by Otto Penzler
COVENTRY CAROL
Chet Williamson
NOTED FOR OUTSTANDING CHARACTERIZATIONS in his novels and short stories, which have been compared with the work of Shirley Jackson, Chester Carlton (Chet) Williamson (1948–) is a prolific author, mainly of horror and supernatural fiction. He also has had a successful career as a musician and an actor with a lifetime membership in Actors’ Equity. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he received his B.S. from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and became a teacher in Cleveland before becoming a professional actor. He turned to full-time freelance writing in 1986 and has written more than a hundred short stories for such publications as The New Yorker, Playboy, The Twilight Zone, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Esquire. He also has written twenty novels, beginning with Soulstorm (1986), and a psychological suspense play, Revenant. Among his numerous awards are the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story Collection for Figures in Rain: Weird and Ghostly Tales (2002), two nominations for the World Fantasy Award, six for the Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association, and an Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination by the Mystery Writers of America for Best Short Story for “Season Pass” (1985). Many readers believe that Williamson’s finest work was in his “Searchers” trilogy: City of Iron (1998), Empire of Dust (1998), and Siege of Stone (1999), an X-Files–type series with the basic premise being that three CIA operatives are asked by a rogue CIA director to investigate paranormal activities—not to find out the truth, but to debunk the claims.
“Coventry Carol” was originally published in Ghosts, edited by Peter Straub (Brooklandville, MD, Borderlands Press, 1995).
Coventry Carol
CHET WILLIAMSON
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,
By, by, lully, lullay.
I
After it happened, Richard was unable to eat grapes. He bought a bunch at a farmers’ market, and set the bag on the car seat next to him, planning to munch on them as he drove home. But when his teeth pierced the resilient green skin and the juice burst tartly over his tongue, the image came immediately to mind of what had been floating there in the toilet bowl only a few weeks before. He pulled the car onto the shoulder, spit out the grape, and gagged, but was able to keep from vomiting. Then he hurled the grapes into the bushes for the rabbits, the groundhogs, the deer. For simpler animals, whose minds did not make such tenuous connections, such fine distinctions of taste.
For the primitive.
II
Both he and Donna had wanted the baby. It was time. They were in their mid-thirties, and the tales of complicated pregnancies haunted their age group as Hansel and Gretel’s witch haunted young children. Hydrocephaly, brain damage, and worse, all because of the waiting. There was, Donna once joked, a price to be paid for living in the bygone Age of Me.
The timing was right in other ways too. Richard had just been made a full professor, and the market research firm where Donna had worked for the past six years was gearing down, so that her departure would save the necessity of firing a colleague, and odds were good, she was told, that in a year or two, when she was ready to return to a job, there would be a job to return to.
Two weeks after they discovered Donna was pregnant, they started on the nursery. Their farmhouse, which they had bought in their early twenties, had transformed over the years, changing as they grew older. In the first few years they had worked only on the kitchen, their bedroom, and their bath, leaving the rest of the building to its previous squalor, so that if, in one of the many parties of those early years, a joint fell burning and unnoticed to the floor, or a beer can spilled, or a bottle of Cribari shattered, it was of no account. The room would be redone someday.
And as they and their circle of friends aged and changed, left Cribari and Bud in cans to the closets of college memories, grew to be more careful with burning drugs of all kinds, started to marry and have children and divorce, to solidify and melt and rethicken, so did the parties and the house change. Carpets covered the planks too scarred to refinish, furniture of wood and glass and chrome replaced the overstuffed monstrosities that had sponged up little less beer than their occupants had drunk. Unframed film posters fell like dead leaves before the winter white walls, the stark muted graphics.
The farmhouse was different from when they had moved in, but it was, then and now, theirs. Only two rooms on the third floor and one on the second remained untouched, and it was that second floor room they worked on, sanding, scrubbing, cleaning, painting, preparing it for the child who would soon arrive.
They were painting the evening it happened, listening to an old Crosby, Stills, and Nash tape on the remote speaker. The music was punctuated by the slap of the rollers, and at times their motion fit the music’s cadence, making Richard smile, then concentrate again on the rough plaster, putting his weight heavily against the roller so that the paint filled the crannies, lightened the dark tiny valleys.
He became aware that Donna’s roller was silent, and turned to look at her. She was sitting on the floor, her back propped against an unpainted wall, her legs splayed out in front of her. She had pulled the sweatband from around her brow so that her ash blonde hair hung loose, and she was twisting the band in her hands. Her lip shook, and tears dropped from her cheeks onto the front of her old, faded blue work shirt. She looked like a handcuffed prisoner, alone and miserable.
“Donna?” he said. “Honey, what’s wrong?” He set his roller carefully in its tray, and knelt in front of her, hoping that it was anticipation and anxiety that had brought her down rather than pain.
She shook her head angrily, and he felt his stomach tense. These were not tears of joy.
“Donna?”
She opened her lips and took several deep, slow breaths through her teeth. At last she looked at him challengingly. “I’ll be all right.”
“What is it?”
“I’m scared. Okay?”
Her antagonism made him uncomfortable. “Scared?” he muttered.
“Yes, scared. May I be scared?”
“Well … well, sure. I’m scared too, honey. Of the responsibility, the … the changes it’s going to mean.…”
“You would be.” Her words were cold.
“What?”
“I’m scared for the baby,” she said quietly. “And you’re afraid you’re going to have your life style cramped.”
“Donna, how can you say that? I want this baby, and you …”
She broke down then, and her arms went out to him, so that he gathered her in and held her tightly. “I’m sorry, Rick,” she cried, “but something’s wrong, something is, I know it.…”
“Okay, relax, relax,” he crooned. “Have you told the doctor?”
“Yes, yes, he says it’s nothing, that nothing’s wrong.”
“Have you been spotting?”
“No.”
“Cramps, pains?”
“No … twinges. It’s just, oh God, a feeling. It sounds so stupid, so foolish, but it’s there.”
He continued to hold her. “You know,” he said slowly, “you can’t go through the whole pregnancy like this.”
“I don’t think I can have a healthy baby,” she said with a sincerity that chilled him.
“That’s ridiculous. Don’t say that.”
“But all we did over the years. The grass, Christ, we did acid a couple of times, and the coke.…”
“We’re not doing it now, and we won’t any more, and that’s what’s important.”
“And the abortion,” she added desperately, “when we couldn’t afford …”
He cut her off. “The doctor knows all about that, and it doesn’t mean a thing. You heard him say that it would have no effect at all on this baby.”
“Yeah. I heard.”
“Donna, expectant mothers worry all the time. They worry if they drink coffee, they worry if they smoke, it’s only natural.”
“I know all that, I just …” She paused, her
eyes far away. “I want this baby so much. I want to hold it and love it and watch it grow, and sing lullabies to it. I want everything I did in the past to stop, and to start everything over with this baby, have everything new, forget everything I did and was.…”
“Hey,” Richard interrupted, “you don’t have to feel guilty about a thing.”
She looked at him and smiled. “If I don’t, Richard, who will?”
“Donna …”
“You have to take responsibility sometime.”
“And we will. We are. But don’t get upset before anything happens. Seven months is a long time, honey.”
“I know. All right. Forget it then. Let’s get back to work.”
They started painting again. The CS&N tape ended, and after a while Richard heard Donna humming a tune. “Pretty,” he said.
She stopped. “Hmm?”
“The song. You were humming.”
“Was I?”
“Coventry Carol,” he said, renewing the supply of paint on his roller. He sang in a light baritone.
“Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,
By, by, lully, lullay.”
“Is that the name of it?” she asked. “I must have heard it on the radio.” It was a month before Christmas, and the airwaves were filled with carols. Richard sang on.
“Oh sisters two, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
By, by, lully, lullay.”
She hummed as he sang, and when they’d finished the Coventry Carol, they sang others, sacred and secular—“Oh Come, All Ye Faithful,” “Up on the Housetop,” “What Child Is This?” and “The First Noel.” Finally Donna set down her roller. “Be right back,” she said.
“How about bringing me back a beer?” Richard asked.
“You got it.”
He heard her walking unhurriedly down the hall, heard the door to the bathroom close. He worked on, and found himself softly singing the Coventry Carol once more. It was no wonder, he thought. The tune was haunting, though melancholy for a Christmas song. There was sadness in it, as though its composer had kept in mind the ultimate destiny of the newborn child.
Then Donna screamed.
The sound froze him for a heartbeat, and he dropped the roller with a wet slap onto the floor, leaped from the ladder, and ran out the door, down the hall, where he threw open the door of the large guest bath.
His wife lay on the cold white tiles, her jeans and underwear in a tangle around her knees. Her body, shaking with sobs, was hunched embryonically, and her hands were buried between her thighs, as if striving to hold something in. A few watery drops of blood dotted the floor.
“I knew it, I told you,” she gasped. “It’s gone, I lost it, oh, Rick, I lost it.…”
He knelt beside her and smoothed the wet hair back from her hot forehead, whispering, “Shh, shh,” not wanting to look into the toilet bowl, unable not to.
It was there. He could barely make it out, floating in a gelatinous cloud of blood and pus. The deep yellow urine darkened it further, a tiny, monstrous fish swimming in some underground sea.
My daughter. My son.
He wanted to vomit, but he kept it down, although the taste of bile was strong at the back of his throat. He started to reach for the flush handle automatically, as he would to flush down a spider, a wriggling centipede, a battered fly, then stopped, realizing that it was neither fly nor fish, but something that was to have been human, that was to have been—that was—his child. So he closed the lid, and turned his attention back to Donna.
“Come on, can you get to the bedroom?” His voice was thick with sorrow.
Hers was thinned by tears. “I think … think so.”
“Ought to lie down,” he said, getting an arm beneath her. “You lie down and I’ll call the doctor.”
“Oh, Rick …”
“Now, it’s all right, it’s over …”
“I lost it.”
“It’s done, it’s over now, just relax.”
She leaned against him as they went down the hall into their room, her feet dragging, stumbling across the carpet.
“I knew it, knew it, all my fault …”
“Shh. It’s not, Donna.”
“Oh yes, yes it is.”
He helped her take off her paint-spattered shirt and kick off her jeans. Tenderly he lowered her back against the pillow and stepped into the adjoining bath, where he took a lavender towel from a high, fluffy stack. When he came back into the bedroom a wave of love shook him as he saw her lying there clad only in an old t-shirt, her lower half bare and vulnerable as a child’s. He tucked the towel beneath her hips and drew the sheet over her.
“Some water?” he asked. She looked at him strangely. “Some water to drink?” he explained. She shook her head no. Tears pooled in her eyes as she stared at the ceiling. “All right. You rest. You just rest now, and I’ll call the doctor.” He could have used the phone by the bed, but he didn’t want her to hear him say that she’d lost the baby.
Richard kissed her forehead, tucked in her sheet, and left the room. On his way to the downstairs telephone, he passed the open door of the guest bath and stopped, looking in at the stained tiles and grout, the closed lid of the toilet bowl, and wondered what he should do.
Then he knew, knew what the doctors and the laboratories would want, knew what they would want to see so that they could find out what went wrong, so that maybe he and Donna could try again and have a baby, a real baby, and not what floated, dead, in the cloudy water, not what he would now have to preserve, to save for study, dissection.
My child. Stained sections on a microscope slide.
“So be it,” he whispered aloud, remembering burying his first dog, scooping his dead goldfish from the smooth surface of the fish bowl. “So be it.”
With a soft pop, he pulled a paper cup from the wall dispenser, then knelt and lifted the lid. It was there, as he knew and feared it would be, drifting against the white porcelain, still shrouded in its coverlet of thick blood and fluid, perhaps still dreaming that it was safely ensconced in its amniotic home.
Even now it was swimming, wasn’t it, so unbelievably tiny, and yet a person.… There, did the little arms move? Arms or paddles, but yes, there were fingers, or the buds that would have been fingers, weren’t there? Like a fly, oh certainly no bigger than a fly, and the limbs did move, yes, there again, and it was swimming, or trying to, wriggling like a tadpole, and wasn’t it still alive, oh yes, of course it was, and he could save it now, and put it back where it could grow, couldn’t he? Of course he could, he was the father, and he could, of course, of course …
Oh sisters two, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling …
In a bottle, he thought suddenly, coldly, damning fantasies and accepting the real. Preserved in a bottle.
He dipped the cup into the water, pulled it against the side until what he wanted was surrounded by the paper, and then lifted it up out of the bowl, pressing the flush lever so that the urine and detritus whirled and sank away, and the water was fresh and clear again.
He carried the cup with the fetus down to the kitchen, put aluminum foil over the top, and placed it at the back of the refrigerator, next to the tray of baking soda, gray with age. As he dialed the doctor’s number, he found that he was humming the Coventry Carol again.
III
“It’s best that it happened,” Richard said.
“I can’t believe that.”
“You know what he said—it would have been impossible to carry it to term, and if it had been born …” He left it unfinished and sipped his wine. It was the evening of the day Richard had thrown away the grapes. The fetus had disappeared into a laboratory, and was no doubt destroyed by now. Donna had recovered completely, at least physically. They had hardly spoken about it. He did not want to force her. The doctor told him in private not to push it, that she seemed extremely
depressed (as if he couldn’t tell), and that it would be best to let her come to terms with what had happened on her own schedule.
Tonight he had finally talked her into a glass of wine, which had loosened her tight facade enough for her to say, slowly and carefully, “Well, I really did it, didn’t I?”
Nature’s way, Richard had replied, spoon-feeding the words the doctor had given him. Donna would not accept them, would accept nothing but the concept that her sins had found her out, and destroyed her child. “I wouldn’t have cared,” she said, “if it had been a monster. I would’ve loved it.”
Richard could say nothing in response.
“Would you?” she asked him.
“What?”
“Have loved it? If it hadn’t been right?”
“It still would have been my child,” he answered, too glibly.
“Until I killed it,” she said.
“You didn’t do any such thing.”
“What I did killed it.”
“That’s stupid. There’s no way to know that,” he said.
“So there’s no way to refute it,” she replied. “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. And my poor little baby is damned forever.”
“Stop talking like that. It was a … a mistake, that’s all, just a genetic fluke, Donna. It could have been as much my fault as yours, for Christ’s sake. It never would’ve been a baby—odds are it couldn’t have survived a minute out of the womb.”
She grew pale as he talked, but he couldn’t stop. He had to tell her what he’d been thinking, what he’d been aching to say. “You did nothing. Things happen, things like this happen to mothers who’ve never smoked a cigarette or had a beer. It could’ve been something that’s been in you or me since we were born, something the goddam factories put into the air or water or food that just didn’t agree with you, it could’ve been so goddam many things, Donna. So stop. Please. Just stop killing yourself over what you couldn’t help. Let’s just think ahead. To the next one.”
