“There!” I said, and pointed. The wall behind the armoire was filthy, covered in dust and a shroud of old cobwebs. Down where the wall met the floor a piece of wood covered a hole and above it, a thin dark crack separated two wide boards.
Teag pulled out a pair of work gloves from his messenger bag, along with a screwdriver. He knelt next to the opening, and began to pry at the wood. I could hardly think straight, because the sensations from the button in my pocket had gone off the charts.
The attic walls melted away, and once again I saw the sunlit battlefield I had glimpsed before through the eyes of the button’s owner.
Fear coursed through me, making my heart pound. All around me, I heard the sharp crack of rifles and in the distance, the steady, deadly pounding of cannons that shook the ground beneath my feet. The uniform I wore was gray, or had been once. Now, it was faded from the sun, stained where it had been splashed with the blood of other men, brown from the red clay dirt. Just as I raised my rifle to my shoulder, I heard another loud crack, closer this time, and staggered backwards as if someone had shoved me. My own shot went wild, with the rifle barrel pointed toward the sky as I nearly fell. When I put my hand down to my side, my fingers came away stained with blood.
“It’s open!” Teag shouted in triumph, setting the board to the side. A dark hole gaped in the wall. From that hole, Teag drew out a small bundle wrapped in old rags. He unwound the rags and withdrew a yellowed skull. He jostled it, and the lower jaw fell away, revealing a gold coin that had been placed in the mouth.
I stared at Teag and the bundle, then my gaze shifted behind him, to the wall. The thin dark crack had grown wider, and from it, a shadow slipped out like smoke.
“Get back, Teag!”
Teag followed my gaze, but I could tell from the look on his face he didn’t see what I saw. Still, he acted, scrabbling backward, clutching the skull and coin. The shadow grew larger, briefly taking the form of a man and then shifting, with tendrils that unwound themselves like a black kraken uncoiling. Behind me, one of the light bulbs flared and then burst with a crack like a gunshot. I searched my senses, and knew that the dark crack was a fissure between more than the attic siding. The Allendale house had been rumored to have been a hotbed of paranormal activity for long before Edward brought home his battlefield treasure. Now I knew why. The dark space was no ordinary splintering of old boards, no settling of the foundation. It was a threshold between the world of the living and the place of the dead.
“Get out of here.” I could barely make words come from my throat. The dark shadow was growing larger.
“The hell I will,” Teag said. “Maybe it wants the button.”
But I could feel what the darkness really wanted; it wanted fresh meat, warm blood, and the life that animated our beating hearts.
My gaze went again to the crack between the boards. I reached for the amulet around my neck for moral support, and pressed the smooth silver disk against my palm.
An image formed in my mind of a woman in an antique bridal gown. A heavy lace veil covered her face. I could sense an aura of power around her.
Leave the shadowed one to me, my child. Send the curse where it belongs, and close the rift.
How? I wondered. How do I close the rift? I looked again at the dark crack, a thin opening, or a small rip. Or a buttonhole.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said, eyeing the skull Teag still held and the distance between me and the wall. “Can you get the coin out of the skull’s mouth?”
Teag juggled his macabre charge. “I think so. Dammit! Someone wired it in here.”
“Try not to handle the coin if you can help it. Put it on the floor, where it’s easy for me to get it,” I instructed, keeping my eyes on that damned shadow.
A coin in the mouth of a corpse, a penny for the ferryman, I thought. Perhaps at some point, Edward Allendale had tried unsuccessfully to send his unwanted visitor to the great beyond.
“Got it,” Teag said
I reached into the pocket of Teag’s jacket and my hand closed over the plastic box with the button, and I fumbled with the latch to open it. The box gave way, and the button tumbled into my palm.
For that instant, the contact with the long-dead soldier was complete. Darkness washed over me, drawing the warmth from my blood. Anger and despair filled me, and my gut contracted with the pain of a rifle wound that was more than one hundred and fifty years in the past. Then another presence filled me, and the image of the bride grew brighter and brighter, becoming a light that flared and forced the shadow to retreat.
Now! The voice shouted in my mind. I dove across the floor, grabbing the coin with my right hand and clenching the button in my left. I skidded toward the wall, and used my momentum to thrust both the coin and the button through the crack.
Maman Brigitte’s light struck the shadow man, just as I forced the coin and the button into the darkness. I heard a scream, although I could not tell whether it came from the shadow or whether it was my own.
The darkness vanished, and I slumped to the ground, too spent to move. In my mind, I saw the image of the bride again, bending over the rift, sealing it with her veil. Teag grabbed my wrist, yanking me to my feet, and together we barreled down the stairs and out of the house. We reached the other side of the street and looked back, half expecting the house to disappear into a vortex or tumble to the ground. It did neither, although for an instant, a light flared brilliantly from the attic window, then went dark.
“Want to bet no one sees a shadow at the window again?” Teag asked. I looked down. He was still holding that damned skull. He caught the direction of my glance, and shrugged. “Poor guy is long overdue for a decent burial. Without the coin, it’s just a skull. I have an old friend who works at the mortuary. I’m betting he can make sure old Jonah gets a proper burial.”
Teag might have said more, but my head was swimming, and I swayed on my feet. He reached out to steady me as I passed out, but there was someone else as well. In my mind’s eye, I saw the veiled bride standing over me. She bent down, and touched a finger to my amulet, and the metal disk felt warm on my skin. As consciousness faded away, so did her image, but I had the feeling she approved.
I woke on the couch in my apartment over the shop. Consciousness returned slowly, and with it, warmth. I felt a presence, safe, reassuring, and it carried a honeyed compulsion to rest. I opened my eyes, and found Sorren, looking down at me, concern clear in his features. He helped me sit up enough to sip some sweet tea, and then eased me back onto the pillows.
“Rest,” Sorren said, and his voice felt like balm poured over a throbbing wound. “When you’re feeling better, there’s a new situation to discuss.”
“Oh, goody,” I murmured, but as I drifted off to sleep, I knew the truth, and so did Sorren. Trifles and Folly was far more than just another antiques store. It helped make the world a little safer, one haunted item at a time. I couldn’t walk away from that, not when my gift could make a difference. Not for all the damned buttons in the world.
NANNY GREY
GEMMA FILES
Secrets can run in families, and secrecy and magic are two very old – some would say ancient – bedfellows. Gemma has taken the theme of women and magic and woven it into a dark and erotic tale. It’s a warning to the curious, but also a story about how power accrues over time and what dreadful price one must pay for its use.
OH LOW ESTATE, my love my love, the song’s hook went, or seemed to, through the wall of the Ladies’. Bill Koslaw felt it more than heard it, buzzing in his back teeth through the sweaty skin of his jaws as he pushed into this posh tart – Sessilie, he thought her name was, and the rest began with a ‘K’ – from behind with her bent over the lav itself, hands wide-braced, each thrust all but mashing that great midnight knot of hair against the cubicle’s tiling. And he could see her lips moving, too, half-quirked in that smile he’d literally never seen her lose thus far: Oh low estate, the threat is great, my love my love (my love)...
Tiny girl, this Sessilie K., almost creepily so. She looked barely legal, though he’d touched a cupcake-sized pair of breasts beneath that silky top of hers as she pulled him inside the Ladies’, nipples long enough to tent the material and one apparently bar-pierced, set inside a shield like a little silver flame which pricked his hand when he’d tried to flick it, drawing blood. And: “Oh, never mind that,” she’d said, that smile intact, opaquely unreadable even as she’d leaned forward with her hips hiked high, flipping her skirt up to show her thong already moved neatly aside for easier penetration.
“Bit cruel to your knickers,” he’d commented. “Bet those cost a pretty penny.”
“No doubt,” she’d replied, bum still in the air and both legs wide-spread, aslant on her too-high heels, completely shameless. “But then, it all ends up in the fire eventually. Doesn’t it?”
Punctuating it with a bit of a shimmy, like: well, get a wiggle on. Don’t waste my time, groundling; better things to do, you know. Better classes of fools to fuck.
That airy contempt of hers, especially when delivered in those plummy tones, engorged him. But...
He should be liking this better than he was, he reckoned. Some sort of aristocrat, perpetually drunk and perpetually talking, always with her credit card out like it was glued to her palm and no apparent impulse control to speak of; what wasn’t to like, for Christ’s sake?
Just her, he supposed. Her, and almost everything about her.
He slid one hand up to ruck her blouse over her shoulderblades, and flinched from what he encountered there. Something halfway between a grey-on-grey tattoo of uncertain design and a brand with scabby edges, so rough it took on a Braille-like texture beneath his fingers. As though if he knew how, he could read it, but only in the dark.
“That a birthmark?”
“Oh, we all have one.”
“Your family?”
“Some of them too, yes.”
“Who was it you meant, then?”
“Oh, Billy, silly Billy. Does it really matter?”
And here she rammed back against him unexpectedly, throwing him off his beat. Singing once more, this time out loud, as she took control of their rhythm: “Ohhhh low estate, the threat is great...
(my love)”
“Am I boring you?”
“No, no. Do carry on.”
“What’s that, then?”
“Quite like this song, is all. I’ll stop if you’d like. Wouldn’t want to, mmm... put you off.”
She shot him a glance back over her shoulder, with that, and reached back down between her legs to run one long nail over the seam of his sack – inch-long nails she had, white with black tips like some odd parody of a French manicure, each with a small black bedazzlement down where the cuticle should be. Pressing just hard enough to make him jump, so she could clamp around him and milk him so fiercely it began to hurt as she tossed a loose forelock out of her eyes and winked at him.
Winked.
Jesus wept.
That, right there – as he grunted and came, listening to her give out a rippling laugh in reply, her own orgasm seeming very much like an afterthought – probably marked the exact point at which Bill stopped feeling anything like bad about always having planned to slip her a Rohypnol and rob her house, later on.
BILL HAD COME to London on a Kon-Tiki packet, planning to round-trip Europe before moving on to the next leg of his pre-Uni world tour. But that’d all been put paid to when this arsehole, Gary from Tasmania, decided he’d cheated him out of the proceeds from reselling a bag of weed they’d both gone in on and took off with his stuff in revenge – passport, money, tickets, the whole deal.
Now it was three months later, and Bill still hadn’t quite worked himself up to the point where he was willing to tell the Old Man what had happened – just kept on moving from place to place, bed to bed, sofa to sofa. Squatted here and there, took under-the-counter jobs, and tried to build up some sort of pad. Going to clubs had become about the next ride home, the next overnight, and then – slowly but surely – about whatever he could pick up around the flat or the house, or wherever, before they woke up. Small items of value, gold and silver, electronics; stuff non-specific enough to pawn or fence without being traced, but nice enough they’d bring a fair turnaround.
Girl like Sessilie, wherever she lived, it had to be just full of stuff like that – a spread of hockable trinkets peppered in and between the Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels-type stuff: antique firearms, paintings and knick-knacks with nice pedigrees, etcetera. That was the assumption, anyhow.
He’d long since learned to trust his instincts when it came to such matters, and it had paid off, literally. Hadn’t been wrong once, thus far.
So: “Shouldn’t there be somebody home, this time of night?” Bill asked as he half-walked, half-lifted her up the stairs. The place was dark, like 19th-century dark; it was the sort of towering three-story house that should really be lit with oil-lamps, not cunning little sodium bulbs on dimmer switches. “Place is a bloody tomb.”
Sessilie’s constant smile skewed a bit to the left, those horrifying nails making a slithery noise on the banister as she dragged them along its curve. “Oh, there’s very little staff left, you know – family holidays, all that. Most of them have already gone down to air out the summer house, for when I’m done with End-of-Term.”
“What about your parents?”
“Hmmm, be quite the surprise if they were here; they’ve both been dead since I was eight.”
“...sorry.”
“Oh, no need. Papa crashed a car and killed himself, but Mama held on a few days in hospital, at least. And ever after, it’s just been me and Nanny Grey.”
As she spoke this last name, Bill almost thought he heard something drop in the dark above them – on the next landing, maybe, or higher up yet. A stealthy noise like a single clock-tick, or the sound of a hairpin falling to the floor. Not footsteps, not exactly. But the dim stairwell and its adjacent hallways took on an air of waiting, of watchfulness, even though absolutely nothing which might be qualified to fill such a role evinced itself.
“You... still have a nanny?” Bill asked, pushing Sessilie up onto what he thought was the second floor, where she laid a finger against her lips and shook her head, drunkenly. Then tottered over to a side-table in those ludicrous heels, their clacking muffled by a thick oriental rug, and took out a long candle the colour of bone that she fitted onto a nearby holder with an absurd little flourish, before rummaging in her purse for a cigarette and lighting it. She took a long drag, then pressed the tip against the candle’s wick, which flared into life.
“Governess would be the proper term. That’s what Nanny would say, anyhow. Such an old bulldog, Nanny Grey. So protective! She’s always been with our family, you see...”
And here she paused, wavering back and forth, her eyes unfocused – yet still retained presence of mind enough to stub the smoke out in the candle-holder’s dish and blink over at Bill, rather sweetly. “’Scuse me,” she said. “I feel... rather off-colour, all of a sudden. Might I rely on you to get me to bed?”
Slowest-to-take-effect Rohypnol in all creation, Bill thought, amazed by her stamina. Ought to check my supply, once this is over with...
“My pleasure,” was what he said, though, giving her a leg-out bow, fairytale prince-style. To which she tittered and made him a practiced curtsy, so well-learnt she barely even stumbled; he slung a hand under either armpit and caught her up with ridiculously little effort (so light, her bones like a bloody bird’s), letting her fold into him, apparently too tired to yawn. Sleeping bloody Beauty.
The bedroom in question, which she directed him towards with a series of chest-muffled murmurs, looked almost exactly the way he’d pictured it would – big canopied bed, choked with pillows and fluffy plush dolls: cute versions of un-cute animals, emo anime characters. He set her down in their embrace, and watched her curl into a foetal position, tucking a particularly infectious-looking teddy-bear – the
size of a two-year-old, chenille-furred and shedding worn lace in leprous swathes – down tight between those hungry thighs.
Strange little girl, he thought. Well, he was right to want to be rid of her, and not just for the obvious reasons; best to get to it, then flee this damn place. Nothing so big should be so empty, so quiet...
And there it was again, from somewhere: that sound. A dog’s nails clicking on the floor, one leg at a time. A mouth opening, pop-gasp, only to shut once more, without even an exhaled breath.
Get going, son. Grab what you can find, and scarper.
If only he could tell which direction the sounds were coming from.
Closer, now. To his left; no, right.
Bill shut the door behind him with excruciating slowness, tensed for the latch’s click, and once he heard it, turned left so hard he thought he might twist an ankle. The candle – left abandoned, with only Sessilie’s crumpled cigarette-butt for company – gave just enough light to navigate by, and Bill took the stairs upwards in loping strides, two by two by two. His heart hammered fast in his throat.
The third floor was smaller than it had seemed, from below. Just a door on either side, master bedroom versus guest-room, or maybe office. Forcing himself not to wonder what might be on the other side, Bill twisted the closest knob and slid in sidelong, trying to keep it open just the bare minimum allowable to admit his frame.
Within, he crept across the floor, tai chi tread, heel rolling straight and narrow to toe with every touch-down, to at least keep the creaks even. This had to be where Sessilie’s dearly departed Mum and Dad once slept – hung with tapestry like some set for Hamlet; a strange mixture of blue velvet and purple trim that shone all the darker in what little moonlight leaked in under drawn blackout shades. Dark like club lighting without the natter of crowds and the underfoot thunder of feet, pulse of music seeping in from everywhere at once as though it were a swarm of tiny biting flies.
The Future of Horror Page 62
