Page 43 of If Looks Could Kill

Pearl looks out the upstairs window and sees Tabitha walk off smilingly, arm in arm with that barkeeper from the Irish pub. How has he come to be part of this, anyway?

It doesn’t matter. There goes Tabitha. Wanting no further part of this snake business. Snatching at the first escape with, perhaps, the first young man to pay her a second glance.

What if the tables were turned, Pearl? Would you stay?

Yesterday’s Pearl would label it Satan’s work and flee. Just not with a Bowery bartender.

That doesn’t stop her feeling utterly pierced with the wound of betrayal.

Of abandonment. All their time and service together—sparring notwithstanding—could be traded for the dazzling company of one young swain.

On this loneliest night of her entire life, Pearl wishes that there was someone, anyone, who would stand loyally beside her.

But there is no such person. Nor will there be. Every relationship she’s ever known is over. Her mother. Her childhood friends. Purse Laurier. Any suitor, once they learn what she is, will reject her. She will end up like this old woman. Alone in a haunted house of shadows.

There it is again. The pull. The tug at her very vitals, urging her uptown, to some irresistible person she is destined to find. Some dark and violent encounter, which fits her now.

She screws her eyes shut. No. She, Pearl, is still in control. She has a dual nature. Human and monster. All mankind bears the scars of just such a schism of the soul. Part devil, part angel.

She’s wide awake. Thirsty, too, and in need of a water closet.

The old lady had offered a bath. Maybe a nice hot soak would be just the thing.

If she could just wash her hair, scrub her head, scratch her scalp with her fingernails—it feels as though if she can just get clean, fully clean, she can wash this darkness off her soul and these serpents off her head.

She’ll be lucky if her sanity survives this night.

She takes her lit candle and peers into the corridor. It’s as empty and silent as a chapel at midnight. She tiptoes across the rug toward the bathroom.

Its tiled corners are dusty and cobwebby, but the middle of the space seems clean enough.

She sets her candleholder atop the commode, cups her hand to drink from the faucet, then stoppers the bathtub and opens the tap for hot water.

She finds a towel on a shelf and a ball of green soap in a wire basket.

Soon she steps into the claw-footed porcelain tub, sits down, and slides her body, head and all, under the surface of the water.

Their barracks tenement has nothing so nice as this.

Half an hour later, clad in her nightgown, with damp hair, drowsy, and trailing a humid cloud perfumed with eucalyptus, she hangs her towel. The bath fixed nothing, yet it soothed her. Perhaps she can sleep. She hears faraway church bells chime the half hour. Ten thirty.

She marvels. Only ten thirty. Today has lasted a lifetime.

Today has ended a lifetime.

She takes her candlestick and opens the door to the hall.

“Oh!”

There, standing in front of the doorway, is Miss Stella. Her snakes blink at Pearl’s candle.

Pearl’s pulse thrums in her throat. “Thank you,” she ventures, “for letting us stay here.”

Miss Stella inclines her head gravely.

“It was kind of you,” continues Pearl. “We had nowhere else to go.”

“Come, my dear,” Miss Stella says. “Come and sit with me awhile.”

She turns toward the stairs and makes her dignified way there, walking stick in hand.

Pearl doesn’t want to talk to this strange woman, but to say no seems appallingly rude.

Slowly down the sweeping staircase the processional descends, one precise step at a time. Pearl hangs back. I’m a bride, she thinks perversely. A debutante, making a grand entrance. This old nightdress is my party gown. The downstairs ghosts are my guests.

Miss Stella crosses to the front parlor, where she settles into her rocking chair. Pearl locates another chair in the dining room and sets it near Miss Stella. Miss Stella’s rocking chair creaks. Pearl stuffs her hands underneath her thighs to stop them from fidgeting.

“Today is your first day?”

Pearl gulps and nods. “Yes.”

“And your heart is breaking.”

Pearl feels split open like a flounder on a fishmonger’s cutting board.

Miss Stella takes Pearl’s hand. The skin draped over her birdlike bones is as soft as silk.

“Be strong,” Miss Stella murmurs. “This agony is not forever.”

She, however, looks as though she has lived forever.

She resumes her rocking. “Have you read any myths about Medusa?”

“No,” says Pearl. “I didn’t ever read that sort of thing.”

“I wouldn’t put much stock in what most of them say,” Miss Stella adds indignantly. “Written by men, millennia later. Much of it pure rubbish.”

Until today, Pearl would’ve stoutly declared that all of it was. Every pagan word.

“Medusa was beheaded by the demigod Perseus,” the older woman says bitterly, “with the help of the goddess Athena, who made the first Medusa herself. Shameful.”

Pearl doesn’t believe in Greek gods, but then, she doesn’t believe in herself, either.

“If any of it’s true,” Miss Stella adds. “Words are men’s sharpest weapons against us.”

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me, Pearl’s pastor had said.

“They say Medusa was a mortal Gorgon, but those she lived with, Stheno and Euryale, were im mortal.” A small laugh rasps in Miss Stella’s throat. “Which immortal monsters didn’t die if beheaded?”

“Um…”

“Excepting the hydra,” Miss Stella says. “ Of course Medusa was immortal.”

Once names like Stheno enter in, Pearl is lost in a foreign country. Until—

“Wait,” she says. “Did you say we are immortal ?”

Miss Stella smiles. “No, dear. Not we.” She leans in and whispers, “But I am one hundred and forty years old .”

Pearl doesn’t believe it.

Miss Stella’s pride masks her disappointment that Pearl hasn’t marveled at her age.

She is a lonely old woman, Pearl tells herself. Have pity. “Then you must remember—”

“The War of Independence?” the old woman cuts in. “Like yesterday. I once danced with Aaron Burr!” She reaches for a basket of knitting. “I’ll die eventually. I certainly age. But I imagine that, for my age, I’m looking rather spry.”

A breath of laughter escapes Pearl in spite of herself.

“Tell me, Pearl,” Miss Stella says, “who has made you a Medusa like me?”

I am not like you, Pearl tells herself. I am not like you.

“Did anyone touch you? Today, I mean?”

Pearl was taken aback. “We went walking. I’m sure I brushed against all sorts of people.”

“It will have been a man,” Miss Stella tells her. “It won’t have taken much.”

“How,” demands Pearl, “can a chance encounter have the power to ruin my whole life?”

As soon as the words escape her, she feels the bitter irony. Easily. That’s how.

“Not for nothing do the ogre parents in fairy tales lock their daughters in towers,” muses Miss Stella. “It’s a dangerous world, and young women are the coveted targets of much of the danger. As to whether a chance encounter should have such power, I can only say that it does.”

Pearl thinks of Cora and Freyda. Chance encounters with her helped to ruin their lives.

“So whoever did this to me,” Pearl says, “will bump into people here and there, cutting a swath of destruction wherever he goes? Destroying one life after another?”

“Oh, no, my dear,” Miss Stella says urgently. “I don’t know that I’d call it ‘destruction.’ But either way, he won’t be allowed to do it for long. Because you will stop him.”

Pearl feels the small hairs on her arms prickle.

“You’ll find him,” Miss Stella says. “You feel the pull, don’t you? You can smell him?”

Pearl flinches. “There is something,” she admits. “I keep feeling… something.”

“It’s a call,” Stella tells Pearl. “It will lead you to your quarry.”

Pearl presses her fingers into her temples. “I thought the idea was that Medusa—that we—turn men to stone. Just by looking at them.” She closes her eyes. “Or them looking at us.” She sits upright in her seat. “Have I killed people? Those men? I don’t think—”

“There, now,” Miss Stella says soothingly. “You haven’t killed anyone. You couldn’t.”

Relief washes over Pearl. “We can’t actually kill?”

A small smile plays over Miss Stella’s lips. “Oh, we can,” she says. “But baby hatchlings almost never do. They’re too new. Too frightened and confused.”

So much for relief. Baby hatchling ? “But then…”

“To kill,” explains Miss Stella, “takes will, and fury, and conviction to see it through.”

Pearl edges away from Miss Stella. “That’s horrible.”

“What?” asks Miss Stella archly. “Would you rather it were easy?”

I am a killer now. Pearl remembers her dream, about him. I wanted to kill him, and now I can. This frightens her far more than snakes.

After a while, Pearl speaks. “I stunned Tabitha tonight.”

Miss Stella tilts her head to one side. “At first glance?”

Pearl shakes her head.

“Then you must have wanted to.” She smiles wryly. “It takes real intent to impact a woman. At least, that’s been my experience.”

Pearl swallows the guilt that bubbles up then. It’s true. She had wanted to. Some Salvation Army sister she was.

Never mind.

“How…,” she begins. “How, then, does the sight of a Medusa stun or… kill a man?”

Miss Stella rocks silently in her chair. Pearl wonders if this question is somehow a taboo.

“There’s no clear answer to that,” Miss Stella says at last. “There’s no… scripture or book of magic or science or… anything like that.”

“Oh.”

“I have a theory.” Miss Stella unravels wool from a skein.

“A Medusa finds, in most men, an easy target. He is terrified of monsters. The supernatural. Things that scream in the night. But the real fear,” she continues, “is born of guilt. A ferocious, deadly female must feel to men like a just and fitting retribution finding them at last. For their crimes, you see.”

“We can only kill… criminals?”