by Ellen Datlow
All seemed well, as frail spring gave way to fetid summer. To be sure, there were days Maggie reeled from hunger and the whole world ran like candle wax. She thought of her last days at Lansdowne then, when she and Aiden were so weak from starvation, they clung together just to stay upright. They took refuge in the workhouse, where Maggie boiled grass for their supper. They’d lain entwined, weak as kittens, waiting to pass to a better world. Then the marquis offered free passage to New York, for any tenant who wanted. It was cheaper for him to send his people to America than to attempt to feed them all.
“Here’s our chance,” she told Aiden, “to find something better.”
What had she known? For there was no grass to eat in Five Points, either. Maggie gobbled clay and sucked on small stones. At night, she brushed straw from the tenement floor and chewed it. When her gums began to bleed, she relished the iron flavor. And whenever Bride smiled, her heart turned over. At least the girl would have it better, Maggie thought. At least she will have a chance.
The air grew brittle. Wind off the river bit hard as a wolf’s teeth. It was autumn again, drear and damp, when Maggie stumped home from a twelve-hour shift at Rosenbaum’s to find Bride pale as a corpse, purple shadows ringing her eyes. Her little neck had swelled, and her breathing was labored.
“She won’t eat. She won’t smile,” said the girl who watched her, pale eyes watering with tears.
The only doctor Maggie could afford worked out of a damp room off an alleyway. He reeked of gin, and his wool coat billowed on a sticklike frame. But his voice was steady enough as he said, “I suppose you’ve been feeding her milk?”
“To be sure. Cow’s milk, as it’s better.”
“Right.” He sighed.
He lit a flickering lantern and wiped a table with his sleeve. He poked and prodded Bride’s small body, grunting at the blue and purple swellings behind her ears, listening to the rasping wheeze of her breath. The baby didn’t cry or smile or kick. She lay limp, her blond curls plastered on her forehead.
The doctor said the milk sold in Five Points came from sick cows and looked thick and creamy only with the addition of paint and chalk. “Your girl would have been better off at the breast, my dear. I’m afraid you’ve been feeding her poison.”
“But what do I do?” The tears on Maggie’s cheeks were warm, though everything else about her had frozen.
“You hope the dear thing can fight it,” he said. “Get some clean water down her, if you can. Though I daresay what comes from the pumps is hardly that. Maybe if you buy some beer?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”
Beer Maggie tried, and gruel and bread, but the baby just turned her face away. So she walked back and forth in her room, picking her way between the huddled bodies of her flatmates, trying to sing the poison out of the child. When her flatmates complained that they couldn’t sleep, Maggie took to the alleyway and walked until the rags around her feet unwound and dragged in dirty twists behind. Night turned to day, and still she rocked and sang, for what else could she do? Maggie walked until her feet were like the bricks on the sidewalk, red and numb and swollen to blocks. Then she sank to the ground, and propped against a wall she slept. All the strangers in the world passed by and paid her no mind at all.
When Maggie woke, it was night again. Flames flickered in the distance, and fireworks snapped. She realized All Hallows’ Eve had come round again, and her heart seized. The spirits were abroad. Maggie fumbled in her pockets for her bit of cold iron. The baby rolled stiff in her arms, like a log.
She shouted when she saw what Bride had become: a child no longer, but a beast with black skin and white eyes. It croaked like a crow and, when Maggie turned it, she saw a tail sprouted from its bottom, one that whipped and lashed like an angry cat’s.
She screamed again. A pack of boys across the street laughed in reply. They sang and smacked sticks against the brick buildings, making loud clacks and clatters. Maggie shook as the creature in her arms spoke, in a voice like fire crackling.
“Esuriens!” it said. “Tua ossua manducabo!”
Blai Orrit had fetched his due, while she slept, a year to the day of his bargain. He had taken Bride and left a changeling in her place. Maggie shut her eyes and steadied her breathing. I can fix this, she thought. The night is not over. If I am brave and smart, I can find Blai Orrit and fetch my Bride back. No price in this world—or his—is too high. Whatever the cost, I’ll pay.
She scrambled upright and, clutching the monster, tottered down the street.
Mrs. Docker’s door was flung wide open. The smell of holiday cakes and beer wafted. Jack was a year taller, and broader, but he roasted hazelnuts the same as before. A lass by his side, with ribbons in her hair, sang to the roasting nuts, “If you hate me, spit and fly! If you love me burn away.”
“Blai Orrit!” Maggie shrieked above the calls of the crowd. “Blai Orrit, damn him, where is he tonight?”
The merriment died as one by one, people turned to look. Stevedores and laborers, lasses and wee ones, all with firelit faces, stared. Maggie stood in the doorway, wild and wet.
“What’s Blai done now?” someone asked.
“He took my child. He took my girl.” Maggie’s voice was hoarse with tears and terror. She stomped her foot to keep from shattering to pieces in the doorway.
“Why, you’re scarce a child yourself.” Mrs. Docker came from around the counter, wiping her hands on her apron. Maggie hated the kindness in her face. “What’s this about Blai Orrit, dear? Did he hurt you?”
“He left me this.” The changeling brayed like a donkey, and everyone but Mrs. Docker drew back. Maggie’s voice rang in silence but for the hazelnuts bursting on the hearth. “I let him…I thought…but he can’t have her. She’s mine! I gave everything—” Sobs grabbed at her throat. “I gave everything.”
Mrs. Docker’s voice was soft as the sawdust on the floor. “Now, now,” she said. “Why don’t you come by the fire and get warm? Have a cup of ale. Jack’s roasting nuts—”
“I don’t want my fortune told. I want my baby!” Maggie’s shout was like a dirty rag flung on Mrs. Docker’s face. The woman recoiled. “He must give her back. How do I find him?”
“If you’re to find Blai tonight, you’d best look to Pete Williams’s or the Brewery.”
It was a man who spoke, red of eye and dark of face, simmering by the fire. Mrs. Docker turned to him and said, “Can’t you see—”
“I see plain. But the girl wants Blai Orrit, not you. So let her try and find him.” The man lifted his chin to Maggie. “Go you there, to Mulberry Bend. You know it?”
She did, of course, everyone did. Pete Williams owned a dance hall on Orange called Almack’s, a wild place where Ethiopes mixed with Irish. The Old Brewery, not far, was a tenement, hemmed in by a lane called Murderer’s Alley. It was the lowest building of its kind in New York, seething with rats and misery.
“Blai Orrit, and the rest like him, that’s where they be,” the man said. He jerked his chin. “Now go away and take that Thing with you. You shouldn’t be carrying it on a night like this.”
“I don’t want to,” Maggie said.
She didn’t want to go to Mulberry Bend, either. But she turned in the doorway and limped into the night, leaving the warmth of Mrs. Docker’s face at her back.
The air had grown colder and more drear. As she walked through shadows, figures flickered in and out of sight. Maggie tried to keep her head down, lest she catch sight of something from the Other Side. But dropping her gaze meant staring at the changeling, whose white eyes glimmered in the dark. So Maggie stared ahead, trying not to mind how the buildings around her squirmed. She told herself, Even if I wander into the World-Behind, it matters not, for that is where Bride has been taken and where I must go.
Maggie’s shoulders softened. She let everything blur around her. Figures scuttled here and there. The grinning teeth and black eye of a horse skull capered. Some Scots children carried lanterns w
ith fiery faces burning inside. Maggie kept walking, and her feet found the way.
The Old Brewery hulked in the darkness, its brick walls dirty and chimneys toppling. In Paradise Square out front, a crowd warmed their hands by a bright orange fire. They were roasting nuts and telling tales, like the folk at Mrs. Docker’s. But this was a different sort of crowd, and Maggie hesitated to address them. For she glimpsed giant bat wings curling out of a man’s back, and a woman with a snout like a pig’s. The huge hooves of a cart horse peeked from under another woman’s grimy skirt hem. The child by her side twitched a fluffy tail.
“If you’re looking for a toss, look elsewhere,” the pig-woman said. The winged man smirked, while firelight carved holes in his face.
“I’m looking for Blai Orrit.” Maggie trembled. “I’m told he might room in yon Brewery. He has a blue coat. Have you seen him?”
“And what would you be wanting with Blai?” The hoofed woman drew herself up.
“Never mind what she wants.” The man’s wings snapped. “If he’s here, you’ll find him in the basement. But I haven’t seen him for some time. Could be he’s moved on.”
“To what?” the horse-woman guffawed.
“To her.” The man grinned and billowed his wings once more.
Maggie turned on their laughter and stepped toward the tenement.
Its door looked ordinary enough, weathered wood with a few steps leading up. Splinters, a round knob, sturdy hinges. But the air felt thick and hot on the threshold. And when Maggie wrapped her hand around the knob, the earth pitched and trembled, like the sea under a boat.
She opened the door. Inside, it stank worse than the workhouse in Lansdowne—of sweat and shit and spilled gin. Maggie could feel how big the space was: like a church, with a looming ceiling, teetering stairs, and balconies climbing the walls. Light glimmered from candles, and though she could not see them, Maggie felt people everywhere. Platforms shook with pattering footsteps. Unseen hands grabbed at rails. Dust showered from above as shadowy forms clumped on the landings.
“Fresh meat.” The whisper skittered around the big space like a roach in a bucket.
Maggie cleared her throat. “I’ve come looking for someone,” she said. “A man. He took my baby.”
Shuffles and whispers stirred the air. Rapid steps rattled down the stairs. Maggie thought, Here he comes, and braced herself. Blai Orrit’s hands would soon snatch her shoulders; Blai Orrit’s teeth would pierce her skin. He would make her his slave for a hundred years. But it was just one step from this nightmare to the next.
A foot scraped on the floorboards. Maggie clenched her fists.
“Are you looking for me?” a soft voice asked.
She whirled. She knew that voice, knew it as well as she knew her childhood prayers. “Aiden?” Her whisper was raw. “Is that you?”
The revenant didn’t take breath of course, but Maggie heard a sigh all the same. “Is that what they called me?” it asked.
It shambled into view. The head hung to one side on a broken neck. The ruined fingers of its right hand dangled. Worms and grubs had made fast work of the flesh. A few dirty rags fluttered, but mostly Aiden was bones.
Maggie trembled from scalp to ankles. “Aiden. Oh, Aiden. Can you help me?”
“Help with what, love?” The jaw did not move; the listing head did not nod; but she heard him all the same. And she felt him as close to her skin as her own dirty clothes.
“Aiden, I’ve lost our child.” The horror of it gushed through her. Maggie reeled, and the revenant grabbed with its unbroken hand. Bony fingers dug in her arm. “And I killed you too.” She wept. “It was me said we should come to America. It’s my fault you died. And then I left you in the gutter with your teeth scattered like penny nails. Like you were something from the midden pile. I’m so cold.” She choked on words too big to fit in her throat. “Everything about me is cold. So how am I the one who is still alive?”
The revenant didn’t answer. Instead, its fingers snapped and Maggie slipped to the floor. She grappled with the squirming changeling in her arms, kneeling in the filth at her dead husband’s feet. “Aiden,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Maggie waited for his reply. She waited for him to help her. But all that happened was a hand touched her head, warm and soft. She raised her streaming eyes. An old woman stood before her, gray hair hanging in clumps. She carried a lantern and it swung, making shadows careen around them. In the woman’s skirts, Maggie glimpsed sparks of light, like stars.
“Child, are you lost?” the star-woman asked.
“I’m looking for Blai Orrit. He took my babe, and gave me this, but I want my Bride. Can you bring her? Are you the queen here?”
The star-woman bent to stare at the changeling. She looked from the monster to Maggie’s wet face. “Blai Orrit’s been locked in the Tombs nigh on four months,” she said. “He’s dead or still rotting in jail, my dear.”
“But then how—”
“What is it you think you hold?”
Maggie swallowed. “Why, a changeling. One of yours, begging your pardon. And I’d like my own baby back.”
The glittering woman tugged on her hand. “Come outside, child. I think I can help you there.”
“But I—”
“Come outside. It will be all right.”
Maggie scrambled to her feet. The star-woman opened the front door. Her legs trembled as the woman pulled her out.
The sun had risen on a gray fall day. In the cool light, Maggie could see the woman’s eyes were yellow, and her teeth and lips as black as a dog’s. The stars in her dress did not gleam as prettily in daylight, but unseen bells tinkled whenever she moved.
“Think you that you hold a changeling child,” the lady said. Maggie nodded. “Then to get your own babe back, you must put it in the fire or throw it in the river. Or didn’t your grandmother tell you?”
Maggie blinked. “She did.”
“Just so.” The woman nodded. “Well. The river is not far off. And we’ve still a good blazing fire in front of us. Which is it to be?”
Maggie gazed about. The bonfire still burned in Paradise Square, its embers rippling with heat and color. But where fell creatures had warmed themselves the night before, people now stood in the dawn. Maggie recognized the woman with the hooves, although she wore ordinary black boots now and florid paint on her mouth. A few thin children had joined her. One poked a stick at the flames, while another hopped up and down. Neither of them had tails. The smell of wood smoke wafted, and so did sweet tobacco.
The changeling child had stopped squirming. Maggie could no longer feel its tail curling around her forearm. Her legs gave out and she sat down, right on the steps of the Old Brewery. The old woman sat beside her, and little bells chimed in the morning air.
“I bought milk for my baby,” Maggie said. “All my pennies. And the doctor called it poison.”
The star-woman asked, “Was this child your first?” Maggie nodded. “Well. There will be others.”
“But my husband is dead.” Her throat ached so she could hardly bear it. “I begged him to come away with me, and he died fighting in the street.”
“There’s always another man. It won’t be your husband, but it will be someone. Life goes on,” the lady said.
“Must it?”
The woman didn’t answer. The sun crawled higher. Hot tears on Maggie’s face grew cold.
“It’s not a changeling, is it?” she asked at last.
“No.”
“And you’re not a faery-lady.”
The woman smiled her black smile. “Are you sure?”
“No.” Maggie laughed, in spite of her weeping. “But I see now. It doesn’t matter if you are. There’s always another world. But it’s never better than here.” She looked at the babe in her arms. In the clear daylight she saw Bride had died and was blue and cold and stiff as a stick.
The sun inched higher in the sky. The whore by the fire left off warming her hands and crossed the squar
e to stand before them. “I’m sorry about your baby,” she said.
“I tried so hard.” Maggie bent her head and kissed Bride’s cold face. “I tried.”
“Ah, love, love,” said the whore. “We all do.”
She sat on Maggie’s other side, pressing her fire-warmed body to her cold one. Maggie leaned her head up against the whore’s shoulder. They sat that way for a long time. And when Maggie was ready, the whore and the star-woman walked with her to the church. They stood by while she spoke to the father there about arranging another funeral. And they kept standing as she went to put flowers on Aiden’s grave and light a candle for his soul.
A Kingdom of Sugar Skulls and Marigolds
Eric J. Guignard
HEY, PACHUCO.
You ever seen the lights go green in a woman’s eyes when she takes the hand of a man made of bones? He’s dressed like the finest of charros with his greca suit of black and gold that twinkles as stars in a moonless night, and the buckle of his piteado belt is carved from sacred jade. He could be the mariachi of dreams, though for all the voice of his song, he don’t play no music, he just dances.
He’s a badass chingón too; even if just a thing of bones, you wouldn’t mess with him. He wears this big top hat instead of a sombrero, and it’s tall as an eagle can fly, all shiny black with a silk band around its crown covered in roses and cockscomb and chrysanthemums, and it’s crazy the hat never moves while he dances, and somehow you get this feeling you don’t want it to move either, because if it did, it’d be bad, even though it’s a skull already wearing this hat, just a skull with carnival paint and sweet candy hearts, but what’s under the hat is still worse….
