Minute Maids

by Rachel Caine

  Something came out of the fog, something tall.

  Olida grabbed Zenobia's arm and half-dragged her up to the top of the stairs again. In the dark, with only the ghosts' light to see by, she turned to her right and pulled Zenobia with her, weeping and praying, all the way to the end of the hall.

  Ghosts everywhere, reaching out to touch her with arms that ended in bloody stumps.

  Of course, she thought as she hauled Zenobia's weight along. He didn't untie those shoelaces from around their arms. He just cut their hands off and slipped the shoelaces off that way.

  At the end of the hall, she waved her hands around over her head.

  What did he do with the hands?

  "Olida?"

  "Damn," Olida muttered.

  "What are you doing?" Zenobia sounded calm now, or like somebody who was too scared to sound scared anymore.

  Olida's fingers touched the cotton cord. She took a deep breath, wrapped both hands around it, and pulled.

  The stairs came down from the ceiling in a thick creaking fall. One corner caught Olida on the shoulder and knocked her out of the way, almost to her knees. She braced herself with one hand on a wood riser.

  Up the stairs into the dark, pulling Zenobia behind her. Zenobia stumbled and almost pulled Olida down with her; Olida's fingers were slick and cold with sweat, both hers and the other woman's.

  Or ghost's blood. Could be that, too, she supposed.

  There was a trap door at the top of the stairs, a heavy one. Olida pushed on it with one hand, then dropped Zenobia's to push with both. It didn't want to move.

  She went up one more step and put her shoulders up against it.

  It groaned up; she groaned with it. She was seeing stars, and they weren't ghosts this time, they were in her head, and she felt so tired she thought she might just lay down on the stairs and sleep for a while. Instead, she took the last three steps up into the hot, stuffy dark at the top of the house.

  She didn't hear anybody coming upstairs yet. She hauled Zenobia up into the attic, closed the trap door, and switched on her flashlight.

  It was full of the stuff most people kept in attics, old boxes, dusty broken sticks of furniture, old pictures jumbled up in the corners. And, at the very end, Olida's light slid over something black.

  It was an old rotary-dial telephone, round and shiny, sitting in a clutter of junk.

  "Thank you Jesus," she whispered, and felt all her strength surge back into her bones. She went over and picked it up. The junk rattled off on to the floor, and she tried to catch it before it hit but was too late. One of the pieces of metal clunked and rolled to a stop.

  It was one of the Deacon's home-made Praying Hands. Olida nudged it with a toe. The set he'd given her had old, weathered-looking fingers. These were a woman's hands, long and thin, pointy nails.

  The dial tone was the sweetest sound in the world.

  She meant to dial the police, but her fingers dialed all by themselves. She held the cold plastic close to her face and felt it cool her skin; drops of her sweat fell on it like tears and ran off to drip on the dusty wood floor.

  "Hello," Lark said. She felt the numbness in her chest go away.

  The pain came to stay.

  "Lark," she whispered. Her head was all filled up with blood. "Oh, Lark --"

  "Olida?"

  "Please," she whispered, and started to cry out all that blood in her head in hot, thick tears. Call the police, she wanted to say, as soon as she could get it out of her head and her throat. Then it would be over.

  Zenobia screamed, across the room. Olida fumbled for her flashlight and pointed it back toward her friend.

  The trap door was opening up, and a pair of hands were reaching out of the hole.

  Olida dropped the phone and ran, and jumped.

  Landed. The trap door slammed down on his head like a hammer hitting a watermelon, and it jammed at a slant, her butt flat against it.

  Zenobia kept screaming. She'd dropped her flashlight and it rolled back and forth, back and forth, lighting and hiding everything in the room.

  The hands were caught in the trap door. They were long, thin, white hands, splattered here and there with liver spots and bright red streaks. Olida watched the fingers wiggle.

  He wasn't dead, Lord, he wasn't dead. And she couldn't get up and let him fall, because he was going to come up and kill them if she did, and she couldn't just sit here forever, she hadn't told Lark to call the police and the old fool would just come over here and get himself killed and then she'd be all alone --

  She looked at Zenobia. The flashlight lit their faces up in flickers. Zenobia looked white again.

  Bled out white.

  She lifted what she had in her hand, what she'd carried upstairs.

  The hacksaw.

  "We can't," Olida said faintly. Zenobia's eyes were narrowed again, little slits, fiery eyes.

  "I got six kids, Olida," she said in a voice that Olida didn't even recognize. "This fucker, he going to kill both of us, going to kill more people, going to kill my kids maybe. He already kill Rita. She got kids too."

  "It ain't right."

  "It ain't right," Zenobia agreed. She leaned over and put the hacksaw on the Deacon's white wrist. "But I'm damn sure gonna do it."

  Olida turned her face away. The sound of the saw was like a hiss, hardly loud enough to hear over Zenobia's rapid loud Spanish and the screams from the other side of the trap door.

  She turned back once, and saw the blood everywhere, spurting out over Zenobia's face and hands and T-shirt. Zenobia's eyes were closed.

  She kept sawing, though. By touch.

  I ain't cleaning this up, Olida thought to herself, and knew she was about to start screaming, so she jammed her fingers in her mouth. It wasn't until Zenobia stopped sawing that she realized she'd bitten through her skin, and the blood in her mouth was her own.

  Zenobia pushed the bloody severed hands away with the end of the hacksaw and stood up. Olida looked up at her from where she sat on top of the trapdoor. Zenobia looked fearsome, like some crazy Aztec warrior, until her eyes filled up with tears and she collapsed in a heap and started screaming and crying things that Olida didn't understand except for the Jesus and Maria and Dios.

  Olida scooted off the trap door and raised it a little.

  The Deacon hit the stairs and slid down them, fell over the side. She heard him scuffle weakly, and picked up the flashlight and pointed it down toward him.

  He looked just like his father, all dressed up in black, face all white like one of the ghosts in the hall. He sat propped against the wall with his eyes open, staring up at her. She thought he was dead, then knew he wasn't.

  Oh, God, so much blood. Pumping out so fast. He didn't have long, just a minute, maybe less. Even though he was staring at her, she didn't think he really saw her. He kept trying to push his wrists together.

  Trying to pray. Oh dear sweet Jesus, trying to pray. His Daddy wanted him to pray, made him pray. He had to pray.

  She didn't really think about it, just slid over the edge of the hole and down onto the steps, down one bump at a time. Down on her knees in all that blood next to him, holding his wrists in her hands, the smell of burnt copper making her choke. Blood flooded out over her fingers, warm like a fountain in summer.

  "Our father who art in Heaven," she mumbled. Too slow. He was going so fast, so fast. "-- hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done -- "

  The pain hit her, hard. Her fingers jerked and locked on his cool skin, slick with blood. His eyes were wide and pretty and dying so fast, faster, she had to go faster.

  " -- earth as -- it -- in heaven -- "

  She couldn't get her breath against the pain. Oh Jesus, she thought. Oh Jesus I can't do it. I can't.

  "Forgive," the Deacon said for her, his last whisper. She gasped for air, fell forward against him.

  " -- trespasses -- " she mumbled, and forgot what she was saying.

  Somebody was talking to her, a quiet wh
ispering drone like bees.

  Was that a siren? Were they coming?

  It's time, she thought. Her heart beat two or three times more, and then the pain was bad, very bad, like the weight of the whole house was on her chest, and she couldn't get her breath and Zenobia was there holding her but she had blood all over her and Olida couldn't stop thinking about Lark on the other end of the phone and LaVelle gone all these years and all these sad scared people still here in this house and then

  she was downstairs.

  Walking.

  The smell was still there. Funny how they hadn't understood it before, smells of pain and fear, stinks that never went away. Olida breathed it in as she walked. Somebody came running around the corner and bumped into her.

  Rita-Mae looked back at her from a tangle of wild blond hair. She opened her mouth and nothing came out, just blood. It ran down her chin and her eyes filled up with tears of frustration and she tried to say something, but she couldn't make a sound.

  Olida put her arms around her and held her close, felt her melt away.

  "You can go home now, baby," she told her. "I love you."

  When she opened her eyes the man who'd left his brains on the wall was in the hall and he was crying, and his wife was with him, the pretty little redhead from Bloomington who'd died upstairs in the barbed wire closet. He'd come looking for her, Olida guessed, and the Deacon had been waiting.

  Poor pitiful things. Olida hugged them close and sent them home.

  Upstairs there were so many, so many, and she prayed for enough time and strength to help them. Little children who pressed cold against her, like Isobel. Old ladies crying naked. Men too proud to cry, to scared to hold back from her.

  In Deacon Graham's bathroom she found a young black woman hunched over in a little ball. Her hands were missing. Olida hugged her close. It wasn't LaVelle, but that didn't matter now, LaVelle was everywhere, in every face she saw.

  One after another, they came, and she accepted them and the house felt emptier with each one gone.

  In the end there were only two left. One sat on the stained attic stairs, weeping, terrified.

  She finished the prayer with him and led him home, and all the heat of her love warmed the cold places in his soul and he went singing.

  The last one was taller, blacker. In his hand he carried a Bible and a whip and a coil of rope and his eyes were as cold as poison.

  "What about me?" he said, and his voice was poison, too. "Aren't you going to save me, sister?"

  Even though he was afraid, he was so cold, like dirty ice that grew in the freezer, old dirty ice with secrets locked inside. Olida looked him over and shook her head.

  "No," she said. "You died too late, Reverend Graham."

  She turned her back and walked away, up the attic steps. If he tried to stop her, he couldn't touch her; when she looked back, he was standing there, just a shadow, all his power gone.

  The house was so quiet.

  She laid down there in Zenobia's arms again, as if she had never moved.

  Her body became light, as light as a girl's, and the warmth went through her and took her away.

  She heard Zenobia praying. It was a sweet sound.

  -- end --