They felt the poison coursing through their arteries in their mad scramble out into the cold world with the moon lighting their way. Unfortunately that night they did trick the sisters of purpose out of their walled monastery and extracted that fateful toll, and so too did they dig up the recently buried dead among the rows of unmarked graves in the prison cemetery. The Reverend Father K. L. Liplin wrote a sermon the next day expressing his heartfelt prayers for the victims and their family members, as well as a note of concern for the disfigurement of Assistant Deputy Raulin’s German Shepherd. The trespasses of the devil against our community are abrupt and shocking, but the great work of God always prevails on a wiser timescale. When they returned home covered in the dirt of the grave and bite marks up and down their arms they could scarcely walk, but crawled into Kate’s bedroom with the foul offerings and Kate sleepily turned one eye over her shoulder to those poor wretches on the floor and said “Oh that’s nice. You girls go on and get to sleep now. You’ll be fine. I was just hazing you,” then set her head back down on her pillow, drifting back into a delicious slumber. “That’s one I learned from my coven’s high priestess back in the day. Boy was she a pickle.” They crawled into bed and slept through into the next night, waking up to sip a few handfuls of cold water that splashed in their empty bellies like a bedpan, then returned for another equal measure of stygian sleep. - - - - - - - - - - Mistrial woke up to a reeking hand, dog’s tongue, and a bed full of pubes that had been kicked around as they slept and availed herself of these things to prank her Heathcliff, placing them all upon her in her last fitful minutes of sleep. But when Heathcliff roused herself she showed no reaction, a total no-sell, and brushed them all off except for the rough grey hand which she turned this way and that, “we should turn it into a hand of glory,” she said. “What’s that.” “It’s a hand that can open all doors.” “What do we do with the dog tongue?” “Fuck if I know.” “How do we do it?” “You place a candle on each finger, save the thumb, so you get four uses, and each time you use it one finger will curl down into the palm.” “That sounds easy enough.” said Mistrial and jumped out of bed to go secure some candles and melted them over the fingers and lit one of them, “so what should we open?” She asked, wagging it at Heath. “Oh you lit one. I think it’s going to go out before we get to anything good. Guess it’s just a wasted charge.” “Maybe I’ll open. . .” Mistrial lurched to splap the dead hand on Heathcliff’s boob, “. . . you!” And the hand passed through Heathcliff into her dark interior and Mistrial stumbled in after it. She passed through her organs, into the memories of the body and weird patterns of days gone by, through the grueling agony of the merciless surgery she herself had performed, and into the bleak sky of freedom days before, just after Heathcliff had delivered herself from the hands of a cruel cult and felt diminished and lost in every way. “Mistrial,” Heath’s voice vibrated from all about this strange space of memory and emotion and impression, “Did you just enter me like as through a doorway? I really didn’t think they worked like that. They never done that for me. ” “I think so,” Mistrial said. “Must be your tattoos, you must have a sigil that works with the hand.” “Well, glory be,” said Mistrial, “and they say these things are not an investment.” She continued on into dark corridors of heathcliff’s past, through the fear and loneliness and rejection of her secret heart. Through long tunnels of childhood abuse and neglect, stayed with her younger self for the long hours of entrapment, the arbitrary brutality of her peers, and faced the torment of that bronze bull, the derangement of Vermilla. How Vermilla had taught all her girls to fly by tossing them off a cliff with their broom and letting them sort the matter out themselves. Back in bed, Heathcliff twisted her hands in the sheets, gripping them with white knuckles, “I don’t think I want you to see all my memories.” “Oh hush, there ain’t nothing you could’ve done that can change the way I feel about you,” and as Mistrial said it she felt tremendous waves of guilt and shame bore upon the shore of a memory perfected in its countless visitations of Heathcliff cutting away at her little sister’s pale body for the broom ceremony, where the soul of an innocent is imbued into its wood handle, trapped forever. It was something that she couldn’t believe. And looked up to see Vermilla, as though from the bottom of a deep ravine under the ocean, overseeing the operation with hostile exactitude. Heathcliff groaned from without, and shook the space, radiating with disgust and self-hatred and Mistrial snapped. She reached out and slapped that evil visage of motherhood gone sick. The fear and disgust receded just a bit, like stepping out of a fog bank into the clear, and Heathcliff asked, “did you just slap my mother?” “I did,” Mistrial asserted, “and I dare say she deserved it.” And soon Mistrial was passing through all these horrible memories, slapping spitting, gouging eyes and before long Heathcliff was twisting in bed shouting YES in ecstasy and joy that had died in her long ago, YES, she called out, YES, for life lost, again and again, disturbing the Canary’s reading and sending her to another room in the large house honestly done with their shit.