Outside, the policeman was walking idly around the folly, his hands clasped behind his back. I handed him his lemonade as I joined him, the ice cracking loudly in the glass, and watched as he took a deep draught. There were great sweat stains beneath his arms and upon his back, a deeper blue against the lighter shade of his shirt, like a relief map of the oceans.
“What do you think of it?” I asked him.
“It’s good,” he replied, believing me to be referring to the lemonade. “Just what the doctor ordered on a day like today.”
I corrected him. “No, I meant the folly.”
Morris shifted his feet slightly and lowered his head. “Not really for me to say, now, Mr. Merriman,” he said. “I don’t claim to be an expert on such matters.”
“Expert or not, you must have an opinion on it.”
“Well, frankly sir, I don’t much care for it. Never have.”
“You sound like you’ve been exposed to it on more than one occasion,” I said.
“It’s been a while,” he said, a little warily. “Mr. Ellis…”
He trailed off. I waited. I was anxious to question him further, but I did not want him to think I was engaged merely in idle prying.
“I heard,” I said at last, “that his wife disappeared, and that the poor man took his own life soon after.”
Morris took another drink of lemonade and looked at me closely. It was easy to underestimate such a man, I thought: His awkwardness, his weight, his struggles with his bicycle, all were rather comical at first appearance. But Constable Morris was a shrewd man, and his lack of progress through the ranks was due not to any deficiencies in his character or his work, but to his own desire to remain at Ebbingdon and tend to those in his care. Now it was my turn to shift beneath his gaze.
“That’s the story,” said Morris. “I was going to say that Mr. Ellis didn’t care much for the folly either. He wanted to demolish it, but then events took a turn for the worst and, well, you know the rest.”
But, of course, I didn’t. I knew only what I had heard through local gossip, and even that was meted out to me, as a new arrival, in carefully measured amounts. I told Morris that this was the case, and he smiled.
“Gossips with discretion,” he said. “I never heard the like.”
“I’m aware of how things stand in small villages,” I said. “I expect that I could leave grandchildren behind me who would still be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion.”
“You have any children then, sir?”
“No,” I replied, unable to keep a twinge of regret from my voice. My wife was not particularly maternal, and nature appeared to have concurred in that assessment.
“It’s an odd thing,” said Morris, giving no indication that he had noticed the alteration in my tone. “It’s been many years since children were heard in Norton Hall, not since before Mr. Gray’s time. Mr Ellis, he was childless too.”
It was not a topic I wished to pursue, but the mention of Ellis allowed me to steer the conversation into more interesting waters, and I jumped at the opportunity a little too eagerly.
“They say, well, they say that Mr. Ellis might have killed his wife.”
I immediately felt embarrassed at speaking so bluntly, but Morris did not appear to mind. In fact, he seemed to appreciate my honesty at broaching the subject so openly.
“There was that suspicion,” he admitted. “We questioned him, and two detectives came up from London to look into it, but it was as if she had disappeared off the face of the earth. We searched the property here, and all the fields and lands around, but we found nothing. There were rumors that she had a fancy man in Brighton, so we tracked him down and questioned him as well. He told us that he hadn’t seen her in weeks, for all the trust you can put in the word of a man who would sleep with another man’s wife. Eventually, we had to let the whole matter rest. There was no body, and without a body there was no crime. Then Mr. Ellis shot himself, and people came to their own conclusions about what might have happened to his wife.”
He drained the last of his lemonade, then handed me the empty glass.
“Thank you,” he said. “That was very refreshing.”
I told him that he was most welcome, and watched as he prepared to mount his bicycle once again.
“Constable?”
He paused in his preparations.
“What do you think happened to Mrs. Ellis?”
Morris shook his head. “I don’t know, sir, but I do know this. Susan Ellis doesn’t walk this earth anymore. She lies beneath it.”
And with that, he cycled away.
The following week I had business in London that could not be put off. I took the train down and spent most of a frustrating day discussing financial affairs, a frustration aggravated by a growing sense of disquiet, so that my time in London was spent with only a fraction of my attention concentrated on my finances and the remainder devoted to the nature of the evil that appeared to have tainted Norton Hall. Although not a superstitious man, I had grown increasingly uneasy about the history of our new home. The dreams had been coming to me with increasing regularity, accompanied always by the sound of talons tapping and jaws clicking and, sometimes, by the sight of Eleanor leaning over me when at last I awoke, her eyes bright and knowing, her cheekbones threatening to erupt like knife blades through the taut skin of her face. Gray’s account of his travels had also unaccountably gone missing, and when I questioned Eleanor about it I sensed that she was lying to me when she denied any knowledge of its whereabouts. Both the attic and the cellar were a jumble of upturned boxes and discarded papers, the mess belying my wife’s claims that she was merely “reorganizing” our surroundings.
Finally, there had been disturbing changes in the more intimate aspects of our married life. Such matters should remain between a man and his wife, but suffice it to say that our relations were of a greater frequency-and, at least on my wife’s part, of a greater ferocity-than we had ever before known. It had now reached a point where I rather feared turning off the light, and I had taken to staying away from our bedroom until late into the night in the hope that Eleanor might be sleeping when at last I took my place beside her.
But Eleanor was rarely asleep, and her appetites were fearful in their insatiability.
It was dark when I got home that evening, but I could still see the marks of the vehicle tracks upon the lawn, and a gaping hole where the folly had once been. The remains of the construct itself lay in a jumble of concrete and lead on the gravel by the house, left there by the men responsible for its demolition, the paucity of its foundations now clearly revealed, for the structure itself was merely a feint, a means of covering up the pit that lay beneath. A figure stood at the lip of the hole, a lamp in her hand. As she turned to me, she smiled, a ghastly smile filled, it seemed to me, with both pity and malice.
“Eleanor!” I cried. “No!”
But it was too late. She turned and began to descend a ladder, the light quickly disappearing from view. I dropped my briefcase and dashed across the lawn, my chest heaving and a growing panic clawing at my gut, until I reached the lip of the hole. Below me, Eleanor was scraping at the dirt with her bare hands, slowly revealing the curled, skeletal figure of a woman, the remains still covered in a tattered pink dress, and I knew instinctively that this was Mrs. Ellis and that Constable Morris was right in his suspicions. She had not run away from her husband. Rather, she had been interred here by him, after she had dug her way beneath the folly and he had killed her, then himself, in a fit of horror and remorse. Mrs. Ellis’s skull was slightly elongated around the nose and mouth, as though some dreadful transformation had been arrested by her sudden death.
By now, Eleanor’s scratching had revealed a small coffin, dark and ornamented. I started down the ladder after her as she took a crowbar and tore at the great lock that Gray had placed on the casket before he buried it. I was on the final steps of the ladder when a wrenching sound came and, with a cry of triumph, Eleanor threw open the
lid. There, just as Gray had described, lay the curled-up remains topped by a strange, elongated skull. Already, the dust was rising and a thin red trail of vapor seeped from Eleanor’s mouth. Her body convulsed, as if it were being shaken by unseen hands. Her eyes bulged whitely in their sockets and her cheeks appeared to collapse into her open mouth, the lineaments of her skull clearly visible beneath the skin. The crowbar fell from her fingers and I grabbed it. Pushing her away, I raised the bar above my head and stood above the casket. A gray-black face with large, dark green eyes and hollows for ears looked up at me, and its sharp beaked jaws clicked as it rose toward me. Talons gripped the sides of its prison as it struggled to rise, and its body was a mockery of all that was beautiful in a woman.
Its breath smelled of dead things.
I closed my eyes, and struck. Something screamed, and the skull broke with a hollow, wet sound like the opening of a melon. The creature fell back, hissing, and I slammed down the lid. At my feet, Eleanor lay unconscious, the final traces of the red vapor coiling slowly between her teeth. Just as Gray had done years before, I took the crowbar and used it to jam the lock. From within the box came a furious hammering, and the crowbar jangled uneasily where it rested. The thing screamed repeatedly, a long high-pitched sound like the squealing of pigs in a slaughterhouse.
I placed Eleanor over my shoulder and, with some difficulty, climbed the ladder to the ground above, the thudding noises from the casket slowly fading. I drove her to Bridesmouth, where I placed her in the care of the local hospital. She remained unconscious for three days, and remembered nothing of the folly, or Lilith, when she awoke.
While she was in the hospital, I made arrangements for us to return permanently to London, and for Norton Hall to be sealed. And then, one bright afternoon, I watched as the hole in the lawn was lined with cement strengthened with steel. More cement was poured into the hole, three containers of it, until the maw was almost half full. Then the workmen began the task of building a second folly to cover the hole, larger and more ornate than its predecessor. It cost me half a year’s income, but I had no doubt that it was worth it. Finally, while Eleanor continued to convalesce with her sister in Bournemouth, I watched as the last stones of the folly were set in place and the workmen set about removing their equipment from the lawn.
“I take it the missus didn’t like the last folly, Mr. Merriman?” said the foreman, as we watched the sun set upon the new structure.
“I’m afraid it didn’t suit her disposition,” I replied.
The foreman gave me a puzzled look.
“They’re funny creatures, women,” he continued at last. “If they had their way, they’d rule the world.”
“If they had their way,” I echoed. But they won’t, I thought. At least, not if I have anything to do with it.
Dangerous Women - Penzler, Otto Ed v1.rtf
A THOUSAND MILES FROM NOWHERE
LORENZO CARCATERRA
T
he tall man sat with his back resting against the thick glass window. His eyes were shut, three fingers of his right hand holding down a long-neck bottle of lukewarm beer. On a radio murmuring somewhere in the distance, the Dixie Chicks were working their way through “Give It Up or Let Me Go.” The man took a deep breath and ran his free hand across the top of his left knee, trying to ease the pain that too many years of medication and three operations had failed to lessen. He was tired, lacking the patience to wait out yet another winter snowstorm, the din of what had, only hours earlier, been a bustling airport terminal, reduced now to the quiet scrapings of cleaning crews and the fitful sleep of stranded passengers.
He was supposed to have been in Nashville four hours ago, finished his job three hours ago and been halfway through a smoked rib and baked bean dinner by now. Instead, here he was, sitting in the back of a bar whose name he didn’t know, manned by a middle-aged bartender who cared less about his next refill than he did about the tape-delayed lacrosse game coming down off the soundless TV above him. The tall man opened his eyes, turned his head and looked out through the steam-streaked glass. The snow was coming down at an angle, thick flakes building up on silent runways and against the wheels of stalled Boeing jets. An airport ground crew was spraying down an American Eagle jet with yellow foam, in a vain attempt to keep its engines from freezing in the midst of an unforgiving wind. The tall man turned away from the window and lifted his bottle of beer, finishing it off in two thick gulps.
There would be no flights tonight.
“You can blame me, if you want,” the woman’s voice said. “Happens every time I fly. I leave the house and the bad weather follows.”
She stood facing the long window, watching the flakes land and slide down the thick glass, a gray satchel resting against the points of her black boots, long blonde hair shielding half her face. A black leather coat stopped at the knee and did little to disguise her slim, shapely body. Her voice was cotton soft and her white skin shimmered off the glow from the low-watt lights that lined the room and the heavy floods that lit the outside runways.
“Make it up to me,” the tall man said to her.
She turned to look at him, her dark eyes giving off a glint of red, a cat caught in the glare of a flashlight. “How?” she asked.
“Let me buy you a drink,” the tall man said. “Thanks to the weather you brought in, it looks like there’s little else to do but wait. And I don’t much feel like reading the paper-again.”
The woman kicked aside her satchel and undid the buttons on her leather coat. She tossed the coat on an empty chair between them, swung aside strands of hair from her eyes, pulled back a chair and sat across from the tall man. “Bourbon,” she said. “Glass of ice water with lemon on the side.”
The tall man gave a hint of a smile, pushed his chair back, grabbed his empty beer bottle and walked toward the bar. The woman watched him leave and then turned her look to the raging storm, swirling gusts of powder and ice particles dancing in circles under the hot lights.
“You’re gonna have to make do with lemon peel,” the tall man said, resting the drinks on her side of the table. He sat back down and tilted a sweaty bottle of Heineken in her direction. “Cheers,” he said with a smile and a wink and downed a long swallow from the cold beer.
The woman nodded and sipped her bourbon, the familiar burn in her throat and chest as welcome as an old friend. She sat back and looked across the table at the tall man. He was in his mid-forties and in shape, hard upper body chiseled by daily workouts, his white, button-down J. Crew shirt tight around the arms and neck. His face was tanned and handsome, set off by Greek olive eyes and rich dark hair. His gestures and movements were deliberate, never rushed, his body language calm and free of stress, the habits of a man at ease in his own skin. “What city aren’t you going to tonight?” he asked.
“Los Angeles,” the woman said, glancing down at the silver Tiffany watch latched around her thin wrist. “If the skies were clear, would have been in LAX twenty minutes ago.”
“What’s there?” he asked.
“Warm weather, palm trees, movie stars and an ocean you can swim in,” the woman said.
“What’s there for you?” he asked, leaning closer toward her, the beer bottle still in his right hand.
“All of that,” she said. “Plus a home where I can walk to the beach, a car that loves winding hills and two cats that are always happy to see me.”
“The beach, a car and two cats,” the man said. “That usually means no kids and no husband.”
“You can’t have everything,” the woman said.
“That depends on what you want everything to be,” the man said.
“What’s it for you?” the woman asked.
The man sipped his beer and shrugged. “This, right now,” the man said. “Having a beer, sitting across from a beautiful woman in an empty airport. Being in the moment and enjoying it. Not having to huddle in a corner and burn out a cell phone battery to say goodnight to kids I never see enough to make a dent or li
sten to a wife complain about something I never even knew was a problem and could care less that it is. No mortgage, no bills, no worries. Live the way I travel. Light.”
“You need money to live like that,” the woman said. “And either a job or a rich father to hand it over. Which belongs to you?”
“If I’m going to open my heart, it’d be nice to know who it’s going to,” the man said, revealing a handsome smile.
“You could call me Josephine,” the woman said. “But I wouldn’t like it very much. Even when my mother used to use the name I’d cringe. Most of the people I talk to just call me Joey. It makes it easier for everyone that way.”
“I knew a nun named Josephine once,” the man said. “She didn’t seem to like the name much either. So, Joey it is.”
“And whose heart is it that’s about to be opened up to Joey?” the woman asked, more a smirk than a smile crossing her lips, bourbon glass held close to her mouth.
“I’m Frank,” the man said. “Same name as my father and grandfather. My family liked to keep things simple.”
“So do you, based on what I’ve heard so far,” Joey said.
“Pretty much,” Frank said. “There usually isn’t any kind of a payoff when you add in complications.”
“That’s not always easy to arrange,” Joey said. “Sometimes complications just seem to happen.”
“All the more reason not to toss our own into the mix,” Frank said. “There’s always somebody somewhere eager to make something simple hard. It’s what they live for and it’s what I do my best to avoid.”
Dangerous Women Page 18
