Under the Stairs

Once upon a time they said that I corrupted children, that my books invited Satan’s forked and flickering tongue into the ears of the innocent. It used to make me cry. I thought of those children in their harsh, cruel houses, pale little faces hiding in the shadows under the stairs. I would think of my own children and imagine hot tears on their cheeks and the harsh red prints of a palm on their backsides. I spoke to these children at signings sometimes, to the emancipated teenagers they became, and we would cry together at the tables as the lines snaked out through air-conditioned shelves to the parking lots where the sun baked pavement and crisped fair skin. “No one should have to live in a closet,” I told them, and when those words left my lips I heard them echoed and re-echoed by a thousand trembling voices growing stronger, by pink-haired boys with press-on nails and girls in studded collars. Later I wrote about their chewed cuticles and chapped lips in a book people didn’t fully understand. Their bare flats which stank of stale cigarette smoke and the repulsive ghost of obesity siphoning money from healthcare and public works. Leaving them to starve.

The movies begin before the books are finished. I am racing against Chris Columbus. Someone named Alfonso who doesn’t understand my work. David Yates. The formula perfected. We are making magic. We are saving children’s lives. A little girl asks to perform and I tell her that if she recovers from the sickness skeletonizing her young body, the part is hers. She is remade. Flesh blooms from the crevices between her little bones. This is magic. I think of it at night as I try to sleep, as I reveal the last of the books and tidal waves of money crash against the house. A year later I see someone blog about what might have happened if the girl had not recovered. The thought squirms like a maggot through my mind for weeks. I hate it. I reject it. I gave her what she needed, not a poisoned lure. I have my assistant call her. We have tea together. Is her smile real? Grateful, grateful, grateful, she says, and with each repetition it becomes less what I need to hear. I wish that I could pierce her skull with a needle of pure will and draw it out to taste her thoughts.

The final book slips from my fingers and is taken away to be trimmed and stapled, corseted and cut. My baby. I can hear it screaming as it goes out to the hungry millions. More copies than the Bible. Events. I look out over seas of screaming faces. They have drowned out the god-botherers, the dull red-faced suburbanites who used to storm my readings screaming that all miracles belong to Christ, that I was a necromancer, a diviner, a witch. They fought as hard as they could, screamed and shoved and threatened and denounced me on television and in newspapers all over the world, but I’ve shown them. Real witches don’t burn.

Years slip past. The movies are gone in a blur of sparks and robes and interviews. I speak from the heart. The crowds thunder louder than ever. Still, there is an ugliness that gathers in the air, a kind of psychic charge that puts me in mind of the Department of Mysteries with its brains swimming in their tanks and its empty archways where dark curtains flutter. Doors are being opened. Again and again I hear hurtful stereotypes and racist overtones and sometimes, absurdly, fatphobia, as though we should all welcome fatness with open arms. They don’t understand stories. They don’t understand symbolism. There is no decorous way to answer these questions, and so I avoid them.

If you’re holding out for universal popularity, I remind myself, thinking of Hagrid in his hut. You will be here for quite some time.

I throw myself back into my work. I answer questions. Clarify points from the books. I want to show them they are not alone, those children I spoke to in those long, long lines before my security guards and the move to Scotland and the wall rising brick by brick around our estate, just for safety. Instead, I find open scorn. Clearly just tacked on after the fact. A gay Nazi who grew up to abuse kids? Cool. Why doesn’t she just shut up and let fic writers handle this? They know the books better than she does. I am crying all the time. The children are upset. Don’t let them see. Husband saying darling, darling, it’s not worth it, and a ten thousand-word blog post logged but never published because my agent drives to our home at dawn to talk me out of it. Beg, really. She puts on a good show. Nearly crying with frustration. I know she only cares about the image. The money. I am throwing money away as fast as they will let me. Literacy. Schools. Hospitals. Every day there is a flood of letters. Children I have taught to read. Lives I have saved with access to surgery and modern medicine. Women who have fled their husbands with my help. A man slapped me, once. I know what they go through. I lived with my brother. I lived in a council flat. A fat spider weaving in the corner. Aragog.

I decide to meet them where they are, to open my heart to their dissent. A great thick encyclopedia written by the fans and edited by me. The first meetings: fawning. Inspiration, oh my God, find myself, my whole life. I love them. I have met them all a thousand times. Lost children who found me. I am like them. They need me. Ideas. Vast glacial drifts of information accrue before I realize my edits are not being implemented, or not all of them. Terse conversations. Homophobia. Different generation. Didn’t want to embarrass you. I don’t want to do what comes next, but ideas are magic, and magic is fragile. It must be protected if we want anything left to pass down to our children. I am doing this for the children. If I let them publish their lies, magic will die and I will have nothing and every good thing I have done will boil away into thin air. Children would have starved. Would you let children starve if you could stop it from happening? A lawsuit is such a little thing. Branching projects spring up and I unleash new suits to run them down. More rumbles of dissent. They don’t understand what I am sacrificing for them. They don’t understand that I fought the church to save them from their fathers’ fists. This is a drop in the bucket compared to what I have given.

Three cases settle. The fourth is stubborn. Internet attacks. Stealthy unattributed articles I notice share her verbal tics. Out of touch. Litigious. Bigoted. Thousands losing their minds over a Twitter “like” my agent plays off as a senior moment, as though I cannot have my own thoughts. A terrible thing is happening at home. There is a boggart in my son’s room, a shapeshifting roil of flesh and muscle struggling to take the shape of what I fear. I am fighting it. I am fighting it as I wrestle the lawsuit, and its painted talons claw my flesh, and its ruby mouth snaps at my throat, and when it is as tall as me and it has stolen my face it will slap me like that man did, once, and nothing will be left. I fight it with all my heart and all my soul and finally there is a doctor who will fix it, who will sew what was torn open back into its proper shape and heal the wounded, seething mind and soothe the fevered brow. Draw out the poison. The night he leaves for treatment I dream that he is under the stairs, that I can hear his heavy coils dragging over the bare boards. I dream of standing at the edge of the dark with my fingers outstretched, waiting for the gleam when he opens his eyes.

I understand no one can know. They would not understand. They would not appreciate that I am doing for my flesh and blood what I have done for all of them. It’s funny, says another mother in the doctor’s waiting room. We are old friends now. Months and months. I could never bring myself to tell you, but we didn’t let our Allison read your books.

We laugh. We are saving our children. In the next room they are being saved in ways that would be torture to anyone without their unique mental health concerns. It’s not torture to them. It isn’t. People do not understand. I am beginning to see a pattern in the outside world. Death Eaters appearing between soaring headstones in the dark. Gathering for a purpose. They want to hurt us. Mutilate us. They could be hiding anywhere. Rita Skeeter’s gold tooth and her big, mannish hands. Twist and writhe and turn into a squirming insect. Tsetse fly nesting in human flesh. It’s simple biology I tell my husband over lunch. It’s simple biology and they can’t accept that, which is misogyny in its purest form. He nods and folds his newspaper. He is a staunch ally. He has raised no objection to the treatments. We are saving our children.

The fourth case will not settle. After months of delays I know she will be bankrupt soon. It is a lesson I am teaching her. She can always make more money. She can go to one of the shelters I sponsor. Sleep in safety. I arrange a meeting by the waterfront. Late at night. Smog billowing over the waves. She rants and sneers and says she will eat shit before she settles. I say it can be over. I will pluck her out of poverty. She just needs to apologize, admit to theft. Plagiarism. She says someone who doesn’t think her wife is a woman isn’t worth speaking to. It is just like my books, in the end. I say a few words. There is a flash of light. (My bodyguard’s bulk hides the gun). Her body hits the floor (in a way that hides the bullet hole) and I cry almost as hard as I cried for Sirius Black. I have had to make so many hard decisions. This is another thing most people cannot understand. A wingtip rolls her limp into the murky water. Gone. I watch from the pier as something swallows her. A sinuous leviathan coiled tight around the pilings. Lamplike eyes shine through the gloom. Protecting me. A week later there is nothing in the news. The lawyers all fall silent.

They are waiting for us in a suite at the Marriott where a folding conference table’s polished surface gleams dully beneath fluorescent lights. My new friends arranged the meeting. Skinny talons clicking on the tabletop. Necklaces flopping around Skeksis necks and mouths full of perfect white veneers. They touch me. So beautiful. So beautiful. Young girlfriends in the cars sometimes. Pretty. Who would want to mutilate something so beautiful? We are saving them. The people waiting at the table are all men, except a single older woman with short hair the color of iron. They are big. Spacious and soft-handed and American. They share our concerns. They talk about biology — which is a science, they say with reverence — and the sickness creeping into our pop culture, the disease insinuating itself in the flesh of our young people. They do not talk about Satan. They do not mention the End of Days. They are warm and reasonable and decent and there are agreements made. Money changes hands. We are saving our children. Millions of them. George Soros and others in his dark money cabal are driving them to hack into themselves, to cut and saw and poison. I am learning every day how deep it runs. Goblin fingers wrapped tight and murderous around their throats.

The screams at the edges of the crowd are getting worse. I see those children from those long-ago lines, but they are twisted now, deformed and leering, implants leaking colorless discharge from beneath suppurating skin. Nightmares of macerated flesh between their legs. Discolored fabric. Dripping fluid. Getting closer. I retreat. New allies forming bulwarks between my aging body and the coming crush. The screams of adulation and the cries for my head hoisted on a pike are starting to become the same sound to my ears. I can’t distinguish. I want it. I hate it. My heart hammers. My son is safe. His flesh is secure and does not move. The people shielding me with their huge, noble bodies once beat their children for reading my books, but now those children are saved as well. Now we have all come to understand that magic is the strongest thing in the world and witches do not burn and the looks these leonine men and their peroxide wives give me from the corners of their eyes are not calculating but looks of respect, of admiration. I have won their hearts.

“I love your work,” I tell a brave young filmmaker online, and the site shakes with opprobrium. How dare I have an opinion. How dare I support a young man who seeks to protect women, the duty of his gender since the dawn of time? What Is A Woman? Do they not want the question answered? They’re afraid. They know that truth and biology are on our side, that I am a woman and they are not, that the burns on my son’s back and behind his ears were for a purpose, that there is a higher meaning behind their degenerate postmodern assault on everything that makes us great. And among the seething horde I see the children who still need me, their white faces stained with soot, tear tracks cleaving through the filth, their palms upturned. I have been invited to a special night. A gala. Closed. No cameras. My new friends have arranged it all. There is no crowd, but I can hear the crowd. I hear its roar as I sit waiting for the man at the podium to finish introducing me.

I fold my notes and slip them into the breast pocket of my silk-lined jacket. I don’t need them. I have practiced my speech. I know it by heart, backwards and forwards.

It’s only fourteen words.