Uncanny

by David Macinnis Gill

  Miss Haverhill wanted the egg, and Louie still had it, until tomorrow evening, when the loan was due. If I could come up with the money, I could get the egg out of hock. Fate or kismet was in my favor, because Ma had just hours earlier given me the means to get the money—the thimbles. After dinner I did some Googling and found out the Meissens were more valuable than I ever dreamed. One almost like mine had sold for eight thousand at auction last month. If I could pawn a thimble for one-tenth of the auction price, I could keep the egg and make rent. I would worry about getting the thimbles back later. Ma would call it borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, but what else was a girl to do?

  I tiptoed to the living room, opened the cabinet and picked up my birthday gift. Inside the case were two thimbles. The white porcelain almost glowed in the light from the streetlamps outside, and the gold glinted as I pushed one onto my thumb. It slid on easily, but when I tried to remove it, it popped like a cork and left a stinging red cut just below the nail.

  “Jeezum,” I said and rubbed the sore spot. Who knew a thimble could be lethal?

  “The price to be paid in blood!” someone screamed, an electric pain arced up my hand, and I could taste metal on my tongue. My eyes closed, and I was lying prone in darkness, my hands crossed over my chest, a shroud covering my face. A casket. I was in a casket, buried deep in the ground, and I had lain there for hundreds of years, waiting, waiting for this moment. I heard a splintering crack, and light flooded in, blinding me, and the muttering returned, louder this time and growing more loud until the voices reached a crescendo and someone called my name.

  “Willow?” Ma said. “Willow Jane?”

  When I opened my eyes, she was standing next to me with a tissue pressed against the cut on my thumb. Blood bloomed through it, and I was surprised how I bled. The thimbles were in their case. She must have put them back.

  “Hey, Ma,” I said.

  “Poor girl.” She steered me to the couch. “Sleepwalking again. It’s been two years, hasn’t it? Since your father—”

  Was murdered.

  “—died. Here, keep pressure on the cut while I get the Mercurochrome.”

  It wasn’t really Mercurochrome: The stuff was banned before I was born. Ma wasn’t one to change, even when the small brown bottle she returned with was clearly labeled “Iodine.”

  “This won’t hurt a bit,” she said.

  “That’s a lie.” I sucked in air when the antiseptic hit the wound. “We both know it burns like molten lava.”

  “Saying it helps me feel less guilty.” She wrapped a Band-Aid around my finger. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

  “Eighth grade. When that goon cross-checked me into the bench and the refs didn’t even call a penalty.”

  “Tsk. You nurse injustices far too long. That’s the Conning in you.” She rubbed the worry lines between her eyebrows. “Ever since the party, you’ve seemed a little bit off.”

  “Just a headache.” It was true. I had been fighting a headache since the party. “No big deal.”

  “Those headaches worry me.” Ma closed the cabinet. “The sleepwalking, too. An aspirin for you, then straight back to bed.”

  “Yes, Mother dear,” I said, kissed her on the cheek, and headed to my room.

  But while Ma was in the bathroom getting aspirin, I ran back and swiped the thimbles. Seconds after I slid between the sheets and hid the thimbles under the mattress, she came in with a bottle of aspirin, a glass of water, and a pair of tailor’s scissors.

  “Take two,” she said.

  I was surprisingly thirsty, and the water burned, it was so cold. Maybe I really was coming down with something.

  I eyed the scissors suspiciously. “What are those for?”

  “Your headache.” She tucked the scissors under my pillow. “Sleep on these, and your pain will be gone like magic.”

  “If I sleep on those,” I said and removed the scissors, “I’ll need stitches.”

  “Steel’s the best thing for a headache, my grandmother always said.”

  “There’s no scientific evidence that sleeping with steel does anything. The same with magnets, runes, and charms.”

  “There’s more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than your philosophy allows,” she said. “Know who said that?”

  “Shakespeare. In Hamlet. Hamlet was telling his friend to have an open mind.”

  “Might I point out that Shakespeare put ghosts and fairies in his plays.”

  “There’s no scientific basis for those, either.”

  “Not everything can be explained with science, missy.”

  “Name one.”

  “Love.”

  Really? “Love is the accumulated effect of endorphins flooding the brain due to chemical responses in another human being.”

  “Leave it to my daughter to explain love like a chemical formula.”

  I put the scissors on the nightstand. “Leave it to my mother to eviscerate me in my sleep.”

  “Good night, my treasure. Sweet dreams,” Ma said. She turned out the light and shut the door, and that’s when my nightmares really began.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I thought fear’s supposed to make girls horny.” Flanagan pulled the crowbar out of the casket. The corner of the lid had broken off, revealing a dark space but no treasure. “It’s open. You want first look?”

  Will Patrick grabbed the crowbar and swung it over his head. The bar slammed into the lid, and a chunk fell into the darkness.

  “Why the hell did you bust it up?” Flanagan said. “You were just whining about me doing the same thing.”

  “The Shadowless needs to breathe,” he said, slack jawed, and dropped the crowbar on the ground. His gaze was fixed on the casket, where an unnatural light glowed between the cracks, illuminating a tattered shroud.

  “I knew it!” Flanagan peeped inside. “Just a pile of dust and rotted bones! Next time you wanna hunt for buried treasure, leave me out.”

  “The bones are the treasure.”

  “Up yours. I’ve got work in six hours. I’m out of here.”

  “You do not have leave to go,” Will Patrick said, his voice low and ghostly.

  Flanagan grabbed his crotch. “Leave this, jagoff.”

  He climbed to the surface, but when he grabbed a tree root to pull himself up, the root snapped, and he fell hard on his back. He lay gasping on a mound of fecund earth and worm-eaten leaves.

  “Oh hell,” he rasped. “I think I cracked some ribs.”

  Snap!

  “Will?” He jerked his head toward the noise in the darkness. “Damn it!” Somebody was watching him. No, he told himself, it’s just a squirrel or a chipmunk or some bird. Nothing to be scared of. The T station in Roxbury was way more dangerous than a bunch of worm-eaten corpses.

  He heard a footfall and looked up at Will Patrick’s face. “Dude! Don’t sneak—”

  Will swung the crowbar, and the claw shattered the bones of Flanagan’s temple and tore off a chunk of ear. The force of the blow snapped his neck so violently two cervical vertebrae splintered, but Flanagan felt nothing but the sensation of floating. He blinked into the darkness and saw the dim streetlights reflected in hundreds of tiny yellow eyes.

  Crows.

  Thousands were roosting in the dead branches above, not making a sound, as if they were silent sentinels keeping watch. Then, with a cacophonous crescendo of screams, the birds cried out and took flight, claws out, beaks wide and sharp, screaming for blood.

  His blood.

  A shadowy figure appeared, a tattered shroud covering its face. The shadow raised its desiccated arms and wrapped its rotted, sinewy hands of gristle and bone around Flanagan’s throat. The words Kelly had read came back to him: You cannot hear the Shadowless when her breath is in your ear.

  “Help me,” Flanagan whispered, but his voice was lost in the fury of the birds’ attack.

  They swept down on him, screaming and pecking, sharp beaks and talons ripping into the soft flesh of his face. In
the distance the bells of the Park Street Church tolled half past the hour, and Flanagan’s screams mixed with the sound of the ringing notes.

  PART TWO

  WONDERS OF AN INVISIBLE WORLD

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MALLEUS danced through the shadows down the path between the graves of Abiah and Josiah Franklin, a yarn necklace tied around her bony neck. Her feet padded on the gravel path, making almost no sound. Streetlights seemed to wash over and off her shroud like water on oilcloth as she left the cemetery and turned down the road, an internal compass pointing her toward the lights in the southern sky. They drew her like a beacon.

  A-hunting, she would go.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE doors of the dive bar blew open, and two hefty bouncers, who had just used Harken’s head like a battering ram, tossed him toward the street. His face skidded over the dirty sidewalk, and he landed on the asphalt on Tremont Street between two parked cabs.

  “Not so pretty now, huh?” the smaller bouncer yelled. “The tooth fairy’s gonna be real good to you tonight.”

  “Pretty is—” Harken crawled to his feet. “—as pretty does.” He put up his dukes like a bare-knuckle brawler. “Ready for another go, gentlemen?”

  “Come back in here again,” the second bouncer yelled as Harken knocked dirt from the shirt and jeans he’d scrounged, “and you’ll get a real beating.”

  Harken cupped a hand and spat an incisor into his palm. His face was skinned, and his left eye was puffed and purple from the left hook the bouncer had been lucky to land. One of his ribs was broken, too, but he wasn’t sure if it was from a punch or from being kicked by the three college boys whose girlfriends he’d flirted with.

  “I’ve had worse beatings from crippled fishwives.” He held up the bloody tooth. “I’ve paid for my supper, and I plan to eat it.”

  “All you can plan on eating,” said the smaller bouncer, “is the curb. Curb service. Get it?”

  “I’m familiar with the phrase.” Harken rolled up his sleeves and cracked his neck. “And you, gentlemen, are about to learn that I give as well as I get.”

  An hour before dawn, Harken awoke in a church courtyard to the sound of screaming. He leaped to his feet, fists ready. He looked around wildly for the source of the sound and found nothing but the stray gray cat that had been curled up next to him. It raised its hackles and hissed, fangs showing.

  “Damned cats,” he said and sighed, allowing his borrowed body to relax. “Why is it always cats?”

  He ran a hand through his black hair to straighten it, then rubbed his neck and stretched. The vertebrae he’d cracked had healed nicely in the hours since he left the bar on Tremont triumphant, if he could call eating a cold steak while the two bouncers and the three angry boyfriends took the naps he’d given them a victory. He’d gone into the seedy dive looking for food—being locked in a bronze grasshopper for almost thirty years raised a scorcher of an appetite—but part of him had been spoiling for a fight. He’d woken up angry, but even an old-fashioned donnybrook had done nothing to take the edge off.

  Harken’s bruised skin had changed during the night. It was now covered in tattooed symbols that began at the back of the neck, wound around his shoulders, and flowed down his broad chest and arms. The symbols were marred by deep-creased scars from a hundred battles great and small. Not all the scars were old. Some of them were as fresh as the new day dawning, but in the patchwork of runes and glyphs, words and pictures, it was impossible to tell. Harken’s body told a story, but like him, it was impenetrable. He had lived nineteen years and four months by his reckoning, but it had taken almost four hundred years to do it. That’s what came of being in the service of the wicked.

  Harken slipped off the leather jacket he’d procured from one of the bouncers and pulled a borrowed crimson hoodie over his head. He’d gone twenty-nine years without a meal, and last night’s steak was long gone. Already his body had burned through the food, using the fuel to heal his wounds. He stood and flexed his arms. There was a gash across his chest, a superficial cut from some glass that had almost healed. He ran a broad palm over the thick chest muscle and pushed hard, so hard he grunted. The black lines of the tattoos seemed to glow like his copper-colored eyes.

  He yawned, then heard another scream, this one louder than the first. The cat hissed again and bounded into the blue-gray light as a murder of crows descended on the courtyard. They washed over the church steeple and filled every nook and cranny from the windowsills to the iron fences to the power lines that stretched to the street.

  “Wicked birds,” he said. “Where’s a cat when you need one?”

  But there was nothing funny about the birds, not the way the flock of crows and rooks and magpies seemed to be moving west toward the Granary Burying Ground, where Harken had long ago buried his own secrets.

  He, it seemed, had not been the only creature reawakened last night.

  It was no more than fifteen minutes later that Harken emerged from an alley. His hood was pulled low to hide his face, and he made sure that traffic had passed before walking to the corner and crossing the street.

  He slipped between the iron gates and headed down the path to the graves of a former merchant and his family, all of whom had lived long lives and died wealthy, only to take eternal rest in graves atop a secret tomb. Wind whipped the branches, sending the leaves to the ground. They tumbled ahead of him and stopped at the hole in the earth where the merchant’s grave had been.

  Beneath a canopy of half-naked trees, Harken could see the chunks of dirt and pieces of mossy lid cast aside. He could see dead crows and carrion on either side of the hole. He could see the body of a young man swinging from an ancient sycamore, a noose tied around his neck, both thumbs sheared from his hands.

  “Not another killing,” Harken whispered. “After so much time.”

  Then he could see more and more and more, looking deep into the past and across the wide ocean to Scotland and its capital. There, as a lad of ten years, he stood with a crowd at Castlehill, separated by a deep ravine from Edinburgh Castle, which was perched high above them on Castle Rock.

  Hiding in the shadows of three tall poles raised upon a platform, Harken had watched as three confessed witches were marched through the crowd. They were led by a haughty minister, who had shoulder-length wavy red hair and a thick mustache. He wore a frock coat, black stockings, and buckled shoes with sturdy heels.

  They were followed by the executioner, a taller spidery man dressed in black and dun who carried a cudgel and a torch. A week earlier a young woman named Gillis Duncan had confessed to witchery and had accused Harken’s mistress and two other women of also cavorting with the devil.

  “Mistress,” Harken whispered as the women marched past.

  Her shoulders were thrown back, chin held high. She wore a gown of red velvet, and her dark hair flowed behind her like a horse’s mane. Although her dress was torn and stained with dried blood, she looked as regal as always. The other two women had fared less well. They wore blood and sweat-stained smocks, and their hair was caked with filth. They walked barefoot, and each of their stumbling steps left a bloody print on the path.

  Under a writ of James VI of Scotland himself, soldiers had taken the mistress in the night, binding her hands before she could fight and carrying her to the dungeons. She and the other accused had been put to torture and pinned to the prison walls in the witch’s bridle, an iron muzzle with four sharp prongs that dug into their soft mouths.

  After a day, their spit turned to blood, and their tongues swelled until they gagged for breath. After two days, they were ready to confess anything, just to be free.

  Now the crowd closed in on them, pressing in like a weight, spitting and cursing.

  “Back!” the executioner bellowed and raised the cudgel and torch. “Else ye’ll be getting the same!”

  The crowd fell back. Harken ducked around shopkeepers and tradesmen, fishwives and horse traders, all smelling of hemp rope, pitch, tar
, and flaxseed oil. Their voices were shrill and full of excitement. A witch burning stirred their blood as much as a battle or a holiday.

  The wavy-haired minister led the condemned up wooden steps to the platform. He chanted a prayer as the executioner tied the first two to their stakes.

  The executioner grabbed Harken’s mistress. He yanked her bound hands above her head, cinching the rope around the charred skin of the stake. Then she laughed, and he stopped cold. She spoke softly, laughing again, and the executioner hastily bound her torso and arms to the stake, then quickly withdrew.

  “Mistress?” Harken whispered to no one. All along he assumed she would escape the soldiers. That she would trick them or kill them, then simply walk out of the dungeons. He never thought that she might actually burn.

  The thought gave him a thrill. To be free of the mistress! To no longer be forced to find other norns for her to kill! To finally return, perhaps, to the arms of his mother. His real mother, whose face he no longer remembered, except in dreams.

  “Confess!” The minister stepped forward, screaming into their faces, “Confess your sins before God and man!”

  The first woman, her head hanging low, confessed. As did the second, and the crowd went mad, screaming, “Fire!” and “Burn!”

  The minister came to the mistress, his face bloodred from screaming, but she met his eye and held it. His voice shook as he tried to yell again. It came out so soft and raspy Harken barely heard him say, “Confess your sins, woman.”

  “Where shall I begin?” The mistress seductively licked her ruby lips. “I have poisoned the king’s children with gut of toad, cat’s feet, and an old man’s toe cuttings. And I’ve thrice danced naked with the devil in the king’s own court.”

  The angry crowd gasped, and Harken felt the flicker of hope go out, never to be rekindled.

  “Harlot! Heretic! Unclean!” the minister cried out. “Woman, how dare you!”