Welcome to Baltimore

I was sore, sleep deprived, and busily debating the best method for disemboweling whoever arranged train schedules on the East Coast when I arrived at Penn Station. My mood was not improved when my father called. After a two hour wait, he had finally remembered to let me know he couldn’t pick me up after all. I would have to call a taxi or walk home.

Walking was not an option. I was a 5’2” white girl traveling through downtown Baltimore City with two large duffel bags. While getting mugged and/or shot would be the cap to this whole travel experience, I was still in favor of not tempting fate. Besides, even though I knew the way from Penn Station to dad’s house – I’d printed out directions before I left home – I had no clue how long it would take me to walk there, and sleeping in a bed was climbing higher and higher on my list of priorities.

Outside, the air was hot and humid. Not as oppressive as New Orleans in the summer, but still, my aversion to walking was reinforced. There were five cabs, all colors of the rainbow, pulled up against the curb, waiting for fares. I lugged my bags to the one closest to me. It was purple and blatantly advertised the Ravens. Inside the station, I’d already been inundated with memorabilia of the local football team. May as well start getting used to it.

I climbed in the back, shoving my bags to the seat next to me. I told the cabbie where to go, checking my Google directions. the corner of Eastern Avenue and Highlandtown Ave. I could've given him the street address, but I considered it a common sense move to not tell strangers exactly where I lived. That corner would get me close enough, a few blocks away from my new home. Besides, he oozed sleaziness, from his greasy, nondescript hair color, to the gumball machine bling on his fingers. Not the kind of person I would give my address to if I was dying. I was grateful that the drive from Penn Station to Patterson Park was only 10-15 minutes. I settled back in my seat as we pulled away from the curb, let my mind wander as we got on the Jones Falls Expressway, and didn't realize until those 10-15 minutes were nearly up that we were driving in the wrong direction. I wasn’t totally sure where we were, but I was positive that my driver was going the wrong way. In fact, it looked like we were going West. He was driving me out of the city.

"Hey! Excuse me, but where are we going? Patterson Park is way back the other way. Hey! Are you listening to me? Turn around! This is the wrong way! HEY!" I reached over the seat to grab his shoulder and get his attention. There was no glass visor between us, like in most cabs I was used to, and I wanted to know where the Hell we were going.

When he turned to me, I cowered back into my seat. His eyes were white, no hint of iris or pupil, his lips were pulled back in a snarl. He growled at me and turned back to stare at the road. I was struck with the fear that he was going to keep on driving and I would reappear weeks later in a city morgue. Suddenly, he turned onto a side street, fishtailed to face the way he'd come, and stopped. The engine was still running, growling; with his hands gripping the wheel, he turned to me again. His eyes were still that horrifying, unblinking white. There was no way in Hell that I was going to wait around for him to start driving again.

I rushed from the cab, tripping over my feet on the way out the door, a bag in each hand. There was an ear splitting squeal of tires as the cabbie drove away. I stood in the middle of the street, slack-jawed and trembling, staring after my ride. What had just happened?

“Hey sweet chil’, need a hand?”

The warm, low voice came from the stoop behind me. A woman was sitting on the brick stairs of a row home, wrapped in a bathrobe and some flowered, pink slippers.

“Um, yeah." My voice shook I swallowed. "My cab driver, he started going the wrong way. When I told him so, he- he just stopped and threw me out here and … I have no clue where I am”

“Hmm. Gotta watch yo’self with the people in this city, honey. Lot a no good souls wandrin ‘round, makin’ trouble fo folks.” She got up from the steps and came to stand beside me. She put an arm around me and I smelled Jean Naté and cigarettes. "Now le'see. Where you headed to honeh?"

"Uh, Patterson Park. Eastern Ave," I added on hastily. Patterson Park was a big place and I didn't want to walk any farther than I absolutely had to.

"Oooh, honeh, you're in Dru Hill. You got quite a walk back east in this heat. Now le'see, wha's the quickest way home fo a pretty li'l thing like you? Hmmm." She stared off to the end of the street, her arm still wrapped around me.

"Do you know anyone with a car who could drive me down there? I mean, it's not that far of a drive...."

"Oh no, honeh," she huffed. "All I gots is my children, an trust meh, you don't want no ride from any a them." Her tone was bitter and angry, and I dropped the subject. Don't piss off the nice lady who might help get you home, I thought.

"Now, near as I can tell, the best way to get you where you wanna be is..." she rattled off a list of street names and turns. I asked her to repeat to three times as I scribbled it down on the back of my printout sheet. It was going to take at least two hours, considering the heat and my own lack of physical endurance, to get to dads' house.

"Okay, I think I have it all," I said, showing her the list of street names and turns she'd given me.

"Looks about right to me.You get on now and stick just to those roads. Even if ya think it's a short cut, there are parts a this city that jus' don't match up like they supposed to."

She patted me on the back and shoved me to the mouth of the road. I turned around, looking back to thank her, but she was gone. I guess she had gone back inside, though I hadn't heard a door close.... I started walking. It was only going to get hotter and I had a long way to go.

Almost as soon as started, I was panicking. What if I got lost? What if I got mugged or worse? What if mom had sent me to Baltimore, hoping to save me from danger, only to get the news that her daughter had been found dead in a gutter after being in Baltimore for a few hours? How pathetic. All this time I’d been hoping I’d die from something interesting, like a black hole caused by the Hadron Collider, or some hilarious accident involving super-heated marshmallow goo and inter-dimensional gods. It didn't help that on every street, men were grouped together, always turning to look at me as I passed. I'd hear shots pretty regularly and couldn't tell if they were gun shots or cars backfiring. I stayed panicked even after I was out of the ghettos and into Baltimore proper.

Of course, by the time I reached Eastern Avenue and the Inner Harbor, annoyance, frustration, pain, and exhaustion had overwhelmed my feelings of fear. It was indeed getting hotter. My duffel bags seemed to get heavier with every step and the straps were wearing my palms and shoulders raw. I'd thought of throwing them away half a dozen times. I didn't really need clothes, not in this heat. My arms ached and my jeans were plastered to my legs. From all the sweating, I was probably dehydrated. The massive headache I had was supporting that theory. The Harbor was packed with tourists who kept pushing me and jostling me and making me nearly drop my bags. I wanted to start beating people. With my bags. A swing to someones face, another to the groin, and hopefully knock them into the water where the sharks would get them. There were sharks in this harbor, right? In my head, there were sharks.

I stayed on the right side of the street, occasionally getting lucky enough to have shadow cover. The two hours we'd estimated had spawned into three and a half. I'd had to take lots of rests; to catch my breath, to cool down, to give my hands a break from carrying the duffel bags. Eastern Avenue seemed to go on forever and ever. I wanted to cry. I was never going to get home. But after that last stretch of Hell, I saw the park. Another couple of blocks took me to Highlandtown Ave and my dad's house, what used to be my grandparents home. The steps were no longer the pristine white marble they'd been during my Nonna's time. I doubted my dad would have the time or the inclination to scrub them every Sunday like she'd done. And the ivy over the door was longer and wilder. There wasn't much dad could be persuaded to care about, his mothers house included. I would feel sad about that after I'd slept.

I opened the door with a key he'd sent me. The inside of the house looked the same and different. Most of Nonna's china plates and fake flower arrangements had been moved. Not surprising at all. I closed the door behind me, dead-bolted it, and dragged my feet to the staircase. Beds were upstairs. My legs were trembling. On second thought, no stairs. I'd probably fall. I dropped my bags on the first step and turned to the living room where there was the familiar shape of Nonna's fat, overstuffed flowery couch, draped in a navy couch cover dad must've bought to negate the femininity. Whatever. It was there and it was soft. I fell into it. Welcome to Baltimore, I thought, sinking unto well earned sleep. Home sweet home.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I boarded the Crescent at 11:30 PM on July 25^th and since it had pulled out of NOL station, I’d been praying every half hour: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, which will hopefully come before this train gets to Penn Station.

I checked the time on my cell. It was nearly 3 AM on July 27^th and I couldn’t sleep. I fidgeted in my seat, trying in vain to find a more comfortable position. There are people in this world who have the idiotic notion that train travel is relaxing and romantic, that the sound of a train moving over its tracks is lulling. These people have obviously never traveled long distance in a train. Because train travel is not relaxing or romantic or lulling at 3 in the morning when you don’t have nearly enough leg room to begin with, the chair doesn’t tilt as far back as it’s supposed to, and the wheels screech every couple of meters.

We were about to pass through Greensboro, N.C. and I was one of a handful of passengers still awake in the car. A girl across the aisle from me was typing furiously on a tiny laptop. I could hear “Go Ask Alice” blare from the headphones of her iPod. It felt like I was heading down the rabbit hole. Amtrak was moving me and my two carry-on bags from New Orleans to Atlanta, Atlanta to D.C., D.C. to Baltimore. I stretched in my seat and tried not to think about the stranger I was moving in with, but my mind inevitably wandered back to him. I wondered frequently which would be more bizarre to me; the city or the man.

Probably the man. Cities had maps and histories neatly, or crappily, written down somewhere. If a city confused you, you could Google directions. They’d probably be shitty directions but at least you’d get where you needed to go eventually. Psychology was a kind of road map, but you still needed a mental landmark for reference. All I had was vague knowledge of a break down that happened when I was 11 and the roster of his favorite B-movies. The only thing he ever connected to me and Artemis with was a love of cheesy horror and sci-fi movies from the 50’s and 60’s. I think the only time I remember seeing him smile was when we watched “The Blob,” and people were being swallowed up in the movie theater.

There was something kind of horrifying about passing through all the cities and towns in the dead of night. You knew that there were supposed to be people walking down the empty sidewalks, you could feel it. And seeing the street lights lit for no one left a sort of dread that no amount of light or sound or train car walls could totally banish. It was like the Blob or something had come by and eaten everyone. Only you couldn’t see it or hear it. Instead, it was still out there, waiting to get on the train or for you to get off. We’d been stopped at Fayetteville two hours ago the first time I’d thought of this, and I’d spent the whole 15 minutes eyeing the doors and windows in panic. Even now, passing through Greensboro, I looked out the window and thought I saw something move by the empty bus stop. I really, really needed to sleep somehow.

The sky outside my window got darker for a moment as we passed through a grouping of trees. The wheels screeched and there was this weird, endless moaning sound the train made. It had something to do with passing through air or wind at high speeds, but I couldn’t think of it. My mind had already drifted back to Baltimore.

I thought of what would eat me there. I thought of dancing wall paper and my sisters. Artemis used to say that the wall paper in her room would dance at night, and that the skeleton man in her room would tell her what it was like to die. That was in the old house, the one mom and dad had lived in after they were married. I remembered what it looked like inside, but I didn’t know where it was. I wanted to find it. I wanted to ask the skeleton man if making the wall paper dance came standard with death.

I checked my phone again and suddenly it was 4:05 AM. The girl across the aisle still had her head phones on, but I couldn’t hear anything from them. Her laptop was off and she was stretched across two seats, sleeping. I moved the armrest of the seat next to mine and stretched out too. I moved my duffel bag onto my seat for a pillow and set the alarm on my phone for 7:30. I was supposed to arrive in Baltimore at 8.

It was 4:08 AM. The train screeched again as we entered a tunnel. In the echoes and growing darkness, as exhaustion finally took me, it sounded like a woman screaming.

Introducing Fin

My name is Seraphim Constantine, and if you've spent any time on YouTube, the odds are good that you already know who I am. Eight years ago, Artemis and Holly, my older twin half-sisters, were faced with a dilemma. Being pack-rats by nature, they’d held on to almost all of their childhood toys, refusing to part with even the most tattered of dolls or obscure gum ball machine prizes. By middle school, their rooms were filled to capacity with toys they were either too old or too busy to play with. Faced with the impending sale of their beloved childhood memorabilia, the twins got resourceful. More to the point, Artemis did.

The summer before 7^th grade, Artemis, the eldest and arguably the most motivated of the Constantine girls, started a home-movie 'theater project.’ Holly and I got dragged into it when The Moms - my mother Sophie and the twins’ mom Val - decided that our heckling couples on Divorce Court was not a worthy past-time. Holly was put on recording duty and would help Artemis voice the dolls. I was given the task of making up scenes and sets for their little dramas - a job the twins had deemed boring. Artemis took the ‘interesting’ job; writing scripts for her show. Mostly she parodied things: books she’d read, TV shows and movies that she thought were either interesting, awesome, or really stupid. These, puns, and anecdotes from our family history gleefully supplied by The Moms, were her first material for Bitter Irony Productions.

No one can really remember where we got the name ‘Bitter Irony’, but it fit and we all liked it. The Moms created a YouTube account for us, helped us build a website, and bragged to friends. Between their nepotistic PR and the twins’ classmates who would help with voices sometimes, we had the beginnings of an audience.

The first two years of Bitter Irony Productions got the three of us attention, both online and in New Orleans where we lived. During that time, we each honed our respective skills. Artemis’ writing improved. Holly, in addition to becoming a video whiz, acted in almost every show, quickly becoming the official ‘face’ of Bitter Irony. I became the show’s Prop Mistress, dealing with sets, costumes, you name it, with occasional cameo appearances as the dour and smartass little sister.

When the twins went on to high school, they got involved with the student run local access channel. By the end of their freshman year, the show had moved out of our house and onto a sound stage. With a budget, cheap-to-free labor and a steady viewership, we had created a cult sensation. By senior year, Artemis had expanded from one show to three, with short bits, commentary, and contests interspersed between commercials. Eventually, the whole of New Orleans became the backdrop for Bitter Irony. And New Orleans came to love us for it.

Artemis earned an Emmy nomination for her writing last year and has been negotiating with a number of interested parties about moving the shows into syndication. Holly, post graduation, was whisked away to Broadway where she's been glorying in chorus line work and the occasional small part.

And I, meanwhile, took over the management of Bitter Irony. But while Artemis and Holly basked in the opportunities their talents had drawn to them, I seemed to attract only the dark side of fame. At the beginning of this year, it came to everyone’s attention that I had a stalker.

Let me tell you, having a stalker is not half as interesting as it sounds. I got a few irritating phone calls on the company voicemail, some creepy letters in the mail, occasional off comments in the fan site forums, but that’s it. I lived in a city with some of the highest crime rates in the country; that runs the annual risk of being flooded out by a hurricane, and go, wellwent, to a high school with rampant drug abuse. None of this, ironically, had ever given my mother Sophie, or the twins’ mom, Val, cause for concern. But having a stalker was a risk to the family, worthy of rearranging my life. Their answer to this crisis: send me to Baltimore City to live with my father.

My father, Mike Constantine, Baltimore born and bred, dated Valerie Grey during his junior year of high school. Over spring break, they did the deed and Valerie ‘went away’ for the rest of the semester. Dad, for reasons unknown - though ‘stupidity’ has been suggested -, didn’t realize that he was to blame. Life went on and he began romancing one of Valerie’s friends, Sophie Lorenzo, never suspecting that he was father to twins. They married a few days after graduation in 1988.

I was conceived in 1989 in a last ditch effort to save their marriage. Mom and dad were Catholic enough that they felt they could get away with naming me Seraphim, but not so Catholic that divorce hadn’t been an option when their brilliant plan failed. They stayed together until February of 1990 - long enough for me to be born within the sacrament of marriage in case my grandparents raised a fuss - then filed for divorce in March. And in the midst of the legal proceedings, Val re-emerged to see about getting some child support for Artemis and Holly, now three. (The resulting drama from that meeting is an epic saga involving many tears, screaming matches, and at least one pizzelli iron hurled at dad’s head. It’s a tale which The Moms will retell and embellish even more at the slightest provocation. The twins and I reenacted it with Barbie’s for our first Thanksgiving Special.)

In the end, mom and Val, having always enjoyed the company and friendship of each other more than dad’s, thought it might be fun to raise their little girls together. They returned to Nevada, where Valerie had been living with her parents and the twins since she’d conceived, and proceeded to do just that.

We stayed there, in relative peace and quiet, until I was 8. That was the summer before we started Bitter Irony. That summer was perhaps the busiest of my life up until now. I for one had had an accident that landed me in the ICU for a few months. Dad had moved to Kansas for a job, which was entirely too close for comfort in the Moms opinions. Then to top it off, one of my mom’s aunts died.

In her will, she’d left possession of her winter house to mom. Said winter house was in fact an old mansion in the Garden district of New Orleans. It was dirty, cluttered with mismatched furniture and lace doilies, suffering from wood rot near the foundation, and there was a snake nest in one of the closets. We all agreed to move in when we saw it had three bathrooms.

Dad, during all of this, had pursued a career with Baltimore’s boys in blue. He rose in the ranks pretty quickly. He became a detective for a while, and then took a job as sheriff of some farm town in Kansas; I’ve forgotten the name of it. Six years ago, he had a nervous breakdown, preceded by a series of psychotic episodes. He was booted from his job in Kansas, went into therapy for four years, moved back to his parents’ house, then tentatively rejoined the police in Baltimore.

The Moms never talk about dads’ breakdown. The subject was labeled completely taboo at home and, eventually, the twins and I learned to stop asking about it. Not that we really cared about him as a person; he’d never been involved in our lives enough for us to think of him like that. It was just morbid curiosity – and, I’ll admit, potential fodder for the show.

The twins and I had visited him occasionally as children. His parents had always made a fuss over the three of us, and been happy to take us off our mothers’ hands for the summer. But since their deaths, the only one of us to go back was Holly. Holly was peppy and friendly and pretty and, this part is vitally important, low maintenance. Even dad was usually happy to see her. But Artemis and I were too morose, too odd looking, and according to our Nana, a little too much like him for him to be happy with. So to Artemis and me, he’d made himself a stranger. And now, he was a mentally unstable stranger.

Dad lived in the house he’d grown up in, in a part of the city called Highlandtown. It was in what he assured me was still a nice place to live in the city. But I’d watched “The Wire;” I was dubious about his definition of ‘nice.’ Memories of prior visits to “Charm City” prominently featured a homeless guy who curled up to sleep on our stoop at night and car chases where police drove on the sidewalks. But more than anything else, I remembered Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Pompeii.

I can’t imagine how anyone could forget Our Lady of Pompeii if for no other reason than the horrible, soul numbing tackiness. The church showcased a Virgin Mary statue lit up with neon rays shooting from her fingertips. My parents had been married there and I’d been baptized there. Mom kept a photo of the light up Madonna in the guest bathroom. Kitschy? Yes. Surreal? Only in a horrible 1960’s sort of way. I was abandoning Anne Rice for “Hairspray.”

Preface

I'm not afraid of death. On the contrary, I find the idea of it comforting. Everyone considers it to be some huge mystery, but it's only one question really. Where do we go? Compared to all the questions we’re forced to ask in life, that one isn't bad at all.

'What do you want to do when you grow up? What are you doing with your life? Why don't you have a boyfriend? A girlfriend? Any friend? Who are you? What are you? Why are you?' You can be just as lost in life as in death. More I think. In life, we're force fed examples of what to do and what not to do and what you should be doing. There are the endless possibilities of what you could have/should have/would have done. And those reminders of possibilities and lost opportunities fester, itch, and drive us crazy. Death, on the other hand, is inevitable. Everyone meets it just the same, no matter how well your portfolio did or how many years it took you to finish college. Death is the equalizer and, in my humble opinion, the peace bringer.

Life is pain. I’m sure you’ve heard that before and it’s true. It hurts to be born and it hurts to die. And in between, life is filled with innumerable hurts that build up and bleed you dry. The childhood accident that should have killed you but didn’t. The parent who didn’t love you enough to even disapprove. So much pain. If there really is balance in the universe like religion says, then a world without pain has to exist somewhere away from here, and that somewhere must be, by necessity, death. One last, big pain before you’re free forever.

So it wasn't dying that I was afraid of now. It was the promise of pain. Excruciating pain before the end. But in the back of my mind, I was afraid that even death wouldn't end it.

Welcome

Welcome to Nevermore: the Blog, the official home to my novel in progress.

In case you haven't heard me talk about it on twitter, livejournal, or my other blog - The Box - , Nevermore is the story of Seraphim 'Fin' Constantine. Fin's unorthodox life in New Orleans takes a turn for the stranger after her family finds out she's being stalked. However, being shipped off to Baltimore to live with her father resembles Alice going down the rabbit hole rather than it being a solution to her problem. In the city, she finds the world to be a stranger place than even she'd suspected. As she gets dragged into the Baltimore Necropolis and the lives and after-lives of its occupants, she begins to wonder; who are the real monsters? The creatures of the Neverworlds, who lurk in the shadows and in between places of reality, or the face she sees in the mirror?

Prior to this blog, Nevermore has existed on my other blog, The Box, in it's rough states. The WIP version of chapters and scenes will still be hosted there, along with all my other ramblings and rantings. However, if you want the complete, edited version, served up in chronological order and without interruptions, this is the place to go.

I hope you enjoy,

- Maria D