When the countess arrived, Hedvig had turned the little drawing room into a showroom, fabric and sewing machine ready for alterations. The countess handled each of the dresses where they hung, rubbing the soft fabrics between her fingers.
“I’ve never seen anything like them,” she said. “These aren’t like the Parisian fashions. These are bizarre, they’re too . . . Where did you learn to do this?”
“I designed them myself, my lady,” Hedvig replied.
“Brilliant,” the countess said. “I’ll try them all. Bring out the dressing screen.”
The dresses, which Hedvig feared might be too small, settled almost perfectly over the countess’s forms.
“I’ll take all of them,” the countess said. “And anything else you make. My butler will settle the bill.”
“I don’t want money,” Hedvig said. “All the money in the world couldn’t pay for them.”
The countess blinked. “Then what do you want?”
“I only want one thing,” Hedvig replied. “I’ve heard about a gentleman who lives here. Ruben. I would like to spend three nights with him.”
The countess’s eyes narrowed. “I see. And what do you want with him?”
Hedvig shrugged. “I don’t need money. I’ve heard of his beauty. I’d like to see it firsthand. You can have all of these dresses, if I can have three nights.”
“Very well,” the countess said. “If you want a blind junkie, then that’s what you’ll have. Come back tonight.”
The room was almost dark. Ruben lay on an enormous platform bed, fast asleep. He looked very small. A bottle of laudanum stood on the nightstand, together with an empty glass. Hedvig sat down on the side of the bed. The butler positioned himself by the door and closed his glass eyes.
“I came for you,” she said to Ruben. “I came to free you. After everything you did, I came for you.”
Hedvig lay down next to him and looked at him as he slept. He wasn’t the man who had held her captive now. He was a helpless little thing. She told him about everything she had gone through to come here. He made no sign that he had heard her.
She woke up when the butler touched her shoulder the next morning. When the countess arrived for the fitting, she replied to Hedvig’s complaint with a shrug.
“I told you, he’s a junkie. You asked to spend three nights with him. You didn’t say what state he should be in.”
The second night went by much like the first. Hedvig talked to Ruben where he lay; she told him about their son, her sorrow, her work to free him. Ruben didn’t move. Like the first night, she fell asleep, and woke up only when the butler gently roused her. She didn’t complain to the countess when she fitted the last two gowns for her.
On the third night, no one came to show Hedvig inside, so she found her own way to Ruben’s room. Just as she was about to open the door, the butler stepped outside, the laudanum bottle in his hand. He bowed and held the door open for Hedvig. She couldn’t interpret the gleam in his eyes.
Ruben sat on the edge of the bed, holding on to the frame. His clothes were rumpled, his face grayish and sweaty. He looked up with milky white eyes as Hedvig stepped inside.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me,” Hedvig replied.
“You,” he said. “You came.”
He held out a hand. Hedvig sat down next to him.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I came to free you.”
“She’s planning to marry me,” Ruben said miserably. “I’ll be hers forever.”
“We’ll think of something,” Hedvig said.
The countess asked Hedvig for a wedding dress. She made it in black stiff velvet with a bell skirt; the sewing machine stitched embroidered vines and flowers in glass and metal through the bodice. On the day of the wedding, the countess called Hedvig into her boudoir for the final adjustments. She stood in front of her enormous mirror, resplendent in the bell skirt gown. Ruben sat on a chaise longue in a corner of the room, dapper and miserable in his tailcoat.
“I made a matching scarf, my lady,” Hedvig said.
The countess inspected the glass-beaded scarf and nodded. “Good.” She flung the ends around her neck and turned back to the mirror. She grinned to herself.
Hedvig caught the ends and pulled the scarf very tight.
It seemed an eternity before the countess stopped fighting. When the last twitch finally left her body, Hedvig’s shins were battered and her dress was torn, but she had held fast. As the countess dropped to the floor, Ruben gasped. His eyes were clear and very green, and focused on Hedvig.
“You saved me,” he said.
Hedvig let go of the scarf and gazed down at the countess’s purple face, then at Ruben where he sat on the divan. He looked like a little boy. He wasn’t the stranger who had held her captive, nor the ravaged young man who had been the countess’s thrall. He was back to square one, just like her. She was done. She had a world of choices.
“I saved myself, I think,” Hedvig said. “Good-bye.”
“Where are you going?”
Hedvig was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “But I’ll be free to choose.”
“Then take me with you,” Ruben said.
The plea made Hedvig laugh.
“What am I supposed to do?” Ruben asked plaintively.
“Do better.”
Hedvig left him next to the dead countess. She walked down to the harbor and followed the shore into Old Town, where Ruben’s sister waited with her son. A cool wind blew in from the sea. Ferries howled at one another across the water. Winter was giving way.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Karin Tidbeck: “Prins Hatt under jorden”—“Prince Hatt Underground”—was one of my favorite stories as a child. A princess is sent to live underground with a mysterious prince whose face she is never allowed to see; later she sets off to save him when he’s abducted by the foul witch who wants to marry him. Together they outsmart the witch and live happily ever after.
When I was asked for a story for the anthology, my thoughts immediately went to Prince Hatt, both because I loved the story and because I’d never seen it retold anywhere. So I went back to read it, this beloved classic, and was horrified. A princess is sold off like chattel and has no problem with living underground with a man whose face she never gets to see, and no issues with never seeing her family except on three occasions. She immediately sets off to save the prince when he faces the same fate he has already subjected his wife to. It’s a very disturbing narrative.
But what would it really be like to suddenly be sold off to a man underground? Who is that man, and why does he refuse to show his face? Why is it all right for him to keep her captive underground, but not for another woman to do the same to him? What started out as playing around with a folktale became a reckoning with my own social programming.
EVEN THE CRUMBS WERE DELICIOUS
Daryl Gregory
aybe, just maybe, it had been a mistake to paper the walls with edible drugs. This thought occurred to Tindal when he walked into the living room and saw the open door, the pages torn from the walls, and the two white teenagers who’d decided to feast upon his home.
The girl was crouched on all fours, picking bits of pharmaceutically enhanced paper from the carpet. The boy huddled inside a white cardboard box that had held funeral party supplies—rolls of black crepe paper, a dozen black candles, two packs of white-print-on-black napkins (RIP in Gothic letters)—now dumped out onto the floor to make room for him. He rocked slightly in the box, hugging his knees, eyes focused on nothing. Until he noticed Tindal.
“Let me out of here!” the boy shouted.
The girl startled, terrified.
“It’s okay, it’s okay!” Tindal said. “Everybody calm down.”
“I’m working as hard as I can,” the girl said tearfully.
“Of course you are,” Tindal said. “Good job.” He knew not to argue with druggies. Especially when he was sto
ned himself. The girl returned her attention to the carpet.
“Return me to my true size,” the boy demanded. “And release my sister from your spell.”
Sister? He saw the resemblance now. Both of them brown-haired and sharp-featured. Like rats, he thought, then immediately felt bad. Mice, then.
“You guys can just leave,” Tindal said to the mouse children. “Really.”
“Don’t mock me, hag,” the boy said.
Hag? thought Tindal. That was hurtful. He edged warily around the box boy and approached the girl, who was inspecting each strand of carpet for shredded paper, plucking with tweezer fingers.
“Just don’t eat those, okay?” Tindal asked.
“Have patience with me,” the girl said without looking up. “This floor is so, so dirty.”
“’Cause I think you’ve had enough,” he added.
“Don’t touch her!” the boy said. “Or so help me, I will carve the meat from your bones.”
Tindal backed away from the girl. “No violence!” he said to the boy. “No bone carving!” He fled to the back bedroom, found his pen in the bedcovers (it was always in the bed), and flicked it open. The screen unfurled only halfway, and he had to yank it open to full size.
He called El Capitan, aka El C the MC (available for parties and events), and Tindal’s best friend. He got no answer but kept trying through voice and text until El Cap’s beard slid onto the screen, followed by his big, sleepy eyes. Tindal quickly told him about the intruders.
“Tindy, my man, slow down. And speak up. You’re, like, whisper yelling.”
“They’re in the next room!” Tindal hissed. “They won’t leave!”
“So who are they again?” El Cap asked.
“I have no idea!” he said, failing to keep a lid on the panic. “But they’re minors. Minors in my house!”
“It’s not exactly your house,” El Cap said patiently. “Rolfe didn’t leave a will.” Rolfe had been Tindal’s roommate. Or rather, Tindal had been Rolfe’s roommate, because Rolfe owned the house and had let Tindal rent a bedroom. But now they weren’t roommates at all, because Rolfe was dead.
El Cap said, “Look, just go out there and explain to them that Rolfe is gone, there’s nothing to buy, and they’re going to have to leave.”
“I tried, but they won’t go! They’re tripping hard. One of them’s kinda violent.” The boy was still shouting. Tindal opened the door a crack, but only a corner of the living room was visible. “I think they ate a lot of wall.”
“Hmm. Did you call the police?”
“The police? I have a house full of drugs!”
“Right, right,” El Cap said. “And these kids don’t need to go to the emergency room or anything? They’re breathing?”
Tindal moaned. “This is your fault.”
“How so?” El Cap hadn’t taken offense. The Captain was philosophical about all things.
“You’re the one who said we needed a funeral party.”
“True, true,” El Cap said. “I do recall, however, that the walls were your idea.”
“And how many people did you tell about that?” Tindal demanded. El Cap, for all his dependability as a friend, was unfortunately a friend to everyone. He overshared and overcommitted, possibly due to the year he’d spent on a South Dakota trust farm doped to the gills on oxytocin enhancers.
El Cap tugged a hand through his beard. “Hang tough, Tindy. I’ll be right over.”
Rolfe’s suicide note had been printed on a decocell sheet from his last batch and attached to the refrigerator with a magnet. That was so Rolfe.
Tindal didn’t take it seriously at first, even though Rolfe didn’t come home that night, because Tindal got pretty high after eating the note. (It was PaintBall, one of Rolfe’s most popular recipes, and the synesthesia/ecstasy combo was intense.) Besides, it wasn’t unusual for Rolfe, the chief beta tester of his own products, to disappear for a day or two to get his head straight.
But not a week. When Rolfe failed to reappear, and the groceries were almost gone, Tindal thought, This shit is getting serious. Rolfe’s friends/clients were showing up at all hours, asking about him and the latest recipes. Tindal put them off, told them Rolfe hadn’t kept any stock, and promised to tell them when he came back. He tried calling the dozen or so of Rolfe’s numbers that he knew about (drug dealers picked up and disposed of pens like toothpicks) and got no answer.
By week two, Tindal had to admit to himself that Rolfe had really killed himself.
El Capitan tried to comfort him. He brought over some amazing dope he’d bought from the Millies, genetically tweaked super smelt that delivered a hardcore yet loving THC punch to the brain. “Maybe he’s at peace now,” El Cap said.
“That’s what he said in his note,” Tindal said. “ ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m going to a better place.’ Or something like that.” He took a hit from the comfort-joint. “He was never a happy person in the real world.”
“Which caused him to lash out at you,” El Cap said.
“True,” Tindal said, thinking of the times he hadn’t been able to pay the rent, and Rolfe failed to see his way to being okay with that. “Still, we should do something for him.” Maybe it was the dope that made him want to be as calm and reasonable as the Captain. “Something to honor his memory.”
“We can make a shrine,” El Cap said. “Like they did for that guy down the block who was hit by that car when he was bicycling. They painted a bicycle white and people put candles and flowers around it.”
“What would we paint?” Tindal said. “We don’t even know what Rolfe was on when he died.”
“Drugs, probably,” El Cap said.
They went to Rolfe’s bedroom to look for shrine-worthy objects, but of course the door was padlocked. Even in death, Rolfe was paranoid. In the nine months Tindal had lived there, he’d never been allowed inside the room.
El Cap went to work on the lock with a meat-tenderizing mallet from the kitchen. That proved ineffective, even for the Captain’s mighty arm, and it was doing the door frame no good. They smoked a while, considering the problem. Then Tindal remembered that Antonia, one of Rolfe’s clients, was a bike thief. She was pretty broken up to hear about Rolfe, but in an hour she was there with a device as big as the Jaws of Life. She snipped the lock and the door swung open to reveal Rolfe’s bedroom/lab.
“Wow,” Tindal said.
“Very mad scientist,” El Cap said.
“Like I always imagined it,” Antonia said.
The room was crammed with electrical equipment, shipping boxes, and homemade ductwork: PVC pipe and laundry dryer foil tubes held together with silver tape, all running to the bedroom’s single window. The pipes were all connected to the machines at the center of the room, two chemjet printers, one older model and one that looked brand-new. These were the main tools of Rolfe’s trade. He could download recipes or create his own on the computer, send them to the chemjets, and print the designer drugs onto decocell sheets. The only part of the process that Rolfe had ever let Tindal do was trim the sheets into strips and wafers.
“I need something to remember him by,” Antonia said, and grabbed a stack of already-printed pages.
“Hey!” Tindal said. “I don’t think you should take anything until—”
She was gone before he finished the sentence.
“It’s okay,” El Cap said. “Rolfe would have wanted it that way.”
The boxes were filled with foil precursor packs. These were the most expensive components in the process, even pricier than the chemjet printers, which were not cheap. You could order the packs from chemical supply companies, if you had the right permits; otherwise you had to buy from an online front company at the usual high markup for quasi-illegal services. With the right packs and a recipe, though, any idiot could make their chemjet mix, heat, chill, distill, and recombine molecules into whatever smart drug you wanted.
Rolfe never hid his disdain for the script kiddies who pumped out MDMA variants
all day. Rolfe was more than that. He created new recipes on a weekly basis, assembling molecules whose effects were infinitely more interesting than the pleasure-center hammer blows craved by Cro-Magnon club kids. He was an artist.
“His life’s work,” Tindal said, taking in the stacks of rice paper remaining. “There’s no way you and I can eat all this.”
“Probably not,” El Cap said. “We should invite people over. A quake of a wake! We can consume Rolfe’s last run.”
“No, it can’t be just what’s already printed,” Tindal said. “We should do it all. Use every pack. Print every recipe he’s got.”
“Hand them out like appetizers,” El Cap said.
“Wait,” Tindal said. Something like an idea rose up in the back of his mind, gathered weight, and then crashed upon the beach of his consciousness: complete, beautiful, loud. He said, “I know what we have to do.”
Word of the walls must have leaked, Tindal thought. It was too much to believe that these (probably) homeless ragamuffins had found the house by accident. The intruders, however, couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him how they’d gotten there, how they’d forced their way in, or how they knew to strike on the day before a massive drug party/wake/art installation.
The kids wouldn’t even tell him what their names were. Tindal suspected that more than natural stubbornness was at work.
“What recipe did they eat, you think?” El Cap asked.
“Hard to say,” Tindal said. “I didn’t really keep track of what I’d printed. Or where I hung it up. But it’s pretty clear they ate a lot. And a bunch of different ones.”
“That might explain the major head scramble,” El Cap said.
“It’s like they were born the minute I walked in. Rolfe has five or six recipes that affect memory. One of them even makes you forget you’re conscious, though you’re still awake.”
“Oh yeah, Zen. I had that once. Tastes like cinnamon.”
The girl insisted that she keep cleaning. She’d finished her inch-by-inch grooming of the carpet and had pleaded with Tindal to give her a rag so that she could dust all the flat surfaces. He was happy to oblige. It was by far the most sanitary thing that had happened in the house since he moved in.
The Starlit Wood Page 4
