Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

by April Genevieve Tucholke

  She heard one of them call out, a girl’s voice, sharp and prickly as a briar branch. Then the pack moved around the corner of the house. There were more children today, now that the hunting party was here, and all the guests. The song went on, cold and distant now, as if sung in the shadows of a courtyard:

  J is for Jamie, alone in the park

  K is for Kerstin, who’s good for a lark

  L is for Louis, who douses the spark

  M is for Misha, who sits in the dark . . .

  She stiffened at the sound of her name, then turned her back on the window and felt her way to the other side of her chamber. Her hands brushed the sunlight-warmed smoothness of a tassel, the rich fur of velvet, sleek porcelain, brass, dark wood, growing colder as she sank farther into the room. She sat down in her chair. It creaked inelegantly under her.

  It had taken them eight months, then, to realize the cousin in the attic, whom no one spoke of, and whom no one wanted to speak to, was worthy of inclusion in their songs. The children seemed to know everything that went on at Hatfield—they were like a dwarfish, all-knowing jury—but they had never sung of her before. Not until today.

  Whenever she went downstairs to join the Gortleys for their family tea (which she did as seldom as possible, because going downstairs felt, to her, akin to drowning), she never once heard the children speak. She could imagine them sitting in their starched collars, eyes grave and full of secrets, but she never heard them whisper or laugh, and there was certainly none of the running and shrill singing she heard now. Sometimes she wondered if the children were not ghosts, conjured up by her own mind, and that if she stumbled into the garden and felt about with her hands she would find no one there, because what child would sing such songs as these?

  But they sounded real enough now.

  O is for Oscar, who might be a pig,

  P is Patrick, who definitely is.

  Misha sorted through the names in her head, trying to pin them to the sachets of sounds and smells with which she recognized people. J for Jamie and L for Louis were no doubt two of the guests who had come up for the foxhunts that weekend. She was related to a Jamie, and a Louis, too, but of course, these might be different ones. Kerstin was a housemaid, a loud, jolly girl, from what little Misha knew of her. She liked to sing “I’m the Queen of London-Town” while bustling laundry across the green toward the stone wash-house. Oscar was a stable boy, Patrick a duke. And then there was M. M for Misha, who sits in the dark. They were right about that, the children. She did sit in the dark. She did other things too, but no one knew.

  Misha sat very still, her thumb rubbing over a ridge in the armrest. K is for Kerstin, who’s good for a lark.

  Misha often wondered whether she would have been like Kerstin if she had been born to a charwoman instead of a lord. Would she have grown up jolly and loud? Would she have been able to see? But what was the use of thinking about it. Misha had been born to a lord, and the lord had died, and then had begun the endless passing about among relatives, from house to house, from London to Oxford to Wiltshire to here, like some sort of odd and awkward present, a lead goose thrust among the china and delicate figurines on a mantel. No one had wanted the great, ungainly girl for long, because she couldn’t sew, that Misha, and she couldn’t sing, and she couldn’t speak interestingly, and she couldn’t see.

  She had seen, once. She remembered being small, dancing in a garden much like the children outside were doing now. She remembered white smocks and scratchy stockings, laughing and jeering, and the brilliant green of the grass, so brilliant, it made her eyes sting and water to think of it. And then she remembered cramped rooms and medicine bottles and sickness. They had pressed a poultice over her eyes, soaked in strong herbs to help her sleep. It had burned them. The last thing she recalled seeing was a shape in the cloth, a long, thin tear in the upper right corner through which the light came. And then the light was gone, and there was only pain and darkness . . .

  W’s for William, who’s such a great boor

  X is for Xavier, who happens to snore

  Y is for Ylenia, who snaps like a stick

  Z is for Zelda, who drinks like a tick

  Misha’s fingers were running over the armrest frantically now. The dinner gong would be ringing soon. That meant going downstairs, drowning, resurfacing stiff and silent in the dining room while the chorus of dinner conversation drew around her like a net, while she listened to the bitter grievances and false friendlinesses whispered across her lap, as if she were deaf as well as blind. She heard every word, of course. She often thought of witty things to say in response, and she waited for other people to say them, but no one did. She could imagine the rows of faces if she tried to, the stunned silence, then the sneers and pitying smirks. It was like a cage almost, the image they had of her, and she could not break out of it for fear of hurting herself. And so she would sit, stiff and hollow, like a doll, but inside, there were colors swirling, and faces like flowers, opening and smiling, and wind and words—

  Someone was at the door. Misha’s heart gave a terrible squirm; she struggled up out of her thoughts. She sat very still, listening. She heard a woman’s voice, high and giggly, and the light tap of a slipper. Then the heavy tread and deep voice of a man. A hand was placed on the doorknob.

  “It—it is occupied,” she coughed, but the words came out in barely a whisper.

  The knob turned. Misha half rose, then scrabbled toward the door, hoping she could lock it in time, or that they would hear her and leave. The latch clicked open. She froze, hunched over, halfway to the door.

  She tried to straighten herself, look composed, but it was too late for that. She could feel the two figures in the doorway, watching her.

  “Oh!” said a woman’s voice. “Good gracious, we didn’t realize—”

  Go away, go away. Misha wanted to sink into the floor, into the dust and beetles between the beams. She heard a nervous titter, heard the woman’s hand on her companion’s arm. “Come along, darling, we’ll find somewhere else . . .”

  But they didn’t move, and if Misha’s instincts were not mistaken, the man continued to stare at her, his presence hanging in the doorway, filling it.

  “Come on, will you?” the woman said, testily now. Lady Willoughby. That’s who it was. Ginty Willoughby, second cousin once removed.

  Silence. Misha felt ill. She heard a sound like a throat clearing, and teeth coming together inside a mouth. Then the door closed abruptly, and the footsteps moved away.

  Misha felt her way backward toward her chair and collapsed into it. The visitors had left behind an odious smell, like lavender and tobacco, far too strong. The children outside were not singing anymore. No doubt they had been called in for dinner. It wouldn’t be five minutes before the gong for the grown-ups rang.

  She got up and went to the washbasin. Her fingers shook against the porcelain, rattling like bones. She felt drained and tired, as if the mere seconds of facing the strangers had taken the last of her energy.

  Stop it, Misha. Stop being so frightened of everything.

  But she couldn’t stop. She carried fear with her like a little animal, curled in the nook behind her heart, and it whispered to her: You are weak, you are frightened, and you will never dare do anything at all.

  She felt about on the floor for her shoes, which she had kicked off. She went and closed the windows. Far down in the house, the dinner gong sounded. She spent a great deal of time clasping a necklace. Then she clenched her hands at her side, opened the door, and poked her head out, breathing heavily.

  The hallway was curiously quiet, as if it were holding its breath. Three stories down, in the entrance hall with its great stone staircase and tapestries, she heard guests arriving, the distant rumble of their voices, but up here there was nothing. Less than nothing: an odd, aching void, as if something had been here, and had been ripped from the air so suddenly it had left a h
ole.

  A floorboard creaked softly somewhere farther on. Misha listened, her heart beating hard and quick, like a stone mallet.

  Oh, stop! She set off purposefully up the hall in the direction of the stairs. Seven, eight, nine, she counted, and her hand caught the newel post at the top of the banister. She started down. A sound reached her ears: a soft knocking and the scuff of shoes. Someone else was on the stairs.

  She paused, suddenly afraid it was the man and woman again, hanging about for a joke. She took another step down. Her face brushed against something. There was an odd smell in the air, like unwashed skin, and she could sense something in front of her. She was fairly sure it wasn’t a person. It was almost the feeling she got when she was near another human being, but this was more like a weight, something solid, displacing the air. She swept her hand out in an arc. She felt cloth again. And all at once something hot dripped onto her face, and she stumbled forward, and suddenly the cloth was everywhere, tangling with her. Her head knocked into something. She felt skin, strangely heavy and clammy, and a face, upside down. Her fingers wriggled across a mouth, hair hanging down, and Misha’s feet were slapping about as if— No. No, not blood, she was dreaming, there was no one there, there was no sleeping woman hanging before her, and no blood, NO BLOOD.

  Something rushed past her. And then she felt a mouth press close to her ear and a thick arm snake around her neck and clamp tight like a noose. A man. He was breathing heavily, gasping, as if he had run a great distance, and his arm went tighter and tighter, and he gasped and breathed, and at last, when Misha thought she was to die too, he said in a rough, country voice that sounded of earth and gravel: “Not a word, old girl, or it’ll be you hanging from the lights, and your guts a-slipperin’ and a-slidin’ on the stairs.”

  He let go of her neck. And then she was alone, standing in silence next to the dead woman. It was a full two minutes before she began to scream.

  × × ×

  Dinner was called off, but the murder had done little to dampen anyone’s appetite, and so all the food was laid out on a buffet in the front hall, and everyone ate there, standing and speaking to one another frantically. Misha was brought into the drawing room, where a police inspector tried to pry words from her head like teeth. She barely spoke. She heard him. She heard all his questions, and she heard the vexation begin to rise in his voice, and she heard Lady Gortley take him to the other end of the room and whisper: “Do be patient, Mr. Bilgeberry. I’m afraid she’s a bit simple, and now with this beastly murder business and her finding poor Lady Willoughby like that . . . Oh, I can’t imagine. Hanging upside down, and the blood just dripping. Thank heavens she’s blind.”

  Misha stared out in front of her, into nothing. She held her hands clasped tightly in her lap. It was all she could do not to rub them raw. They said the murderer had being trying to haul Lady Willoughby’s body up into the attic, through the trapdoor above the landing. He had let her fall when Misha had interrupted him, and the body had tangled with the antlers in the chandelier. One of the prongs had driven clean through her leg. A servant had washed the gore off Misha—she had felt the warm water and the rub of the cloth—but somehow it was as if the blood were still there, drying stickily between her fingers.

  “Miss Markham?” The inspector was leaning over her again. She could smell his breath, rot and meat and the sherry Lady Gortley had been so liberally offering him, and which he had been accepting gratefully. “We will try again: You were the only one in that level of the house. Your rooms are only a few steps from the stairwell where the woman was savagely attacked with a knife. Surely you must have heard something!”

  Misha turned her head. She imagined how the inspector must look with that voice and that meaty, rotten breath. No doubt he was a constable, hurried away from his dinner in the village, not a real inspector at all. She imagined spectacles and a brown tartan waistcoat and a great walrus mustache, someone with a family and a cottage, someone who would find this all rather thrilling and flattering, and who really had no idea what he was doing.

  “I heard nothing,” she said, and the smell of the blood and the lavender and the tobacco flooded over her so that she thought she might be sick in the middle of the drawing room. Not a word, old girl, or it’ll be you hanging from the lights. “I left my room to go to dinner. And then I was on the stairs, and . . .”

  “And what?”

  “And there was the body.” Her fingers tightened in her lap. She felt like running. If she could get away from that house in its little bowl of gardens and walls, away from the narrow corridors and the guests, all the J’s and the L’s, the grand and prideful people, maybe she could be happy. Maybe she could burst her cage and brush the splinters from her hair, and never be afraid again.

  She sensed the inspector leaning back. “Very well,” he said, frostily now, and perhaps a little bit petulantly. She was ruining this for him. “We will speak again in the morning. Miss Markham, if any new scrap of information should surface in your mind, we would be very thankful if you would share it with us.” His tone shifted abruptly, all posturing and humble subservience now. “Lady Gortley, if it isn’t too much trouble, we will question the others now. And you’ll make sure, won’t you, that all the servants are accounted for, and that no one should leave the house or grounds, at all? Yes. Not under any circumstances.”

  × × ×

  After the interview, Lady Gortley positioned Misha in a chair in the hallway and left her to speak with Mr. Hudson, the butler. It was then that they descended on Misha. They were not cautious or polite. They buzzed toward her like a cloud of mosquitoes, and they wanted to know everything, gory details, things not even the inspector had asked.

  “Were you quite covered in blood? Head to toe?” Minerva Boulstridge. Great-aunt.

  “Was Lady Willoughby, well—I heard she was wearing all her jewels, every last ring and bauble, and you know that means she was planning to elope.” Emily Howsham. No relation. Guest.

  “What if the blind one did it herself?” Jamie Thorpe. Cousin. Up from London.

  She recognized many of the peripheral voices too, all of them elegant, shiny like boot-black, and smooth as cream: Lady Dartmouth, whispering behind her fan; Lord Bellham, Duke of Westerdown, also known as Patrick, Definitely a Pig. She could feel their eyes boring into her, pinning her to the chair. Some hung back, what they thought was a safe distance, but she heard them too:

  “To think, it was someone in the house. Perhaps one of us. And she can’t even tell us who!”

  “Horace, look at her nose.”

  “I see it, I see. She’s like an ogress.”

  “There are convents for girls like her.”

  “And prisons.” Somone laughed.

  Misha let their words flow over her, and she retreated from them, surrounding herself in kinder thoughts, pictures of things half remembered from childhood, teapots and clocks, and her characters and friends that she kept in her head, beautiful, kind people with golden hair and rosy cheeks. And all at once, someone snatched her firmly by the arm and dragged her up. She struggled at first, shocked. She heard a rough voice nearby, and was sure it was the murderer come to finish her off. But then she heard the heavy shoes, and a brisk girl’s voice saying: “Sorry, ma’ams, sirs, I was told to take her up, she’s quite disturbed, mistress’s orders, come along now, Miss Misha.”

  With that, Misha was dragged from the crowd of spectators and bundled quickly toward the baize servants’ door, and Kerstin was muttering, “Wicked folk. Wicked, wicked people.”

  × × ×

  Fear made Misha raw and empty, scratched her insides to ribbons, as Kerstin helped her up the stairs to the fourth floor. They were going up by the back way, as the front stairs were still occupied by the murder scene. No doubt the landing was strewn with white sheets and shattered flashbulbs, and crawling with policemen like bluebottle flies.

  The mu
rderer knew who she was, and yet Misha knew nothing. Nothing except that he smelled of lavender and tobacco and spoke in a strange country voice, and those were things easily falsified. If he decided to kill her, no one could stop him. And if he decided to kill someone else—

  “Miss?” Kerstin said, and Misha flinched. Kerstin had never spoken to her directly before, not even when bringing up the breakfast tray, or passing her in the hall. “Miss,” Kerstin said again, and she sounded a little breathless, as if she had gathered up all her courage and now she was a steam engine, barreling unstoppably forward. “I’m sorry for all them down there. I just want you to know that I saw someone murdered once, and it weren’t a pretty sight, nor sound, and I know— Well, I just know.”

  Misha’s face felt like a mask, cotton skin on porcelain bones, but underneath she had begun to spin. It was strange, what words could do. No one had spoken to her like that since she was a child, like she was a real person, a real girl, and not just a walking list of ailments and deficits.

  She didn’t answer at first. Kerstin fell silent, as if worried she had spoken out of turn.

  “You saw a murder?” Misha said softly, at last. “In the village?”

  “No. In Leeds, where I grew up.” Kerstin’s voice turned eager, and a shade dramatic. “It was a dreadful thing. Guts everywhere, like all that skin a person has is just wrapping, and when it pops you splatter everywhere. And I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t seen it. You know, it’s not really the sight that sticks with me. It’s the feeling. I got there right after it happened, and the feeling in the air, like something unnatural horrid had been done that couldn’t ever be taken back, like something had left and when it went, it tore a hole right through everything.” Kerstin’s voice softened suddenly, the bravado gone. “It was dreadful.”

  Misha wasn’t sure what to do. She wanted to say: “That is what I thought. That is what I felt,” but she didn’t. She climbed the stairs next to the servant girl in silence, feeling strangely light.