DOMINION by Bentley Little (interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

When she was little, around eight or nine, she had seen the movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Bing Crosby. It had been light entertainment, a romantic musical comedy, but the thing that had made the biggest impression on her, that had stayed with her for years to come, had been the fact that Bing had been able to save his life by remembering the date of a solar eclipse, passing himself off as a powerful magician, pretending to the medieval men and women intending to burn him at the stake that he was able to make the sun disappear by simply making absurd hand gestures at the appropriate time. It had been a terrifying scene to her, and had been the cause of many a nightmare-filled sleep time. Throughout grammar school she had been obsessed with learning the dates for solar and lunar eclipses, past and present, just in case a similar situation ever happened to her.

There was still some of that fear in her as she looked up at the moon now. Her rational mind told her that it was merely earth’s satellite, a dead, inanimate orb reflecting back the refracted light of the sun, but on a deeper, more visceral level she could not help feeling a little intimidated by it, as though, like the moon in a children’s book, it was sentient and possessed some sort of magic that could affect her life.

The feeling was strange but not unpleasant, and she was grateful that even the cold facts of astronomy had not been able to completely dissolve for her the mystery of the night sky.

Penelope looked over at her mother. “Do you like looking at the moon?” she asked. “Looking at stars?”

Her mother smiled. “Sometimes.”

Her father had liked to look at the stars.

Or so her mothers had told her.

She found herself thinking of her father. She did not think of him often, and sometimes she felt guilty about that, but she had not really known him; to her he had been little more than a face in an old photograph. He’d been a handsome man, that she knew. Tall and broad-shouldered, with longish brown hair and a mustache, he looked in his picture as if he could be either a carpenter or a college professor.

There was about him that appearance of both intelligence and physicality which suggested that he was equally at home with books and tools, adept at both mental and manual labor; a romantic assumption which was borne out by the descriptions of her mothers.

When she was younger, her mothers had talked about her father a lot, answering her myriad questions, invoking his perceived wishes in regard to discipline and learning, endeavoring to make his presence felt through affectionate stories and detailed reminiscences. But as she’d grown older, the talk had ceased, as if her father had been an imaginary entity like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, invented to aid a period of her development, as if the spectra of his life had performed its function and outlived its usefulness. By the time she’d hit her teens, the subject of her father seldom, if ever, came up in discussion, and her infrequent questions concerning him were often redirected elsewhere.

It was all very confusing to her, and sensing the shift in attitude, she had stopped mentioning him at all. Gradually, the details of her father’s life began to blur and fade, blending in with the other secondhand stories of childhood.

The details of his death, however, remained sharp and clear.

Her father had been killed shortly after she’d been born, brutally murdered, torn apart in the wild woods beyond the fence by a stray band of rabid wolves. She knew the story by heart. It had been spring, late April, and her father had gone out for one of the evening strolls he enjoyed so much. Mother Felice and Mother Sheila had been preparing dinner in the kitchen, with Mother Janine watching television in the next room. Mother Margeaux had been in the office with Mother Margaret.

All of them, even Mother Margeaux and Mother Margaret, had heard the screams, and all had come running out, only to see the gray-white blur of wolves savagely attacking a human figure on the dirt path which led between the tall trees. The screams had already stopped, but though it was night, they could clearly see in the distance the fall of her father’s upraised arm, the sleeve of his yellow shirt torn and streaked black with blood.

Mother Janine had screamed, and Mother Margeaux had rushed into the house for the rifle, ordering Mother Felice to call the police. Mother Margeaux had led the charge across the meadow, firing into the air, and the wolves had fled, scattering and disappearing into the woods.

There had been nothing left of her father’s face. His chest had been chewed open, his entrails devoured, and large chunks of his arms had been bitten off. Only his legs, for some reason, had sustained minor injuries.

The six of them had carried his body back to the house themselves, his cooling blood dripping down their arms and over their clothes, and waited for the ambulance to arrive.

The tale had been told to her and retold hundreds of times, and looking back now, Penelope wondered why her mothers had felt compelled to dwell on the end of her father’s life, why they had insisted on telling a small child such a horrifying story. For it had been horrifying. And frightening. And her mothers had always gone into gruesome detail in their descriptions of the blood and the body. She had had a series of ultra-vivid recurring nightmares in which her mothers had killed her father. What, she wondered now, had she been meant to learn from all that?

She didn’t know.

But she knew that her life would probably be a lot less confusing if her father was still alive.

Mother Felice nudged her elbow, stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go