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The Twisted Ones

Page 17

by T. Kingfisher


  I said as much to Foxy, or tried to.

  “Nah, not so much. Oh, I expect that now and again there’s ways people go through on accident, but not often. And they either get out or they go missing.”

  “Or get eaten by deer monsters,” I said.

  “There’s always that, sure.”

  An example of the ramblings in this section that I remember: But I shall always remember those days if I live to be quite old, because all the time I felt so strange, wondering and doubting, and feeling quite sure at one time, and making up my mind, and then I would feel quite sure that such things couldn’t happen really… (more such here, cannot remember exact words). But I took great care not to do certain things that might be very dangerous. So I waited and wondered for a long time, and though I was not sure at all, I never dared to try to find out. But one day I became sure that all that nurse said was quite true, and I was all alone when I found it out.

  The cause of the narrator’s moment of revelation is obscured. Ambrose believed it might be caused by the menarche, traditionally a highly dangerous time in the spiritual life of women.

  Oh, gag me, I thought. Your first period’s not dangerous unless you plan on wearing white pants. Freaks you the hell out, sure, particularly if nobody bothered to explain it.

  Foxy was a fast reader. She got to that section a few minutes after I did. I could tell by the explosive snort.

  “Just like men,” she muttered. “Periods scare the crap out of ’em, so they assume the whole damn world’s scared of it too.”

  “Thank you!” I said, with feeling.

  “Although I s’pose this nurse could have told her she’d start bleedin’ and she took it as proof of everything else, too,” Foxy added. I grunted.

  Then she decides to repeat her journey to the grey stones to see the secret again. She makes a poppet of her own, a much finer image than the one her nurse had made; and when it was finished I did everything that I could imagine and much more than she did, because it was the likeness of something far better.

  She makes no further mention of the poppet or what it is used for.

  And a few days later, when I had done my lessons early, I went for the second time by the way of the little brook that had led me into a strange country, a long, long way.

  At one point she turns and sees the countryside behind her resolve into two figures and remembers a story in which the two figures are called Adam and Eve. She blindfolds herself with a red silk handkerchief.

  Then I began to go on, step by step, very slowly. My heart beat faster and faster, and something rose in my throat that choked me and made me want to cry… something else here, not sure… Boughs caught in my hair as I went, and great thorns tore me; but I went on to the end of the path. Then I stopped, and held out my arms and bowed, and I went around the first time, feeling with my hands, and there was nothing. I went round the second time, feeling with my hands, and there was nothing. Then I went round the third time, feeling with my hands, and the story was all true, and I wished that the years were gone by, and that I had not so long a time to wait before I was happy for ever and ever.

  Neither Ambrose nor I were ever entirely clear about this section, but it seems likely that the narrator realized that she herself was a changeling or descendant of the white people, and that she will at some point return to her own people. She looks in the water and remembers the white lady that she saw before, presumably comparing her reflection to that figure and believing that the lady must be her mother.

  The Green Book cuts off abruptly shortly after this. She remembers about Nymphs, which she must look for everywhere, and some are dark and some are bright, and resolves to go and call them up. The last words are The dark Nymph, Alanna, came, and she turned the pool of water into a pool of fire….

  Ambrose believed that the nymphs were references to certain alchemical processes, couched by the narrator in somewhat childish terms. This then would indicate that the narrator has learned to control some of those processes, perhaps in the form of prayers to “Nymphs.” In a more mature mind, Ambrose speculated, we might see them as a recitation of the formulas required for a certain result, perhaps somewhat like a mathematical equation. The ancient alchemists undoubtedly knew such formulas, but they cast them in mystical terms too, like Virgin’s Milk and the Philosopher’s Stone.

  The Green Book was not very long and the narrator had reached the end of it, with the last line written on the endpaper itself.

  Ambrose did tell me of what he called “the sequel” to the Green Book, a story only, in which the girl was found dead before a white stone statue in the woods, perhaps a year after the writing of the Green Book.

  So much for dying in bed at a hundred years old, I thought. Well, if she was in her late teens and Ambrose was old enough to be a friend of her father… Oh hell, I couldn’t make sense of the chronology. Late 1800s, maybe, assuming Ambrose had been holding on to the Green Book for a while. Maybe a little later. I still didn’t know if Cotgrave had met Ambrose before or after the war.

  It didn’t matter now, I supposed. Everyone was dead, except the holler people and me and, please God, my dog.

  I pressed him on the subject, and he at last relented enough to say that the girl’s father had called him in and the statue, which he had seen, was an image of copulating beings. He said that he would be hard-pressed to describe those beings, being a representation of things belonging to heaven or hell, not to earth, but that they were of two different kinds, and the offspring of such a union would be most terrible. He went on to say that the statue was known to have been incorporated into the mythology of the Witches’ Sabbat.

  I wish now that I had asked where he knew that last bit from, but Ambrose enjoyed his secrets, particularly if they had a questionable bibliography behind them.

  The girl, he suggested, had seen the statue once by chance and then had blindfolded herself to avoid seeing it again. It is likely that one day the blindfold slipped, or perhaps she took it off deliberately, and then perhaps she became impregnated by the forces of the statue through a sympathetic process, though Ambrose hastened to say that her virtue was intact and she was blameless in the conventional sense, even if she had, quite by accident, stormed the gates of heaven.

  In any event, the servants had noted her comings and goings and the changes associated with pregnancy and so jumped to conclusions. When she was found dead, Ambrose was called in and he had the statue destroyed. The nurse could not be found.

  I scowled over the pages. I’d been thinking that this statue was the same as the white stone I had seen, but clearly it must not have been, because the stone was intact.

  Unless it was a different stone. Unless there was more than one.

  Well, why wouldn’t there be more than one? If Ambrose’s stone was in Wales, the holler people could have another one over here. It’d be pretty inconvenient to cross the Atlantic whenever you needed to get a confused teenager knocked up by a rock.

  The fact that I even had to think this sentence was probably proof that things had gotten badly out of hand.

  The pregnancy killed her in the end. “Poisoned by knowledge beyond her understanding,” Ambrose said. He did not say, at the time, whether she had borne what she carried, or whether her body had proved too frail to contain the forces within. It seems unlikely, in that time, that her father would have consented to an autopsy, particularly as Ambrose was not a medical doctor. But the stone itself was in the woods, not terribly far from human haunts.

  I wish that I had never learned that. It is not pleasant to think that there may be such forces in the world lying in wait for the unsuspecting to stumble over.

  It is even less pleasant now that I have discovered what lies behind the house. The hill of stones is there. I saw it once, but I knew to look away. The second time, though, I sought the stones out like a fool. I was close to falling into Ambrose’s sin, I know. Now I wish that I had never gone and never seen them. I got away from them in Wales, but blo
od calls blood and I climbed the hill at last. If I had stayed away the second time… but there is no point now in wishing.

  If Ambrose were alive, I would ask him about those twisted stones, but he is not, so I must make my own guesses. The white people carved them. Of that there is no doubt. Perhaps one of them might derive information from such a stone, like a man reading a signpost. Perhaps the hill of stones is a vast library of knowledge, which I am too blind and mortal to comprehend.

  And I twisted myself about like the twisted ones.

  And I twisted myself about like the twisted ones.

  This phrase rings in my head, but I no longer believe it was meant for me. The writer of the Green Book knew many things and she knew there were things she should not write down, but she was young and untrained. It is not surprising that perhaps a phrase bled over imperfectly, and I find myself saying these words like an incantation against the darkness in my mind.

  There is a girl in the woods that I see sometimes now, and I have tried to warn her away, but what can I say? I am an old man who is not allowed to rest and I sound mad if I say, “Don’t look at the stones on the hill or you will be a mother of monsters.”

  If I had the strength, I should go and find the white stone and hammer it down, as Ambrose did, but I do not know, in practical terms, if I am strong enough to wield the hammer.

  If Ambrose were alive, perhaps he would have some idea what to do. But it has been a long time since we had those conversations. I don’t even know if I am remembering them right myself.

  If Ambrose were alive… If I were stronger… I have become an old man, obsessed with the tasks I can no longer finish.

  I have done my best. It seems unlikely that my mind will ever be clearer than it is now. I have written the Green Book down as best as I can recall. I thought I would remember more than I did. I certify that all that I have written is accurate, to the best of my recollection, and if parts are blurred or forgotten, it is a failure of memory and not of will.

  Frederick Cotgrave

  United States of America

  but once of Wales

  March 1998

  13

  I stared at the signature for a while. The parts about impregnation were getting dangerously Rosemary’s Baby–esque to me. Was I supposed to believe that the Green Book narrator had been pregnant with a monster from looking at a statue of monsters doing it?

  It seemed far more likely that in the year after the book was written, she’d discovered boys. After all, the whole world is full of boys and really short on statues that knock you up.

  On the other hand…

  “She’s screwing the clay doll, right?” Foxy broke in. “ ‘I did everything that I could imagine and much more besides.’ And the bit about the nurse’s face getting red. That’s the takeaway here, right?”

  “Oh God. I didn’t want to say it, and maybe it’s the language difference, but that’s the impression I got too,” I said glumly, setting the last page aside. “I mean, I think she was seventeen at the time, so it was… errr… legal, I guess?”

  “Also the bit where it’s made out of, you know, clay.”

  I groaned. “Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, do you think she got that from the nurse? Is this a story about abuse? Should we call someone?”

  “Bit late for that, I’d say, since everybody’s dead.” Foxy turned the page.

  If she was actually running around with human boys and trying to cover it up by blaming a statue in the woods—not, arguably, the most normal thing to blame it on—then why would she have written it in a book she never intended anyone to read? The Green Book was a diary of sorts, wasn’t it? Would she had invented some elaborate code about clay dolls to stand in for boys so that no one would know?

  It seemed bizarrely far-fetched.

  Yes, that’s certainly much more far-fetched than a teenager getting pregnant by looking twice at a rock.

  Of course, if she’d been doing things with the clay statue, maybe that had opened the way somehow for—uh—monstrous impregnation—

  Oh, don’t be stupid. This is insane. There’s horrible magic things in the woods, okay. There’s a weird-ass hill that’s sometimes there and sometimes not there, fine. But you’re reading a book that’s badly remembered, by a man with creeping dementia, written by a dead teenage girl who is clearly imaginative, weird, and probably abused, and trying to make it fit with the horrible things in the woods, and they probably don’t go together at all.

  I dug my fingers into my scalp as if I could pry the ideas out and make sense of them.

  The only thing that kept me from pitching the book aside as a waste of time was the description of the stones. I knew those stones. There was one behind the house, for Christ’s sake!

  Cotgrave hadn’t mentioned it specifically. I wondered if the deer-stone had turned up later, if it was a signpost as he said. Maybe to warn other holler people that my grandmother lived there. Heh.

  And the white monolith… the monolith with the carvings I couldn’t make out, the one I had wanted to press myself against until it grew warm… I couldn’t even blame that one on the power of suggestion, because I’d seen it and had the dream before I read the transcript of the Green Book.

  Oh Jesus, the monolith. Did this mean I was about to get horrible monster babies?

  Joke’s on you, holler people. I got an IUD in there. Let’s see your monolith get past that!

  I wondered briefly about the girl in the woods he’d tried to warn. He’d mentioned her in the journal too, hadn’t he? But that was twenty years ago, and she was long gone by now, or at least she wasn’t a girl anymore. She’d have to be my age or older. Was that too old to get impregnated by evil monoliths?

  Why was I even having to think things like this? My face felt hot. Maybe I had a fever, or there was black mold in the walls and I was hallucinating all of this. Maybe Bongo was still here and I was curled up on the floor giggling while he waited for dinner.

  In the next room, Elaine Rogers reminded me why we valued public radio. It was a valuable resource in our lives. She seemed to lose the thread for a second and said “valuable” three or four times before her cohost cut in.

  And that clinched it really. If I was hallucinating all of this, I could have probably cooked up the effigy and maybe Foxy and definitely Kilroy, but I don’t think I could have come up with the world’s most exhausted public radio manager. Black mold could only go so far.

  “Well, that was some weird shit,” said Foxy, finishing the manuscript up.

  I started laughing—a real laugh, although I won’t swear it didn’t have hysterical edges. Yes. Yes, that was some weird shit, all right. The whole world was teetering on a thin skin over the top of horrific realization. Definitely weird shit.

  Foxy poured me a slug of whiskey in a teacup. I had actually finished the tea sometime earlier, but that was fine. Better, anyway.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I am so far from okay that I cannot see okay from here. Other than that, I’m fine.” I looked out the door, and somehow it wasn’t dark yet, which seemed almost as unnatural as everything else. “Do you think that was real?”

  “What, the story?” She made a complicated shrug that was mostly collarbones and chin. Her bracelets rattled. “I expect it was really written by some girl that got mixed up with the holler people. Or whose daddy did, and then they got her in the end.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “Shit, I dunno. They can make a hog walk around with a wasp nest for a head; you’d think sleeping with a fellow was no big deal. I tell you, though, I haven’t heard much about that out here. Plat-eyes—they got them down south a bit, the big things that look like white animals. And there’s stories about the Devil’s daughter coming to a dance, and when it rains while the sun’s out, some folks say it’s the Devil’s daughter getting married.” She snorted. “ ’Course, I always heard that was the Devil beating his wife, but whichever. But it’s not like back in Ireland or wh
atever, when it was all changelings and fairy folk and whatnot going around and knocking people up with fairy babies.”

  “Maybe they’re different over there,” I said. “If they’re even the same thing.”

  Foxy tipped her hand back and forth. “Eh, maybe? You got me. We got monsters, sure, but I don’t think they’re all the holler people. There’s more than one thing in the world, and just ’cos some stories are true doesn’t mean they all are.”

  “Did I show you the bone?” I asked abruptly.

  Foxy raised a painted-on eyebrow.

  I dug out my phone and turned it on. I swear I could actually watch the battery drain. I had taken it out earlier to take a photo of the bone on the steps and then I picked up the bone with gloves and put it in a trash bag and put that in another trash bag and then I buried it in boxes of things-as-seen-on-TV, which were the least dangerous things I could think of, and threw the whole mess out by the road, where the trash pickup supposedly came once a week.

  I’m not saying that I thought it would do anything. I’m just saying that if something out in the woods is making shit get up and walk around, out of bones all tied together with cords, you’re real careful with weird bones after that.

  I wasn’t gonna let it anywhere near the baby dolls, for one thing.

  I handed the picture of the bone to Foxy. The phone was already starting to get warm.

  “Huh!” she said, looking at it. “That’s a bone, all right.”

  “Do you recognize it? It was on the front steps this morning. I tripped over it, and that’s how I let go of Bongo’s leash.”

  “I mean, it’s a bone. You want to know what it’s from, I can’t tell you. Probably not a deer—looks too thick.” She handed the phone back, and I switched it off before it decided to catch fire.

  I thought about Foxy’s hog with the wasp-nest head. “Did you ever hear about one of these things coming up and banging on somebody’s window?”

 

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