by Jeff Strand
Gently, you open the door and step out into the entrance hall. The house is massive. You made a lot of money—it was always part of the deal: fame, riches, success beyond your wildest imaginings—and have been able to afford all the good things in life.
You walk softly across the varnished wooden floor, trying not to make a sound. You have lived here for eight years, so you know every loose board, each separate groan the house might make as you move through it. He doesn’t know any of this—he is an intruder, an alien in your midst. Your familiarity with the house gives you an edge, or so you tell yourself, keeping up the pretence that you have a chance of changing things.
Shadows skim across the floor and huddle like frightened animals at the bases of the walls. You ignore them. They are nothing, just tricks of the night. The real trickster—the one you have waited the best part of a decade to meet again—is waiting for you somewhere within the house, grinning with that hideous oversized mouth.
You check the living room, but he isn’t in there. The grandfather clock stands like a blind sentry, the leather armchair is a fat dwarf waiting to pounce. The fire grate is an open mouth.
You turn around and walk towards the library. The door is open, and when you peer inside, half expecting to find him there, poring over the old books in your collection, all you see is the dark interior of the shelf-lined room. The books you paid so much for, the signed and limited editions, the first editions and forgotten volumes, are all worthless to you now. The only thing that is worth anything is upstairs in an attic bedroom, behind a bolted door and with an armed guard—an ex mercenary and former SAS man known only as Mr. Timbre.
The kitchen is empty of life, too. Just pots and pans and cabinets packed with food. The walk-in freezer is locked, as always, and he wouldn’t be in there anyway.
He hates the cold.
He likes the heat, just like the devil he is.
Finally you return to the hallway and begin to climb the stairs, one hand on the banister, the other clutching the pistol. You aim the barrel forward, in case he decides to jump out on you, like a jack-in-the-box. But he doesn’t do that; it isn’t his way. He prefers a more subtle approach.
At the top of the stairs you stand and stare along the landing. All the doors are closed. At the end of the landing, around the corner and up another short flight of wooden stairs, is your son’s attic room. Toby is asleep. It is his tenth birthday, and you let him stay up late to watch a DVD. He fell asleep before the end, and you carried him up the stairs and to his room, with Mr. Timbre bringing up the rear just in case you-know-who (or, more to the point, you-don’t-know-who) decided to make an appearance earlier than promised.
But he wouldn’t have done that, either. He is nothing if not a man of his word. A man…is that really what he is? Right now, at the dead of night in a darkened house, you think not. Everything he promised you came true: all the riches, the magazine covers and television shows, the films and the awards, and all the money that fell into your open hands, making you a multi-millionaire almost overnight. No mortal man could deliver on such a deal.
You check each room as you move along the landing, just in case. It feels as if you are simply delaying the inevitable. You know where he is, you have always known. He is exactly where he said he would be: in your son’s room, waiting for you to make your own entrance. But this is all part of the game, a way of deceiving yourself and pretending that the legends were all lies, stories told to scare children into behaving themselves.
Fairy stories.
He isn’t in either of the two guest rooms. Nor is he in your room, the master bedroom, with its huge bed and thick carpets. The showroom; the best room in the house. No, he isn’t in there. You know he isn’t, yet still you are compelled to look, to continue with this absurd delaying tactic.
Finally you reach the turning at the end of the landing. You stop, take a deep breath, and tighten your grip on the gun. Your palms are sweaty; the gun feels like it might fall from your hand. You close your eyes and remember…you remember how it all started…
…as a struggling artist in a cramped council flat in east Leeds, waiting for opportunity to come and find you. You would have done anything to make it to the big time: sold your soul, traded your flesh, even given away your firstborn son, who at that point was not even a flicker in your imagination. You never wanted kids. You didn’t think it would matter…
And that was when he came. It is always when he comes. Just as that thought enters a person’s head, put there by the fairy tales of their youth, he stirs in his nest of baby bones and rolls onto the blood-sodden ground of his underground cavern, hearing the clarion call of yet another desperate soul, a man or a woman so in love with the thought of a short cut to success that they would give anything to achieve status and respect without having to work hard, to sweat blood and tears, without having to earn it.
In the story the code is cracked, his name is always learned or overheard at the last minute, just in time to save the day. But in reality, things are not so simple. He either doesn’t have a name or he has so many that it is impossible to pin one down and present it to him when he comes a-calling.
Mr. Timbre has travelled the world trying to learn the name he goes by, but always he returned without a clue. An old man in Tibet was meant to know the secret, but when Mr. Timbre reached the village where the man was supposed to live, all he found was fifty dead bodies and a bunch of burned-out huts, the embers still smoking. Then again, in India, it was claimed that a woman was the keeper of his name, that she had it tattooed on the inside of her mouth. All Mr. Timbre found was an old painting of a woman with her jaws held open by metal rods, and a question mark carved into the flesh of her tongue.
There is an obscure tribe in a remote part of the Andes whose members worship him, venerating him as a deity: a harsh God who steals children, who consumes their flesh and picks clean their bones with his long, thin talons.
He does not have a name. Or perhaps he has too many.
You turn the bend in the hallway and see Mr. Timbre on the floor at the foot of the attic stairs, a pool of blood forming a perfect crimson nova around his head. You mourn him only briefly—he was a good friend, a dogged worker for the cause, but in the end he was unable to help. You bend down, touch a hand to his forehead, and close your eyes, saying a prayer to a God in which you have never believed.
Then, accepting the truth of the situation at last, you stand and approach the stairs that lead up to your son’s bedroom door.
At the top of the stairs the handle is twisted; the big heavy-duty Yale lock has been broken in half. The door is ajar. You reach out and push it open, not stepping inside, not yet; just waiting on the threshold, waiting to be invited in.
“Enter.” His voice is the same as before: high-pitched, childlike, a mockery of humanity.
You step up into the attic room and close the door behind you, never looking anywhere but straight ahead. Not at the flickering television set in the corner, the shelves and cupboards, the cartoon posters on the walls. Staring only at him, directly into his terrible watery eyes…
He looks identical to the last time you met, ten short years ago. He has not aged a bit—but, strange-looking as he is, you probably would not have noticed any effects of ageing on his distorted features. He is short, perhaps four feet tall and as thin as a bunch of sticks. His hands are long, large: they are the hands of a giant grafted onto the arms of a dwarf. He is wearing red felt ankle-length trousers, a short green waistcoat with nothing underneath. His ribs are so visible that the grey skin covering them looks like parchment paper. You are sure that you can see the motion of his heart beating, the slow flow of blood through his monstrous veins.
“It’s nice to see you again.” His lips are like skinned sausages, framing a mouth that takes up most of the lower part of his perfectly round face. His nose consists of two black holes located an inch above the top lip. His eyes are the size and shape of saucers, with lots of white pupil and tiny red
irises.
You are unable to speak.
“What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?” He is holding your sleeping son, with one of his painfully thin arms wrapped around the boy’s neck, like some kind of variation on the sleeper hold used by nightclub bouncers and old-school wrestlers. He tightens his grip. Your son sleeps on, drugged by either narcotics or magic.
“Let him go.” Your voice, when it comes, is pathetic; quiet as a whisper.
He laughs, his shoulders shrugging gently. “Don’t be so damned silly. I’ve come to collect on your part of the bargain.”
“Please…”
He laughs again. “That’s exactly what you said when you asked me for fame and wealth and all the treasures of the modern world. ‘Please’, you said. ‘Let me have it all.’ I told you the cost back then, and it’s the same now. I’m taking your first born son. In ten years, a man gets hungry.”
His tiny feet wiggle at the end of his thin legs. He is wearing purple velvet shoes, with little bells on the pointed toes. But the bells are silent; they make no music. Now is not the time for music of any kind.
“Take anything else—take me. Just…just not him. Not my boy.” You fall down onto your knees, holding out the gun. The barrel is shaking.
“Bullets don’t work on the likes of me. Just ask your dead friend out there. He tried that one, too, until I slit his throat with my fingernails.” He laughs again; the sound is empty, mocking, and it makes you feel physically ill.
“You have one chance now. Remember? Can you remember that part of the bargain, the single get-out clause? You have one chance to save your boy, and to save yourself.” He pauses, strokes your son’s damp blonde head with those long, long fingers. The nails are like knives, and stained red with Mr. Timbre’s blood. “Just tell me my name and I’ll leave. It’s as simple as that.”
You begin to cry, but soundlessly, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of hearing you sob. “But it isn’t easy. Not at all. I’ve searched everywhere, spoken to everyone who might have the slightest clue, but I’ve never found a thing. Nobody knows who you are. You have no name.”
“Oh,” he says, opening that enormous mouth to show oversized wet, pink gums without any teeth. Gums meant for sucking, not biting. “Oh, but I do have a name. If you think about it, my name is obvious.”
You taste the word before you say it, and it makes you retch.
“Rumplestiltskin.”
This time his laughter is uproarious, as if what you have said is the funniest thing he has heard in several lifetimes, the greatest joke of all time. “Oh, don’t be so fucking stupid,” he says, between bouts of manic laughter. “I expected so much more from you.”
“I…I don’t know your name.” Everything you say is obsolete. Nothing sounds right.
He gets up off the bed, dragging your son along the floor by the neck. Still Toby does not move; he is out of it, deep under the influence of this twisted little man, this goblin from the darkest recesses of the human mind.
“Please, just let him go.”
He shakes his head. His pulsing eyes are filled with sorrow. “I don’t like doing this, but it’s necessary. Such is my lot in this life; to take away the ones you people love most and eat them like a good steak, sucking off the succulent skin and devouring the tender sweetmeats beneath.” He licks his lips; his thick tongue, when it unfurls, is at least a foot long and covered in livid spots. Contrary to his self-serving soliloquy, he looks as though he enjoys this very much. “All you have to do to save them is tell me my name. It’s easy if you put your mind to it, so damned obvious. But nobody ever guesses right—they’re all too caught up in that stupid fairy tale, the one read to you by your stupid parents when you’re lying gurgling in your cribs.”
His eyes are shining. They are aflame. He shakes his head, and then continues with his rhapsody:
“But let me tell you something, my friend. Those fairy tales are all lies; they are perfect little deceits, designed to cover up our real intent. That’s precisely what gives them their power.” He walks slowly to the small dormer window, hauling your son onto his broad, square shoulders before delivering the kicker, the punch line. “That’s what gives me my power…”
You do not want him to leave, not now, not like this, with Toby hanging from his shoulders like a potato sack. “Do one thing, then…before you leave.” You point the gun at him, your finger tightening on the useless trigger. “Tell me your name.”
He pauses with one leg raised and his foot resting on the narrow window sill. The window is open. A chill breeze ruffles his sparse hair. “I won’t do that,” he says in his curiously singsong voice. “But I will tell you this:
“I am the oil in the water, the canker in the rose, the tiny spot of blood at the center of the egg yolk. Mine is the first and the last story ever told. I walk through walls and I dance around the fire like nobody’s watching. My blood runs with the molten lava of youth but I have been around for centuries, playing my games and telling my stories. I am famine and pestilence, I am illness without cure. My name is written on the underside of the rocks at the bottom of the ocean; it is whispered by eagles in flight and carved into the inner walls of volcanoes. I am chaos, I am destiny, and I am the one who always wins the fight. I am you, I am him, and I am her.
“I am everyone.”
Then, in a flurry of movement, the imp is gone, leaping over the window sill as if the burden he carries is as light as a doll. His footsteps clatter across the roof tiles, quick and light.
The window rattles in its frame, the breeze flutters the edges of the posters on the walls, curling them, and the sweat dries like paint on your suddenly cold skin. Much too late, you pull the trigger but the gun does not fire. It was never going to fire, not while he was around, exerting his influence and playing out his grim little games until the world ends…
You drop the gun and crawl over to your son’s bed, then climb up onto the mattress and curl up into a ball on top of the bedclothes. You can smell his skin. You pull his stuffed toys close, cuddling them as if by doing so might change this thing that has happened. Among them is a toy you have never seen before, a final insult left behind by that monster. It looks just like him: thin arms, big hands, round grinning face…
You close your eyes and see liquid fire surging behind the lids: the burning walls of a volcano, the inside of the throat of a dragon, the molten belly at the core of the planet earth.
Lava. Magma. The blazing fires of eternity.
Written there in jagged lines of light, burned deeply into the shifting stone ceilings of underground caverns, you finally see his name, and the irony is so damned perfect that it breaks your heart in two. The truth was there all along, right behind your eyes, but you didn’t have the sense to notice. His name has never changed. It has always been the same, eternal and immortal, just like him…a name that will never, ever die.
“Tell me my name,” you whisper though the tears.
“My name,” you answer, smiling and shivering and trying to imitate his voice.
“My name is…Forever.”
Discarded
Nancy Rosenberg England
Blake was tired of waiting in the attic. He was just tired period. It felt like it had been a very long time, but he wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. He wasn’t hungry. Or thirsty. Maybe he ate and drank before he came to the attic? He couldn’t remember before the attic, though. His head hurt.
A squirrel ran across the floor in front of him, right over his foot! Blake froze.
The twenty or so forgotten dolls surrounding him stared blankly in various directions. Some stared at the wooden dollhouse, the one that was never painted. Some stared at the shoe boxes filled with ancient cassette tapes—R.E.M., Tears for Fears, Van Halen. Some simply stared into the attic itself, a slanted space no more than four feet high at its highest point. A small window allowed filtered light and Blake saw that the sun was going away.
One doll was a Chinese
girl named Ling with a lovely porcelain face, thick dusty black hair (real?), and a long white nightgown. The lace at the end of its nightgown was yellowed but still beautiful. Its expression was solemn. Most of the dolls wore solemn expressions.
The Barbie doll didn’t look like the one in Toy Story 3. Its blonde hair was chopped off and parts of it were missing, revealing small holes in its head where hair used to sprout. What was left was streaked green, maybe from a magic marker. It wore a pair of neon pink stiletto heels and nothing else. The little yellow dress by the boxes of puzzles might look nice on it, but Blake was too far away.
Baby Boy, the favorite, was propped up against a curly auburn-haired Cabbage Patch Kid named Nathaniel Xander that was lying flat on its stomach. Baby Boy’s eyes were so big and blue. Its soft, well-hugged pajamas were tattered and spots of dried applesauce painted its bib. It looked like a real baby and that its owner dearly loved it, maybe even took it on strolls in the turquoise and white bassinet in the corner. And it blinked! At least Blake thought it seemed as if it could blink if someone were to hold it.
The Alice in Wonderland doll looked confused to be in an attic and not a wonderland, but its lips still yet formed a sweet bow. Blake thought it was pretty. Maybe it could be his girlfriend some day! But his head hurt right now. What a pretty blue dress and white apron. Why, it even held a pocket watch! Was it real?
The fancy, boxed Winnie-the-Pooh tea set was out of Blake’s reach. The illustrations on the tea set’s box were marvelous, though. Kanga and Roo with raised teacups; Piglet and Pooh Bear giggling, eating tiny cakes; Owl looking down on them, stern yet pleased. Alice might like to have a tea party with him, Blake thought. He would serve whatever people served at tea parties.
Blake stared at Alice, at all of them, and they stared back.
After a while, they bred long shadows that looked real. The lace at the end of Ling’s nightgown was a cobweb, stretching across a chunk of the attic. Barbie’s stilettos and breasts were sharp weapons. Baby Boy was nothing special, just a lump. Nathaniel Xander was a corpse floating in a river. And the Alice doll cast the tall, intimidating shadow of an angry adult; its pocket watch was a large rock. The rest of the dolls were a jumble. Blake couldn’t find his shadow.
