CORPSE BABY

YOU’D THINK AFTER my brother the snake was born they’d have stopped at one. But no.

Next was the wolf, Fenrir.

And then me.

How Mum must have hoped, when my top half slithered out, that it was third time lucky. A human head. Praise the Blood Mother. Pink cheeks. Pale skin. No scales! Two arms. Ten little fingers at the end of two dimpled hands. Oh, thank you Blood Mother, thank you Hekla the fierce one, Earth Spewer, Ancestors all. Finally, finally, I am blessed. Oh, sound the horns, bang the drums. My darling, my baby, my beauty, almost there.

Panting. Straining. Pushing. A little god? A little goddess? Who cared, just so long as–

And then slither. Plop. Out I come, dangling my rotting legs. Corpse baby. Carrion tot. The third monster.

Mum screamed. Cursed the Earth Spewer and the Sun Swallower.

Dad – well, Dad probably would have screamed too, if he’d been around. Which he wasn’t.

And me? Yeah, I screamed. Everyone else was – why shouldn’t I join the party?

I slipped from her hands and smacked onto the rocky ground. Ouch. Ow. Mum kept on screaming and wailing.

I remember everything. I remember it all.

What’s she howling about? I thought. I’m the one flopped on the floor.

Then rough grey fur. Growling.

A tongue licked me. I flinched. Fen’s iron breath chilling my face. That’s fitting, isn’t it, that my first smell is putrid.

“Leave it, Fenrir,” said Mum. (Thanks, Mum!) She tossed my wolf brother a bloody haunch of meat. He tore into it with frantic whimperings. I heard the hideous squelchy sound of raw flesh being ripped from bone.

Mum looked down at me, then turned away. Her tears dribbled onto my face.

It’s not all about you, Mum. What do you think it’s like for me? Okay, I didn’t think that then. I’m a goddess, but even I was born a mewling infant.

I lay naked on my back and looked up at the rocky ceiling, black with smoke. This is my cold, dark, noisy, heavy world. Screaming. Slobbering. Could be worse. Could be better. What did I know then?

Each of you must endure the ending of life in this world. But not me.

Time’s iron feet don’t trample over me. Time is what I have. Time without end. A long, dull, everlasting eternity. I live in time and out of time. Time for me stands still.

I am Hel, Goddess of the Dead.

This is my story. This is my word-shrine. This is my testament. I don’t know who will be alive to hear it, but I want to tell my saga. For too long others have spoken for me; now I speak for myself.

I wasn’t always lying silent and rotting on a stinking bed in the Underworld. Listening to snakes hissing and corpses shrieking.

I am telling about the time before time, when Midgard was new and shiny and unpeopled, Asgard was half built and the gods settling into their kingdom, drawing boundaries, establishing their cruel dominion over the rest of us.

I didn’t start off hating everything. I liked flowers.

I liked trees.

I liked mountains.

I liked glaciers.

It was just mortals I couldn’t stand. And the gods. And my family.

Oh.

Just one more thing. Before you reject me, before you hate me, remember: I never asked to be Hel’s queen.

UNWRAP THE BANDAGES

AS A CHILD I NEVER smiled. Ever. Or laughed. Not even when Fen got up on his hind legs and danced before biting a rat in half.

What exactly did I have to smile about?

I once heard a story about a rich giantess who would only marry the giant who made her laugh. She’d chop off the heads of the ones who didn’t. That would be me, surrounded by skulls.

My nature is sombre and fierce. That’s who I am, not some jolly skipping elf, beaming and twining daisies to crown my golden locks. My hair is silver, by the way. Coiling and curling past my shoulders. Strong like a fishing line. My hair is the only part of me others want to pat and pull. I hate being touched so no one dares, but I can see it in their faces. I tried to comb it once, with my mother’s comb, and the walrus ivory splintered. She walloped me for that. Maybe Dad gave her the comb (unlikely – Dad wasn’t exactly lavish with gifts). I can’t see why she made such a fuss. I thought, Why do you beat me? Get another comb. Who cares, it’s just a comb. She’s the mother of a snake and a wolf and a half-corpse, you’d think she’d have more serious stuff to get upset about.

I rarely went outside. I hated being shouted at as I lurched around on my corpse legs, wind-blown and bent over in the hail, my ice-white hair shrouding my face, hoping no one would notice me.

Fat chance.

“Aren’t you the lovely one?” said a two-headed troll, smacking his rubbery lips.

Compliments from a troll.

It was easier just to stay hidden in our cave.

When I say “cave,” I’m exaggerating. Did you imagine I lived in a dank pit like some ogre? Underground like a dwarf in a furnace? Ha. Our cave was more like a great hall than some low hole. Remember who’s talking to you. Hel. I’m a goddess.

Unfortunately (a word bound to me with iron fetters), wherever I shuffle about in our cave the smell hits me. Heavy. Foul. Overlaid with the perfume of rancid wet dog (thanks, Fen) and anything noxious and maggotty he’d dragged home from Ironwood on which to snack.

And then, of course, there was me. I brought my own stink with me wherever I went. We kept a smoking lamp, filled with oils, to mask the odour but it never did.

We’ve been avoiding the subject. Let’s take a look at my bottom half, shall we? You know you want to. Go on, have a good gape at my carrion legs. I’ll lift up my furs and unwrap the bandages, set aside the rosemary and mint I use to try to hide my stench. What colour will my twisted legs be today? How much more decayed the flesh? They moulder and stink, blotched with gangrene. And yet they never rot away: corpse legs suspended in life. My immortal flesh never peels off. It just stays attached, reeking and putrefying.

And what about my face? What about it? I have two eyes, a nose, a mouth. Do you really think anyone gets close enough to me to take a second look? One whiff and they’re off.

Seen enough? Smelled enough?

Sometimes I dream my legs are whole. I run, or fly, I move gracefully through the worlds. Then I wake and I’m back to my monstrous self, jerking like a cart with a broken wheel. Walking is hard for me. I spend a lot of time lying on my mat or sitting on a cushioned chair, a bearskin pulled over my legs. I watch the slaves gut fish and hang it to dry on racks by the fire. (Yes, of course we had slaves. We weren’t savages. They fetched firewood and water, fed and cleaned the animals, made butter and cheese, brewed ale and mead. Occasionally one of them would unwrap my bandages and wrap my corpse legs in fresh ones – as if new cloth could make any difference.)

My father visits every so often, but then I’m banished immediately. He picks Fen up by the scruff of his neck and hurls him out of the cave. Jor slithers away before he can be caught. I move towards him –

“Go away! You stink of death. My gods,” he’d yell, before sweeping my mother up in his arms. Mum is kinder when Dad’s not around. When he is, I might as well be a fish bone.

I remember huddling on the floor while Mum and Dad screamed and hurled benches and platters. Once Dad smashed a plate of food to the floor, which no one touched for nights. Even Fen left it alone. And I thought, Just go away, Dad. We don’t need you. Just go away.

When they fought, it was easier for Fen and Jor to scuttle out. I couldn’t really move, so I hid, made myself small. Dad cursed Mum for breeding monsters.

She cursed him for siring us. “Trolls take you!” they screeched at each other.

I would take cover under a bench, humming oh so quietly to myself, sending my thoughts far away. I’d heard that two of the goddesses had falcon capes that gave them wings to fly and I wished with all my heart I had one too.

When it was just Mum and us, which was more and more often, what can I say? Once she made a rattle of bones for me. I clacked them together a few times, more in shock because I’d been given a toy. Then I dropped it and Fen chomped it up. Mum never made me another. Actually, I didn’t need any noisemakers. What with the hissing and the howling and the fighting and the shouting, there was enough noise to fill the cave without me adding a few rattles of my own.

I’ve heard there are parents who smother their children with love. Give them the choicest tidbits. Wrap them in the softest furs. Tickle them under the chin and call them “dumpling” and “honey lamb”.

Ugh. I can’t imagine that.

Excerpted with permission from THE MONSTROUS CHILD by Francesca Simon. Copyright © 2016 by Francesca Simon. First published in the US in June 2017 by Faber & Faber.