Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths: And Other Tales of Dark Fantasy

by Connolly, Harry

  After a few minutes, the old Indian woman shuffled over to me, another bowl of mush in her hand. She set it on the ground beside me.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, thinking a show of manners from a white man would flatter her, “but I wonder if you would answer a couple of questions about Grummond’s daughters.”

  “Fuck you, white face. I wouldn’t help you for your weight in gold. You and Massachie Grummond can kill each other for all I care.”

  Right. I was on my own. Like always.

  The day passed slowly. I didn’t know what to do next, so I sat thinking. Art sat in Digger’s spot. Whatever his former position at the camp, he had been reduced to guard duty. He didn’t look happy about it.

  My gift hummed for the entire morning, urging me toward the house. I felt like a parched man who’d been told not to touch the glass of whiskey beside him. What could be in that house that my gift wanted? I sure as hell hoped it wasn’t one of those Grummond girls. Women were scarce in the territory, true, but I have never cared for having lead thrown in my direction.

  By lunch time, the sun had brought on a powerful thirst. I stood and walked toward the side of the house.

  Bigelow jumped to his feet. “What the hell do you—”

  “Shut up,” I told him. “Follow me.”

  I led him to the cook’s side door. Just then, I noticed that there was lattice around the bottom of the house. I knelt in the mud, my gift buzzing like a nest of flies. Behind the lattice was a wide, gray stone with rough marks along the side.

  I broke the lattice away. Bigelow said “Hey,” but I ignored him. He didn’t have anyone to impress any more.

  The stone was warm to the touch. I felt one of the marks with my thumb but didn’t recognize it. When my thumb completed the carved shape, a jolt of pain shot up my arm. I yanked my hand out with a sharp cry.

  Bigelow snorted. “Snake get you?”

  It was only took me a moment to realize that the shape I’d traced on the rock was the same as the brand above the front door, but upside down. I entered the house.

  It was dark inside. Grummond wasn’t a man to leave his window cloths open. To the left was a kitchen, lit by only a pair of oil lamps. There was also a heavy door with a deadbolt lock just like the one on the girl’s backdoor. I led Art into the sitting room.

  The furniture here was just like the furniture in the girl’s room, rough and unpainted. I picked up a bottle full of dark liquid, one of many on the bar. It was cheap, cloudy glass with a candle wax stopper. The cheap stuff. I set it back down. I knew this camp could make a fellow rich: someone ought to teach Big Bill how to live a little.

  Above the fireplace, on a little mahogany stand, sat a hammered copper ornament. It was rectangular and a little larger than a greenback, with a stamped impression the same size and shape of the carving in the stone.

  The cook came out of the light toward us. It took me a moment to realize he was gabbling threats in broken English but when I did I snatched the cleaver from him and tossed it over his head into the kitchen. When he turned toward it, cursing, I grabbed one of the bottles on the bar and slapped it against Art’s chest. In his surprise, he took it.

  I followed the cook into the kitchen. The black iron stove was set in a recess in the floor atop the same gray stone I’d seen behind the lattice.

  The front door banged open and Grummond charged in at us. “Eli—”

  “This stone,” I interrupted, “is it under the whole house? One stone?”

  He was flummoxed for a moment. “Yes. What are you doing inside my house?”

  “The task you set me. What about this?” I led him to the sitting room and pointed at the copper design. “Where did this come from?”

  “I— My wife. When she saw the house I was building, she had it made for us and insisted it be mounted here.”

  “And she had the panel over the door branded?” Grummond nodded. “And all this trouble started when she died, right? You put this ornament here?” Grummond nodded again. He looked ready to shoot me if only so he could take some control over what was going on.

  “Let’s go.” I snatched two tin cups off the counter and dragged Art out the side door into the muddy yard. The cook scowled at us and Grummond stayed in his dark, dark house.

  I led Art into the woods. He protested, of course, but I told him to shut up. I told him I had a plan.

  We stopped at a felled pine and sat. Art set his rifle beside him. He pulled the stopper on the bottle and poured the liquid into the cups. Rum. Bleh. The smell reminded me of too many bad days back east.

  “Why did you do that back there?”

  “What? Go into the house?”

  “No. Why did you step in when Grummond was fixing to shoot me?”

  “I need you for the job.”

  He thought about that a moment. “Thanks,” he said, and tilted his cup way back to drain it.

  In one swift motion, I pulled Wallace Fielding’s knife from my pocket and plunged it into Art’s throat. He choked, his arms dropping nerveless to his side. He fell sideways into the mud.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. The flow of blood was prodigious. My cut had gone all the way to the base of his skull. Art would not move again for the rest of his very short life. I set the point of the knife against the inside corner of his right eye and began to cut carefully around it. I had to move quickly: I needed to remove his eyes while he still had life in him. The rest I could do at leisure.

  After I collected them, his eyes went into one of the tin cups, with plenty of rum to give them flavor. Art did me the favor of expiring, and I spent the bulk of the afternoon doing my nasty, bloody labor on him. My preparations were complex, and it was gone supper when I was finally ready to reenter camp. I paused at the tree line. If my spell had worked, I would be invisible to every eye. If it had failed… well, it’s never wise to enter an armed man’s property covered in blood and wearing a man’s skin like a shawl.

  I walked into the yard. Grummond and his daughters relaxed on the porch, not sixty feet away. They didn’t see me.

  The first thing I did was fetch the copper ornament from inside the house. By the time I reached the back porch again and pulled off my boots, Grummond was ready to escort his daughters into their room. I slipped inside with them. Ruthanne turned toward her upturned nose toward me as though she could feel me close, but then she shrugged and turned away.

  As the three sisters went around the room shutting their window cloths, I had a brief moment of hopeful expectation—watching women dress for bed is a pleasure few men tire of, especially on this lonely frontier. They disappointed me, though. The girls pulled long cloaks from beneath their mattresses and put them on over the dresses they were already wearing. Then they moved to an open space in the floor, sat in a circle, closed their eyes and went utterly silent.

  I moved as slowly as I could among the empty beds. What had happened to the girls who’d slept here? Where had they gone? I was impatient to find out, but the long day and my own exertions were wearing on me, and I felt myself growing drowsy. There was little choice, though. I stood stock still for hour upon hour so the girls would not hear so much as a creaking floorboard.

  I almost yelped in surprise when all three began to sing as though at some secret cue.

  The twins each held a note, one high and one low, in perfect harmony. The youngest daughter played a melody between them. It washed over me like a working, but the stolen copper ornament blocked its effect. Everyone within range of those voices—and those girls could have commanded quite a stage—would be falling asleep very soon now.

  The song kept going, on and on. I watched them, waiting for one to take a breath. They didn’t. One minute. Two minutes. Their eyes were closed and their mouths open, and I realized they weren’t singing, not really. The song came through them from somewhere else.

  Tonight was going to be mighty dangerous.

  Eventually, they fell silent at the same moment. Their eyes opened and th
ey smiled in a fashion that brought me chills. One of the twins turned to the other and I could suddenly see the difference between them.

  Ruthanne hurried to the window and peeked out. “Bonnie, he’s not there.”

  “So?” one of the sisters said. “You always check on them and they’re always asleep. You shouldn’t fret so much.”

  The third sister, Elizabeth, grabbed her bed by the posts and, with great determination, dragged it away from the wall. She lifted a trap beneath and led the other two down.

  I followed, of course, down a set of rough stone stairs that went straight down into the darkness.

  In truth, this was pretty much what I’d expected: a tunnel beneath the house leading to an outbuilding nearby, probably by the river, much like my uncle’s house when it was a stop on the Underground Railroad. I’d expected to find a steamer in the mosquito fleet with an unsavory character at the helm.

  I was soon proved wrong, though. The stairs led down into the darkness, much deeper than I’d thought. At first I suspected they had created it with a working, but as we descended I realized that anyone capable of a working this powerful would never live as these girls did.

  The tunnel ahead had a dim source of light. The girls rushed toward it, their bare feet padding on the stone and their breath tight and excited. After we’d descended for about ten minutes, we reached the bottom. They were actually giggling now, as they pulled on dancing shoes that were waiting for them on the bottom step.

  Then they set off along the curving grey stone tunnel.

  I followed the girls’ example and pulled my boots on before I stepped off the stairs. Something about that stone made me reluctant to lay my bare feet against it.

  After I followed the tunnel’s curve for a few steps, I stepped into nothingness. The walls and ceiling ended and the tunnel became a stone path suspended in a black void. The dim light I’d seen was the gleam of beautiful silver trees at the far end of the path, each branch as bare and twisted as an old oak in winter. We had entered the ghostlands.

  The trunks of those trees went down, down into the unfathomable darkness.

  The girls had gotten far ahead of me and I had to hurry to catch up. The path straightened out ahead, and I saw the girls at the very end, climbing down the branches of the last of the silver trees.

  I followed, hand over hand. At one point, I stepped on a branch that was thinner than the others and it wobbled. Ruthanne glanced up at the sound, but I kept still until she started down again.

  My legs were already tired from the stairs, and my fingers grew sore digging for purchase in the cold metal bark. Luckily, the girls were not quick, either, despite their clear familiarity with the path.

  All around us was void—from here I couldn’t even see the other silver trees that populated the ghostlands. I forced myself to look down and watch Grummond’s daughters. A man could go mad staring into those depths and imagining what might be out there.

  After a short while, the tree changed from silver to a pale gold, and the branches became more like roots. I tried to break off a tiny piece with my fingers, but I didn’t have the strength or the tools.

  The scuffle of slippered feet against stone prompted me to look down. The girls stepped onto a narrow tower made of dusty yellow stone and were now rushing down a winding stairway.

  I hurried after them. The steps led down into a blasted building. Once, it had been a temple built from colossal blocks of unmortared stone. Now it was just a shell.

  The girls led me across the temple floor and through a gigantic doorway. They had reached the sandy edge of a still, black lake. They played a game of Rochambeau beside a row of four beached Whitehall rowboats. In the time it took me to catch up, the twins had taken positions at the oars and the youngest daughter had eased into the empty bow seat. I carefully settled an empty boat, rocking it a little, but no one seemed to notice.

  The girls rowed across the dark water. When they got so far ahead that I could barely see them, I dipped my oars in the water and followed as quietly as I could manage. The weird black water seemed to swallow the sound.

  I checked my “cloak.” The treated skin was going stiff. It would begin to lose its potency soon.

  But they had reached their destination. A low mound rose from the water just ahead; it was a single round stone like a tortoise hump, barely larger than the clearing around Grummond’s home.

  When their boat touched the island, the three girls bowed their heads and said: “We come invited. We come without arms or spells. We come to give of ourselves.” Then they climbed onto the island and dragged the boat safely onto land.

  I had not been invited, had brought both a knife and a working and had plans to take, not give. I stayed in my boat.

  The girls moved to the top of the island and stared expectantly into the blackness above them. It was only a few seconds before a high, keening sound began. It was joined by a second, then a third. The noises sounded far away but they moment by moment they grew louder as if something was moving down out of the darkness. The tones became softer, then began to harmonize.

  Music. The tones began to shift around each other, forming a long, complex melody. The sound of bone clacking against bone provided rhythm. The girls began to dance in a circle, their arms extended toward the void.

  Something was coming. Possibly an entire orchestra of somethings. Fear sweat beaded on my back. I crouched low in the boat and cursed the gift that had brought me to this place.

  Dusky ribbons twirled out of the darkness above. The girls cried out with delight as the ribbons wrapped around their arms and bodies.

  Then I realized they were pale headless serpents, not ribbons, and the sisters laughed as they slithered across their skin. After a moment, the serpents withdrew.

  The girls stared upward expectantly. The keening and clacking was uncomfortably loud, but wasn’t growing louder. Whatever was up there wasn’t moving closer. For the moment.

  Three more things dropped out of the darkness. They were shaped like men, but their limbs flopped about like cloth sacks. Scarecrows, I thought.

  They hit the stone with a wet, meaty smack. The headless serpents plunged down into the crumpled figures like spears. Then, the figures stood as if under their own power, the long fleshly ropes hanging slack.

  Each of the girls curtsied to one of the things, and the scarecrows bowed in return. Then they began to dance.

  I knelt in the bow of the rowboat, staring dumbstruck. Whatever I had expected to find, it was not the sight of three smiling young women far into the ghostlands, dancing with otherworldly devils. And by god, they were ecstatic. All my life I’d chased after things—money, power, workings, women of every kind—but I had never found a happiness that came close to what I was seeing and I’d never known anyone who had. Their joy was so raw and free that it astonished me and made me ashamed.

  The tempo of the music picked up and the dancers began to whirl. Three more serpents uncoiled from the darkness above as the music became more frenzied. Then the scarecrows bent toward the sisters as if to kiss them. The girls lifted their chins. At the moment they touched, the second set of uncoiled serpents plunged into the base of the scarecrows’ skulls.

  The percussion immediately stopped and the music held a long, trembling triple-note. The girl’s faces became still. Their knees buckled. The scarecrows gently lowered them to the stone floor.

  Little Ruthanne drew back from the kiss. “Oh God, I’m alive!” she screamed. “Alive!”

  Suddenly, I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t watch them like this, them crying out with delight and me all alone, crouching in the darkness with filthy clothes, dried blood in my hair, and no hope for joy at all. I couldn’t let this go on. By God, it wasn’t decent.

  I pulled the copper ornament from my pocket and stepped out of the boat. The instant my boot touched the island, the scarecrows were yanked upward into the darkness and the music stopped.

  Grummond’s daughters cried out, and I felt a
savage’s happiness at their loss and disappointment. I stalked toward the nearest girl, Bonnie, intending to drag her into the boat.

  Something came out of the darkness and slammed into stone between us.

  It was a massive uncloven hoof—as big around as a wagon wheel—on a long, slender, mottled gray leg. The impact knocked me off my feet and somehow blasted the skin cloak off my shoulders into the lake. Art Bigelow’s two eyes rolled down the mound and vanished with a splash. I stood revealed.

  I scrabbled toward the crown of the hill. Another hoof struck, then another. I looked up but the darkness was impenetrable. I couldn’t see what was up there.

  Ruthanne saw me. “You’re the one! You!” Her sisters could only scream in terror.

  Before I could reach Bonnie, a monstrous, toothless worm’s maw swooped down and snatched her up with a long, sticky tongue. She screamed as she was carried up into the darkness.

  Ruthanne was now the closest and I ran toward her. Another massive foot struck nearby, close enough to touch, so I did, brushing the ornament against the hoof wall. It cracked as though struck by a mighty hammer. A blast of discordant, otherworldly shrieks filled the darkness.

  I grabbed Ruthanne’s arm and lifted her to her feet. She screamed as her other sister was snatched into the void like the first. Damnation. I had to bring one of them with me, at least, or it wouldn’t matter if I escaped from this with my life because Grummond would surely take it.

  Silence fell again. Ruthanne spat at me but missed. “You’re the one!” she screamed. “You killed us.”

  The worm’s maw rushed at us.

  No damned devil was going to take me; I wouldn’t have it. I threw the ornament. My aim was off; the ornament came up short but it struck that sticky tongue near the base. The thing jerked back into the darkness and the discordant shrieks returned, doubled in their pain and misery.

  “Come on!” I shouted, dragging Ruthanne across the top of the stone mound toward the boats.

  The hooves withdrew up into the darkness. Only the awful shrieking was left, and it was receding. Even the black water was draining away.