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To our love send a dozen white lilies
To our love send a coffin of wood
To our love let all the pink-eyed pigeons coo
That people they just ain't no good
To our love send back all the letters
To our love a valentine of blood
To our love let all the jilted lovers cry
That people they just ain't no good
(Nick Cave)
The nights over Spinners End are black, bottomless pits. They're without songs, without magic. No spell can enchant the dried grass, the brick houses, the deserted streets. There are no stars.
Though the black river moves only sluggishly, the ice is dangerously thin, thinner as it ought to be here, in the cold North: the waters are flooded with the hot, septic sewage of the surrounding mills and this is why the surface is never as cold as one would expect it to be. In the past it used to swallow careless children skating on the ice, but the city locked the river piers and built wire fences.
Still, even these days some children climb over the fence the way children always do, lured by the bank slopes covered in virginal white snow, and the deceptive sturdy looking crust of ice.
The river is not deep, but people underestimate the junk that is lying on the muddy ground, half buried in it. Rusty, old bikes and cars with their doors open, unhinged, smashed windscreens, discarded machinery from the mills, empty containers with torn, toothed openings like gigantic, hungry jaws, the dense underwater plant growth, suffocating every other life in the waters.
With many arms the river clutches at its prey and doesn't let go.
What goes into the water must stay in the water.
They say Severus Snape can do strange things.
He can put pictures into people's minds, they say. He only looks at them and he can make them see dark, twisted things: a knife blade gleaming in the moon light, a ribbon of blood, a shadow moving closer. He can plant fear and horror into their hearts. In the beginning the other children taunt him and call him names like "freak" or "weirdo." Other names, too. They have funny games, children, they do.
They scream at him: "Go away! Leave us alone!" They try to hurt him with their sticks and stones, chase him away.
Now they fall silent when he comes to sit on the bench. The whole play ground falls silent and although they pretend to not see him, they watch him fearfully from the corner of their eyes. They never go near him anymore. Yet he still goes to the playground to watch. Only when the sun sets and the swing in the middle of the playground glows red in the dying light he goes home.
Sometimes they find him playing in the dirt with the bugs, scratching strange letters and symbols into the earth with a broken branch, sometimes a gutted mouse is still twitching in his hand and he is murmuring, blood on his lips, valentine blood painted on his cheeks, his forehead. A circle of fallen leaves, arranged in a perfect manner, moves around him.
The children claim that he moved marbles without touching them. They rolled over the ground and one of the boys stepped on them and fell. He argued with one of the Evans girls and a branch snapped and nearly killed her. Another boy bit into an apple and there was a razor blade in it. Blood gushed out of his mouth, and he looked funny like one of these clowns, painted red mouth, wide, rolling eyes.
There are strange stories about him.
Severus doesn't play with the other children. He sits on the bench and watches. When he doesn't watch them he stays alone behind the bushes. After he has left, the children find dead animals there, with their necks twisted and broken, their eyes burnt or scratched out, the little hearts missing.
Strange stories.
Tobias has heard of them. When neighbours approach him with questions about Eileen and his son he only shrugs. What can he say, really? He tells them, that they're not from here and that has to suffice.
Although he's from here he doesn't work in the mills like the others. He takes the bus to Leeds to work in one of the many logistics companies in the growing, expanding city. Usually he goes home with the 6.20 bus, punctually as clockwork. On Fridays he goes out with some of the coworkers for one, maybe two pints, but he never comes home later than 10 o'clock especially when Eileen has disappeared again the way she often does.
Severus is always in his room and on his way up Tobias usually listens from the hallway to the child murmuring and muttering and silently shakes his head. He does have her blood running through his veins, so there is nothing he can do about it.
Then one day, when Severus is nine, maybe ten, he's not in his room.
Instead Tobias can hear small noises emanating from the bed room, the sounds of a drawer being opened and pushed close, and for a moment he thinks Eileen is back. But he also hears the low hum of a child's voice, and Eileen never hums. Quietly he opens the door.
Severus doesn't notice Tobias standing in the door.
He is sitting in their bed chamber, in front of her dresser, holding her brush in his bony little fingers, tugging strands of long, black hair out of it, enthralled in what he is doing. Tobias wonders if he is missing her. Can a child as cold as Severus is, still instinctively miss the mother, although she never showed him any love, any affection?
Then Severus spine stiffens. He must have seen a movement in the mirror. Slowly, minutely his back straightens - he can feel the ripples of panic run through him, the breathless stillness that comes over the child's posture. Severus turns around in a dreamlike movement, fluid as if under water, the muscles of his back moving under white skin, the thin, fragile shoulder blades shifting.
Tobias will remember this moment until the day he dies, until the very last moment, where his strength leaves him and he sinks. Everything will be taken from him, and he won't give a damn. All the memories of his mediocre, quiet life he will give up but to this one he will hold on until his last breath.
Hiding his trembling fingers he takes in Severus' sallow face, the purple shadows under his eyes and then he sees the lips, bloodied with Eileen's lipstick, and for a moment he is dizzied by the colour.
He thinks, this is how king Herod must have felt when Salome danced her dance of Seven Veils.
Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee.
Severus is sitting in his bedroom with his half open mouth, the slack lips, the violent, fiery color smeared clumsily on his lips, merely looking at him. The black burning gaze touches Tobias so deeply within he wants to cry, to sink down onto his knees and pray, to reach out and grasp Severus' shoulders and caress his dirty, lank hair and pull it back, so he can see the soft white throat, make that painted whore mouth open further, in a parody of lust and frenzy.
Later when the leaves come sailing down and the trees stand naked against the darkening skies, and when the streets are covered with dirty, white snow, he will still remember the heat of that summer day. Even later when the rivers warm again in spring and the waters rise and wrap Spinners End in their smell of death and decay he will saviour the taste, the fragrance of this particular memory.
Until the very last moment, when the blackness of the water turns into Severus' hot ember gaze.
A long time ago Eileen had told him that there is a spell that can make one forget, that erases painful, unwanted memories and he wished he could ask her to do this to him, to absolve him, to take this away from him, but in the end he knows he is grateful that this will never leave him. Instead he recalls the colours, the black and the white and the valentine red, and heat consumes his body and he says nothing. He burns in the fire of his memories but he says nothing in the end.
Better to have this, than to be left with nothing.
Severus is his child. His own flesh and blood, his forbidden fruit. A beautiful solanaceous plant, so inconspicuous during the day, not much to look at as the neighbours say, true, but Tobias knows better. They move together, hungry, obsessed, and who is devouring who now? His valentine red concubine mouth smears the pillow, and his black eyes throw back the images in his mind and they amplify and double not unlike an echo being thrown back.
When Severus turns eleven the owls arrive silently in the night, sweeping down on Spinners End and Eileen closes the windows. The owls won't leave. They peck against the closed windows and sit on the doorsteps, perch on the lamp posts, their orange eyes mocking her attempts. He asks her why she is so afraid. Is this not her world calling him home? But she shakes her head, refusing to answer him. In the end she gives in and takes the letter and then the owls leave, one by one.
And in the autumn of the same year he drives them all the way to London, through the crazy London traffic to King's Cross, glancing nervously at his child who is sitting in the back. His lank hair obscures his face, and he's hunched over a shabby bag Tobias has given him the evening before. Eileen sits on the other side, as far away from her child as possible, an unreadable expression etched into her face.
Before Severus climbs out of the car, Eileen tells Tobias to wait in the car, so he only nods and looks at his son. Their eyes lock and he wishes he could touch him one more time, could steal one last kiss. Then Severus is gone, and Tobias wishes he could feel relieved.
Even when he is far away, in the nights he feels Severus reaching for him, his magic seeping through the walls, through every crack of the house and under the floorboards, invading every space like the river water. In these dreams they tumble together, their limbs entangled and the black waves are crashing over their heads, and while Severus is pulling him down, he drowns gladly, without regret.
He never writes, of course, but then Tobias is not a man who needs roses, bows and love letters, and other such delusions. He feeds off his dreams, and when the wild valentine red of the dreams threaten to dull, he goes and sits in Severus' room that smells of burnt things, paper, hair, bones maybe, but is eerily empty save for the little bed, the table and the wooden chair. Before he takes the pillow to bury his face in it and inhale the scent of his child he closes the door softly. It's the only door in the house that doesn't creak because he oiled the hinges years ago and even polished the floor underneath so the wood can't scrape the boards.
He is careful although Eileen never ever goes near Severus' room.
Eileen is often gone, vanishing into thin air like some mirage and without a trace, although she does come back eventually. During her unexplained absences that seem to last longer each time there is no need to be careful and he clutches the lipstick from her dresser and warms the cold plastic case in his hand. The sensory memory comes back immediately to him; he warms the lipstick, then opens it, and the whore smell of the perfumed wax wafts up. He remembers how he applied the color to Severus' pale lips, even smeared a bit onto his pallid cheeks.
The year is long without Severus in the house. He longs for him, yearns for him, for the embrace of fragile, bony arms. His body aches with pent-up longing for the touch of his lily white skin and the taste of that painted mouth.
One day in summer, he wakes up to find himself alone in bed and he knows that this time Eileen won't return. His gaze falls upon her dresser, and he realises that she has even taken the tiny bracelet with her, the one that Severus made for her years ago from red beads, from dried ivory bones and strands of black hair. She threw it away, anguished, enraged and with fear in her eyes. But of course it reappeared on her dresser the same night, and no matter what she did with it, it kept returning to her, and eventually she kept it there, her sign of defeat. The fact that she has chosen to take the bracelet with her, warms him a little, as if she did care for their child in the end, at least a bit, but he is also certain then that she won't return.
He won't miss her.
He tells the few people who inquire about her that she has gone to her parents but they remain suspicious for a while. After all, what woman leaves without taking her child with her. Then one of the neighbours, Mrs. Benton, who has known Eileen shrugs and murmurs that it's probably for the best.
Severus returns for the summers and they rarely talk. He stays in his rooms and Tobias can hear him murmuring and even singing, an eery kind of singing and he can feel the magic grasping at him through the door, crawling through the house. In the beginning he tries to avoid his son, but very soon he gives in and enters Severus room and Severus always expects him, and he never says anything.
Not a word is spoken, not even when Tobias smears the blood colour of Eileen's lipstick onto his child's lips and then kisses them. Severus opens his mouth and Tobias can never say if the grimace on his face is a silent laugh, or lust or fear or anger. He can see the glint of his eyes in the darkness. He kisses the pale, hairless limbs. And while Tobias covers Severus' body with his own he hears him whispering things. His bitten fingernails are dirty, black half-moons, scratching patterns into his back.
Then Severus goes back to that school and Tobias begins his waiting again. He is poisoned by his black desire, his blood red lust, his searing white pain.
The year Severus graduates from that strange school, he doesn't return on the last day of June the way he did before. This summer passes without any sign of his child, then the autumn goes by and winter is early like every year but Tobias pays no attention. Even the dreams have stopped and he knows something is not right.
On Severus' birthday, Tobias sits in the bedroom in front of the dresser, holding the red lipstick. He carefully puts the black plastic lid down and unscrews the red wax. Although not used very often–it was an early gift he had bought Eileen shortly after they had married, the most expensive thing he ever got her–the color has worn down. The perfume has long faded and only the waxen oily, even a bit rancid smell remains.
Not much is left of the valentine red that enthralled him years ago.
He never wept for Eileen, but he weeps for his son now, his sweet, black haired siren with his burning ember eyes that barely hide the coldness in them, like the black waters of the river.
On Valentines Day Tobias walks to the play ground although he hasn't been there in years and only sees the empty swing. He remembers his son so very well, the small boy he was only a few years ago, his face hidden behind midnight black hair, his hands grasping the chains of the swing.
The river swells already, the ice cracks and eerie, popping sounds can be heard across the surface. The widening gaps move the dirty, white slates. The snow on the steep river banks is mostly gone but here and there Tobias can see white flecks of snow like glimpses of naked skin. The grass is dirty and wet and slippery.
Severus is standing at the river, dangerously close to the black water.
Tobias can't breathe for a moment, then he steps closer to the wire fence. His son is standing with his back to him, in a long, black cloak and ... he can't be sure.
Then, in an imitation of that summer moment years ago, Severus turns around slowly and gracefully. Even now Tobias heart stops at the picture of his son, although Severus is not a child anymore. He has grown so tall, too thin and too wiry. The taste of his skin will have changed, Tobias knows and is sad about it. But he recognises even from far away the black eyes, the cupid bow of his lips, almost heart shaped.
He seems to beckon to him, but Tobias can't see very well from where he is standing. Suddenly the locked gates open in a silent invitation.
All these years Tobias has never known if he took Severus against his will or with his consent. It seemed a strange thing to ask in the starless nights, when he was holding thin bony wrists, kissed the blue veins underneath the milk white skin, bit the jutting collar bone. He has never dared to speak to him and instead smothered any protest Severus might utter with his kisses, forced his tongue into that red mouth, and the child has never fought him long, and learned fast how to pleasure him.
(And why ask, when Tobias very well knew, that in truth it was Severus who called him, lured him into his arms, to let Tobias drown in waves of black, bottomless lust.)
But some nights it was hard to distinguish lust from anguish, acquiescence from silent defeat, passion from pain, and they left Tobias with nagging doubts.
The opened gate yet dispels all of them. All that remains is beautiful, liberating clarity.
"Severus," he murmurs, and he steps onto the steep river bank.
Then his child makes another movement, as if to shed his cloak and reveal his sinful, naked body underneath, bare it to the February chill. Together they turn, Severus presses himself against him, enveloping him in a black embrace.
Severus' lips are red, and white clouds of breath rise through the night and he whispers words Tobias can't understand, a foreign, an alien spell.
Suddenly the muscles in Tobias body lock, and he loses his footing. Every muscle goes rigid. He wants to hold on to Severus but can't. He wants to say something, scream, but can't.
Severus
Severus steps aside and his black robes are swishing his face, when he slides into the river, breaking through the thinned ice, into foul, black water and the waters move around him like inky strands of black hair and pull him down.
Through the water he can see his child's face twisted into a monkey grin, long teeth bared, black eyes so very cold.
He attempts to stretch his arms and move up to the surface again, but his limbs seem to be paralysed. Panic rises in him. According to the law of physics he ought to float up again but then he feels something pulling him down, a hooked bone protruding from the darkness, and from the corner of his eyes he can glimpse a thin bracelet dangling around that bone, red beads, strands of hair and recognition sets in.
He sinks.
And then he dreams of black hair, surrounding him, enveloping his numb limbs, seeping into him through his mouth, his nostrils and ears, filling his lungs, of his son's sweet valentine red lips and finally, finally of nothing anymore.
Dead things rot quietly in the water, until the spring warms the river and decomposition speeds up, the developing gas causing them to bloat and float upwards. Whatever lies underneath surfaces.
Later in March or April they find the skeleton of a woman who must have fallen into the river and drowned a long time ago. Her bracelet had caught onto a branch. She could have slipped it off and swam up to the surface, but for reasons never understood she didn't.
They might come and find Tobias, too, one day, in his gravelly, muddy bed but he does not miss the gray skies over Spinners End. In his quiet grave he does not need to listen to the noise of the world anymore. He rests peacefully entangled in the decaying underwater plants, and he feels he always belonged here, down in the black waters of the river.
~fin~