I gently lowered myself to sit beside her and cooed her name. She came awake with a start and slashed at me. Luckily, I was ready for that, suspicious type that I am.
“Okay, unfriendly and counterproductive,” I told her, snatching away the blade and tossing it over the fence. “So, Sally, tell me everything you know.”
“Fuck you, bitch.”
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
She let loose with a few more choice profanities and in the end I lost patience, grabbing at her face and squeezing the corners of her jaw so she whimpered.
“Now, you will notice that I am freakishly strong, Sally. I can and will pop your head if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
She tried to say something. It sounded like half-breed, so I squeezed a little tighter. Tears trickled down her cheeks. I felt bad and let her go. I stroked her hair and that made her flinch.
“Okay, let’s try again. Sally, I’m looking for a friend of mine. She’s young and she’s innocent and if anything happens to her I swear I’ll be back for you and you will not enjoy our reunion. Now, I suspect you’ve been leading children astray. No, don’t say anything—if I only suspect things, you’re safe.” I waved a finger at her. “If I know for certain then I will not be able to turn a blind eye. I will tell Tepes.” The fear in her eyes told me she knew about Bela. “But I am willing to ignore all the other things you’ve done if you tell me where I can find my friend.”
“She’ll kill me,” the child whined.
Beneath the rat-like demeanor I could see a little girl who’d been ill-used; who did what she could to survive; whose humanity had been stripped away until she thought of no one but herself. I felt sorry for her, but it didn’t stop me from saying, “And if you don’t tell me, I’ll kill you.”
She whimpered.
“Sally, tell me and I will stop her. She won’t hurt anyone again. She won’t be a danger to you. I promise.”
She seemed to weigh the odds and the scales dropped in my favor. “House at Ascot.”
She reeled off the address and I stood up, anxious. I pulled whatever notes I had in my pocket out and gave them to her, thinking they might keep her from doing anything awful for a night or two at least. “If you’ve lied to me . . . ”
She nodded I know, I know.
And then I had a thought. “Did you take her?” Lizzie wouldn’t have gone to an adult. She would have gone to another child, though, she would have wanted to play.
The hesitation was enough. I felt sick but I turned and walked away.
“Aw, Ziggi. How did we not know about this place?”
The house in Ascot was a big, old architectural layer cake. I didn’t remember seeing it before and looked askance at my sidekick. I mean, I like old houses, I spend a lot of time in them, and I know Brisneyland pretty damned well.
He shrugged. “Glamoured.”
He was right—it was kind of hard to look at. My eyes kept sliding to the side and I had to concentrate for the first few minutes we sat and watched. It got easier after a while, but still the building seemed, well, slippery. I leaned against the body of the cab while Ziggi hung out the window. “Right. Big trees, too.”
The block of land was huge (even for this area) and the house was set far back from the road, in the middle of an overgrown garden. Camphor laurels led up the driveway and grew so tall and close that they formed a canopy above the gravel path on which the taxi was parked. Flying foxes squeaked overhead, heading off for an evening of stripping people’s fruit trees and crapping on their laundry. They were darker patches against the moonlit sky, like shadow puppets.
“Aw, Ziggi,” I repeated. “Shit.”
“What? You don’t think it looks right?”
“I think it looks too damned right.” I pushed myself away from the grimy duco. “You’re not going anywhere?”
“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said, then added hopefully, “Hey, if anyone comes you got a secret signal you want me to give?”
“Fuck no. I want you to make a really big noise so I hear you. Who knows, maybe you’ll scare them away. And I want you to listen out in case I start yelling for help. Help would be good. You know, cavalry, etcetera.”
“I got it. Big fuckin’ noise.”
I gave him a thumbs-up and walked down the drive.
This would have made sense in West End, but this . . . this was Ascot. Home to the important people; property prices so high they could give you a nosebleed. If the car in the drive wasn’t a Jag or a Merc, then you knew it belonged to the cleaning woman. And here was this house, gigantic, glamoured, and seemingly empty.
The wood creaked under my feet as I went up the five steps to the verandah. A swing-chair sat beside the double front doors. There was a doorbell. I pushed it, hard, swung on it for a long while. What if Sally lied? Hell, what if Sally had told the truth? If anyone answered I’d ask if they were interested in a pyramid selling scheme. That ruse had gotten me out of trouble more than once. People tended to back away, like you had a spare eye or a secondary nose. Of course, it had also gotten me into trouble once or twice.
No one came. I tried the handle—no joy. I peered in through the windows. They were clean, as was the upholstery on the swing-chair. So. Not deserted, and someone was concerned enough to keep the place spick and span.
I tapped my foot. Maybe Sally had lied and this was just a normal house. Then, why the glamour? I might have given up but that was the kicker; that and the sick feeling in my gut. Something was off. Where do you hide a whole bunch of kids? How do you make them disappear without a trace? Take them somewhere no one would look. Hide them away.
I couldn’t see too much further inside: dark tidy rooms, some expensive pieces of furniture, a chandelier catching stray streaks of moonlight, thick curtains on most of the other windows. I listened hard for the sound of someone moving about inside. Nothing.
I broke a panel of the frosted glass in the front door, then reached through and let myself in. Ziggi studiously ignored my break and enter. I wasn’t too worried about making noise. The cops I could deal with. Dead kids, I couldn’t.
The long hallway had a thin Persian carpet running its length and that muffled my footsteps. I didn’t know what I was looking for, not exactly, but something like a door to a basement would be a good start. Eventually, I found it in the kitchen; in the pantry to be exact, right next to a shelf stacked with salt, sugar and water crackers. Plain as day. I guess when you’ve got a glamour around your house and you live in Ascot you think you’re bulletproof.
The door wasn’t locked and the stairway that led down was brightly lit. My sneakers were soft on the steps, but not quite silent because the ache in my leg meant I brought one foot down harder than the other.
At the bottom of the stairs I found a large white room, the floor dark gray polished concrete. The house was old and the basement must have been dug at the same time as the foundations were laid, but it wasn’t some dingy old cellar; it was pristine, industrial. One wall was lined with wine racks, half of them full. There was a row of steel tables, a large furnace in the back corner, a round vat with a screw-down lid and pipes running into and out of it like a moonshine still. Stark against the floor next to the furnace was a tumbling stack of small shoes and the air ached with a faint smell of cooked flesh.
In the middle of this stood a woman.
For all intents and purposes, she looked like an Ascot matron; in fact, she was the Ascot matron who’d smiled out at me from the community noticeboard. She didn’t look much different. Maybe in her sixties, but her true age was concealed by a combination of expensive cosmetics, a little glamour and a lot of Botox. Not overly tall, but with a good figure; a little thick around the waist. Her pale blue dress was impeccable and her hair an elegant mix of gray and blond. The ensemble was completed by an expensive gold watch, pearl earrings and knuckle-duster rings probably worth more than my house.
“Yes?” she said. Didn’t say, What are you doing in
my house, peasant? I’m calling the police. She was holding a pair of thick black gloves maybe made out of that same stuff they’re using to make muffin trays nowadays. They were at odds with the rest of her outfit.
I must have looked dumbly at her when I said, “You’re not eating them.”
“Oh, no. If you take their tears,” she told me quite tenderly, “you can’t use the meat afterwards. It’s too dry, tough. Really, it’s either wine or veal.” She smiled. “You’re Grigor’s daughter, aren’t you?”
I swallowed and peered around, noticing at last that on one of the tables lay a child. She was still dressed; her chest rose and fell. The woman nodded toward her. “Isn’t she lovely? I was very happy with Sally for this one—it’s much nicer when they’re clean and content.” She smiled. “She smells a little like you, you know—my, what a vintage you would have made, my girl, when you were young! What grief, what unadulterated heartache! Oh, what wouldn’t I have done to take the tears from you? The wine tastes so much sweeter when it’s born of sorrow.”
“Lizzie,” I said. She didn’t stir. Louder: “Lizzie!”
“She can’t hear you, dear. I keep them under, just a little sleeping spell, right up until I’m ready to put them in the press. You don’t want too much panic; that sours things. It’s the grief you want, the pain. Best taken fresh; giving them time to worry just makes things, well, stale.”
“Wake her up,” I said. “Wake her up and give her to me and we walk out of here. I tell no one about you. Just give her to me.” I wondered how many deals like this I’d try to make.
“I knew your father. Wonderful butcher. Reliable business partner. Talented kinderfresser, but sometimes so stupid, so rash.” She shook her head.
“Bela Tepes knows I’m here,” I lied. “You mess with me, you mess with him. You mess with him, you mess with the Weyrd Council.”
“I can handle them. Two of my best customers are on the board, lovey,” she confided.
On the table, Lizzie moved. The woman tut-tutted. “Oh, look you’ve broken my concentration. She’s waking up.”
And she came at me so quickly I didn’t have time to think. In my head, she was still the sort of woman who was only dangerous if you took the last friand at her favorite coffee shop. But she was older than that, infinitely stranger, and stronger. She punched me in the chest with both fists. I felt her rings rip the thin cotton of my overwashed T-shirt and pierce my skin, into the flesh. I fell straight backward. She cackled like a fairy tale witch. I hit my head on the concrete and black welled across my eyes.
Next thing I knew I could feel myself being dragged along the smooth cold floor. She had hold of my ankles, the agony of her pulling on my bad leg having woken me; that and the pain in my lacerated chest and my aching skull. She reached the furnace and let go—that hurt too—and I lay there trying to get my brain in order, trying to make my body work, trying to get to my damned feet and fight. I turned my head and looked into Lizzie’s open, terrified eyes.
I heard the door of the furnace clank open and felt the heat whoosh out. I raised my gaze and saw the old woman had finally put her gloves on, and yes, they did indeed clash with her outfit.
“Now,” she said, tilting her head to consider me, “you’re quite tall. How am I going to fit you in? Might be a bit of a squeeze.”
She leaned down to grab my hands so she could pull me forward. She was hideously strong; she was Baba Yaga, the witch in the forest, the stepmother with a poisoned apple in her hand. She hauled my top half up and for a moment our faces almost touched. She smiled and laughed and her breath was like rotten meat. I got my hand around her throat and she laughed again, kept laughing until she felt my grip tighten.
Then she was gasping and taking me seriously. I felt her nails against my back as they burst through the heatproof gloves and tore into me. I screamed and kept squeezing, watching her face turn purple. Her nails slid further in, closer to organs that would not react well to puncturing.
And then she was gone; the talons tore bigger holes in me as she was pushed aside and I fell to my knees.
Lizzie and my attacker fell back against the open maw of the furnace. I heaved myself up and pushed Lizzie out of the way. The old woman, smoke already rising from behind her head, started to scream. I punched at her torso just as she had done to me and she overbalanced, silver-gray hair becoming red and gold with flame. I grabbed at her ankles and lifted—the top half of her disappeared into the furnace and Lizzie and I jammed the rest of her in after. We pushed the door shut and locked it.
Welcome to the Gingerbread House.
The cab rolled across the Story Bridge in the soft darkness. I felt every bump and dip in the road, a regular rolling rhythm of thud thud thud. My T-shirt was sticky with blood; my wounds ached and itched. I wanted to get Lizzie home to her mother before I went to hospital. Sleep called but I fought it. Ziggi looked at me, the back eye intent and the two at the front flicking to my image in the rear view mirror. I gave him a weak grin and a wave.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m a human pincushion.”
“When are you gonna tell Bela?”
“When I stop bleeding.”
“Kid okay?”
I looked down at Lizzie. Her little body was curled on the seat beside me and her head was in my lap. She sucked her thumb. My hand was on her shoulder and I could feel the occasional tremor running through her, like a dog that dreamed it was chasing a rabbit.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of all the kids who weren’t. “She’s okay.” Ziggi pushed a CD into the player. Softly, Bernard sang about being washed clean. The sun came up.
Can you ever rely on your memories of love—lost or otherwise? How powerful is the imagination? Neil Gaiman makes us consider such questions with this haunting tale . . .
THE THING ABOUT CASSANDRA
NEIL GAIMAN
So there’s Scallie and me wearing Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, complete with sideburns, at five o’clock in the morning by the side of a canal in Amsterdam. There had been ten of us that night, including Rob, the groom, last seen handcuffed to a bed in the Red Light district with shaving foam covering his nether regions and his brother-in-law giggling and patting the hooker holding the straight razor on the arse, which was the point I looked at Scallie and he looked at me, and he said, “Maximum deniability?” And I nodded, because there are some questions you don’t want to be able to answer when a bride starts asking pointed questions about the stag weekend, so we slipped off for a drink, leaving eight men in Starsky-and-Hutch wigs (one of whom was mostly naked, attached to a bed by fluffy pink handcuffs, and seemed to be starting to think that this adventure wasn’t such a good idea after all) behind us, in a room that smelled of disinfectant and cheap incense, and we went and sat by a canal and drank cans of Danish lager and talked about the old days.
Scallie—whose real name is Jeremy Porter, and these days people call him Jeremy, but he had been Scallie when we were eleven—and the groom-to-be, Rob Cunningham, had been at school with me. We had drifted out of touch, more or less, had found each other the lazy way you do these days, through Friends Reunited and Facebook and such, and now Scallie and I were together for the first time since we were nineteen. The Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, which had been Scallie’s idea, made us look like we were playing brothers in some made-for-TV movie—Scallie the short, stocky brother with the thick mustache, me, the tall one. Given that I’ve made a significant part of my income since leaving school modeling, I’d add the tall good-looking-one, but nobody looks good in a Starsky-and-Hutch wig, complete with sideburns.
Also, the wig itched.
We sat by the canal, and when the lager had all gone we kept talking and we watched the sun come up.
Last time I saw Scallie he was nineteen and filled with big plans. He had just joined the RAF as a cadet. He was going to fly planes, and do double duty using the flights to smuggle drugs, and so get incredibly rich while helping his country. It was the kind of mad idea
he used to have all the way through school. Usually the whole thing would fall apart. Sometimes he’d get the rest of us into trouble on the way.
Now, twelve years later, his six months in the RAF ended early because of an unspecified problem with his right knee, he was a senior executive in a firm that manufactured double-glazed windows, he told me, with, since the divorce, a smaller house than he felt that he deserved and only a golden retriever for company.
He was sleeping with a woman in the double-glazing firm, but had no expectations of her leaving her boyfriend for him, seemed to find it easier that way. “Of course, I wake up crying sometimes, since the divorce. Well, you do,” he said at one point. I could not imagine him crying, and anyway he said it with a huge, Scallie grin.
I told him about me: still modeling, helping out in a friend’s antique shop to keep busy, more and more painting. I was lucky; people bought my paintings. Every year I would have a small gallery show at the Little Gallery in Chelsea, and while initially the only people to buy anything had been people I knew—photographers, old girlfriends, and the like—these days I have actual collectors. We talked about the days that only Scallie seemed to remember, when he and Rob and I had been a team of three, inviolable, unbreakable. We talked about teenage heartbreak, about Caroline Minton (who was now Caroline Keen, and married to a vicar), about the first time we brazened our way into an 18 film, although neither of us could remember what the film actually was.
Then Scallie said, “I heard from Cassandra the other day.”
“Cassandra?”
“Your old girlfriend. Cassandra. Remember?”
“ . . . No.”
“The one from Reigate. You had her name written on all your books.”
I must have looked particularly dense or drunk or sleepy, because he said, “You met her on a skiiing holiday. Oh, for heaven’s sake. Your first shag. Cassandra.”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 42
