by Lisa Tuttle
I won’t have to give up writing, but I’ll lose my precious “extra hour.”
I was a fool to think I could do whatever I wanted without consequences. Everything makes a difference; everything has its cost.
I must not go there again.
I feel as sad and despairing as if this meant giving up writing. Maybe it does. By luck or magic I found a way to make more time in which to write, and now I’ll have to do without.
But if I carry on like this I’ll destroy my marriage. If it was only my happiness at stake maybe I’d risk it, maybe I’d choose the unknown over present comfort. But there are the children to think of as well, their lives, their happiness. I’m not that selfish. I know, pace Charlotte Perkins Gilman and all the other feminist writer-heroines, that writing — especially my writing — is simply not that important. People’s lives are what’s important, my family’s happiness, not my own selfish gratification.
Besides — I have to keep reminding myself — it’s not writing I’m giving up, just the sneaky, supernatural way I’ve been doing it lately. I will finish my novel.
Only not tonight. My hour is up, and I haven’t done a thing. I’ll have to give up this journal, too. Cut back to the basics. We’ll survive.
Twelve
Twice I heard the clock strike; twice I ignored it, as I’d promised myself I would, but the third time —
It was nearly four months since I’d heard it, and I’d thought I never would again. This might be my last chance.
Oh, David, I never meant to betray you, or leave you, and I still don’t. Maybe, if you read these pages, and can bring yourself to believe them, you’ll understand why, if not how, I have gone.
I got up when I heard the clock strike. It was a half-conscious impulse, a powerful desire, unreasoning, that drew me. I hesitated when I saw the door at the turn of the stair, hesitated and thought of you. What would happen if I called you? Would the door vanish, or would you be able to enter with me?
I wish now that I’d tried, had given you the chance to see, but I didn’t, and it’s too late for second-guessing. I did what I did.
As soon as I stepped into the room I was seized, attacked, by overwhelming pain. I staggered forward, doubled over, struggling to cope with whatever was happening to me, and then the pain passed. I could breathe again, but I was weak and covered in sweat. And there was something familiar about the pain. I looked down and realized I was pregnant.
The pain wracked me again. This time, the shock and terror were nearly as overwhelming as the physical labor. I was having a baby!
The contractions were very close together and horribly intense, with scarcely any space to rest in between. I didn’t really have the time or energy to worry about the fact that I was all alone and wonder how I’d cope — I just had to get on with it. It never occurred to me to try to leave the room; what I was going through so consumed everything that there was no chance of thinking coherently. All my energies were devoted to getting through the next surge of pain, and then the next, and then in pushing the baby out. I managed to get my clothes off, and located some towels. I suppose it was all over rather quickly, although it didn’t feel like it.
Then everything happened much too fast, and there was a baby slipping between my legs as I struggled to grasp and lift the slippery, bloody little creature. We rested for a while on the floor and she — yes, she; another girl, of course — looked up at me with her dark blue eyes and gave a peeping, mewling cry more like a newborn kitten than a human child. She was so much smaller than Rachel had been, tinier even than Phoebe, but she was just as solid, just as real, and the protective, wondering love I felt welling up in me for her was just as strong as it had been for my other two.
Oh, my baby!
Those splotches are tears. Well, I’m postpartum, I can’t be expected to — I can’t help it, I —
But looking at me now, looking at my breasts, you’d never guess that a few minutes ago they were swollen at least two bra-sizes bigger. You’d never know from looking at me that I just gave birth. There’s no trace left of the sweat and blood or any of the other fluids — I don’t even smell of anything much, as if I’d done nothing more strenuous today than walk up and down the stairs.
We lay there together a while, first on the floor where she’d been born, then up onto the chaise longue. All of a sudden I felt hungry, but what I wanted even more than something to eat was to have a good wash, and to wash her, and get some fresh clothes for both of us. Also, I was worrying about the umbilicus, having nothing to cut it. I had a vague notion that something awful could happen if you left it too long, although I couldn’t for the life of me remember what. We couldn’t just stay there in post-natal coma like that forever. I guess I knew it was a risk: nothing and no one from that world could go out my door with me; I’d never even been able to take out a notebook. But I’d taken ideas, stories, out, and she was as much a part of me as my stories — she was even still attached to me.
I thought it might work, but it didn’t. As soon as I stepped through the door she was gone, and I was alone and intact in this world again.
That’s why I screamed, and lied so unintelligibly when you called up to me.
Then I ran straight back here, to my desk, to my notebook, to try to write my way back inside to my baby.
She needs me; she can’t live without me, and I can’t let her die.
Newborns can go several days without food (I keep reminding myself of these comforting facts), but how quickly will several days pass in there while I’m out here? I won’t leave my desk, I won’t sleep, until I hear the clock strike to let me back in.
You do understand why, don’t you, David?
It’s not that I value her life more than your happiness, or Phoebe’s, or Rachel’s, only — only it is her life we’re talking about, her actual life weighed against mere comfort. She needs me in the way the rest of you don’t. The three of you can survive without me — she can’t.
But maybe you can both have me; maybe we can all survive. Time works so differently there. It might be, as I hope, that I can go back there, climb out the window and scale the rough stone wall of my tower with my baby strapped to my front, and carry her across that beautiful, wild emptiness to another house or a village or a castle — Jack came from somewhere, so there must be other people, and habitations, there — find her a foster home and wet-nurse, and then come back. I just want to save her life; I don’t have to raise her myself.
If I can do all that in the same sort of no-time in which she was conceived, then I’ll be back here before bedtime. You’ll never have to read this, never know what I’ve been through, and I’ll pretend — and eventually convince myself — that it all took place inside my head.
But if you don’t find me when you come upstairs looking for me, and you read this, I want you to know the truth.
The clock!
Remember, I love you all.
Where the Stones Grow
He saw the stone move. Smoothly as a door falling shut, it swung slightly around and settled back into the place where it had stood for centuries.
They’ll kill anyone who sees them.
Terrified, Paul backed away, ready to run, when he saw something that didn’t belong in that high, empty field which smelled of the sea. Lying half-in, half-out of the triangle formed by the three tall stones called the Sisters was Paul’s father, his face bloody and his body permanently stilled.
*
When he was twenty-six, his company offered to send Paul Staunton to England for a special training course, the offer a token of better things to come. In a panic, Paul refused, much too vehemently. His only reason — that his father had died violently in England eighteen years before — was not considered a reason at all. Before the end of the year, Paul had been transferred away from the main office in Houston to the branch in San Antonio.
He knew he should be unhappy, but, oddly enough, the move suited him. He was still being paid well for work he enjoye
d, and he found the climate and pace of life in San Antonio more congenial than that of Houston. He decided to buy a house and settle down.
The house he chose was about forty years old, built of native white limestone and set in a bucolic neighborhood on the west side of the city. It was a simple rectangle, long and low to the ground, like a railway car. The roof was flat and the gutters and window frames peeled green paint. The four rooms offered him no more space than the average mobile home, but it was enough for him.
A yard of impressive size surrounded the house with thick green grass shaded by mimosas, pecans, a magnolia, and two massive, spreading fig trees. A chain-link fence defined the boundaries of the property, although one section at the back was torn and sagging and would have to be repaired. There were neighboring houses on either side, also set in large yards, but beyond the fence at the back of the house was a wild mass of bushes and high weeds, ten or more undeveloped acres separating his house from a state highway.
Paul Staunton moved into his house on a day in June, a few days shy of the nineteenth anniversary of his father’s death. The problems and sheer physical labor involved in moving had kept him from brooding about the past until something unexpected happened. As he was unrolling a new rug to cover the ugly checkerboard linoleum in the living room, something spilled softly out: less than a handful of gray grit, the pieces too small even to be called pebbles. Just rock-shards.
Paul broke into a sweat and let go of the rug as if it were contaminated. He was breathing quickly and shallowly as he stared at the debris.
His reaction was absurd, all out of proportion. He forced himself to take hold of the rug again and finish unrolling it. Then — he could not make himself pick them up — he took the carpet sweeper and rolled it over the rug, back and forth, until all the hard gray crumbs were gone.
It was time for a break. Paul got himself a beer from the refrigerator and a folding chair from the kitchen and went out to sit in the back yard. He stationed himself beneath one of the mimosa trees and stared out at the lush green profusion. He wouldn’t even mind mowing it, he thought as he drank the beer. It was his property, the first he’d ever owned. Soon the figs would be ripe. He’d never had a fig before, except inside a cookie.
When the beer was all gone, and he was calmer, he let himself think about his father.
*
Paul’s father, Edward Staunton, had always been lured by the thought of England. It was a place of magic and history, the land his ancestors had come from. From childhood he had dreamed of going there, but it was not until he was twenty-seven, with a wife and an eight-year-old son, that a trip to England had been possible.
Paul had a few dim memories of London, of the smell of the streets, and riding on top of a bus, and drinking sweet, milky tea — but most of these earlier memories had been obliterated by the horror that followed.
It began in a seaside village in Devon. It was a picturesque little place, but famous for nothing. Paul never knew why they had gone there.
They arrived in the late afternoon and walked through cobbled streets, dappled with slanting sun rays. The smell of the sea was strong on the wind, and the cry of gulls carried even into the center of town. One street had looked like a mountain to Paul, a straight drop down to the gray, shining ocean, with neatly kept stone cottages staggered on both sides. At the sight of it, Paul’s mother had laughed and gasped and exclaimed that she didn’t dare, not in her shoes, but the three of them had held hands and, calling out warnings to each other like intrepid mountaineers, the Stauntons had, at last, descended.
At the bottom was a narrow pebble beach, and steep, pale cliffs rose up on either side of the town, curving around like protecting wings.
“It’s magnificent,” said Charlotte Staunton, looking from the cliffs to the gray-and-white movement of the water, and then back up at the town.
Paul bent down to pick up a pebble. It was smooth and dark brown, more like a piece of wood or a nut than a stone. Then another: smaller, nearly round, milky. And then a flat black one that looked like a drop of ink. He put them in his pocket and continued to search hunched over, his eyes on the ground.
He heard his father say, “I wonder if there’s another way up?” And then another voice, a stranger’s, responded, “Oh, aye, there is. There is the Sisters’ Way.”
Paul looked up in surprise and saw an elderly man with a stick and a pipe and a little black dog who stood on the beach with them as if he’d grown there, and regarded the three Americans with a mild, benevolent interest.
“The Sisters’ Way?” said Paul’s father.
The old man gestured with his knobby walking stick toward the cliffs to their right. “I was headed that way myself,” he said. “Would you care to walk along with me? It’s an easier path than the High Street.”
“I think we’d like that,” said Staunton. “Thank you. But who are the Sisters?”
“You’ll see them soon enough,” said the man as they all began to walk together. “They’re at the top.”
At first sight, the cliffs had looked dauntingly steep. But as they drew closer they appeared accessible. Paul thought it would be fun to climb straight up, taking advantage of footholds and ledges he could now see, but that was not necessary. The old man led them to a narrow pathway which led gently up the cliffs in a circuitous way, turning and winding, so that it was not a difficult ascent at all. The way was not quite wide enough to walk two abreast, so the Stauntons fell into a single file after the old man, with the dog bringing up the rear.
“Now,” said their guide when they reached the top. “Here we are! And there stand the Sisters.”
They stood in a weedy, empty meadow just outside town — rooftops could be seen just beyond a stand of trees about a half a mile away. And the Sisters, to judge from the old man’s gesture, could be nothing more than some rough gray boulders.
“Standing stones,” said Edward Staunton in a tone of great interest. He walked toward the boulders and his wife and son followed.
They were massive pieces of gray granite, each one perhaps eight feet tall, rearing out of the porous soil in a roughly triangular formation. The elder Staunton walked among them, touching them, a reverent look on his face. “These must be incredibly old,” he said. He looked back at their guide and raised his voice slightly. “Why are they called the ‘Sisters’?”
The old man shrugged. “That’s what they be.”
“But what’s the story?” Staunton asked. “There must be some legend — a tradition — maybe a ritual the local people perform.”
“We’re good Christians here,” the old man said, sounding indignant. “No rituals here. We leave them stones alone!” As he spoke, the little dog trotted forward, seemingly headed for the stones, but a hand gesture from the man froze it, and it sat obediently at his side.
“But surely there’s a story about how they came to be here? Why is that path we came up named after them?”
“Ah, that,” said the man. “That is called the Sisters’ Way because on certain nights of the year the Sisters go down that path to bathe in the sea.”
Paul felt his stomach jump uneasily at those words, and he stepped back a little, not wanting to be too close to the stones. He had never heard of stones that could move by themselves, and he was fairly certain such a thing was not possible, but the idea still frightened him.
“They move!” exclaimed Staunton. He sounded pleased. “Have you ever seen them do it?”
“Oh, no. Not I, or any man alive. The Sisters don’t like to be spied on. They’ll kill anyone who sees them.”
“Mama,” said Paul, urgently. “Let’s go back. I’m hungry.”
She patted his shoulder absently. “Soon, dear.”
“I wonder if anyone has tried,” said Staunton. “I wonder where such a story comes from. When exactly are they supposed to travel?”
“Certain nights,” said the old man. He sounded uneasy.
“Sacred times? Like Allhallows maybe?”
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br /> The old man looked away toward the trees and the village and he said: “My wife will have my tea waiting for me. She worries if I’m late. I’ll just say good day to you, then.” He slapped his hip, the dog sprang up, and they walked away together, moving quickly.
“He believes it,” Staunton said. “It’s not just a story to him. I wonder what made him so nervous? Did he think the stones would take offense at his talking about them?”
“Maybe tonight is one of those nights,” his wife said thoughtfully. “Isn’t Midsummer Night supposed to be magical?”
“Let’s go,” said Paul again. He was afraid even to look at the stones. From the corner of his eye he could catch a glimpse of them, and it seemed to him that they were leaning toward his parents threateningly, listening.
“Paul’s got a good idea,” his mother said cheerfully. “I could do with something to eat myself. Shall we go?”
The Stauntons found lodging for the night in a green-shuttered cottage with a Bed and Breakfast sign hanging over the gate. It was the home of Mr. and Mrs. Winkle, a weathered-looking couple, who raised cats and rose bushes and treated their visitors like old friends. After the light had faded from the sky, the Stauntons sat with the Winkles in their cozy parlor and talked. Paul was given a jigsaw puzzle to work, and he sat with it in a corner, listening to the adults and hoping he would not be noticed and sent to bed.
“One thing I like about this country is the way the old legends live on,” Staunton said. “We met an old man this afternoon on the beach, and he led us up a path called the Sisters’ Way, and showed us the stones at the top. But I couldn’t get much out of him about why the stones should be called the Sisters — I got the idea that he was afraid of them.”
“Many are,” said Mr. Winkle equably. “Better safe than sorry.”
“What’s the story about those stones? Do you know it?”
“When I was a girl,” Mrs. Winkle offered, “people said that they were three sisters who long ago had been turned to stone for sea-bathing on the Sabbath. And so wicked were they that, instead of repenting their sin, they continue to climb down the cliff to bathe whenever they get the chance.”
