Them Old Mountain Stories Ch. 02

The young woman teetered on her colt's legs, her eyes registering nothing but Madame Marianne. She sank to her knees on the floor at the edge of the settee and clutched at the train of her mistress' gown with hands that lacked the strength to break a stale biscuit. Marianne smiled at her affectionately. "Strip, Fiona."

The pale girl pulled her rough dress over her head, exposing the rest of the bruises that crawled from her ankles to her jutting hipbones then climbed the ladders of her ribs, each one the size and shape of a thumb. Seen all together, they weren't the random marks of savagery but a calculated pattern, with the lowest ones fading to yellow. With a quickness Six-String's eyes could not track, Madame Marianne drew a silver dagger from the low bodice of her dress and offered it to the kneeling woman, point first, in her open palms. "Cut, Fiona."

The girl's trembling hand closed around the handle of the knife in careful stages as she willed each finger to move. When it was in her grasp she drew it to her small left breast, a hand's breadth below the cut of her clavicle. Her skin opened around it like a mouth, the red welling in a thick line that did not break into rolling drops of blood until she had sliced into the same place above her right breast. With each breath, another red streak coursed down the slope of her chest toward her nipples. She handed the dagger back to Madame Marianne, who licked the blood from the edge before putting it away then bent at the waist and lifted the girl to the settee beside as if she weighed no more than a sack of feathers.

None of the patrons in the room seemed to see them at all. Marianne's girls, if they noticed what was happening, cared less about it than they did flirting with their customers. Madame cradled the pallid woman beside her in her arms as she lapped the blood off her breasts with long strokes of her tongue. The woman's brown nipples stood out in hard, puckered points and her head lolled back. Once the flowing blood was gone, Marianne pressed her lips to one of the cuts and sucked at it until her cheeks hollowed. When she moved to the other breast, Six-String could see the skin where the cut had been had knit itself together under a fresh black bruise. Marianne didn't close her mouth over the remaining wound immediately but teased the girl's nipple instead, her tongue long enough to wrap all the way around the nub. Her victim shuddered and moaned, a fresh course of sluggish red pumping out of the cut. Marianne drank it up to the source, which she sealed as she had the other. "Fiona," she nuzzled the girl's neck, "tell my guest what's worth your blood."

Fiona wrenched her head to the side to point her lost eyes at Six-String. Whether she actually saw the woman with the guitar in her lap, drinking chicory, who could say? Her mouth worked soundlessly around the syllables before she rasped out one word: "Release."

"And so you shall have it," Madame Marianne soothed. She pushed Fiona's drained body back against the arm of the settee and parted her knees. She bent forward between the girl's thighs and spread her dark curls with her thumbs. With no preamble, she closed her lips against that hidden place. The girl stiffened immediately, her feet curling and drumming weakly against Marianne's back. She choked out a cry as her spine arched and her hands tore at what was left of her chopped off hair. For a long moment, she made no sound at all while her body strained against itself in impossible struggle. Then, as if a string had snapped inside her, she fell into a loose insensate pile against the settee. Madame Marianne sat up and dabbed at her painted mouth with a lace-edged handkerchief.

Six-String picked out the notes of a slow, sad song on her silver strings.

"That's one I've never heard before," Marianne said, ignoring the naked woman beside her. "Where did you hear it?"

"That one I wrote on the road some time ago," Six-String replied, "and have just now found the place it belongs to."

"Does it have lyrics?"

"Yes, though I'm still working them out." So she sang: There is a house in New Orleans they call The Rising Sun-

"No!" Marianne commanded. "I won't hear songs until they're finished. I won't."

"Then I'll play you songs that have been finished and gone a long time. We'll return to our game."

She played on and on, working back by careful increments of years and studying Madame Marianne for any sign of recognition, any unguarded moment of girlish joy on hearing the song she first danced to with the boy she hoped would pay court, before she knew a much darker groom had come to call. Six-String's eyes stung with the effort and her fingers ached. Her fine soprano had tarnished in the tobacco and tallow smoke of the parlor and strained at the edges with the effort of continuous song. Six-String finished one song without starting the next and rested her guitar against her thighs.

"Can I trouble you for a glass of whiskey? I can keep going if I can rest a moment."

Madame Marianne sent a footman to fetch the drink and took advantage of the break to feed her curiosity. "You've played songs now from before a guitar like yours was even invented, songs I heard played on harp and on piano forte."

"Yes, and I've songs that are older still."

Marianne's eyes narrowed. "It is impossible that you managed to transcribe it all to your five-string guitar without help, help from a teacher who surely taught you a proper guitar has six strings." That dark lady, she thought she'd found the tail of the answer to her question and she smiled like a cat. "So tell me, and no more riddles or half-histories: where is your sixth string?"

The hall clock chimed the end of an hour.

"Why do you always ask the wrong question?" Six-String dropped her entertainer's patter like an ax blade. "You've asked me the same question three times now, but you've yet to ask the one you should."

"Oh? And what question is that?" Marianne was too caught up to know that games had ended. She was very old; though Six-String would have gotten to the songs of her actual youth within another hour or so, she wasn't there yet. Madame Marianne thought she knew far better the asking and answering of questions.

"Where are your whores, Marianne?"

Madame looked around the parlor and found she'd been so engrossed in the songs and stories that she hadn't noticed it was long empty of the sounds of flirting and clinking glasses. Her customers had all gone home to their families and her girls had gone to ground for the day in other velvet rooms. Even the servants were gone; the footman she sent for Six-String's whiskey had been the last. The only living soul left in the room beside the two of them was the drained and discarded heap at the edge of the settee, her ribs barely rising with her breath.

"What time is it, Marianne?"

Madame Marianne marked no time passing, save for one thing: the line between night and day. She realized she had heard the hall clock chime the hour, but had been too engrossed in the game to mind what hour was struck. The house was draped in perpetual darkness, with heavy curtains, with shutters boarded closed. It was surrounded by brick walls and trees thick with Spanish moss and charms to protect it from even the accidental introduction of sunlight. She sneered at Six-String.

"Many have waited to see me wither at dawn and been just as disappointed as you are now. I am going to drink you for a year, you worthless songbird."

"Oh, I know it's not the time of dawn but the light of dawn that catches you." Six-String cocked her head, a glint of playfulness on the blade-edge of her voice, "but you could've had me down ten times by now. You won't touch me until you know, will you? Until you know the question you should have asked?"

Madame Marianne made a sound no living thing makes until its very last breath. Six-String had her shackled in her very nature.

"I suppose I have to tell you. I told you I'd pay a fair price for your story, though I never told you I only wanted the end." Marianne twisted against herself as she rose, the indomitable instinct of her body to survive warring with her inhuman curiosity. Six-String had only the span of a chorus before she'd be under the dark lady's mouth.

"You missed the most important question all night long, Madame. Three times you asked me about my one missing string. Never did you ask: where are Fiona's five older brothers?"

Sunlight ripped into the room at that moment, shutters shattered inward by sledge hammers and crowbars, the velvet drapes yanked from their rods. The same quality that made Madame beautiful to see and impossible to gaze on worked on her house as well, so long as her attention was not completely held by something else. The five stout men from the mountains had been working through the wards around the house all night while Marianne was too distracted to attend to the trembles of warning in her web. The doorman who'd loved Six-String's wild red hair lay across his own threshold, his throat opened to the morning and two silver coins laid over his eyes to keep his spirit from flying out to warn his mistress.

Madame Marianne was caught by the beam, sure as a moth under a pin. Her skin split like a peach after harvest, suddenly too small for what it contained. All the rot she'd kept at bay by hiding in the dark and stealing life from others could be held inside no more. She peeled apart inside her dress, her elegant contours shredding themselves apart into spidery strands and collapsing under the weight of the dark fabric. Six-String stepped on her throat with one heavy work boot to hold her still and let the sun continue its work. While she waited for the final end of the endless Madame, she sang herself the lyrics she'd worked out that night to her new song. Fiona's brothers were quick to their work, breaking every shutter and dragging the heavy curtains into the light of the courtyard to air out any lingering spirits. The only watchful witnesses of Marianne's last moment were the rearing horses, wandering shepherds, and faithful dogs of the parlor's oil paintings.

When Madame Marianne was not but a stain on her own carpet, Six-String fished into her guitar case for an old laborer's shirt and a pair of denim trousers, still stiff the stitches fresh from the treadle sewing machine. She dressed Fiona, who was beyond noticing her own rescue, to keep her brothers from seeing her knobby spine and the hundreds of places she'd cut into her skin to give her blood. The men's clothes had been a guess as to what condition she'd be in when they found her. Carrying an insensate lady through the streets of New Orleans at dawn would draw attention; carrying a passed-out laborer was just a Sunday.

There was some talk of burning the house. They had barricaded the doors of the upper floors to keep Madame Marianne's girls contained, knowing none of them would risk the sun. Six-String assured them that the women were just that. They had fed their Madame at times, certainly, and her lamprey mouth had given them youth and beauty beyond their natural measure, but none of them had become a thing like Marianne. The sun would do its work for them as well, making them the women they should be.

Fiona stirred in her brothers' arms as soon as they brought her into the street, and some small color returned to her cheeks. She would go on to live a life with the milestones many others have: she would love and marry, she would have home and work and children. But between those points she would always seem to be looking for something her eyes could never quite rest upon.

Without its purpose as Madame Marianne LeSoleil Levant's home, the house lost its luster, too. It passed through many hands, none held it for long before selling, none was able to fully paint over the mark above the front door of the red sun rising.

For Six-String's part, she didn't care if people told the story of her bravery or her wit or forgot it, so long as they heard and sang back the song she wrote. They did, of course, for she had a knack for those kinds of melodies and this one was her finest. There is the part of the song that's gotten changed and garbled with the passing of time that I aim to set right for you, though. When my family gets together to fry fish and pass jugs of home brew, we sing Six-String's song with its original chorus. You see, what Colleen Six-String sang with her boot digging in to Madame Marianne LeSoleil Levant's ancient, melting neck was:

There is a house in New Orleans, they call The Rising Sun. It's been the ruin of many a poor girl. But I will not be one.

*****

"Alright," Jolene said, and it was the first time I'd ever heard her quiet and thoughtful, "that is for true something I never heard before. What should we dance to?"

"Something slow, but not too weepy. Not too old. I have to clear The House of the Rising Sun out of my head. Think I've got just the thing."

The digital jukebox was mostly a monstrosity, crouched and glowing in the corner. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a sleek chrome console with a touchscreen on it instead of trying to look like an old timey wooden cabinet jukebox with its rounded edges and bubbling tubes of light. This is 2015. Everyone knows there's an iPod in there, not a stack of records. It looked much worse for putting on the appearance of something it wasn't. I couldn't fault it for selection, though.

By the time I found the song I wanted, Jolene was waiting for me in the cleared area that acts as a dance floor in my bar on the rare occasions people are dancing. She put her hands where my shoulders met my neck and I rested mine on the small of her back. Glen Campbell sang about being a lineman for the county.

"Good choice," Jolene had near vibrated under my initial touch, now she relaxed into me as her feet found the familiar sway of the beat. "I love this song."

"What do you love about it?" What I loved was her firm breasts pressed against me with only my t-shirt and her tank top between us. What I loved was the flex of her muscles under my hands as her hips rocked back and forth. Jo's got a body made for a lot of things I like to do, and one of them is dancing

"Glen's voice, of course. He had a gift for making ordinary peoples' problems into something to sing about just from the way he did."

"My favorite part is where he says he needs her more than he wants her." My favorite part was the way her hair smelled like every good thing from a kitchen and a meadow, but nothing like shampoo.

"That how you love a woman, John?" Her eyes cut through me, green lasers, right into my brain. I had forgotten how dangerous I thought she was not half an hour before. I had forgotten because she seemed so much smaller, swaying to the beat against my chest.

"I have," I trace my fingers up her back and pull them down again.

"Would you say right now that you want me?" She leaned in and brushed her lips across my cheek on her way to my ear, where she whispered. "Or that you need me?"

"Right now?" I let my hands fall lower, just to the top curve of where her jeans filled out and I pulled her tight enough against me that she'd feel my erection, if she couldn't already. The song was almost over. "Right now I want you very much. It's going to have to wait, though, Jo. I'm still on the clock."

"Glad to hear it," she whispered, then caught my earlobe between her lips so briefly it might have been an accident. "Because you owe me a drink."

"The hell you say." I put a few inches between us so I had a chance at less clouded thinking. Jolene was changing the game again. "I said I'd pour you one if you'd ever heard that story before."

"And I had."

"Bullshit."

"You're not gonna take my word for it?"

"Not after you just told me totally different, no." And yet, I was walking back behind the bar.

"Don't get ugly now," she followed back to her seat. "Not that dancing with you wasn't worth the time all by itself, but I told you I'd do it if you told me something I didn't already know. I sure never heard the part about the song and it was worth a fair piece more than a single dance. But you promised me another bourbon if your story wasn't new to me. Colleen Six-String and that evil Madame? That I heard before."

"Prove it."

"Fiona Kelly." Jolene folded her arms like that had settled the whole argument.

"What about her?"

"She was the girl your great-great-gran rescued. One of those five strong brothers was Hiram Kelly, whom she loved more than life. The Kelly's were as rich as mountain folk get and Six-String didn't have a pot. Fiona's life was the only dowry she had to marry Hiram."

I got a clean glass and dropped a few cubes of ice in before covering them in Four Roses Reserve.

"You a Kelly on your daddy's side?" She asked before she swirled the bourbon I offered her under her nose.

"Yeah. Colleen Six-String was my father's father's grandmother."

"But your last name's not Kelly, is it?"

"No, it's...it's a long story. Not the good kind, either."

"It's one I'd like to hear."

"No, you wouldn't. It's the kind with foster parents, not Si lords handing out gifts."

"Will you tell me if I can do it again?"

"Do what?" I knew full well what she meant, but hoped she'd drop it.

"If I tell you a story you never heard before. A story for a story, how 'bout it?"

"You wouldn't rather have bourbon?"

"You poured me two doubles already, John," she rubbed her lower lip against the rim of the glass. "You trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me?"

"Jolene, I don't much like my odds of surviving taking advantage of you." I meant it as another gentle folly in our flirting game, but she set her glass down on the bar so hard I feared it would break.

"What do you mean by that?" Low. Dangerous. I didn't know enough to guess where I'd gone wrong.

"I mean that I don't think I'd have my wits about me enough to pace myself. I'd probably stroke out." I turned my back to her and pretended I need to pull bottles off the shelf to inspect how much liquor was in them. It was a calculated risk. Breaking eye contact also broke the direct tension, but I was leaving myself vulnerable to...what? What was I so afraid of? Was she going to break her glass and stab me with it? Rip into me with her fingernails? I had no words or images to attach to my fear of what Jolene was capable of doing. My fear was just like my attraction to her: instinctual and real. I didn't have to think about the whys and hows of either.

"John?" The anger had fallen off her voice leaving only sweetness behind. I turned to see her finishing the last of her bourbon. "Your story's put me in mind to one of mine I'll bet you never heard before. I'll trade it to you."

"For the story about how I ended up in foster care?"

"No. That one don't sound like something I need to know right now. I'll let you choose which one strikes you."

I poured her a Diet Coke from the spritz gun, my own offering in what looked to be our truce. "What's your story about, Jolene?"

"It's about the most beautiful love song I ever heard that's never been in any jukebox. Anywhere."

*****

Thank you for reading my story, especially those who left great comments for me on Chapter One. Like all the writers on Literotica, the only payment I receive for writing and posting stories is the appreciation of my readers. If you enjoyed this story, please let me know with your vote and your comments. Look out for Chapter Three: To Sleep Alone All of My Life, in two weeks.