The End of the Sentence

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  But the letters are from him. “But why would the prison expect the Weyland family to take responsibility for his body?”

  “The family worked for him, way back. Blacksmiths. Ironhide was the one who bought the place for them, that and all the land around it. Olivia, the lady who owned the house before you, sold off some of the land when things went hard for her,” said Ralph. “But check your papers. Some of it at least should still be yours.

  “I’m sure the Board of Corrections just wants some money to bury the bastard with. No one actually expects you to sling a body in your trunk and drive off.”

  Lischen cleared my empty plate. “Can I get you anything more?”

  “No, thank you. You’ve been very kind.”

  “Better to take care of someone.” She began wiping down the counter. The diner had emptied itself of all but the three of us.

  “It’s late. I should be going.”

  “Are you going to be able to get yourself back safe, now? It’s no bother for me to run you out there,” Ralph said.

  “I’m better, thanks.”

  He looked at me, then nodded. “You’ll feel better still once you get that place cleared out. I can come out to help, you need it.”

  “Ralph, it’s late to be drumming up business. Let the poor man get home.” Lischen smiled at me. “Drive safe, now.”

  I sat in the car for a minute, head tipped back against the cracked leather of the seat, waiting for the spinning that had nothing to do with drink to stop. The sign blinked, and across my windshield, again, in letters of bleeding red, HER.

  I rolled down all the windows to let the night into the car as I drove home.

  I wanted to believe those good, logical explanations. It was easier to think there was some hidden clause in the papers I’d signed, something that said I needed to pay for a murderer’s burial, than to think that the pages and pages of letters littering my hallway were written by that same iron-skinned murderer. Better to think that, even if it meant realizing that my grip on sanity was less than I’d thought after Row’s death.

  The car thumped and skidded, wheels off the shoulder and into the dirt. I wrenched the steering wheel back to true. A dead rabbit, twisted and broken, on the side of the road.

  (My child, my boy, twisted and broken.)

  I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, dead man’s nails biting in, and pushed those wishes and wants out of my head until I turned into my driveway.

  I wanted to believe Lischen and Ralph, but want and truth didn’t sleep well in the same bed together.

  10.

  I woke to find my sheets twisted like a noose around my neck. The room smelled stale and sour, last night’s alcohol still seeping from my pores. My head throbbed like a rotted tooth.

  I went into the bathroom, opened the mirrored medicine cabinet, and found what I was looking for on the rusted white shelves. Clippers, to trim my nails.

  In the kitchen, there was bacon, done until crisp, two eggs over hard, and toast, with a heavy glass jar of strawberry preserves next to it. There was also coffee, in a blue enamelware pot I hadn’t known I had. Leaning against the coffeepot was a letter.

  Twenty-third October

  My dear Malcolm,

  I am not dead, though it bothers me not that others think me so. It is easier, in this fashion, for me to go about my business unhindered. Well. Unhindered except for the temporary inconvenience of my imprisonment, but that is about to change.

  Nine days more, Malcolm, and then my shoes, my shoes. There are things which must be done in advance of my arrival, the hour of which draws ever nearer.

  You have been given the key, Malcolm. Open the door.

  If I could speak more plainly to you I would. I have no great love for unnecessary mysteries, particularly between friends. We are friends, are we not? The house cares for you, and it would not, if you were my enemy. But I too am bound by the bargains that were struck when I was imprisoned, and while this mystery is a solvable one, it must be you who plucks out the heart of it.

  Time is sliding through the glass. Find the door and find your answers.

  Yours,

  Dusha.

  Better, I thought, to know what it was that he wanted, than to wait until the clock ticked down to disaster. I went back to my room, and collected the keys.

  “I need,” I said to the ghosts, the house, the hauntings, “the door.”

  There was a muffled, heavy sound. Something large moving. A scrape, and a shriek of metal long unused and now forced into movement. A piece of paper fluttered through the air to land in the center of my bed.

  Down. I swallowed.

  The front hallway was as it had been, letters stacked on the end table, and gathered in the willow-branch and reed basket. A breeze came through the hallway, rustling the piles of paper. The kitchen door was open.

  A huge pile of brush had been pulled away from the side of the house, exposing a metal storm door, ringed with the thorned canes of some sort of bush. The door stood open. I could see a set of stairs leading down, and I could not see where they ended.

  Better to know.

  The crumpled shells of dead insects crunched beneath my feet. Cobwebs clung to my head and hands, and I could hear the skitterings of small animals. There was another scratching, more deliberate and regular, behind me. I turned.

  Take care.

  I kept walking down. There were oil lamps on the walls that flared and smoked into life just enough ahead of my steps that the path was illuminated for me. The keys in my pocket clanked against each other as I walked.

  And then, the door.

  I steeled myself. The articles I’d read in the library had not said how extensive the search for the bodies of Lischen March (a smile, a floral dress, and a scent like sunshine and cedar and no, you idiot, not her) and Michael Miller had been.

  It was the second key that worked. The lock turned, and the door, for all its weight, opened smoothly on its hinges. The air smelled of iron.

  It was a large room, high-ceilinged enough to nearly counteract the press of the earth on all sides. And it was clear that I’d been walking out from the house under the earth, because there was a large oven, a furnace, with a chimney stretching up from it, and there was no chimney in my house.

  There were no skeletons, no bodies. But in the center of the room was an anvil, marked with the same C&W that had been on the brand. There was a sledgehammer too, angled beside it as though it had been dropped. Rusted, everything, a rime on the hammer, and on the wooden handle the marks of a small hand’s grip. The movement of my feet stirred up red dust. Dried blood on my hands and under my nails and. No. Then, not now.

  I put my hands in my pockets, trying to make sure I left no prints on anything, and again, I didn’t know why. I wasn’t a criminal. I was just a man in the dark, on his land, looking over the vault beneath it. I thought about the smoke I’d seen days before, in the burned out rectangle where the meth house had been. The chimney. The forge. The smoke. Nothing on fire, but maybe—

  A breeze came through the chimney, a sudden whistling, and a bird flew out and into the room, fast and frantic, the panicked flapping of wings. My heart lurched, but it wasn’t coming for me.

  I looked up, and in looking up saw what was waiting. The instructions? The nest was a twiggy mass beneath one of the lamps mounted to the wall, and there were eggs in it. Eggs and an envelope, written not on the prison form, but the old stationery I’d seen once before.

  Mrs. Paul Weyland. Olivia.

  The letter was dated two years earlier. A shaking hand, pencil, lines crossed out throughout. I strained to make it out in the half-light.

  11.

  Dear Stranger,

  I’ll be dead by the time anyone finds this letter. I leave it for you, on the chance it helps. Though I fear this can’t be helped. There seems no remedy, not prayer, not sacrifi

  By the time I came to this place, everyone who’d known me was dead. My dear Paul, who’d spent his life ru
nning from Ione and his responsibility here. My parents and sister, who’d cautioned me against marrying him. I loved him. I did as I pleased. Now I bear the consequences, and if you are reading this, I’ve passed them to you. I am sorry for that. I tried.

  I was Olivia Jones, who married into the Weylands, and into this land. I wasn’t young when I came. Now I’m older than I ought to be. The house has kept me, feeding me, petting me. The doctor in town has died, and so has his son. Now I see his granddaughter, who thinks I’m a nice old lady.

  I am not. I’m a woman who married into a monster. I am a woman who vowed herself into a debt, a woman who wore a white dress and a veil, and I said that I would accompany my husband where he went. I said I’d walk beside him. I did that, and when he died, I thought I’d die of sorrow, but I didn’t. No one dies of sorrow.

  Everyone I know is dead or in that prison in Salem, and that person, I met only once.

  I inherited the thing they call Ironhide, who I know as Dusha Chuchonnyhoof. Maybe you’ll inherit him also, as I did, unknowing. If so, you are as cursed as I am. I left my duties too long, and now, I’m not strong enough to do them. I could scarcely make my way down into this dark, and light the forge. I knew it was here all these years. How could I ignore it, you’ll ask? I did. Perhaps you will try to ignore it too.

  I went to church of a Sunday, and at night I prayed for deliverance. Something from Hell, I thought, and now I don’t know. Perhaps Dusha Chuchonnyhoof is from Heaven and Heaven is not what we thought.

  I thought the house would help me, but those who live in the house—perhaps now I am one of them, serving you your dinner, filling your bath, laundering your shirts—cannot work down here. Ghosts and iron don’t mix. He, though, mixed with the Weylands, and married them, or so he says. Someone of that family married him, once, long ago, and made him promises, just as I made promises to Paul.

  I met him once, did I write that already? I met him. It was 1958.

  “I have lost all hope, Olivia,” he’d written. “You have no child, and I have no one left to give me what I need. I’ve volunteered for execution. Come and pray for me. I am a thing of metal and bones. My shoes are breaking and my feet blister, Olivia.”

  He sent me an invitation. The prison stamped it “Approved.” I put on my Sunday hat, and took the bus to Salem. He’d written me thousands of letters by then. I was a Christian woman. I was lonely here in this strange house, in this strange place, and I had grown fond of him. Devils tempt, and men too.

  I thought I might love him, though I knew love could not help him. Love was not what he wanted. Not from me.

  By then, the executions were done by gas chamber, and no longer by hanging. When I was a girl in Nevada, a hanging was called a necktie social, and the town would dress in their best to attend, but here, they’d changed it to the gas chamber after too many bad deaths.

  I went to Dusha Chuchonnyhoof’s execution.

  A tiny room with metal walls, a black leather and wood chair, a window to the hallway where we all stood. He was inside the chamber for two hours, alive under the hood, as the gas poured into the room. At last, they walked him out, and I was there. He hobbled on stiff legs, and I heard the thin clack of his shoes. They’d taken off the hood.

  He smiled at me then. Have you seen him yet? Have you met him? The end of the sentence approaches, he’s told me, for years now. Perhaps you have.

  He’s a small man. His hair is short and dull, the color of iron, and his mouth is always smiling. His skin is rust red. His eyes are blue, and they will upset you. He knew me instantly.

  “Olivia,” he said. “My dear, I seem to live for you.”

  They tried to hang Dusha Chuchonnyhoof as well, though I doubt you’ll find record of it. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof didn’t hang. Later, after I left the prison, I’m told they tried to shoot him, all the men behind a screen, their rifles through it, and him, standing there in his hood, but the bullets made no difference to his body.

  As I write this letter, Dusha Chuchonnyhoof lives. Two lifetimes and a day he will remain there, and then he will come home unbound. Unbound, stranger. I don’t know what that means, but I have nightmares that don’t fade with the sunrise. I thought I could do what he asked. I lit the fires. I brought the hand. But there is not enough of me left, and though I could throw myself into the fire, it wants a blacksmith and another, two others. You must give it two more, or it will never be done. One is not enough for this. What could I do here, all alone? Who could help me? I tried but the bad people in the house next door couldn’t give me what I needed, stranger, and they were dead of their poison (and maybe it was not their poison that killed them. Maybe it was mine. I have a cabinet full of pills here, and what addict wouldn’t want a gift?) before I tried, but the bargain requires the living and the loving. So I

  I lit a fire to hide my mistakes.

  I couldn’t perform the anvil marriage alone. Paul is dead. He died and was buried, as any Christian man should be. I am buried if you read this. Who will mourn me but Dusha Chuchonnyhoof?

  You’ll find part of me here, on the horn. I tried. It was all I could do, and it wasn’t enough. The task needs the living.

  I wish you the grace of the Lord, whoever you are. I go up from here to die, I think. I hope I go to die.

  Olivia Jones Weyland

  I looked around the room, my throat closing, but there was no one here. Just me, in the dark, with the oil lamps and the anvil. I knelt to examine the piece of metal that still hung looped over the pointed end. The horn, some memory dredged up. The horn, the shoulder, the foot, the body, the face, the waist, the heel. Metalshop. High school. Flunking out of everything but the blaster class, the anvil like a woman’s body before me, and my heart the red hot metal waiting to be shaped.

  It was a horseshoe, the thing hanging from the horn. My hands stretched out, wanting to take its hand in mine.

  Its hand? No. Yes. The horseshoe was made of iron fingers, connected end to end, a thumb and an index finger stretching into the arc, another pair of fingers attached to the tips of the first. It wasn’t symmetrical. The nails were long and feminine. (I shuddered at the length, Naglfar’s materials.) Perfect replicas. The level of detail, down to the fingerprints, etched in perfect hairline scratches. All this, meant to be nailed to a hoof, and never seen by anyone but the farrier.

  Farrier? The word surfaced in my brain like something fished up from the bottom of a lake. One of the fingers wore a wedding ring, an old-fashioned solitaire, but the diamond and gold were iron too.

  The horseshoe clattered on the floor. I’d been imagining cobbling, tanning hide, working the leather, using small nails to make a pair of shoes, but this was something else. There were no horses here, not that I’d seen, though this was horse country.

  There were things I could make of iron, maybe, dim memories of high school. A nail. If I was lucky, a basic horseshoe, for a normal horse. The bend was tricky, pounding the metal into the proper shape to fit a hoof. Nothing like what lay at my feet, a macabre wonder of craftsmanship. Craftswomanship? Had Olivia Weyland somehow made that shoe?

  You’ll find part of me here…. Perfect replicas of fingers, down even to perfect fingerprints.

  Had Olivia Weyland somehow become that shoe?

  Oil lamps and an anvil, rust on everything in the room. No footprints, but the mark of a hand, small. A great furnace, waiting for a fire.

  Smoke, rising above the burned-out square of earth.

  I knelt to check the hearth, and make sure it was cool. The thought of leaving a fire still burning beneath my land was a bad one. The forge was cold, but as my fingers sifted through the ashes, one of the bricks of the hearth shifted as well. There, beneath it, I found the instructions Dusha Chuchonnyhoof had promised.

  They were written on parchment, rather than paper. At least, I hoped that the skin I held had once been that of an animal. The lines were in a hand I did not know, pointed and full of flourishes.

  A Method for the Binding of the
Goblin Chuchonnyhoof

  Necessary to complete the binding are the hands of two who are themselves bound by vow, bound by love and bound with their hands atop the anvil. Only two such hands made into shoes will hold the Goblin bound in its proper form, so that it may walk among others in the shape of a man.

  Images unfolded in my mind as I read. I saw this room, and two young people, their hands clasped together over the anvil, Lischen March, identical to her great-niece, and a man who must have been Michael Miller. I could not see his face, but she was weeping.

  The blacksmith must also be bound, by vow and to the line Weyland. The binding of love is not here required, though it may strengthen that which is here done. It must be a blacksmith who stands at the forge, for the work of a whitesmith will strike false.

  I saw just their hands, and the surface of the anvil, slick with blood. It seemed as though I could smell the heat of the forge and the blood too.

  The shoes will be made of iron, for there is iron in the blood, and without both, the shape cannot be made to hold. The iron shoes must be quenched in the blood of those whose hands have been given, those hands made iron.

  In my mind, the result of this ceremony, a set of horseshoes like the one that Olivia had left. Hands, perfect, twinned together, still faintly glowing from the heat, steam rising from them.

  And when this is done, the shape of the Goblin shall be held in the form of man, and the souls shall be preserved, and what is lost will be returned, and made perfect.

  There were the iron shoes, nailed to a pair of hooves, and there was a man matching the description Olivia’s letter had given of Dusha Chuchonnyhoof, and there was Lischen March and Michael Miller, and they were whole and hale.