The Hanging Wives of New England

by Ellis Brightwell

  We followed a snow-hidden path behind the resort back to where sloping hills climbed to meet the road. We held on to one another to keep from falling into seaside drift drop-offs, so called because you might fall into a roadside bank of snow only to find nothing beneath it for thirty feet. The chain-link fence guarding the rear of the bait and tackle shop kept the snow confined to the encroaching woods well enough. The purpose of the dead bodies hanging from the front door’s awning, however, was much less clear. Their lifeless faces looked out over wooden piers where fishermen would, under normal circumstances, dock their boats during inclement weather. That they were empty now was an unwelcome sight, as was the red-flanneled man who exited the log cabin-style shop wearing a fleece-lined hunting hat with a rifle on his shoulder.

  “I see you limping,” he said to me. “Did one of those things get you?”

  “It grabbed my leg and twisted my ankle, but I got away,” I said.

  “Looks like it drew blood,” he said. “My niece and her daughter are in there. If you’re bitten and you turn into a monster, I’ll have to shoot you so you don’t eat them.”

  “So you can string her up like those two?” said Lily.

  “The fences guard the perimeter, and if they don’t work—which they usually do—the wards out front keep the bad things away.”

  “Wards?” I said. “That’s what you call the dead people you have hanging by their necks in front of your shop?”

  “They’re not entirely dead,” he said. “They were bitten. We didn’t have a choice. One’s my sister. The other’s a family friend. They keep the bad ones away. The men, at least. Not sure why, but it works well enough. My niece Amy doesn’t like it, but she likes not being dead better. I’m Rusty. Not literally, it’s just short for Russell.”

  “I’m Shannon,” I said. “That’s my… sister, Lily.”

  Lily smiled at me.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said to Rusty.

  “Wish I could say the same,” said Rusty. “You don’t look like sisters.”

  “And you don’t look like an asshole,” said Lily.

  “You’ve got good glasses,” said Rusty. “Do me a favor and use them to check your sister’s leg for bites.”

  Lily stooped down, lifted my bloody pant leg, and let it fall to my ankle.

  “Nothing,” she said over her shoulder.

  She came in close to me and pulled the end of her shirt sleeve away from her wrist long enough to show me the hideous, purple welts on the inside of her forearm.

  “Ink from Alyssa’s arm when I grabbed her,” she whispered. “I took it from her skin so she wouldn’t get it on you.”

  Lily turned around and stood in front of me with her arms crossed.

  “I was just telling my sister not to be afraid of you,” she said to Rusty. “We came here to talk to the fishermen.”

  “You’re the last people they’d want to talk to,” said Rusty. “No offense, but it’s the truth. That spirit out in the sea is going to be coming for you. Right here is where he first appeared to us. Told us he didn’t like what we were doing up in the hills, taking the stone from the earth and leaving it barren. He came here to punish us. His poison makes us go crazy and kill each other. His fog calls to the people with his ink in their veins and kills anyone who doesn’t have it.”

  “Why does he do all that?” I said.

  “Some of the elders think it’s a fisherman who drowned a long time ago,” said Rusty. “In his grief over being separated from his wife, he turned into a monster. The kind of monster that only women with his life in their blood can appease.”

  Women like Alyssa. Maybe Rusty’s drowned fisherman took her from the sea beneath the bridge. The patch of fog that broke apart may have been some small diminution of his grief. Perhaps I could do something to further assuage this creature’s anguish and spare others from suffering.

  I slid my right pant leg up to my shin and turned my calf to show Rusty the six holes that ran red with blood.

  “Yep,” said Rusty. “That’s what I figured, what with you being sisters. Couldn’t bring myself to do it to Molly, so she stays right there by the door. Keeps the sea spirit from taking any more of us. The fishermen might know why, but they don’t talk to me much. Too upset about their wives, I think. That’s what they call the ones they keep on their boats. Don’t know whether they’re actually married. If you’re nice to them, they might take you out to sea and let you give yourself to the sea spirit as an offering. Maybe that’ll make him happy. Maybe he’ll go away. Or maybe things will keep on being shot to hell.”

  “You got any ammo?” said Lily. “We need to defend ourselves.”

  “From who?” said Rusty. “Everyone’s dead. The hanging ones keep the rest of them away.”

  “I need to defend her,” said Lily. “She lost her kids and husband.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Rusty. “I’m not going to shoot either of you. Not unless your sister starts turning and you don’t take care of it. After that, I expect you to find a place to rest in peace where you won’t be bothering anyone. That barrette on your wrist. Amy’s daughter, Maria, lets her hair hang all over the place. You give her mother that hair band, I’ll give you a box of bullets for that pistol.”

  “Deal,” said Lily.

  Rusty opened a screen door in between two suspended bodies that bore an unsettling resemblance to the mothers of my son’s high school classmates. That would be me, not long from now, if I didn’t find a way to deal with this bite. I didn’t want Lily to have to be the one to handle it.

  “Don’t let them hang me up like that,” I said to her.

  “I won’t,” she said. “I’m not leaving you. If this is it, we go down together.”

  She set her arm around my shoulders and walked with me between two hanging corpses to await our own fates.

  8

  Fishermen

  Rusty motioned to his left with the barrels of his shotgun, directing me away from the messy-haired girl sitting on a padded, green sofa near the fireplace. He shadowed me to the opposite end of the shop, where he offered me a flimsy camping chair. I sat down on the sagging nylon and crossed my ankles to hide my bloody pant leg. Rusty retreated to the warmth of the fire at the other end, nodding at Lily as he passed her. The soft-cheeked, brown-haired woman behind the counter glanced back and forth between me and Rusty, scrubbing her cash register’s counter all the while. Lily took the barrette from her wrist and held it out between two fingers.

  “For your daughter,” she said. “You’re Amy, right?”

  “That’s my mom,” said the girl on the sofa. She didn’t look up from her device. “I’m Maria.”

  Amy stopped scrubbing and glowered at her daughter. Maria’s arms looked like candy canes in their red-and-white-striped sleeves. She gesticulated while playing some sort of handheld game. Rusty took the barrette from Lily’s fingers and dropped it in Maria’s lap.

  “For your hair,” he said.

  “Do I have to?” she whined.

  “They’re trading it for a box of hollow points,” said Rusty.

  “Pause your game and put your hair in a tail,” said Amy.

  She reached under the counter and produced a red, cardboard box. Lily opened it and loaded her magazine where she stood. Rusty lowered his shotgun to the floor.

  “The one over there in the dark lost her children and husband,” he said.

  Amy’s sigh took the frown from her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Too many of us have lost loved ones. Why don’t you come over to the fireplace?”

  “Because she’s bitten,” said Rusty.

  Amy stepped away from the counter and stood in front of her daughter with her back to me. Maria went up on tiptoe to look at me over her mother’s shoulder.

  “Put your barrette in, sweetheart,” said Amy. “If she’s bitten, why did you let them in here?”

  “They said they’re going to talk to the fishermen at dusk,” said Rusty.
“They plan on working out some sort of deal to drop her off in the water or… I don’t know. Something so her sister doesn’t have to shoot her and the boys don’t hang her.”

  Amy held her daughter in her arms. Her padded, orange down vest glowed in the fireplace’s light.

  “I guess that does make sense,” she said. “But if you start hissing or growling like those things outside, I expect your sister to look after you… outside. I will not have my daughter suffer because my uncle has a penchant for hospitality at the expense of level-headedness.”

  “We’re leaving as soon as the boats come in,” said Lily. She slotted her gun’s magazine inside its handle. “I’ll watch her so you don’t have to glare at her like she’s a rabid wolf.”

  Lily strode to a row of blocky, green tubes leaning against the wall beside me. She pulled a folded-up camping chair out of its carrying case and plopped herself down next to me with her gun in her lap.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” said Amy. “We have enough of that out there. And we prefer it stays out there.”

  “That’s why Mom’s aunt is hanging next to the door,” said Maria. “Mom says she was a bitch.”

  “Maria,” said Amy, “that’s enough.”

  “I’m wearing her barrette,” said Maria. “She should at least know what we do to people who get bit around here.”

  “I understand,” I say. “I had a girl just like you. She talked just like you.”

  “Where is she?” said Maria. “Can I meet her?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Stop talking to my daughter,” said Amy. “You want to talk to someone, talk to your sister. I don’t want to know anything about you, not even your names. That’ll make it easier to remember that you were never here when the fishermen take your bodies and string you up with the rest of them.”

  “Her name is Shannon Hayes,” said Lily. “I’m Lily Ming. You write that on our gravestones or carve it into a tree.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Maria. “Shannon Hayes. Lily Ming. Memorized.”

  “That’s enough from you, Maria,” said Amy. “Too much sound and movement attracts uninvited guests. That’s what I was telling my uncle right before he went out for ‘a walk’ and look what happened.”

  A thunderous sound shook the shop’s walls. Amy took Maria behind the counter and knelt down out of sight. Rusty stood beside the fireplace with his shotgun pointed at the window next to the door. Lily joined him.

  “I told you to put boards or bars on that window,” said Amy from where she hid.

  “We didn’t need to,” said Rusty. “None of us were bitten. I think they can smell our guests. Their hunger must be overpowering the wards.”

  “My aunt tastes bad anyway,” said Maria. “At least when the monsters eat me, my hair will be in a nice ponytail. Right, Mom?”

  “Shush,” said Amy.

  I should have knelt down next to the counter like Amy and Maria, but I was too tired to move from my chair. Something struck the window overlooking the fireplace, jarring the pane against its wooden housing.

  “He hits it again, he’ll spider web it,” said Rusty.

  Amy stood up behind the counter. She climbed over it, knelt down in front of me, and took my hands.

  “You’re going to die,” she said. “I know it’s not fair what this world did to your children, but if you have any love or kindness left in your heart, you’ll let me keep my daughter. If I could, I would let you stay here and spend time with Maria to soothe the pain of your loss. But I can’t, and you know that. From a mother to a mother, I am begging you to go out there and take those things away from my daughter.”

  “I know you don’t want me here,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  “Thank you,” said Amy.

  Whatever Lily said to me in passing drowned in the undercurrent of the melody tickling at the corners of my mind. I opened the wooden door, then the screen door, and walked out into a world of snow and frosty wind. The pair of dead men on my left did not greet me, nor did their three friends follow me on my slow walk down to the docks to await the boats that would come drifting in at dusk. The tackle shop’s door slammed shut behind me. A soft song swelling within my heart called me to come and sleep down in the depths of the water beneath the setting sun. With every snowy step, my siren’s lilting words grew sweeter. I would find comfort in her arms.

  Five sharp explosions pierced the whispering wind. Lily stood in front of five bodies that blackened the fresh snow around them. She stomped on the head of the nearest one and left her footprints in the white powder from the bait shop to the docks. She stuck her gun in her skirt and held out her pinky finger.

  “You said I was flirting with you like some high school girl,” she said, “so I say we swear to stay together forever.”

  “Forever’s not going to last very long,” I said.

  “Not with that attitude. Give me your pinkie.”

  I linked my little finger with hers.

  “Repeat after me.” Lily’s voice floated somewhere out on the water. “I promise to stay by your side, through thick and thin, until the end of time and beyond.”

  My eyelids hung heavy with sleep. What were the words?

  “I promise to… I promise to stay with you forever.”

  “I like that even better. Why are the boats here so soon?”

  An explosion near our heads was her answer. Lily dragged me from the snow into the long, narrow house on the leftmost dock where fishermen gutted their fish and emptied their own bowels. My leaden legs struggled to keep up with Lily, even more so when she took one arm from me to pinch her nose at the godawful smell coming from doorless toilet stalls. We ducked under a windowless hole in the wall facing the bay just as a blast struck the wooden frame above our heads and powdered our hair with sawdust.

  “How are we supposed to ask the fishermen for a ride if they’re shooting at us?” I said.

  “We’ll wait for them to come ashore and I’ll negotiate with them,” said Lily.

  “Like you did at the police station?”

  “Yep, except this time, I have a lot more bullets.”

  The wooden planks beneath us shook life into my legs. Shaking became trembling. The trembling became violent. Lily peeked over the lip of the window frame, ducked down again, and grabbed my sweater arm.

  “They’re docking right into the goddamn building,” she said. “We need to get out of here.”

  Lily half-carried me and my useless legs away from the window. The hallway behind us splintered apart in a raucous cacophony. A pair of ropes whipped three-pronged hooks ahead of us that snaked their way backwards past our sidestepping feet—were they fishing for us? The floorboards flooded with icy water as we ran. We jumped from the dock and tumbled into the snow. Lily scrambled to the longhouse’s outer wall and stood flat against it with her gun held over her shoulder. A misty, glowing fog inside whatever was left of the narrow building’s hallway grew brighter and brighter. Lily stepped out into a wide stance, took aim, and fired three shots. Three heavy thuds sounded against wood.

  “I should have known,” said Lily. “They’re all bleeding black stuff like they did at Yamata.”

  “So they’re dead?” I said.

  “If they weren’t before, they are now.”

  “Did you get all of them?”

  “Oh, no, there’s more than that. Come and see.”

  At the end of the shattered dock floated an off-white, two-tiered fishing boat from whose upper level hung more emaciated bodies than I could count. They wore blouses and skirts and slacks and jeans with holes in the knees—women, all of them, strangled by the ropes around their necks. Lily swung her legs over the side of the boat and approached a raven-haired, middle-aged woman in a cashmere sweater and designer jeans whose lips opened and closed like a fish washed ashore. I hauled my own heavy body over the boat’s rubbery side rail and leaned against it to keep my legs from giving out. Lily dragged a blue, plastic chair under the woman’s hanging sho
es and loosened the rope around her neck just enough to let her raspy breaths take shape into words.

  “You have to help us,” she said.

  “Help you do what?” said Lily. “Bite us? Kill us? Is that why you’re handcuffed?”

  “They bound our wrists and ankles to keep us from running away,” said the woman. “They take us out in the morning and stay at sea until the sun goes down. There’s a song out there. I heard it when I was first bitten, but not anymore.”

  “You were bitten?” said Lily. “When?”

  “We were driving down here to visit my husband’s relatives,” she said. “Dead people ran us off the road. My husband, Frank, escaped to the docks with the kids while I was trapped between the driver’s seat and the steering column. He didn’t want to leave me, but I told him he needed to get the kids to safety, so he did. One of the dead people broke through the window and bit me. I shoved my car keys into his eyeballs until he stopped moving. I managed to free myself and hide up in the hills. Frank found me the next day. He did this to me. He said it was for the best.”

  “How long have you been on this boat?”

  “This is the third time I’ve seen the sun set.”

  “Three days?” Lily said. “Wouldn’t you be dead from dehydration or asphyxiation?”

  “I’m fine,” the woman said.

  “You don’t look fine,” said Lily. “You’re as skinny as a skeleton and your eyes are glass. Maybe that fog keeps you going. I can’t tell whether you’re actually alive, though. And I don’t know whether I want to take a chance on this particular fairy tale.”

  Lily took the gun from her skirt and pointed it at the woman’s head.

  “Please don’t,” said the woman. “It’s the dreams that kill me. Every time we go out into the fog, I fall asleep and the nightmares come back. I meet my husband and sons in a world of pitch black. I have to watch them die, turn into that black stuff, over and over and over. Sometimes I have to kill them. Sometimes they kill me. But I want to stay alive, stay awake, see my husband in the flesh. I want to see my boys. Please help me.”