by Paula Guran
“I shall visit again tonight, then, when she sleeps,” the arrogant little cockerel promised.
I stomped up the ladder, my anger echoing through the wooden boards of the third floor, the fourth, and then pounding via my fist into the trapdoor of the fifth.
“Daughter!” I called.
Some whispers and a short commotion of bare feet later, she pulled the trapdoor open.
“Are you talking to someone?” I asked.
“No,” she quavered. The lie was a fly in cream, piss on snow. Abominable.
I glanced out the window, but the rat had gone. For a moment, I couldn’t even breathe, and then I lost my temper. I screamed at her, spit flecking her terrified face, until I collapsed in sobs.
I didn’t beat her. I never beat her. She only tripped on her own hair as she backed away from me, and split her brow upon the corner of a table.
My daughter, my perfect, precious, innocent daughter. I made her promise never to speak with strangers again.
“They lie, poppet,” I said, smoothing her hair. Tears coursed down both of our cheeks, hot and salty like the stagnant marsh beyond our tower walls. “And their sins are contagious. See how you lied to me today? You’ve never lied to me before,” I said, hoping it was true, sure it was true. “And look what’s happened now.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” she said, and we embraced, my gnarled, fire-scarred claws stroking her golden silk, her soft hands petting my misshapen baldness.
I was waiting there that night when the boy I thought of as Dirt came back. He never saw me. In the night, I was sure my daughter also was blind to my knife slitting his gullet or scooping out his eyes.
But sometimes, I wonder.
I didn’t find out about the third boy until early autumn, when the birds flew away from the marsh and the brambles lost their leaves. My hearing’s not what it was and I was prone, especially in the cooling weather, to impromptu naps in my chair by the fire.
One gray morning, while my daughter was safely tucked away in her room, I’d taken my collection from the very back of the bottom cupboard. I met their stupid gazes with smug satisfaction. Insipid blue, conniving brown.
But she was mine again. She adored her cat, perhaps not so much as she’d once adored Utney; she played all her instruments, not just the lyre, and her own voice soared in accompaniment; and she helped me with enthusiasm in the kitchen and garden. Every afternoon we had tea together in the kitchen before she climbed the ladders to the music room while I napped.
I noticed a darkness in her, a hesitance to believe what I said until she’d thought it over, but this I suspected would fade with the removed influence of the village vermin. Her songs, after all, now praised the sun rather than the storm, explored questions of joy and not despair. My favorite was a ballad detailing the playful love of the sleek otters we sometimes glimpsed from our windows.
Rain crawled in from the bay, soaked my tired garden and sluiced dust off of the window panes. It rejuvenated everything but my badly healed bones. It wasn’t enough for the townsmen to thrust me into the fire—I was beaten first and bent over a horse trough for their whims. I’ve always taken the potent marsh skullcap with my tea to dull the pain brought on by inclement weather, but when I uncorked the jar, I found it very low.
Suddenly I understood my daughter’s love songs and my frequent naps.
She made my tea.
I switched our cups that day.
I thought the boy would use the balcony. It was closest to the ground, and the railings provided an anchor for rope. I confirmed it by checking the pumpkin vines where they hung down in a cascade of leafy tendrils. Some of the leaves were bruised.
“I’ll save you,” I said, to my daughter, or the pumpkins, or myself.
A search of her room turned up no rope, so the boy would have it. Sure enough, he tossed a coil up, and I bent over and knotted it for him, my twisted face hidden behind the yellowed tomato plants and pea trellis.
He spewed lies between breaths as he climbed.
“My father says he’ll help build a cottage for us just north of the farm. It won’t be as beautiful as your room here—”
That part was true, at least.
“—but we’ll be happy. And I asked because you said, but I already knew he’d let you bring Sunshine.”
His face popped up over the stone rail, and I stabbed him in the throat.
Hadn’t the boy I loved once made those same promises? And hadn’t he blamed me when I could save one of his young brothers from the fever but not the other? Hadn’t his mother then spit in my eyes and accused me of murder, of witchcraft?
He dribbled blood from the cut, a mere finger’s width that leaked as he coughed and swallowed and coughed again. It was nothing then to stomp on the fingers of one hand while I stabbed the other. The lying bastard tumbled down. One of his legs snapped at the wrong angle. Unfortunately, the soft peat saved him from further injury.
Rain stung my scarred head as I dangled over the edge, lowering myself down the rope with even more difficulty than last time. My bones ached, my arms trembled with the effort, but at last my feet sank into the mud.
“Monster,” he rasped, and when he coughed, he sprayed red at me from his wound. “You beat her, cage her. Ellis said.”
Ellis must have been Dirt’s name. That was how this green-eyed turd had come to stalk my daughter—his rat friend’s word.
I howled like an animal, and it crumbled into the words, “I love her!”
“No, I love her. You’re a witch,” he croaked.
He hit me as I crawled onto him, but I didn’t feel it, and his wounds weakened him. I knelt astride his chest, pinning his arms down with my knees.
And this time, with one fist wrapped in his black hair, I cut out his eyes before I killed him.
I dragged his worthless corpse to the log in the marsh.
I cleaned up and started supper.
And my daughter woke in her chair.
“What time is it?” she asked, stretching.
“It’s nearly supper. You’ve tired yourself playing the flute,” I chided. “Perhaps you should go back to the cello for a few days—you won’t have to hold it in the air.”
She held her breath as she realized the boy had come calling while she slept. Her innocence was only too plain. She supposed she could hide the truth from me.
I thought with great hubris that because she couldn’t hide, she also couldn’t seek.
For days my daughter still sang love songs, but they became increasingly forlorn. They were no longer of happily-ever-afters, but of unrequited love. The October rain drove me to a drowsy state, all aches and naps and mourning for the sunshine, but not my daughter. A song would no sooner begin than she would change her mind; she would sometimes skip supper because it wasn’t to her liking.
Finally, her mood roused her to clean the tower. She started in her room, shining every individual windowpane, dusting the rafters, sweeping away fallen grit while Sunshine pounced at the broom. She oiled the instruments of the music room, categorized and then alphabetized the library. She scrubbed the tub and covered the garden in compost. Then she started in on the kitchen.
While I snored in my chair, she found my collection. I didn’t see it, but I can imagine. She would have been repulsed but curious at the blue eyes. She’d never seen a mirror, but I’d told her what color hers were. The brown ones might have given her a clue. And when she found the green ones, she woke me with her screams.
“You killed him! You beast, you killed him!”
I started in my chair, my eyes scanning the room for the intruder before I realized my hysterical daughter was shouting at me. She dropped the glass jar, but she was only kneeling, so it didn’t shatter; instead, it simply rolled across the flagstones, the eyeballs searching for her as the jar spun.
She scraped her knees scuttling away from the dusty cupboard, her scrub brush forgotten, her eyes narrowed in revulsion.
“He would have hurt you
,” I wheedled, tears rolling down my cheeks, but she would hear no excuse.
“He was right. You are a witch!” My daughter began climbing the rungs to the second floor, and by the time I reached the bottom, her young muscles had already ascended the second ladder.
“I’m not! I’m not!” I screamed.
Faster than I could follow, she was into her room with the trap door slammed shut. Her feet stomped across the floor, in harmony with her desperate, screaming sobs. I felt her pain in my heart and when glass crashed and tinkled, it somehow felt right.
The trapdoor wouldn’t open. I pounded on it for long minutes. Sunshine watched me from behind the legs of the harpsichord, wary of this sudden, loud insanity. In a fury, I descended to the kitchen and snatched the hatchet we used to fit especially large pieces of bramble or driftwood into the kitchen hearth.
The trapdoor was solid, but with relentless chopping, it finally splintered away. I climbed the ladder to see that my daughter had thrown her footstool through the window that depicted a charming castle.
She stared at the hole, her blank, blue eyes swimming red with burst capillaries. Her tongue protruded as dark and swollen as a dead mudskipper, and her soiled dress fluttered in the breeze from the broken window.
My daughter, my sweet Rapunzel, had thrown her hair over the rafter, then braided it tightly around her neck and jumped off one of the hammock braces.
I made that hole in the side of the tower, but I don’t think I’ll fill it with a door. I think I’ll let the winter storms in. There’s plenty of room in here now, even for the sea.
I moved the green-eyed boy’s body, to the stand of stunted trees where I long ago buried my daughter’s parents. Rapunzel also sleeps with them, though the necklace that clinks while I make my breakfast is made of her bones. Polished with sand and tears, they look magnificent and feel terrible when I wear them with my woven scarf.
It’s lustrous as silk, curls at the ends like pumpkin tendrils, and glints like sunlight caressing the sea.
T.A. Pratt’s Marla Mason is a modern-day, ass-kicking sorceress who doesn’t wear a leather catsuit, doesn’t suffer from low self-esteem, doesn’t wallow in angst, and is almost always absolutely certain she’s right . . . even when she’s dead wrong. She’s featured in four novels published by Bantam Spectra, a fifth reader-supported novel, a serialized online novella, and several short stories. In this new story, written especially for this anthology, Marla’s adventure is enhanced by the author’s appreciation of Fritz Leiber and others . . . but mentioning Leiber allows a chance to bring up Conjure Wife, his 1943 novel based on the premise that all women are practicing witches, a secret kept well-guarded from the husbands they magically assist and protect. The story is told from the point of view of Norman Saylor, a highly rational college professor who discovers his wife, Tansy, is practicing witchcraft. Having spent his career debunking such primitive superstitions, Saylor assumes she is neurotic and convinces her to cease her silliness. Bad things, naturally, start happening. Although it must now be read with the understanding that the book reflects its times, Conjure Wife remains a classic of dark fantasy and a must-read of witchcraft fiction. (Already used as the basis for three films, a new movie version was announced in December 2008, but has been “in development” ever since.)
Ill Met in Ulthar
T.A. Pratt
“His name is Roderick Barrow,” Dr. Husch said. “He’s what we call ‘exothermically delusional.’ ”
Marla Mason, twenty-two years old and by her own reckoning the deadliest mercenary sorcerer on the east coast, propped her feet up on the doctor’s desk. “Good thing he’s locked up in the nut hutch, then.”
Dr. Husch made a small moue of distaste and shoved Marla’s boots off the desk. The doctor looked like a sculpture of a classical nymph that had been brought to life, her hair bound up in a tight bun, and the whole dressed in an impeccably tailored gray suit: lushness tightly contained. “Alas, that’s where the ‘exothermic’ part comes in—his delusions are becoming more and more . . . aggressive.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I’ll show you.” Dr. Husch rose from her desk and led Marla out of the room, down a hospital-clean hallway—which made sense, as they were in a hospital, of sorts. The Blackwing Institute didn’t treat diseases of the body, but it contained the diseased in mind—specifically wielders of magic who became a danger to themselves, and others, and occasionally reality. The Institute was funded by prominent sorcerers, who recognized madness as an occupational hazard, and knew they might find themselves in need of treatment some day too.
The corridor was lined with iron doors, some acid-etched with runes of calming or containment. Dr. Husch stopped about halfway down the passage and slid aside a metal panel covering a square eye-level window in one of the barred doors. Light flared out, like someone had lit a strip of magnesium, and Dr. Husch wordlessly handed Marla a pair of sunglasses. Squinting and cursing, Marla pulled on the shades, then looked into the room.
A shape writhed in the air, sinuous and sparking, like a boa constrictor made of lightning instead of flesh. The serpent hovered in the air, and as its jaws snapped open and shut, Marla tried to count its fangs; she gave up after a dozen. The only part of the serpent that wasn’t made of pure white light was its eyes—they were black pits of absence, but strangely aware. The serpent noticed them, and smashed itself against the door, sparks showering up around it. Marla jumped back, drawing her magical cloak around her. The cloak showed its white side, now, and protected her with healing magics, but with a thought she could reverse it, and make the bruise-purple inner lining switch to the outside. When clothed in the purple, Marla was possessed by vicious battle magics that made her essentially unstoppable—though at the cost of losing some self-control. There were those who said Marla was an amateur, and that only the cloak made her dangerous. The people stupid enough to say that in Marla’s presence got their asses kicked, but only after she removed the cloak first, just to prove them wrong. But she was glad to have the cloak on now; there was no such thing as an unfair advantage when you were dealing with flying electric hover-snakes.
Dr. Husch slid the panel over the window shut as the beast continued battering against the door. “Don’t worry, it can’t get out. The interior of the room is lined with rubber, reinforced by magic. We used to keep a paranoid electrothaumaturge locked up there. There are no electrical outlets or light fixtures, either—when we found the creature in Barrow’s room, it had smashed the light bulbs, and was suckling at the outlets like a hamster at a water bottle.”
Marla took off the glasses and rubbed her eyes. “What is that thing?”
“Barrow calls it an arc-drake. They live in the haunted mountains called the Lightning Peaks, north of the Sea of Surcease, a vast lake of liquid suffering.”
“You sound like the trailer for a bad fantasy movie,” Marla said.
“Appropriate, as Barrow was a fantasy writer. Though he wasn’t a particularly bad one, especially by the standards of his time. He was a pulp writer, mostly, published alongside the likes of Clifford Simak, Doc Smith, Sprague de Camp, Marsham Craswell—did you ever read much science fiction and fantasy, Marla?”
“Not really. I was too busy smoking and having sex with boys. I was always more interested in this world than in imaginary ones.”
Husch sniffed. “As a sorcerer, you should be ashamed. Magic is the act of imposing your will on reality. But without imagination, what good is even the strongest will? So what if you can do anything, if you can’t think of anything interesting to do?”
“I manage to keep myself entertained,” Marla said. “But I gotta say, I’m getting a little bored right now. So this Barrow, what, wrote about the arc-drakes in a fantasy story, and then somehow brought one to life?”
“Oh, it’s so much worse than that,” Dr. Husch said.
“We have won through, Lector,” Barrow muttered, his eyelids twitching rapidly. “Though our allies and re
tainers fell, you and I have reached this cursed plain, and now we need only—”
Dr. Husch thumbed off the intercom switch, and Barrow’s voice cut off abruptly. Marla leaned against the window, taking in the view on the other side. Barrow’s room was small, furnished with a hospital bed and not much else, but it didn’t lack for items of interest: A pile of weirdly ridged skulls heaped in one corner. What looked like a lion pelt draped over a chair. Scorch marks on one wall and part of the ceiling. Barrow himself was a white-haired old gent with a wild beard, dressed in a hospital gown, lips moving as he muttered, hands occasionally clenching and unclenching.
“He’s been like this for, oh, twenty years,” Dr. Husch said. “He suffered a nervous breakdown thirty years ago, was comatose for a decade, and then . . . he began to speak. Since then, he doesn’t eat, drink, or eliminate waste, and he doesn’t age—as best I can tell, he’s sustained by psychic energy. That’s when his regular family doctor made some inquiries and had him transferred here, since we’re better able to care for . . . unusual cases.”
“So he wasn’t a sorcerer? Just a writer?”
“As far as we know, he was unaware of his own latent psychic abilities, though the uncontrollable power of his mind may have caused his breakdown. His chronic alcoholism might also have been a factor.”
“What’s he babbling about?”
“That’s dialogue,” Dr. Husch said. “He seems to be inhabiting an epic fantasy story of his own creation. The only glimpse we used to have of that story was the bits of dialogue spoken by his—narrator? Character? Avatar? Barrow is playing the part, living the part, of a mighty hero, on a quest to win a great mystical treasure. Delusions of grandeur. But recently he’s been . . . exothermically delusional. His hallucinations are starting to break through to this world. The skulls of slain goblins, the skinned hide of a manticore—those apports were certainly of clinical interest. But when a live arc-drake appeared in his room yesterday . . . I grew more concerned. His dialogue indicates that the goal of his quest is to win a magical Key that will allow him to move between worlds at will.”
