Tear looked at her grandmother's lovely long hair and thought she might have it spun into silk and made into a wedding dress. She would be the one in charge of that bookstall, and she'd read every book in it before she sold them. She'd tend them gently, making sure no bookworms made their way into the pages. She'd polish the bindings like fine boot leather, and touch the gilded edges with a soft cloth. Her husband would drink sherry every night while she read by candlelight. Tear was very young. She thought that these things were all that mattered.
There was a ringing at the door, and a galloping on the roof. Throughout the house, the servants stiffened. The funeral band had stopped playing.
Bernardine came down the front staircase, her ring of keys jangling, her black-slippered feet stepping carefully, like hooves, her little selection of knives, twine, pots, and saffron at the ready.
The bookseller put his head around the doorframe, startled at the lack of greeting.
“You've come!” Tear cried out.
From the white fedora, bats took flight. On the roof, two goats did a tarantella. The rest of the goats waited. They were everywhere.
Mr. Doornail stretched, anticipating its next fifty years.
Who among us hasn't tried to keep love in the house? It always resists, burning itself in the oil lamps, folding itself into dirty laundry to be sent out for cleaning. It fights confinement, looping itself through pocket-watch chains and inserting itself into the beaks of chickens, only to fly out when they peck in the feed. It takes flight, clinging to the fur and feathers of animals, to the wings of bats, to the scales of fish, and, particularly, it enjoys wrapping itself about a finger, twining on someone else's wedding ring, and leaving for the train. What is love but hunger?
The bookseller came hatless into the house and Mr. Doornail observed him through the keyhole. There was a heart in that breast, yes, a fat and throbbing heart, a heart the monster might enjoy stewed.
The bookseller sat on the couch opposite the daughters.
“I've brought flowers,” the bookseller said, and brought them out from his jacket. They were made of paper and perfumed with lemon. It was a flattened bouquet of posies, and when he shook it in the air, it unfolded, a giant mass of pink and white and red, all of it written on with the words of some old poet.
They were pages painted and folded carefully, perhaps a hundred roses made of paper, and Tear leaned forward to take them from him, but Bernardine took them and presented them to Anguish instead, who was bewildered.
“What are these?” Anguish said. “This is a funeral. We are in mourning.”
She had no interest in this bookseller. His vest was the color of a persimmon, and he had a beard. She hated it. She hated men altogether. The notion of a husband was as foreign as lemon-scented prose roses, as foreign as thorns she could tear with her fingertips.
The assistant cook marched through the parlor just then, hands full of almond pastry, her ass round and firm as bread fresh from the oven. Anguish watched her, speechless. She'd imagined that there would be no betrothal for her, not at thirty-nine years old.
Bernardine looked at the young man's perfect heart, and nodded. The tomcat named Bite came charging through the house, claws full of shredded pink silk.
“This man will marry my eldest daughter,” Bernardine announced, and Tear and Anguish both gasped.
A servant dashed in with a mop to make sure no one slipped in the ooze, and the grandmother danced past the door, her jewels gleaming. The funeral band had returned to playing outside, though they were four bottles into the afternoon. One of them had already vomited into his hat, and another had first bothered and then been butted by a goat.
Bernardine rattled her keys.
“Daughters,” she said.
“Mother,” said Anguish. “I will not marry that man.”
“You will,” said Bernardine. “Mr. Doornail insists, and Mr. Doornail is the law of this house.”
The grandmother moved one of her seven wedding rings from finger to finger, and back again. It was heavy and made of dark gold embossed with tentacles. Oh! She loved it. It had been given to her by a sailor. Or perhaps she'd found it on the finger of a drowned man and tugged it, bit by bit, over the knuckles of his pale blue finger. Or perhaps —
Who among us has not known a Mr. Doornail?
Bernardine held her own wedding ring in her hand, and then she put it around the finger of the bookseller. She unspelled Anguish, and the eldest daughter felt an unknotting, the spell dismantling itself.
Behind the door, Mr. Doornail moved in a way that could not truly be described. It climbed the wood with all its suckers at once; a soft, clinging climbing, like that of a fly moving along the surface of milk, or a maggot making its way out from the nostril of a dear, dead man and into the air.
Mr. Doornail was darkness, but Mr. Doornail was loved.
The grandmother danced, clapping her hands, her brightest jewels and most flamboyant petticoats, a flamenco in slow motion.
Bernardine put a key to a lock.
“Father,” she said. Perhaps she was a monster after all. She had never denied it. She was a monster's daughter.
There was no answer.
“What will you give me if I give you a new heart?”
The door shook, and Mr. Doornail sent seven tentacles out from above and below, clutching the door frame, twisting through the locks. The door shuddered, and Mr. Doornail pulled back the bars and dismantled the chains.
The five daughters shuddered, and Mr. Doornail sent out tentacles with their faces, each one dressed in a black gown, each one a futureless daughter with no notions of her own.
The bookseller walked toward the door, not Mr. Doornail's door, but the door to the street.
The bookseller had not been bewitched into this by Bernardine or by Mr. Doornail. He had been bewitched by goats.
Who among us has not tried to live forever? It takes work, immortality, just as does immorality. Meanness is laborious. One has to pay for it. It is expensive. Some of us have tried to achieve immortality with olive oil and oranges, and others have tried it with bribes to witches, and still others have tried to get it by hanging by our heels over the heads of monsters, waiting for our chance to strike.
There was a thundering, a raging, a rattling of goats. There was a drift of white fur, and the ringing of bells, loud and certain, bells like a church gone chaos. All the ringing of a thousand goats, and all the singing of a thousand goats, goats for miles around come to pay their respects to the old man. The goats were stampeding into the villa, knocking down the door.
Outside, the fedora quivered, emptied of bats, and in the chimney, bats hung upside down, each one a beating heart with wings.
In the villa, there was a green edge to a petticoat, and then an entire green dress, as Tear tore the front of her black gown and revealed the springtime beneath it, as the bookseller opened his eyes to see what was coming for him.
Mr. Doornail stretched its thousand tentacles, each with the face of a townsperson, and in the band, men's hearts beat frantically, wanting to offer themselves to the monster, ensorcelled by Bernardine and by the magic of Mr. Doornail.
On the table, the old man's body rose up, his clothing filled with bats. He was lifted into the air. The old man flew across the room and out the door, and with him went the music of the funeral band, a song of failing trumpets. The goats and the old man were stealing their hearts away.
The chimney shook, and the rafters, and the door frame.
Mr. Doornail emerged.
Mr. Doornail wanted the world. It was abruptly starving, and all through the village, its tentacles rippled, its oozing monster limbs and fluid, its body an ocean full of lava, bits of it like rocks and other bits like quince jelly.
The servants of the house were finished tolerating any of this. A mop rose up like a sword, as a thousand goats stampeded over Mr. Doornail, into the central courtyard, up the walls and down again.
The goats were hungry. The
goats were in love.
Who among us can ever forget the sight of Mr. Doornail? A wave of monster, a tsunami of monster, a broken dam of monster, and all of it filled with the love of the lost, hearts eaten and memories melded into the overall flood? Who can forget the way the goats stood atop Mr. Doornail, every goat in a hundred miles singing their devil song, sharpening their hooves, and then beginning to eat the monster away from its foundations, just as they might eat a Model T?
Who can forget the way the ghosts surged up from the foundations the moment the band ceased playing, a white mist of husbands, a hasty cloud of the heartless?
Who can forget the bookseller, the way he'd made a raft of books, the way he took the witch's youngest daughter in his arms and brought her aboard, even as Mr. Doornail poured toward the sea? The bookseller didn't care that the witch's youngest daughter was nothing nice. He was nothing nice either. He'd read every book in his stall, and from them he'd gleaned the edges of the world.
Bernardine in her black dress, and Maria Josepha in her bridal gown, the remaining four granddaughters of Mr. Doornail, all of them stood in the courtyard of the villa, the bats dancing above them, as one by one the daughters tore off their dark gowns and bared their ruby talons.
All of them were monsters, and all of them were lovers, and all of them were fleet footed and free of the house. They were gone in moments, to futures, to pasts, to stars and possibilities. Pastries and pasties. Chickens flew from the roof.
Maria Josepha was lifted to the top of a foaming, roaring wave of monster, all her wedding rings shining, until she and the horrible thing, the wonder, the husband of this history, were flung out into the ocean, unencumbered by the rules of courtship.
Off they went, and we all watched them, the men of the band, and the goats nipping away the chains that had bound Mr. Doornail to our town, the bats carrying away the grandmother's jewels, the chickens on the curtains, and the servants with their spears disguised as mops.
In the end, all that was left was Bernardine in a small rowboat, where once had been a house. Who among us hasn't gone out from the storm, and into the flood? Who among us hasn't made enemies with wing and tentacle? Who among us hasn't seen a woman in black unspell herself, and sit, for a time, in the middle of a little boat in a tossing ocean, accompanied by ghosts, the peaks of buildings catching her as she drifts among the drowned?
There are other kinds of endings to stories about monsters, but in this one, there is a white fedora floating on a newborn sea, and an old man just beneath the waves, wearing it, as he opens his eyes again.
Little Widow
I was fourteen and at a sleepover when the cult drank poison. The sleepover mom turned on the TV and said “Oh my lord, Mary, would you look at this? It's the feds is what, and a bomb, right out there where you come from.”
But it wasn't the feds, and it wasn't a bomb. It was us. We were destined to die. I watched it burn, and listened to the news call us a cult, which was not what we called ourselves. We called ourselves Heaven's Avengers. I watched it for a while, and then I threw up hamburger casserole.
Miracle didn't have a stoplight. Miracle didn't have a grocery store. Miracle didn't typically attract anything but traffic going the dirty way to some other place. We were on the road to California, and people sorrowing in other states found their way to Disneyland through us. Miracle had no marvels. It was named after a thing that'd happened back in 1913. People got lost — a whole troupe of the religiously devout on a pilgrimage — and then they got found. They came up out of a lake bottom and walked on the water, briefly, before they disappeared again. A cult got started around that notion, and a hundred years later, on the anniversary of the water walk, my cult killed itself.
Now it was trailers and scraggly dogs and everyone who hadn't been part of the dead cult was an ex-con turned to factory work. An hour away, we had a sugar factory and you could get a company bus. Most of our town worked there, bleaching brown to white.
This story also appears in WHAT THE #@&% IS THAT? edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen. Available Nov. 1, 2016 from Saga Press.
BUY THE BOOK
I watched the compound burning on the news. My mom and dad were in there, and everyone else too, all sleeping on the floor. Nobody'd noticed that we were having problems, or maybe people had — the police had visited us and done a couple of circles with their sirens on, but another cult had lately gunned down half the police force in a little town in Texas. The locals let us be.
We were hippies only in theory. In reality, we were working on an armed takeover of heaven. The Preacher thought if we meditated white knives into our minds, we'd hit heaven as a unified army, slashing. We wanted heaven for ourselves. We didn't see the point of suffering. The plan was to rise up, and so the Preacher put poison in the pop.
A lot of the kids in the town had been born into the cult, and when it committed suicide, there was an epidemic of orphans. The little ones got sent out to the rest of the state, but some of us stayed. We were old enough to be okay. The leftover kids milled around Miracle, grieving and weird, not fitting in. The sleepover had been at the house of a friend who wasn't really, and I wasn't right in the world, not with my long dresses and my uncut hair.
I was married already, but no one except my fellow orphans knew that. I'd been married to the Preacher since I was seven. I was the Littlest Wife, and that was a special role. I brewed tea, and balanced crystals in the palms of my hands, while the rest of the wives did other things. There were fifty of us. All but three were dead now, and we were only alive because we were too young to commit to being killed. Somewhere in the mind of the Preacher there was a notion of legal.
Our life in Heaven's Avengers was not like some people thought it was. People had ideas about us, that we'd grown up in a sex cult. It was the reverse, except for the Preacher and his army of wives. Most of those were not having intercourse with him. They were just a battalion. The Preacher preached. Once a year, each wife, the of-age wives, spent a night with him, and got a baby or didn't. We were trying to grow Heaven's Avengers. There were only a hundred of us total, though we had some international followers who came to us through our website, and participated long distance in preaching. So I was married to him, but I was still a virgin. I was a wedded warrior. There were long traditions of wedded warriors, which most people didn't know about. Armies of women, all married to a chieftain. This is the kind of thing you knew about if you were from Heaven's Avengers.
Back then, I was called Mary out in the world, and the other two were called Rebekah and Ruth, but all three of us were “Sister” on the compound. We knew better than to stay Sister. When everyone died, we chose emergency new names. We looked at a magazine of celebrities and picked by dress color. I chose Natalie, and the other two Sisters, who were both sixteen, chose Reese and Scarlett. Then Reese took out a pair of scissors, cut off my hair, and hacked my dress up from the ground to my knees. She snipped her own hair so short she could pass for a boy. Scarlett tore her hem into a miniskirt, and chopped her hair into a bob. We were all crying, but we looked better.
We got taken in by the Stuarts, and they let us have their old teenager's bedrooms. The Stuarts had lost two sons in Afghanistan. They didn't care that we were cult kids. There was room in the house for us, and they fed us cereal and scrambled eggs and didn't ask us to go to church.
Mrs. Stuart was a faded-out redhead with white roots, a tight jaw, and a nose that'd been broken four times while bull riding. She chewed tobacco and tended cattle. Mr. Stuart had a motorcycle on the weekends, but during the week he worked at the factory. They left us alone. We didn't mind. We wanted to be alone. The three of us tried to figure out school. We could read, at least. We were lucky. The littler ones couldn't. No one had taught them. Things had gotten too intense, what with the coming of the War, and schooling had slid.
We could fight with our minds, and that did no one any good in high school. Now we didn't think about white light
, nor about knives. We tried not to think about how maybe everyone we knew was warring in heaven now, but Reese sometimes looked up and cried at the sky. She missed her boyfriend, who'd turned eighteen just before the exit. He was a crack shot, and could do a backflip, but I'd never liked him. He hit me in the face once for stealing a piece of gum.
Scarlett was sad about the suiciders too, but not as sad as Reese was. Scarlett had a natural figure for fortune, and knew how to sew. She stitched up a party dress from dishtowels, wriggled into it, and went out to the first school dance of the year wearing shoplifted lipstick. Within a minute, she was leading cheers at the football games, and nobody cared that she was missing some back teeth, and had a crooked arm from breaking it during battle training.
Scarlett had strawberry blonde hair and unlikely curves, a waist like a funnel. Reese was the reverse. Her body was round, with tiny wrists and ankles. She had curls, tight ones the color of cake batter, and eyes so pale they looked blind. She was smart as a whipsnake, which tricked people. Her albino coloring made people in Miracle think she was mental. She wasn't. She was going somewhere. She was a genius in ways that might scare a person, if you didn't know for sure she liked you. Then there was me, Natalie, with a scar where my lip had been prayed back together, my body a unified width from chest to hips, the same turned sideways as front.
My mama was adopted when she was nine from Delhi and Reese's when she was six from Ethiopia, and they both started as Littlest Wives. We didn't know where Scarlett came from. Her mama'd died of a rattlesnake when she was three, and then her dad dropped her off on the compound, and that's how she ended up married to the Preacher. She was no relation to him. The other two of us were chastely married to our father.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 55
