Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017

by Uncanny Magazine

  Had my husband met the devil at sea? I did not love my husband. I scarcely knew him. He was an old man and I was only a girl. This, though, was nothing I desired for him, nor for myself.

  “What, praytell, is the name of your companion?” I managed to ask. “Will your friend be staying here long? Shall I tell the servants to prepare a room?”

  “My companion’s name is Night,” my husband said, as though I ought to know already.

  The thing looked at me, and it glittered like a sky full of stars, but it was a lacunae in the center of the darkness, a place where a star had died, and beyond the edge of the dark there was something much worse, a roiling red planet, hidden behind a thin black veil.

  “And where did you meet?” I asked, my voice that of a polite hostess. I had in my hands a tray of cordial, and I could hear the glasses rattling, but I held myself as steady as I could.

  “Thule,” said the thing, its voice a hiss containing an unlikely mellifluence. I felt myself sway at its sweetness. “Thule was my kingdom, but I am banished by a mortal dreamer. I was the ruler of Thule, and now I shall bide a time with you while I seek for the dreamer who dares injure me.”

  “I found my friend on the ship,” said my husband seemingly oblivious to the creature’s foulness. “A stowaway, fled from the land of dreams. And oh, that such a one could be hidden amongst coiled ropes.” He turned to look at the creature, and on his face there was nothing but worship.

  I turned and walked back up the stair, feeling eyes on my spine. I went directly to my own chamber, and locked the door behind me, pressing my back to the wood, gasping.

  I was the ruler of Thule . The creature said again in my mind, and the words resonated terribly inside me, over and over.”

  I looked at the innkeeper, and her eyes were on mine, steady. She nodded.

  “Thule,” she repeated. “I thought as much.”

  I continued.

  “From that night forward, I listened to the sound of whispers, but I never knew what they discussed. My husband took to drink, and the stowaway took to meat. The butcher brought us wrapped packets, tied tightly with red string, and in these late days, whenever I saw any red fabric, I thought of this, the way that string had unspooled down our front staircase, twisting like intestines on the white marble of the floor.

  It was not long before my husband was dead. I looked into his open grave on a snowy day in February and saw something at the bottom of it, dozens of long and tangled arms embracing the coffin. Inside it, his frozen body bore the marks of hooves. In the official version, he died of drink.

  My woe continued with my husband’s death, for though he left me his fortune, he also left me the stowaway. I spent my evenings sitting in the dark, opposite a pair of glowing eyes. And so went my misery, nearly twenty years of it.

  The creature was neither husband nor companion. We shared the house, but that was all. The stowaway did not visit my bed, nor did it seem eager to woo me to any unsavory realm. It went about its own business, sometimes leaving a trail of blood or of thick, black fluid. In the night, I’d wake to sounds I couldn’t parse, shrills and moans, a music like a piano being dragged down a flight of metal stairs, the scuttlings of animals both small and large, but the stowaway did not speak to me with its honeyed voice, nor did it touch me with its burning fingertips.

  It did not, that is, until one fateful night six months prior to this evening. That night is the reason I am here now.”

  I looked to my audience. She had leaned forward in her chair, drawing her shawl more tightly about her shoulders.

  “Go on,” she said eagerly, but I could not. The knowledge of the thing I carried had overwhelmed me, and it was necessary I retreat to my chamber. It was too dark. Night had fallen, and I no longer trusted myself to remain among humans.

  “I have heard many tales,” the innkeeper said. “It may be that I can assist you, whatever it is.”

  “Tomorrow,” I told her. “I will tell you the rest of my woe, and you will counsel me, if indeed you can. For tomorrow, I may be liberated from the misery that has haunted me.”

  “A sleeping draught,” she said, offering me a hot cup, though sleep was beyond me. I could not allow myself true unconsciousness, not with my burden.

  In my bedchamber, a brick at my feet, I sat up in my wrapper, a feeling of possibility in my chest. I was feverish, yes, and my skin was damp with it, but tomorrow there would be a portrait, and the portrait would save me. The portrait would free me.

  At last, fearing dreams and the consequences of same, I removed certain items from my case: chains, locks, a key. I twined the chains about the posts of the bed, and around my ankles, and locked myself into place. The key, I threw to the cushion across the room, out of my reach, and thus secured, I allowed my eyes to close. There could be no more dawns like the ones of the past sixmonth, waking to find myself alongside the river, the pale gray light, my hands clutching at small mementoes, but nothing more to tell what I had done. I could not allow that to happen here. There would be no wandering along the bay, no waking choking in an alleyway, my mouth wet and my clothing torn, not from the outside, but from within, the seams stretched and the bones bent.

  In dreams I walked, and in dreams I stalked, and in dreams I did things I would never do in the waking world.

  Inside my heart, the stowaway whispered endlessly in verse, a sad lament and a hunger for words. Inside my skin, the monster languished, longing and lonely, but nothing of its loneliness was kind. It sent me dreams of ghosts and of ladies walking into the ocean. It sent me dreams of death.

  The Stowaway’s Tale

  The monster is invented on a whim, a ruler for a kingdom of woe. Night, sitting enthroned in a dark city, looking out over stones and water, decreeing all those who wake to wander blind within Thule.

  Now, Night walks with ice inside it, seeking heat. Night moves between dreams and not, through the corners of gazes, out the edges of windows. There is no place a shadow can’t bide, and it hides in lockets and scent bottles, in barrels full of salted fish. The monster is resourceful. It flattens itself between folds of an overcoat, and when the coat is donned, the monster latches on, its mouth full of teeth, enough to consume a man in moments. A long night can make an explorer lost, and this night is long. This is an Arctic evening, twenty hours of darkness, and with each hour, the night devours ships, crews, husbands, captains.

  Night is disappointed, consuming wishes and letters, consuming last words, but none of them the words of its maker. It hungers for even a faint lantern lit on deck during a storm. Night was king in Thule, and then its maker fell in love, only to wreck on a shoal far from the northern clouds.

  Look at that beach made of broken bones, look at that sea made of ink, look at the way Thule can expand and shrink again, the unknown country vaster than any other. Look at this country of ghosts. They are all ghosts here, all but Night, who lives on fire and blood. Night is the loneliest ruler, on a black throne, and up the throne’s sides rise dark water.

  At last, Night flees, killing ghosts and leaving them in their white shrouds, seeking another ending to the story. There is no joy in Thule, not written, not lived, and in Thule the monster is in misery.

  The monster slips into a ship leaving Thule for the world. Dream trade and export, slaves imported in again. There are those in the waking world who never wake, shanghaied onto ships of sleepers, corpses crimped.

  Night stows itself in a crow’s nest and pretends to be a raven, perched on the basket to look out over the sea, and when the crew ascends, they see only a bird. Night hides in black feathers. The Thule ruler revises itself, a secret hid amongst coils of rope.

  It finds a man who looks like its maker, and wraps around him, hidden in the lining of his coat, and when it discovers the man is no poet but only an invention of a poet, it presses the man down in the darkness of the drive and drinks his dreams.

  Night inhabits a house, hidden in closets and beneath beds, and when the world is in shadow, it
wanders the streets, seeking its god and his pen. It finds only the young wife, an invention herself, her skin pale and her hair black, her eyes violet. It binds itself to her body.

  Annabel , Night hisses, or Lenore, or Virginia. It calls her every version of the names its creator has called his loves. It hides in her hair, plaited among flowers, and in her skin it anchors, a ship full of the lost souls of Thule. It makes its way into the world with Annabel, this creature, and to a city it finds familiar. It feeds on poets, amputating sentences, lyrics, love letters, but none of them are the right ones.

  And then.

  The Dreamer’s Journey

  The poet writes in a frenzy, in an attic room in a city by the sea. There is sun, but he denies it. The world he belongs in is a world of rain, and the only climate is one of mist and dim. He writes a ship in a harbor, and on the ship a crew of sleepers. He writes a sail made of paper, and written on it is a poem about a kingdom burning. He writes himself, swimming in water made of something that can catch fire. He closes his eyes, dreaming the dream within the dream, and in it, he dives, the water filled with nothing but hunger, the sea below him ice and skeletons. He swims to shore in evening dress, shivering, shuddering, chasing the raven that fled his companion, chilling and killing the poet by the sea, dreaming and drafting a story of a stowaway captured.

  He thinks of years spent following love, and of years spent losing it. Shaking at the desk in the dark now, the dreamer watches snow falling into the world he’s made. He spins a net of words and weaves sentences into rope.

  Now he is in a hotel in Providence. His mind has moved him from city to city, along the rails and to this place. He has built and sold imaginary kingdoms and now, at the end of his life, he is responsible for monsters.

  All this he writes over the head of the innkeeper, a woman living between worlds, her hair pale and about her neck a gemstone mined in a pretender’s place.

  Poe is broken with drink and disaster, and something has bitten him in a street, a rangy dog with blood in its eyes and foam at its jaw. He doesn’t mind it. Things have bitten him all his life. He is a man born of dreams, and in dreams he remains, the child of actors, and all his life a play.

  He wanders as he writes, pacing the room in Providence, here to no end but his own. The world of his dream and the world of his story are entwined now, and he walks real streets in imaginary places.

  Somewhere out there is his companion, invented as a cure for pain. Somewhere is a beast made of morphia, a soothing icy hand on the forehead, something that will cure his pangs and fevers, something that will walk with him when he walks toward the land of the dead. Though it is a monster, it is his monster.

  He writes it into this hotel, and places it in hiding in a woman he’s made of words. He writes himself into the sea, and feels it rising in his rooms, the water green and salty, the cuffs of his trousers drenched, his belt sopping, his shirt transparent and floating, his white ascot tightly tied about his throat.

  Edgar Allan Poe swims in a sea of ink.

  The Lady’s Tale, Second Part

  Sometime in that night at the inn, I saw movement outside my window.

  Phosphorescence, I thought at first, a ripple cresting a hidden shoal, but then it was more, a man in a cream–colored waistcoat and black string tie, emerging from the water, drenched and heaving. He crawled up, and I sat up in bed, drawing my wrapper more tightly about myself. A long black mustache and long black hair, his eyes desolate and his face forlorn. I dared not move. He looked rather like my former husband, and he shared with that man a visible despair. I wondered how long it would be before he was dead, if he were not already.

  He stood beneath my window looking up at me, and his gaze did the opposite of burn. I did not open the window, but I found my fingers stretching toward the sash. Only the chains kept me from reaching it.

  Wake , he whispered, but I did not know how.

  I must have fallen into sleep, for an insistent bell woke me at dawn, and the innkeeper entered with a tray. There were no burning eyes in my memory, nor was my body tender. I did not feel pains in my body that might suggest a night walk, nor did my mouth taste of metal. Within my body though, I felt the telltale motions of the stowaway, swimming in a tight circle.

  “What is this?” asked the innkeeper, looking at my chains.

  I looked at her with as much dignity as I could muster, and I said, “Might you release me? The key is on the pillow, just there.”

  She placed the tray on the bed and fetched the key.

  “How am I to know if freedom suits you?” she asked.

  “My agonies occur only at night,” I told her, for the stowaway took no notice of the innkeeper. It did not wish for women, nor did it care for daylight. It slept within me when the sun was high.

  “Will you continue your tale?” the innkeeper asked, unlocking my chains with less caution than I might have imagined she’d use. She poured a cup of coffee and delivered it into my shaking hands.

  I indicated that I would, and the innkeeper withdrew long enough that I might tidy myself. Back then, to that sitting room downstairs, with its view of the silvery bay, a pot of coffee rather than tea, to increase my strength for the day ahead.

  The innkeeper sat opposite me. “The night six months past,” she said, prompting me back to my tale.

  I ate a spoonful of porridge and sipped my coffee, feeling the heat in my body, a healthy heat, not that of the stowaway. For a moment I felt hopeful.

  “Though the stowaway’s presence prohibited guests to my house, I was at liberty to leave it. The stowaway seemed to see me as a gentle pet, a cat who might play about in the garden while its owner remained in the house. Thus were my days spent, with concerts and the usual occupations of a lady. It was not, despite the trouble in my house, a terrible life.

  On the evening in question, I sat at the piano, picking out a song, and as I did, I noticed a stirring in the wall. I withdrew my fingers from the keys, fearing a mouse or moths, never imagining—”

  I looked around the sitting room, fearing eyes and ears in the walls, but there was nothing visible here.

  “A man emerged from the wallpaper, hair silken as fur, eyes like seaglass. Out of the floral pattern he came, his suit patterned with falling leaves, and I knew I could not trust a man who arrived that way, but there was no help for it. He stepped into the room, hung his coat on the tree, and walked across the carpet making no sound at all. I looked down at his feet, and they did not touch the ground.

  He nodded at me, implying that I continue to play. I did, though my playing was nothing to be proud of, neglected in my duties as the keeper of a dead man’s house. When, at last, I stopped, the man looked steadily at me.

  “Who are you?” I whispered. “Have you come to deliver me from my stowaway?”

  He looked at me, and said “I am a dreamer come to save you from darkness, Annabel MacFarlane, if you will be saved.”

  Why should I not allow the haunting, I thought. Why should I not give myself over to a dream? I had been alone for a very long time, and it seemed no harm to invite air into the house.

  The dream gave me a ring, bent of a length of gold wire. He ran icy fingers over my skin—”

  I hesitated.

  “—and my nights became other than they’d been for nearly twenty years. For weeks, the stowaway stayed to its own side of the house. I heard the usual sounds of animals, of wind, of whispers, but nothing came through my chamber door. I thought the man in my house was, if not my secret, a guest the stowaway had no objection to. Indeed, I sometimes believed that he was an illusion, and that my joy was only something manufactured by waking dreams. I did not ask the dream who had sent him, and indeed, I did not dare to, for what if he came from the same realm as the stowaway? I did not wish to know.

  The white marble of our staircase was sometimes marred with red footprints, and the rail as well, the marks of hands attempting to cling to the bannister. I had known of the stowaway’s habits these long yea
rs, but though I read the papers, I saw no sign that the stowaway preyed upon the unlucky of our region. It may seem cold, my failure to investigate the nature of the victims, but I was as frightened of the stowaway as any prisoner of a jailor, and I did not. I wished only that the beast be fed, and not by myself.

  One night, though, there was a thunderous sound and down the hall outside my rooms ran a thousand hooves. Boar? Horses? I could not say. There was a wrenching creak, and a roar from no animal I’d ever imagined.

  “Go!” I whispered to the man beside me, but he did not. The stowaway stood in my doorway, eyes flicking over the chamber. I stayed still in the bed, coverlet drawn close about my throat. The stowaway inhaled deeply, and then dropped to the floor, undulating until it reached the wall through which my husband had arrived.

  Up the wall the stowaway seeped, leaving an ichorous ooze, and the leaves and flowers on the paper, previously verdant, began to wither. Night began to fall over the green kingdom from which my dream had entered, and slowly I saw stars beginning to reveal themselves, cruel points of light in a sky that had been day.

  The stowaway looked at me briefly, eyes glowing red, and the printed plants withered and blackened.

  “Come,” the stowaway said, and took a step toward me.

  It was only then that my dream revealed himself, emerging from beneath the bedsheets. In his hand he held a pistol, and he aimed it at the stowaway, shouting.

  “I am a hunter of Thule, and you will return to your prison!”

  The stowaway’s eyes glowed brighter, and it growled the growl of a lion over an antelope. Its entire flesh was stars now, and its tail whipped as it leapt at the man who had been my own true love, and covered him as though the skin of the sky had slid down and over the land.

  “I am stronger than I was,” the stowaway hissed. “You will not take me.”