Cosplay: The Tale of Cynthia and The Fallen Mask

Inspired by The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Cosplay is an origin story for Cynthia Peters, a character from Malevolent Fairy, the final part of the Tangled Knot trilogy.
 
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I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the television-lit bedroom in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the cotton sheets and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great timbre of the gossip from each character who bore me through my life so far, away from childhood and teenage years, through my twenties, and into the unguessable territory of my thirties.
 
And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my favorite character, a grandmother stuck at the dead-end of a neighborly street, would be moving slowly about a plotline that had been recycled countless times, and she might pause before the camera and think of all the people, including myself, who were turning their back on these daytime soap operas. She might feel threatened by all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of someone like myself, a woman who has decided to explore a life beyond these shows, to leave the television set behind, and walk down their stairs and out the front door.
 
Are you sure, she might have asked, facing the camera directly in a way that was usually prohibited when acting. Are you sure you want to leave this room of womb-like protection, with the multitude of television channels at your disposal, the trinkets lined up by your bed, and the coffee dispenser always percolating at the edge of satisfying your need for stimulation?
 
‘I’m sure I need more than this,’ I said.
 
And would say no more.
 
She sighed, as if it was with reluctance that I might at last banish the specter of isolation from its habitual place in my meagre bedroom. She should understand my predicament, for my favorite character had known of her own isolation. I learned from the gossip blogs that after she had failed to find a lover, wife or husband, she gladly, defiantly beggared herself for fame and freedom from her own bedroom and graced the stages of Australia before landing this role that she made her own for years, decades, even.
 
Now, this fine day, her gallant spectators are failing to return from other preoccupations, and her agent is getting twitchy about these dwindling viewer numbers, but even this stranglehold of guilt will not keep me here in this bedroom of isolation where I am trapped by the comfort of her overly rehearsed lines.
 
A starburst of lights spattered from my opening door, and I almost retreated, letting my home consume me once more. I thought of the onslaught of attention that would greet me, from passers-by and their silent stares, their inquiring minds and their assessments, evaluations, and categorizations that always concluded with ‘clown’ or ‘misfit’ or ‘oddity.’ My big feet, the garish colors that I wore, and the mysterious noises I made forced me into the category, they claimed, of a clown, an oddity borne of a strange place that existed far beyond the grasp of their imagination, a haunted castle, perhaps, whose walls were made of stone, that legendary habitation in which I had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. My destination, my destiny, because I was not, am not, a clown nor a misfit nor an oddity. I am a woman, still young enough, of pointed breasts and shoulders, and I have shown men, online, how teasingly they might caress me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs as I shifted restlessly in my bedroom. Their kiss I invited, with tongue and teeth in it, if they choose, and promised that one chosen one might return to my bedroom to lay with me in my bed. For too long it had been theoretical, acting as wooden as the grandmother in the Australian soap opera, and now it was time to use these dating apps and arrange a meeting with one of these men, at the park, no less, so I can play at adulthood, for a change, in real life.
 
Above the syncopated roar of my heartbeat, I could hear my jagged, unsteady breath. I saw protruding like spears the black metal railings of the park, motifs of war some might say, but I found them of comfort, as a boundary for the unfurling. Just so it didn’t get too messy. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I could see amongst the trees, the dark, leonine shape of his head and my nostrils caught a whiff of the opulent male scent of leather and spices. Though he was a big man, he moved as softly as if his shoes had soles of velvet, as if his footfall turned the ground into snow. I imagine he planned to surprise me in my abstracted solitude. I imagine he wanted to pounce, after softly creeping up from behind me. But that perfume of spiced leather would have betrayed him, and I would have been forced to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed.
 
The moon was swollen and bright, so I could see that he was older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane. But his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures have been eroded by successive tides. There was a stillness about his face that disturbed me, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes and the absolute absence of light, and it made him appear as if he were wearing a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underneath this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the face in which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a face unsigned by the years.
 
And, elsewhere, I might see him plain. Elsewhere. But, where?
 
In, perhaps, my bedroom to which I longed to bring him, where I could serve him coffee from the dispenser, and show him my trinkets and shows. I could even introduce him to the Australian grandmother, and there might be an awkward transition when he didn’t appreciate her in the way that I did, but eventually, surely, he would come to love her as his own.
 
I found that he was trembling. His breath came thickly. He could not meet my eye and turned his head away, out of pride, out of shyness, and watched a dozen rays of light flash from cars that passed outside the park. Slowly, methodically, teasingly, I unfastened the button and zipper of his trousers and slipped my hand in. Enough! No; more! Off comes some of my clothes, and the blood rushed to my face.
 
I guessed it might be so- -that we should have no formal disrobing, no ritual to remember. Sheltered as my life had been, I knew that things would be clumsy and full of greedy haste. I approached him like he was a familiar treat, with a relentless appetite, but he soon grew weary.
 
He began to shudder, and he told me that he had business to attend to. He leaned in to kiss me goodbye and there was a pungent intensification of the odor of leather. I held onto his shirt collar and forbade him to leave. I knew that I could not tell him about my bedroom, and the bed where I secretly hoped that we might conceive. I stammered foolishly: We’ve not taken dinner yet; and besides, I need you to stay until sunrise, where it will be all the better to see you. When he pulled back, and I did not relent, I wondered if he might choke me here, in the darkness, and drop my body amongst the trees. I thought of fertilizer, and what little I knew about what was in that mixture that fed the trees and bushes with so much nourishment. I wanted him to twine my hair into a rope and lift it off my shoulders so that he could kiss the softened skin beneath my ears; to make me shudder. But he stood there, without action nor words, and I realized we were playacting at this show that is adulthood. My mask had dropped and he didn’t like what he saw, so I was in danger of returning alone to the Australian soap actress, who would know how much I depended on her, so she might put less effort into her lines, and it might lose its allure, and wasn’t it going to anyway, in sharp contrast to the taste and smell of flesh in real life?
 
Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if I were giving a child a great, mysterious treat, I took out a ring of keys from inside my pocket, and I shook them before his wide eyes. Most of the keys were clumsy and archaic, and a flutter of laughter tickled my throat when I thought he might view them as keys for a dungeon. Keys, keys, keys. I told him there might come a day when I could trust him with these keys, although I might keep one from him, and if he asked, I would forbid him from touching it. I imagined how much fun we might have if he asked what one particular key was for. ‘The key to your heart?’ he might ask. ‘Then give it to me!’
 
I would dangle the key tantalizingly above his head, out of reach of his straining fingers, and I would tell him that every woman must have one secret. I would ask him to promise me that he uses all the keys on the ring except that last one, the one I had engraved with a small question mark. When I was inspired to add this engraving, did I foretell this moment when it could tempt a stranger even more, with something mysterious, something forbidden, for what better way to punctuate a moment of mystique?
 
He looked at the keys that dangled before his eyes that were twinkling in the moonlight, and I told him that my entire home could be his, that everywhere could be open to him—except the lock that this single key fits. I told him that all it is is the key to a little room at the furthest reach of my apartment, at the end of a dark hallway full of horrid cobwebs that would get into his hair and frighten him if he ventured there. (I’d seen how he flinched at every leaf that hung from the surrounding branches, and the creepy crawlies that scuttled about our darkened shoes.) 
 
He seemed to grow tired of my little game, so he told me that he had to leave the park, that he had an important business meeting, although what sort of business he might have planned this late into the evening was beyond me. He promised that we could meet again, and he agreed that he would come to my home this time, instead of frolicking in the dirt and shadows with a raw and feral heart. I knew he was lying when he made these promises.
 
I thought of returning to my bedroom to lay in bed alone. I thought of how I would long for him, unable to drift into a slumber. And that disgusted me.
 
I was certain, now, that he had no important business meeting, and he was leaving me for an importunate mistress tucked away in some other park, so I ordered him to walk me home, and to my surprise, he agreed. He probably feared the scandal I might create if he disagreed with me, if I told everyone how he pinned me to the ground and tore at my clothes (I could produce one or two tears, if needed) and, of course, there was enough evidence of his body intermingled with mine.
 
As we walked from the park, the bunch of keys lay in my pocket, and by the time we reached my apartment, the friction of our movement had excited them so that they no longer felt cold to the touch but warm, almost, as my own skin. He eyed me reproachfully as if I’d set a trap as I retrieved the clinking bundle of keys from my pocket. I felt the exhilaration of an explorer as I plunged the key into the lock and turned to let him in, swiftly closing the door behind us as soon as he stepped across the threshold, and sealing us in with the thickening air
 
Lights! We need more lights! he might have cried, if he wasn’t mute with fear. Instead, he felt for the walls of a blackened hallway, stumbling on something or other as he let out a stifled cry of confusion. How strange he must find this dark apartment, and how strange to find that it is he, not me, a mere woman, who is the intimidated one, who is trying to keep a hold of his manners and smile through his fear. I think of distracting him with a trip to my bedroom where I would open it with the question marked key, a place where I could show him a secret drawer containing a file labeled: Personal. Would he think that my heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, rests within this file? And would he expect to find in this drawer a postcard with a view of a village graveyard, among mountains, where some black-coated ghoul enthusiastically dug at a grave?
 
A joke. A clownish joke in the worst possible taste when the poor man is practically crawling the walls as he stumbles on something that emits a pungent aroma, and he is probably fearful that he has wandered too far from the straight and narrow, and he is cursing himself for ever messaging a strange woman on a dating app and meeting her in a dark and dirty park. Think of the filth that can be encountered, and to think that he might walk it into his home, and to what or whom? A wife and children who await him, who kiss the same mouth that he ran along the edges, and eventually the depth, of that filth? He made his decision to explore all this and ultimately end up in this long, mysterious hallway, so he probably deems it inevitable to find himself embroiled in some kind of horror story.
 
‘There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer,’ opined my favorite poet; and now this man could see this too, or some such fear, because his wild eyes and terrified grin were rigid under the partial light from my cell phone. Blinded, he must be seeing in his mind’s eye red walls of naked rock surrounding a rack, a wheel, and other such instruments of torture.
 
Absolute darkness. The cell phone light died, and I wondered if he might take this opportunity to run, so I grabbed for his shirt collar again. With the most treacherous, lascivious tenderness, I kissed his eyes, and, mimicking the earlier passionate version of this man from the park, he flung his arms around me, for on his seeming acquiescence depended his salvation.
 
My hand brushed his trousers, and he flinched from this intimate touch, perhaps seeing once more those instruments of torture that he invented from my awkwardness, and I felt there emanate from him a stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly, and the leather of his scent were reverting to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed. The gravity of our presence, combined and ready to merge as one again, exerted a tremendous pressure on the hallway we were standing in, so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea.
 
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I can smell the blood.’
 
The cell phone light flickered back into life so I could see him again, this time with a hand over his nose, and I figured he wasn’t used to the smell of my body as much as I was. I could be lazy with hygiene, I admit, but he didn’t have to react so dramatically, so I made a joke of the discarded tissues, the ones that looked, in some respects, beautiful with crimson splayed out like a Rorschach test, and I bid him welcome to my bloody chamber. No doubt he presumed that the evidence of the blood showed him he could expect no mercy. Yet, when I raised my head and stared at him, I wondered if he felt a terrified pity for me, for this woman who lived in such a strange manner.
 
The atrocious loneliness of a monster! Restore the fallen mask!
 
I thought of ordering him to ‘Kneel!’ I thought of pressing the key lightly to his forehead, holding it there for a moment, and I wondered if the mark left on him might be a question mark, a heart, or the sign of the beast.
 
I heard him whimper and curse. Was he silently preparing himself for decapitation with a ceremonial sword, or some other form of martyrdom, and would he expect it to take the form of some elaborate ritual of sacrifice before whatever god or gods I might worship? He might even hear, ringing in his head, the trumpets of the angels of death, a fitting tribute to a person who meant something to someone, assuming there was some wife or children kept hidden far away from me. Only the accompanied are deserving of homage.
 
The whizz of that heavy sword; no less terrifying to be imagined than real.
 
But then a frenzied scrabble back down the hallway, and to the door that he used to try and reach the safety of the street. A great battering and pounding, and the unholy silence of the place shattered in an instant. No blade descended, no head rolled, and no man through the door, at the door, or standing right next to me in the first place. Instead, the grandmother, my devoted companion, never missing a beat with her next line or move. You never saw such a wild thing as this Australian soap actress, still playing her heart out as the audience numbers dwindled. And I was still there, in my bedroom, standing so close to the television screen that the fizzle and hiss of static tickled my nose. I must have dropped the remote, stepped on a button and switched to a show about a man in a park, maybe a bloody chamber too. That could be what happened, but then why do I feel different, as if things have been rearranged inside of me, as if something is growing and, one day, it might break free of this mask and flourish, and seek freedom from this bloody chamber.

BB Clifford 
Author of Tangled Knot, Rainbow Warrior, and Malevolent Fairy