THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Something must save them. Or else where and how would her children be able to live?

  #

  Jim stood alongside Guida, reading the formal papers from the tax assessor. As they stared the first paragraph of black typed letters on the page began to wriggle and move around, dancing like electrons around a nucleus. Jim looked incredulous.

  Guida smiled mysteriously and heard the official say, "What a lovely smile you have, Mrs.

  Fredrickson. I'm so glad I brought this out for you and your husband to see today. I know it takes a load of worry off you both to know everything has been filed and the ranch is all paid up." He looked confused, however, even as he said the words. He blinked rapidly and shivered a little.

  Guida handed back the changed document and said, "Thanks so much. It was good of you to come all this way to let us know."

  As he drove away Guida said to her husband, "Well, that's the first spell that's worked for me in months."

  "What spell?" he asked. "Sometimes I think you speak in riddles just to make me look stupid, Guida."

  He had already forgotten he saw the magic work on the words of the papers from the tax assessor.

  That was the first inkling Guida had that something had gone wrong.

  The next instance happened less than an hour later when Brady came to her with another complaint about his little sister. "Martha won't play house right. She keeps making me sweep the floor. Will you make her behave, Mama?"

  "Tell Martha to come here and I'll speak to her."

  Brady stood there, puzzled.

  "Well? What are you waiting for?"

  "I don't know, Mama. Didn't you call me?"

  "I thought you wanted me to talk to your sister about the rules of playing house."

  "Martha's fine. I love Martha. She knows how to play. Can I go now? She's waiting for me to sweep the floors."

  After she'd dismissed him, she wondered what in the world was happening. Had she deceived Brady into believing his sister was a paragon of virtue? And Jim. Had the spell in some way spread out from the papers to his mind, deceiving him into thinking there had been no spell cast to save them from paying the taxes and losing the ranch?

  She had never seen a spell travel so rapidly from one event to another, from one person to another.

  It could turn against her and finally wreck everything if she didn't control it. It was like a spirit let loose, blowing reality into shreds.

  She hurried to the barn, climbed to the loft, and took up the book. She reread the spell, her lips moving as she went over the words. Had she left one out, mispronounced a word, added in something she shouldn't have?

  That night in bed Jim turned to her and whispered, "I never thought I'd be married to a movie star."

  Shocked, Guida said, "What?"

  "Honey, my world is perfect because of you. There's a thousand men in Hollywood who would have wanted you for their own, but I was the lucky one. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you."

  He thought she was someone else! Now the spell was mutating so that the people it controlled grew to deceive themselves without her having anything to do with it. Had Jim always fantasized being married to some movie queen? And now he believed he was?

  In the morning she'd have to find the priestess and ask for help. This was turning into a disaster.

  #

  "Weren't you in class the day I told the apprentices not to use that spell without supervision with higher ups? It's the most dangerous and unpredictable spell of all."

  Guida's eyes opened wide. "I must have been absent. I don't remember anything of the sort."

  "Well, you've caused yourself a great headache, Guida Fredrickson. You're going to have to reverse this spell. If you let it go on, eventually no one will know who you are. Everyone you meet will deceive himself into thinking you're someone else, someone they've admired or had a craving to know--replacing the real you in their memories."

  "This is terrible! My husband already thinks I'm a movie star. This morning my children thought I was Miss Rosback, their favorite teacher at school."

  "Hurry back home and call for a reversal before it gets any worse."

  Guida stood from the sofa and moved quickly to the door. She turned back to ask how long would she need to pray and the priestess astonished her by rising, coming to give her a hug before she stepped back to say, "I'm so glad you visited, Rita. I thought you'd never come on a trip all the way from Spain to see me."

  Rita? Now her mentor thought she was a long-lost sister. She had heard her mention the woman before and how she missed seeing her.

  She must hurry home to the barn loft. No time to lose! It was all getting out of hand. If she didn't do something soon her whole world--even her own memory--would be destroyed by the Great Lie, by the spell of Deception.

  #

  The day wore on toward night and the light dimmed in the stable, casting shadows like black bars across the empty spaces.

  Guida had been on her knees and studying for hours. Her mind had begun to fade like an old photograph left in the sun. She rubbed her temples wondering why she felt so...confused. So dizzy.

  Suddenly she felt better, in fact, felt like a million dollars. She dropped the spell book from her hands and turned to move smoothly, gracefully to the ladder leading down to the stable floor.

  On the way to the house she touched her hair and thought, I should have my hair seen after. It must be a fright. She looked down at her faded dress and thought, I need new vestments. This ragged apparel will not do.

  As she opened the front door, her children greeted her with cries of delight. They called her Miss Rosbach, but that was all right, the dears, she would straighten that out later. They could call her anything they liked as long as they were well-behaved and gave her no trouble. They couldn't very well address her as Diana, Goddess of Moon, Forest, Animals, and Childbirth, could they? At least not yet they couldn't.

  Orpheus came from the kitchen, an apron tied around his waist. Even in a rancher's dusty clothes, old boots, and the apron, he made her heard accelerate. She had always known he would make a good mate. If he would follow Eurydice into the bowels of Hell, he would be true to his Diana. "Hi, sweetie," he said. "I thought I'd make dinner tonight."

  She nodded at him and smiled regally. "I'll entertain the children," she said, sweeping her skirts aside as she sat down in the easy chair in the living room, feeling it just as elegant as a throne.

  "Come now and sit at my feet," she ordered, reaching out to touch each child on the shoulder.

  She then rested her hands on her growing stomach and began to tell the tale of olden times when there were theaters and coliseums and chariots full of adoring worshipers who came to give the gods and goddesses their due. She talked about the great hunts and how she ruled over all the forests and all the green woods, over all the animals.

  She concluded, "Though the time has passed from that golden age to this new one, we are back once again to create the world anew. You do know your mama is a goddess, right? And your papa is a god? That we rule eternal? Yes, it's true, my little babies, it is as true as true can be. We had only been waiting for the right time and the right spell to set us free. Your old mama and papa? You won't miss them, I promise you, just wait and see."

  The children at her feet all beamed in enchantment. She had done that to them with her tales, with her words, with just being in her presence.

  Diana thought that tomorrow she would cast a new spell, adding more cattle to the ranch, building a forest glen where the children could pay in running brooks--something cool and beautiful to take the place of the empty pastureland--and maybe she would have the moon shine all throughout the day to signal a fresh beginning in the land. She controlled great powers, and her husband possessed a great many abilities of his own. If they wanted, together they could change everything now that gods had come to earth to make it a paradise once more.

  She stood and clapped her hands in glee, her smile majestic. Her old fa
rm dress changed instantly to a green satin gown studded with emeralds. The children cried out softly in awe, touching the hem of her skirt.

  "Come," she said. "We will join your father for dinner. And tomorrow there will be surprises! Oh so many surprises!"

  As the family sat together at the table, subtle changes made the kitchen more sleek, the appliances more modern. Changes made painted walls into flocked wallpaper and bare overhead bulbs into chandeliers. Changes transformed the entire house during the course of dinner into a small, but comfortable palace. The children wore finer clothes, as did Orpheus. He looked like a king in his gold shirt with the onyx buttons. Diana smiled and smiled.

  It was a new world. It was a new age. And anything was possible.

  THE END

  THE SMILE OF A MIME

  by

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

  First published in MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg, DAW Books, 1996

  I was dozing off that day during Professor Alan's lecture on the Norse legend of the ash tree when Carla Knight came into my life and changed it forever.

  I'd just slipped down in my chair to a comfortable position and sat with my cheek resting on my fist. My eyelids kept falling shut. I began to drift, to dream. I dreamed I was in my apartment with slices of cucumber covering my weary eyes and a cup of ginseng tea in my hand. It was so soothing, restful, so very pleasant, and so far away from the prison of the classroom. Then Professor Alan's monotonous voice intruded, waking me. "The great ash held together the earth, heaven, and hell by its roots and branches."

  I opened my eyes wide, trying to come alert, but a minute later my eyes closed, just for a moment so that I could think of sipping the tea and placing the cool cucumber slices on my eyes, and, again, I snapped to as a phrase from the lecture struck a chord in my consciousness. The words this time were

  "Ancient Ones."

  I blinked, trying to listen, wondering what "Ancient Ones" might have to do with an ash tree.

  It was then I felt a prickling of hairs at the base of my neck and I twisted in my seat to discover a girl staring at me with a dark look from where she sat at the back of the row. I raised my eyebrows in query as if to ask, What's up?

  She smiled then, a dark smile that silently hinted at possession of some mystical truth, the kind of smile a mime might give someone passing on a street corner. I am silent, the smile said, because I am mute, and I am mute because I am not prepared, yet, to deal with you any other way.

  I turned around again, disturbed. I didn't know her and couldn't fathom why she'd been staring at the back of my head. I didn't know any of the students in Professor Alan's mythology class. It was the start of the school year at Miskatonic, early September, and I had come a long way from my home in Alabama to attend the University, feeling there was nothing the southern universities offered that I should be interested in learning. In order to afford tuition, I had taken a tiny apartment in a squalid building next to the ruins of an old church.

  I hadn't made any friends and didn't care if I ever managed to. I have had one ambition, and it has been the acquisition of knowledge. Wide, deep, comprehensive knowledge of how the world works. I believed that if I knew that much, I could then manipulate the world for my own ends, no matter what profession I entered after my degree.

  Professor Alan was not the most inspiring lecturer I had drawn during the lottery style sign-up for classes. I expected the subject matter to overcome whatever phlegmatic professor was assigned to teach the course, but I was wrong. Professor Alan had been putting me to sleep ever since the beginning of the term.

  When class broke, without me falling asleep again due to the creepy stare from the girl behind me, I exited the classroom yawning. I was one of the last stragglers, slow to get my things, slow to move, worn and tired from fifty minutes of interminable droning. The pages of my notebook were full not of notes, but of miniature drawings of winged beasts and snarling Gothic creatures--evidence of my state of mind. If I could, I would have one of the little doodles on the page take life and swoop down over the balding pate of the professor, lifting off the top of his skull as if it were hinged and dining from the delicate gnarled fruit there uncovered.

  Just outside the door of the classroom Carla Knight waited, her shoulders crouched over her books held to her chest, her neck outstretched and her head oddly thrust out toward anyone coming through the door. I flinched and stepped around her. What a loon, I thought. She was already speaking, though now it was to my back for I was maneuvering through the busy crowd in the hallway. "I live across the street from you," she said. "I've seen you wandering around the church ruins."

  By now she had caught up with me and walked at my side, her head still thrust forward and now turned to watch my face.

  "My name's Carla, Carla Knight, K-n-i-g-h-t. Want to go to the University Spa and have a Coke?"

  I halted, turning to her. "Why were you staring so hard at me in class? What do you want?"

  She shrugged and the strange smile slipped back to her lips. Then her eyes brightened, as she noticed I was about to leave her standing there. "Wait." She reached out and put a staying hand on my arm. "I'll tell you why I was staring if you'll come with me to the Spa. You won't be sorry."

  It was my turn to shrug. Why not? Professor Alan's class was my last one for the day and I didn't have any pressing demands on my time. Besides, I admitted to a bizarre interest in the unusual girl. She not only looked funny, the way she held herself, the way she smiled, the way she spoke, all breathless like Marilyn Monroe, but I wanted to know what she wanted from me.

  We made our way across the campus without talking, the only sound the crackle and swish of our feet wading through the unraked sea of autumn leaves. I never visited the University Spa on my own. I had no friends of course, and saw no reason to come alone to be ridiculed, to be whispered about behind my back. Worse than in high school, it seemed, young men and women paired off at college.

  Though not ugly or unkempt, I've never had luck with guys. It may be the direct looks I give them or the cool aura I project, an aloofness too chilly to penetrate. It could be my intellect. Or...I'm the first to allow that I am this way to keep from being rejected. Who needs complications, that's how I think. My thirst for knowledge doesn't leave much room for hungering after romantic involvements.

  "I like your sweater," Carla said, as we mounted the steps into the building housing the Spa. "Are those occult symbols?"

  I frowned at her "No, it's just the threads. They're randomly selected, producing a...collage. Like modern art."

  "Well, I like it."

  I wouldn't say thank-you. I didn't know if I liked her enough to get too chummy. She lived across the street from my building, she said. What if she became a pest and wanted to come over all the time, interrupting my studies? I kept a four-point grade average. And I hadn't had a best friend since grade school and didn't look forward to one now. No time for that. No time at all.

  We bought Cokes and took them with Styrofoam cups of ice to an empty table. A gaggle of laughing couples were frolicking in the pool, the sounds bouncing from the overhead dome of cool green glass. The air smelled of chlorine and damp towels, hot dogs and hamburgers. I wrinkled my nose and promptly brought the frothing Coke I'd poured into the cup of ice to my lips.

  When I set it down on the table, I had to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. "So what was the mysterious message you were trying to send during class?"

  "Let me ask a question first. Since you go into the churchyard and climb around the ruins and since you're taking Mythology, could I assume you're interested in the soul and in the unseen?"

  "The what? The unseen? You mean, like spirits or ghosts?"

  She watched me, concentrating on my lips as I spoke, which made me wonder if I'd gotten off all the Coke froth or if she were partly deaf and must lip-read.

  "Not like spirits or ghosts," she said.
>
  "What else is there that you're referring to then?"

  We were having less of a conversation than a battle of confusing words.

  "The gods, the old gods, the Ancient Ones. The Unseen."

  The creep was back on my neck, standing hairs on end. How did she know my innermost thoughts? How did she guess the reason I thought I might find key secrets here at Miskatonic?

  Since I hadn't answered her, she continued. "When Professor Alan mentioned the Ancient Ones, your head rose from your fist where you'd been resting it, and your attention, at least for a few moments, was riveted. It's what you've come here to discover more about, isn't it?"

  I sipped Coke and looked away to the swimmers in the deep end of the Olympic-sized indoor pool.

  An athlete with bulging biceps readied for a dive from the high board. He lifted into the air as primly as a swan and cut the water neatly. "If I have, I don't know that it would be any of your business."

  "I've been in the library stacks," she said cryptically.

  I looked at her birdlike neck stretched out, her inquisitive hazel eyes that promised knowledge of vital information. "How did you get in there as an underclassman?"

  The thought of getting into the revered stacks where only graduate students were permitted sent a delicious shiver all down my spine. I would give anything to be allowed entrance to the tomes hidden there. They could not be checked out. They couldn't even be consulted within the library without special permission.

  "You've found something," I said, "about the Ancient Ones."

  She blinked rapidly and her eyes watered and shined as if she were starving and a plate of steak and fries had been set before her. "I've found something," she agreed.

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "Because," she said, reaching out to brush a stray length of hair from my forehead. "I've read your mind. Ever since you moved into your apartment. I've read your mind."

  #

  There used to be a tale told in rural southern Alabama about an old black woman who lived back in the woods. She could tell fortunes, they said, and more than that, she knew what you wanted to hear before you told her of your concerns.