At the sound of boots crunching snow, I tear my ear off the ice, leaving behind a pulp of skin. Warm blood trickles down my neck, dotting the ice. As the silhouette draws closer, the outline becomes clear and Gillian says, “MilaGino.”
Between them, Mila and Gino have been married separately five times. Sheila presided over their sixth attempt last week in the Nub Hut. They spent their wedding night holding hands under water. Afterward, Mila sacrificed her right arm, Gino his left. Now they’re sewn together at the shoulder.
They take a knee and I feel stale breath on my face. MilaGino speak as one, both mouths repeating the words a moment apart, creating a strange echo.
“How are you holding up?”
I attempt to respond, but my tongue is a balled-up sock.
“It’s okay, Alan,” they say putting a hand on my shoulder. “We understand.”
But they can’t understand. Maybe they could when they wandered camp as lonely hearts before the takeover. Or maybe they could have understood in the days after the revolt when we were all unified, everyone joyous in having a place to call our own, a place where we belonged. But they can’t understand anymore. Now they’re muscle for Sheila. Now they belong to the Nub Hut.
While the wind chips at my face, MilaGino survey the others. Everyone smiles through frozen lips. Hannah and Nigel push their arms deeper into the water. We’re all dogs hoping to go home from the pound.
MilaGino draw out the choice, discussing us privately, their faces inches apart. But it’s all show. Everyone knows who makes the final call. They nod simultaneously then say, “Hannah, come join us in the Nub Hut.” And my arm burns all over again.
Just one look at Hannah, with her hangdog face and saddle bags making it appear that she’s carrying hundreds of pennies in her pockets, and you can understand how it’s a thinly disguised pity pick. Every society needs a target. And who’s easier than the woman who spends her free time talking of Renaissance festivals and reading her silly backward comics? I might feel sorry for Hannah if I didn’t hate her so much right now.
Hannah’s sweatshirt clings to the ice as MilaGino help her up. With a jerk, her hoodie tears away, leaving white university letters behind. MilaGino lose their footing for a moment, slipping on the ice and tumbling sideways before regaining balance. As they guide Hannah up the path, her feet barely touch the snowy ground.
“There’s gotta be some sort of mistake,” Nigel says.
“That it wasn’t you?” Gillian says. “Let’s see, Nigel. Sweet Hannah without an offensive bone in her body, or you with your pseudo-intellectual bullshit and babies playing poker.”
“They’re fetuses. It’s symbolic.”
“What it is is asinine.”
“I have a hundred dollars that says you played softball in college, Gillian.”
“Asshole.”
“Dyke.”
It’s like that.
My lips twitch as if electrified and now I’ve lost all sensation in my feet. My eyes are closed before I realize it.
This is how it happens. No matter what you try, you never take root. It’s years of no luck with work, no luck with women, no luck at all. You’re on an endless search without a clear destination. You tell yourself it’s in the next city or the next town, but everywhere you go you’re a cipher. On the outside you look like everyone else, but inside you’re ash and isolation. Then on the Discovery Channel you see Alaska’s promise of endless possibilities as the last frontier. And if you’re twenty-nine and have traveled nothing but dead-end roads, you’ll follow whichever star lights the way. It’s only when you get here that you realize the entire state is filled with mirror images of yourself waiting for further directions.
Cheers erupting inside the Nub Hut shake me from my haze. We crane our necks for any sign. Hannah must be submitting to the blade. She belongs to them now. As the ovation dies down, we all crumble back onto the ice. No one has to mention the resentment surging through each of us.
Minutes later, Gillian whispers, “Alan?” A thin layer of frost covers her face. Her lips are white in the moonlight, but it’s her eyes, wide and bottomless, that frighten me.
“It’s so strange,” she says, “I’m not even cold anymore.”
Gripping the hole’s edge with her free arm, Gillian pulls herself into the water. She drifts downward like a snowflake before disappearing altogether. The rope around her feet snakes behind her until going taut. Someone will reel her in later.
I’m too cold to move, too cold to respond. I just stare into the abyss. Maybe in the daylight I could see her, but in the darkness the black water reveals nothing.
Nigel begins laughing and can’t stop choking on his words. Finally he roars, “Ophelia of the Arctic,” and pounds the ice with his free hand until I think bones might break.
In the beginning, only two others joined Sheila in the Nub Hut. Lorna iced her toes, Trevor his hand. After that, everyone flocked to the hole for a chance at metamorphosis. Now supposedly there’s a pile of severed nipples on a table. Gillian said the Asian from Toledo sliced off his lips. Rumor is some are talking castration next. No one can touch Sheila though. She sacrificed both legs the day after removing her arms. Even God’s terrified of Sheila at this point.
“Why don’t you take a swim too, Alan?” Nigel says. “Join your friend. This is beyond you. Your core self isn’t—”
Even with Nigel’s yammering and the wind howling across the Chukchi Sea, I hear the party in the Nub Hut. Harriet must’ve finished the sawing by now. She used to go through three hundred fish an hour, so it makes sense that she commands the knife. Once done, Marco does a fishing line suture, closing the wound in a crisscross of railroad tracks. Sometimes though the soldering gun is necessary.
There’s no burn anymore, no freezing, not even any pressure. I even have to double check to make sure my arm’s still in the water. Gillian watches me through the ice. She stares wide-eyed, our faces separated by inches. Free from the confines of her hat, red hair swims around her face. With her eyes, she blinks out Morse code messages I can’t decipher.
In the weeks leading up to the revolution there were grumblings throughout camp as if Alaska had reneged on her promise. Then one day Sheila pulled the conveyor belt’s emergency shutdown and Milo sledgehammered the control panel announcing, “This belongs to us now.” There wasn’t much thinking after that, just years of frustration pouring out in busted jaws and smashed machinery while Sheila smiled surveying the chaos. Outnumbered, and with no help for hundreds of miles, management evacuated in the buses. Two days later, Sheila birthed the Nub Hut.
“They won’t take you.” Nigel’s voice creaks like a rusty hinge. “You don’t belong here. You never have.”
I want to tell him how there isn’t anywhere else. How he’ll never get up because his bare legs are welded to the ice. But what comes out instead is, “Sherrshingfel” before my tongue freezes and my vision fails.
I’m not sure how long I’m out. I’m dreaming of roads clogged with hitchhikers heading north to the Nub Hut when plastic sliding across the ice snaps me back. With my free hand I paw at my face, chipping away the frost sealing my eyes. The noise grows louder until it is right in front of me. Nigel bays with excitement. When I can finally see again, I am staring at four rubber-soled boots. MilaGino.
Trailing behind, pulled in her red disk sled, sits a triumphant Sheila ready to announce her final selection. She is propped on a pillow, little more than a face peeking out from the blanket bundled around her. MilaGino scoops her from the sled, holding her high like a newborn.
Sheila’s teeth, now filed to sharp points, gleam in the moonlight. No one mentions the scar anymore, zigzagging across her face, that in the old world kept her working alone in backrooms away from the public. Now Sheila is beautiful. Now Sheila is someone. Now Sheila rules the Nub Hut.
“After tonight, we will be complete,” she says. “There is only room for one more. The Nub Hut is not for everyone.”
It’s
Nigel. Sheila doesn’t have to say anymore for me to know. I can instinctively recognize defeat. The decision radiates from Sheila’s eyes, from her aura, even from the air.
Nigel Nine Toes must sense it too because he kicks spastically, contorting his body in anticipation. For the briefest of moments, his arm leaves the water. The withered limb is nothing but a shriveled birch twig. He thrusts it back in, his eyes wide. When he speaks, each word is a tiny earthquake.
“I’m sorry, Sheila,” he says. “Please.”
She surveys Nigel Nine Toes like a saddened parent, then gives a private shake of her head. She whispers to MilaGino who reverently places her back on the disc before turning to Nigel.
Despite the thrashing and screaming, it only takes a moment for MilaGino to cut the rope around Nigel’s ankle. At first I think he will refuse to move, but Nigel gets to his feet wailing endlessly. His bare legs are nothing but charcoal down the front. The crying doesn’t stop even as he stumbles away from the hole, away from the camp, away from the Nub Hut. He disappears across the ice into the darkness until he is nothing but a beast howling in the distance.
MilaGino reaches under my armpits and lifts me, careful not to touch the dead limb. My entire left side hangs slack. Dynamite detonates throughout my body.
“Welcome,” Sheila says finally. She smiles from atop her cushioned throne. Sheila the sacrificer. Sheila the leader. Sheila of the Nub Hut.
But the smile can’t disguise her disappointment. This wasn’t the plan. She wanted Nigel. To her, I’m the also-ran, now substituted as a last-minute replacement for the Nub Hut.
“We need to set you down for a minute, Alan, so we can get Sheila back,” MilaGino says, lowering me. “After we get her inside, we’ll—”
They slip like before, teetering on the hole’s edge, but this time there’s no quick recovery. Their arms flail, and there’s a moment where I know I can reach with my good hand to steady them. Instead, I let MilaGino tumble into the hole. The splash is a muted explosion. They scream in harmony before the water immobilizes their bodies and drags them under.
Moments pass before Sheila finally says, “Take me back inside, Alex.” She wants to sound commanding, but her voice waivers. She can’t keep my eye. Sheila can’t even get my name right.
But I couldn’t care less. Because now I am engulfed in the transformation of the Nub Hut. The change is nothing physical; it’s more a clarity of purpose. Is this what Sheila felt when she first conceived the Nub Hut? Is this what surges through her when she selects new citizens? Maybe. It doesn’t matter anymore.
I watch the water until its surface is a glass-topped table. Sheila begs for help, but whether it’s the wind or the music drowning out her cries, no one appears. When she finally quiets, her change is also complete. No longer is she Sheila of the Nub Hut—she’s simply Sheila with the scar-carved face.
I pull her towards me, then use my head to bump the sled the remainder of the way to the hole. Then I begin the long crawl home. Up ahead the Nub Hut awaits.
About the Author
Kurt Dinan’s stories have twice appeared in ChiZine (once winning the 2007 short story contest), and in the anthologies Horror Library III and IV, Dark Faith, and Darkness on the Edge: Stories Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and three sons.
Story Notes
On first reaction, you might think of this as a pretty bizarre story. But is it? A culture has been created here, an exclusive group created within it. Humans have a primal need to be part of a group. For our ancestors, survival meant acceptance into a group. Beyond survival: whatever defined “success” or “power” could usually be won only by belonging to an elite circle or gaining its favor. We still want to know and to be known and accepted. What we are willing to do—the ways we enact our desire to belong, the rituals and rule we accept—differs according to the culture. Some people play golf. Others have cosmetic surgery. These people . . . well, they do something else.
THE CABINET CHILD
STEVE RASNIC TEM
Around the beginning of the last century, near a small southwest Virginia town which no longer exists, a childless woman named Alma lived with her gentleman farmer husband in a large house on a ridge on the outskirts of this soon-to-be-forgotten town. The woman was not childless because of any medical condition—her husband simply felt that children were “ill-advised” in their circumstances, that there was no space for children in the twenty-or-so rooms of what he called their modest home.
Not being of a demonstrative inclination, his wife kept her disappointment largely to herself, but it could not have been more obvious if she had screamed it from their many-gabled roof. Sometimes, in fact, she muttered it in dialog with whoever should pass, and when no one was looking, she pretended to scream. Over the years despair worked its way into her eyes and drifted down into her cheeks, and the weight of her grief kept her bent and shuffling.
Although her husband Jacob was an insensitive man he was not inobservant. After enduring a number of years of his wife’s sad display he apparently decided it gave an inappropriate impression of his household’s tenor to the outside world and became determined to do something about it. He did not share his thinking with her directly, of course, but after an equal number of years enduring his maddening obstinacy his wife was well acquainted with his opinions and attitudes. Without so much as a knock he came into her bedroom one afternoon as she sat staring out her window and said, “I have decided you need something to cheer yourself up, my dear. John Hand will be bringing his wagon around soon and you may choose anything on it. Let us call it an early Christmas present, why don’t we?”
She looked up at him curiously. After having prayed aloud for some sign of his attention, for so many nights, she could scarcely believe her ears. Was this some trick? As little as it was, still he had never offered her such a prize before. She thought at first that somehow he had hurt his face, then realized what she had taken for a wound was simply a strained and unaccustomed smile. He carried that awkward smile out the door with him, thank God. She did not think she could bear it if such a thing were running around loose in her private quarters.
John Hand was known throughout the region as a fine furniture craftsman who hauled his pieces around in a large gray wagon as roughly made as his furniture was exquisitely constructed. And yet this wagon had not fallen apart in over twenty years of travels up and down wild hollows and over worn mountain ridges with no paved roads. She had not perused his inventory herself, but people both in town and on the outlying farms claimed he carried goods to suit every taste and had a knack for finding the very thing that would please you, that is, if you had any capacity for being pleased at all, which some folk clearly did not.
Alma had twenty rooms full of furniture, the vast majority of it handed down from various branches of Jacob’s family. Alma had never known her husband to be very close to his relations, but any time one of them died and there were goods to be divided he was one of the first to call with his respects. And although he was hardly liked by any of those grieving relatives he always seemed able to talk them into letting him leave with some item he did not rightly deserve.
Sometimes at night she would catch him with his new acquisitions, stroking and talking to them as if they had replaced the family he no longer much cared for. She could not understand what had come over her that she would have married such a greedy man.
Although she needed no furniture, without question Alma was sorely in need of being pleased, which was why she was at the front gate with an apron pocket full of Jacob’s money the next time John Hand came trundling down the road in that horse-drawn wagon full of his wares.
Even though she waved almost frantically Hand did not appear to acknowledge her, but then stopped abruptly in front of their grand gate. She had seen him in town before but never paid him much attention. When Hand suddenly jumped down and stood peering up at her she was somewhat alarmed by the smallness of the man—he wa
s thin as a pin and painfully bent, the top of his head not even reaching to her shoulders, and she was not a particularly tall woman. The wagon loomed like a great ocean liner behind him, and she could not imagine how this crooked little man had filled it with all this furniture, pieces so jammed together it looked like a puzzle successfully completed.
Then Mr. Hand turned his head rather sideways and presented her with a beatific smile, and, completely charmed, she felt prepared to go with anything the little man cared to suggest.
“A present from the husband, no?”
“Well, yes, he said I could choose anything.”
“But not the present madam most wished for.” He said it as if it were undeniable fact, and she did not correct him. Surely he had simply guessed, based on some clues in her appearance?
He gazed at her well past the point of discomfort, then clambered up the side of the wagon, monkey-like and with surprising speed. The next thing she knew he had landed in front of her, holding a small, polished wood cabinet supported by his disproportionately large palm and the cabinet’s four unusually long and thin, spiderish legs. “I must confess it has had a previous owner,” he said with a mock sad expression. “She was like you, wanting a child so very much. This was to be in the nursery, to hold its dainty little clothes.”
Alma was alarmed for a number of reasons, not the least of which that she’d never told the little man that she had wanted a child. Then she quickly realized what a hurtful insult this was on his part—to give someone never to have children a cabinet to hold its clothes? She turned and made for the gate, averting her head so the vicious little man would not see her streaming tears.
“Wait! Please,” he said, and a certain softness in his voice stopped her more firmly than a hand on her shoulder ever could. She turned just as he shoved the small cabinet into her open arms. “You will not be—unfulfilled by this gift, I assure you.” And with a quick turn he had leapt back onto the seat and the tired-looking horses were pulling him away. She stood awkwardly, unable to speak, the cabinet clutched to her breast like a stricken child.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 65
