Stamps, Vamps & Tramps (A Three Little Words Anthology)

by Rachel Caine

“I can do that,” she said, and tried not to sound as eager as she felt. “My pa always said I was more mountain goat than girl.”

  “Then let’s get you a hot bath drawn and your bed made up, and you’ll be up on that ladder tomorrow, lickety split.”

  As they went down the narrow central hall that ran from front door to back in an unbroken line, she studied the things on the walls. Some old-time photos of people in stiff black coats and high-necked dresses, nobody smiling. Some old stitched samplers that said GOD BLESS THIS HOME and PEACE TO THOSE WHO ENTER HERE.

  There was one more, smaller and hung in a darker spot, and she only had time to glance at it before Grandpa opened up a door and flicked on the light. It was odd, but she could have sworn it said EVIL TO HIM WHO EVIL DOES, which wasn’t something girls generally embroidered onto their samplers and pillows.

  She forgot it when she saw the room. It had once belonged to a girl, she thought; there were feminine touches in the curtains and the colorful quilt, and a big hope chest of polished cherry wood sat at the foot of the four-poster bed.

  She had the oddest feeling as she put her bindle down in the corner of the room that it was still a girl’s room, though there was no trace of someone living in it now. No frillies on the clean dresser top, no perfume or jewel box. Not even a picture postcard.

  Grandpa Riley must have sensed something, because he said, “Was my granddaughter’s room. Lila Mae. She’s gone now. Consumption—TB, they call it now. She’s been gone a few months now.”

  Tuberculosis took a lot of folks. There were plenty of hobos with it, and she’d tried to stay well away from them as they hacked and coughed. Most died hard and slow. Her ma might have died of it, too; they hadn’t been sure what had killed her, in the end. Just too much sickness and too little comfort.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “God gives and takes. Ain’t no use asking why. I’ll start your bath across the hall. You sleep tight, now. There’s some gowns in the drawer there.”

  He shuffled away again, and she sat down on the edge of the bed, staring after him.

  Easy mark, the signs had read, but she didn’t think he was. Not at all. For all his kindness and his good food, there was something steely underneath all of that. Something that wouldn’t be fooled, or shoved.

  She had a flash of that face again, the face framed by the curtains in the window. The face that wasn’t his, or anyone’s; wasn’t even a face, exactly.

  She shivered, and when she heard the hot water running in the tub, she grabbed a nightgown from the drawer and went across the hall to wash up for bed.

  Being on a ladder again felt good to her. Danna balanced herself easily, swung the hammer hard. Driving in the shingles felt like making a home again, even though she knew she couldn’t stay here. Shouldn’t even think about it. Just a kindness for a kindness, she told herself, and wiped her sweaty forehead. She felt strong today—stronger than she had in months. Grandpa Riley had fed her breakfast of eggs and thick ham steak and buttered biscuits and more coffee, and she felt she could hammer all day long and half the night. She could build a house if she had to, all by herself. Amazing what food and sleep and safety could do for you.

  Grandpa had gone inside to fetch her some lemonade, and she’d clambered up on the pitched roof to rip away some old damaged tar paper and put down some new when she heard a new voice from below in the back yard say, “Hey, you the man of the house?”

  Danna looked down. She was wearing old, baggy pants and a thick man’s shirt and a peaked cap, and climbing around up there she supposed anybody would have thought she was a young man. She crouched at the edge and stared at the man looking up at her.

  Like her, he was a tramp. Unlike her, he was big and burly. Life on the road hadn’t been too tough on him; he still had muscle and bone, though he was dirty enough she could smell him from here. Lazy, too. She saw it in his mocking grin that thought all that hard work she was doing was for suckers.

  “Naw,” she said, and kept her voice rough and low in her throat. “I just work here.”

  The back door banged open, and Grandpa came out with a thick glass pitcher filled with cloudy yellow, lemons still swimming in around the ice cubes. He had two glasses.

  The hobo standing in the yard looked over Grandpa Riley and kept that mocking grin firmly in place. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, and held out his hand. “Ain’t had lemonade in a coon’s age.”

  “Ain’t having it now,” Grandpa said. “It’s for my handyman up there. Dan, you come on down, now.”

  Dan was the name she’d asked him to use—it was the one she needed on the road, and it fit natural enough. She didn’t want to get too used to being called Danna anymore.

  The hobo standing in the yard reached out for the ladder, and for a second Danna thought he meant to steady it for her to come down—but as she reached for it, he tipped it sideways. It topped over, slamming hard into the ground and tearing up a tomato plant in the garden. “You just stay up there, handyman,” the hobo said. “Me and the old man got things to talk about.”

  Danna caught herself, balanced on the edge. She didn’t know what to do. Grandpa Riley wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t looking bothered by this either. He just put down the lemonade glasses, poured one, and handed it to the man who’d knocked over her ladder. “Drink it and go,” he said. “We don’t want no trouble, mister.”

  The hobo upended the glass and drank it in one long rush, dirty throat working as he glugged. When it was just ice cubes and a lemon slice, he handed it back. “Nice start, mister,” he said. “Gonna want some dinner too. And whatever cash you got to spare.”

  “Ain’t got no dinner for you. And no cash either.”

  “You have to be paying your handyman something, and I can smell that food from out here. You just fork it over and there won’t be no need for trouble.”

  Grandpa poured him another glass of lemonade. “You drink it and go.”

  The hobo poured the lemonade—perfectly good lemonade!—on the thirsty ground, tossed the glass aside, and grabbed Grandpa Riley by the shirt. “I ain’t playing games with you, Pop,” he said. He was still smiling, but it was a nasty sort of smile, something that made chills crawl up Danna’s spine despite the warm sun. “You, kid, jump down. Do it now.”

  “It’s a long way, mister,” she said.

  “Fuck I care? Jump or this old man gets hit. You know I’ll do it.”

  She knew. He had the look, and the big scarred hands of someone who hit often and for no reason at all. But she also knew that if she jumped now, things would go worse, not better.

  She still would have jumped, even knowing it, except that Grandpa Riley suddenly threw himself to one side, hard. “Now!” Grandpa yelled. “Get ‘im!”

  She threw herself off the roof and landed on the lug feet first, driving down hard and feeling bone break. Collarbone, most like. The hobo yelled in shock and fury, and twisted as she was knocked to the ground. She hit hard, and the wind got knocked out of her. He loomed over her the size of a mountain, dark against the sun, and she saw the white slice of a knife in his undamaged right hand.

  “Shouldn’t have done that, kid,” he said. “Last thing you’ll ever do.”

  Grandpa hit him in the kidneys from behind with a sucker punch, and Danna watched in horror as the hobo turned, snarling, and drove that sharp knife in a hard, shining arc… right into the old man’s stomach.

  Grandpa made a sound like a squeak, as if his throat had closed up tight to stop any scream, but his mouth was wide open and dark as the grave. He grabbed the hobo with palsied old hands, but the man pushed him contemptuously away.

  Grandpa fell into a sitting position, both hands pushing against the wound in his stomach as if he was trying to remove a knife that was no longer there. The hobo hadn’t given it up, of course. He was holding the blood-streaked blade in his hand and glaring at Danna, and she could see the thoughts crawling through his muddy, mean eyes: the kid saw me. Kill him, too. />
  Only Grandpa wasn’t dead.

  Grandpa was laughing.

  Danna rolled to her knees and grabbed for the old man, but he turned and looked at her, and his face blurred as if she was seeing it through tears, and she stopped before she touched him.

  Him? No. That was… that was…

  It was what she’d seen in the window, framed by the quaint old lace curtains. That face. That face that… that…

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Grandpa said, and she distantly realized he—it—was mocking the hobo with his own words. “I try to be nice, you know. I try to be what he’d want me to be. But there’s always enough like you that I don’t have to go looking.”

  Danna saw it move. It had the unsettling, wrong feel of watching a spider scuttle—fast, but all joints and angles. The hobo stabbed it again, and again, and it kept laughing. One pale hand—no longer old and shaky—grabbed the place where the hobo’s collarbone had broken and squeezed, and the man let out a howl like a wounded dog that froze her in place.

  “Let’s do this inside. The neighbors may get nosy,” the spider said, and took the fly into the house.

  Danna sat in the dirt, too weak to move, too scared to run. She knew she should, but she also had the awful, awful idea that if she did, it would come after her, and having it come at her from behind was worse than facing it.

  After a long, silent few minutes, the back door opened with a creak, and Grandpa Riley stood there looking at her. He looked just the same as before, except there was blood on his shirt, fresh and red. There were holes in his worn blue shirt.

  “You’d better come in, Danna,” he said. “I ought to explain.”

  Come into my house, said the spider to the fly.

  He saw her hesitating, and she felt like—crazy as it was—that the look on his old, seamed face of regret was real. “I won’t hurt you, girl,” he said. “You done me good, and I’ll do the same for you. You come and go in peace, just like before. My word on it.”

  How could she take its word? In what Godforsaken world did any of this make any sense at all? She didn’t believe in fairytales, never had; she believed in people, good and bad and indifferent. People did the good in this world, and they did the evil. She’d never needed angels or demons to credit for the one and blame for the other.

  But she didn’t know what to make of this. Not at all.

  Her mother came back to her again, a smell of sugar and apples and cinnamon, and Danna closed her eyes just for a second to savor the memory. Curiosity killed the cat, Danna, she’d laughed, and whacked Danna’s chubby little hands playfully with her wooden spoon. You are the most curious creature I’ve ever seen. You watch that, now.

  But she couldn’t just leave. Maybe it was that cat-killing curiosity; maybe it was a feeling that the thing that wore Grandpa Riley’s face really didn’t want to hurt her.

  Well, she thought, everything I own is inside tied up in a bindle and leaning in a corner.

  She’d lost a lot, the past few years. But she wasn’t prepared to run away from everything she had left.

  Danna rose to her feet, dusted off, and limped on into the spider’s house.

  It was no different inside. She’d expected it to be; she’d expected to see rot and mold and darkness ruining the well-scrubbed home, but instead it was exactly the same as when she’d walked out this morning with the hammer and nails and a leather tool belt strapped on her hips. Her morning plate with the remains of the scrambled eggs still sat on the counter.

  As she sat down at the kitchen table, Grandpa sat her thick chipped mug in front of her, full to the brim with steaming hot coffee. She sipped. It tasted fresh.

  There was no sign of the hobo in here.

  Grandpa looked down at his shirt, sighed, and poured his own cup before he sat down across from her. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I wanted to spare you if I could.”

  That didn’t sound good. Danna took another mouthful of coffee. If she was going to die, she figured to do it on her own terms. “What are you?” she asked. “You’re not Grandpa Riley.”

  “I can be,” it said. “I like being Grandpa Riley. He was a nice man. I miss him. He took care of me when my parents sent me here. He didn’t have much, but what he had, he shared. Not just with me. With anybody who needed it.”

  The voice changed just a bit, sliding into a higher register, something not quite male, not quite female. Neither. Both. Grandpa’s face was getting slowly younger, slowly thinner. His shock of white hair was darkening and falling flatter around his head.

  Her head. There was something of Grandpa in the features, but they were softened, made young and feminine, with wide brown eyes and soft curls framing her cheekbones.

  She wasn’t that much older—at least she looked it—than Danna herself.

  “This is what I looked like,” she said. “When I was myself. This was where I lived, with my grandfather.” There it was again, that indefinable look of regret, of loss, of loneliness. “My ma and pa sent me out here because they thought the air would be better for my lungs.”

  “You had TB,” Danna said. “You were a lunger?”

  The girl nodded. Grandpa’s clothes fit her about as well, in this form, as Danna’s clothes did her. The two of them, passing for something they weren’t, out of necessity.

  “I’ve been sick a long time, but I was so bad they thought I wouldn’t make it all the way here on the train. I did, though. I guess they were sending me away so they didn’t have to watch me die.” Lila Mae—that was the name Grandpa had used, Lila Mae—stared out the window for a moment. Her pretty round face had grown still and serious. “My grandpa was a sailor, when he was younger. He traveled the world, and he said he knew things that could help me. He went all the way to Asia when he was younger, and that’s where he found out about her.” The girl’s throat worked, as if she struggled to swallow a bad taste. “They had a lot of names for her, but mostly they call her Lilith. She’s old, real old, and my grandpa said it was told that she could suck the sickness out of someone who was dying. Make them better.”

  It sounded crazy, but Danna didn’t say so. She was into something that was crazy already. The girl rolled up Grandpa Riley’s shirt sleeve, and there Danna saw the one thing that hadn’t changed from the old man’s body to the young girl’s form.

  The tattoo.

  It still gave her a queer feeling, looking at it, as if her whole body vibrated. She couldn’t make it out, any more than she’d been able to understand the face at the window. She just knew it was ink, blue India ink, and full of swoops and curls. It made her head hurt to try to understand it.

  Danna looked away and sipped coffee to settle her unquiet stomach. Lila Mae rolled the sleeve back down. “Hurts, doesn’t it?” she said, and pulled a sympathetic face. “I can’t look at it either. It hurts all the time, like thorns under my skin. I was too sick to say no when he got the needles and the ink and started drawing it on me, but I would have said yes anyway, because he said it would make me better. Make me well.”

  The girl’s eyes were haunted now, staring into a memory. Danna shivered just a bit. “What happened?”

  “She came in the night,” Lila Mae said. It was just a whisper. “She sucked all the sickness out of me, just like he said. But she left something, too. Something—” Her fingers brushed and rubbed restlessly at the fabric that covered the tattoo, and she snapped back to the present and gave Danna a quick, guilty smile. “I woke up well for the first time since I was just a kid. Grandpa died a few weeks later in his sleep. Maybe she came to get him, life for a life, I don’t know. All I know is that while this thing is still on my skin, she can come and go any time she wants in me. Mostly she leaves me alone, but sometimes—when I meet somebody who’s like him, the one outside—sometimes, she comes in. And when she does… it’s like she’s hungry. So hungry.”

  “Where is he? Is he dead?” Danna asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but she’d rather know now than stumble on so
me horrible corpse in the dark.

  “Gone,” Lila Mae said. “She took him, body and soul. Took him down to hell. You know your Proverbs?”

  Danna shook her head. “I never was much for reading. My ma was always despairing about how I never learned the Good Book.”

  “In Proverbs, it says, Her house sinks down to death, and her course leads to the shades. All who go to her cannot return and find again the paths of life.” Lila Mae looked down at her hands, clasped around her mug, and swallowed hard. “He’s with her now. Somewhere.”

  “Why do you pretend to be Grandpa Riley? You don’t need to. You can’t—”

  “Die?” Lila Mae shook her head. “No, I can’t. She won’t let me go. I guess I pretend to be Grandpa because it’s easier than… being me. Because he was a nice man, a good man, and I loved him. I try to be him, as much as I can. I try to help people who come, if they’re like you. But sometimes…”

  “Sometimes they’re like that other man,” Danna said. “And they deserve what they get.” Her house sinks down to death. “I wouldn’t lose any sleep about him, Lila Mae.” She’d seen too many like that on the rails, in the camps—willing to cut a throat for an extra slice of bacon, or a good pair of shoes. Willing to do anything for their own comfort and pleasure. “Does it hurt?”

  “When she comes?” Lila Mae fussed a bit with the hem of Grandpa’s shirt, and nodded without looking up. “More when she comes, but it hurts all the time. I go half crazy when I’m alone with it.”

  “You want it out of you?”

  Lila Mae’s eyes, when she glanced at her, were wide and surprised. “It’s a tattoo, it’s permanent, like the one Grandpa had from crossing the equator on the ship that looked like a turtle. It doesn’t wash off no matter how hard I scrub it.”

  Danna took in a deep breath. “Skin comes off,” she said. “If you cut it.”

  There was a clear, ringing silence in the warm lemon-scented kitchen. Outside, a bluebird took up a melody. The sun drifted warm through the lace curtains.

  Lila Mae looked uncomprehending at first, then scared. Her lips parted, and her eyes grew round. But she didn’t say anything.