“Just past it,” said one of them. “But don’t worry. We took care of that part. Although Bates said he’d have a word with you later about his tools.”
“I put the books back where you found them,” said the other, who therefore had to be Fiske. “Including the fancy one in His Nibs’ office. I may have got some of the others wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I could not bear it any longer; I reached out with my left hand, caught the material of his sleeve. “Are you Fiske?”
“Yessir,” he said, though he and Hobden exchanged alarmed glances.
I squinted to focus, first on his face, then on Hobden’s. They were not identical lead soldiers, after all; they were men. And when finally, reluctantly, I met their eyes, first one and then the other, both frowning and worried, at last I saw. Fiske’s eyes were brown. Hobden’s eyes were blue. And around those eyes, dark and pale, their faces resolved. Nothing changed, for indeed there was nothing in them that needed changing, but I saw them.
But I looked away quickly, before they could see me in return.
About the Author
Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 104-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, four cats, and one husband. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several “year’s best” anthologies; a short story collection, The Bone Key, was published in 2007. She has written one novel (A Companion to Wolves, 2007) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will be published under the name Katherine Addison. Visit Monette online at www.sarahmonette.com.
Story Notes
The narrator of “White Charles,” Kyle Murchison Booth, appears in a number of “necromantic mystery” stories by Sarah Monette—ten of which are collected in The Bone Key. As the author wrote in her introduction to the book, the “more I read [M.R.] James and [H.P.] Lovecraft, the more I found myself wanting to take their stories apart and put them back together with a fifth gear, as it were: the psychological and psychosexual focus of that other James. The Turn of the Screw is, after all, also a magnificent work of horror.” I, for one, am glad she did and rejoice to again encounter the “neurotic, erudite, insomniac” museum archivist who inadvertently became a magnet for the supernatural.
EVERYTHING DIES, BABY
NADIA BULKIN
It was the middle of a high-wind, full-sun summer Sunday when the Wagners heard a big bang from the backyard and looked out the kitchen window to see a dead man. He was in a closed and broken oak coffin, a lot better looking than Joe’s had been, and one foot with a black shoe was kicking out of the bottom end. At first Beth stalled, just like her black Camaro had a habit of doing on the way to work, but then the baby pulled on her hair to kick start her and she went outside with a rolling pin.
Beth circled the smoking, broken coffin in the rising dust of their dry backyard. The lock had broken off. She would have run to get a tarp and call the police if she hadn’t heard a faint human moan coming from inside.
She leaned down closer and heard it again: a long and muffled “oh.” Boys from the high school, she concluded. Their fathers never gave them enough work. She didn’t know why those cow-tippers chose this house, given she was no waitress at Chickpea, but she’d stopped wondering why things happened since Joe died.
“Yeah, have a good time in there, you little freak,” she said.
Beth and the baby stayed away from the kitchen until dinnertime. Then the evening news from Omaha switched from coverage of a plane crash near the Sandhills to pale and sickly complaining about drug prices, the baby pinched her nose and whined for food, and Beth went to reheat chicken from the night before. While she waited she looked out the window. There was only a half-moon, but she thought she saw the coffin lid thrown open. Good, she thought, they’ve gone.
Except someone then knocked at the door. All rational thoughts fell out of Beth’s head and she stood there in the kitchen with her back to the noise, trying to breathe, until the baby shouted, “Mommy! There’s somebody!”
Somebody. A no-name. A stranger, a vagrant, a criminal. A convict from the penitentiary down the road. She grabbed her rolling pin and pulled the door open with a hard twist and a snarl—but on the other side was a much less imposing creature. A slight man in a gray suit stood on her stoop under the flickering porch light, swarmed by moths. He looked sick and powdered and foreign. Beth clenched the rolling pin.
“Yes?”
“Hello,” he said, but it was barely recognizable as a human voice. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello.” That time it came out better. “Can I use your phone?”
Beth narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“Because . . . I’m . . . trying to figure out how I got here.” The stranger scratched at the suit like it itched, like it wasn’t his. “I’m sorry, I know this must seem strange to you. I’m, uh . . . I’m unarmed.”
Joe had said something very similar when he first met her. She was stranded in her Camaro as usual and when he stopped his jeep behind her she immediately rolled up her windows. “Miss, I’m unarmed!” Joe had shouted from the other side of the glass, waving his empty hands. Just as she had then, Beth opened the door another few inches. Silently, she let the stranger in.
He smelled musty, like an unclean lab, and dragged himself down the hallway with stiff jerks that looked painful. When Beth handed him the phone he nearly dropped it, and after he dragged himself to the kitchen for privacy he could not seem to make his fingers work with the buttons. He kept muttering. He kept starting over.
The baby looked at her mother as if she’d let in a coyote.
“He just needs to use the phone, Janelle.”
In a minute the man came back into the living room, holding the phone in his hand like a dead raccoon. “My brother didn’t answer,” he muttered, “and my mother hung up on me.” He wheezed for a while in contemplation and then looked at Beth. “Where are we?”
“Bermuda,” said the baby. The man looked shocked. His bloodshot eyes swung back to Beth for confirmation. “In McKinley County, Nebraska,” the baby finished, resting her plump chin on her plump fist and raising her eyebrows at the stranger. “In America,” she added, when his eyes didn’t get any calmer.
“Where did you think you were?” Beth asked.
“I live in Denver.”
“How did you get here?”
“I don’t know.”
Paranoia climbed up her spine, demanding she expel this stranger from her territory, but he looked like such a deer in headlights. She’d run over her share of those—her dodgy Camaro liked the taste of blood. He had their gentle brown eyes, soft as a newborn’s. People didn’t have eyes like that these days. People didn’t knock on strangers’ doors. Beth chewed her nail. If she shooed him away he’d either knock on McCormick’s door and get his head shot through, or knock on the Samsons’ door and get arrested—and by the looks of him the cops would assume he was either a terrorist or a mobster without bothering to notice what a deer in headlights he was. No, she was going to save this one.
“Well, maybe you’ll remember later,” said Beth, taking her thumb out from between her lips. The microwave started beeping. “We were just gonna have dinner, do you want some?”
The man looked even more bewildered. “You’re very kind, Mrs. . . . ”
“Beth. Wagner.”
“My name is Hamzah al-Faraj.”
Beth managed a smile.
Weeds with tender white and yellow flowers curled up and over the coffin as if to bind it to the earth. For years this was a yard nothing grew in, but all at once insects with metallic exoskeletons were walking floral vines like tight rope; all of a sudden, the soil was mo
ist. Eventually a green tide would turn the broken coffin into a hill.
On his first day with the Wagners, Hamzah spent hours extracting the splinters he got pounding his way out of the coffin. He was in a hurry to forget it. Waking up inside that tiny dark death trap with the worst body ache of his life hadn’t been pleasant, and besides, all he really wanted to do at first was eat. Even the stuff he didn’t like, even the stuff he knew was unholy. He took out goods the Wagners had forgotten they had: jars of fermenting preservatives, take-out from chain restaurants that had closed and moved away, cookies in aluminum foil from many Christmases past, vegetables growing colonies in the bottom drawer. He ate it all, expiration date be damned. He never got sick, so he ate more, and his dead exterior sloughed off like snakeskin. The ache faded. He ran laps. Bermuda was a strange place to discover joie de vivre.
And because of this he did wonder if the baby was onto something when she asked him how dying was. The neighbors were not angelic, but sometimes at dusk rings of light did crown them.
“I think you’re our present,” said Janelle. She was sitting on Beth’s lap and staring at Hamzah with the eyes of an old judge in the rich dark quiet of the night. “To make up for Daddy. Mommy, you remember, like when you took the broken toaster back to the store and came back with a new one.”
Later, on the staircase, Beth apologized to Hamzah for Janelle’s presumptuousness. She also wanted to ask him why he wasn’t trying to hitch a ride back to Denver, but she was afraid of giving him ideas. She went to sleep holding her breath, waiting for the big wind to knock down their house of cards.
And as the living slept, voices gathered on the roof. Like squirrels they pawed at the shingles and scrambled from corner to corner, hissing to each other and searching the roof for weak spots. They pressed their proto-lips against the asphalt rectangles and whispered, “He belongs to us!” Beth mistook them for the radio, and when she heard their demands, she just hit the buttons next to her bed. At last one voice fell through a tiny hole in the roof onto the cold pillow next to hers, crying, “Give him back!” so up close and personal that Beth did sit up and shout into the dark: “Joe!”
But it was not Joe who’d come back, and this she remembered in the morning when she saw Hamzah in the kitchen, pouring juice for Janelle. This she remembered every time she heard her gap-toothed baby laugh. Sometimes she did need to put her hands on the man’s face to realize that this was not Joe—this was the deer in headlights.
“Joe,” she said in the bathroom, looking up at the crack in the ceiling, “I love you. I hope you are all right with this. I hope this was your doing.” She thought about what Joe said in the hospital near the end—Be good to yourself, Beth—and nodded bravely. “I know this was your doing. Goodbye. I love you.” And then she went back out and had breakfast with Hamzah and Janelle.
It was only when Hamzah moved to the upstairs bedroom that the voices on the roof found him. Then he’d wake up tossing in the sheets, asking Beth for mosquito repellent.
Whenever anyone knocked at the door, Beth closed her eyes and felt Chinook winds rock her knees. There it was: reality, Joe’s gravestone, the dentist’s office, the dying Camaro, the crass combine harvester world that ripped the seeds off the stalk and left behind mannequins of straw. She could try to ignore it, yes, but it would stand out there through seasons of sleet and fire with hunched shoulders, knocking.
She had let the world take Joe. She would not knuckle under like that again, so she always made Hamzah hide upstairs before answering the door.
One Saturday it was McCormick, red and sweating with his hands on his hips and his Colt .44 Magnum dangling. “Say Beth,” he said, “you heard about that plane crash in the Sandhills? The plane goin’ to Milwaukee?”
She chewed her lip.
“There’s this huge chunk of metal in my backyard and I can’t figure out where the hell it came from. It almost looks like it came off a plane. You wanna see it?”
It was a reminder she did not need. Hamzah’s mother lived in Milwaukee and Beth knew this by now. She could slam the door in McCormick’s face and the backyard could consume the coffin whole but the wind was picking up. The cards were shuddering like her bones.
Hamzah found her sitting at the table. “Beth?”
“There was a plane crash east of here,” Beth said. She pulled out an old newspaper, the one she’d saved. “It was going to Milwaukee. Everybody died. Including you.”
He pinched his hand. It hurt; that was a good sign. “I didn’t go on any plane,” he murmured.
“My neighbor has something that looks like a piece of a plane in his yard, okay? You must have fallen out while it was going down!”
She’d gotten very loud by then. Beth wiped the wetness off her face and pointed at the front page.
Hamzah looked at the smoking black wreckage and the helicopters circling it like scavengers. It had been a 737 once. The cranes would come back from Canada and wonder why the hell there were human bits in their nests.
“I didn’t get on any plane,” he said, “and I woke up in that thing out there, remember, not some airplane seat.” He cautiously put his hand on Beth’s shoulder. “I wasn’t on that plane. I didn’t die.”
Beth looked up, wiping her nose. He was trying to smile and when he squeezed her weak bones, her heartbeat slowed. His other hand folded up the newspaper and she buried that ugly air crash under the bills and credit card offers and other unwelcome guests.
But they both knew that he’d been dead. Even Janelle dropped a road-killed squirrel in their backyard, hoping to bring it back to life. It stayed dead and smashed, and in the wake of Janelle’s disappointment they buried the poor thing in the moist dark soil. From its body sprouted an even denser wilderness of weeds and insect eyes.
The Wagners spent their days in the jungle they had grown and went to sleep listening to cicadae. It was just as well, even if they got eaten up by chiggers, because the ghosts were getting out of control.
They had begun by manifesting in mirrors, as well as in doorways and around corners—but then as rotating shadows only, tricks of the light. Then one night Janelle woke up in the middle of the night to see dark pillars of smog bent over her, voices begging her to “give him back to us.” Janelle ran to her mother’s bed, but they were only too happy to follow her there, leaving burn-marks on the carpet.
Hamzah suggested they move. He didn’t say back to Denver but Beth suspected it was what he had in mind. That only made the hauntings worse: the day after he made the suggestion they started growing bodies.
It was life as a perpetual wake. They came in all forms, from all places—some old and some very young, in cotton sweats and business suits. From the ceiling and the floor they watched the living eat dinner. When their billowing faces got too close Beth would swat them away. But before they floated away they would breathe hot cobwebs down Hamzah’s neck, and when they grew stubby burned hands they would press those to his skin too.
Their touch scalded, but only for a moment. Beth touched his arm when he jolted for the tenth time. “Just leave it,” she murmured. “They’ll go away on their own.”
But they stayed, all the way through primetime television. They crowded round Hamzah and piled their hands on him, and though he shook them all off like mayflies they began to leave behind a dull ache, a stiffness.
“Are you okay?” asked Janelle. “You look sick.”
Hamzah turned his head to answer her and his eyes suddenly swung up toward the ceiling, then down to the floor. He stumbled and grabbed the arms of the chair.
“Hamzah?” Beth stood up, but he could not meet her eyes. Instead he leaned his head down between his knees and squeezed his neck until something seemed to rattle his spine, making him seize up with a cry. Janelle shrieked along with him and covered her ears.
Beth tried to grab onto his limbs to steady him, but even if she put all her weight into it she could not stop the awful contortions of his face. “Hamzah, what is it? What?”
In a moment his body slowed down, and his facial muscles drooped. He opened his eyes, and he was the deer in headlights again—panicked and stuck. Beth gave him her sweetest smile, trying to reassure him that she was no semi-truck.
“What is it?” she asked again, not above a whisper.
“I felt my bones breaking. I smell . . . ” He took a deep breath. All she smelled was the ghosts’ charcoal. “Asphalt and metal. And blood. My blood. God, it’s strong, Beth.”
“What’s strong?”
“The car that hit me.”
Beth’s jaw dropped and she took a hesitant step back, through a cloud of ghosts. “A car hit you?”
One of the ghosts put its hands over his eyes. Beth jumped at it, screaming at it to get away from him, but Hamzah had already seen the headlights of the Chrysler come charging out of downtown Denver, the first in a stream of traffic. A golden demon—an angel? Drivers had trouble at dusk. So did pedestrians. The half-light deceived them all. He shouldn’t have stepped onto the street. But he didn’t think the car was so close. Then all of a sudden the car was right there, up against his legs with the force of three hundred horses. His body flopping like a fish.
“Yes, and I . . . ” Hamzah winced. “I didn’t get up. Beth, I’m dead, I died.”
Beth immediately shook her head. Her fingers kept catching in the knots in her hair. “But we knew . . . ” she whispered. “We know . . . you came back, Hamzah.”
He was looking at the ghosts. Some were missing noses, others eyes. Some wore dangling oxygen masks like yokes. They smoldered, he realized, because they were still in the fires of the 737. He stood up, sweeping past Beth and her protests, and started stumbling toward them. “Why are you here?” he asked.
Some of them looked away, suddenly shy, revealing bloody ears. He reached out his hand for them and they faded. “Please,” he said.
Finally a few of them on the other side of the room murmured through null mouths, “Come back, passenger. Come away with us.” And then the others joined, kneeling at Hamzah’s feet like lepers in the rain: “You, the one who fell. The man in the cargohold. The missing.”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 59
