This was, it turned out, true in more than one way, if the process of waking may be associated with revival. For my aunt was not alone in her abrupt and miraculous feat of recovery. It transpired, as over succeeding days I learned in more detail, that of all the six hundred-odd persons lying sick that night, or even, it was thought, at the point of death, not one but did not rouse up an instant or so after the appalling clangour of the bell. And not one thereafter but did not take quickly a swift and easy path to full recovery. (Even, or so I was assured, a cat that had been failing grew suddenly well, and a canary that had sunk to the floor of its cage flew up on its perch and began to sing.)
Shamelessly, it was spoken of as a miracle, this reversal of extreme illness to good health. And there were those who spoke religiously of the falling bell, some claiming that it had cast itself down in some curious form of sacrifice, which it achieved, having cracked and buckled itself beyond use. Others averred that it had been itself unlucky or impure in some sensational but mysterious way, and therefore fell like an evil angel, at God’s will, after which the town was freed from its curse.
These notions, of course, were ludicrous, but everywhere for a while one heard them, and small surprise. For the saving of so many of the town’s lives, both young and old, affluent and poor, and in so abrupt and unheralded a form, did indeed smack of divine intervention. While I did not for a moment credit this, yet I thanked God with everyone else there. And as the days went on, and Steepleford hoisted itself slowly but surely from its own ashes, the streets cleared of water and debris, the baleful fires vanished, and the summer sun took pity and shone with greater brightness and less heat. The smell of furnaces and dungeons melted away.
Ten days later, accompanying my aunt on her first walk up and down the thoroughfares, I saw fresh roses blooming in twenty gardens. Now and then, where a tree had come down or been axed, new growth could be seen rioting, shining green, from the stumps.
They had found by then that the bell rope had been eaten away. By rats, some said, as Steepleford moved, a rescued ship, back upon its even keel.
‘Such a nuisance,’ added my aunt, flighty as a girl. ‘Now the rector will want another one.’
I said that this would mean more fund-raising bacchanals, and Aunt Alice remarked that the strange Mr Polleto at least would spare them all his disappointing presence. ‘Lady Constance, when she called, told me that he had left the town only last Monday. Generally such a thing would never have caught her attention, but it seems the cottage is now for sale, and she wishes to buy it for a young painter she has found.’
But I had then no interest at all in Mr Polleto.
My aunt, meanwhile, had more than become herself again. She seemed to me younger and more active than she had been for years. The doctor too assured me that he now thought her ‘good for three decades’. And when she said to me one evening, ‘Do you know, dear boy, I think being ill has done me good,’ I could only agree. And so, it must be confessed, once more at liberty to do so, I began to hanker after my own life.
Of course, I was bemused too. I wanted time to myself to think over events. One instant I felt I had been the involuntary party to a delusion. At another, the unreal seemed actual. But we seldom trust ourselves upon such matters, I mean upon matters that may involve the supernatural. There is always some other explanation that surely must be the proper one.
I am not unduly superstitious, and now, in the glow of returning normality, I began to prefer to think of myself as having been in the grasp of a wild obsession. In this state I had imagined some things and brooded upon others, until I could make them fit my vivid scenario.
When finally I commenced my preparations to leave Steepleford, I was told, in passing, by a neighbour that no carriage could now be driven along Salter’s Lane.
‘Are the fallen trees still uncleared?’
‘No, no. It’s the new growth shooting out there. It’s become one great coppice, with trees bursting, they say, from the stumps. Those that have seen it say they’ve never known a sight like it. But there’s a deal going on with trees and other plants, after that drought we had.’ Here he gave me a long list of things, which I will not reproduce. Then, as I was tiring, he said this: ‘Perhaps you may have noticed the old beech at the station? A fine old tree, but it was twisting and due for the axe. But now it’s been spared, and they say the roots have dug down again, if such a thing is to be believed, and the trunk is straight again too. And the leaves are coming out on it as if it were May, not August. A strange business and no mistake. Did you ever get a peep at that house in the Lane? The Witch House, some call it.’
Sombrely I replied that I had.
‘Well, that’s all come down, like a house of cards. Not a wall of it standing, nor one stone on another. A great heap of rubble.’
I had a dream, not while I remained in the town but a month later, when Nash had persuaded me back to France, in the south, in a little village among the chestnut woods. I dreamed I was on the roof of Steepleford church, and pale, glassy arrows flew by through the air. They were the looks of a woman who stood at a window in Salter’s Lane. These arrows severed the rope of the bell in the church spire. And when it fell there was no sound, only a great nothingness. But in the nothingness, I knew that woman was no more.
‘What’s up?’ said Nash, finding me out in the village street, smoking, at four in the morning, the dawn just lifting its silver lids beyond the trees.
‘Do you suppose,’ I said, ‘that something thought fully virtuous, if attacked, might rebound on the attacker, might destroy them?’
‘History and experience relate otherwise,’ said Nash.
And so they do.
* * * *
IV
That, then, was my story of Steepleford, all I had of it at the time, but which I gave to my companion, Jeffers, on the terrace of the Hotel Alpius as we waited for the Wassenhaur train.
I was nevertheless moved to express to him my regret for the unsatisfactory lack of explanation concerning the final outcome of events.
‘I haven’t been back to the place for years now,’ I finished, ‘and so can add nothing. My aunt, you see, grew sprightly - she still is - and moved to London, where she has a fine town house.’
‘Hmm,’ said my companion. He drew upon his cigar, and looked covertly again at the instigator of my tale, that same quaint little shopkeeper Polleto, who still sat at his adjacent table.
Precisely at that moment the untoward took place. Or perhaps I should say the apt, as it had happened before, and neither of us could now miss its significance.
A party of three gentlemen and two ladies had just now been coming across the terrace, and had taken their seats to my right. So it was that I heard, from behind my right ear, a stifled little cry, and next the splintering crash of a water glass dropped on the paving.
Jeffers and I both turned sharply, in time to see that the second young lady of the party, ashen in colour, was being supported by her friends. As they fussed and produced a smelling-bottle, and called loudly for spirits, Polleto darted to his feet and went gliding quickly from the terrace.
‘Now I fancy,’ said Jeffers, ‘you’ve witnessed something of this sort before. And I too, in a way, since you told me of it.’
‘You mean Daffodil King, who fainted at the church tea?’
‘Just so.’
‘You imagine that she, and the lady over there, swooned for a similar reason - that they had seen Mr Polleto?’
‘Don’t you imagine it?’ asked Jeffers laconically.
I thought, and answered honestly, ‘Yes. But why?’
‘I wonder,’ said Jeffers, infuriatingly. Then he added, ‘No, I’m not being fair to you. You see, I’ve read of the case, and viewed a rather poor photograph once, in a police museum, in circumstances I shan’t bore you with. When you first pointed him out, I had a half-suspicion. But in the light of both ladies fainting at the sight of the man . . . Recollect, Austria is only over the border here. I
believe you told me that the charming Daffodil had been in Austria once, and said she had seen something there so awful that it had taken her six years to recover from it?’
‘Yes, or so her sister informed me.’
‘What she saw then was that same man, Polleto, in the street probably, on the day that the people of a well-known Austrian spa almost lynched him. I have no doubts the other lady, to our right, saw him in a similar style. Unless she had the singular misfortune to have met him.’
‘Then he’s notorious?’
‘No. Of course, his real nameisn’t Polleto. 1 was never told what his real name was. The documents referred to him only as the Criminal. And the crime too was hushed up in the end, and rich acquaintances got him away to avoid a most resounding scandal, which would, I believe, have brought down the Austrian government of the hour.’
‘In God’s name - what had he done?’
Jeffers shrugged. ‘That’s the thing, Frederick, what had he done? No one would say. Not even the file on him, which I was shown, would say anything as to the nature of his crime. Not even the policemen I spoke with. It was something so vile, so disgusting, so inhuman, that no scrap of it has ever been revealed by anyone who knows. They won’t - can’t - speak of it. They try to push it from their minds. And if they see him, like that lady across the terrace, some part of them withers. There now, she’s looking a little better. All the better, no doubt, since what made her ill has left the vicinity.’
I sat staring at him.
Presently I said, ‘Are you then saying to me what I suppose you must be?’
Jeffers stretched himself in his chair, and smiled at me. ‘Even you,’ said he, ‘asked yourself whether or not something of great perceived virtue, like a church bell, could halt Amber Maria, should she set her sights on it. But it wasn’t virtue she avoided, was it? She loved the earth and all the people in it. I, too, Frederick, have heard of the Lilyite sect, and of course she must have been a member of it. No doubt Josebaar Hawkins let her have her meetings in his house, and protected her afterwards by lying. But maybe, in later years, he feared that in her too, that she was one of the Lilyites and put the teachings of Jesus before all other things. “What did she do but love others and want to help them with her precious gift of seeing, from which she herself had never tried to profit? She saw good and beauty in all men and all things, and loved them like - loved them better than - herself. And where have you heard such philosophy before, save from the lips of Christ?’
I was shocked a little, to have missed this clue. Humbly I waited for him to go on. He did so.
‘Amber Maria looked with her eating eyes through her window, and after the blocked-up bricks and pins, she had the glass, and then, as you said, the trees, the air and the Lane. And next she ate up Steepleford with her eyes. And it would have gone on like this, like rings spreading from a pebble thrown into a pool, and God knows where it could have ended. But ended it must have done, at last. For in this world, along with all those who, despite their colossal failings, carry in them the seeds of goodness and beauty, there are a few, only a few, I trust, who have nothing like that inside them. Who are composed only of the grossest and most foul of atoms, who are, though human, like things of the Pit. In them there is not, I dare say, one hint of light. Perhaps there is no soul. And meeting one of these persons, Amber Maria, who fed on goodness and beauty and drained it to dust, fed instead upon the worst poison, that which would scald away the psychic core of any such vampire. It was Polleto, you see, Polleto, that little ghastly human demon, whose crime is so unspeakable that it is never spoken of, Polleto who had come to live in the town, placating it by helping it buy a bell, Polleto that at last her devouring eyes reached. Like everything else then, she tried to eat him up. And then she must have tried to spew him out. But it was too late. She had touched and tasted in a manner only vampires know. She who had once loved God and once loved others as herself, until they let her die in that atrocious manner. And after that she who hated and would have eaten the world, save in due course she came to Polleto and ate at Polleto. Polleto! And it killed her, Frederick, in each and every way. It killed her, sending her to a death more deep than any grave, more cold than any stone.’
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* * * *
GLEN HIRSHBERG
Struwwelpeter
The following story originally appeared on SciFi.Com, and has been selected for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection as well as this volume of The Mammoth Books of Best New Horror.
Glen Hirshberg’s novelette, ‘Mr Dark’s Carnival’, which received its first printing in the Ash-Tree Press anthology Shadows and Silence and later appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection, was nominated for both the International Horror Guild Award and the World Fantasy Award. He also has stories in Dark Terrors 6 and The Dark. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, is published in the United States by Carroll & Graf. Currently, he is putting the final touches on a collection of ghost stories and working on a new novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.
About ‘Struwwelpeter’ the author notes: ‘Ballard is an actual section of Seattle, but the neighborhood portrayed here bares little resemblance to it except for the rain and the duplexes and the lutefisk smell. This story is dedicated to Phil Bednarz, wherever he is, for taking me bell-ringing.’
* * * *
‘The dead are not altogether powerless.’
- Chief Seattle
T
his was before we knew about Peter, or at least before we understood what we knew, and my mother says it’s impossible to know a thing like that anyway. She’s wrong, though, and she doesn’t need me to tell her she is, either.
Back then, we still gathered, afterschool afternoons, at the Andersz house, because it was close to the locks. If it wasn’t raining, we’d drop our books and grab ho-hos out of the tin Mr Andersz always left on the table for us and head immediately toward the water. Gulls spun in the sunlight overhead, their cries urgent, taunting, telling us, you’re missing it, you’re missing it. We’d sprint between the rows of low stone duplexes, the sad little gardens with their flowers battered by the rain until the petals looked bent and forgotten like discarded training wheels, the splintery, sagging blue walls of the Black Anchor restaurant where Mr Paars used to hunker alone and murmuring over his plates of reeking lutefisk when he wasn’t stalking 15th Street, knocking pigeons and homeless people out of the way with his dog-head cane. Finally, we’d burst into the park, pour down the avenue of fir trees like a mudslide, scattering people, bugs, and birds before us until we hit the water.
For hours, we’d prowl the green hillsides, watching the sailors yell at the invading seals from the top of the locks while the seals ignored them, skimming for fish and sometimes rolling on their backs and flipping their fins. We watched the rich-people sailboats with their masts rusting, the big grey fishing boats from Alaska and Japan and Russia with the fishermen bored on deck, smoking, throwing butts at the seals and leaning on the rails while the gulls shrieked overhead. As long as the rain held off, we stayed and threw stones to see how high up the opposite bank we could get them, and Peter would wait for ships to drift in front of us and then throw low over their bows. The sailors would scream curses in other languages or sometimes ours, and Peter would throw bigger stones at the boat-hulls. When they hit with a thunk, we’d flop on our backs on the wet grass and flip our feet in the air like the seals. It was the rudest gesture we knew.
Of course, most days it was raining, and we stayed in the Anderszes’ basement until Mr Andersz and the Serbians came home. Down there, in the damp - Mr Andersz claimed his was one of three basements in all of Ballard - you could hear the wetness rising in the grass outside like lock-water. The first thing Peter did when we got downstairs was flick on the gas fireplace (not for heat, it didn’t throw any), and we’d toss in stuff: pencils, a tinfoil ball, a plastic cup, and once a broken old 45 which formed blist
ers on its surface and then spit black goo into the air like a fleeing octopus dumping ink before it slid into a notch in the logs to melt. Once, Peter went upstairs and came back with one of Mr Andersz’s red spiral photo albums and tossed it into the flames, and when one of the Mack sisters asked him what was in it, he told her, ‘No idea. Didn’t look.’
The burning never lasted long, five minutes, maybe. Then we’d eat ho-hos and play the Atari Mr Andersz had bought Peter years before at a yard sale, and it wasn’t like you think, not always. Mostly, Peter flopped in his orange bean-bag chair with his long legs stretched in front of him and his too-long black bangs splayed across his forehead like the talons of some horrible, giant bird gripping him to lift him away. He let me and the Mack sisters take turns on the machine, and Kenny London and Steve Rourke, too, back in the days when they would come. I was the best at the basic games, Asteroids and Pong, but Jenny Mack could stay on Dig Dug forever and not get grabbed by the floating grabby-things in the ground. Even when we asked Peter to take his turn, he wouldn’t. He’d say, ‘Go ahead,’ or ‘Too tired,’ or ‘Fuck off,’ and once I even turned around in the middle of losing to Jenny and found him watching us, sort of, the rainy window and us, not the tv screen at all. He reminded me a little of my grandfather before he died, all folded up in his chair and not wanting to go anywhere and kind of happy to have us there. Always, Peter seemed happy to have us there.
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