Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  We sat in silence for a long time, watching the candle burn lower, until she blew out the flame, pushed her chair back, stood up. “Not another word,” she said. “Not another word of your lies.”

  Sitting on the hard curb has made my butt sore and I am sweating a sour scent. My nose keeps running and I have to wipe it on my sleeve. How can she do this to me? I ask myself over and over again, even as I accept that nothing I’ve said has worked. It’s time to try something else.

  I hear her before I see her. She is clicking and jangling and I remember how I used to love the sound of her; next comes the scent, the smell of sweet smoke and burned flowers, the way the kitchen smells after one of her ceremonies. When I see her, my heart opens like one of those flowers before it turns to ash. She doesn’t understand; all this time she pretended to have the power when I’m the one who does.

  She sees me, and for a moment I think I’ve been wrong about her. She looks like she knows what is about to happen. “Marissa.”

  “He touches me,” I say.

  “Marissa, don’t do this to me.”

  “He comes into my room in the dark.”

  She is just a woman, after all. Not old, exactly, but certainly not young. The sun is low in the sky behind her. She looks so insubstantial that she could be made out of paper. We look at each other for a while, then she walks over to the car, opens the door, and gets inside. After a moment I join her. We drive home in silence.

  THE STONE WITCH

  ISOBELLE CARMODY

  HERE’S THE THING. I hate kids. Always have.

  I mean, I know the job of the race, biologically speaking, is to achieve immortality through reproduction, but the idea of getting impregnated and blowing up like a balloon as I serve as a carrier and service unit for this other person who will eventually burst out of me in the most terrifying way imaginable, then carry on using me one way or another for the rest of my life, is right up there with throwing myself off the top of a twenty-story building. If I have a biological clock, it is digital and does not tick. Moreover, I am fine with being solo. I mean manless as well as kidless. Not everyone needs someone, no matter what the greeting cards say.

  So it seemed like the height of unfairness that I should have a kid seated beside me for the trip. I mean, this was business class and I thought they banned children. Or was it just that adults with kids never got upgraded? Anyway, what was with spending all that money on a kid, given this one was easily small enough to curl up and sleep in an economy-class-size seat?

  Seating the child next to me, the flight attendant gave me one of those hundred-watt beaming smiles that makes you want to squint or confess something, and asked me to keep an eye out. For what? I would have said, but I was speechless with indignation to have booked business class and find myself a designated child watcher. No doubt some of what was going through my mind showed because for a moment the honey-pie smile froze, but flight attendants are trained to cope with anything, and before I could marshal my objections, she looked at the kid and said reassuringly that she would come back after takeoff.

  I watched her walk away twitching her ass in a perky way, wondering, Why me? I mean, I am not old enough to have a grandmumsy look, and I don’t have that flowerlike eagerness that beautiful young women have precisely in order to entice a man to want to make them a mother. I am not curvy. I am skinny in some places and I have actual fat in other places, and the end result is not the sort of woman men gaze at in magazines with thunderstruck longing. I don’t do vacuous smiles or friendly aimless chat. Especially I don’t do it with a kid. Come to think of it, I have probably not spoken to a kid since I was one, and even then I didn’t much like them.

  I looked at the kid. I could not tell if it was male or female because it was a skinny, malnourished waif with jeans, a hooded jacket, and a choppy, chin-length bob that might have been a designer do but also could have been the result of someone having at it with the nail scissors in a dark room. The kid looked back at me. The disconcerting thing about this was that it did not smile. It just looked in that steady, slightly creepy unsmiling way little kids have. I wondered how old it was. Ten? Eleven? Seven?

  I mean, how do you tell? I knew it wasn’t a teen yet because it didn’t sneer.

  I could have asked but decided I didn’t want to know badly enough to break my rule about never making conversation with anyone on a plane at the start of a long journey. No matter how interesting the stranger next to you is, you will not want to spend thirteen hours talking to them. Ergo, no conversation or eye contact until the last fifteen minutes of the flight, and then only the sort of fleeting friendliness you feel toward other survivors of a flight. The eye contact thing was already blown, of course, but the kid would not speak unless I spoke to it, I was sure, and I had no intention of doing that.

  I fumed silently about having a kid next to me until the plane started taxiing down the runway, then I gave up fuming for imagining all the terrible things that could happen if the plane tilted and caught its wing on the ground, an engine burst into flames, or a terrorist leaped out brandishing a glass knife. I have always had a terrific imagination, and this was one of the occasions—like when you wake in the middle of the night and wonder in the pitch dark what woke you—when an imagination is not a good thing.

  “You don’t need to be scared,” the kid said in this slightly raspy voice.

  I glared at it. “I’m not scared,” I said frostily, consciously loosening my white-knuckled grip on the armrests.

  “You look scared,” said the kid.

  “I am not scared. I am concentrating,” I said, enunciating carefully through clenched teeth.

  The kid said nothing, and I looked at the back of the seat in front of me and concentrated on not looking scared or showing by any outward sign of how much I hate takeoffs, which is only a little less than how much I loathe landings and a little more than how much I hate flying. My irritation at the kid was swallowed up in a spurt of fear at the slight judder in the plane carriage as we took off. I wanted to ring for the flight attendant and point it out except she would be buckled in her seat, and if she came, everyone in the plane would know who had risked her life by selfishly summoning her while the seat belt sign was illuminated.

  I listened to the clunk of the wheel carriage retracting and told myself that if there were anything wrong, the pilot would notice and land the plane. I looked out the window, but as far as I could tell we were not turning back. We were, however, tilted heavily to one side.

  What if they had forgotten to put petrol in one of the tanks? But again, the pilot, or copilot, would notice and turn us around. If we were not turning around, nothing was wrong. The mantra had just started to calm the hysterical dialogue I always had with myself after takeoff when I noticed a faint knocking sound. I have extremely good hearing. It is a curse because I can always hear things no one else hears.

  I said my mantra again: Nothing is wrong if we are not turning around. Even if the captain couldn’t hear the things I could, he had all those instruments. They would tell him if something was wrong.

  By this time, the plane had stopped climbing and banking and we had leveled out. The belt sign went off with a loud ping, and a smooth voice announced that we could get up and move around if we wanted but if we stayed sitting, we should keep our seat belts on. This seemed to me to be a barely disguised warning from the captain that leaving the seat was risking your life, in case we hit an air pocket or an unexpected hurricane, so I remained seated and buckled.

  I closed my eyes and breathed slowly.

  “Are you still concentrating?” asked the kid.

  I stayed as I was and hoped it would think I had gone to sleep. I stayed that way for a long time, but when I opened my eyes a slit and looked sideways without turning my head, I encountered the kid’s rapt dissective gaze, which clearly had been on me the whole time.

  “Are you meditating?” the kid asked solemnly.

  “I am minding my own business,” I said cold
ly, and leaned forward to dig my book out of the pocket of the seat in front of me. I unlatched my tray table so I could rest the tome on it, and opened it up. It was a book on birds. The kid said nothing, and although reducing it to repressed silence had been my desire it was not long before I began to find its silence distracting. Surely it was unnatural for a child to be that quiet. I wanted to look at it but feared it was still staring at me. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I could feel its eyes boring into me. I licked my lips and pretended absorption. I read the same paragraph several times without taking it in, with growing irritation, knowing that if I did not soon turn the page, the kid would want to know why. I tried again to concentrate on the book, but to no avail. I closed the book and set it squarely on the tray table, just as the flight attendant bent over to pass the child a yellow plastic purse.

  I turned to watch the kid accept it gravely. It did not smile, and it cheered me slightly that this seemed to disconcert the attendant. Her peachy pink smile dimmed, and she asked the kid if it was okay. She did not look at me, but I sensed that she suspected me of doing something to the kid. I felt the guilty heat glow in my cheeks. It was intolerable because I blush easily and noticeably, and when her eyes flickered over me, they seemed to harden slightly.

  I did not know what to do. To say I was innocent would be like the man saying he no longer beat his wife. Silence would be the wiser course, given that the child had made no complaint. Even so, I noticed another flight attendant passing by a minute later giving me a hostile look, and imagined the first one telling the others to keep an eye on me. That infuriated me, but there was not a thing I could do about it.

  I closed my eyes, reclined my seat as far as it would go, and willed myself to sleep.

  The plane gave a frisky little buck, and my eyes flew open. The plane gave another buck and then a sideways lurch that had a hostess staggering hard sideways. The captain came on with a ping and told everyone to sit down, including the cabin crew, because we were flying into unexpected turbulence. I didn’t like the word unexpected. Turbulence was seldom unexpected. What had probably happened was that some turbulence had gone where it was not expected to go. A hurricane sheered off from a coast at the last minute, sparing the people there the destruction they were battening down for, or rain somewhere fell unusually hard and long, causing a flood, which resulted in some sort of shift of air that pushed a fog bank inland. And the displaced turbulence had wound up in our flight path.

  The plane lurched hard sideways and then dropped before rising again. I swallowed and found my throat unpleasantly dry.

  “Is the plane going to crash?” asked the kid. My head creaked around and I looked at it. It did not appear to be scared, and I was still trying to find some words to say when it added, “I’ve never been on a plane before.”

  My brain scrambled to do something with these two statements, but the plane now gave a series of playful little jumps and then suddenly banked viciously left. I heard a few gasps and a cry, and was amazed none of it had come from me. Then the plane reared up and my stomach did a slow queasy roll.

  But then we leveled out and were flying smoothly, and it seemed the worst must be over. The only reason I didn’t relax was because the flight attendants were still seated. I could see one of them a few rows forward, sitting on one of those seats that come from nowhere and blocks the aisle, facing back along the plane so he could watch over the herd. I could see that he was not smiling, but did he look scared? I noticed his lips were moving very, very slightly.

  Is he praying? I thought incredulously. I wondered if the captain had told him and the others more than he had told us. Or maybe he was just running through the chores he would have to do when he was allowed to get up.

  We flew for some time, everyone belted in and the plane giving the odd skittish lurch or tremble, but more or less moving smoothly, which made me wonder why I was so totally wound up.

  But the body cannot sustain fear at a high level for very long, so after a while I relaxed and glanced at the kid, who was staring out the window. I felt a small twinge of conscience then.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  It turned and looked at me, the same grave, considering look in dark eyes too big for its face. Its mouth was a nice curly shape and it had very long lashes, like little black brushes. The chin was delicate and slightly pointed, the neck a thin white stalk. A girl, I thought.

  “I think the plane is going to crash,” she said.

  My conscience shriveled. “The plane’s fine. If it wasn’t, the captain would have turned us round and headed back to the airport.”

  “Not if it was too late,” said the kid.

  The plane jerked sideways and a shudder went through it that had people muttering curses and prayers. Then the plane began inexorably to tilt forward and speed up. There was a ping and the oxygen masks came snaking and bouncing down. People grabbed at them. I couldn’t lift my hands. The speed of the plane was pressing me back into my seat. I felt heavy and weak. My body relaxed completely without my telling it to do anything. It had its own ideas. I stared at the oxygen mask tilting away from me. I saw that the kid’s was swinging forward as well. I remembered the demonstration and the cartoon hostess telling me to fit my own mask before I helped anyone else.

  I looked at the kid. “Do you need me to help you put on your mask?” My voice sounded as if I had my head underwater. The air was thrumming. Dimly I heard a woman sobbing. I looked forward and saw the flight attendant had his hands over his face. Somewhere outside the plane there was a terrific noise.

  “You want to hold hands?” asked the kid solemnly.

  I let go of the armrest and turned my hand up. The kid put hers in it, and I closed my hand loosely around it. The hand inside mine was small and warm and slightly damp, like a little hairless mouse.

  I closed my eyes.

  I must have fainted because all at once I was dreaming a dream I had had so many times in my life that I immediately knew I was dreaming.

  I was walking over a flat, dark plain. I could not see far because a mist or a brownish murky-looking fog was billowing around me. A blighted light revealed pitted boulders here and there but no grass or trees. Not even dead ones. I had the feeling nothing had ever grown in that place. Nearby was the bed of what had once been a river, now bone dry and dusty. The air tasted dry, too.

  It’s the air in the plane, I thought. I’m dehydrated. I can wake up and make that snotty smiling flight attendant bring me some water. I could even ask her for a cup of tea and she would have to make it for me.

  Usually, thinking about waking woke me, but not this time. It seemed to me that I heard something where I had never heard anything before, and when I looked around I was startled to see the kid from the plane walking alongside me.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked at me. Now that she was walking I was certain she was a she. Something in the delicacy of the way she put her feet down. Bare feet.

  “Where are your shoes?” I asked.

  “I took them off on the plane,” she answered. “Are we dead?”

  I looked at her. Maybe it was an accusing look because she shrugged apologetically. “This is a dream,” I said firmly. “I am willing myself to wake.”

  “Is it your dream or mine?” asked the girl after a moment, when nothing happened.

  I said nothing, feeling baffled and uneasy. And thirsty. Somehow anxiety always manifested as thirst for me.

  “I’m thirsty,” said the kid.

  “It’s just a dream,” I said.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Because I’ve dreamed this dream before,” I said.

  “Was I in it before?” asked the kid, sounding interested.

  I stared at her. “No.”

  I don’t know if she would have said anything to that, but we both heard the sound of footsteps approaching. That had never happened before, either. The kid was right beside me, and her hand crept into mine again as we wa
ited. It seemed a long time before the fog stirred and a woman emerged. She was about sixty with iron-gray hair plaited and hanging over one shoulder to her waist. She wore a gray shift and cardigan and black gumboots, and she was carrying a broom of the sort you get from a craft market, made from a lot of little trimmed branch ends bound around the end of a pole. Padding along at her side was an enormous, ferocious-looking Doberman. It was big enough to have put its jaws around the kid’s whole head. Its ears had not been cropped but otherwise it looked like the dogs that the young cloned Hitler in Boys from Brazil ordered to eat his interrogator.

  The old woman and the Doberman stopped in front of us. I noticed that the dog’s sleek, brutal head was level with the kid’s.

  “Don’t be uneasy about Jasper,” said the woman in a brisk, no-nonsense voice. “He doesn’t bite unless he has to. I’m Rose.”

  “Did you dream of her before?” asked the kid.

  The old woman’s gaze switched from my face to the kid’s. “Who in the blazes is this? No one said anything about a child.”

  “The hostess seated her next to me on the—” I began, then stopped.

  “Why is she here?” the woman demanded with asperity. “How did she get here?”

  “Where is here?” I asked, deciding I needed to take charge of my dream, which seemed to be getting out of hand. Wake up, I willed myself.

  “Stop that,” said the woman crossly, lifting her gaze from the kid to glare at me. “The point is that she is not supposed to be here. You ought not to have brought her with you, and she will have to be put back.”

  “Put back?” I echoed faintly.

  “Back where she belongs,” Rose snapped. “In the plane.”

  “The plane was going to crash,” said the kid.

  “Of course it was,” snapped the old woman. She looked at me again and added severely, “No one authorized you to bring a child.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know what you are talking about.”