The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  And the woman with wings and shining bird eyes said her name, Angeline, said her name so it meant things she’d never suspected, some way the name held everything she was in three syllables. One long arm out to her, arm too long and thin to believe, skin like moonlight or afterbirth, fingers longer still and pointing to the door of the cage. Padlocked steel and the interlace design from the threshold again, engraved there like a warning; ‘Please,’ the woman in the cage said, ‘Please, Angeline.’

  Angeline Desvernine ran, then, ran from even the possibility of this pleading thing, door slammed shut behind her, closing it away and closing away the fading illusion of her victory. Almost an hour before she found her way back to her own room, trailing pools and crusting smears of blood from her ruined feet; crawling, hands and knees, at the end. She locked her door, and by then the sound of servants awake, distant commotion, her name called again and again, but there was no comfort left after those eyes, the ragged holes they’d put in her. No way not to see them or hear that silk and thorny voice.

  Most of the storm’s fury spent by dawn, by the time the maids and cooks and various manservants gave up and called for someone from the stables to take the door off its hinges.

  First leadflat light in the empty room, the balcony doors standing open wide and tiny drifts of snow reaching almost to the bed. They found her hanging from the balustrade, noose from curtain cord tiebacks, snow in her tangled black hair, crimson icicles from the sliced flesh of her toes and heels. And her eyes open wide and staring sightless toward the Storm King.

  * * * *

  ‘They’re my dreams,’ he says, whispers loud, and she says ‘They’re lies,’ and he keeps his eyes on the last colourless smudges of afternoon and says low, mumbled so she won’t hear, ‘Then they’re my lies.’

  * * * *

  This time, this dog-eared incarnation of the climb up Storm King and he’s alone, except for the thunder and lightning and rain like wet needles against exposed skin, wind that would take him in its cold fist and fling him, broken, back down to the rocks below, to the impatient, waiting river. No sign anymore of the trail he’s followed from the road, faintest path for deer or whatever else might come this way and now even that’s gone. He can see in the white spaces after the thunder, flashpowder snapshots of the mountain, trees bending and the hulk of Breakneck across the river, Storm King’s twin. Jealous Siamese thing severed by the acid Hudson, and he thinks No, somewhere deep they’re still connected, still bound safe by their granite vinculum below the water’s slash and silt.

  Thunder that sounds like angels burning and he slips, catches himself, numb hands into the roots of something small that writhes, woodsy revulsion at his touch, and he’s shivering now, the mud and wet straight through his clothes. He lies so still, waiting, to fall, to drown in the gurgling runoff, until the thunder says it’s time to get moving again and he opens his eyes. And he’s standing at the summit, little clearing and the tall stone at its heart like a stake to hold the world in place. Grey megalith like things he’s seen in England or Denmark or France and in the crackling brief electric flash he can see the marks made in the stone, marks smoothed almost away by time and frost and a hundred thousand storms before. Forgotten characters traced in clean rivulets like emphasis. He would turn and run, from the place and the moment, If you had it to do over again, If you could take it back, but the roots have twisted about his wrists, greenstick pythons and for all his clever, distracting variations, there’s only this one way it can go.

  She steps out of the place where the stone is, brilliant moment, thinnest sliver of an instant caught and held in forked lightning teeth; the rain that beads, rolls off her feathers, each exquisite, roughgem drop and the strange angles of her arms and legs, too many joints. The head that turns on its elegant neck and the eyes that find him, sharp face and molten eyes that will never let him go.

  ‘Nothing from the Pterodactyle, I shouldn’t think,’ says Professor Osborn, standing somewhere behind him, ‘though the cranium is oddly reminiscent of the Dimorphodon, isn’t it?’ and Silas Desvernine bows his head, stares down at the soggy darkness where his feet must be and waits for the leather and satin rustle of her wings, gentle loversound through the storm. The rain catches his tears and washes them away with everything else.

  * * * *

  The funeral over and the servants busy downstairs when Silas opened the doors of his gallery; viewed the damage she’d done for the first time, knew it was mostly broken glass and little that couldn’t be put right again, but the sight hurt his chest, hurt his eyes. Heart already so broken and eyes already so raw but new pain anyway. No bottom to this pain, and he bent over and picked up his dodo, retrieved it from a bed of diamond shards and Silas brushed the glass from its dusty beak and rump feathers. Set it back on the high shelf between passenger pigeons and three Carolina parakeets. Another step closer to her cage, the drapes still pulled open, and his shoes crunched. Her, crouched in the shadows, wings wrapped tight about her like a cocoon, living shield against him, and he said, ‘What did you do to her, Tisiphone?’ And surprised at how calm his voice could be, how empty of everything locked inside him and clawing to get out.

  The wings shivered, cringed and folded back; ‘That’s not my name,’ she said.

  ‘What did you do to her, Megaera?’

  ‘Shut up,’ words spit at the wall where her face was still hidden, at him, ‘You know that I’m not one of the three, you’ve known that all along.’

  ‘She couldn’t have hurt you, even if she’d wanted to,’ he said, hearing her words but as close as he would ever come to being able to ignore them: her weak, and his grief too wide to cross even for her voice. ‘Did you think she could hurt you?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ and shaking her head now, forehead bang and smack against brick and he could see the sticky, black smear she left on the wall.

  ‘Then you did it to get back at me. Is that it? You thought to hurt me by hurting her.’

  ‘No,’ she said and that was the only time he ever saw her cry, if it was crying, the dim phosphorescence leaking from the corners of her eyes. ‘No, no .. .’

  ‘But you know she’s dead, don’t you?’ and ‘Yes,’ she said, small yes too quick and it made him want to wring her white throat, lock his strong hands around her neck and twist until he was rewarded with the pop and cartilage grind of ruined vertebrae. Squeeze until her tongue hung useless from her lipless mouth.

  ‘She never hurt anyone, Alecto,’ he hissed and she turned around, snake-sudden movement and he took a step away from the bars despite himself.

  ‘I asked her to help me,’ and she was screaming now, perfect, crystal teeth bared. ‘I asked her to free me,’ and her hurt and fury swept over him, blast furnace heat rushing away from her, and faint smell of nutmeg and decay left in the air around his head.

  ‘I asked her to unlock the fucking cage, Silas!’ and the wings slipped from off her back and lay bloody and very still on the unclean metal and hay-strewn floor of the cage.

  * * * *

  In the simplest sense, these things, at least, are true: that during the last week of June 1916, Silas Desvernine hired workmen from Haverstraw to excavate a large stone from a spot near the summit of Storm King, and that during this excavation several men died or fell seriously ill, each under circumstances that only seemed unusual if considered in connection with one another. When the foreman resigned (monkeyed little Scotsman with a face like ripe cranberries), Silas hired a second crew and in July the stone was carried down and away from the mountain, ingenious block-and-tackle of his own design, then horse and wagon, and finally, barge, the short distance upriver to Pollepel Island. Moneys were paid to a Mr Harriman of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, well enough known for his discretion in such matters, and no questions were asked.

  And also, that archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists and cryptographers were allowed brief viewings of the artefact over the next year and only the sketchiest, conflicting concl
usions regarding the glyphs on the stone were drawn: that they might have been made by Vikings, or Phoenicians, or Minoans, or Atlanteans; that they might be something like Sanskrit, or perhaps the tracks of prehistoric sea worms, or have been etched by Silas Desvernine himself. The suggestion by a geologist of no particular note, that the stone itself, oily black shale with cream flecks of calcite, was not even native to the region, was summarily ignored by everyone but Silas. Who ignored nothing.

  One passing footnote mention of ‘the Butterhill Stone’ in a monograph on Mahican pottery and by 1918 it was forgotten by the busy, forgetful world of men and words beyond the safeguarding walls of Silas’ Castle.

  * * * *

  ‘Wake up,’ she says. ‘You must wake up,’ and he does, gummy blink, unfocused, and the room’s dark except for the light of brass lamps with stained glass shades like willows and dragon-flies and drooping, purple wisteria.

  ‘You’re dying, Silas,’ and he squints towards the great cage, cage that could hold lions or leopards and she looks so terribly small in there. Deceptive contrast of iron and white, white skin, and she says, ‘Before the sun rises again . . .’

  Big sigh rattle from his bony chest and ‘No,’ looking about the desk for his spectacles. ‘No, not yet,’ but she says ‘You’re an old man, Silas, and old men die, eventually. All of them.’

  ‘Not yet,’ and there they are, his bifocals perched on a thick book about African beetles, ‘there’s a new war, new ships that have to be built,’ and he slips them on, frame wire bent and straightened and bent again so they won’t sit quite right on his face any longer. Walking cane within reach, but he doesn’t stand, waits for the murky room to become solid again.

  ‘Let me go now,’ she says, as if she hasn’t said it a thousand thousand times before, as if it were a new idea, never occurred to her before and he laughs. Froggy little strangled sound more like a burp. ‘You’re trying to trick me,’ he says, grins his false-toothed grin at her and one crooked finger pointed so there can be no doubt. ‘You’re not a sibyl,’ and it takes him five minutes to remember where he’s put his pocket watch.

  ‘I can hear your tired old heart and it’s winding down, like your watch,’ and there it is, in his vest pocket; 4:19, but the hour hand and minute hand and splinter second hand still as ice. He forgets to wind it a lot these days, and how much time has he lost, dozing at his desk? Stiff neck crane and he can see stars through the high windows.

  ‘You can’t leave me here, Silas.’

  ‘Haven’t I told you that I won’t?’ still watching the stars, dim glimpse of Canes Venatici or part of the Little Bear, and the anger in his voice surprising him. ‘Haven’t I said that? That I’ll let you go before I die?’

  ‘You’re a liar, Silas Desvernine. You’ll leave me here with all these other things that you’ve stolen,’ and he notices that her eyes have settled on the tall glass case near her cage, four tall panes and the supporting metal rods inside, the shrivelled, leathery things wired there. The dead feathers that have come loose and lie scattered like October leaves at the bottom of the case.

  ‘You would have destroyed them if I hadn’t put them there,’ he mumbles, ‘Don’t tell me that’s not the truth,’ turning away, anything now to occupy his attention, and it was true, that part. That she’d tried to eat them after they’d fallen off, Jesus Christ, tried to eat them, before he took them away from her, still warm and oozing blood from their ragged stumps.

  ‘Please,’ she whispers, softest, snowflake excuse for sound, and ‘Please, Silas,’ as he opens a book, yellowbrown paper to crackle loud between his fingers, and adjusts his bent spectacles.

  ‘I keep my promises,’ grumbled, and he turns a dry page.

  * * * *

  Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Gothic and Goth-noir short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Sandman Book of Dreams, Love in Vein II, Lethal Kisses, Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium, Noirotica 2, Brothers of the Night and the previous volume of Dark Terrors. Her first novel, Silk, is due from Penguin/RoC. She made her comics-writing debut in DC Comics’ The Dreaming, for whom she now writes fall-time. As for the background to her story in this volume, the author recalls: ‘In part “Estate” grew out of a drive with Christa Faust and her father along the Hudson River Valley on a misty, cold afternoon in February 1996, although we didn’t make it as far upriver as Storm King or Pollepel Island. And I’d been reading a lot of Charles Fort and Edward Gorey, and suffered a recent obsession with the great American industrialists. I suspect it will be the first in the long story cycle to be collected as Tales of Pain and Wonder. “Estate” was written to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads and to Black Tape for a Blue Girl.’

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  * * * *

  Walking Wounded

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

  When after two days the discomfort in his side had not stopped, merely mutated, Richard began to get mildly concerned. It didn’t hurt as often as it had at first, and he could make a wider range of movements without triggering it; but when the pain did come it was somehow deeper, as if settled into the bone.

  Christine’s answer to the problem was straightforward, and strident in its logic and delivery. He should go to Casualty, or at the very least to the doctor’s surgery which was just opposite their new flat in Kingsley Road. Richard’s view, though unspoken, was just as definite: bollocks to that. There were more than enough dull post-move tasks to be endured without traipsing up to the Royal Free and sitting with stoic old women and bleeding youths in a purgatory of peeling linoleum. As they were now condemned to living on a different branch of the Northern line to Hampstead, it would require two dogleg trips down to Camden and back out again - together with a potentially limitless spell on a waiting-room bench - and burn up a whole afternoon. Even less appealing, for some reason, was the prospect of going just across the road and explaining in front of an audience of whey-faced locals that he had been living somewhere else, now lived just across the road, and wished to both register with the doctor and have his apathetic opinion on a rather unspecific pain in Richard’s side. And that he was very sorry for being middle-class and would they please not beat him up.

  He couldn’t be bothered, in other words, and instead decided to dedicate Monday to taking a wide variety of objects out of cardboard boxes and trying to work out where they could be least unattractively placed. Christine had gone back to work, at least, which meant she couldn’t see his occasional winces or hear the swearing which greeted every new object for which there simply wasn’t room.

  The weekend had been hell, and not just because Richard hadn’t wanted to move in the first place. Or rather he had, in one way; he had believed that they should move, instead of actually wanting to. It had come to him one night lying in bed in the flat in Belsize Park, listening to the even cadence of Chris’s breathing and wondering at what point in the last couple of months they had stopped falling asleep together. At first they’d drifted off simultaneously, facing each other, four hands clasped into a declaration, determined not to leave each other even for the hours they spent in another realm. Richard half-remembered a poem by someone long dead - Herrick, possibly? - the gist of which had been that though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one is hurled into a several world. Well it hadn’t been that way with them, not at first. Yet after nine months there he was, lying awake, happy to be in the same bed as Chris but wondering where she was.

  Eventually he’d got up and wandered through into the sitting-room. In the half-light it looked the same as it always had. You couldn’t see which pictures had been taken down, which objects had been removed from shelves and hidden in boxes at the bottom of cupboards. You couldn’t tell that for three years he had lived there with someone else.

  But Richard knew that he had, and so did Christine. As he gazed out over the garden in which Susan’s attempts at horticulture still struggled for life in the face of their joint indifference, Richar
d finally realized that they should move. Understood, suddenly and with cold guilt, that Chris probably didn’t like living here. It was a lovely flat, with huge rooms and high ceilings. It was on Belsize Avenue, which meant not only was it within three minutes’ walk of Haverstock Hill, with its cafés, stores and Tube station, but Belsize ‘village’ was just around the corner. A small enclave of shops specifically designed to cater to the needs of the local well-heeled, the village was so comprehensively stocked with pâtés, wine, videos and magazines that you hardly ever actually needed to go up to Hampstead, itself only a pleasant ten minutes’ walk away. The view from the front of the flat itself was on to the Avenue, wide and spaced with ancient trees. The back was on to a garden neatly bordered by an old brick wall, and although only a few plants grew with any real enthusiasm the general effect was still pleasing.

  But the view through Christine’s eyes was probably different. She perhaps saw the local pubs and restaurants in which Richard and Susan had spent years of happy evenings. She maybe felt the tightness with which her predecessor had held Richard’s hand as they walked down to the village, past the gnarled mulberry tree which was the sole survivor of the garden of a country house which had originally stood there. She certainly wondered which particular patches of carpet within the flat had provided arenas for cheerful, drunken sex. This had come out one night after they had come back from an unsuccessful dinner party at one of Chris’s friends, both rather drunk and irritable. Richard had been bored enough by the evening to respond angrily to the question, and the matter had been dropped. Standing there in the middle of the night, staring around a room stripped of its familiarity by darkness, he remembered the conversation, the nearest thing they’d yet had to a full-blown argument. For a moment he saw the flat as she probably did, and almost believed he could hear the rustling of gifts from another woman, condemned to storage but stirring in their boxes, remembering the places where they had once stood.