by Holly Black
“Who says?” demanded Brad.
“Maybe he would if he could.” Dorothy almost left it at that, but she’d been alone with the idea long enough. “I think he was in my house.”
“You say one more word about him and you won’t like what you get,” Charmaine deafened her by promising. “He never went anywhere he wasn’t wanted.”
Then that should be Charmaine’s house, Dorothy reflected, and at once she saw how to be rid of him. She didn’t speak while the Bulloughs stared at her, although it looked as if she was heeding Charmaine’s warning. When they straggled towards their house she packed away her tools and headed for the florist’s. “Visiting again?” the assistant said, and it was easiest to tell her yes, though Dorothy had learned to stay clear of the churchyard during the week, when it tended to be occupied by drunks and other addicts. She wouldn’t be sending a remembrance to the paper either. She didn’t want to put Harry in the same place as Keanu, even if she wished she’d had the boy to teach.
Waiting for nightfall made her feel uncomfortably like a criminal. Of course that was silly, and tomorrow she could discuss next year’s holiday with Helena over lunch. She could have imagined that her unjustified guilt was raising the scents of the wreath. It must be the smell of the house, though she had the notion that it masked some less welcome odour. At last the dwindling day released her, but witnesses were loitering on both sides of the road.
She would be committing no crime—more like the opposite. As she tried to believe they were too preoccupied with their needs to notice or at least to identify her, a police car cruised into the road. In seconds the pavements were deserted, and Dorothy followed the car, hoping for once that it wouldn’t stop at the Bullough house.
It didn’t, but she did. She limped up the garden path as swiftly as her legs would work, past a motor bicycle that the younger Bulloughs had tired of riding up and down the street, and posted the wreath through the massively brass-hinged mahogany door of the pebbledashed terrace house. She heard Charmaine and an indeterminate number of her children screaming at one another, and wondered whether they would sound any different if they had a more than unexpected visitor. “Go home to your mother,” she murmured.
The police were out of sight. Customers were reappearing from the alleys between the houses. She did her best not to hurry, though she wasn’t anxious to be nearby when any of the Bulloughs found the wreath. She was several houses distant from her own when she glimpsed movement outside her gate.
The flowers tied to the lamp-standard were soaked in orange light. Most of them were blackened by it, looking rotten. Though the concrete post was no wider than her hand, a shape was using it for cover. As she took a not entirely willing step a bunch of flowers nodded around the post and dodged back. She thought the skulker was using them to hide whatever was left of its face. She wouldn’t be scared away from her own house. She stamped towards it, making all the noise she could, and the remnant of a body sidled around the post, keeping it between them. She avoided it as much as she was able on the way to her gate. As she unlocked the door she heard a scuttling of less than feet behind her. It was receding, and she managed not to look while it grew inaudible somewhere across the road.
The house still smelled rather too intensely floral. In the morning she could tone that down while she went for lunch. She made up for the dinner she’d found unappetising last night, and bookmarked pages in the travel guide to show Helena, and even found reasons to giggle at a comedy on television. After all that and the rest of the day she felt ready for bed.
She stooped to peer under it, but the carpet was bare, though a faint scent lingered in the room. It seemed unthreatening as she lay in bed. Could the flowers have been intended as some kind of peace offering? In a way she’d been the last person to speak to Keanu. The idea fell short of keeping her awake, but the smell of flowers roused her. It was stronger and more suggestive of rot, and most of all it was closer. The flowers were in bed with her. There were insects as well, which didn’t entirely explain the jerky movements of the mass of stalks that nestled against her. She was able to believe they were only stalks until their head, decorated or masked or overgrown with shrivelled flowers, lolled against her face.
Melanie Klein Said
Robert McVey
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein said that life itself is an aberration. Now that’s going for it. I believe when she was a child, she was blamed for her brother’s death by her parents, but, as always, I haven’t looked into the matter. But do not one and one make two in this instance? On the whole, per Melanie Klein, there should be only rocks and not even lichen on them to achieve a true state of nature, and so maybe she did kill him, and then said to her parents, doubting Thomases heretofore of her precept, “There, see what I mean?” But this was not to be my way. I stood in front of the class at age nine with a crayon drawing of a burning house and put my forefinger through a crayoned second-story window and cried, “Help, help, help!,” wiggling the finger wildly. The teacher had told us to do drawings for a little girl named Anita, who had been burned out of her home last week in Philadelphia. It had been in the papers. She would be sent the drawings. Mine was a lively art, not like Melanie’s demonstration. But what would it be like if any children were able to say at such a juncture, “What in God’s name are crayon drawings made by strangers going to do for a homeless child? Do you think Anita wants to reflect on twenty-eight versions of the inferno from which she somehow escaped with her life? Is your intention to traumatize and retraumatize this child twenty-eight-fold, courtesy of Crayola? Or does it go deeper than that, are you demonstrating for Anita your belief in Freud’s concept of the death instinct, Miss Neary? Are you attempting via artwork to induce in this child a regret that she ignored her unconscious urge to run back into the flames? In this attempt, are you using us as your cat’s paw? Did you know Melanie Klein said life itself is an aberration?” One by one we all got in front of the class and showed our drawings. Mine was the only one which had a body part bursting out a window. Maybe from that I could have gone on to become a full-blooded male, a Jackson Pollack type, or, if not an artist, a hard-ass prosecutor type, or a soldier-of-fortune reporter type drunkenly heckling photo-op politicos in a war zone. But this as it happened was my high tide. I think it was Anita’s, too. I think Anita burned her own house down, and I hope she did. No school for her the next day. No fish on Friday. Daddy’s filthy porn an ash. Not only living things can be destroyed, Melanie. Everything can go, and people can live free, Miss Neary: Anita’s Law.
Gaslight
Jeffrey Ford
We first heard about the child one evening at the Monday Afternoon Club from old Matterson, last heir to an empire of sweatshops. We’d been going round in a circle offering up stories of the supernatural to pass a dreary winter’s eve. The ones we’d come out with so far were of a pedestrian nature—the haunted governess, the young woman who sees her father in an art museum in Italy at the moment of his death three continents away, the romance of certain old shoes—but then it was Matterson’s turn, and the poor codger seemed to be experiencing some bout of internal distress. Well into his fourth whiskey and passing wind like a bellows in Hell, he came out with it, and when he did, he gave an unfeigned shiver, as did we all.
The tale held us captive in the face of its teller’s overripe departures from decorum. Mr. Steel pinched his nostrils with thumb and pointer and begged a jot more speed in the telling. Matterson was not to be hurried, though. “All in due course,” he said, and paused to run his fingers through his prodigious sideburns, like a pair of kittens, while from his southern hemisphere there issued a long slow ripping noise, proof that his trousers had seen their last. It was at this point that my man, Hubert, reached for a handkerchief. I’ll admit, I was also rather faint, but the lure of the harrowing saga won out over self-preservation, and I dare say we all, Steel, Hubert, Mr. Cipus, and myself, tears forming in the corners of our eyes, forfeited no mean parcel of our respective life
spans to hear it.
Matterson gave ample evidence of his own proximity to doom, and yet some infernal genius still burned and burnished his descriptions of the evil child, the manner in which the scamp emerged from the mist, his dripping paleness, the sharp teeth. And the setting, with its glistening gas-lit cobblestones and shadowed alleys gave the thing a ring of the genuine. His technique abolished all disbelief, even when we learned that the boy curled himself up, small as a squirrel, in a woman’s handbag outside the opera one evening and was ferried, unknowingly, to her apartment. We accepted this strangeness gratefully as if it were fresh air. Even after the woman had gone to bed, and the sickly little phantom let himself out of her bag and crept to her side, we had no care for why or how, but wished only to know what was next to happen. Matterson took great pains with the scene of the woman’s disemboweling. Every grim detail was gilded with adjectives as the boy clawed his way into her womb. “Ungodly,” said Mr. Cipus, in his unfailing ability to state the obvious, and if I’m not mistaken, my good stoic, Hubert’s, hands trembled slightly. I’d heard few things more ghastly, but this outlandishness was exceeded soon after when Matterson revealed the number of victims and recounted the specifics of their bloody deaths, punctuating each episode with a sulfurous staccato note reminiscent of the piccolo.
“Too much,” cried Steel.
“There is ever more,” replied Matterson, and with a volley of thunder, and a cruel smile upon his lips, he launched into the biography of the spirit. “Tommy Tim was the lad’s name.” He told us that in the neighborhoods around Wessel Street, a ditty was sung about the specter. I prayed he would not sing it, but he did, in a mock child’s voice, accompanying himself with a complicated score like some mad Bach of the posterior.
Tommy Tim, Tommy Tim
Look below, it is him
Climbing up your lady’s leg
Climbing for your lady’s egg
Rip, rip, rip, and then
Tommy Tim is home again.
Most disturbing. And yet not the last word, for Matterson went on, dispensing horror from both ends, relaying the dismal life of the boy who would rise from a lonely, unmarked grave to wreak fear upon the living with his desire to be born again and seek that love which had been absent in his first go round. By this point I’d broken into a full sweat and had grown dizzy amidst the barrage of the storyteller’s fromage. It was in that staggered condition, my thoughts verily whirling like a pinwheel, that I learned that only minutes after birth the lad had been trundled in a dirty blanket and left upon a doorstep—not a lucky one. He was raised in a drab orphanage where he was regularly beaten. Upon reaching the age of eight, he was sent to labor at the Gas Works. Although I swooned in and out of consciousness, I saw it all in my mind’s eyes, a tapestry of destitution, depravity, and sodden depression. When, in Matterson’s recounting, poor Tommy Tim, weak from incipient starvation, slips on the ledge above the putrefaction vat at work and plunges headlong into the boiling slurry of detritus, I, unable to draw a decent breath, also fell forward. I could feel Hubert catch me and heard his voice, “Bring the smelling salts … and for God’s sake, a fan.” Overcome by Matterson’s wicked craft, I went out cold.
Perhaps not even a minute later, I came to with a sweet breeze of brisk air laving my face. Hubert had dragged me bodily to the window at the opposite end of the parlor and opened it halfway. Steel, Mr. Cipus, myself and my trusty man, all crowded around the portal. Behind us, still belaboring the atmosphere with raucous indiscretions, Matterson retrieved a cigar from his jacket pocket. As he cut the tip and tamped the end, he laughed and said, “I’ve reserved the most disturbing part for last.”
“I’m surprised you’ve got anything left,” said Steel.
Matterson lifted one cheek off the chair and snarled angrily. He took out his box of matches and setting one against the flint, said, “Are you familiar with the cuckoo bird?”
We four remained silent.
“The cuckoo,” he said, “invades the nest of another species of bird while the adults are out hunting, destroys the existing eggs and lays its own in their place before vanishing. In a similar way, Tommy Tim hoped to trick some woman into raising him, into loving him. In his ghostly child’s mind he cannot comprehend how his brutal incursions into the wombs of the living, the strangling of the expected child, etc., negate his desires as he tries to fulfill them.”
Matterson struck the match but it failed.
Mr. Cipus understood before the rest of us that a spark might be fatal. “Duck, gentlemen,” he said.
We did just that as Matterson, expelling a parade of gurglers, struck another. This one lit and a heartbeat later he exploded in an impressive fireball that consumed his chair. He burned fiercely and we frantically summoned Emmonds, the club’s retainer, to bring bottles of soda water with which we extinguished the blaze. In the billowing smoke that resulted, Tommy Tim’s figure appeared briefly. We all saw it. He held his arms out to us and called, “Daddy.” We all confessed to feeling a chill. Then he vanished with the smoke, and Matterson sifted down to a pile of ash.
Endless Encore
Will Ludwigsen
At least she still comes to see me, the little girl in the white and lavender dress—some people would have left me behind to get help.
Every day in what I assume is the late afternoon, when the sun is far enough to the horizon to cast the edge of the well in shadow, she comes. All I can really see of her at first is her silhouette, the eclipse of her small head and dangling curls against the light. From so far down, she looks even smaller than she probably is, though her voice can somehow always find its way to me.
“Hello,” she says every time. “Would you like a show?”
It doesn’t do any good to say yes or to say no or to say, “Can you please go for help? I think my leg is broken.” She doesn’t seem to care much about how I fell down here or why I haven’t left.
Whether I say yes or I say no, the puppets descend on their long strings. They’re the old-fashioned wooden kind with patches of cloth and hair pasted on their flat surfaces. One seems to be a man dressed in Edwardian style with a brown-gray woolen suit and hat, and the other seems to be a little girl dressed in a white and lavender dress with blonde curls. Both wear paper fairy wings on their backs.
I know the story by heart now.
“Hello, little Lizabeth,” says the man in the brown-gray suit.
“Hello, Duncan,” says the girl in the lavender dress.
“Will you come walk with me?” says the man.
“May I take my puppets?” says the girl.
“Of course,” he replies. “Maybe we can make a show.”
The puppets’ legs jerk and their arms swing, the little joints squeaking as they walk and walk. This part always strikes me as tedious for a puppet show, and I’ve wondered if the little girl is performing a literal time or distance. If she is, I have no idea how far or how long because neither has much meaning here in the well.
“Will you come sit with me?” says the man.
“Where?” asks the girl.
“Over here,” says the man. “On my lap.”
Both pairs of legs draw up and the puppets dangle a moment, maybe thinking, maybe admiring the willows together. To me, they’re staring at wet stone walls furred over with moss.
“You’re going to miss your sister, aren’t you, Lizabeth?” asks the man.
“Very much, Duncan.”
“Am I wrong to suspect that you’re going to miss me, too?”
“Even more, Duncan.”
“We won’t be far, you know. Down the road a few miles in our own home, a place you’re always welcome, with all the woods you could want.”
“But who will come to my puppet shows? Father hasn’t the time, and Mother doesn’t like them.”
“Lizabeth, we’ll build you your own theater at Barrowgrange. A grand one, with enough room for you and all your marionettes.”
The girl puppet hangs her arms and head,
swinging quietly in the stale air above me. “What about you? Won’t you be playing with me anymore?”
“Oh, Lizabeth!” The puppet reaches for her and she tugs away. “We can’t stage plays for fairies in the well forever, you know. I wish we could. I’ll miss those plays, truly. But when people get older, they stop climbing around dry wells and imagining fairy audiences at the bottom. Someday soon, you’ll understand.”
“Understand what?”
The puppet in the brown suit shakes its head slowly. “That people grow up. Me, your sister … even you. And grown ups play in different ways. You won’t want to play with puppets someday, just as Mary and I don’t.”
“I’m going to play forever.” The girl puppet’s arms came together as though they were folded. “I want to do one more puppet show.”
“Lizabeth—”
“I want to.”
“I shouldn’t even be here. The preparations for the wedding—”
“You be the prince and I’ll be the princess.” Then, in a slightly different voice accented with a stereotypical aristocracy, she says, “‘Prince Duncan, Prince Duncan, whither are you going on the day of our wedding?’”
The other puppet hangs there, doing nothing.
“‘Today was the day you swore to marry me,’” says the girl’s voice.
“Is that what this is about, Lizabeth? Something I said when I was a boy, something to please your heart when you were sad?” The puppet reached and this time rested his wooden hand on the other’s shoulder. “Oh, Lizabeth. You’re still so young. Mary and I, we—”
The girl puppet whirls on its strings and reaches for him with her woodblock arms. “Mary and you! Mary and you! Mary and you!”
The puppets tangle now, the limbs clopping together. Their strings twist and twine into one cord. They clatter on one wall and then the other before dropping into the mud beside me. The head of the man puppet seems bent back at a horrible angle, and the girl puppet rests hers on his chest.
