by John Everson
Bellinda and her mom rescued the food from his side of the table and ate in silence.
The next day Bellinda came home from school filled with anxiety. Her plants had sprouted last night, but again she’d been unable to check their progress after breakfast. She dropped her bookbag just inside the back door and ran downstairs immediately.
These plants were cool! They had elephant ear leaves that were dark green with sharp yellow spikes sticking out of them at the edges. And they were already three feet high.
As Bellinda looked them over, she heard a screech from upstairs. The plants seemed to shake violently, as if there were a strong wind blowing through the cellar, or a bird flapping in their fledgling branches.
Bellinda ran up the stairs to see who had screamed and stopped when she got to the kitchen. Mrs. Gailthen from next door was wrestling with her mom in the frontroom! She stood rooted to the tile as she saw her mom knee the older woman in the crotch and then push her to the floor.
“I’ve got to have them,” her mom said, straddling Mrs. Gailthen. Her hands pulled at the earrings on the neighbor’s ears.
Mrs. Gailthen screamed. “Are you crazy? You ripped my ears. You biiiittch!”
Bellinda’s mom stood up and walked away, holding up a string of pearls to the light, and comparing the creamy stones of the stolen earrings to them. She didn’t seem to see Bellinda as she took her new jewelry upstairs, leaving Mrs. Gailthen shaking her head in amazement behind her.
The old woman took a hand from her ear and screamed again as she saw the blood.“I’m bleeding, damn you! I’m bleeding!”
And then, realizing that only a child was listening, she hurried from the house.
That night after Bellinda had tucked herself into bed, a shadow leaned across her bed. Peeking unobtrusively from the security of her blanket, she watched as the shadow moved across her room to her dresser. Something rattled and something else fell to the floor, but she didn’t let out a sound. What if it was looking for her?
But the shadow didn’t come for her, and soon it disappeared, closing the door behind it.
When Bellinda got up in the morning, her piggybank was missing.
She cried alone in her room, knowing that to complain about it to her mom would only end up with her getting spanked somehow. But she’d had five dollars and thirty-four cents in there! She’d been saving for weeks.
After school, Bellinda once again ran to the cellar and screamed with delight at the size of her new plants. Their leaves were as wide as her kitchen table and the plants’ tops strained against the ceiling. Each of the leaves held dozens of spikes, and at the tip of each spike grew a thick lemondrop of a seed.
“Bellinda?” Her dad called from the top of the stairs. She ran up and met him in the kitchen. “I’m glad you’re home, baby,” he said.
“Where’s Mom?” Bellinda asked. Even though he worked at home, it was odd to see dad in the middle of the day.
“Well, that’s why I’m glad you’re home. You know how I always tell you not to take the candy at the store without paying for it?”
She nodded.
“Well… Mommy forgot about that rule and now she’s in trouble with the police. So I’m gonna go down and help her out.”
“Mommy took candy without paying?” Belinda asked.
“No, honey. She took diamonds. Can you stay here and work on your homework while I’m gone?”
She nodded again and he patted her head.
“Good girl. Don’t get into any trouble, now.”
Bellinda was happy to have the house to herself. Lately, when her parents bothered to notice her, it was only to yell, so the quiet was refreshing.
After her dad left, she went back downstairs and saw that her new plants seemed to be wilting. She took the mason jar and went outside to get water for them, but when she came back downstairs, she noticed that one of the two treelike plants had a dark brown streak down its leaves. As she poured the contents of the mason jar on the ground at their bases, something plopped to the ground behind her.
Then again.
The seeds!
The floor was already littered with a handful of the sunseeds. Bellinda remembered how Penelope said it was important to get all of them. She picked up the fallen ones and dropped them in the jar. Then she began to pluck the remaining seeds from the leaves.
When the mason jar was full, she stuffed the rest in her pockets. As she plucked the last one, the entire plant seemed to shudder and fold in upon itself. She squeaked and jumped backwards as the elephant trees simply sunk into the ground, disappearing with a whisper of sunny dust fogging the air.
Bellinda ran all the way to the creekbed and called Penelope’s name before she even neared the large elm where she’d last seen the old woman.
Sure enough, Penelope stepped out from behind the tree.
“Are they ready so soon?” Penelope asked.
“Yes,” Bellinda said breathlessly. “And they made so many seeds.”
“You’ve been a very good gardner.” Penelope patted the girl’s head. Bellinda felt warm all over at her touch.
She decided that Penelope was no stranger, and it was definitely okay to talk to her.
“You said the seeds are magic?”
Penelope nodded slowly. Her black cloak fluttered ominously in the slow wind.
“Is that why my parents have been acting so weird?”
Again, Penelope nodded. “The seeds grow on the sins and desires of your parents. And just as the dark souls of your parents feed the plants, so do the plants feed the dark in your parents’ souls. And the result is that you and I get more seeds.”
Bellinda grinned. “You’re a witch, aren’t you?”
Penelope said nothing, only arched an eyebrow.
“I want to be a witch like you,” the girl ventured. “Then my parents could never hurt me.”
She looked at the seeds remaining in Penelope’s outstretched hand and said, “Which ones are the strongest ones?”
The corner of Penelope’s mouth turned up and she pointed at the red seeds. Bellinda nodded once and said, “Then I want those.”
“The old woman showed all of her teeth as she handed them over.
“These are very powerful,” she said. “You come get me if you have any trouble.”
The heart-shaped seeds grew fast, and Bellinda skipped dinner again to watch them. But this time it wasn’t because she was more fascinated in the plants than dinner, it was because Mom and Dad were playing naked on the kitchen table. She’d made the mistake of coming upstairs when she heard the noise, but quickly slipped back downstairs when she saw what they were doing.
Her new plants were covered in small thick, crimson leaves. Each leaf was like a fat circle of deep green flesh covered with fuzzy red velvet. Bellinda enjoyed running her fingers across them. They tickled, but that felt good, too.
After things in the kitchen had quieted down, she carefully crept up the stairs to make sure Mom and Dad had left. They had, but when she went to her room, Bellinda could still hear them giggling and crying out in their room down the hall.
She closed her door and went to bed without supper, again.
The next day, when Bellinda came home, the seeds were ready. She ran downstairs without stopping to see them.
But her excitement about them was tainted when she walked into the front room and found her mom lying on the floor.
Mom wasn’t wearing any clothes, and her arms and legs were twisted around the naked body of the mailman. He had dark black hair and a pimply butt. Bellinda knew it was the mailman because his U.S. Postal bag was lying on the floor near the door, along with his clothes.
Dad – who still had all his clothes on – lay next to them with a silver gun in his hand. All three of them had blood leaking from their heads. It bloomed in bright crimson petals on the pale carpet.
Part of her was relieved; they wouldn’t hurt her anymore. But part of her was scared, too. Bellinda didn’t know what to do; the
only adult she knew in this town other than her teacher was Penelope. As soon as the thought of the older woman crept into her head, she smiled. Penelope would know what to do.
“Back so soon?” the old woman asked.
Bellinda nodded, tears streaking her freckled cheeks.
“Mommy and Daddy are dead,” she declared. “And the mailman.”
Penelope nodded. “The seeds of lust can work strange things on a couple,” she said. “And with the aftereffects of the seeds of pride and greed still in the air… well, I must say I’m not surprised. Did you collect the seeds?”
Bellinda shook her head no, and Penelope patted her on the head.
“Well, then we’d best go do that, and while we’re at it, we’ll see if we can’t clean up the mess they’ve made. They did stain the carpeting, I bet, didn’t they?”
Bellinda thought of the pools of blood surrounding her parents heads and nodded, one tear trickling down her left cheek.
“I thought I’d heard gunshots earlier. Well, come on then.”
Together the two descended the cellar stairs and plucked each fat red seed from the cone-shaped sprouts of the velvety plants. There were only a couple dozen of them, but they looked thick, bloodfilled and healthy.
Then they went upstairs.
“Stay back,” Penelope cautioned, and ventured alone into the living room.
Bellinda sat at the kitchen table as Penelope reached into her black satchel for a vial of something dark. She opened the stopper, blew across its mouth and mumbled some guttural phrases that sounded like nonsense.
When she was done, Bellinda smiled at her and took her hand. It was cold but firm.
“They weren’t very nice,” she said and followed the witch upstairs. When she did, Bellinda noticed that the bodies were gone from the living room.
In the upstairs office, Penelope used one arm to brush the row of Dad’s brightly colored books from the shelf onto the floor. Then, one by one, the old woman began to replace them with her herbal and occult books – some bound in crusty leather – from the dust pile in the corner of the room. Finally, they were back on the shelf where they had been before Brian’s brief ownership of the room.
On the lower shelves, she set the dark old canisters.
She opened an empty one, and poured the blood red seeds and closed the lid tightly.
“Are those things all yours?” Bellinda asked.
“Yes,” Penelope said. “I’ve been waiting to get them back. But first I had to leave this house so that a new family would move in and bring me an assistant.”
Penelope held up a canister and Bellinda could see within it a handful of grey seeds that looked almost like garden slugs. They were different from the ones she’d planted in the cellar.
“I planted some of these, my own magic seeds, before you moved in,” the older woman said. “Thanks to them, your family moved into the house. I think your parents brought me a good harvest.”
“You used to live here?” Bellinda asked.
“Oh yes,” Penelope smiled, cupping the girl’s chin. “When I first came here, I was a little girl just like you. And I met an old woman who gave me seeds to plant in the cellar, too. After they grew, and my parents went away, the old woman moved in and took care of me. She taught me all about growing all sorts of special seeds, and other things.”
“She was a witch, too?”
Penelope nodded. “Would you like to learn magic?”
“Will we plant the rest of the seeds?” Bellinda asked. “If I could plant them by the kids at school, I bet they’d grow really fast.”
“Not here or now,” Penelope said. “I think we’ve grown just about enough deadlies for this week.”
The girl’s mouth puckered slightly, but then she brightened.
“Are you gonna stay here with me? Will I get to become a witch like you?”
Penelope gave her a crooked smile. “If you like.”
Bellinda nodded once and then disappeared from the room for a moment. When she returned, she was wearing a long black sweater of her mother’s. It dragged on the ground like a dress and bunched in comical thick folds at her wrists. But when she stood next to Penelope, the light from the room seemed to fade into cold shadows.
“I’m ready,” the girl said.
~*~
PRESERVE
“I don’t kill, I preserve.”
He smiled reassuringly.
I knew I had come to the right man.
The man was Arthur. He put the art in Art’s Taxidermy, a tiny little shop around the corner from Main Street. You’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there. The shop squatted in one of those old white Victorians converted to businesses when people grew more inclined to shop, rather than live, downtown. Like most of the converted homes in the area, the only clue to there being a business, instead of a family, inside was the shingle hung near the sidewalk: Art’s Taxidermy.
I’d heard the rumors that Arthur did more than stuff nine-pound bass and mount deer heads for the overly proud hunter’s den. They said he’d embalm a man – if the price was right. The only problem was in getting the body. I intended to make that part easy.
“My life savings,” I said, holding out a bank envelope containing a not inconsiderable sum. I had withdrawn it less than an hour before. “It’s yours; I won’t need it.”
He shook his head slowly. A silver cowlick bobbed with the motion. For the second time he insisted, “I don’t kill, I preserve.”
He hesitated a moment. I could see worry lines wrinkle near his eyes. “Let me show you.”
Arthur stepped out from behind the glass counter he’d been working at when I came in. He was slender, bi-focaled, sixty-ish, about my height – five-foot-nine. He locked the entrance door and turned around the sign in the window.
Now the Open sign faced us. I was hoping he’d be amenable to opening a vein. The menagerie of stiff squirrels, beavers – even a skunk in one corner – demonstrated his prowess with filling veins.
I expected the baby deer that stood poised to jump on the far side of the room to do so at any second. They all seemed so… alive. As if he and I existed outside of a second in time – while they were trapped inside.
It reminded me of Caitlin. I really didn’t mean it, I said to myself for the millionth time.
“This way.”
I broke my reverie and turned to follow Arthur, who was waiting in the hallway for me to follow.
He walked stiffly through a 1950s style black and white tiled kitchen, pausing to open a door next to an old refrigerator. A pile of fresh rabbits’ feet were staining the white formica snack table a dark red. I must have frowned when I saw them.
“Disgusting, isn’t it? To dismember an animal – for luck! But people bring them in and people come to buy them.” He shook his head. “I would rather preserve the animal in its full form. As beautiful in death as in life.”
He motioned for me to follow and disappeared through the door. Twelve creaky steps and I was standing in an old stone basement, murkily lit by one bare bulb. A cord ran from the light to the top of the handrail upstairs. The walls appeared to have been chipped out of solid bedrock. I shivered from the icy damp air. Arthur headed to a door in the south wall to what seemed to be a fruit cellar. My grandmother had had one like that in her basement. He slid back the oak door and we both stepped through.
It was a dollhouse.
A dollhouse on a real-life scale. The floor, ceiling and walls were rough hewn wood, elegantly decorated with persian rugs and ornate tapestries. A scarlet shaded hurricane lamp lit up part of the room, which extended much farther than any fruit cellar should have. But fruit was not what Arthur was keeping. Arthur’s dolls were people. Had been people. They were everywhere – on divans, leaning against the walls, lying seductively on the floor… It looked like a snapshot of a nudist convention in a 19th century sitting room.
“What do you think of my friends?” Arthur asked.
“How…”
&
nbsp; “They came to me, as you have,” he said softly. “They begged me for death. I promised to preserve them. I kept my promise.”
His steps thudded on the planks as he crossed to a shiny mahogany victrola. Cranking the arm of the machine like he was winding up a Model A, he continued talking to me over his shoulder. “Jeanine loved the big bands.” He set the needle down on a thick black platter, and the scratchy clarinets of Benny Goodman’s orchestra echoed through the room.
“This is Marshall,” Arthur announced, patting the shoulder of a youngish man propped up at a small table on his elbows. His naked, fishbelly white and nearly hairless legs were delicately crossed beneath the table. Arthur turned the page of a Bible resting between Marshall ’s arms.
“ Marshall said he’d never been able to read the Bible cover to cover,” Arthur said quietly. “Now perhaps, he can.”
I didn’t think Marshall was in much of a state to read anything. But his eyes seemed to glint as Arthur crossed behind him and bent over to adjust a knob on a machine beneath the hurricane lamp. It hummed a bit louder after his touch, and I noticed tiny tubes ran from it to each of Arthur’s “friends.”
“This is what keeps everyone looking so nice,” Arthur explained. “If you could see the skins under the pelts of the animals upstairs, you’d see how it gets sunken, wrinkled, discolored. Everything settles in. So with humans, if we don’t want them to look like mummies, we pump them up with this solution here.”
He walked over to a blond woman arranged seductively on a purple velvet couch. If her skin hadn’t had a disturbingly bone-white caste, she could have been a Playboy centerfold brought to life.
Her eyes were half open, her lips – painted with bright red lipstick – were parted. I felt like a necrophiliac looking at her. She excited me.
“Touch her breast,” Arthur commanded.
Why not, I thought. Pretty soon it won’t matter anyway. Still, my arm shook as I gingerly fingered a rouged nipple. It was cool, dry – and seemed to ripple as I took my hand away. Arthur reached between her legs for a moment and his face took on the relaxed aspect of a man stroking his pet cat.
