“She uh . . . she’s not doing very well, Heather.”
He watched tears gather in her eyes. Then her face darkened and she rubbed them roughly away. “You told me she was fine,” she said quietly.
“I didn’t want to upset you. I wanted you to come home.”
“You didn’t want to upset me?” Her voice rose into a shout. Her hand clenched at her side and he watched her wrestle down the anger. It took her a minute.
“I’m sorry, Heather.”
She shook her head. She wouldn’t look at him. “Whatever. Did she try to kill herself again? She’s not even here at all, is she Is she in the psych ward?”
“No, she’s here. And yes, she did.”
She turned her back to him and walked into the living room, where she dropped onto the couch and slouched back, her arms crossed over her chest like a child. Sean followed her, pried loose one of her hands and held onto it as he sat beside her.
“She needs us, kiddo.”
“I would never have come back!” she said, her rage cresting like a sun. “God damn it!”
“Hey! Now listen to me. She needs us.”
“She needs to be committed!”
“Stop it. Stop that. I know this is hard.”
“Oh do you?” She glared at him, her face red. He had never seen her like this; anger made her face into something ugly and unrecognizable. “How do you know, Dad? When did you ever have to deal with it? It was always me! I was the one at home with her. I was the one who had to call the hospital that one time I found her in her own blood and then call you so you could come! I was the one who—” She gave in then, abruptly and catastrophically, like a battlement falling; sobs broke up whatever else she was going to say. She pulled in a shuddering breath and said, “I can’t believe you tricked me!”
“Every night!” Sean hissed, his own large hands wrapped into fists, cudgels on his lap. He saw them there and caught himself. He felt something slide down over his mind. The emotions pulled away, the guilt and the horror and the shame, until he was only looking at someone having a fit. People, it seemed, were always having some kind of breakdown or another. Somebody had to keep it together. Somebody always had to keep it together.
“It was not just you. Every night I came home to it. Will she be okay tonight? Will she be normal? Or will she talk about walking in front of a bus? Will she be crying because of something I said, or she thinks I said, last fucking week? Every night. Do you think it all just went away when you went to sleep? Come out of your narcissistic little bubble and realize that the world is bigger than you.”
She looked at him, shocked and hurt. Her lower lip was trembling, and the tears came back in force.
“But I always stood by her side. Always.” He took her lightly by the arm stood with her.
“Your mother needs us. And we’re going to go see her. Right now.”
He led her toward the basement door.
What is the story of our family?
He led her down the stairs, into the cool, earthy musk of the basement, the smell of upturned soil a dank bloom in the air. His grip on her arm was firm as he descended one step ahead of her. The light from the kitchen behind them was an ax blade in the darkness, cutting a narrow wedge. It illuminated the corner of the mattress, powdered with a layer of dirt. Beside it, the bottom two feet of the support beam she had nailed the bird to; something new was screwed into place there, but he could intuit from the glistening mass only gristle and hair, a sheet of dried blood beneath it.
“What’s going on here? Oh my god, Dad, what’s going on?”
“Your mom’s in trouble. She needs us.”
Heather made a noise and he clamped down harder on her arm. “Katie?” he said. “Heather’s here.” His voice did not carry, the words dropping like stones at his feet.
Our family has weathered great upheaval. Our family is bound together by love.
They heard something shift, in the darkness beyond the reach of the light.
“Mom?”
“Katie? Where are you, honey?”
“Dad, what happened to her?”
“Just tell me where you are, sweetheart. We’ll come to you.”
They reached the bottom of the steps and as he moved out of the path of the kitchen light it shone more fully on the thing fixed to the post: a gory mass of scrambled flesh, a ragged web of graying black hair. Something moved in the shadows beyond it, small and hunched and pale, its back buckling with each grunted effort, like something caught in the act of love.
Our family will not abandon itself.
Heather stepped backward; her heel caught on the lowest step and she fell onto the stairs.
Sean approached his wife. She labored weakly in the bottom of a small declivity, grave-shaped, worm-spangled, her dull white bones poking through the parchment skin of her back, her spine bending as she burrowed into the earth. Her denuded skull still bore the tatters of its face, like the flag of a ruined army.
“Daddy, come on.” Sean turned to see his daughter crawling up the stairs. She reached the top and crawled through the doorway, pulling her legs in after her. In the light, he could see the tears on her face, the twist of anguish. “Daddy, please. Come on. Come on.”
Sean put his hand on Katie’s back. “Don’t you remember me? I’m your husband. Don’t you remember?”
She continued to work, slowly, her arms like pistons powered by a fading battery.
He lifted her from her place in the earth, dirt sifting from her body like a snowfall, and clutched her tightly to his chest. He rested his head against the blood-greased curve of her skull, cradled her forehead in his hand. “Stay with me.”
Heather, one more time, from somewhere above him: “Daddy, oh no, please come up. Please.”
“Get down here,” Sean said. “Goddamn you, get down here.” The door shut, cutting off the wedge of light. He held his wife in his arms, rocking her back and forth, cooing into the ear that still remained.
He pulled her away, but she barely knew it. Everything was quiet now. Silence blew from the hole she had dug like smoke. She could feel what lay just beyond. The new countryside. The unspeaking multitude. Steeples and arches of bone; temples of silence. She felt the great shapes that moved there, majestic and unfurled, utterly silent, utterly dark.
He held her, breathing air onto the last cinder in her skull. Her fingers scraped at empty air, the remains of her body engaged in this one final enterprise, working with a machine’s unguided industry, divorced at last from its practical function. Working only because that was its purpose; its rote, inelegant chore.
Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters, from Small Beer Press. Several of his stories have been reprinted in “year’s best” anthologies, and his story “The Monsters of Heaven” won a Shirley Jackson Award. He’s worked as a bartender in New Orleans, a cook on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and a waiter in a fancy restaurant. Currently he lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter, where he’s at work on his first novel. You can find him online at nathanballingrud.wordpress.com.
Chimeric with secrets, she was amazed the whole house did not lurch
into motion, pulling up its deep roots and walls to run somewhere that
wasn’t bathed in madness and the footsteps of the dead . . .
THE SOUL IN THE BELL JAR
KJ Kabza
Ten lonely miles from the shores of the Gneiss Sea, where the low town of Hume rots beneath the mist, runs a half-wild road without a name. Flanked by brambles and the black, it turns through wolf-thick hollows, watched by yellow eyes that glitter with hunger and the moon. The wolves, of course, are nothing, and no cutthroat highwayman ever waited beneath the shadows of those oaks. There are far worse things that shamble in the dark. This is the road that skirts Long Hill.
So the coachman declared, and so Lindsome Glass already knew. She also knew whose fault the shambling things were, and where their nursery lay: in the great, moaning house at Long Hill’s
apex.
She knew anxiety and sorrow, for having to approach it.
“Can’t imagine what business a nice young miss like you has with the Stitchman,” said the coachman.
Lindsome knew he was fishing for gossip. She did not reply.
“A pretty young miss like you?” pressed the coachman. Their vehicle was a simple horse trap, and there was nowhere to sit that was away from his dirty trousers and wine-stained smile. “You can’t be, what, more than eleven? Twelve? Only them scienticians go up there. Unless you’s a new Help, is that it? The ol’ Stitchman could use a new pair of hands, says me. That big ol’ house, rottin’ up in the weeds with hardly nobody to tend to it none.” He laughed. “Course, it’s no wonder. You couldn’t get Help up there for all the gold in Yorken.” He eyed her sideways. “So what’s he have on you?”
The road wound upward, the branches overhead thinned, and the stones beneath the wheels took on the dreary glow of an overcast sky. November in Tattenlane meant sunshine, but Lindsome was not in Tattenlane anymore.
“Eh?” the coachman pressed.
Lindsome turned her pale face away. She fought against the quiver in her jaw. “Mama and Papa have gone on a trip around the world. They didn’t say for how long, but I’m to stay here until they return. The Stitchman is my great-uncle.”
Startled into silence, the coachman looked away.
The nameless road flattened, and the mad, untamed lawn of Apsis House sprawled into view. It clawed to the horizons, large as night, lonely as the world.
When Lindsome alighted with her single hatbox and carpetbag, there was only one sour-mouthed, middle-aged man to meet her. He was tall and stooped, with shoulders too square and a neck too short, giving him an altogether looming air of menace. “Took your time, didn’t you?”
Behind Lindsome, the coachman was already retreating down Long Hill. “I—I’m sorry. The roads were—”
“Where are you manners?” the sour-mouthed man demanded. “Introduce yourself.”
Lindsome bit her lip. The quiver in her jaw threatened to return. I must not cry, she told herself. I am a young lady. Lindsome gripped the hem of her white dress and dropped into a graceful curtsey. “I . . . beg your pardon, sir. My name is Lindsome Glass. How do you do? Our meeting is well.”
“S’well,” the man replied shortly. “That’s better. Now take your things and come inside. Ghost knows where that lack-about Thomlin is. Doctor Dandridge is on the cusp of a singular work, one of the greatest in his career, and he and I have far more valuable things to do with our time than coddle you in welcome.”
Lindsome nearly had to run to keep up with the man’s long, loping strides. “The house has three main floors, one attic, and two basements,” he said, leading her past a half-collapsed carriage house. “Attic is dangerous and off-limits. Third floor is Help’s quarters and off-limits. Basements are the laboratories, so they are definitely off limits, especially to careless little children.”
The man pushed through a back door that cried on rust-thick hinges. Lindsome followed. The interior had a damp, close smell of things forgotten in the rain, and the air was clammy and chill. A small, useless fire guttered in a distant grate. Pots and pans, dingy with age and wear, hung from beams like gutted animals. Lindsome set down her hatbox and touched a bunch of drying sage. It crumbled like a desiccated spiderweb.
The man grabbed her wrist. “And don’t. Touch. Anything.”
Lindsome fearfully withdrew her hand. “Yes, sir.”
A middle-aged woman, generous in girth but mousy in the face, hobbled out from a pantry, wiping her hands on her flour-smeared apron. “Good afternoon, Mister Chaswick, sir.” She turned to Lindsome. Her smile was kind. “Is this the young miss? Oh, so pale, with such lovely dark hair. You’ll be a heartbreaker someday, won’t you? What’s your name?”
“This is Lindsome Glass,” said Chaswick. “Mind you watch her.”
“Yes, Mister Chaswick.”
“Don’t trouble to see her up. I’ll do it.”
“Thank you, Mister Chaswick.”
“Don’t thank me. With your knees it takes you a century to get up the bloody staircase.”
Chaswick led Lindsome deeper into the house, under moldering lintels, through crooked doorways, past water-damaged wainscoting and rooms hung with peeling wallpaper. The carcasses of upturned insects lay in corners, legs folded neatly in rictus. Paintings lined the soot-blackened walls, and Lindsome thought that perhaps they had portrayed beautiful scenes, once, but now most were so caked with filth that it was hard to divine their subjects. Here, a lake? There, a table of hunting bounty? Many were portraits with tarnished nameplates. Any names still legible meant nothing. Who was Marilda Dandridge, anyway?
“Are you paying attention?” Chaswick demanded. “Breakfast’s at seven, supper’s at noon, and dinner’s at seven. We don’t have tea or any of that Tatterlane nonsense here. Bath day is Sunday, wash day is Monday, and if you’d like to occupy yourself, I suggest the library on the second floor, as it contains a number of volumes that will ensure the moral betterment of a young person such as yourself.”
“Do you have any picture books?” Lindsome asked.
Chaswick frowned. “I suppose you could borrow one of your great-uncle’s illustrated medical atlases. Perhaps Porphyry’s Intestinal Arrangements of the Dispeptic or Gharison’s Common Melancholia in the Spleen of the Breeding Female.”
Lindsome looked down at her shoes. “Never mind.”
“You may also explore the grounds,” Chaswick continued. “But don’t cross paths with the gardener. Understand? If you ever hear the gardener working, turn around and go back at once.
“And mind the vivifieds. Doctor Dandridge is a brilliant, highly prolific man, and you’ll see a great many examples of his work roaming throughout the area, many of which do not have souls consanguineous to their bodies. However, none of the vivifieds that Doctor Dandridge and I have created for practical purposes is chimeric, so you may safely pat the house cats and the horses in the stables. If you’d like to go for a ride . . . ”
Something colorful moved at the edge of Lindsome’s vision. Surprised at something so bright in so dreary a place, she stopped and backtracked. She peered around a corner, down a short hall sandwiched between a pair of much grander rooms.
The door at the end of the hall stood ajar. A hand’s-breadth of room beckoned, sunny-yellow and smelling of lavender. A bookcase stood partially in view, crammed with spinning tops, painted wooden blocks, tin soldiers, stuffed animals, rattles, little blankets, papers cleverly folded into birds . . .
Lindsome stepped forward.
A woman exited the room. Her movements were quick, though she was old and excessively thin, with dark circles about her despairing eyes. She grasped the doorknob with bloodless talons, pulling it shut and locking it with a tiny iron key.
She turned and saw Lindsome.
Her transformation into rage was instantaneous. “What are you doing?” the woman bellowed, baring her long, gray teeth. “Get out of this hall! Get away from here!”
Lindsome fled to Chaswick.
“What’s this?” said Chaswick, turning. “What! Have you not been following me?”
“There was a woman!” Lindsome said, dropping her things. “A thin woman!”
Chaswick grabbed Lindsome’s wrist again. He bent over and pulled her close—lifted her, even, until she was nearly on her tiptoes and squirming with discomfort and alarm.
“That’s Emlee, the housekeeper. Mind her too.” Chaswick narrowed his eyes. “And that little hallway between the study and the card room? Definitely, absolutely off limits.”
Chaswick deposited Lindsome in front of a room on the second floor. As soon as he had withdrawn down the grand staircase, Lindsome set her things inside and made a survey of the rest of the level. The aforementioned library was spacious and well stocked but poorly kept, with uneven layers of dust and bookbindings faded by sun. Many volumes had been reshelved unevenly, i
ncorrectly, or even upside-down, if at all.
Most of the other rooms were unused, their furniture wholly absent or in deep slumber beneath moth-eaten sheets. Two of the rooms were locked, or perhaps even rusted shut, including one next to what she assumed were her great-uncle’s personal quarters, since they were the largest and, she could only surmise, at one time, the grandest. Now, like all else in Apsis House, their colors and details had darkened with soot and neglect, and Lindsome wondered how, if Dr. Dandridge were so brilliant, he could fail to control such misery and decay.
While exploring the first floor more thoroughly, she came across a squat, surly man in overalls who was pasting paper over a broken window in the Piano Room. He introduced himself as Thomlin, the Housemaster. Lindsome politely asked how did he do. Thomlin said he did fine, as long as he took his medicine, and as an illustration produced a silver flask, from which he took a hearty pull.
“May I ask you something, Mister Thomlin? What’s at the end of the little hallway? In the yellow room?”
The house’m scowled as he lifted his paste brush from the bucket and slapped it desultorily over the glass. “Nothin’,” he said. “Nothin’ that a good girl should stick ’er nose in. How a man wants to grieve, that’s his business. No, no, I’ve said too much already.” Juggling flask and brush, he took another medicinal dose. “I know everything that happens and ever did happen in these walls, you understand, inside and out. Wish I didn’t, but I do. Housemaster, that’s me. All these poor bastards—oops, pardon my language, young miss—I mean all these poor folks walk around in a fog a’ their own problems, but a Housemaster sees everything as The Ghost sees it: absolute and clear as finest crystal, as not a soul else can ever understand. But good men tell no tales anyway. An’ a gooder man you won’t find either side of this whole blasphemous Long Hill heap. Why don’t you go play outside? But don’t never interrupt the gardener. Hear?”
Lindsome did not want to explore the grounds, but she told herself, I must be brave, because I am a young lady, and went outside with her head held high. Nonetheless, she did not get far. The weeds and brambles of the neglected lawn had long since matured into an impenetrable thicket, and Lindsome could barely see the rooftops of the nearby outbuildings above the wild creepers, dying leaves, needle-thin thorns, and drab, stenchful flowers. The late autumnal blossoms stank of carrion and sulfur, mingled with the ghastly sickly-sweetness of mothballs. Lindsome pulled one sleeve over her hand and held it to her wrinkled nose as she picked her way along a downward-sloping animal trail that ran near the main house, the closest navigational relief in this unrelenting jungle, but she could get no corresponding relief from the smell.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 10
