we the monsters -- pt. 2

Katalin first looks up because of his voice, and keeps looking because of his eyes: dark with a curious steepness to them, viperous and hard. At once she knows him, because she’s seen those eyes on his sister, his brother. This must be Juhasz Imre, the eldest sibling and the true lord of that high, lonely castle. And as she crouches in the dusky earth, basket forgotten, he speaks to her with a familiarity that she doesn’t know how to return.

“You’re the Szarvas girl,” he says plainly, his voice very clear, almost sweet. To this Katalin says nothing, because there are four Szarvas girls, and she isn’t even the prettiest among them. Besides, what would Juhasz Imre want to do with her? She thinks of his sister Mariska, the brocaded amulet she wears in the hollow of her throat, and something inside of Katalin flutters like the wings of a moth even as she does her very best to pin them.

“One of them, my lord.” She’s never spoken to Mariska or her twin brother Tamar, and wonders if they sound the same: as if they expect the world to part before them, as if they’re swans in water. She can imagine it of Mariska, but not of Tamar.

“Not the youngest or the eldest,” he says. “One of the two in between.”

She says nothing.

“My sister has noticed you,” he continues, and now Katalin looks back up and sees him almost smiling. “How old are you, truly?”

“Almost twenty now, my lord.”

“Unmarried.” It is not a question.

“Yes,” she says. She could say the same for him and his siblings, but they are lofty in a way she never will be. “I care for my mother.”

“Is she ill?”

“Melancholy.”

“So not ill, then,” says Imre. “We are all melancholy.”

My mother wasn’t, Katalin thinks, not before me. 

“Would you like to meet her?” Imre asks, and he sounds as if he truly wishes to know. “My sister Mariska?” 

Katalin is so surprised that she speaks honestly. “I am not certain, my lord.”

“Do you mean the rumors?” He looks uninterested now, with a sort of carelessness only the nobility can afford. “Do you believe that she runs in the forests until her feet bleed, and hunts with her bare hands, and lies in the silver stripes of moonlight? Do you think that she ensnares all the wanton village girls to her and consumes them like a wolf?” He is watching Katalin carefully again, gauging her reaction as a mountain poacher would, and she doesn’t like it. “You should know better. My sister is gentle, and good.”

Katalin says nothing again, and waits for him to leave her. He doesn’t.

“It isn’t your choice, not truly, little macska,” Imre says finally. “It’s Mariska’s.” There is no demand in his voice, no expectation, and that’s what frightens her.

“If she wishes to meet me,” says Katalin, suddenly conscious of her dirty wrists, the sweat shining like a badge on the back of her neck, “Then I will do as she says.”

“Good,” says Imre, and in the speckled forest light it’s as if he sees her properly for the first time. “When you do, wear your hair without the net, down across your shoulders. She likes dark hair very much, my sister.”

Are you her errand boy? Katalin wishes to ask in astonishment, because Imre is older than his sister by six years, and by rights even Tamar should have more authority. But she’s seen the two of them in the village, Tamar looking to his twin in what could be described as a careful deference, and sees it now replicated in Imre. A bizarre respect, she thinks — a devoted sense of consideration. But there’s something in Imre’s gaze that has never been in his brother’s, and she doesn’t like that, either. 

“She just wants to see you up close,” says Imre, and his voice is gauze-soft now, compassionate. “See you for what you truly are.”

“And you, my lord?” She can’t help it, not really; the impulse to resist jerks within her like a hare’s leg caught in a snare. “Do you wish to see me for what I truly am?”

“You mustn’t worry about that,” Imre says, and he’s almost smiling again. “I think I already have.” He pauses, and dips his head, and in the dim light she can see that his hair is almost as dark as her own: not the gorgeous russet of his siblings. “I like your spirit, but Mariska is different. Be careful, little macska. Sweet things can swiftly turn bitter, and my sister has always been one of them.”

we the monsters -- pt. 1

folie à famille — madness shared by a family.

She is born an unfortunate child, in an unfortunate time, in an unfortunate place. When the winter recedes and the slow freeze thaws, it will be too late; she'll be two months old on the very margin of spring, and she'll have outlasted what many children her age never do.  Her mother names her Katalin, not because the girl is so very perfect but because the mountains around them are caught suspended in an atmospheric chill, and her skin is white as snow.

In the little house on the white hill, isolated from the arm's reach of the nearby village, her sisters spin thread and her brothers sleep away the cold. Her mother rarely sleeps at all. She’s gripped by a misery that cradles her even as she refuses to rock her own child; it’s possible to be soothed by grief, the woman learns, to hold legions of it within you. It’s possible to be happier being unhappy.

The sorrow never leaves her, and though as she grows Katalin isn’t foolish enough to carry the blame entirely, she also isn’t foolish enough to think herself an innocent. She is a timid, pretty child that grows into a timid, pretty girl, forgettable in every way save for the black hair caught always under a simple unornamented net — the color so dark it seems glossed with ebony lacquer — and her impossible stark-white skin.

The first time Katalin sees Juhasz Mariska in the village, she’s standing curved and rushlike around a fine-featured boy who Katalin can’t identify. They have the same sweet edges to their faces, that blank animal sharpness, clear and illuminated and bright; she grows to think of them as lovers, but later learns they’re twins. Upon closer inspection it becomes more apparent; they look more alike than she’d first observed, and their affection doesn’t surpass a familial warmth. There is another sibling, too, she learns — an elder brother of some twenty-six years, reclusive and proud who rarely leaves the stifled chambers of their castle. The twins, by the time Katalin turns eighteen, are twenty and still unmarried: strange enough. Stranger yet that their elder brother exerts no influence over them, lets them wander the village in their pale dove-gray clothing and touch the dirty hands of  curious children.

It’s Mariska they’re most fascinated by, because her twin’s straightforward good looks are startling when replicated in her: the chestnut hair, bright and coppery and fine, the small slender hands always in movement. She’s like no girl (or woman, or man) that Katalin has ever seen, and so she fosters a bizarre curiosity about her — about the three siblings alone on the mountain.

Not everyone shares her keen awareness of them: or if they do, they mask it underneath disgust and fear. The siblings are called both zealots and heathens, saints and sinners, Christians and unbelievers. In truth, no one has a word for what they are, and no one wants to.

But rumors still flicker on some tongues: that they were the ones to poison their mother and father, that they speak to the devils that sleep under their floorboards, that they are gripped in the hold of a loneliness that is impossible to comprehend. But, as Katalin comes to grasp, there is a darker, more elusive truth within these fragments of lies that chills her like the very bone of winter: that they wet their lips on the blood of those willing, and let night destroy the rest.