Bone Swans: Stories

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “Aw, Di!”

  Granny Two-Shoes, who still held his hand, now squeezed with intent. Tex allowed her to tug him into the cardboard hut after Diodiance, with Sheepdog Sal trotting behind, and the Flabberghast following last.

  The first thing they saw, after the marble-floored foyer itself, was her skin.

  It hung from one blank wall, stretched out and tacked there with silver nails. They knew the skin belonged to Beatrice because her hair was red. Not orange-red like the Flabberghast’s. Red like when a fire dies.

  “Beatrice!” Diodiance screamed. This time Tex did punch the Flabberghast. Right in the knee.

  The Flabberghast stumbled against a small table that held, among other things, a flensing tool and a familiar brown loafer (a scuffed size six, women’s) all under the coating of gray dust that comes from crunching bones. He hit the table’s edge and his peacock coat snarled him. Searching for purchase, his hands closed on air. This close up, he was not graceful. Not like he’d always seemed, sitting out in his blue lawn chair with his legs stretched before him like unfurled fire hoses.

  Diodiance flinched against the wall, shielding Granny Two-Shoes with her body, Tex at her side, Beatrice’s skin at her back. Granny Two-Shoes saw something on the floor and bent to pick it up. Beatrice’s slingshot.

  This put the Flabberghast between them and the door. He stood very still now, arms hanging loosely at his sides.

  “You killed her!” Diodiance said. It wasn’t a sob, and it wasn’t a growl, but it was something like both.

  “I do not eat the living,” said the Flabberghast.

  “You killed her and stripped her flesh and ate her bones.”

  The Flabberghast splayed one hand over his stomach. His diamond teeth gleamed and glinted, as if a spotlight in his belly shone up and out his throat, through his lips, casting rainbows all around him.

  “She died at my feet,” he said. “She was in the final stages when I found her. The slaprash marked her face, all down one side. Nothing to save. She was just that age.” He shrugged, as if to say, “The rest you know. I am what I am.”

  Tex gnawed his lip to keep back a wail.

  “I wish your Beatrice had come to me earlier,” reflected the Flabberghast. “Those underground have informed us here of a matter in the deadlands that needs our immediate attention. Not being bound by the black iron gates, I am the only Tall One at liberty to perform the task. However. To do so, I shall need the help of a living child. Willing help, I should say. Otherwise, the door to the deadlands opens only one way, and I have no particular desire to be stuck on the far side of it. Had your Beatrice trusted me more, or perhaps loved you less, she would have done splendidly. She was so strong. Not fearless, but not one to fear foolishly. This journey would have prepared her for the one she now must undergo. Alas, she died too soon. I liked her. I might have used her to better purpose than as a lunchbox.” He paused. “I don’t suppose any of you might volunteer to be of assis—”

  “Never!” spat Diodiance through her tears. “Never, until the end of the end of the world! I’d sooner slap myself right now and bleed out bawlin’ murder!”

  Hearing the quaver in her voice, Tex slung an arm around her, and stated, “Me, neither!”

  His free hand grasped a stone in his pocket. He was already gauging distance, velocity, angle, wondering if Tall Ones felt pain like humans, if they had brains to concuss, if the great holes that were their eyes could be put out…

  The Flabberghast turned those black-dark eyes on him. Tex’s hand went numb.

  “A pity.” The Flabberghast’s long fingers drummed the silver buttons on his red brocade vest. “For, in return for your ready collaboration, I would offer my brave adventurer a chance to see Beatrice again. I need to travel to a certain level of the deadlands, to the place she now resides. Only a child may bring me there. And only a living child may bring me out again.”

  A bark, and Tex and Diodiance sprang apart. Granny Two-Shoes, once again mounted like a maharani atop Sheepdog Sal, came forward. Her thin blond hair had not been combed in two days. There was chocolate on her face from the icing she’d eaten for breakfast, a cut on her knee where she’d fallen that morning. But her eyes were steady, blue as the Flabberghast’s were black, and she held out her hand. He stared down at her.

  “Even in an epoch that deplores such conventions,” said he, “and though you are by far the most superior three-year-old representative of your species I have ever come across, I cannot help but feel that you are not quite of an age to consent.” His long black mouth twisted a little as if he wanted to say something more. Instead he flipped his palm like a playing card. When Granny laid her own hand there, he bowed over it.

  “You are very brave. And I thank you for the offer, but—”

  Tex barged forward, breaking their link of flesh. “Think you can stop her, Flabby? You? Stop Granny Two-Shoes?” And he laughed a laugh like wet tissue paper tearing. “You can’t keep Granny from her Beatrice, and you can’t keep us from Granny. If she’s a-goin’, I’m a-goin’.”

  “I’ll go, too,” Diodiance announced, stepping away from the wall. “We’ll do Queen B’s death rite to her face. We’ll say goodbye.” She didn’t look over her shoulder at that horrible skin.

  “My stars!” cried the Flabberghast. “What enterprising children you are! What pioneering spirits! What gumption. You don’t faint at the sight of blood, do you?”

  They all glared at him, wearing, between them, more scab than rags, and he grinned, and the marble foyer of the cardboard hut danced with the rainbows cast by his diamond teeth.

  “Of course not,” he murmured. “How silly of me.”

  The Flabberghast held up his left hand, folding thumb and fingers into palm, all except for his pinkie. This he held erect like a spindle, and the Barka Gang saw that his long nail was sparkling clear as his teeth.

  “I’ll just need a drop of your blood,” he explained. “Your canine companion’s, too, if you wish her to accompany us.”

  One by one, at the Flabberghast’s direction, they pricked the soft spot at the center of their wrists, and the tip of Sal’s panting tongue, too, and filed over to the stretched skin on the wall. They pressed their blood upon it. Diodiance signed her name. Tex made a big “T.” Granny drew something that could have been a flower or a bone or a bullet. Sheepdog Sal licked the place where Beatrice’s big toe had been.

  The Flabberghast himself scored open his own palm. The hut filled with a smell that drowned the copper trickle of mortal blood in citrus-wine-wildflower-campfire-tidewater-leaf, and what leaked out of his skin was black like his eyes, and like his eyes full of tiny, whirling lights.

  The blackness spread over Beatrice’s stretched skin, overwhelming the tiny dots of blood like raindrops converging on a windowpane. The drop becomes a stream, the stream a puddle, the puddle a lake. The blackness spread. And Beatrice’s skin became a door.

  Granny Two-Shoes was the first one to step through.

  * * *

  Every building in Chuckle City was on fire. The buildings were tenements, and from their high, flaming windows rained a constant bombardment of grotesque little clowns. They smashed on the cobblestones below. Sometimes they jumped right up from the stones and dragged themselves back into the burning buildings to do the thing all over again. More often they just lay there and writhed on the cracked stones, ragged clothes smoking, the white greasepaint on their faces gray with soot, red noses charred. They twitched.

  In the middle of Main Street, a skinny girl in a monkey mask, or perhaps a skinny monkey in a girl suit, cranked out “Ode to Joy” on her hurdy-gurdy. Beatrice shivered. The whole city smelled like ash.

  “Isn’t it FUNNY?” asked Rosie Rightly. “Isn’t it a RIOT?”

  Beatrice looked at her with solemn eyes. “You think that’s funny?”

  But Rosie Rightly was undaunted, or seemed to be. “It’s always funny when things fall out a window.”

  Another bright upchuck of
screaming bodies hit the pavement. A tiny clown near Beatrice’s feet made a burbling sound that might have been laughter. Beatrice really did not think it was.

  “Look at them bounce!” screamed Rosie Rightly. “Ga-DOING! Ga-DOING!”

  When Beatrice did not respond, Rosie Rightly patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry your warts, Bee-Bee-licious. You can’t kill the dead. They’re fine. They’re all fine.” She pushed a lock of blue hair from her forehead. “So just relax. Have a laugh, would you?” Her lips trembled. “Please?”

  Beatrice studied the bodies on the ground. Heaps of little clowns. Smoldering.

  Just like this two years ago, she remembered, when the slaprash first came to town. For a while the grown-ups tried to put up some kind of…quartermain? Or, calamine… She forgot what Dad had called it. Roadblocks at all entrances and exits. To keep the slaprash in. To prevent panicked folks from getting out.

  At first they tried burying their dead in big pits, then they were just burning them, but soon there weren’t enough grown-ups left to do any of that. Fires got out of control. Whole neighborhoods burned down. That was when the soldiers came. They didn’t last long, either. None of the grown-ups lasted. The slaprash took them all and left the children behind. With a lot of bullet casings and bones.

  “First comes the handprint

  Then comes the flush

  Then come the shaky-shakes

  All—in—a—rush!

  Breath starts to rattle

  Like dice in a cup

  And the slaprash’ll getcha

  When—you’re—all—growed—up!”

  Beatrice slammed her hands over her ears and shook off the nasty din of jump ropes. Worst thing in a long list of bad that the Rubberbaby Gang ever did, inventing that jump rope rhyme and spreading it ’round. Their leader Aunt Oolalune, nearly Beatrice’s age, remembered all the rhymes from the olden days, Seuss and Silverstein, Gorey and Lear. The kiddy gangs loved her for her rhymes, but especially that one. It was their own, the only gravestone they’d get. Forget “Ring Around the Rosie” and “Susie Has a Steamboat.” “The Slaprash Rhyme,” like its namesake, went viral, went everywhere. What Dad would’ve called ubittinus. No, that wasn’t the word.

  Beatrice watched the little clowns scrape themselves off the ground and trudge into the burning buildings. Flames swallowed them. Bodies plummeted from high windows. The gleeful (or not) screaming began again.

  Beatrice turned to Rosie Rightly, who grinned her manic grin. “Whaddya think, Bee-Bee?”

  “Is this it, Rosie? This all there is?”

  “We-ell.” Rosie Rightly squirmed like she had to pee. “I could show you something else, sure! There’s lots of great things here. It’s Chuckle City! It’s a laugh a minute. Like, like, look at these guys! The rustics! I love me some rustics!” She pointed at an approaching ambulance. “These guys are FUNNY. Wait and see!”

  The tiny ambulance whizzed past them. Three rustics hung from its windows. They wore straw hats and overalls, glasses without lenses, fake tufts of white hair glued to their chins. Their faces were contorted in identical expressions of constipation. The ambulance itself was locomotioned by no engine but the hustle of their bare feet. When the feet stopped moving, the ambulance dropped, neatly squashing one of the supine victims of the tenement fires.

  From beneath the steel frame came a soft moan. A splatter of bodies later and the moan was lost to the tautophony of the scene. The rustics climbed out of their ambulance, cursing one another’s clumsiness.

  “If ya’ll’d dropped it over there, Mr. Wick, we could’ve smushed two!”

  “Weren’t two bodies lying close enough together for that, Mr. Jones.”

  “Could’ve waited, Mr. Gibbs. More come down every second, like bird poop!”

  They clustered around the smushed clown like farmers at a town hall meeting, discussing blight.

  “Broked, Mr. Wick!” said one.

  “Backbone clean severed, Mr. Gibbs!” said another.

  “What to do, Mr. Jones?” asked a third.

  “I know!” answered the first. “Let’s make balloon aminals!”

  “Balloon aminals! Oh, yay!” squealed Rosie Rightly, dancing around Beatrice, who tried not to feel sick. “BULLY! Oh, they’re great, Bee-Bee! You’re going to love them!”

  From pockets, hats, folds of cuffs, rolls of socks, the rustics drew out flaccid balloon skins and began inflating them with such gust and vigor that behind fake beards and empty glasses frames, their smooth young faces turned purple, and puce, and orange. Soon the balloons humped up, took on vivid, twisted shapes, the shapes of things best left under beds and in the dark of closets, and they grew large and larger, aerial sculptures that vied for the greatest ghoulishness. Only when they became truly huge and horrible did the rustics at last tie them off, whipping out black Sharpies from their bibs to scribble in teeth, eyes, scales, claws. Soon the balloons were not balloons at all, but buoyant beasts that turned on their makers and began chomping at them. The rustics tried to fight them off, but were snapped up, shaken apart, eaten, spat out again.

  Rosie Rightly no longer danced. She stared at the balloons with an expression of abject misery. But she did not move.

  Beatrice stumbled back from the bright melee, dragging Rosie Rightly by her pink chiffon princess sleeve.

  “Let’s go, Rosie. Show me the way out of Chuckle City. You can come, too. I’ll take care of you, I—”

  “Too late.” Rosie Rightly’s tinsel-lashed eyes were bright with tears she could no longer cry, but her never-ending smile showed a full crescent of teeth. “It’s the Big Bah-Ha for me and for you, lambikin, unless—”

  A balloon aminal loomed too close, leering. Beatrice batted at it with a fist and pulled Rosie Rightly out of range behind a charred building. Rosie Rightly began to slump against the wall, but Beatrice took her blue head between her hands and pressed their foreheads together.

  “Focus. We have to stay in the Big Bah-Ha, you said, unless…?”

  Rosie Rightly fiddled with her gloves. They had torn in the scuffle. Beatrice saw her wrists through the pink net, where two large wounds glowed as red as coals. Seeing her look, Rosie Rightly clasped her hands behind her.

  “Unless,” she stammered, “the—the Gray Harlequin releases you. There’s a place beyond the mirror, but—but it’s so hard. Hard to get there. Too hard.”

  They stared at each other, clown and girl. Beatrice tried to interpret Rosie Rightly’s expression. The shine of her very-nearly-tears had already vanished. Her smile was fixed. She tore her puffy pink sleeve from Beatrice’s grip and fluffed it up again.

  “Poor Bee-Bee,” she giggled. “So serious all the time! If you want, I’ll take you to the Gray Harlequin. He’s probably by the mirror. Always looking into it, and no wonder, for he’s the prettiest clown of all. He wears the August Crown. I think he’s been here forever. Or at least,” she added, “since I arrived. Same thing.”

  * * *

  “This is where dead kids have to go? The Big Bah-Ha?” Diodiance scanned the lay of the land, her round brown eyes skeptical. “Maybe I’ll just become a Tall One instead. Wear a white light on my shoulder. Eat some bones. I tell ya, Tex, our good ol’ gravy yard is lookin’ like a big bucketful of screamin’ monkey-fun from where I’m standin’.”

  Tex scratched under his left arm. “Look there.” He pointed to a sunken gray groove where an empty sock ringed in rusty lace lay. Picking it up, he put it in his pocket.

  “Very astute,” breathed the Flabberghast. “What keen eyes you have, Young Texas! Like the Prince of Peregrines, you watch the world below.”

  “Shut up, Flabby,” said Tex.

  The Flabberghast crossed his arms, portraying nonchalance not very well at all. The corner of his mouth got up a tic. His peacock coat swung with the force of his shrug. All the Tall Ones wore white lights upon their shoulders, but the top of the Flabberghast’s coat sleeve carried only a scorch mark. The Barka Gang used to spend who
le nights speculating where that light had gone.

  “Children,” he observed in a hurt voice, “too often take the aggressive myth of the Napoleon complex to an unbecoming extreme.”

  Granny Two-Shoes cleared her throat. It made a sound in the dead gray air like a wooden spoon banged with no particular rhythm against a plastic bucket. She put her hand over her heart. Had it missed a beat? Was this dying? Was she dead?

  The Flabberghast’s painted-on creases softened when he gazed at her. “No. Not yet, Miss Granny. But our time here must perforce be limited, for these are the deadlands, and you must not lavish them too long with the extravagance of your living youth. Perhaps in the past, you might have stayed a trifle longer, but the very equivalence of air here seems sucked dry. This land,” he sighed, “is too much changed from what it was.”

  Granny Two-Shoes paused to nuzzle her face against Sheepdog Sal’s brown fur. In return for this she received a reassuring lick. It cleared her head.

  In these deadlands, thought Granny Two-Shoes, might merely being alive mean being too alive? Are we flaunting our liveliness to these dead gray skies? Are we attracting the attention of the dead? Can the dead harm the living? What does harm mean here, where hurt doesn’t necessarily stop with the cessation of a heartbeat? Where there is no hope of healing?

  The Flabberghast caught her eye and held a finger to his lips. Hush was implied, but all he said aloud was, “Check your cuts, children,” in a voice that even Tex obeyed.

  Diodiance dabbed at her wrist, at the place she had torn it against the Flabberghast’s fingernail. “Still bleedin’.”

  “Good,” said the Flabberghast. “We can stay here until your scab forms and closes. Keep a lively eye upon it. And another on the sky.”

  Tex’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’re we lookin’ for?”

  For answer, Granny Two-Shoes threw out her arms and flapped so vigorously she almost fell off of Sheepdog Sal. Sal turned around in circles, trying to keep her rider astride.

  “Bad birds?” Diodiance guessed.