Once Upon a Curse

by Peter Beagle

  To this day I wonder if I knew. Something made me open the door.

  I saw her in her nightdress, framed by the window. I saw Him as a black shadow, eyes like the collapsed pits of stars.

  She turned. Saw me. Her face went taut with fear.

  She raised a finger to her lips. Shhh.

  Here is the part I do not understand. I could have shouted, raised the house. I could have asked her to stay.

  I looked at her and saw she wanted to go.

  My unwilling feet made their way back to my room. I lay down in my bed of guilt and fear and thought, tomorrow it will all be okay. It will all turn out okay.

  I have never thought that since.

  We all have our stories: the stories we tell; the ones we never share. Lying awake, I listen to the thin voice of the radio and try to take comfort that somewhere, others are doing the same.

  Some nights I catch myself thinking that I too could go out into the night. I could find answers.

  But I do not think They would be interested in me anymore. It is life They want to taste, hot and bright-flowing. Not this endless, suspended existence.

  We hear on the radio that a body has been found. Some of the unliving rise, put on thick woolen gloves, get ready for the drive. In other, farther places, we lie hoping for an ending that never comes.

  Frayed Tapestry

  by

  Imogen Howson

  The first time it happened was almost a year after he’d married her. They were giving a drinks party, and the spacious top-floor apartment was filled with sleek, beautiful people in immaculately cut trousers, or little black dresses and the discreet glint of gold jewelry.

  Candy had been busy since the first guests arrived. Clym liked her to keep the canapés coming and make sure he was supplied with ice for the drinks. With that, as well as welcoming new guests and trying to make sure she remembered everybody’s names, she’d scarcely sipped her own glass of wine.

  So, afterwards, although she tried to blame the alcohol, she knew she couldn’t.

  She was in the kitchen, cutting up more lemons for the gin and tonics. She had a gleaming steel bowl of them, glossy polished yellow next to the duller green globes of limes, and a neat little serrated knife to slice them into perfect rounds. But then, of course, she had everything. She’d seen it reflected in her guests’ eyes. Her, this nineteen-year-old, already with a beautiful apartment, a handsome, adoring, powerful husband…

  The knife slipped. It shouldn’t have—she was holding it carefully; its edge had already bitten into the yellow rind, sending the sharp fragrance up to her nose. But it did: slipped downward sharply and sliced into the side of her left thumb.

  The pain was instant and shocking. She gasped, dropping the knife, and clamped her right hand over her left. Such a small cut—it shouldn’t hurt so much. But after a second she realized the pain came from the lemon juice seeping, acidic, into the wound.

  “Oh, you stupid…” With her uninjured hand, she twisted the tap on the sink next to her. It stuck a moment and, the pain unendurable; she put her thumb in her mouth to soothe it.

  Water poured into the sink so hard it splashed up against the matt black tiles above the taps, spattering the worktop. She thrust her thumb under the water, swallowing against the tears coming to her eyes.

  And it happened. All at once her hand was submerged in a rush of water so cold it instantly numbed the pain. Her other hand was grasping not the tap but the rough bark of a twisted, moss-covered tree branch. Her bare toes clung to damp, gritty stone and cold air struck her skin, raising goose bumps on her bare arms.

  And it was familiar. She knew where she was, knew if she turned away from the waterfall she’d see the cliff rising to the sky, and knew the tree was an oak, ancient and craggy, home to thousands of tiny creatures. She’d stood here before, feet cold on the stone, stood here with—

  “Candy? Are you in the kitchen?”

  She jumped, lost her grip on the branch, grabbed for another handhold, feet slipping on the wet—On the wet kitchen floor.

  “Candy!” Arms came around her. For a moment she didn’t recognize them, didn’t know who was holding her. “What are you doing?”

  Clym’s voice. Oh, of course—Clym’s hands. She stood in his arms, her thumb streaking watery blood all over his shirt, the front of her dress drenched.

  He reached past her and turned off the tap. “What happened? What did you do?” His voice roughened with bewilderment and exasperation. “You’ve got the tap on so that it’s splashing all over the floor—no wonder you slipped.” Then his voice went cold and suddenly his hands seemed cold too, sending ice into her bones. “Where are your shoes?”

  She looked down, her breath already coming short at that tone in his voice. “I don’t—I was wearing them.” But sure enough, there were her feet, bare and brown against the white tiles, their toenails neat and straight, shiny with pale gold nail polish.

  “Sit down.”

  He moved her backwards and she sat on one of the kitchen stools. From the sitting room behind him came the jumble of conversation, laughter, the click of high heels as someone stepped out onto the balcony, the ripple of the low music she’d spent an hour selecting. Clym reached over her head and pulled the first aid box off its shelf. “Give me your hand.” He wiped the cut with a disinfectant wipe, not roughly, but not bothering to be gentle either, and then stretched a plaster over it.

  She sat motionless, still feeling that bite of cold in his fingers as he touched her. He always had cold hands. Sometimes she teased him about it—but only in bed. She’d learned early on not to seem to make fun of him anywhere else—and never, ever in front of other people.

  He pressed the plaster down to seal it firmly over the cut. Pain jabbed through her thumb. “You know I don’t like you not wearing shoes. Especially on this floor. If you’d been wearing them you wouldn’t have slipped.”

  Well, that was ridiculous. The shoes she’d put on for the party were dainty, strappy things with smooth soles—plenty more slippery than bare feet. And where were they, anyway? If she’d taken them off in the kitchen wouldn’t they be around here somewhere?

  “Candy.”

  Her attention jerked back to him. He was looking down at her, his eyes very dark. “Go and dry your dress and put some shoes on. No—not that way.” This as she got off the stool and took a step toward the sitting room. “Do you think I want our guests to see you like that?”

  This time the anger came clear through his voice. She turned and went through the little corridor at the other end of the kitchen—narrow and lined with shelves, it was normally only used as a store cupboard—then into the entrance hall, and from there into their bedroom.

  She rubbed her dress and feet with a towel, found some other shoes. Grit and a dusting of earth came off on the towel. She shook it into the bath, rinsed it away, and stuffed the towel into the laundry bag. Hopefully he wouldn’t ask her to find the missing shoes. The grit on her feet had only confirmed what she already, really, knew. Wherever she’d left her shoes, it wasn’t in the apartment.

  The next morning she woke with a headache and lay still, eyes shut against the sunlight that turned red as it came through the curtains. Clym liked red. To her, though, it seemed the wrong color for curtains. Curtains should be pale gold, leaf green, letting through dappled light that moved like sunspots on water…

  She felt her thoughts pause. Where had that image—huge trees filtering the sunlight, a wide milk-calm lake—come from? Nowhere in the city, where she’d lived her whole life—

  And at that she paused again, stuttered as if she’d met a break in the track of her thoughts. My whole life? But where was I before I married Clym?

  “Wake up, baby.”

  She eased her eyes open. Clym stood, a shadow against the sunlit curtains, holding a tray. She moved to prop herself up on her elbows, trying to clear her mind of the weird jumble of thoughts that made no sense.

  “I don’t think I should ha
ve had those other glasses of wine,” she said. “I feel like death.”

  Clym laughed, setting the tray down on the bedside table. “Baby doll, a few glasses of wine won’t have done you any harm. Like I said, you needed it after cutting your thumb so badly. Now, you need a good breakfast, that’s all. Sit up.”

  She wriggled up to lean against the bank of huge, marsh-mallow-soft pillows. Clym passed her a mug of tea—gentle, pale brown, with plenty of milk. The scent of honey drifted up with the steam and she breathed it in.

  “Oh, that’s heaven. Thank you.”

  “Here.” He moved the tray over onto her duvet-covered lap. “Chilled melon slices. And—you need protein—scrambled eggs on toast.”

  He sat on the bed next to her, moving carefully so as not to tip the tray. She bit into the melon slice and cold, sweet juice filled her mouth. Its fragrance seemed to travel up through the roof of her mouth into her head, clearing it of the ache, smoothing the jagged tracks of her thoughts.

  Clym had cut the thick slices of white toast into fingers, golden with a shimmer of butter. He leaned forward to put one into her mouth and it crunched deliciously between her teeth.

  “Last night,” she said. “I don’t know why I took my shoes off. Are you still angry?”

  “No, baby. I know you didn’t mean to worry me. Just”—he leaned forward, brushed a kiss over her nose—“be more careful next time, okay?”

  “Okay.” She smiled at him, feeling warm, relaxed, floating on the pillows as if they were clouds. She reached for the fork and his hand came down on hers, stopping her. She blinked at him. “Hey, I need protein, remember?”

  He laughed. “I’ll feed you, sweetheart. Here, open wide.”

  She really wanted to feed herself. She was hungry now, and he was clumsy, and buttery crumbs and bits of egg got spilled on the crimson satin duvet cover. But it was worth it, to know he wasn’t angry with her, that he’d forgiven her. And while he was with her, laughing, spooning eggs into her mouth, leaning over to kiss her, then eventually putting the tray on the floor so he could join her under the duvet, she knew her thoughts were safe. While he was here her thoughts wouldn’t go jagged, they wouldn’t hiccup and pause and shoot strange familiar images into her head. They’d be safe, and so would she.

  Clym went to work six days a week and she didn’t yet know many of their neighbors, but she had plenty to do. It was only a short walk to the avenues of shops, and Clym had accounts at all of them. It was fun to try on slinky little outfits, then, if she especially liked one, walk out dressed head to toe in all new clothes.

  This time, she found a chiffon dress in different shades of green, beech-leaf to moss, fastened with a gold belt that hugged her rib cage, just under her breasts. Pulling the dress on over her head, she imagined she smelled cut grass, the drifting sweetness of honeysuckle.

  They knew her here; she told them she’d take it, asked them to send her clothes home, and stepped out of the shop, lifting her face to the warmth of the sunlight.

  And stopped. It was—it was sunlight, but what had she been expecting? She looked up into the arc of indigo sky, from which the sun shone, golden-red and familiar—and wrong. In her head was an image of something different, something brighter, cleaner…higher, although that was ridiculous.

  She shook her head as if to clear it. She needed to buy new shoes. She looked down at herself, and her shoulders slumped a little. This was exactly the sort of dress that didn’t even look good with shoes. Which was probably, really, why she’d bought it. She missed going barefoot.

  Well, you should have thought about that before you married him, she told herself severely, beginning to walk again. If you marry a man who thinks bare feet look slutty, then you know very well what you’re getting into.

  Except—had she known?

  Her feet stuttered on the pavement. The sun—the odd, wrong-colored sun—blazed down at her. She felt sick, a little dizzy.

  She was just passing the cool, dim doorway of a coffee shop. She turned in to it, and sat at a small round table. Its metal surface was patterned with irregular diamond shapes that seemed to run into each other, making the surface look as if it were warped. She spread her fingers on it, and of course it was perfectly flat. Her heart was pounding horribly, down next to her stomach so she felt nausea pulse through her.

  She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember deciding to marry him. She couldn’t remember meeting him. She couldn’t remember her wedding day. What sort of freak can’t remember her wedding day?

  “Can I get you anything?”

  She looked up at the thin, dark-haired waitress and answered automatically. “Latte, please.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The waitress disappeared behind the counter. Candy pressed her hands hard on the table, watching the skin around her nails whiten. This was insane. What was wrong with her? For the past year she’d lived this idyllic life. She’d been wonderfully, dreamily happy. Clym adored her, all his friends treated her like a queen, and she had everything she could want. Then one slip of a knife, and she no longer even recognized her own mind. How could it have done that? How could it have affected her so much?

  Her hand stilled. Slowly, she turned it over so she could see the ugly mark on her thumb, the flesh around it bruising as it healed. It hadn’t happened when she cut herself. It had happened when she’d put her thumb in her mouth, when she’d tasted her blood.

  Not that that made any more sense. But somehow, in those echoes in the back of her mind, she knew blood was important. It had…meaning, significance beyond the obvious. If she could just remember properly, pull the memories forward to look at, maybe something would start to make sense.

  A saucer clinked gently on the table.

  “One latte.”

  “Thank you.” She stirred in sugar, picked the cup up and sipped, the foam soft on her upper lip. Her heartbeat slowed and the tightness in her chest eased. She shut her eyes for a moment and sipped again.

  She was so silly. Sitting here, heart pounding, letting all sorts of thoughts into her head. She was hungry, that’s all. She’d have lunch, and then she’d be much more able to work out why her imagination was suddenly getting the better of her like this.

  She ordered a hot-smoked salmon salad and a freshly squeezed orange juice, and sat drinking her coffee, letting the warm sweetness travel down through her, easing her into relaxation, until the food arrived.

  The salmon broke into thick flakes under her fork, and the curly lettuce and slices of translucent green cucumber tasted of olive oil, lemon juice and black pepper. It came with a split ciabatta roll, dusty with flour, and a pat of butter, golden and oily from being next to the warm roll.

  The orange juice glowed in its tall frosted glass, thick with specks of orange pulp, sweet and sharp. She sipped the last of it as she used the ciabatta crust to mop up the remnants of the salad dressing, and although she knew something had been bothering her, she could no longer remember what it was. So she signed the bill—she was so lucky, Clym had accounts everywhere—and went out again into the sunshine to buy the sexiest shoes she could find.

  The sunlight was lovely today, and after buying her shoes she decided to walk home through the meadows. They called them meadows, but it was a park really, with wide paths. The flowers grew neatly in flowerbeds as well as straggling, skimmed-milk white, amongst the faded green of the dry grass in the fields stretching down to the river.

  Across the river was where Clym worked. But she didn’t let her feet drift toward it. “I have to deal with people who aren’t very nice, baby,” he’d said, months ago, when they were first married. “So when I’m at work I’m not very nice, either. If you saw me there”—and he’d laughed, rubbing the tip of his nose on her forehead—“maybe you wouldn’t like me any more.”

  “Oh, Clym,” she’d said, laughing with him, but partly shocked that he’d ever think such a thing, “as if that would make any difference!”


  Still, the subject had dropped, and somehow she hadn’t liked to raise it again.

  But all the same it was nice to sit in the long, prickly-soft grass, letting the sun warm her hair, knowing she wasn’t far away from him. And that maybe, if she sat here long enough, and if he decided to walk home this way, she might meet him and they could walk home together.

  In the distance, she caught sight of other visitors. There were so many coming back and forth, strolling down the paths and wandering through the tall grass, that it was odd that, in all the times she’d visited the meadows, she’d never come close enough to speak to any of them. Nor, in almost a year, had she ever seen the same face twice.

  Idly, she plucked a few of the flowers’ thin stems. Their petals were soft—she could hardly feel them where they touched her skin—but their leaves were long and tough, coming to spiky points. She’d thought she could take them home, arrange them in a vase, but looking at them now, she realized they’d fade to invisibility against the blacks and reds of the apartment. And even as she held them, they drooped, their petals melting into nothing, leaves shriveling, the stalks drying, twisting into something like hair between her fingers that, released, floated away over the nodding grasses.

  She hadn’t thought they’d die so quickly. She pushed her fingertips down into the earth, wondering what their roots were like, that, once severed from them, they died so fast.

  Except there was no earth. She dug her nails into the ground, looking down, bewildered, and met nothing but the faded, springy stuff she sat on, that she’d thought was the tangled lower stems of the grasses, the growth of new plants, a layer of dry soil that would crumble under her fingernails…It wasn’t. It was fibres, woven tightly together, a tapestry of ochre, sand-color and faded brownish-green. Completely convincing until you touched it.

  Candy snatched her hand back. No, she wasn’t going to do this. Her world was perfect, perfect. She wasn’t going to go prying and poking beneath the surface. She wasn’t going to try and think back, try and remember how or when things had changed. She wasn’t going to ask questions. She wasn’t going to let the panic come back in.