Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  She’d taken no more than fifty steps, head down, anticipating the comfort she’d find in the presence of Austin and the arms of his wife, Susan, when from the street behind her rose the sound of horses’ hooves, the clickety-whir of carriage wheels. The noise slowed and then stopped her; zero at the bone. She dared not turn to look, and hoped the late-night travelers would pass her without notice. From the corner of her left eye she saw the contrivance pull just ahead of her and halt. It was an elegant black brougham with a driver’s seat, a cab, and two white horses dappled with dark spots like a leopard’s markings.

  Emily turned and lifted her head but couldn’t make out the driver beyond his silhouette. He was dressed in a heavy coat, collar up, a wide-brimmed hat, and gloves. He turned and lit the two lanterns that were attached to the front of the cab and then resumed his slumped posture. The door swung open and a male voice called out of the dark compartment, “Miss Emily Dickinson?” She blushed as she always did when confronted by a stranger. A man stepped out of the brougham. She took two steps back.

  In that instant, she hoped and then thought for certain it was Sam Bowles, editor of The Springfield Republican and her clandestine correspondent. His stream of letters had dried up since his wife had discovered that he and Emily referred to her as “the hedgehog.” Emily missed him so dearly since his departure for the sanitorium to treat his nervous condition. It would be like him to surprise her with his return in this way. But just as quickly she saw the features weren’t Bowles’, and her joy curdled.

  It was a gentleman, finely dressed in a black tailcoat and trousers, a spotless white shirt. There was a lovely white rose in his lapel. He wore leather gloves and carried a walking stick. The last she dared to take in was his face, which was adorned by a thin mustache but otherwise smoothly shaven. His eyes were dark yet glimmered with the light of the lanterns. His smile was, considering her anxiety, enormously appealing. He took a gold watch from his vest pocket and held it on its chain up close to his eyes. “We’re running late,” he muttered, as if to himself, but loud enough for her to hear. This fact didn’t seem to distress him in the least. In fact, he smiled more broadly.

  Her manners obliterated, she called out louder than she’d intended, “Who are you?”

  The gentleman stepped up out of the street and onto the sidewalk. “I’m nobody, who are you?” he said and laughed. “You know me,” he added.

  He wore some subtle cologne that reminded her exactly of the scent of the garden at the height of summer. The chill left her immediately and her breathing eased. “What do you want?” she asked, now more relaxed but still with a fading memory that she’d meant to be defensive.

  “I’m here to bring you where you need to go,” he said. “I know you’re busy so I’ve taken it upon myself to come for you.”

  “I’m only going up the street to my brother’s house.”

  “Oh, no, Miss Dickinson, you’ll be going much farther than that.”

  “Please. I’m in a hurry. An emergency.”

  He took the glove off his left hand and held it in his right. She was incredulous at the effrontery when he reached down and lightly clasped her fingers. At his touch a blast of cold, like a January wind, ran through her body, lodging in her mind and causing a sudden confusion. He had no right to touch her. She meant to protest, to pull her hand away, but every time forgot what she’d intended and then remembered and forgot again.

  “If I might call you Emily?” he said in a soothing voice.

  “How civil,” she thought while still searching within herself for the panic she expected. The cold that had invaded her slowly diffused into a sense of utter calm more comforting than an afternoon with Susan and the new baby. He gave a half-bow and led her toward the brougham as if her fears about him had never existed. She stepped off the curb convinced that a journey was precisely what was needed.

  Emily woke to the movement of the carriage. The shades were up and the sunlight shone through the window to her left. She pushed against the hard bench to straighten her posture and yawned.

  “You’ll want to see this,” said the gentleman, sitting opposite her.

  He smiled cordially and her spine stiffened, a scream rendered numb fell to the bottom of her throat. He pointed out the sunlit window and his gaze insisted she look. The view was dizzying as the rig sped madly through town. She thought they were caught up in a twister, but then she was able to identify a section of street, and the whizzing scenery slowed to a crawl, as if it and not the carriage were moving. The sidewalks were empty in the late afternoon light, and the aroma of the oyster bar downstairs in the Gunn Hotel pervaded the cab. The very next thing she noticed was the spire of the First Congregational Church, and that was all wrong, for it should have been in the opposite direction.

  They went a few more yards down the road and, impossibly, were passing the grounds of Amherst Academy. Whereas the church and hotel were steeped in the summer heat, the three-story school was surrounded by trees whose leaves had gone golden. There were children sitting on the steps of the building and some playing Ring A Rosie in the field out front. Emily remembered that the school had closed just that year, as a new public school had been built. She wondered what had brought the old place back to life. As the carriage rolled by, the children turned in the ring and she glimpsed the laughing face of her second cousin, Sophia.

  She gasped and closed her eyes, averting her gaze from the window. “It can’t be,” she said.

  “What’s that?” asked her traveling companion.

  “My cousin, Sophia. She died of typhus when we were children.”

  “You don’t understand yet, do you?”

  “You’re taking me to my family, I thought.”

  “In a sense,” he said.

  “But then what is all this, this journey through the town all crossways and confusing?”

  “You’re taking the tour, Emily. Everybody gets the tour.”

  “The tour of what?” she begged, her voice raised.

  “Why, your life, of course. A little summing up before nestling down into your alabaster chamber.”

  “How do you come to use my private words?”

  “I can see you’re beginning to see now,” he said.

  She turned quickly and caught a glimpse of Mount Holyoke Academy, miles away from Amherst, in the early evening, and right after it Amherst Town Hall, with its giant clock lit by morning light.

  She looked back at him and asked, “What happened?”

  “It comes to all, my dear. You were weak and had one of your seizures and . . . well . . . I have my job to do.”

  “But Vinnie and Mother and Father?”

  “Oh, they’re all as well as when you last saw them. It’ll be a while more before they get the tour.”

  “I want to say goodbye to them.” Tears formed in her eyes.

  He shrugged and opened his gloved hands as if to indicate there was nothing that could be done.

  “Where are we going?”

  The gentleman banged on the ceiling of the cab with his cane, and the horses instantly set into a gallop. “Toward eternity,” he said.

  She fell back into the corner of the bench, her face turned toward the window. It was night, no stars visible. Only the bumping of the carriage and the sound of the horses’ hooves gave any indication they were moving. They traveled on for what seemed hours and hours, and then she blinked and it was as if they’d arrived in a moment. In the carriage lantern’s glow, she could see they’d halted in front of the Amherst Town Tomb, a stone structure built into the earth with a grassy hill of a roof and its cornice in the ground, like a sinking house.

  “You are Death,” said Emily.

  Her fellow traveler sat in shadow. “Call me Quill.” He leaned forward so that she could see his face and nodded. “Go ahead. I know you have questions.”

  Emily knew there was no point in trying to escape or cry out. Alt
hough she was terrified, her curiosity was intact. “Which direction am I heading once I’m interred?”

  “That’s the thing,” said Quill, lighting a thin cigar. He swung open the carriage door to blow the smoke out. “I’ve got nothing to do with that. I don’t know what happens after. That will always remain a mystery to me. My specialty is the moment of, so to speak, an entire life squeezed down into a flyspeck on the windowpane of the universe. I wish I could tell you more.”

  “I’ve done bold things in my life, as quiet as it might have seemed.”

  “You don’t have to convince me, Emily,” he said. “I know everything you’ve done and thought. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Even the falling sickness you tried to hide. It was nothing more than some twisted little knot in your brain work. You and Julius Caesar, my dear. Two emperors, one of men and one of words.”

  “My secret afternoons?” she whispered.

  He shook his head. “I just deliver the spent to their rest.”

  “But why am I being put into the Town Tomb? It’s only for the bodies of those who die in winter when the ground is too hard to dig a grave.”

  The gentleman clasped the cigar between his teeth and then removed his left glove with his right hand. He snapped his fingers. “There, look now,” he said as he pulled the glove back on his hand.

  She peered out the carriage window at a snowy scene, the wind howling, drifts having instantaneously formed around the entrance to the tomb.

  Quill took a drag on his cigar and tossed it out the door of the cab. As he spoke his words traveled on curling smoke.

  The brain is just the weight of God,

  For, lift them, pound for pound,

  And they will differ, if they do,

  As syllable from sound.

  “You see what I mean?” he asked. “It’s metaphorical.”

  “What is?” she said.

  “Everything. The world,” he told her. “Come now, let’s get to it.” He reached his gloved hand out.

  She appreciated his gentleness, his friendly manner, but still she pressed her back against the seat and didn’t reach to meet his touch. “I’m only thirty-one. A dozen unfinished poems right now await me in my dresser drawer.” Her breathing grew frantic.

  “Unlike you, Emily, I never tell it slantwise.”

  “Is there nothing?”

  He sat silently for a moment, and then reached out, grabbed the carriage door by the handle, and swung it shut. The sound of it latching brought a change to the scene outside the window. They were no longer in front of the tomb. It was early autumn again, twilight, and the carriage was moving along Russell Street, west, through Hadley, harvest fields to either side.

  “Are you much for deals, Miss Dickinson?” asked Quill.

  “Deals?” she asked.

  “Yes, it so happens I’m in need of a poet. If you’ll help me, I’ll erase this evening and not bother you again until, uh . . . .” He paused and reached into his jacket pocket for a small notebook. Flipping the pages, he finally landed on one and stopped. Running his finger down a list of names, he said, “You’ll have another quarter century. It’s the best I can do.”

  “You’re saying I can go home?”

  “Yes, when we’re finished with my errand. It’s somewhat dangerous and there’s a chance you still might wind up in the tomb if things go awry, but this is the only way.”

  Emily remembered from her reading of fairy tales the dangers of deals with Death, but she was flattered that he knew her as a poet. “What do I have to do?”

  “I want you to help me kill a child,” he said.

  She shook her head vehemently.

  “Hear me out, Miss Dickinson, hear me out,” said Quill, and tapped his stick twice on the carriage floor.

  “Speak,” she said.

  “First, keep in mind what I told you about the world being made of metaphor. I know you’re an adherent of reality, a devotee of science. ‘Microscopes are prudent in an emergency,’ you write. Yes, sound advice, but there are those moments of—shall I call it magic? Sorcery? The supernatural, let us say . . . .”

  “You mean something like a coach carrying Death, pulling up to take you hither and yon?”

  “Well put,” he said. “Now, this is where things stand—there’s a child, a boy, who has for all intents and purposes died, succumbed to scarlet fever. But his mother has cast a spell upon him to keep him living.”

  “Can this be real?” she asked.

  “It’s real. I’m speaking of the power of words. Your father, a devout preacher, would be disappointed in you, not to mention what Reverend Wadsworth might think. In Genesis, God spoke the world and all that’s in it. He said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was.”

  “Sophistry,” she said. “But go on.”

  “The fact that I’m prevented from taking the child has caused all manner of problems. In fact, I’d not have had to come for you so early if it wasn’t for this one boy—you, and a dozen more whose times were not nigh. I’ve got to compensate for the aberration. It’s not right.”

  “Why a poet?”

  “The spell has to be undone. I’m not sure how, but word magic, I’m guessing, can best be subdued with words. You know, I almost decided to snatch Walt Whitman instead.”

  Emily winced. “The man’s pen has dysentery.”

  “For me, there’s a method to his madness,” said Quill. “Like you, he writes about my work quite a bit. He writes that the grass is ‘the beautiful uncut hair of graves.’ Now that’s the spirit. He writes, ‘And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.’ You can see why I appreciate the gentleman.”

  “Please, allow Mr. Whitman the honor.”

  “For this task, though, I need a surgeon not a dervish.”

  She turned again to look out the window and noticed the road was lined with trees. “Where are we?”

  “Just beyond Holyoke, heading toward the Horse Caves. The woman in question, the Widow Cremint, has a fine old home there in a clearing just a few hundred yards off the road. It’s recently come to my attention that she’s been advertising for domestic help in town. We will apply for the positions—a governess for the child and a laborer. No one else will dare to apply. They’ve all heard rumors and know what she is. I spread those rumors myself in the guise of a traveling preacher. She’ll have to take us on.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Nothing’s a certainty, but I’ve been doing this for millions of years.”

  “Oh, my,” said Emily, and brought her open palm to her mouth. “I just remembered one time when a very old woman came to the door of my father’s house inquiring where she might find lodging in Amherst. This was when I still answered the door. I gave her directions that would eventually lead her to the cemetery, and told myself, this way she wouldn’t have to move more than once in a year.” She shook her head. “How I laughed at that mischief. I was laughing at myself.”

  She looked up for his reaction and noticed some commotion on his shadowed side of the compartment. There was a sound like the flapping of wings, and then something flew toward her. She closed her eyes and brought her arms up.

  “Gather yourself,” said Quill.

  Emily lowered her arms and opened her eyes to morning sunlight. She blinked and then focused on a set of steps before her. When her gaze widened, she took in what she could see of a large, sprawling house that seemed to surpass the Homestead in size but not in upkeep. White paint was peeling, porch railing supports were missing, and one of the front windows had a meandering crack traversing its pane.

  The suddenness of day forced her to adjust her balance, and she took a step back and then one forward. Quill, somehow she knew it was Quill, although he was no longer the gentleman of the brougham, stood next to her in front of the door. He was older, tired-looking, with a puffy, wrinkled face and white hair. His drab jacket and trousers were
on the verge of tattered. She looked down and saw that she was now wearing a dark blue day dress, but thankfully her walking boots were her own.

  “I wear white,” she said.

  “Not for this,” he said, and stepped forward to rap on the door. “All that white you wear; I have a theory that it’s symbolic of the blank page.”

  “Think again, Mr. Quill,” she said.

  “I hope you don’t mind, I’ve supplied you with undergarments. White, by the way.”

  “I’ll treat them like a blank page,” she said, and noticed now that he was carrying a large sack over his shoulder.

  The door opened and a tall young woman stood before them. Quill stepped forward and said, “Good day, Mrs. Cremint. I heard in town that you were looking for a laborer and a woman to watch your child. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m John Gullen and this is my daughter, Dagmar.”

  Emily wondered if the witch would know there was treachery behind Quill’s smile. She averted her gaze, but not before noticing the woman’s voluminous hair and the inordinate length of her neck. When Emily looked down, she realized that she was wearing the very same blue day dress that Mrs. Cremint wore.

  “You, there,” said the woman. Emily looked up. “Do you have any experience with children? Have you cared for them before?” Her tone was demanding, and the poet was too nervous to answer. She merely nodded.

  “We have a letter of recommendation from our last employer, Jessup Halstone, Albany, New York. A very wealthy and well-respected gentleman,” said Quill. He handed Mrs. Cremint a piece of paper, folded in half. The woman took it and read through it quickly. She handed it back to Quill.

  “You can see the place needs work,” she said, her voice softening. “I’ll take you on. But I want the young lady here—Dagmar, is it?—to know that my child is very frail. He has a serious condition that the doctors cannot diagnose. I should say, those from outside might think his demeanor something strange. If she thinks she can bring herself to treat him as she would any other child, she can have the position.”