Dark Duets

by Christopher Golden

  In the morning, Marcus was looking glum. “I do not think this thing between us is working out,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t,” she agreed. He looked very beautiful in the morning sunlight, very noble and square jawed, and she still admired his cheekbones. “I am so glad you agree.”

  And she turned him into a pale yellow rabbit. At first the rabbit ran around the courtyard of the hotel a bit, but he was soon calmed with carrots. She tucked him in the bodice of her dress, where his ears hung out a bit, and set off with all speed toward the forest.

  When she arrived at her sisters’ dwelling place, they were not nearly as agreeable as Marcus had been. They were quite angry, in fact. Furious, even. They explained that after she had gone away and taken their single eye, leaving them to crash blindly around the forest, they had not been able to find food and had been eating rocks and grass, rendering them very unwell. Clytemnestra’s play had fallen into ruins—most of the rodent actors had run away, except for a few squirrels and a chipmunk. The chipmunk was directing, but since he did not understand basic plot elements such as foreshadowing and denouement, the play no longer made sense.

  Clytemnestra was lying upon the ground.

  “Ruined, ruined,” she moaned. “It’s all ruined. My vision is ruined! And why is it ruined? Because I can’t see!”

  “I don’t see why you’re complaining,” said Hibiscus sadly. “You’re not the one who bit into a rock and broke your last tooth.”

  “I have explained, over and over again,” said Clytemnestra, “that actors should be suitable for their roles, that it can’t all be about the tortoise action scene, and that removing the climax is a bad idea because stories should have endings!”

  “I liked that tooth,” muttered Hibiscus.

  “Er,” said Scylla. “Hi?”

  The two sisters, as elder sisters will when faced with the youngest, forgot their differences and began to converge menacingly on the sound of Scylla’s voice.

  “Sisters,” said Scylla. “I am truly sorry. I have learned the error of my ways and I grieve if my actions have caused you any inconvenience! But I have learned a life lesson: that I was dreaming my life away when what I truly wanted was what I had all along: not romance, but being true to myself, being with you, serving our evil master and delighting in the suffering of the innocent. Until now I did not know myself. So you see it was all for the best.”

  She hastily thrust Marcus into the hands of Clytemnestra. There was an uneasy moment while Clytemnestra looked as if she might be about to eat him, but then she petted his ears and set him among the squirrels, where the chipmunk began to order him to learn lines.

  “The eye?” Hibiscus said, warningly.

  “Oh, er, yes!” Scylla replied brightly and plucked it from her eye socket. She had never worn it for so long before and felt the darkness descend on her ominously as she stretched out her hand. “Here it is. And I am willing to give up my turn at it for—”

  “Your turn? Your turn!” Clytemnestra roared, snatching the eye. “You’ll be lucky if you ever have a turn again!”

  “That’s not fair!” Scylla began. It wasn’t like she hadn’t brought it back!

  “Eminently fair, eminently fair,” muttered Hibiscus. “But your punishment must be even more fair than that. I thought about taking your voice, but I do like to hear you prattle on. And I thought about taking your hands, but you can be so useful with them. And I thought about taking your heart before I remembered you’d lost it to that rabbit, so you clearly wouldn’t miss it much. But then, then I realized what we must take from you—your feet!”

  “My feet?” Scylla shrunk back. “No. They’re my feet. They’re not for sharing.” But she felt the sharp bright line of pain across one ankle. She winced. This was going to hurt. “Ow!”

  “Without feet, you can’t run away,” said Hibiscus.

  “Oh, don’t whine, we’ll let you have them back sometimes,” Clytemnestra told her. “Or bird claws. Or hooves. That is, if you’re very, very, very good.”

  The sisters placed Scylla gently in her accustomed seat of bones and roots. Scylla squawked and sulkily kicked Clytemnestra in the shin with her protruding ankle bone. But even as angry and unhappy as she was to be footless, she had to admit that she had been even more unhappy in town. And once Marcus the rabbit had been placed in her arms, she buried her face in his fur and found she preferred him this way too.

  In the end, Scylla stopped missing her feet and learned a valuable lesson about what she truly wanted as compared to what she’d thought and dreamed she wanted, and Hibiscus and Clytemnestra learned how they valued their young sister, by missing her. Also family discipline was upheld through mutilation, which was harsh but fair. The town remained a ruin of ashes and bones brought down by evil, but it had been too late for the townsfolk before this story began.

  Even Clytemnestra’s play was a success. To the surprise of all, Marcus turned out to be a sensational leading rabbit and was much beloved by all the squirrels.

  Sins Like Scarlet

  Mark Morris and Rio Youers

  It began its miserable purple existence nine and a half years ago, a growth in the inner layer of his colon, which—untreated—metastasized into his lymphatic system, internal chest wall, and liver. It was doubtless other places by now. His bones. Maybe his lungs. He’d skipped his last two rounds of chemo, because it was cruel, cold, and pointless: a shot of ugly that left him whimpering at hell’s door. The doctors hadn’t been hopeful before his few treatments began and told him now that his life expectancy was down to months. He believed them. No reason not to. The blood in the toilet bowl, and in his saliva, delivered a similar prognosis. And his body—once firm and powerful—was now a rawboned rack of hurt. But what the doctors didn’t know was that there was an older pain, a deeper pain, that he had suffered for many years. He’d lain in machines that had scanned his body, but as far as he knew there was nothing for the soul. Should such a machine exist, the doctors would find his malady: a shadow, worse than any cancer, and shaped like grief.

  Allan Strand closed his eyes and fumbled for the hip flask in his pocket. Antique silver, dulled and dented with use, filled with liquid morphine. He unscrewed the cap with buckled fingers and raised the flask to his lips. A single swallow, raspy throat clenching like a fist. Allan groaned and his thin body trembled. He didn’t feel relief so much as numbness—the physical pain encased in ice that would melt all too soon. And that deeper, emotional pain . . . still there, but the morphine had lifted hands for him to hide behind.

  He smeared blood from his lips and screwed the cap back on the hip flask.

  “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

  He opened his eyes. The boy was gone.

  HE HADN’T SPOKEN to Holly for twenty-five years. Their marriage—once, like him, firm and powerful—had withered to nothing following the murder of their only son. There had been eleven subsequent months of togetherness, each as fragile as eggshells. No lovemaking. No comfort or assurances. They finally separated in the winter of 1987, whereupon Allan’s wings had stretched far and wide. He flew his crippled coop to begin a new life in Canada. He’d hoped thirty-five hundred miles would nullify his woes and responsibilities. He was wrong. His pain had spread its wings, too. Some things refused to be left behind.

  “Hello.”

  Holly, it’s Allan. . .

  He breathed his sickness into the mouthpiece and rubbed a tear from his eye with the heel of his free hand. Her voice awoke memories, both dark and light. So easy to envision the girl he had fallen in love with. Nineteen years old. Green eyes and a line of freckles across her nose, as distinctive as the markings on a cat. The bow in her hair had come untied, and Allan had pulled it free and handed it to her before she lost it. That was how they’d met. She’d taken the ribbon from his hand and twelve years later they stood beside the too-small coffin of their one child with a valley of emptiness between them. Allan would never have believ
ed that silence could be so deep.

  “Hello . . . ?”

  Holly . . . I have something to tell you.

  He opened his sandpaper mouth, not sure that he could speak at all. To utter a single word—even one as innocuous as hello—demanded vast courage. He gripped the phone tighter. His throat clicked. He considered hanging up, and in the end didn’t have to; Holly beat him to it. The empty line was a different kind of morphine. Old pain slipped sweetly away—temporarily, at least.

  There was a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mirror on the table in front of him. He’d found a convenience store downtown that sold a few British tabloids. They were always a day or two late, but for Allan—who was unfamiliar with the Internet—it was the best way to keep up with the news back home. The paper was open on page seven, where a black-and-white picture and two-column story wavered like smoke, and which he’d inhaled, inducing waves of nausea and despair. It had prompted him to call Holly, even if he hadn’t mustered the courage to talk to her. Now he inhaled the story again, the headline: MEADINGHAM MONSTER DIES IN BROADMOOR, and the picture of a thin man with close-set features and a small, dark mouth. The caption beneath read: Desmond Grayson—termed the “Meadingham Monster” after killing twelve children in the 1980s—suffered a fatal heart attack in his Broadmoor Hospital room on Thursday. He was sixty-two. The killer’s eyes regarded Allan impassively, as if his sins were unformed, and the blood on his hands could so easily be washed away.

  The image unsettled Allan. It always had, and he had seen it thousands of times. It had been splashed across the news throughout Grayson’s trial, so synonymous with evil that it had attained cult status. Allan had even seen it printed on posters and T-shirts. Desmond Grayson may have been a diminutive, psychologically frail individual . . . but the media had made him famous.

  His victims were aged between six and eleven. He lured them by asking for directions or pretending to look for something he’d dropped, and the moment the children lowered their guards, he grabbed them. He took them to his house, where he raped, tortured, and killed them. Then he dumped their bodies in secluded locations in and around Meadingham. It was a wave of terror that lasted six years, ending on a frosty night just after Christmas of 1989, when Grayson was pulled over for speeding. One of the two officers who spoke to him was sufficiently alerted by his odd behavior to ask him to open his trunk. The bloodstains they found on the upholstery prompted them to take Grayson in for questioning, and twenty-four hours later he had confessed to all twelve murders.

  Allan remembered Holly’s shock when she first saw Grayson. She had expected a person both imposing and demonic—the stuff of horror movies. But in reality he was well groomed and courteous, and he sat throughout the trial with his hands folded primly in his lap, his voice—on the occasions he spoke—soft and controlled. Holly regarded the child killer with as much disbelief in her heart as hate. How can someone so normal-looking commit such ungodly crimes? she had asked. But it wasn’t Grayson’s appearance that unsettled Allan, so much as the emptiness in his eyes. Did he really feel nothing? Was he indifferent to all the blood he had spilled . . . to the small, broken bodies piled behind him?

  Thomas—their son—was seven years old. His body was discovered in a dilapidated barn two miles outside Meadingham. Although he had not been raped, he had been stabbed thirty-eight times. His body had been covered in abrasions and bruises. His right arm and neck had been broken. The officer in charge of the murder inquiry, Detective Inspector Lomax, had informed them that it was the broken neck that had killed their son, and that the knife wounds had been inflicted postmortem. The thinking was that Thomas had died from falling down Grayson’s basement steps, thus denying the killer his sadistic pleasure. Lomax’s tone had been one almost of satisfaction, as if the little boy had bravely and resourcefully outwitted his abductor, but for Allan and Holly, it was the end of everything.

  Their togetherness fractured, along with their happiness. Holly’s kind and loving heart shattered, and she strayed all too often into a vortex of depression and delirium. She once drove to London with the intention of attacking Grayson as he was ushered from the Old Bailey. Unable to get close, she hurled abuse and pushed ineffectually at the crowd, and in a frenzy she attacked the young PC who tried to restrain her, gouging his cleanly shaven cheek. In the end it took four policemen to wrestle her into a Black Maria, after which she was detained in a cell overnight and issued with a caution, despite the extenuating circumstances. Shortly afterward, she downed a cocktail of lorazepam and vodka and spent the night in Meadingham General having her stomach pumped. Allan wanted to care, but he didn’t . . . couldn’t. The distance between them had grown too vast, and he had problems of his own—this new and terrible illness: a cancer of the soul that struck long before the disease touched his body.

  Running a hand down his sunken face, Allan closed the newspaper. He reached for the phone again, dialed the first three numbers, then hung up. Pain rolled through his stomach. His right leg twitched. He coughed—sprayed blood against his bunched fist—and fumbled for his morphine. The hip flask’s curves and dents were so familiar that he took comfort from simply holding it. Alas, not enough; he had a callus on his lower lip where he’d so often pressed the collar.

  When the pain subsided, he picked up the phone again, dialed Holly’s number, then cut the call before the connection could be made. He wept for a long time, albeit silently, the tears rolling down his face and dripping off his chin. Then he tried calling her again . . . still couldn’t. Perhaps it would be easier to catch a flight to England and talk to her in person.

  His tears had made an impressive puddle on the table. He used the newspaper to mop them up, then turned to page seven and scrawled black X’s on the monster’s impassive eyes.

  TWO DAYS LATER he made the call, not to Holly, but to British Airways reservations. He was going back to England. He was going home.

  There was peace in his decision, yet no reprieve from the pain. If anything, the shadow on his soul only grew. He battled through the hours, his fragile body twisted out of shape, cold with sweat. Exhausted, he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep. It was like falling into a box of broken glass. He awoke with a start to the insipid gloom of evening, a half-packed suitcase on the bed next to him, and his dead son, Thomas, standing in the corner.

  Seeing him was nothing new. Allan often spotted him in the shadows, or in the corner of his eye, but his visits had become more frequent since the cancer took hold. His son was as fair and beautiful as he had been in life, but disturbingly, uncharacteristically, the little boy was always silent, his staring eyes shining like cold moonlight reflecting off glass. Allan had tried speaking to him, even reaching out to him, but had never received even the merest flicker of a response.

  There was only one way to make him disappear.

  Allan’s hip flask—never far away—was on the bedside table. The dying man snatched it up with a spavined, bird’s-claw hand and unscrewed the cap. He pressed the collar to the hard spot on his lip and took a full hit as Thomas stared at him.

  He closed his eyes . . . waited.

  “Though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool.”

  THERE WAS A time when Allan had been afraid of flying. Back when life meant something, when it seemed too precious to risk. Now the thought of crashing in flames, of being snuffed out as easily as a bug on a windshield, was almost too much to hope for. It was odd how he clung so tenaciously to the grinding misery of his existence, even while constantly wishing that Fate would intervene and absolve him of all responsibility. He had contemplated suicide, of course, but it was precisely that warped sense of responsibility that kept him here. He simply couldn’t allow himself the blessed release of ending it all, not when so much remained unfinished. Allan found a bizarre sense of pride in the idea that, whatever he’d been reduced to, he still retained a shred of . . . what? Decency? Humanity?

  He barked a laugh, which quickly became a series of rasping coughs that fel
t as though every tube and passage from his esophagus to his bowel was being dredged with meat hooks. Cupping one hand over his mouth, he used the other to scrabble in his trouser and jacket pockets, hoping to unearth an old tissue or screwed-up handkerchief. He knew that to the hale and hearty his sickness was an affront, a crime against life’s optimism and vitality. Knew too that the mucus-clotted blood spattering his palm was the incriminating evidence that would excite a level of attention he could do without. Oh, there would be a ripple of concern shown by his fellow passengers and the air crew, but mostly there would be revulsion, alarm, fear. Post-9/11, a man coughing up blood in an airplane was not merely ill, he was infected. Over the past year, Allan had grown weary of telling people that he wasn’t contagious; even wearier of their dewy-eyed pity when they found out what was really wrong with him—especially when that pity barely masked their relief that the cancer was devouring him, and not them.

  He was still rooting through his pockets when he spotted the sick bag between his knees, poking out from the pouch affixed to the back of the seat in front. He snatched it out as the young man beside him—whose bronzed skin and sun-bleached hair gave him the illusion of immortality—asked, “You all right, mate?”

  Allan barely nodded before half turning away, his scrawny body shielding his actions from the man’s curious gaze. He smeared blood from his palm on the stiff paper, then folded it over and dabbed telltale flecks of red from his lips before scrunching the bag into a ball. His bones felt full of ground glass as he pushed himself to his feet, but he managed to scurry down the aisle toward the back of the plane without attracting undue attention. Indeed, the majority of his fellow passengers were too distracted by trivialities—computer games, in-flight movies, banal interviews with soap stars in gossip magazines—to even afford him a second glance. In recent weeks, as mortality had homed in on him, its great black wings beating ever closer, Allan had felt increasingly like an alien observing the pointless actions of another species from afar. He resented and reviled the way so many people passed the time without effect, wiling away their precious lives in increments. But although he felt an urge to rail against their wastefulness, he was aware too of the great tragedy of human existence, which was that death made a mockery of achievement, and that the more a person accumulated in life, the more he or she was set to lose when their once seemingly endless days were scattered like dust.