To Make Death Love Us by Sovereign Falconer Read Free Book Online Page A

turned him from a human being into a
bloodied pulp. They killed him, there in the street, pounding him into an almost unrecognizable
lump of human meat, just two blocks away from the house with the lace curtains and the gentle
moon-child dreaming his death in the window.
    It was, in Serena's
heart, in Enoch's mind, an act of kindness.
     
     
     
     
     
    Enoch was gone but,
somehow, nothing much seemed changed. There were all sorts of things to take care of, people to
see, arrangements to make, deliveries to be made, checks filled out, that sort of thing. Mary
Pratt was frail, however, and so a nurse was brought in—at first, to help in the taking care of
Serena, and, later, taking care of Mary, who took to her bed soon after her husband's death,
obsessed with the idea that she was pregnant again with Serena, her first born.
    The power that
gentle Serena invoked, subsided. Like the dream from which it sprang, it returned into that deep
and secret place in her mind, to await another time and place suitable for its
invoking.
    Serena felt no
guilt, no great remorse. She mourned Enoch's death in the spirit of one who has lost someone
beloved, but her grief was tempered by a feeling of justice rendered, of mercy
tendered.
    Her father could
not love life as it was.
    So she had made
death love him, where life could not.
    In her own way,
too, Serena understood her mother's madness.
    It was a madness
without pain. She saw it very clearly on the days she sat in her window, carefully sifting
through the world about her in dreams.
    Mary Pratt's
madness was a joyful one, the expectant mother of an imaginary fetus.
    Serena sensed no
need for death, no great longing for it as her father had experienced. And so Serena's dreams
were more like caresses than inquiries, as she sometimes probed the gentle madness in her
mother.
    Serena often sat
beside her mother's bed for long hours, listening to her talk of the child yet to
come.
    "I shall call her
Serena. It will be a girl, I am sure. A woman knows these things," said Mary Pratt, touching her
empty belly, trying to sense the unmistakable stir­rings of new life inside her. "Did you feel
that? She kicked me! I felt it." Mary's face was rapturous.
    "Yes, Mother."
Serena stroked her face. They spent many long hours in just this way.
    Sometimes Serena
read fairy stories to her mother from a big, colored book that only her fingers could see. Mary
Pratt listened with obvious delight, thinking to herself that some day she would read those very
same stories to her child when it came.
     
     
     
     
     
    Serena was
twenty-two when Will Carney came calling. He'd gone to buy an ice-cream suit and some
frilled-front shirts from the very same tailor to whom Enoch Pratt had once given his
custom.
    The salesman was
something of a gossip and something of a historian of the bizarre. He had too little to think
about and too much to say. The tailor mentioned Enoch Pratt, who had lived, almost, in another
century. He talked about the strange
house with drawn curtains. He spoke of the enigmatic, reclusive moon child, Serena. While he
talked, the tailor glanced often at Will's crip­pled, scar-laced hand as though suggesting that
Will, him­self maimed in some small way, might appreciate a story of someone really put upon by
fate.
    "You say her hair
is pure white?" Will Carney asked, his mind spinning with the notion.
    "Like a winter full
of snow, like milkweed. Didn't I just say it? I've seen her myself, sitting in the window of
their house on Rain Street," said the tailor.
    "And her eyes are
pink?"
    "They seem so when
the sun strikes them."
    "Can't walk? Just
sits in that chair all day?"
    "Oh, she can walk.
But her legs are like toothpicks and about as long. How she's able to walk on them at all is a
miracle in itself."
    Will Carney thought
about this, becoming more and more intrigued.
    "But the rest of
it—her being blind, yet able to read regular print