(oh low estate)
(the threat)
(my)
Bill felt his way forwards, in search of drawers, cupboards, some sort of indication that anything had ever been kept in this damnable room besides memories and a place for wrinklies to shag. Something pushed forward under his fingers, a slick surface impossible to hold onto. Something hit the ground with a crunch, right in the midst of a bright stripe of moonlight: a presumably happy couple trapped under a fresh lattice of cracks, taken someplace sunny enough their faces were almost impossible to make out in detail, except that the man might have had Sessilie’s hair-colour, while the woman’s smile cut the exact same angle as her darling daughter’s...
Bill froze, waiting in vain for another of those... no-sounds; those weird, unidentifiable lack-of-noises, but none came. So he just kept staring down as though hypnotised, finding himself trying to make out what that was there, on the inside crook of dead Mrs. K’s arm, just angled so the camera barely registered it; grey on grey, uneven edges. It couldn’t be... no, stupid idea.
No one gets a tattoo – or whatever – just like their Mum’s, you twat.
Not even someone as odd as Sessilie, surely. Or... that was it, goddamnit. And that... he realized, at pretty much the very same instant...
... was the noise.
It’s right behind me.
Before he could tell himself not to, he’d already turned.
At first, he genuinely didn’t recognize her without all that high-gloss cack on her face. She’d taken her hair down, proving it to be far longer than it had seemed when knotted up – brushing her thighs in one thick, glossy, dead-straight fall, shiny-black as her own nail-tips. She’d changed, too, into an actual honest-to-God cotton nightie with long, ruffled sleeves and a button-down front, whose collar went up to her jawline. With skin thus mainly hidden yet feet left bare, she looked both younger than before – enough to make him seriously question his own judgement, in terms of where he’d chosen to stick his tackle – and sexier than ever in a still freakier way.
“Do you like the rest of my home, Billy?” she said, fluttering her lashes. “It’s a bit of a dump, but one does what one can. Still, it must’ve exerted quite a pull on you, for you to go stumbling around here in the dark while you thought I was asleep.”
“Well, uh... I was just looking around for...”
“The loo? I do know how you appreciate a nice bathroom, after all. One on every floor, dear; two, sometimes. One wonders how you missed them.”
Oh, does one? That tone of hers was maddening; not simply the way in which she spoke, but the sentiment – or lack thereof – behind it. And so difficult to listen to as well. Slipped away whenever the ear tried to fasten on it, pig-greasy with happy idiocy, as though nothing said ‘like that’ could be worth paying attention to, even with only half an ear.
Which was why he found himself trying to focus on the light she held, instead, using its soft flicker to steady himself. “That’s from... downstairs, isn’t it?”
“Why yes, it is. Funny you should notice.”
“Why? I was there when you lit it.”
“’Course you were, I knew that. But, you see – this is rather a special candle.”
She took a moment to run her finger over its uppermost quarter, hot wax slopping onto her in a way that anyone else would find unbearable, and made an odd little fiddly gesture that seemed to make a perfect little approximation of somebody’s features emerge from the unburnt portion. Not just somebody’s, though – for as she did, Bill heard a fold of tapestry pull back, revealing a long, narrow oval of mirror, and glanced automatically towards its surface. There, hanging inside like a drowned corpse under glass, he recognized himself; his blood congealed, the air itself becoming slow, difficult to move through. He could barely think, barely breathe; his chest heaved painfully, a landed fish yearning for water.
“Whuh...” was all he could say by way of reply, and Sessilie smirked.
“Oh, it’s an awfully amusing story. You see, when one of my Mama’s great-great-whatevers was clapped in durance vileover having been accused of merry-dancing with Old Sir ‘S’, she smuggled this candle into the clink to make a dolly out of it. And where she put it, I can’t possibly say; a very secret place indeed, if you take my meaning. But...”
With a frighteningly massive effort, Bill managed to half-turn himself back towards the door, though his feet seemed snared in treacle, his Achilles tendons shot full of novocaine. He fell to his knees, clutching for Sessilie’s ankles, but she skipped back out of range as though playing hop-scotch, content to let his own weight carry him down onto all fours. And even then, practically parallel with the floor, he couldn’t manage to keep ‘upright’; everything hurt, impossible to support. His hands gave way, knees bowed inwards, joints unsteady.
“It’s special, you see,” Sessilie went on, “because it can burn all night, and still never quite be consumed. The wax grows back like flesh, so that every new woman of my blood may re-shape the face to their liking, light it, and use it like a Hand of Glory to trap our enemies. Though it has other uses too, of course. Summoning the one who first gave it us, for example, and who is sworn to do our bidding just as we, in turn, swear to eventually pay for that long and faithful service.”
Behind her, a stirring. A wind ruffling those tapestries as something passed behind them, dropped pin-quiet, clicking dog’s nails-distinct. A lip-pop with every step.
“As for you, meanwhile,” Sessilie added, “how long d’you intend to make me wait, exactly? And after all this trouble I’ve gone to, on your behalf.”
The answering voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, soft as fallen leaves. Saying, without haste: “A moment’s rest is always pleasant, my lady. You do keep me so very busy.”
“Really, Nanny, you’re very lazy, all things considered; greedy, too. But then, Mama always warned me you were. Rule with an iron hand, and all that.”
“Yes, my lady. Your lady mother was a perceptive woman, with – very good taste.”
“You aren’t being impertinent, are you, Nanny?”
“Only a trifle, my lady. Will you deny me that, too?”
“No, Nanny. You may be as impertinent as you like, so long as you do what you’re told.”
“Yes, my lady.”
She rose up then, manifesting from what might have been the bottom of the tapestries, the dark under Sessilie’s parents’ bed, or a pile of rags in the corner. Thirty at the most, slim and straight and taller than Sessilie yet bent, willow-graceful; coloured white and black and grey like Sessilie’s room, with the occasional hint of red at her mouth, her ears, her distressingly long fingers. The dress she wore might’ve been modelled on Sessilie’s nightgown but copied in negative, its fabric less cotton than bombazine, giving off a distinctive swish of underskirts as she stepped forward in her neat little black patent shoes.
The click, the pin-drop, that was the sound of each movement – not a creak, not a sigh, nothing human. As Bill goggled at the realization, she dipped her head as though he’d spoken out loud, projecting: Yes, I fooled you. I am sorry to play such games. They are the only pleasures left to me, I’m afraid...
(Well – almost. I do not mean to lie. Lying is the provenance of your species, not mine.)
(But we will talk further of such things, soon enough.)
“Where’d you... come from?” He asked her, barely able to raise what voice remained to him. She simply regarded him silently while Sessilie frowned, tapping her nails so that the candle-holder rang dully. Replying, impatiently–
“Really, Billy, don’t you listen? I told you already, she’s always here. This is Nanny Grey.”
IT WAS A dream – had to be. How else could they have moved from one room to another, on whose walls an array of photos gave way to prints, giving way in turn to portraits, etchings, watercolours, oils? And somewhere in each composition – lurking patient and anonymous, behind or beside the centrepiece arrangement of we
ll-dressed men, women, girls and even some boys who all shared Sessilie’s dead-straight ink-fall of hair, her grey-blue eyes, her cruelly slanted smile – a version of Nanny Grey was present in her long black dress, her sensible footwear, no matter what the era.
“Nanny is my governess, as I said,” Sessilie told Bill as she pressed him back onto what felt like a nest of sheets. “My servant, my lady-in-waiting. She’s my helpmeet, the head of my household; she keeps all of this running, and whatever she does, she does at my pleasure.” Raising her voice slightly here, a coiled lash, brandished rather than used: “Isn’t that so, Nanny?”
“It is, my lady.”
“Since – oh, I forget the year. Thirteen-oh-oh something, Mama said...”
“1346, my lady. When the very fount of your blood was almost cut off in full flower, for – was it treason? Yes. You Kytelers are treasonous by nature, I believe. And to kill one’s husband, then, no matter what provocation might have preceded such a desperate act, was considered just as bad as conspiring to kill the king himself. They burnt women at the stake for it just as surely as for witchcraft, soaked in oil and pitch with no hope of merciful strangulation, whilst crowds screamed and pelted them with garbage.”
“Better by far to turn to the Devil than God, under such circumstances,” Sessilie chimed in, with an air of quoting something learned by rote. “Or easier, anyhow.”
“Down there in the dark, yes, amongst the rats and bones. A bad place for any pretty woman to end. But then again, that is where your ancestor Lady Alyce eventually found me, after all – where we found each other, more accurately.”
“Quite. But the promise behind our contract isn’t enough to satisfy Nanny, you see, not always. And though it’s such a bother to arrange for boys like you to come visit every once in a while, Nanny does so much work on our behalf that she really must be kept happy. It’s only good manners.”
“I do value good manners, you see. Courtesy, common or otherwise. The little gestures.”
“‘Manners maketh man’, and all that.”
“A party-dress on an ape, that’s all they are, when everything is said and done. But since there’s no alternative, they simply have to do.”
“Given it must’ve been God who deeded you to us in the first place, directly or in-, do you think perhaps we might be part of your Hell, Nanny?”
“I often ask myself that very question, my lady.”
“But to no avail?”
“None, my lady.”
“That’s prayer for you, Nanny.”
“Yes, my lady.”
Nanny Grey eddied forward with one long white hand on her breast, head bent down submissively. And when she looked up, eyes pleasantly crinkled, she smiled so wide that Bill could see how her teeth were packed together far too numerously for most human beings, bright as little red eyes in the wet darkness of her mouth. While her eyes, on the other hand, were white – white as real teeth, as salt, as a blank page upon which some unlucky person’s name had yet to be inscribed.
“Little master,” she murmured. “You wished a tour, I believe, and no one knows this house better than I. Come with me, please.”
“I don’t–”
“Oh, it will be no trouble; what my lady orders, I do. For as she told you, this is the bargain between us – the terms of my employment.”
“Yes, and I do hope you were finally paying attention, silly Billy. Because with so little time left, I’d hate to have to repeat myself.”
Sessilie leant down then, pressing one ear to Bill’s chest, in a vile parody of post-coital relaxation. But when Nanny Grey laid one of those too-long hands on his forehead a moment later, he felt his heart lurch and stutter as though he were about to have a heart attack, pounding double, triple, quadruple-time. Sessilie must’ve heard it, for she gave yet another of those rippling laughs, and he wanted nothing more than to be able to rouse his limbs enough to tear her soft white throat open with his thumbs. She drew back and pouted.
“I’m going to tell you something now, Billy,” she said, “because I actually quite like you, all things considered. One day, when I turn Nanny over to my daughter the way Mama turned her over to me, she will take me wherever she’s taking you – wherever she took my Mama, and hers before her, so on, etcetera. Back to the first of us, great Lady Alyce in her shit-filled cell. So there; that might help.”
Bill swallowed hard, barely scraping enough air to whisper: “It... really... doesn’t.”
“Mmm, s’pose not; shouldn’t think it would. But then, I did only say ‘might.’”
He sank down further then, excruciatingly slow, into a deep, deep blackness. Only to hear them still arguing, as he went–
“Do this, Nanny Grey; do that, Nanny Grey. Eat up, Nanny Grey. You’ll expect me to digest him completely as well, I’m sure, just to save you the trouble of having to cover up your own indiscretions.”
“Well, I could simply take him away now, if you’d prefer – but what on earth would be the use of that, considering? There are limits to even your perversity, I’m sure.”
“Really, it’s you Kytelers who are the lazy ones. Never doing anything for yourselves... what sort of example do you think that sets, for everyone else?”
“Oh, pish-tosh, Nanny. Why should we have to make the effort, when we have you to do it for us?”
“... crazy...” Bill told them both, through stiffening lips, to which Sessilie only smiled, as ever. While Nanny Grey raised a single perfectly-arched eyebrow, expressionless as a cast pewter mask, and murmured, in return: “I had wings once, little master. You’d be disappointed too, I’d venture, if you found yourself where I find myself now.”
“Poor Nanny. Quite the come-down, wasn’t it?”
“A fall, yes, both long and hard. And at the end of it–”
“Me,” Sessilie supplied, brightly. “Wasn’t that nice?”
A pause, infinite as some gigantic clock’s gears turning over, millennial, epochal. Deep time caught in the shallowest of all possible circuits, and only digging itself deeper. After which Bill heard the thing that called itself Nanny Grey reply, with truly terrible patience–
“...even so, my lady.”
DUMB LUCY
ROBERT SHEARMAN
Shearman is a magician. I don’t mean in the traditional sense, but there is something about the way that Robert uses words and imagery that makes him quite unlike any other writer working today. ‘Dumb Lucy’ shows Shearman at his best: a poignant, heart-breaking tale that has hints of the work of Russell Hoban and Walter M. Miller Jr about it, but the magic is undoubtedly Shearman’s own.
THERE WAS LITTLE magic left to those dark times. The world seemed cracked somehow, too weak for the magic to hold; latterly, as he’d performed his tricks, he’d begun to doubt they would work at all, he’d stood before his audience behind his patter and his sheen and a beaming smile that was well-oiled and ready practised, and he’d felt himself starting to sweat, he’d felt the fear take over – the magic wouldn’t hold, the magic would fail. Lucy never seemed to notice. Lucy never seemed to get nervous. And he supposed that if Lucy couldn’t see how frightened he was, then neither could anybody else. The magic had held. Still, it worried him.
They hadn’t performed for a month. It would be better, he supposed, when they reached the town. The villagers wanted nothing to do with their conjuring. They had no coins to waste on such a thing. But he had strong arms, they said, he could work alongside them in the fields – and the little girl, she could join the other children, there were always berries that needed picking. Sometimes the coins they earned were enough to buy them shelter for the night, and sometimes not.
And in the meantime they’d keep on walking, trying to keep ahead of the darkness. Because what choice did they have? He pulled the cart behind them. It would have been much quicker without the cart, but then they couldn’t have performed their magic. She walked by his side, and matched him step for step, and kept him company, though she never spoke.
/>
“Is this the town?” he said one day, and Lucy of course didn’t answer, and he knew already that this couldn’t be the town, it wasn’t big enough, it was little more than a street with a few houses either side. But maybe it might have grown into a town, one day, had the blackness not come.
One of the houses was marked ‘inn’. He put down the cart, and beat upon the wooden door with his blistered hands. There was no reply, but he knew that someone was inside, he could hear breathing just an inch away, someone trying very hard to be quiet, someone scared.
“Please,” he called. “We mean you no harm. We’re two travellers, we just want a room for the night.”
“This is no inn,” a woman’s voice came back. “And the people who called it one are long since gone, or dead most like. There is no room for you here.”
“If not for my sake, then for the little girl’s.” And at that, as if on cue, Lucy lifted her head and flared her dimples, and opened her eyes out wide and innocent. It was an expression she could pull at a moment’s notice, and it had been a useful trick in the old days, to gather about a sympathetic crowd, to persuade the crowd to part with coins. He saw no signs that anyone inside could see them; there must have been a secret window somewhere, or a crack in the wood, because next time the woman spoke her voice was softer.
“D’ye have money?”
“We are, at present, financially embarrassed,” confessed the man, but he puffed out his chest, and his voice became richer – somehow Lucy putting on her pose beside him gave him a little swagger too – “But we propose to pay you with a spectacle of our arts. We are magicians, conjurors, masters of the illusory and the bizarre. We have dazzled the crowned heads of three different empires with our legerdemain, the only limits to what we can surprise you with your own imagination. I am the Great Zinkiewicz, and this, my assistant, Lucy!” And at this he delivered a sweeping bow, directed at where he hoped his audience was watching him.
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