Bereft, I managed to ask, “When are you leaving?”
“Today’s my last day. You’re my last client.”
I could not let this happen. Vonda was a young, vital woman with plenty more to give. Carefully, raising myself on one elbow, I said, “I’ll miss you.”
“Thanks. I’ll miss this place, too. Sort of.”
“I hope we can keep in touch.”
There was a pause, and I expected either no acknowledgment of my overture or one of those responses like “we’ll have to get together sometime” designed to be rejecting without quite admitting it. In either case, I’d have pressed. But, to my pleasant surprise, I didn’t need to. Vonda looked up at me almost shyly and said, “I hope you mean it, Madyson. I’d like that.”
Heart pounding, I suggested, “Let’s have lunch. Tomorrow. There’s this great little place I know. Charon’s. Let’s meet there.”
“Great.” Vonda nodded happily. “I’ll see if the daycare can keep Phoebe another half day.”
“No!”
She raised her eyebrows at my vehemence, and I hastened to moderate it. To control and conceal how much I needed to touch that little girl, to cradle and kiss her, to stroke her baby skin and hold her against my heart and infuse myself with all that raw new energy. “No,” I repeated, with great effort calming my demeanor. “I’d really love to see her. Please. Bring her along.”
FOREVER, AMEN
Elizabeth Massie
Elizabeth Massie published her first horror short story in 1984. Since then her fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, with her novella “Stephen” winning the Bram Stoker Award and being nominated for a World Fantasy Award.
She has published such novels as the Bram Stoker Award–winning Sineater, Welcome Back to the Night, Wire Mesh Mothers, Twisted Branch: A Novel of the Abbadon Hotel (as “Chris Blaine”), Homeplace, DD Murphry Secret Policeman (with Alan M. Clark), Brazen Bull, Desper Hollow, Hell Gate, and the TV tie-ins Dark Shadows: Dreams of the Dark (with Stephen Mark Rainey) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Power of Persuasion.
In the mid-1990s she created a series of historical horror novels for young adults, including the Young Founders series and the Daughters of Liberty trilogy, and her Ameri-Scares series of regional horror novels for middle-grade readers features Maryland: Terror in the Harbor, California: From the Pit, New York: Rips and Wrinkles, Virginia: Valley of Secrets, and Illinois: The Cemetery Club.
Her short fiction is collected in Southern Discomfort, Shadow Dreams, The Fear Report, Afraid, Sundown, Naked on the Edge, and A Little Magenta Book of Mean Stories, and It, Watching. The first four chapters of her Silver Slut series of lighthearted superhero adventures were released in 2016.
“In creating ‘Forever, Amen,’ I considered immortality—blessing or curse?—and its various manifestations,” explains Massie. “Vampirism, reincarnation, time travel. The appeal of living forever is darkened when the future is discovered to be no better than the present or the past, when progress is only technical and not humanitarian, and civil people pound their chests and boast of their foul-smelling goodness. Where is one to go then? Where is one to run?”
Then Pilate went out to the people and saith unto them, Behold, I have found no fault with this man. The chief priests and officers cried out, Crucify him!
Pilate held forth his hand toward Jesus, who bore a crown of thorns and purple robe, and saith, I may release to thee a man on this day of Feasting. Whom will ye that I release, the man Barabbas or this man Jesus?
And the crowd cried, Give us Barabbas! Jesus must die!
When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing to save the man Jesus and that Jesus was indeed to die to please the crowd, he offered the execution of noble captives, to have the man’s wrists slashed with sword and thus causing him to bleed quickly unto death. But from the crowd called up the man Andrew, son of Phinneas the shepherd, who said, Jesus must suffer for his words! Crucify Him! The crowd joined in the mocking call, He must suffer for his words!
Then Pilate went from the crowd and washed his hands, and turned Jesus to the officers and soldiers, who gave unto Him a cross and bearing such went all unto the place of the skull which is called Golgotha:
Where they crucified Him, and two others on either side with Jesus in the midst.
—Book of Trials, 7:23–28
DANIELLE STOOD AGAINST the rough wall, her red eyes turned furiously toward the shrouded figure on the gurney. Marie and Clarice were gone, spun away with dour exasperation and vanished through the small ceiling-high window of the cellar. Their words still echoed in the room like late-season flies caught in a bottle.
Marie: “He is not Alexandre. He is nothing. He is less than nothing.”
Clarice: “It’s done. Come with us. Sister, take my hand. It stinks in here.”
Marie: “Look if you must, but be done with it, and then come.”
Danielle had pressed her gloved hands to her ears and shook her head. No.
Marie: a sharp snapping of the fingers as if Danielle was a dog to obey her mistress, and Danielle had simply said, “Leave me be.” Marie and Clarice had done just that. They thought their companion mad, not a good thing for a creature of the night. Madness could only lead to foolishness and carelessness, and with carelessness, destruction. They had left their mad friend to her own fate.
Danielle stared at the soiled sheet, the sharp protrusions beneath the cloth where the nose and chin were, the feet. Softer mounds of the shoulders, the fisted hands, the groin. Light from lanterns, hung in this subterranean room by the men who had departed here just minutes ago, sputtered from ceiling hooks. Water pipes dripped puddles onto the dirt floor. Spiders and their webs, left in corners by the hasty custodian the day before, held still as if pondering the strange and recent occurrence.
“Alexandre?” Danielle said softly, tasting the cold of her breath as it passed through her incisors, her protruding canines. “Why can that not be you?” She took several steps forward, her chin dipping down as if her face were dread to see beneath the sheet. So much she had witnessed in all these many years, so much terror and viciousness and death, yet this one was almost beyond her ken.
“Why can that not be you?” she repeated, then touched her own face. “Is this not me? Am I not still walking this squalid earth in the form of a young woman though I am one hundred seventeen years of age?”
The sheet stirred slightly. Danielle gasped and put out her hand to find that it was just a current of air passing though the damp brick room, traveling from one ill-hung door to another on the other side.
Was this world not spattered with such as her, existing in conjunction with mortals who most often believed their own reality was the sum and total? And so what incredulous magic could not happen, what damnable curse was impossible?
The room was hot and rancid, foul human scents coiling like smoke from the floor, the walls, the chairs, the gurney. The men who had been here just minutes ago had stunk at first of excitement, and then disgust. They claimed for themselves the crown of civility, yet winced and vomited at the result of their infinite goodness.
“Is this not me?” she repeated. “Look and see that flesh which you once loved.” She shook her head, warding off the stench, then ripped her gloves from her hands and threw them to the floor. She clutched at the frilly bodice of her dress, and ripped it from neck to waist. Her dagger-sharp nails raked the white skin of her breast as she did, leaving long, bloodless skin-lips gaping silently in the air.
Cursed costume of the modern, nineteenth-century woman! Such prudes, such whores, tied up and trussed and playing at seduction with their prim dress, not knowing what it is to be wholly female! Ah, but she had known! Alexandre had known her femaleness and she his maleness, and have reveled in the wonder of it all.
She tossed the ripped cloth aside. Then she wrenched off the rest of her garb—the leg-of-mutton sleeves, the full muslin skirt, the petticoat, cotton stockings, garters, buttoned shoes. All we
re hurled away. The hat, the hair pins, the ear bobs. Her auburn hair fell free about her shoulders.
Danielle closed her eyes and caressed her cold skin. She traced the length of her arms and torso, feathering the soft hairs on her chilly stomach, strumming the already-healing skin-lips on her breasts.
She had been naked when they had taken away Alexandre from her the first time. Lying in a stall of the weanling barn they’d been, Danielle leaning gaily into the wiry hair of Alexandre’s chest and laughing at the prickling straw in her hair and in her back. She had picked up a yellow stem and had ticked his chin and his nose. He had kissed the straw and then her fingers. He had wrapped his arms around her waist and nestled his chin into her neck, his tongue playing easily along the tender flesh there.
“You were tender and true,” she said, her brows knotted and her lips trembling. “But only one wrong named to you, as any human would have who has lived past infancy. How, then, did this curse come to you?”
Beneath the sheet, Alexandre did not move. Danielle took several more steps, across the uneven and cold floor, and grasped the sheet which covered her beloved.
The handsome, tattered young man arrived at Bicetre on a frosty, late March morning in 1792, appearing like a specter beneath the shadows of the pear orchard behind Paris’s infamous hospital and prison. The sky had rained not an hour earlier, and the rain had been cold and severe, drilling chilly puddles into the ground and knocking branch tips from the naked trees. Shivering droplets hung triumphantly to the fur of the animals in the paddocks and to the emerald leaves of the boxwood shrubs that lined the narrow dirt pathways.
The brick institution of Bicetre was large, dark, and filled with most unpleasant business—that of madness, of loneliness, of anger, desperation. Of screams. Of silence. Bright, curious doctors ministered to the sick. Hardened officers tended the miscreants.
In the shadow of the great place, flanking its west side, was a four-acre plot on which animals and vegetables were raised for the use of Bicetre’s personnel, patients, and inmates. It was called appropriately the “Little Farm.” Fenced paddocks monitored the cows and sheep and pigs; in a small hutch nested chickens and pigeons. Several gardens bordered with woven vine fences offered up turnips and beans in the warmer months. A tiny grove of pear trees held sentinel near the stone wall where, beyond, the citizens of Paris pounded back and forth in the rhythm of their individual and now collective lives.
Danielle, one of three young maids employed to tend the animals and gardens and assist in meal preparations, had been in the paddock on a stool, scrubbing the udder of one poorly producing cow and slapping flies from her face when she saw the man amid the naked pear trees and thought, My God, but he is beautiful! Thank you for this gift today! She left the stool and the muddy bovine for the orchard, stopping several yards away and drawing her wool shawl about her shoulders.
“Good morning,” Danielle said. “Are you lost?”
The man raised his hand in tentative greeting—a fine, strong hand it was, a workingman’s hand with dark knuckle hair and calluses—and said, “Not now that I’ve beheld you.” He smiled, and Danielle could see that his teeth were fine and white. Her mother, before she had died, had told Danielle that good teeth meant a good heart.
Danielle didn’t back away nor did she turn her gaze to the ground as the finer of France’s daughters would have done in the presence of a strange man. She was not a maid in the sense the Maid of Orleans had been; Danielle had had her lovers, most of them young doctors at Bicetre and an occasional nurse, who brought her to their private offices within the heavy walls of the institution, made over her lush body on firm, practical sofas, then laughed at her and sent her back to the barn with a slap to the ass. The Revolution stated there was to be no more class distinction, and Paris had turned nearly upside down with its fervent attention to la chose publique, “public things” which had to be monitored for counter-revolutionary thought and action, yet Danielle and her sister maids at the hospital farm found their lives little changed. The gnats and flies were as thick as before, the cows as dirty, the pears in the orchard as worm-ridden, and the doctors as lustful toward girls in maid garb.
The young man beneath the pear branches was quite handsome, with dark hair, a black beard, and gentle, crinkling eyes. He had obviously scaled the stone wall, and had torn the knee of his breeches.
“Are you thirsty, sir?” Danielle asked. The man nodded, and she led him past the dirty cow and the stool to the well. Here he put down his worn leather satchel and drank countless dippers-full which she supplied from the dented tin bucket. Her fingers brushed his once as she passed the dipper, and the hairs on her knuckles stood up at attention.
“What brings you here?” she pressed as he sipped. “You’re not a lost patient with a simple mind, are you, to stumble back to the hospital from which you were attempting escape?”
He saw that she was joking, and he smiled broadly and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I’m from the north, and have come to Paris for work as my home and shop were burned in a fire just a week ago, leaving me without means. I am a cobbler by trade. An accident it was, with the wind knocking a lantern from the window onto the floor. Christ, such a loss.” He paused to wipe stray drops from his beard. “But I cannot make it over, cannot make it right. So I brought a few things with me to the city. From the road I spied soft and browned pears, hiding in the tall grass from last autumn, and climbed the wall in hopes of plucking some without being spied. Then I saw you and was glad I’d been seen.”
“Rotten pears!” Danielle raised a brow. “The third estate cannot say they eat such things now, for dire poverty is of the old time! Shush!”
“They cannot say, but they certainly can eat, yes?”
Danielle smiled, then tipped her head. “This is a hospital, and a prison. There are shoes always in need of repair. I would think you could find work here, if you would like?”
“I might like that very much,” said the man.
Up the boxwood-lined path from the pigs’ paddock strolled the two other maids, Marie and Clarice, each steering a waddling sow with a stick. But they only smiled at Danielle, allowing their friend her time, and trudged on to the stoop and rear door that led to Bicetre’s kitchen. The pigs were poked and prodded into small wicker cages by the door, where they would await a fate their grub-fed brains could not fathom.
Danielle offered the man a place to rest in the empty weanling calves’ barn and left him alone several hours until she found a spare moment between her farming and kitchen duties. She carried with her a slab of ham, some bread, and a bottle of wine beneath her skirt, pilfered from the enormous cellar beneath the kitchen. The two shared food and drink in the straw. And then kisses, caresses. She learned that he was Alexandre Demanche, twenty-two, an orphan raised in the countryside outside of Beauvais. He had been engaged but never married for the young woman had died of consumption three weeks before they were to wed. Alexandre learned that she was Danielle Boquet, born in Paris to a patient at Bicetre who expired during childbirth, leaving Danielle to be raised by various matrons about the institution who taught her to cook, garden, and manage livestock. In all her nineteen years, she had only set foot off Bicetre’s property to attend weekly mass. She was, she admitted, afraid of the city and its people, but felt safe behind the stone walls of the Little Farm.
In the morning Danielle presented Alexandre to Claude LeBeque, the pudgy little man who was in charge of the massive loads of laundry produced within the thick walls of the hospital and prison. She stopped him at the hospital’s front gate. Behind him on the street milk carts and fish wagons rattled back and forth in the cold spring sun, and children were tugged behind mothers with baskets on their arms and hats pinned to their hair.
LeBeque pulled at his substantial, red-splotched nose, then sniffed at being detained. “This man needs work? You’re good for what, Monsieur?”
“Good with shoes,” said Alexandre.
�
�So you say?”
“Someone must supply clothing and shoes to the inmates,” said Danielle. “Who would that be?”
LeBeque pulled his nose again, then a small smile found his cracking lips. He dabbed at his fleshy forehead with a filthy handkerchief and purred, “That would be me.”
Alexandre stepped forward. “I understand this place houses a good many people and therefore, I suspect, a good many shoes. I mend shoes and I make shoes. Have you a need for such as myself?”
LeBeque shrugged and raised a brow in a way that seemed to tease. “Oh, I might find a place for you. I’ll send word soon. Don’t go too far, sir.”
With permission to stay on the premises and await hiring, Alexandre made a tidy bunk for himself in the empty barn. He used a blanket Danielle brought from her own room in the cellar and rolled his cape into a pillow. She helped rake and toss out the molded straw and pile up fresh that she’d brought in from the sheep’s shed. A roost of swallows, perturbed at losing nesting space, squawked, swooped, and evacuated with a swirl of scissored tails and batting of sharp wings.
From his satchel he removed a journal, pen, ink well, and pouch of ink powder and placed them on a protruding beam. A small black volume, tied shut with a string, joined these items on the shelf.
“I will call this home for now,” he said with a touch of resigned satisfaction.
Danielle linked her fingers together and said, “Take rest. I will come back to see you as soon as I am able.”
Bearing a beeswax candle encased in a sooty lantern, Danielle sneaked out from the hospital to join him that evening when duties were done. Madame Duban, the head cook, demanded that the girls in her charge retire to their cots in the cellar at nine, and had always threatened dismissal at any hint of disobedience. But Danielle would not be denied, and when the old woman was snoring soundly in her spinster’s bed, Danielle took several bits of bread and the light and crept outside into the tainted glow of the Paris moon. She followed the path to the barn, happy that the little building would not be needed for another few weeks when the first of the spring calves were old enough to wean and were placed in the barn to keep them from their bawling mothers.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 49
