“I don’t know,” says the king, shaking his head. The boy asked for this story over and over again when he was very young, but he hasn’t asked in a long time. “I’ve told you how you were brought to me by hunters and I bought you from them.”
“Because I licked your hand,” the boy said. “I was the last of a litter. The other pups died of exposure.”
The king nods slowly; there is something new in the boy’s voice, something calculating.
“That’s not a true story,” he says.
The king thinks he should be angry, but what he feels is panic. “What do you mean?”
The boy is very calm, very still. “I could hear it in your voice. It isn’t a true story, but I can’t tell which parts are false.”
“You will not question me,” the king demands, standing. “I will not be questioned.” He thinks of Elienad, lying beneath tables, listening to the inflections of lies. Watching the hesitations, the gestures, the tensed muscles. Learning a language the king was unaware he even spoke.
“Did my brothers and sisters go to the fights?” the boy asks and his voice hitches a little. He drops the wood and the knife on the bed and stands. “Was it you that found me? Maybe you shot my mother? Please just tell me.”
The king is too afraid to answer, afraid some movement will give him away. He stalks from the room. When he looks back, Elienad has not followed him.
“I won’t be mad,” the boy says softly as the door shuts.
The king’s heart is beating so loudly that he thinks everyone in the hall must hear it. To him, the sound is the dull thudding of something chasing him, something that speeds the faster he runs from it.
Late that night, the boy leaves his room and pads barefoot to the great hall where the throne is. He sits on the velvet and runs his hands over the carved wood. He imagines himself no longer cowering under a table. He imagines looking every one of the courtiers in the eye.
Every evening the knights ride out into the town and hunt. They patrol the streets until dawn and come back empty-handed.
One night as the courtiers spin in a complicated dance that looks like cogs in a delicate machine, Toran walks into court, his armor wet and red. At the sight of the blood, ladies shriek and the wheels of spinning dancers come apart.
The king is flushed with exertion. “How dare you?” he demands, but Toran seems to ignore him, sinking down on one knee.
“The monster attacked me,” the knight says, his head still bowed. “We fought and I managed to slice off one of its paws.”
He opens a stained woven bag, but inside is no gory paw. Instead there is a slim hand with long, delicate fingers, pale save for the hacked flesh and severed bone at one end. And one finger is circled with a fat ruby ring.
There are more screams. Elienad smells blood and fear and the commingling of those scents wakes something coiled inside of him.
Toran drops the bag, rises, backs away. “Your majesty,” he stammers.
Elienad pads closer. Courtiers shrink from him.
“This hand came from a wolf?” the king asks, still hoping that somehow it has not come to this.
One of Toran’s party, all of whom idle near the doorway, not bold enough to interrupt the king, steps forward. “It was. We all saw it. That thing killed Pyter.”
“The rumors are all true! The creatures walk among us!” Lady Mironov say, before swooning to the floor. She is practiced at swooning and is caught easily by her husband and his brother.
“It is gravely wounded,” says the king. “It will be tracked and destroyed.” He hopes it will be killed before it can be interrogated. He does not want to hear the things of which the creature might speak. His kingdom must have the illusion of safety, even at the cost of truth.
He does not remember the ring or the woman who wore it, but Elienad does. He recognizes the red stone and remembers the hand he licked clean under the table.
Elienad finds her by smell, behind Lord Borodin’s stables. The horses shift and whinny in their pens as he passes. Her blood has soaked the icy ground around her and dotted the snow with bright red holes, like someone scattered poisonous berries. She is wrapped in a horse blanket, stiff with gore. Her hair is tangled with dirt and twigs.
She has never seen him with a human face, but she knows him immediately. Her pale mouth curves into a smile. “I didn’t know they let you out of the palace,” she says. She is very beautiful, even dying.
“They don’t,” he says and knees beside her. “Give me your arm.”
He ties his sash around it as tightly as he can and the bleeding ebbs. It is probably too late, but he does it anyway.
“It is a hunger never ending, to be what we are. It gnaws at my stomach.” Her eyes look strange, her pupils blown wide and black.
“Where did you come from?” he asks her. He doesn’t want to talk about the hunger, not with the smell of her blood making him dizzy.
“From the forests,” she says. “They caught my son. I thought it would be easy to find him. I had never even seen a city.”
He can’t help hoping. “Like me. They brought me—”
She sees his face and laughs. It is a thin rattling sound. “He’s dead. And you never came from any forest.”
“What do you mean?” he asks. He has brought a sack with men’s clothes. They are too loose for her in some places and too tight in others, but they are warm and dry.
She struggles to get the shirt over her head. Her shoulders are shaking with cold. “You were born here, in this city. Didn’t you know?”
“I don’t understand.” Part of him wishes she would stop talking because he feels as he does when he’s about to shift, like he’s drowning. The rest of him only wishes she would speak faster.
“A mirror would tell you more than I could.” Her sly look bothers him, but he still doesn’t know what she means.
He shakes off the questions. “We have to get you inside. Somewhere warm.”
“No. I can care for myself.” Her hand slides under her body. She holds out a knife. Toran’s knife. “I want you to take this and put it into the chest of the king.”
His eyes narrow.
“Have you been to the dog fights? Have you seen how we are set against each other, how we are kept in stinking pens.”
“You murdered those children,” he says softly. “And then you ate them.”
“Let them know what it is to have their babies snatched from them, what it is to be afraid and then find that they were killed for amusement. For amusement.” Her face is so pale that it looks like the snow. “You are not only wolf he has kept, but the first one was grown when he got her. She died rather than become his pet. You are nothing but an animal to him.”
“I see,” he says. “Yes, you are right.” Elienad takes the knife from her cold hand. He looks at his face in its mirrored surface and his features look as though they belong to someone else. His voice is only a whisper. “He must think I am an animal.”
The king leaves his court late and stumbles tipsily to his rooms. The court will continue to celebrate until they collapse beneath tables, until they have drunk themselves so full of relief that they are sick from it.
The king lights a lamp on his desk and begins to write the speech he will give in the morning. He plans to say many reassuring things. He plans to declare Toran his heir.
He hears a laugh. It is a boy’s laugh.
“Elienad?” the king asks the darkness.
There is silence, then the sound of laughter again, naughty and close.
“Elienad,” the king says sternly.
“I will be king after you,” the boy says.
The king hands begin to shake so hard that the ink on his pen nib spatters the page. He looks down at it as though the wet black marks will tell him what to do now.
The boy moves into the lamp light, his face lit with an impish smile, showing white teeth.
“Please,” says the king.
“Please what, father?” The boy blows dow
n the glass of the lamp and the light goes out.
In the darkness, the king calls the boy’s name for the third time, but his voice quavers. He remembers his age, remembers how stiff he is from dancing.
This time when he hears the boy’s laughter, it is near the door. He hears the footsteps as bare feet slap their way out the door and down the dark hall. Like the court, the king feels sick with relief.
Later, when the king lights the lamps—all of them—he will think of another woman, now long gone, and of her liquid eyes staring up at him in the dark. He will not sleep.
In the morning, he will make his way to the throne room. There, he will find courtiers gathered around a young boy with black hair in need of cutting. Beside the boy will be a corpse. The dead woman’s hand will be missing and her throat will be cut. Dimly, the king will remember that he promised the kingdom to whosoever killed the wolf. And the boy will smile up at him as the trap closes.
Turn a promise to a lie and you will be the next to die. Take this story to heart and you might begin to worry about the dangers of making up strange scary tales . . .
HOW BRIA DIED
MIKE ARONOVITZ
Bria jumped rope all alone
And now her eyes are made of stone
She calls for Mommy from the grave
And crawls out of the drain
She drags her jump rope on cement
And calls you from the heating vent
Turn a promise to a lie
And you will be the next to die
Ben Marcus didn’t like it messy, but it was that time of the year. His feet hurt. A ninth grade boy in the lunch room had not liked the fact that the volunteer serving girl with the hairnet had given him only one taco off the cart, so he had chucked it on the floor. Ben had walked over, retrieved the plate, and stuck it back on the kid’s portion of the long brown table. After a stare down, the young man had taken it, a bit too slowly, to a trash receptacle in the middle of the room by a white pillar with a picture of Frederick Douglass on it. Ben had followed. When the kid tossed in the garbage there was some up-splash that got on Ben’s sleeve. He hated lunch duty.
It was wrap-around Thursday and Ben had his homeroom for the second time that day. His legs were crossed. He was sucking on one of the temple tip ear-pieces of his wire-framed glasses, and he had one shoe off at the back heel. He was sort of dangling it on the end of his toe. It was the time of the year when the kids started jumping into their summer vacations a month early. Right around May 5th, the boys started untucking their dress shirts and removing their ties before the first bell. The girls somehow found ways to roll their blue skirts far above the knee and show off a bit of brastrap up top, even though the uniform requirement clearly stated that they were limited to bulky, formless, long-sleeved white blouses. Suddenly, they all wanted to follow each other consecutively to the bathroom like a parade, and trick you into thinking you had the due dates wrong for their final papers. You had to keep up the game face all the way through June or they walked all over you.
Ben knew the deal, and his reputation as the most popular teacher at The People First Charter School in downtown Philadelphia usually carried him through these tough final weeks. All year, he was strict when he had to be and bitingly sarcastic. He was known for pushing the envelope and talking about controversial things in class, like sex and death. He made kids laugh and he cursed frequently. He was an expert at finding a student’s one vulnerable moment and filling that moment with insight. The girls liked him because he could out-dance the boys in verbal confrontation, and the boys liked him because he was so popular with the girls. The school was set up first grade through twelfth, and being that Ben was the head of tenth grade and the sole English teacher at that level, most kids at People First looked forward to high school. He always found a way to make it interesting, often taking rude interruptions and turning them into stories. Then he’d wrap it all back into the given lesson.
Last week Rahim Bethea had activated a talking Sponge Bob key chain in the middle of a lecture about totalitarianism in Animal Farm. Ben had stopped, rode the laughter, and gone into a rant about how Sponge Bob’s friend Patrick, the pink starfish, was really a symbol for the penis. The class had roared, and many defended the character. Ben walked the room, one side to the other. He started the kids chanting, “Patrick is a penis!” so loudly that Rollins, the security guard for the second floor, poked his head in. Ben immediately mouthed, Johnson? the name of the school’s Chief Administrative Officer. Rollins gave a quick shake of the head, No, she ain’t coming down the hall, and gave the thumbs up sign. Ben turned back to the kids and said that the human cock was the symbolic foundation of every story ever made, including Animal Farm. A conversation started, hands in the air. Half the class claimed that the story was clearly about money, and the other half argued the story did, in fact, leave females to the side like a void. It became a discussion about which lens the story was better to build from: economics and exchange, or feministic absence. Ben wrote those headings on the board, and as a class they filled it in. Yes, he was that good.
His wife Kim was a paralegal and kept a nice garden behind their comfy duplex in Havertown. She had long red hair with a streak of gray in it, and slight age parentheses at the corners of her mouth. She had crinkles at the edges of her eyes that Ben still liked to kiss softly. He knew she adored him, but it had become clear that she thought his style was far too risky and inappropriate for an educational system so quick to slap teachers with harsh consequences delivered by stern lawyers and passionate advocates. It wasn’t an issue. Ben had stopped discussing his methods with her years ago.
He put his glasses back on and rolled up his sleeve. It had come undone down to the last fold at the cuff and the taco stain was showing. Behind him were some compare and contrast papers pinned to the corkboard, their edges curling. His desk had been moved to the side almost to the end of the whiteboard by the hall door, and he was trapped behind some desks that had been pushed all the way to the wooden cubbies overflowing with hoodies, sweaters, old papers, binders, and ratty textbooks that looked like they had been run over by an army of sixteen wheelers.
The parts of speech and number tables competition was tomorrow. It was Mrs. Johnson’s baby. People First was a back-to-basics school, and while the elementary grades were required to chant the parts of speech in English class every day, Mrs. Johnson had the upper school kids unveil complex dance routines based on those drills to showcase her method for guests at the end of the year. At the last staff meeting she had handed out an official memo that instructed teachers to set a week of class time aside for rehearsals. The mayor was there for the performance last May, along with a representative from the NAACP. It was no joke, and neither was Mrs. Johnson.
The woman ran a tight ship and everyone was terrified of her. She was six foot, three inches tall. She wore her hair back in a tight bun, went heavy on the foundation, and had eyes that always looked wide and wrathful. She was handsome in the way statues were handsome, and walked the halls like a general. She believed in old school discipline. So did Ben. His vision of how to administer that discipline, however, was a bit off color at times, and he was thankful that she chose not to investigate all too closely what he actually did behind closed doors to get those shining student evaluations and test results.
Ben put up his hands and waved them.
“No!” he said. “Yo. Yo! Turn the music off for a minute.”
The kids stopped their routine and shut off the boom box. Monique Hudson rolled her eyes. A few boys sat on desks off to the side and Joy Smith popped her gum. Ben worked his face to a mask of gentle concern. Actually he had the beginnings of a headache coming on and he looked forward to his prep coming up in thirteen minutes. On Thursdays he had two free periods in a row to end the day, and he planned on putting his head down in the lounge.
“Guys,” he said. “This is the last day you have to practice before the competition, and you’re bringing in new dance steps
all of a sudden. It’s asinine. First off, the girls coming down in rows and doing the shoulder shake thing was great. You trashed that for this puppet-puppeteer pop-lock thing, and it throws off the group. Everyone is just standing and watching Steve and Jerome. It’s like a big donut with a hole in it. I also have to tell you that my B class is doing the same kind of puppet thing and they have Rob and Tiny.”
“They ain’t shit,” Steve said. His tie was off and his shirt was dirty. Ben hoped Ms. Johnson didn’t do a pop-in right now. Most of the kids were out of uniform code at the moment.
“The hell they’re not,” Ben said. “They’ve been doing that routine longer than you and you know it. Also, Rob is so tall that Tiny really does look like a puppet when he stands in front and they mirror each other.”
Jerome made his eyes go to half-mast and curdled up an angry grin.
“That don’t matter. They gay.”
“If I wanted shit from you, Jerome, I would have squeezed your head,” Ben answered.
Everyone laughed. Ben looked over toward Malik Redson. He was in the far corner of the room listening to his iPod, juking his head a bit, shirt untucked, hiking boots up on the desk in front of him. Ben made the sign to take out the ear buds. Malik did so reluctantly.
“What?” he said.
“You’re the show,” Ben said. “Your routine comes in after the girls hop down in their rows. Once they are in position they make perfect backing for you with that cheerleader thing they do with the hand-claps. You have to dance.”
Malik yawned, then licked his lips. The peach-fuzz mustache he had going was an illusion. He was as grown as any man out on Broad Street. He had two kids already, and he worked nights at the BP gas station on Market Street. His solo routine was also the best in the school.
“The music sucks,” he said. “And I also don’t give a goddamn.”
“Fuck the music!” Ben snapped. All the little side whispers stopped. He stood up. He did not like losing. Not even a trivial moment like this one. “I am aware that you think this contest is retarded, I’m not fucking stupid. But when the whole upper school is watching and the other homerooms have a better show than you, it’s going to matter.”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 59
