that had grown within him.

Just as Jesse was overpowered by his shame and his remorse, so too did he repent sincerely from his actions. Jesse changed his ways, and he swore especially to atone for his misdeeds, and in that instant of repentance all of his rage and cruelty was overpowered. As his heart turned towards the Light it turned the bitterness of Naomi out into the dust, to flail there and be still, with no further place to breed in him, and no purchase either within him or within the victims that he might have grafted it to.

***

Cynics might observe that Jesse had no claim to such repentance, or any example to follow in the restoration of his own damaged heart. He had been badly betrayed by the people who should have loved him, and there was no obvious influence in his life that could have set his footing so firmly back on the proper path.

But the world is vast, as are the places outside of it, and in the desert places where the strange voices sing perhaps there was some intercession on his behalf. A deep and abiding love that sang strangely to Jesse, from the clear space of these outward places, especially when he would doze, or dream, or come to the verge of sleep.

Sometimes in the dusk, in the night season, this love might float down upon his head, or rise like mist from the ground luminosity that arose unseen, unnoticed about him at these times. In the morning with the dew on the grass, and before the first light of the sun, a sure love that sang to him, that did not falter from its singing.

And if he could discern the words, in those times when he was anointed by them, reading the patterns in the dew and the evening sky, the mist upon the night gardens, Jesse may have heard these words, praising him and calling him to the greatness he was destined for:

Who is this, whose eyes are the Morning Sun

His face as irresistible as the dawn?

Who is it that comes among us

Like the balsam that flows upon the slopes of Gilead?

This strange love song that falls mostly on deaf ears and hearts of stone but which also falls on more fertile fields, like the heart of this Jesse James, hearts that are constructed to be entirely susceptible to it:

He is chief amongst the ten thousand…

And it may have been this love that Jesse learned by, this love that he followed, this song that led him to the places where men are guided so that they may be restored.

And it may be that Jesse multiplied this love within himself, and thus purified his heart, and grew worthier of this love as it reached out ever more strongly to him. Even though the architects of this song could not help but sing to him, as the world has been made.

And if Jesse grew in his many gifts, gifts that might repay sevenfold the strange ones who sang to him, and if he thus accepted the destiny he was born to?

O you who know the truth -

Chapter 7 - Better Than Birthdays

FOR those years that were designated to them Mother Ruby and Ruby Pearl roamed together and hunted together. Together they faced many dangers, and they destroyed many other dangers separately and alone. They shared and stored up their knowledge of these things without resorting to words, in the shared space that grew between them, unlimited even by the arcane forms of description that could approximate the nature of their deeds.

Ruby Child proved herself to be a savage hunter and to have an instinct for rout and capture that was developed far beyond the instincts of her mother. More and more Ruby led her mother in their forays, and she was so absorbed in their exact execution that she did not notice that her mother was lagging further behind, showing less and less fervour for the hunt. In her dedication Ruby did not see the space between them taken up increasingly by her young soul, as her mother’s soul spooled down and was diminished. Ruby did not notice, when they sang together after hunting, she did not notice her mother sing ever more quietly, retaining more of the evil she had encountered, her strength slowly attenuating and laying her lower and lower.

One day Ruby arrived home from college to be greeted as usual by her mother waiting at the door of their little house. But on this day Ruby saw very deeply into her mother’s soul and she saw the blunt truth of what was occurring there, what had been occurring for months without Ruby ever noticing.

Ruby gasped and pushed roughly past her mother and went directly to her room. She blocked her ears but she could not shut out the sound of her mother singing to her, this time her line more tenuous, full of longing and sadness and also a grave contrition.

Despite her shock and pain Ruby Child came out of her room, following her mother’s songline down to where she sat waiting for her, pouring her a cup of tea.

Why didn’t you tell me?

Her mother smiled and stroked Ruby’s burning cheeks.

It is forbidden, she said.

So that you would not seek to hold me.

How long do we have?

Some time, her mother said.

And my precious Ruby you already know. There is no death for us.

That is just a song, Ruby said.

No, her mother said. It is our song.

But is it true?

Yes, my child. I am with you. I will always be.

Ruby wanted to say more, or yell and run out of the house, but she saw how great was the weariness that had descended upon her mother. Ruby led her by the hand to her bedroom and made her lie down, and although her mother told her not to fuss Ruby went to make her a fresh cup of tea, and a little bit of buttered toast.

When she returned to the bedroom her mother was already fast asleep. Ruby set her offerings down on the bedside table, and she sat there silently beside her unwaking mother until night came down around them.

***

Mother Ruby’s sleep did not refresh her, and from that point onwards she rarely left her bed. Ruby tried to feed her but she took very little by way of food or drink, and she grew pale and her breath became shallow and strained whether she woke or slept.

Ruby knew that her mother was dying and she wanted to bring her medicine, but she also knew in the deep part of her bones that the death approaching her mother was not something that could be halted, even by the best medicine that was available.

Mother Ruby breathed shallower and shallower until there was little air that circulated in her lungs. She moved less and spoke less, and then upon the first new moon after she had taken to her bed, in that time between the darkness and the dawn, she stopped breathing altogether and her heart was still.

Ruby made careful funeral arrangements. She directed that her mother’s body was to be burned, and she accompanied the body to every place that she was admitted, and she waited just outside the doors if that was all she was allowed. She directed that her mother should not be treated with any kind of chemical, and that nobody was to disturb her organs or her blood in any manner at all. Her mother was placed in a pine box without any adornment and she was brought as quickly as possible to the crematorium, where she was to be burned absolutely in accordance with Ruby’s wishes. For as she grieved Ruby knew what forces were arrayed during that intervening time, forces anxious to take the body of her mother and to desecrate it, to use it for their own despicable ends.

On the final morning of these preparations Ruby sat in the crematorium, tense and serious and vigilant. Her mother’s coffin was placed on to the conveyor and soon the flames of the furnace began to consume her body.

Ruby had been vigilant but as the fire did its work she knew there was no further need of that. She softened and found tears welling in her eyes, but she knew that these were forbidden to her even in such extremity. She closed off her tears and she sat without crying, shaking and shuddering in her desperate, dry-eyed grief.

As she sat and shook Ruby felt the flames devour her mother’s body, and for the first time in her life she felt horribly, disastrously alone. Even by the standards of this depraved world she made a piteous sight, this slight girl shaking and heaving against the vastness of the world, having so carefully delivered her mother to the flames that were taking her away.

Ruby sat while the last parts of her mother were consumed and turned to ash. But just as she felt that happen, the last of her mother’s body disintegrate, she felt the latches of her heart snap open. And what flowed into her, what her heart rejoiced to absorb? These are things that cannot be told, but Ruby’s sadness was turned into joy, and just as she had sown in sorrow, so did she rejoice as she gathered in her sheaves. Her spirit soared in a fierce rush and joined ultimately with the soul of her mother, and also with the soul of every Ruby Tuesday that had gone before them. She found that what her mother had always sung to her was true, and that song was suddenly within her being sung by many singers, singing her back to the Garden where once they had sung, to which they will be restored by the One who will be sent to deliver them.

***

After some time the stiff man who was assisting Ruby with the funeral arrangements came up and sat next to her, carrying a small steel urn that he held out for her to take. Ruby thanked him with a smiling, overspilling warmth, and the man was both pleased and intensely puzzled by the change that had come upon this poor girl who had so recently lost her mother.

These are her ashes, he said.

Thank you, said Ruby.

I’m so sorry.

Don’t be, she said, warmly shaking his hand.

The man did not know what else to say. He gravely wished her all the best, and she thanked him again, and although she took the urn with due gravity she only did so in order to protect the man from the limits of his understanding, the narrow constraints of his particular religious faith.

Ruby walked out of the crematorium into the cool air. She smelled the coming rain, the cool rain that was to fall on that day, the mercy that falls from heaven.

As she walked down the raked gravel of the driveway she opened the urn, and she let the ashes slowly swirl out of the vessel as she walked. The ashes dusted themselves against the neat hedges, and out on to the edges of the carefully tended path.

After all of the ashes were swept out Ruby dropped the urn into the last of the hedges lining the driveway to the crematorium. And through fine and persistent rain she walked bareheaded all the way back to her home. The rain moved in creases and rivulets through her hair and across her face, touching the sides of her mouth as they coursed there, her smile softly meeting the tiny streams as they flowed across her skin.

Ruby walked for many hours. When she arrived home she sat down at the kitchen table and smiled to think of her new presence there, now fully inhabiting their home. She thought of what she had become, what she was turning into. Ruby felt her mother now absolutely with her, and also the absolute presence of her lineage for the first time in her life, reaching back to those times when there was little else upon the earth. She felt her mother’s admiration for how she had confronted her grief, she heard her mother whisper to her and teach her those things that remained to be taught. And in that intense presence, the whole of her mother’s soul, Ruby was most willingly instructed.

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