The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  Ambrose believed that this section—and perhaps all the Green Book—represented a survival of folk ritual, perhaps to appease the white folk, or to harness their power for the user. He used to say that many dark things were cloaked in simple stories of fairies and humble rural superstition.

  I rolled my eyes a bit at that one. Humble rural superstition. Ambrose sounded like a bit of a jerk. The sort of person who’d stand by the maypole at the Renaissance Festival and tell you that actually it was a fertility rite, like you didn’t bloody well know—

  “Hey, you eaten lunch?” asked Foxy.

  I let out a squawk and lurched backward, nearly knocking the chair over. Papers went everywhere.

  “Sorry,” said Foxy. She leaned against the screen door and waited for me to unlatch it. “You got that radio up so loud I could walk a brass band past the door.”

  “Yeah,” I said, picking up papers hurriedly. “Yeah, it’s… I needed noise.”

  She nodded. I let her into the house and she handed me a Tupperware container with a sandwich in it. “Skip made tuna salad. I figured you were probably workin’ yourself into a state, so I came over.”

  “Thank Skip for me.” I wolfed down the sandwich and realized I could have eaten about ten more. “I’ve been drinking coffee all this time. I didn’t realize it was lunchtime.”

  “It ain’t,” said Foxy. “It’s closing in on supper. It’ll be dark soon, and I figured I’d come sit up with you tonight.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “In the house,” she said patiently. “Tonight. In case your monster comes back.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “Well, of course!” Her bangles clacked together as she flailed her hands in the air. “You don’t let your neighbors get et by monsters alone. Tomas’d do it, but he’s a boy, so it wouldn’t be respectable. And I ain’t sure how much he knows about the holler people. They got different stuff going on where he’s from, or maybe the same stuff walkin’ around in different skins.”

  I shuddered at the mental image, vague though it was. “You mean in Mexico?”

  “No. I mean Arizona. Tomas’s from Phoenix.”

  Annnnnd I’m a racist ass. And here I was just yelling at Cotgrave about that.…

  “Never been out that way myself,” Foxy continued, “but he says they got a whole tribe way back when who built big cliff houses and then vanished off the face of the earth.” She pointed a finger at me. “Mind you, we got that out here, too. That Lost Colony they do the play about.”

  “I’m pretty sure that colony went off and lived with the local tribes,” I said weakly. “Apparently that happened a lot back then.”

  Foxy dismissed the weight of decades of archaeology with a wave of her hand. “Well, maybe. But I ain’t convinced, and there ain’t any of those local tribes around talking about it, are there?”

  I opened my mouth to launch into a diatribe about why there were no local tribes, then thought better of it. While I am generally willing to rant at people about smallpox and colonialism, this did not seem like an opportune time. If I lived through the night, I could find Foxy a book on the topic.

  At the moment I had something else for her to read. “Foxy? I’m in the middle of reading this manuscript my stepgrandfather wrote. Would you mind reading it too?”

  She raised one painted-on eyebrow. “A manuscript? What sorta thing?”

  “I think it’s about the holler people.”

  Her other eyebrow went up. “Oh,” she said. “All right, then. Let’s see what the old man had to say.”

  Foxy wanted to head back home before it got dark and bring over a sleeping bag. I dragged the cushions off the couch and set them up in the kitchen for her. The wraparound porch didn’t run under the kitchen window, and I didn’t think the deer monster would be tall enough to look through it unless it could run up the walls like a spider. Stop, stop. Don’t think about that—

  I played another game of solitaire to settle my brain.

  Then I went to the stairs and the wall of junk. Had I seen a tea kettle in there earlier? I could swear I had.…

  Aha!

  The kettle was lurking under a grid of wire coat hangers and a dish drying rack with a broken hinge. It took some wiggling and there was a dent in the side, but I managed to haul it free. I scrubbed it out and was heating water for tea by the time Foxy returned.

  “I brought more sandwiches,” she said, holding up more Tupperware.

  “I’ll make coffee,” I said. “Or tea.” The tea bags in the cupboard were about a thousand years old, but Lipton doesn’t go bad, does it? “Err… do you drink tea?”

  “I’ll drink just about anything, hon.” She patted her purse. “Brought something to put in it, too.”

  “Is it a good idea to be drunk if there are… uh… things out there?”

  Foxy snorted. “You kidding? It’s the best idea.”

  We settled back down. I took my chair again, and Foxy sat in an armchair that I’d managed to liberate from the newspapers. I passed the pages over as I finished them. The radio droned pleasantly in the background. It could almost have been cozy, if things weren’t so deeply bizarre. Together we settled down to read.

  There is a story of a young man happening on the secret rites, but it follows the ordinary sort of cautionary tale, where a man looks on forbidden knowledge. (I think this is a different young man from the one who visited the Queen of Fairies, but I fear it has been too long to be sure. There were too many young men in the stories, and they have all blurred together in my head.) He is bound up by some invisible force and wakes the next morning. When he tries to tell the villagers what he has seen, those who go to the rites already know but will not speak of it. The rites are largely unspecific, except for “making a sound like thunder,” which is probably the use of a bull-roarer or other primitive instrument. Supposedly this sound is answered from far away. Bread and wine are passed around and “secret things” brought out. Ambrose pointed out the connections here to the Eleusinian Mysteries, but I have always considered this tenuous at best. One could describe a High Mass nearly the same way, with bread and wine and smoke and singing.

  Somewhere in these descriptions, the nurse takes her to make a clay doll, keeping it hidden, doing “queer things with it.” She describes the nurse as making “such funny red faces” while she kneads the clay, singing the entire time, while her face gets redder and redder. The nurse impresses the importance of secrecy on her, with more threats of being thrown in the black pit.

  It was long after I came here, and after Ambrose died, that I learned of the hoodoo men in the South who claim to make dolls, or poppets, and can use them to cast sickness on a person. Voodoo dolls have become a silly toy on television programs now, like fire-walking. If there is some grain of truth to these stories, I would not be surprised if it is related to the clay doll in the Green Book.

  They perform strange rites with the doll, “paying their respects.” The narrator does as the nurse does, calling it an “odd game” that they are playing, but agrees to do what the nurse does because she likes her. She gives no details. She says that the nurse looks at this time like the white lady from the wood.

  I’ll be honest, if I heard this from a modern narrator, I would have Child Protective Services on the line so fast it would make your head spin. All this stuff about odd games that have to be kept secret set off serious warning bells.

  But… well… different era. Different language. Maybe this wasn’t as creepy as it seemed. Or maybe it was, but I couldn’t very well call the cops on a book.

  I was a bit surprised that neither Ambrose nor Cotgrave commented on that, but then again, they were also from a far older time when I suppose you just didn’t talk about that sort of thing.

  On the other hand, if you were summoning up people from another world and making—I dunno, the English equivalent of voodoo dolls—you’d probably want to keep that secret too. Maybe it was just perfectly innocent devil worship.
/>   I rubbed my forehead.

  “You’re thinking awfully hard,” said Foxy, turning a page.

  “There’s a lot to think about,” I said. “How far have you gotten?”

  “She’s going a long, long, long, long, long, long way,” said Foxy. “I’m getting the impression it was a bit of a walk.”

  “Do you think her white people are the holler people?”

  “If they aren’t, they’re at least kissing cousins.” Foxy rubbed her forearms, setting her bracelets clicking. “I dunno. She’s a strange one, isn’t she?”

  “Yes!” I said, more strongly than I meant to. “Or Cotgrave’s writing her strange. I don’t know. I… I don’t like her.”

  “Well, she’s been dead a good long while,” Foxy pointed out. “So I don’t think that’s gonna hurt her none.”

  I exhaled. I had been feeling a strange sort of guilt about it. A bright young girl caught up with a clearly bizarre nurse, in peculiar circumstances… I should have felt sorry for her.

  Instead…

  I edited a manuscript once that wasn’t terrible. Most of it was pretty good. But they’d tried to do a point-of-view thing with a feral child, and that bit had been completely dreadful. It had read pretty much exactly like a reasonably smart man trying to write like he thought a naive innocent would write, and it had come off like Norman Mailer trying to write virginity, only with more eating bugs in the woods. This wasn’t that bad, but it was, as Foxy would say, kissing cousins.

  I mean, it might have been Cotgrave. Maybe he was transcribing it wrong. But there was something strange about the girl in this book. I couldn’t put my finger on any one thing.

  I didn’t trust her, or her stupid semicolons.

  “Maybe Cotgrave’s just leaving out the sympathetic parts,” I said, struggling to be fair.

  “Could be,” agreed Foxy. “Anyway, I’ll tell you in a bit. She’s still going the long, long, long way around.”

  “I thought the stones sounded like the ones on the hill,” I said.

  Foxy grunted. “Only seen ’em once,” she admitted. “Years ago. And I turned right the hell around and left again. Those things weren’t right.”

  “There’s one in the backyard,” I said.

  She looked over the edge of the paper at me. “Didn’t know that.”

  “Should we do something with it?” I asked. “Like… um… bury it or smash it or something?”

  Foxy dropped the paper in her lap and waved her hands. “How the hell should I know? I’d say burn the thing, but I don’t know if you can burn rocks.”

  “You can if you get them hot enough,” I said. “I guess we could find a volcano.…” I had a mad image of Foxy and me, two unlikely hobbits lugging a two-hundred-pound rock to Mount Doom.

  “Not a lot of volcanoes in this neck of the woods,” she said. She took out a silver flask and poured several healthy glugs into her mug of tea. “Let me finish reading this thing, and then we can go take a look at your evil rock.”

  “Technically I think it was my grandmother’s evil rock, not mine.…”

  She grinned down at the paper.

  There is a story of a poppet like this one, owned by a beautiful woman “of the high gentry” who lived in a great castle. And she was so beautiful that all the gentlemen wanted to marry her, because she was the loveliest lady that anybody had ever seen, and she was kind to everybody, and everybody thought she was very good.

  The lady puts her suitors off for a year and a day, but one disguises himself as a girl to hide in the castle and befriend one of the maids. It is a plot worthy of the Bard, but the lady is more akin to one of Macbeth’s witches.

  She knew more of the secret things than anyone else, and more than anyone knew before or after, because she would not tell anybody the most secret secrets. She knew how to do all the awful things, how to destroy young men, and how to put a curse on people, and other things.… There may have been another awful thing here, but I cannot remember it.… And the dancing people called her Cassap, which meant somebody very wise, in the old language. And she was whiter than any of them and taller, and her eyes shone in the dark like burning rubies; and she could sing songs that none of the others could sing, and when she sang they all fell down on their faces and worshipped her. And she could do what they called shib-show, which was a very wonderful enchantment.…

  Neither Ambrose nor my later research turned up anything on either the title Cassap or shib-show. Shib-show, as described in the text, is a kind of taming of serpents. The serpents leave her a gift called a glame stone, which is presumably derived from the same root as “glamour.” Her description as being whiter and taller than others, with eyes like burning rubies, would indicate that she was one of the white people herself. A changeling? One trapped on this side, or simply amusing herself among humankind?

  At any rate, the lady has a poppet made of beeswax, which the narrator compares to the one her nurse made out of clay. She feeds it and bathes it in wine and it becomes a man, who kisses her. It becomes clear that the poppet is her true husband, although unlike the story of the Black Man, this one appears to be subservient to her. She makes more wax dolls and assigns them each the name of one of her suitors, then ritually kills them off one by one, drowning, burning, and strangling them with violet cords. When only the disguised young man is left alive, he goes to the bishop and reveals everything.

  It is worth noting that there are multiple suitors, and after two or three had been killed, he might easily have gone to the bishop and thus saved several of his rivals, but the author of the Green Book never comments on this.

  The Lady Cassap is burned alive, with her wax husband hung around her neck, and the poppet is said to scream when it burns.

  And I thought of this story again and again as I was lying awake in my bed, and I imagined the lady in the marketplace, with the yellow flames eating up her beautiful white body. And I thought of it so much that I seemed to get into the story myself, and I fancied I was the lady, and that they were coming to take me to be burnt with fire, with all the people in the town looking at me. And I wondered whether she cared, after all the strange things she had done, and whether it hurt very much to be burned at the stake.

  Much of the rest of the Green Book is of no great account. The girl writes rambling comments about whether anything she has learned is really true, about stories in her head, which she does not explain, and ruminates on the wonderful secret that she knows, but she never reveals it. She mentions a few things that her nurse has taught her. Nurse said she would show me something funny that would make me laugh, and then she showed me how one could turn a whole house upside down, and the pots and pans would jump about and the china would be broken. She reveals that her nurse went away some years before and no one knows where she had gone, and that her father had been angry when she spoke of the stories the nurse had told. She also mentions an old game called “Troy Town” where one dances a pattern and then must answer questions truthfully… or was that earlier? I can’t remember. It might have been when she talked about the rituals and the bull-roarers. There is no organization to the book, and it has been so long since I read it.

  Troy towns are, of course, our common labyrinths, though they do not call them that much over here. Americans seem uninterested in labyrinths and mazes. Probably they require too much mental effort.

  Thanks, Cotgrave. Nobody deserved to marry my grandmother, but apparently some people didn’t deserve it less than others.

  I glanced over at Foxy. She had nearly caught up to me, only a page or two behind.

  She must have sensed me looking at her and glanced up. “They say people used to go up in the hills and do devil things here, too, in the old days,” she said. “But it was mostly moonshiners, and I expect they put the stories about to keep people off their stills. And the Klan of course.” She made a gesture as if to spit and then remembered she was indoors. “They’re dumb enough to mess around with the hollers, I expect, but too dumb to live thr
ough it.”

  I snorted. Moonshiners and white supremacists. Lovely. If that was what Cotgrave was seeing up in the hills, I could see how he’d gone sarcastic about Americans.

  “It surprises me, though,” I said. “I mean, I wandered onto that hill. You’d think more drunk kids would do the same thing.” I could picture two frat boys wandering around the hill, trying to knock over stones and refusing to admit to each other that things had gone strange.

  “I doubt it happens much,” she said. “You followed your dog, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m only guessing, you understand, but I think there’s probably different ways to the hills. Animals know ways through stuff that we don’t. That one time I saw the stones, you know? Been out deer hunting and only clipped ’im. Well, you don’t let a deer bleed out and leave it lying—it ain’t right—so I went after, and next thing I knew I was more’n halfway up that hill and saw the stones. Only time I’ve ever let a deer fall and not brought it back, but I wasn’t chasing anything into that country.”

  She took another slug of tea and bourbon. “I never could find my way back on my own, but I ain’t saying I tried very hard, either.”

  I let out a long sigh. It didn’t mean that I’d get Bongo back, but the idea that I might not be driving down the road and suddenly slip into a terrible different dimension relieved a fear I hadn’t realized that I’d been harboring. The idea that you could just be walking and one minute you were in the world and the next everything changed and was full of gray stones and white people and effigies.…