Alexandra’s Bargaining

I don’t know if you can hear me. I don’t even know where I am supposed to go to talk to you, since the juniper is gone. It was a mistake. I know that now. I never should have gotten rid of it, I never should have summoned you.

You promised me it would be alright. You promised me. It is not alright. He is not the same. He has no recollection of our time together, he doesn’t know who I am now. I don’t know who I am. I do things for you, I do whatever you tell me, and all you had to do was to bring him back.

We went to the museum in the city the other day, and grabbed a bite afterwards. The photographs moved me to tears, and Mark held me and told me it was alright. Yesterday he referred to the trip as something he had done alone, and urged me to go see the exhibit. When I said what the hell is wrong with you, I was there, he seemed genuinely surprised.

Why would you do this? I was loyal, I did everything you asked, even that one thing! When I remembered how I got him back, I had a sense of terrible dread, and I was right to have it.

I no longer see the faces of my family and friends in these rooms. You took them away. I feel isolated and alone, even when Mark is here. He works long hours, he is often distracted. He seems to have lost interest in our life together. I don’t know how much he remembers, if anything at all. I don’t dare ask. Maybe he remembers everything and knows it was my fault that he stumbled upon my secret door in the floor by mistake. Because I never told him about it.

The house loses color. I no longer see beyond the birches. The roof bangs sometimes on its own, but not the way it did before. Now I am not afraid. Now I don’t guess what it could be. I always know it is you.

Why did you bring him back at all? Is it nurturing for you, to see the house get torn apart like this? Not a happy house now, since you took the love away. When I was running back through the wastelands, where old man Larsen used to grow barley when we had just gotten married, after I had done that one thing you wanted, I for a while could not see my own house. It seemed like there was nothing at all beyond the wall of fir trees. I had a sense of running between houses, new, very recently built, that the houses had grown overnight on that field, and I would lose my way. The pristine, unhistorical houses, black houses, nodding and snoozing in the night, and my lovely home with its secret windows and secret landscapes and doorways and noises was gone.

There was no flowerbed with peonies swaying in the mild wind, no compost in the far corner, luring mice and owls, no red chimney visible through the leaves of the silver willow, no porch swing, no ancient steps with moss growing on them, nothing inside the shrunken hawthorn hedge that was once growing wild and rampant, how I loved that wildness! No birds nested amid its branches.

The deal is off, Pennywise! Whatever your name is. The deal is off.

The peace is gone. We are strangers in that house. The feeling of safety and security is gone. I destroyed it the day I begged for you to bring him back, the day I yanked the juniper out of the ground. It was a mistake.

The sun still shines, slanted, through the Venetian blinds in the kitchen in the mornings. But now it makes me cry. The stars, clearly visible in the night sky, the vast sky I never see in the city, make me cry. The damp smell of earth in the pantry. The rickety door in the vestibule, how it sometimes jingles on its own because the yellow glass is coming loose in the panes. We never got around to fixing it, although we always talked about it.

I cannot bear it anymore. The soul of the house is gone. I killed it the night I begged for you to help me. I think the soul is in me, now.

No. No, no, no, no, no. I refuse to believe that, that - whispering. You are devious. You are crafty. But you will not fool me. I will defeat you. I will do it, if it is the last thing I’ll ever do. If it is all in me, then you are in me, too, and that means I can fight you. And I will fight you.

Go ahead and burn it, if you will. Burn it down. I don’t care.

Oh, but you do care, Alexandra. You care. You will do anything to maintain what you have. You are a sore loser. You need to learn to let go.

Now, if you had wanted to, you would have seen, easily, that he is not there. There is no one. The day he disappeared you lost your mind, little girl. They took you away. You are not in your beloved house. If it loses color, it is because your memory of it is beginning to fade.

They tore it down, Alexandra. It was unlivable. There is no house, and there is no Mark. All there ever was, was the spider in the juniper bush.

Yes, cry now. Cry, cry until your face is swollen and red, like a balloon. I will eat your tears. I will eat them up, and wait until you are rife with sorrow and pain, and then I will eat you, Alexandra.