Once Upon a Curse

by Peter Beagle

  When I walked out I half expected to see Joaquin, drawn by the noise. No one sat at the table, though a book and some dishes lay scattered upon it. The food looked like offerings left for mice, so old and desiccated it was. I looked down at the axe in my hand, then turned around and put it back in the kitchen. I did not wish to approach my husband so obviously armed. I settled, instead, for a small knife that fit in my pocket.

  I wrapped the blanket around myself like a stole, and with my back straight, I marched out of the dining room.

  She was beautiful, the woman who stood near the bottom of the stairs, her hand on the rail. She wore a white dress, beaded and embroidered lavishly in red, and a velvet coat that pooled onto the pale marble below. She wore her rich black hair pulled slightly up to one side, graced by a ruby tiara. She had on a choker of rubies, and rubies dripped from her wrists and from her elbows. As I got closer one ruby drop fell to the steps and splashed, and as I took another step I realized that the line around her neck, her elbows, fingers and wrists were all made of blood. The embroidery became splashes of blood, and she dripped, calmly staring at me, on the marble of the white stairs. The only rubies she truly wore were on her ears and in her crown.

  I stood only a foot from her. “Hello,” I said.

  Her mouth almost lifted. Her expression almost mocking and amused, but only slightly, as if she had not the energy to gather anymore.

  I walked up the steps, scraping the wall to put as much space between me and wife number one as possible. Only her eyes moved.

  “But not too bold,” she said. I looked at her, and realized that her hair was not half pulled up, but shorn on one side, as if it had been between the blade and the flesh. I kept going, and her head turned. “Lest your heart’s blood grow cold.” And then she laughed. “God knows mine did.” She fell to pieces then, whatever had been holding her together vanished, and she lay in a pile, her head rolling down the few steps and coming to a stop near the door.

  I managed to make it to my bedroom without further incident, where I began to pull my warmest dress out of the cupboard, then stopped. Instead I pulled out the dress I’d married Joaquin in, and slowly, bit by bit, dressed myself in my finest things. My most beautiful jewelry, the intricately embroidered shawl. I decorated my hair as finely as I could, and carefully applied a subtly enhancing layer of cosmetics. My fingers twitched to put on my heavy walking boots in case I decided to run for it, but, knowing they’d look amiss, I slipped on soft slippers instead.

  When I was done I looked just like the woman he’d married.

  The library was a mess. The dome was shattered, books scattered everywhere. I crunched and slid through the room until I got to the study. The painting had been ripped from the mantel and thrown aside. In the direct light from the sun I realized that the hunters had the faces and hands of foxes, and that the creature on the spit was a man. “We’ll have to burn that,” I muttered, and made my way back and up the stairs.

  He was sitting in the middle of the music room, the wind blowing in and twanging across half broken strings. He looked up at me slowly. “There you are,” he said, offhandedly, as if I’d wandered off somewhere.

  “You look like you smashed your face into a glass cabinet.” I said, and he did. Crisscrossed scratches covered his face and hands. Three lines that looked like claw marks stuck out against the brutal purple collar of flesh that decorated his throat. Dried blood pooled in the shell of one ear.

  His eyes looked out into the distance. He didn’t seem to even see me. “I think,” he said, after awhile, “that you should go and visit your cousin. It will do you good, to be away for awhile.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  His eyes focused, and he looked at me with that searing expression he used to grant me when he was not to be coaxed. “I was not making a suggestion.”

  I stepped forward, wanting to keep his attention, wanting to keep him. “We should both go. Together. It doesn’t matter where. You can run your business anywhere.”

  His eyes unfocused again, and he drifted away from me. “I can’t leave. Not for long.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am the house,” he said, and then buried his face in his hands and laughed, a soft, angry chuckle that was half sob, half acceptance. The house had to get its power from somewhere, I realized, and though he was trying, he couldn’t fight against himself.

  I placed my hand on his head. “I really do love you,” I said, then sighed. “Right, then. It’s up to me.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked me as I left.

  “You’ll see,” I said. “Lock, door.” And it did as I bid it.

  The axe was where I left it, and so was wife number one. I shuddered both times I passed her, and hoped she’d be gone when I got back.

  I finally stood before the red framed door. The wood was scratched and splintered, and someone had written nasty-looking curses and spells around the frame with a nail or a knife. The voices were loud inside my head, the whispers beating in time with the drum of my heart, but they did not need to urge me to take the key to the lock. It turned easily, the glass almost too hot to hold. The door opened slowly.

  The odor was nearly overwhelming, death and animal mixed together. Things lay scattered everywhere. Balled-up and stained dresses of bright cloth in piles, sapphire and ruby, one of them a wedding dress. Gnawed bones mixed with shattered plates. Next to the room’s only window, Joaquin stood, dressed in perfect black mourning, polished boots and starched white cuffs. He turned to me, shutting the book he held in his hands with a snap. A fine mist of fur covered the back of his hands, and climbed up his neck, surrounding his face in a soft fuzz. His fingernails were quite longer than he was in the habit of keeping them, and his teeth were very sharp when he smiled.

  “Well, then,” I said. “I am pleased to finally meet the rest of the family.”

  He smirked at me. “I knew you would come.” He threw the book aside. “They always do.” He walked closer, and my hand tightened on the axe. He rested his paws on the back of a chair. “Tell me, what did you expect to find? More fine jewels, more fair wonders? What did you expect to find in this room that made all of the other treasures seem so inadequate?”

  “I found what I expected,” I said. “A monster who preys on the innocent, who enjoys chopping up the servants just because he can. I revile you, and I want you out of my house and away from my husband.”

  “But I am the house,” he said, feigning shock.

  “It is time, then, for some remodeling.” I hefted the axe and struck the wall. I was rewarded by a pained scream that barely muffled my own as a shock of pain ran down my elbow. The scream came from Joaquin, not from the monster I shared the room with.

  He smiled, all his sharp teeth glittering. “He came out first,” he said, “and he’ll die before me.”

  I pulled the axe from the wall.

  “I would thank you to be kinder to the walls,” Joaquin, the real Joaquin, was leaning on the door frame, one hand holding his shoulder.

  “What are you? What is he?”

  He straightened slowly, and came toward me. “My father was a man,” he said, reaching for the axe. I resisted his tug on the handle before letting it slide from my fingers. “My mother was a fox.”

  “They lured women here,” his twin continued, “to feed the family.” He ran his eyes down my form, and I could feel his gaze is if it were his tongue, tasting and testing, deciding where he’d like to begin eating.

  “Is this true?”

  Joaquin was looking at the balled-up wedding dress. “Yes,” he said.

  “But you don’t look like him,” I said. “I mean, you do, but…”

  “He shaves,” his brother sneered. “And he leaves you to hunt game in the deep woods. What do you hunt now? Chickens? A stray goat? While I stayed locked up in this room, forgotten like yesterday’s meal.”

  “If that’s so, how have you survived?”

  “It’s the house. We are the h
ouse, the house takes care of us.” Joaquin’s hand flexed on the axe. “There must always be two.”

  I tucked my hand in my pocket. The small kitchen knife was there. “I am your flesh,” I said to him. “We swore before God.” He looked at me, and I tried to read his eyes .“You’ve lived too long with this. You must choose.”

  “He can’t choose!” his brother snarled. “His choices were taken from him long ago. Without the house, he dies. Without me, he dies.”

  “Because you are the house?”

  “That’s right,” he snarled, his fingers ripping open his coat.

  “I have a message for you, from the house,” I said, pulling the knife out. “It doesn’t want you anymore.”

  Joaquin brushed past me. “I’ll go first,” he said.

  Of course, I must have lived, or I would not be telling you this.

  The house showed itself to me when I picked up the axe and proved that I was willing to take things into my own hands. It showed me the servants, murdered so long ago by my in-laws, and when I struck it, it hurt my shoulder as it hurt Joaquin’s and so I knew, or hoped.

  Sometimes I walk past that room. It is empty, the occupant buried, but I do not open the door. I do not want to see his ghost, taunting me with my husband’s face.

  I would like to leave the house sometimes but I no longer can for more than a few weeks else I begin to pine. I feel weak and hungry and no amount of food fills me.

  I always see the ghosts now, the servants at their work, bound to me and the house; unwilling to go even if I could free them. Sometimes I see wife number one and a woman I call sapphire earrings, and both of them shoot daggers at Joaquin, who seems never to notice. Once I saw a woman with wild red curls, beads of amber twined about her throat. She stood behind Joaquin’s chair cheerfully petting the air above his head. When she looked up at me I saw that they shared the same eyes, and she smiled at me, her teeth sharp. Her ears twitched and she bounded off, a bush of tail ruining the line of her loose, colorful skirts.

  “Don’t you see them?” I asked.

  “God forbid that it should ever be so.” He shuddered, and I decided not to discuss it again. Even when a man with hair so black that it was blue, the stubble from the late day beginnings of a beard making his skin cobalt, was awaiting for me at the front landing, cleaning his nails with a small, sharp knife not unlike the one I always carried. He gave me a look filled with lust and menace, and took a step forward.

  “If you don’t behave yourself, I can have you kicked out and then you’ll be even less than you are now.” I did not look back to see what he made of it, but in the kitchen the housekeeper gave me a pleased wink.

  I am heavy with child now and Joaquin thinks it will be twins. He does not look pleased, and sometimes, when he seems to be happy, his hand on my swelling belly, talking nonsense to me and our children, waiting for one to kick, a shadow will cross his face, and I realize that he is afraid.

  I’m not. The house and I have an agreement and I will do what I have to.

  It is what mothers always do, in the woods.

  Come Lady Death

  by

  Peter S. Beagle

  This all happened in England a long time ago, when that George who spoke English with a heavy German accent and hated his sons was King. At that time there lived in London a lady who had nothing to do but give parties. Her name was Flora, Lady Neville, and she was a widow and very old. She lived in a great house not far from Buckingham Palace, and she had so many servants that she could not possibly remember all their names; indeed, there were some she had never even seen. She had more food than she could eat, more gowns than she could ever wear; she had wine in her cellars that no one would drink in her lifetime, and her private vaults were filled with great works of art that she did not know she owned. She spent the last years of her life giving parties and balls to which the greatest lords of England—and sometimes the King himself—came, and she was known as the wisest and wittiest woman in all London.

  But in time her own parties began to bore her, and though she invited the most famous people in the land and hired the greatest jugglers and acrobats and dancers and magicians to entertain them, still she found her parties duller and duller. Listening to court gossip, which she had always loved, made her yawn. The most marvelous music, the most exciting feats of magic put her to sleep. Watching a beautiful young couple dance by her made her feel sad, and she hated to feel sad.

  And so, one summer afternoon she called her closest friends around her and said to them, “More and more I find that my parties entertain everyone but me. The secret of my long life is that nothing has ever been dull for me. For all my life, I have been interested in everything I saw and been anxious to see more. But I cannot stand to be bored, and I will not go to parties at which I expect to be bored, especially if they are my own. Therefore, to my next ball I shall invite the one guest I am sure no one, not even myself, could possibly find boring. My friends, the guest of honor at my next party shall be Death himself!”

  A young poet thought that this was a wonderful idea, but the rest of her friends were terrified and drew back from her. They did not want to die, they pleaded with her. Death would come for them when he was ready; why should she invite him before the appointed hour, which would arrive soon enough? But Lady Neville said, “Precisely. If Death has planned to take any of us on the night of my party, he will come whether he is invited or not. But if none of us are to die, then I think it would be charming to have Death among us—perhaps even to perform some little trick if he is in a good humor. And think of being able to say that we had been to a party with Death! All of London will envy us, all of England!”

  The idea began to please her friends, but a young lord, very new to London, suggested timidly, “Death is so busy. Suppose he has work to do and cannot accept your invitation?”

  “No one has ever refused an invitation of mine,” said Lady Neville, “not even the King.” And the young lord was not invited to her party.

  She sat down then and there and wrote out the invitation. There was some dispute among her friends as to how they should address Death. “His Lordship Death” seemed to place him only on the level of a viscount or a baron. “His Grace Death” met with more acceptance, but Lady Neville said it sounded hypocritical. And to refer to Death as “His Majesty” was to make him the equal of the King of England, which even Lady Neville would not dare to do. It was finally decided that all should speak of him as “His Eminence Death,” which pleased nearly everyone.

  Captain Compson, known both as England’s most dashing cavalry officer and most elegant rake, remarked next, “That’s all very well, but how is the invitation to reach Death? Does anyone here know where he lives?”

  “Death undoubtedly lives in London,” said Lady Neville, “like everyone else of any importance, though he probably goes to Deauville for the summer. Actually, Death must live fairly near my own house. This is much the best section of London, and you could hardly expect a person of Death’s importance to live anywhere else. When I stop to think of it, it’s really rather strange that we haven’t met before now, on the street.”

  Most of her friends agreed with her, but the poet, whose name was David Lorimond, cried out, “No, my lady, you are wrong! Death lives among the poor. Death lives in the foulest, darkest alleys of this city, in some vile, rat-ridden hovel that smells of—” He stopped here, partly because Lady Neville had indicated her displeasure, and partly because he had never been inside such a hut or thought of wondering what it smelled like. “Death lives among the poor,” he went on, “and comes to visit them every day, for he is their only friend.”

  Lady Neville answered him as coldly as she had spoken to the young lord. “He may be forced to deal with them, David, but I hardly think that he seeks them out as companions. I am certain that it is as difficult for him to think of the poor as individuals as it is for me. Death is, after all, a nobleman.”

  There was no real argument among the
lords and ladies that Death lived in a neighborhood at least as good as their own, but none of them seemed to know the name of Death’s street, and no one had ever seen Death’s house.

  “If there were a war,” Captain Compson said, “Death would be easy to find. I have seen him, you know, even spoken to him, but he has never answered me.”

  “Quite proper,” said Lady Neville. “Death must always speak first. You are not a very correct person, Captain,” but she smiled at him, as all women did.

  Then an idea came to her. “My hairdresser has a sick child, I understand,” she said. “He was telling me about it yesterday, sounding most dull and hopeless. I will send for him and give him the invitation, and he in his turn can give it to Death when he comes to take the brat. A bit unconventional, I admit, but I see no other way.”

  “If he refuses?” asked a lord who had just been married.

  “Why should he?” asked Lady Neville.

  Again it was the poet who exclaimed amidst the general approval that it was a cruel and wicked thing to do. But he fell silent when Lady Neville innocently asked him, “Why, David?”

  So the hairdresser was sent for, and when he stood before them, smiling nervously and twisting his hands to be in the same room with so many great lords, Lady Neville told him the errand that was required of him. And she was right, as she usually was, for he made no refusal. He merely took the invitation in his hand and asked to be excused.

  He did not return for two days, but when he did he presented himself to Lady Neville without being sent for and handed her a small white envelope. Saying, “How very nice of you, thank you very much,” she opened it and found therein a plain calling card with nothing on it except these words:

  Death will be pleased to attend Lady Neville’s ball.

  “Death gave you this?” she asked the hairdresser eagerly. “What was he like?” But the hairdresser stood still, looking past her, and said nothing, and she, not really waiting for an answer, called a dozen servants to her and told them to run and summon her friends. As she paced up and down the room waiting for them, she asked again, “What is Death like?” The hairdresser did not reply.