“Hah,” says a girl all in red: the hair, the lips, the dress, the heels. She’s playing cribbage with the boys, two tables down from Lady Blue, and she’s just won two nob points for dealing a Jack. “Clear sky, not a drop. Anyway we’re tens of miles inland.”
“Doesn’t matter,” says gap-toothed Shaun, who’s been at Old Benny’s Pub longer than a girl like Red can remember. “Benny’s never wrong.”
“Nobody’s never wrong,” says Red. She snaps down a card. “Five.”
Then it comes.
It’s a wind that whips through Benny’s half-open windows. A visible wind, a dirty brownish-blue, smelling of brine. It leaves a scuff on Jason’s glass, like someone’s rotten-tooth breath.
“What’d I tell you?” Shaun hollers. He points to the frigid swirl at the centre of the room, which grows more visible by the second, thickening into something like limbs. Shaun loves it when Benny’s right. Benny just shakes his head, keeps washing the bar.
The wind thickens and thickens, and then the howl isn’t wind through branches but an unearthly trill in the throats of what’s standing there.
They’re men from the solar plexus down. Above that, something slimy and finned twists up and up to a blind head. Each one gapes with three black lamprey mouths.
Lightning flashes, flickering off of their thousands of teeth.
Everybody’s looking now, even Jason. Bloody Tom Jackson with the long sideburns, fingering the switchblade in his back pocket, is the first to rise.
“This ain’t your town,” he says. “Get going, you.”
Bloody Tom stares down the lampreys. The lampreys, eye-less, gape back at him.
Jason edges a little closer to Lady Blue.
Then there’s a lunge. Nobody’s sure if it’s Bloody Tom who strikes first, or the lampreys. There’s just a whirling howl, a wet smacking noise, then Bloody Tom lies limp in a lamprey’s grip, his knife knocked out of his hand. The creature dips its mouthy end as if about to kiss him. One sucking mouth latches on to the hollow of Bloody Tom’s cheekbone. One at the base of his jaw. And the third, the largest one, at the base of his throat, between the collarbones.
There is a sound like a child sucking a milkshake through a straw. Bloody Tom’s body shrivels.
Jason clutches at Lady Blue’s hand. He’s shaking, poor thing. Lady Blue trails a fingertip along his knuckles. She is not fool enough to interfere, but she rather wants to stay and watch. Lady Blue is not afraid of anything.
The lamprey drops Bloody Tom’s body to the floor. Its mouthy end looks different now, rounder, with something rough at the edges, like a parody of sideburns.
“My name is Bloody Tom,” it says, all three mouths speaking in unison. “Everyone knows I beat my wife. Nobody knows I beat my children. I want them to be tough enough to get out of here, see? But they fuck up and I lose control. Then I beat myself. I think I never really had control, not in my whole life.”
The other men, poised at first to defend Bloody Tom, back away.
“My name is Bloody Tom,” says the lamprey again. “Does anyone else have a problem with me?”
And no one’s dumb enough to say they do. The lamprey stomps to the bar and orders a Jim Beam, Bloody Tom’s favourite. Benny’s the kind of bartender who doesn’t say anything. Just slides the glass across and takes his money.
The other men make excuses and leave: some with terror in their eyes, some saving up murder for later. Lady Blue would like to watch the lampreys a little longer. The one taking Bloody Tom’s name looks like his head is imperceptibly unrounding, gradually losing Tom’s features. She’d like to see how that works, what it means. But Jason is practically in her lap now, clinging to her, though he’s man enough to pretend that’s not what he’s doing.
“I got to get you home, honey,” he says. “I don’t think it’s safe for you here.”
Lady Blue’s house is the biggest in town. There are rooms for breakfast, rooms for lunch, pantries and dining rooms, bathrooms, shower rooms, hot-tub rooms, guest rooms, storage rooms, linen closets, wardrobes, rooms full of appliances, rooms for television and board games and stacks on stacks of books. There is the one little room where Jason must never go, and there is the big bedroom, the mountainous canopy bed where he waits every night, naked but for the key round his neck, the way Lady Blue likes. If he were a dog, he’d be wagging his tail.
Tonight when he gathers her up in his arms, his forearms quiver. “What was that tonight, honey? Where do things like that come from? Do you know?”
“Not a thing,” says Lady Blue, which is the truth. “Smart men learn not to look too hard for answers.”
Jason has an adorable way of multitasking when he’s drunk. He tugs at the buttons of Lady Blue’s dress while he talks. “God, when I think of anything happening to you – when I think of you in the same room with those things, I just get…” He reaches the last button. The thick blue silk falls away, and he falters midsentence. Falls to her creamy skin instead of talking, kisses and bites the curve of her breast.
Lady Blue smiles indulgently, weaves her fingers through his short hair. “You get frisky, honey?”
“No! No, that’s not it, I just get—” Whatever he gets is lost in another set of incoherent noises. He clutches her waist, pulls her closer and kisses his way up to her mouth.
She leans in over him, hands at his shoulder blades, makes him lean back. Lady Blue doesn’t talk back because there’s no need. Jason knows just how to please her. She tells him sometimes, when they’re done and lying puddled together, what a good boy he is. How he makes her shine from the inside out. But she will never admit the other thing she feels. The way she looks down at him sometimes and dares to believe that he’s perfect. After all these years and all these husbands, this one will stay good to her. This is the one she can keep.
If anything ever scared Lady Blue, it would be the way she gets that feeling every time, even knowing better.
The lampreys don’t go away. They skulk on street corners gaping at passersby. Working mothers pull their children close to cross on the other side of the street. Men glare at the lampreys and growl.
On Sunday, three of Bloody Tom’s friends jump a lamprey, figuring three men with blades drawn are a fair match for three mouths. The lamprey doesn’t think so. There’s a whirling of wind. Now it’s three men and seven lampreys. No one sees those men again, but everyone hears their voices in snatches of three-part harmony.
“My name is Lou, and I’m so lonely I sleep with my arms wrapped around the radio.”
“My name is Cal, and when my sister died, I knew who’d taken her. I never told. I was a kid. I thought he’d come for me next if I said anything.”
“My name is Mack. I was lying when I said I wanted to stab that lamprey. I was drunk, I just wanted to sound tough, and didn’t think – please. I don’t give a shit about Tom. If I hadn’t lost that factory job, think I’d be here? You think I’d care about you lowlifes? I hate you all. Please. God. Please, let me go.”
Some folks look at the lampreys with pity when they say those things – though the pity is not for the lampreys. Most folks, even the ones who thought they loved Cal and Mack, draw away. Most don’t want to know the things at the bottom of a dead man’s heart.
On Monday there’s another fight, and no one in town agrees which side started it. On Tuesday, the lampreys take the local seamstress and her baby son. When a lamprey crosses town declaring that its name is Ollie and it misses its mama, the game changes. Conquest now, not vengeance. Families hide in their cellars. Leave the window open a crack, or a knothole unguarded in the wall, and there’s a chance they’ll come shrieking in on the wind.
On Wednesday night, Lady Blue slinks into Old Benny’s Pub and takes her usual seat. The pub has been unofficially divided, with lampreys to one side. A few of the shabbiest regulars, still alive, huddle at the other and nurse their cheap liquor.
Benny raises an eyebrow as Lady Blue enters. “Where’s the husband?”
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“Safe,” says Lady Blue. Benny puts down the usual Electric Lemonade, and she raises it to her lips. “Doors weatherstripped, windows shut, snug as a pin. I mean to keep this one a good while yet.” And she means it. Poor thing – when she suggested going out, he said yes, but he shook like a trapped rabbit. It’s a good enough reason for missing their date night, she thinks. This once. As long as he’s waiting for her when she returns.
“Yet you’re out here.”
Lady Blue takes another sip. “I want to understand what’s happening. A lady doesn’t do that by hiding at home.”
“So what’s your grand plan?”
“Observe.”
Lady Blue looks away from Benny. The man’s seen a lot, and there’s a wariness in his voice when he talks to her. He avoids looking straight at her, even while he’s setting out the highball just the way she likes. Lady Blue finds this tiresome.
The bar’s quiet, but for lampreys murmuring in their wind-whisper way and human drunks muttering in despair.
Lady Blue strains to hear if there are any human words in what the lampreys say. Lady Blue does not believe in God, but it strikes her that the lampreys are like little gods, judging every soul that goes in. Or pretending to. She wonders if the human words in those mouths are even true. She wonders which is worse, calumny or exposure.
While she is thinking, a new man walks in.
You can tell he’s from out of town by the uniform, the crisp-cut walk. No one walks so clean and straight in this town. Even spotless Lady Blue tends to slink or to glide, not to march like a fool soldier. The man’s clean-shaven, with hair so short it must be military, and a wooden cross round his neck. His eyes are bright green.
“Evenin’, sir,” he says, nodding to Benny and Lady Blue. “Ma’am.”
“Evening,” says Lady Blue, nodding back.
“What’ll you have?” says Benny.
“Nothing, sir. My name’s Abner. I’m from the Department of Emergencies. There’s been reports of some disturbance here, sir, so I was sent…” He trails off, his Adam’s apple rising. Reports of some disturbance hardly covers it.
“You think you can do anything?” says Lady Blue.
“Ma’am,” says Abner, “with the good Lord on our side, the Department of Emergencies can always do something. Can’t say I’ve seen a case quite like this, but there’s always hope.”
Lady Blue takes a sip of her Electric Lemonade. “What if the good Lord is on the lampreys’ side?”
Abner laughs. “Wash out your mouth, ma’am.”
“And spoil the taste of a good highball?”
“Fair point.” He smiles. More intrigued than offended. “Night like tonight, though, shouldn’t a dame like you be home, where it’s safe?”
“I can take care of myself, thank you.”
One of the drunks in the corner grins up at them. “Toughest dame in town, that one. Richest, too.”
This seems to perk Abner’s interest. Or his worry. “You’re not from that big house up on the hill, ma’am?”
“I would be, yes.”
His brow furrows. “You… You don’t have a spouse or dependents in that house, do you, ma’am?”
Lady Blue looks at him levelly. “What’s it to you?”
“Ma’am, I went by that house and there was a front window wide open. You better get back there, round up your people, if they’re still there. Beggin’ your pardon, of course.”
Lady Blue’s gaze becomes a stare.
She is sure that she closed every window, sealed every door. Lady Blue pays attention to the details.
“I can walk you there, ma’am,” says Abner. He’s subtler about it than most, but his eyes have been on her since he came in, more than on the lampreys. Men see Lady Blue and they want to stay with her, protect her. “Not sure what I can do beyond that, but if you need a pair of hands—”
“No,” says Lady Blue.
She puts down her Electric Lemonade unfinished and pays, leaving Benny his usual tip. Then she slips out of Old Benny’s Pub and runs up the street, in her long blue dress and high heels, as fast as she’s ever run to anything.
Jason is silly, not stupid. He knows what will happen if he opens a window. He cannot have done it carelessly, and Lady Blue knows she did not do it herself. He can only have done it on purpose. To hurt her. To hurt himself.
There is only one thing that makes Lady Blue’s husbands betray her.
She hopes she is wrong. Jason is so new. He hasn’t started with a single one of the warning signs. He has never toyed idly with the key in her presence; never cast long, brooding looks at it; never asked the wrong questions. Lady Blue will never admit it, but there are tears in her eyes. She does not want the lampreys to have this man. If she is wrong about what he has done tonight, she will protect him with everything she has. She hopes she is wrong.
She knows she is right.
She reaches the house on the hill. The front window is wide open. She unlocks the door, lets herself in, closes it behind her, and shuts and locks the window.
The anteroom is silent and dark. Lady Blue flicks on the lights. She does not see any lampreys, so far.
She walks head held high, no sound but the clicking of her heels, through the five halls and the countless rooms. She thinks something wails faintly, now and again, but is not certain. She does not see lampreys. She does not see Jason. She pauses by the door to the one little room where he can never go. It is shut and locked, but that is no proof of anything.
She checks the closets, even the cupboards. She pauses in the kitchen and draws her best carving knife from its drawer. She saves the master bedroom for last.
On the great canopy bed, Jason is waiting for her, naked, just the way she likes. But he is weeping. His eyes are puffy and red, and the key round his neck drips, fouling the sheets with blood that is not yet his.
Lady Blue goes very still.
“Jason,” she says.
He starts toward her, then cringes away.
“Explain this to me, Jason,” says Lady Blue without a hint of emotion.
He struggles to speak through his tears. “What did you do to them?”
“To whom, Jason?”
“Your other husbands.” The words wrench their way out of him, halfway between a sob and a shout of rage. “All of your other husbands! All h-hanging there, dead, dripping.”
“Why did you go in that room, Jason?”
“You were so c-casual. All the time. With the lampreys. And I thought – I thought you must know something. I know I promised you I wouldn’t look, but the whole town is dying. If I saved the whole town, you’d forgive me, wouldn’t you? God would forgive me. Maybe things wouldn’t be like they were, but—” He hiccups, chokes briefly on his tears. “But there was nothing about lampreys. There was just them.”
“And the window, Jason?”
“I was so scared. And angry. I could hear them wailing outside. I thought, if they want to kill us both, why not? Why should I want to live?” He sniffs loudly. “But they didn’t come. And you’re going to kill me now, too, aren’t you?”
Lady Blue makes no effort to hide the carving knife. Neither does she do anything with it yet. She sits on the edge of the bed next to him. He shies away, but she catches him under the chin with one finger, makes him look in her eyes. “If I didn’t kill you now, honey, what would you do? If I held you gently and explained in small words how it started, said I was sorry for scaring you like this, promised not to hurt you so long as you kept my secret? Could you live with me? Could you still be my dearest husband and make me shine from the inside out?”
Jason pulls away, and that’s when she knows for sure. He can’t meet her eyes, but he sniffs and mumbles, “Yes. Yes, I’d still love you. Please. It could be like before.”
“You’d listen to everything I told you? You’d keep it all a secret for me?”
“Please…”
Lady Blue strokes back along his cheek. Tangles her left hand lazily i
n his hair, like she does every night, when he wants to put his mouth on her. “Then kiss me, honey.”
She doesn’t draw him closer. She waits for him to move, and he does – away from her, bucking against her grip. They all struggle like this, in the end. “What did you do to them?” he demands again, his voice rising to a shriek.
“This,” says Lady Blue. She cuts his throat, spilling his blood over the bedspread.
Then she puts on a little light music.
Lady Blue is a creature who mourns. Just not the same way as most women. Most of her rage and grief at losing Jason is in the carving knife, the one swift cut that brings closure. The rest must be dealt with in other ways. The essential thing is to keep herself moving and orderly. There are rituals: care of the body, washing of hands and sheets, cleaning of knife, lighting of candles. And there is music. Lady Blue’s only real friend at these times is her old vinyl record of Verdi’s Requiem. Verdi understands about punishment, about actions having consequences, even if Lady Blue’s husbands never do in the end. She has everything timed, so that when the last strains of the “Libera me” fade, her house is spotless. Except for that one little room.
She washes her hands as the choir softly murmurs, and then she gets to work. She fetches a coat hanger from that one little room and hangs Jason on it like a suit jacket. The hardest part is carrying the body down the hall and not leaving a trail of blood. She always fails at this, a little, and has to use steel wool and polish to get it off the hardwood, which is factored in to the schedule.
Three feet from the door to that one little room, she hears a wailing like wind.
She pauses. Jason’s body lolls in her arms.
“I have no quarrel with you,” she says to the walls. “Leave me alone.”
The wailing fades, or seems to. It’s hard to tell under the music. Lady Blue stands in place and breathes for a moment, considering. She could turn off the record, but that would mess up the ritual. Anyway the “Kyrie” is winding down, with longer and slower pauses between each phrase, and maybe if she waits a moment—
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