by Annie Bellet
Swapt clean off, his head went flying, his body dropped straight down. The other one got a hand to his belt and scrabbled for a pistol while Ma’am stepped up and hauled back to come round for his head too. Which one first, then—pistol or axe? He got the gun out and up and shot. Missed, though, even that close, his hand useless as a drunk’s, he was so scared. The axe knocked his chest in and him off his feet. Ma’am stomped the body twice getting her axe back out. With one hand she plucked Easter up off the ground to her feet. “Run, girl!”
They ran.
They should have gone straight into the woods, but their feet took them onto the familiar trail. Just in the trees’ shadows, a big white man looked up grinning from a child small and dead on the ground. He must have caught some flash or glimpse of swinging wet iron because that white man’s grin fell off, he loosed an ear-splitting screech, before Ma’am chopped that face and scream in half.
“Rawly?” Out of sight in the trees, some other white man called. “You all right over there, Rawly?” The fallen man, head in halves like the first red slice into a melon, made no answer. Nor was Ma’am’s axe wedging out of his spine soon enough. Other white men took up the call of that name, and there was crash and movement in the trees.
Ma’am and Easter ran off the trail the other way. The wrong way again. They should have forgotten house and home and kept on forever into wilderness. Though probably it didn’t matter anymore at that point. The others found the body—axe stuck in it—and cared not at all for the sight of a dead white man, or what had killed him. Ma’am and Easter thrashed past branches, crackled and snapped over twigs, and behind them in the tangled brush shouts of pursuit kept on doubling. What sounded like four men clearly had to be at least eight, and then just eight couldn’t half account for such noise. Some men ahorse, some with dogs. Pistols and rifles firing blind.
They burst into the yard and ran up to the house. Ma’am slammed the bar onto the door. For a moment, they hunched over trying only to get air enough for life, and then Ma’am went to the wall and snatched off Brother’s old Springfield from the war. Where the durn cartridges at, and the caps, the doggone ramrod . . . ? Curses and questions, both were plain on Ma’am’s face as she looked round the house abruptly disordered and strange by the knock-knock of Death at the door. White men were already in the yard.
The glass fell out of the back window and shattered all over the iron stove. Brother, up on his back legs, barked in the open window, his forepaws on the windowsill.
“Go on, Easter.” Ma’am let the rifle fall to the floor. “Never mind what I said before. Just go on with your brother now. I’m paying your way.”
Easter was too afraid to say or do or think, and Brother at the back window was just barking and barking. She was too scared.
In her meanest voice, Ma’am said, “Take off that dress, Easter Sunday Mack!”
Sobbing breathlessly, Easter could only obey.
“All of it, Easter, take it off. And throw them old nasty beads on the floor!”
Easter did that too, Brother barking madly.
Ma’am said, “Now—”
Rifles stuttered thunderously and the dark wood door of the house lit up, splintering full of holes of daylight. In front of it Ma’am shuddered awfully and hot blood speckled Easter’s naked body even where she stood across the room. Ma’am sighed one time, got down gently, and stretched out on the floor. White men stomped onto the porch.
Easter fell, caught herself on her hands, and the bad one went out under her so she smacked down flat on the floor. But effortlessly she bounded up and through the window. Brother was right there when Easter landed badly again. He kept himself to her swift limp as they tore away neck-and-neck through Ma’am’s back garden and on into the woods.*
* Stop here, with the escape. Or no; I don’t know. I wish there were some kind of way to offer the reader the epilogue, and yet warn them off too. I know it couldn’t be otherwise, but it’s just so grim.
—Dad
Epilogue
They were back! Right out there sniffing in the bushes where the rabbits were. Two great big ole dogs! About to shout for her husband, Anna Beth remembered he was lying down in the back with one of his headaches. So she took down the Whitworth and loaded it herself. Of course she knew how to fire a rifle, but back in the War Between the States they’d hand-picked Michael-Thomas to train the sharpshooters of his brigade, and then given him one of original Southern Crosses, too, for so many Yankees killed. Teary-eyed and squinting from his headaches, he still never missed what he meant to hit. Anna Beth crept back to the bedroom and opened the door a crack.
“You ’wake?” she whispered. “Michael-Thomas?”
Out of the shadows: “Annie?” His voice, breathy with pain. “What is it?”
“I seen ’em again! They’re right out there in the creepers and bushes by the rabbit burrows.”
“You sure, Annie? My head’s real bad. Don’t go making me get up and it ain’t nothing out there again.”
“I just now seen ’em, Michael-Thomas. Big ole nasty dogs like nothing you ever saw before.” Better the little girl voice—that never failed: “Got your Whitworth right here, honey. All loaded up and ret’ to go.”
Michael-Thomas sighed. “Here I come, then.”
The mattress creaked, his cane thumped the floor, and there was a grunt as his bad leg had to take some weight as he rose to standing. (Knee shot off at the Petersburg siege, and not just his knee, either . . .) Michael-Thomas pushed the door wide, his squinting eyes red, pouched under with violet bags. He’d taken off his half-mask, and so Anna Beth felt her stomach lurch and go funny, as usual. Friends at the church, and Mama, and just everybody had assured her she would—sooner or later—but Anna Beth never had gotten used to seeing what some chunk of Yankee artillery had done to Michael-Thomas’ face. Supposed to still be up in there, that chip of metal, under the ruin and crater where his left cheek . . . “Here you go.” Anna Beth passed off the Whitworth to him.
Rifle in hand, Michael-Thomas gimped himself over to where she pointed—the open window. There he stood his cane against the wall and laboriously got down kneeling. With practiced grace he lay the rifle across the window sash, nor did he even bother with the telescopic sight at this distance—just a couple hundred yards. He shot, muttering, “Damn! Just look at ’em,” a moment before he did so. The kick liked to knock him over.
Anna Beth had fingertips jammed in her ears against the report, but it was loud anyhow. Through the window and down the yard she saw the bigger dog, dirty mustard color—had been nosing round in the honeysuckle near the rabbit warren—suddenly drop from view into deep weeds. Looked like the littler one didn’t have the sense to dash off into the woods. All while Michael-Thomas reloaded, the other dog nudged its nose downward at the carcass unseen in the weeds, and just looked up and all around, whining—pitiful if it weren’t so ugly. Michael-Thomas shot that one too.
“Ah,” he said. “Oh.” He swapped the Whitworth for his cane, leaving the rifle on the floor under the window. “My head’s killing me.” Michael-Thomas went right on back to the bedroom to lie down again.
He could be relied on to hit just what he aimed for, so Anna Beth didn’t fear to see gore-soaked dogs yelping and kicking, only half-dead, out there in the untamed, overgrown end of the yard, should she take a notion to venture out that way for a look-see. Would them dogs be just as big, up close and stone dead, as they’d looked from far-off and alive?
But it weren’t carcasses nor live dogs, either, back there where the weeds grew thickest. Two dead niggers, naked as sin. Gal with the back of her head blown off, and buck missing his forehead and half his brains too. Anna Beth come running back up to the house, hollering.
* * *
Kai Ashante Wilson’s stories, “Super Bass” and “Kaiju maximus®,” can be read, respectively, online at Tor.com and in the December 2015 issue of Lightspeed magazine. His novella The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is available for purchase f
rom all fine e-book purveyors. His novelette, «Légendaire.», can be read in the anthology Stories for Chip, which celebrates the legacy of science fiction grandmaster Samuel R. Delany. Kai Ashante Wilson lives in New York City.
The Litany Of Earth
By Ruthanna Emrys
After a year in San Francisco, my legs grew strong again. A hill and a half lay between the bookstore where I found work and the apartment I shared with the Kotos. Every morning and evening I walked, breathing mist and rain into my desert-scarred lungs, and every morning the walk was a little easier. Even at the beginning, when my feet ached all day from the unaccustomed strain, it was a hill and a half that I hadn’t been permitted for seventeen years.
In the evenings, the radio told what I had missed: an earth-spanning war, and atrocities in Europe to match and even exceed what had been done to both our peoples. We did not ask, the Kotos and I, whether our captors too would eventually be called to justice. The Japanese American community, for the most part, was trying to put the camps behind them. And it was not the way of my folk—who had grown resigned to the camps long before the Kotos’ people were sent to join us, and who no longer had a community on land—to dwell on impossibilities.
That morning, I had received a letter from my brother. Caleb didn’t write often, and hearing from him was equal parts relief and uncomfortable reminder. His grammar was good, but his handwriting and spelling revealed the paucity of his lessons. He had written:
The town is a ruin, but not near enouff of one. Houses still stand; even a few windos are whole. It has all been looked over most carefully long ago, but I think forgotten or ignorred since.
And:
I looked through our library, and those of other houses, but there is not a book or torn page left on the shelves. I have saugt permisson to look throuh the collecton at Miskatonic, but they are putting me off. I very much fear that the most importent volumes were placed in some government warehouse to be forgotten—as we were.
So, our family collections were still lost. I remembered the feel of the old pages, my father leaning over me, long fingers tracing a difficult passage as he explained its meaning—and my mother, breaking in with some simple suggestion that cut to the heart of it. Now, the only books I had to work with were the basic texts and a single children’s spellbook in the store’s backroom collection. The texts, in fact, belonged to Charlie—my boss—and I bartered my half-remembered childhood Enochian and R’lyehn for access.
Charlie looked up and frowned as the bells announced my arrival. He had done that from the first time I came in to apply, and so far as I knew gave all his customers the same glare.
“Miss Marsh.”
I closed my eyes and breathed in the paper-sweet dust. “I’m not late, Mr. Day.”
“We need to finish the inventory this morning. You can start with the westerns.”
I stuck my purse behind the counter and headed back toward the piles of spine-creased Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey. “What I like about you,” I said honestly, “is that you don’t pretend to be civil.”
“And dry off first.” But no arguments, by now, that I ought to carry an umbrella or wear a jacket. No questions about why I liked the damp and chill, second only to the company of old books. Charlie wasn’t unimaginative, but he kept his curiosity to himself.
I spent the rest of the morning shelving. Sometimes I would read a passage at random, drinking in the impossible luxury of ink organized into meaningful patterns. Very occasionally I would bring one forward and read a bit aloud to Charlie, who would harumph at me and continue with his work, or read me a paragraph of his own.
By midafternoon I was holding down the register while Charlie did something finicky and specific with the cookbooks. The bells jangled. A man poked his head in, sniffed cautiously, and made directly for me.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for books on the occult—for research.” He smiled, a salesman’s too-open expression, daring me to disapprove. I showed him to the shelf where we kept Crowley and other such nonsense, and returned to the counter frowning thoughtfully.
After a few minutes, he returned. “None of that is quite what I’m looking for. Do you keep anything more . . . esoteric?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. What you see is what we have.”
He leaned across the counter. His scent, ordinary sweat and faint cologne, insinuated itself against me, and I stepped back out of reach. “Maybe something in a storage room? I’m sure you must have more than these turn-of-the-century fakers. Some Al-Hazred, say? Prinn’s Vermis?”
I tried not to flinch. I knew the look of the old families, and he had none of it—tall and dark-haired and thin-faced, conventional attractiveness marred by nothing more than a somewhat square nose. Nor was he cautious in revealing his familiarity with the Aeonist canon, as Charlie had been. He was either stupid, or playing with me.
“I’ve never heard of either,” I said. “We don’t specialize in esoterica; I’m afraid you’d better try another store.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” He drew himself straighter, and I took another step back. He smiled again, in a way I thought was intended to be friendly, but seemed rather the bare-toothed threat of an ape. “Miss Aphra Marsh. I know you’re familiar with these things, and I’m sure we can help each other.”
I held my ground and gave my mother’s best glare. “You have me mistaken, sir. If you are not in the store to purchase goods that we actually have, I strongly suggest that you look elsewhere.”
He shrugged and held out his hands. “Perhaps later.”
Charlie limped back to the counter as the door rang the man’s departure. “Customer?”
“No.” My hands were trembling, and I clasped them behind my back. “He wanted to know about your private shelf. Charlie, I don’t like him. I don’t trust him.”
He frowned again and glanced toward the employees-only door. “Thief?”
That would have been best, certainly. My pulse fluttered in my throat. “Well informed, if so.”
Charlie must have seen how hard I was holding myself. He found the metal thermos and offered it silently. I shook my head, and with a surge of dizziness found myself on the floor. I wrapped my arms around my knees and continued to shake my head at whatever else might be offered.
“He might be after the books,” I forced out at last. “Or he might be after us.”
He crouched next to me, moving slowly with his bad knee and the stiffness of joints beginning to admit mortality. “For having the books?”
I shook my head again. “Yes. Or for being the sort of people who would have them.” I stared at my interlaced fingers, long and bony, as though they might be thinking about growing extra joints. There was no way to explain the idea I had, that the smiling man might come back with more men, and guns, and vans that locked in the back. And probably he was only a poorly spoken dabbler, harmless. “He knew my name.”
Charlie pulled himself up and into a chair, settling with a grunt. “I don’t suppose he could have been one of those Yith you told me about?”
I looked up, struck by the idea. I had always thought of the Great Race as solemn and wise, and meeting one was supposed to be very lucky. But they were also known to be arrogant and abrupt, when they wanted something. It was a nice thought. “I don’t think so. They have phrases, secret ways of making themselves known to people who would recognize them. I’m afraid he was just a man.”
“Well.” Charlie got to his feet. “No help for it unless he comes back. Do you need to go home early?”
That was quite an offer, coming from Charlie, and I couldn’t bear the thought that I looked like I needed it. I eased myself off the floor, the remaining edge of fear making me slow and clumsy. “Thank you. I’d rather stay here. Just warn me if you see him again.”
• • • •
The first change in my new life, also heralded by a customer . . .
It is not yet a month since my return to the world. I am still weak, my s
kin sallow from malnourishment and dehydration. After my first look in a good mirror, I have shaved my brittle locks to the quick, and the new are growing in ragged, but thick and rich and dark like my mother’s. My hair as an adult woman, which I have never seen ’til now.
I am shelving when a familiar phrase stings my ears. Hope and danger, tingling together as I drift forward, straining to hear more.
The blond man is trying to sell Charlie a copy of the Book of the Grey People, but it soon becomes apparent that he knows little but the title. I should be more cautious than I am next, should think more carefully about what I reveal. But I like Charlie, his gruffness and his honesty and the endless difference between him and everything I have hated or loved. I don’t like to see him taken in.
The blond man startles when I appear by his shoulder, but when I pull the tome over to flip the pages, he tries to regroup. “Now just a minute here, young lady. This book is valuable.”
