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Reflections on Bloody Mary

By Catherine MacLeod

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“Maaa-reee,” my husband taunts. “Oh, Maaa-reee. Come out now, dear. We need to talk.”

Wrong, I think but don’t say. My mother used to say, “A real lady knows when to keep her mouth shut.” It was her favourite piece of advice. When I didn’t follow it, she whispered, “Sh, sh.”

“Mary, you don’t understand.”

Also, wrong. I understand my husband is a liar, a thief, and a joke, and his snug little world just imploded.

My mother would surely have advice for that, too.

I never wanted to follow in her footsteps, but tonight I did, right into a dark bathroom with only one exit. “History repeats itself,” she used to say, and yes, it does.

“Maaa-reee.” Shadows shift under the door as Leonard prowls back and forth. He’s drunk, terrified, and—SLAM!—determined to kick the door in. I might have 10 minutes before he goes full-out Jack Torrance.

This would’ve been a good night for most small-town college English professors. Leonard’s article, Bloody Mary: History Repeats Itself, won the Tamsin Reed Award for the Study of Urban Mythology. It’s not a well-known award, but it comes with prize money and publication in the magazine that sponsors it—reason enough to have a couple of extra drinks at the monthly English department get-together.

Not that Leonard needs an excuse. He hates the parties but feels obliged to attend. He hates that the head of the department asked me to call him James the first time we met but never extended that courtesy to him. He hates that because James likes me, he can’t just leave me home.

And tonight, after one of his colleagues announced his win, he hated me. He glared at me suddenly, as if I’d betrayed him somehow. I’d seen my father give Mom that look and knew exactly what it meant: SHUT UP.

Then he turned back to the party, smiling.

James whispered, “Mary, what the hell?” 

“I didn’t know.”

“Then who did?” 

The article should never have been submitted without his knowledge, and the people who might’ve thought they could get away with it made a short list. We clued in at the same moment: Anne, Leonard’s secretary. She’s either the cliché of the woman in love with her boss, or protecting her meal ticket, but, either way, she must’ve thought this would win her points with Leonard. 

It won’t win her any with James. It wasn’t her place to withhold information from the head of the department.

It wasn’t Leonard’s, either. But he had, and James and I both knew why. Even in a middle-of-nowhere college like this, publish-or-perish is the rule, and Leonard hadn’t published anything in over a year. He was writing steadily but not getting anywhere, and his colleagues had noticed.

Did he think I hadn’t? If he hadn’t known about the submission then, he wouldn’t be so desperate to assure my silence now, and I doubt he’d have made the news public until he had.

All I can think is that someone overheard him talking to Anne and thought the announcement would stir up tonight’s party.

Oh, it did that.

“MARY!” He kicks the door again. He doesn’t want this life, but it was the best he could get. “Mary, I can’t afford to lose everything.”

Too late. Anne must have thought no one would find out I’d written the article. Leonard must have thought I’d stay quiet if they did. Neither knew James had already read it.

And they don’t know him at all if they think he’ll let this slide. At the very least, Leonard should be looking at a demotion, but that wouldn’t mean much in a place like this. It’s more likely James will give him a choice—leave quietly or be fired.  

It sounds fair to me. Leonard is between a rock and a hard place, but I didn’t put him there. I wrote Bloody Mary: History Repeats Itself, but I didn’t tell him to steal it. 

I also didn’t turn on the light when I ran in here, but I know there’s nothing I can use as a weapon. No razor blades, because he uses an electric shaver. No hanging plant I can throw. The heaviest thing I have is a big lavender-scented candle, the last birthday gift Mom ever gave me. I’ve never used it because Leonard says he’s allergic to strong fragrances. Right—he smokes a pack a day. I carry his cigarettes and lighter in my coat pocket because he doesn’t want the faculty to know he smokes.

Just like he doesn’t want them to know he’s scared right now.

And right now, I’m sure he also doesn’t want them to know he’s scaring me.

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Bloody Mary is a kids’ game, my mother told me. Of course, it is. Half the games we teach our kids, we should just give them a hand grenade and send them out to play. You don’t tell them Hopscotch is practice for the trip to the afterlife, or that Ring Around the Rosey is a warning about bubonic plague. Those are things they learn for themselves.

Belinda Everly was big on letting kids learn things for themselves.

She didn’t know where Bloody Mary came from originally, only that most versions of the story say you spin 13 times before a mirror in a darkened room, with only a single lit candle to focus you. With every spin you say, “Bloody Mary!” On the seventh spin, the mirror takes on a reddish hue, and the shadowy form of a woman appears on the other side. You speak louder with each spin, and on the 13th, you scream, “BLOODY MARY!”

“At which point,” my mother said, “a crazy woman on the other side of the mirror reaches through and either claws your face or rips it off. Or yanks you through the mirror to live with her forever. Everyone who does this sees a different woman, I’ve heard. And some people yell, ‘Bloody Mary, I tried to kill your baby!’”

I said, “Anyone who yells that deserves to have their face ripped off.”  

“Agreed.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Have you ever done it?”

“God, no. I believe it enough to think you’d be crazy to mess with it.”

I researched the hell out of it after Mom told me that story. Writing the article years later was like revisiting the conversation.

She was a beautiful woman: green eyes, honey-blonde hair, the most elegant widow’s peak. She’d grown up too poor for much education but loved books. She’d accidentally found a volume of folklore and urban myths at the library when she was a kid and scrounged enough money to buy a used copy of her own. I still have it. She read the stories to me like fairy tales. But I never heard my father mention them once, which was strange, I thought—you’d think a well-known horror writer like Richard Everly could use that kind of information.

He taught high school English and wrote short stories and didn’t talk to me much.

But sometimes his conversations with Mom got loud.

Sometimes I wondered why she didn’t leave him. She obviously wasn’t happy with him. But I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my place to offer my mother advice about her marriage.

Her advice about hair and makeup made for agreeable chitchat, though. She never told me I was too young for lipstick, or that I shouldn’t wear it every day, but she never liked my shade. She always wiped it off right after I kissed her. “Coral doesn’t look good on me, Mary.”

After Dad left us, she stopped chit-chatting and took up drinking. The steady resales of his last story bought the good stuff. She used to say, “A real lady can hold her liquor.” She believed it right up to the night she tried to walk downstairs drunk.

I understand her better now. More than I ever wanted to. I’d always hoped to avoid becoming a real lady, but some curses stay with you. This one has me crouched against a tile wall, hands pressed over my mouth to keep the words in.

Mary, Mary.

Mirror, mirror.

Sh, sh.

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On the Monday before last Christmas, I lugged my laptop over to the library. Leonard was grading papers for his American Supernatural Fiction course, and I didn’t want to listen to him mumbling to himself. It was a quiet night, all the students hungover, burning out, or losing interest in their majors. I knew most of them by then. I’d volunteered as assistant to the librarian when we moved here, shown enough interest to actually learn the job, and got slotted into her position when she retired suddenly. It’s that kind of college—they make do with the workers they’ve got. If you do your job well enough, no one asks too many questions. 

I’d just typed the final page of Bloody Mary: History Repeats Itself when James came in with a list for me.

“I need these books, Mary.”

I took his arm and sat him in my chair. “Take a break. Forgive me, but you look as if you could use one. I won’t be long.”

I came back to find him reading my paper. “Oh, um…”

He grinned. “This is really good.”

“Thanks.”

“Has Leonard read it yet?”  

“No. There’s not much time for conversation lately.”

“You could email it to him.”

“He deletes my emails.”

James raised an eyebrow, but when I didn’t say anything else, he let it go. He said, “Your idea is solid—that Bloody Mary has always been a woman who wasn’t allowed to speak in her own defense.” He picked up the handwritten notes I’d left scattered on the desk. “Your mother sounds like quite a lady.”

“She was. This was her favorite story.”

“Please tell me she didn’t name you after it.”

“You never know.”

He was joking. I wasn’t.

“I’ve read all of your father’s stories,” he said. “The Same River Twice is my favorite.”

“Mine, too.”

“His earlier ones were…”

“Workmanlike?” I asked. Most reviewers said that.

“Yes. But The Same River Twice is brilliant.”

“It was the last story he ever sold.” 

“Mary, did the police ever…?”

“No, they never found him. They say his case is still open.”

I locked up and James walked me out. The next day there was a power surge of some kind, and my laptop got fried. I lost everything, including Bloody Mary. I asked around the computer science department, but it hadn’t happened to anyone else. Finally, I put it down to bad luck and planned to retype everything when I got a new laptop. 

Apparently, Leonard was my bad luck. 

He walked me out of tonight’s party while James was in the kitchen. He was actually growling by the time we got home. There’s not much difference between anger and fear, but he was in no mood to be reasoned with. He shoved me through the door ahead of him, then turned around to lock it.

My mother never told me a real lady knows when to run.

Some things you learn for yourself.

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I’ve heard Bloody Mary was beaten by the man she loved.

That she was falsely accused of witchcraft and hanged without a trial.

That she had her face mutilated in a car accident and lost her boyfriend because he was disgusted by her looks.

What does Leonard see when he looks at me? A rival? A threat? I think maybe, once, he thought there might be some prestige in marrying Richard Everly’s daughter. 

I left college to follow him here. Neither of us knew what we really needed. He used to sing silly lines to make me laugh: “Mary, Mary, a little contrary,” and “Mary-Belle has tales to tell.” He was young and a fool. I was younger and a bigger one. I didn’t think there was anything distinguished about me—or the memory of my father.

By the time Dad left, I knew enough to hide when the fighting started. That last night he was yelling something about The Same River Twice and telling Mom to come out and talk to him. She was screaming my name, yelling that she’d been hurt, but I was too scared to go help. I heard the door frame crack and the sound of breaking glass as my father lunged into the bathroom. I remember screams that weren’t my mother’s, and then sudden, unnerving silence.

I think I passed out for a while. I never saw my father leave. Mom limped out eventually, trembling with shock. She hugged me almost absently, and I asked, “Where’s Dad?”

She said, “Sh, sh.”

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Sorting Mom’s papers after she died was an adventure. There were boxes full of letters, newspaper clippings, postcards, and old to-do lists.

And several early drafts of The Same River Twice written in her precise cursive.

My mother wrote my father’s most famous story.

His job requirements weren’t the same as Leonard’s. He couldn’t pretend he needed the publication. But even after he left, she never said anything. She let him get away with it. My mother, who’d wanted to be the next Shirley Jackson, couldn’t make herself throw stones. 

I don’t understand that. But I think I understand this now: the night Dad left she wasn’t screaming for me. She wasn’t saying she’d been hurt.

She was learning that at a time like this, there’s only one thing a real lady can say.

I light Mom’s candle, wishing like hell she’d given me a hand grenade. Leonard is ramming the door steadily, the sound of history repeating itself. I start spinning as it cracks, whispering, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” Saying, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” Yelling, “Bloody Mary!”

Screaming, “BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY!” The door smashes as the mirror turns red. “BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY!”

When he rushes in, I grab his arm and shriek, “BLOODY MARY!” and shove him ahead of me. Flailing for balance, he accidentally gets in one good slap. I stumble back, tripping over my own feet, my head hitting the toilet seat as his face hits the mirror. Just for a second, I think I see arms reaching from behind the glass, and a pale and furious face before Leonard is, impossibly, sucked through the mirror.

Just for a second, I think Bloody Mary has the most elegant widow’s peak.

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Several of the neighbors heard the noise. When the police arrive, I’m sitting on the bathroom floor, staring at nothing. They ask, “Where’s your husband?”

“I don’t know. I think…I passed out for a while.” My lip is bleeding. There’s glass in my hair. If I hold a piece of it to my ear like a seashell, will I hear Leonard screaming?

They drive me to the hospital. I have bruises but no deep cuts, a headache but no concussion. James comes to get me in the morning. The police are already back in my apartment, and I wait in the hall until they’re ready for me, singing under my breath, “Mary, Mary, a little contrary,” and “Mary-Belle has tales to tell.”

Marry in haste, repent at leisure, I think but don’t say.

The police ask more questions, but none that I mind. When they’re done, I drift away, wondering what possibilities might present themselves now. I want to stay here. This small town is my home. The college still needs a librarian. Maybe I can finish my degree. 

I can use the prize money to get another apartment and a new laptop. But not a bottle of anything: I’m not following Mom’s footsteps down that road.

I’m sure the investigation into Leonard’s disappearance will be forever ongoing. I feel a moment of pity for him, but nothing more. Last night his desperation got the best of him. Today the best thing I can say about our marriage is that he probably wouldn’t have killed me on purpose.

I don’t know what Mom would have said about that.

Everyone sees a different woman in the mirror, she said. Maybe the one I think I saw thought someone was trying to kill her baby.

I go back into the bathroom. Leonard stepped on my candle. There’s glass on the floor, but a few shards still hang in the mirror frame. On impulse, I plant a bright coral kiss on the biggest.

One of the policemen calls, “Ma’am? We’re leaving now.”

I step to the door and say, “I’ll be right there.”

When I look back, the lipstick is gone.

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Host Commentary

Before we go further, this story contains references to coercive control, spousal abuse, and alcoholism.

Is there anything worse than realising that someone you thought you knew, thought you could trust, is a liar? Has been lying to you, has been lying to other people, and worst of all, apparently sees nothing wrong in that? That’s what Mary is dealing with, here. The horror of realising the floor you thought was pretty solid under your feet isn’t, and you need to get out, as soon as possible. 

Bloody Mary: History Repeats Itself. 

I love the title of the article embedded in this story, because it does so much. Just in case you don’t know the details of the Bloody Mary myth, let me go over it.

It was originally a divination ritual. A young woman is meant to walk up some stairs backwards, holding a candle and a hand-mirror. As they gaze into the mirror, they’re meant to be able to catch a glimpse of their future husband’s face. But if they saw a skull, instead, it meant they would die before having a chance to marry. 

That version is less well-known than the more modern version described here: in which someone, or a group of someones, speak the name ‘Bloody Mary’ some number of times into a mirror in a dimly lit room. At which point, an apparition appears, possibly covered in blood, which may be friendly or… might not be. Participants are supposed to endure the figure, whatever happens.

And then, of course, there was the 16th century monarch, Mary I of England, also known as Mary Tudor – the only surviving child of Henry VIII by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. To quote comedian and writer David Mitchell: 

“Queen Mary was known as Bloody Mary because of the large number of people she killed. And also because of misogyny. She was the first properly crowned woman to rule as queen regnant, not just queen consort. You weren’t supposed to be able to do this job if you were a woman, so a lot of people didn’t like it.

 

So there are lots of things tangled up here. In this story, Mary’s mother, with her elegant widow’s peak, died trying to walk downstairs drunk one night, having been trapped in an abusive relationship with Mary’s father. Mary has found herself in a similar situation with Leonard. At the same time, there’s the repeat of the name. Not just in the ritual, but Leonard is also screaming ‘Mary!’ at his wife as she hides in the bathroom. 

History repeats itself. 

But this time, this time Mary, or perhaps her mother, or perhaps another scorned woman from history, arrives. And another lying, violent man disappears without a trace. 

Such a loss.

This doesn’t always work in real life, unfortunately. The baddie-gets-his-comeuppance endings are in somewhat short supply outside of fiction. If you need support, we’ll put some links in the show notes. 

Wonderful work by Catherine MacLeod. 

And finally, PseudoPod, and Barbara Deming, know…  

“Vengeance is not the point; change is.” 

 

See you soon, folks, take care, and… don’t steal other people’s work.