The Retirement of a Victorian Witch
An aging cleaning woman at a public swimming pool clings to her magical way of life amid a high-tech renovation
AS THE SNOW FALLS from midnight skies outside, mere days before the hallowtide of winter solstice, Rilyeh the Elder performs her last sacred dance of the season. The Victorian Baths Spa and Pools—a rundown public swimming facility—would close for the holidays. She would need to savor this. It would be all she has to get through the dark nights ahead.
She swirls her bony finger, black and purple, into the dank drain hole of the men’s showers. Swirling for hair, dead skin, finger nails, all green and gooey with decay, she never fails to find treasure. She lowers her cheek to porcelain, puckers her lips towards the hole and whispers invocations into darkness, “Come out, my pretties. Come out, come out.”
Her finger and voice, both crooked with age, seek that which lies below, a witch’s secret, a magic that keeps her alive. On arthritic hands and knees she crawls on faded and cracked tile—once white, now grey and blue—around the drain, whispering, whispering into the pipes, into the small dark passageways that lead into the depths, into the unfathomable.
In decades past the pool stood as a philanthropic gesture from a local industrialist to his workers. A testament to craftsmanship, masonry, and ironworking. But times change: industrialists die, and industry moves away. And no one believes in craftmanship anymore, only costs. Until recently, the pool’s upkeep fell on cash-poor local councils. They did the minimum to keep the mold and mildew at bay. Shoddy repairs, and a thin coat of paint every decade, is all that holds it together. And so she cleans in vain. No one watches the old lady with her mops, with her bony black and purple digits, crooked and swirling for treasure, for old magic, in the Men’s Room. No one knows.
She draws the goo from the holes, and recites her incantations. Her voice echoing off rust stained porcelain, and lime scaled glass. In the dim showers, darker images pour forth. The spirits of the pipes, the dark memories that live beneath, come to tell their tales. Unflattered by the flickering fluorescent lights, they shy from her, though she calls them nightly, and knows them well.
She turns off the lights, leaving only the ever present glow of the emergency exit sign, it’s plastic yellowed with age. Then she coaxes them with “Pretty, pretty pets. Come, come now. Dance with me again.”
And in the twilight, a dark steam rises around her. The mist takes the shape of forgotten men of the Victorian Baths, fat and hirsute, scratching their pits, their bellies, their groins. Short, dark, curly hairs sluicing down their bodies, mixed with hard soap and oily pool water residue. She hears them clearing their noses, their throats, horking out gobs of phlegm and mucus into the drains. See feels the goo, feels the mix of pubes and sputum. She knows they all piss in the showers too. All the secrets end up here. No one thinks that anyone knows, but she can smell it, heavy in the air, like a Christmas turkey in the oven.
And so she dances, dances with the dark secrets of the baths, as she pushes her mops, and wipes down the walls and surfaces. They dance in time to the dripping faucets. No one knows.
When she is spent, and the dancing, and the cleaning done, she says her goodbyes to the dark spirits, and prepares to leave for the season. As she pushes out into the cold, the doors locking shut behind her, she notices an unfamiliar sign. Posted to the outside of the front doors, perhaps while she danced, it reads: “Action Interiors—Coming Soon!” She laughs like a girl, thinking she’s had enough action tonight, turns and trudges off through the snow, each step away feeling older, feeling the snow grow deeper, colder. She trudges off to hibernate a fortnight until the Victorian Baths Spa and Pools will re-open in the New Year.
***
She spends two weeks alone in her tiny caravan. No one calls, for she has no phone. Her cathode-ray-tube TV, with its antennae splayed like the legs of a cat licking itself, spews out fuzzy daytime game shows and nightly holiday special atrocities. She eats only saltine crackers, washed down with weak jasmine tea, and chased with White Rabbit candies, as she counts down the days of her annual furlough.
Sometimes, she sits shivering in her empty bath, knees pulled to chest, while swirling fingers in the drain for treasures, but no man ever stood over this dark passageway. The hallowtide of solstice creeps past like a burglar in the night.
Into the second week, the loneliness grows unbearable. She needs the spirits. She burrows into her bed, beneath the heavy stack of tattered Afghans and fraying shawls, and calls to the darkness, to the ineffable shapes from below. She desires a dance, but they give her only faint glimpses, frustrating fragments, until she cries herself to sleep, gooey tears crusting to her pillow.
No one would know.
***
Upon the re-opening of the Victorian Baths, her desperate need for the company of the dark spirits—the need to dance with them—drives her to arrive early for work, before closing, before her usual witching hours. Contractors’ vehicles loiter in the handicap parking outside the entrance like menacing playground bullies. Painted on their sides: “Action Interiors—When you need it done fast!”
The facility administrator, a young woman named Marcy Meagre, holds court in the lobby. She wears her hair up in a tight bun, and a strand of pearls around her neck, in an attempt to seem older and more competent. She congratulates the workers on pulling off a Christmas miracle, when she notices the old cleaning lady.
‘Why hello, Mrs Rilyeh. Happy New Year to you,’ she beams. ‘I was just telling these young men that they’ve done such a fine job getting us ready for next month’s 130th anniversary celebration. It’s hard to believe it’s the same place, isn’t it?’
The facilities look new, and yet old at the same time. Workers have peeled away what the dark decades had accreted, exposing the old bones, and then illuminating them with new technology. Restored red brick and wrought iron dazzle under rows of sleek new LED lights. The old lady squints. She knows it’s too bright for her pretties. It’s too bright for her. She feels dizzy, untethered, as if abandoned by a gravity that once held her to the floor of this place.
‘I bet you’re excited not to have to clean the old showers anymore. These boys have been working extra hard for us over the break to give the community a special, and very expensive renovation,’ says Marcy. ‘Long overdue!’
The old woman, with a stiff, arthritic arm swishing a path before her, pushes through the workers and moves directly to the men’s showers. To her horror, it gleams with new nano-coated tiles, new brass fixtures, new self-flushing urinals, new anti-fogging mirrors, and new self-drying shower stalls. The interior designer styling it all in a fashion sympathetic to its origins more than a century ago: old, but not. A clever illusion, a spell warding against true age.
The room sparkles like the white teeth of a predator.
A technician in an Action Interiors jumpsuit applies the finishing touches to a control panel on the wall, activating the automated robot cleaners. Like giant hockey pucks gliding across fresh ice, the disc-shaped janitors rush out from their hidden charging stations, swirling around the floors, and around the drains, hoovering up the goo.
No! My magic!
‘I hope this doesn’t put you out of work,’ says the worker.
She is certain he doesn’t mean it.
Marcy’s voice follows up from behind as she joins the congregation in the Men’s Room, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about Mrs Rilyeh. She has been a member of the Victorian Baths family since before I was born. She’ll always have a job here for as long as she wants one. But maybe it will be a bit easier on her now.’
She gives the drain lady a little reassuring pat on the arm, and turns to escort the workers out—gushing with compliments and flattery.
They leave the old woman with her crooked, black and purple fingers standing in full unflattering view before the mirrors, her skin grey and blue beneath the bright LEDs, standing stone still as the robots swirl about her, closing in, preparing for the kill.
No one would know.🙭
First published in Elegant Literature Issue 42. https://www.elegantliterature.com/magazine/