On this particular day, Jurie and I were riding on the top of the cage of the man winder in order to perform an inspection upon its gears. This was the part that I disliked most about the job, that great fall into the black, just watching that cable unwind slowly as the winding engine driver lowered us down. Jurie, of course, was Jurie and it never bothered him in the slightest, he was the sort of man who could raise a smile on the Devil’s lips if he had to. In those days we could not get a radio signal in the mines so we used a system of bells to communicate with the surface: one chime to stop, two chimes to raise slowly, and three chimes to lower. So this time it was three chimes to lower, and down we went, one, two, just like that and the winding engine driver sent the cage a hundred meters, two hundred meters into darkness.
It was at about the two hundred-fifty meter mark where Jurie was fooling around as he did sometimes, knowing that I was a nervous man about such things. Sometimes he would joke about the other men, and sometimes he would sing that old mining song. “Shosholoza,” he would sing, “shosholoza, you are running away on these mountains. Eh, boss? Sing it with me.” And the sound would echo back up through the mines like Jurie was the tongue kicking around at the bottom of some enormous throat. “Shosholoza, shosholoza,” he was singing like a mad man, and me chiming three times for the winding engine driver to take us the rest of the way down. And Jurie’s just been singing along—“shosholoza, shosholoza,” he’s singing like a drunk, “go forward, go forward,” he’s singing—and suddenly he’s hollering up a storm. Underneath us the cage starts to shudder and shake—snick, snick, snick—making a noise. Oh, my bokkie, I don’t have to tell you that it is every mine worker ’s nightmare. That sound. The feeling of the world shifting under your feet and a straight plunge into darkness waiting for you. It sends shivers through me even now, just remembering.
But there it was, the man winder tilting sideways until there’s a shower of sparks as it scrapes along the side of the shaft, but not budging too much because now it’s jammed solid in the shaft. Then I can see something flashing like a snake in the bright cone of my mining light, something winding through the air, fast now, hooking back and forth. I’m looking around and then I see what it is, one of the stabilizing guy wires snapped free.
It’s snapping mad like a hyena put off her dinner for too long, and Jurie’s still shrieking, and I can see he’s over by the cage’s metal guide, and now he’s waving his hand around and the air has gone heavy and sour with the smell of blood.
You’ve seen Jurie smile that goose smile of his, yes, I know it, but you’ve never seen the way a man smiles, you’ve never seen the way a man’s lips might become something else, might change the very shape of his face when he’s staring at the stump of his thumb down there in the mine’s darkness, two hundred meters from a sunlight you don’t know you’ll ever see again.
That snapped guy wire, you see, that wasn’t enough to drop us solid—thank God for that—but it was enough to jam us down there. Jurie with just that stub of his thumb bleeding out on the cage. Me with nothing but that bell to tell them what had happened. “Eh, boss,” says Jurie, and I don’t even know if he can tell what he’s saying, but he’s whispering, “go forward, go forward” still as if the song’s just kept running through his head, teeth flashing white and glowing in that thin beam of mining light.
I chime the bell once, and the cage, it stops grinding away. At least it’s steady for a moment.
I look at Jurie, and Jurie looks at me. He’s licking his lips now, I don’t know if he can feel the pain, but he’s licking his lips just like he’s going to settle down to a chicken dinner, like he’s so hungry and that scares me all the worse.
“We’ll get you, Goose,” I say to him, “they’ll be coming down here for us, you know that.” I’m tearing off something of my shirt, and you can hear that noise, that long rip echoing back up the throat of the mine. Then I’m wrapping it around him, wrapping it around that hand, and I can feel the blood pooling sticky onto my hand, and I can hear him breathing heavy now in my ear. “Eh, boss,” he’s saying, as he holds his other hand over mine till I can feel them almost tacking together with the blood. “Eh, boss. You gotta climb, you gotta climb now.”
I know he’s right. I know that bell isn’t enough, and if we wait, well, Jurie’s bones wouldn’t be the first to feed the darkness, his blood wouldn’t be the first dripping down into the great dark black. But, dammit, if there isn’t a worse thing I can imagine at that moment than climbing. But there is need, and I know it, and I know that if I do not climb then Jurie will be dead.
There are vertical ladders—five, six meters each—running up the side of the shaft, so before I think about it, before my brain slams on the brakes, there I am, twenty meters up, Jurie’s mine light winking away below me, him slumped over away from the broken guy wire. And then I was climbing. I was climbing and the shaft wall was wet with groundwater leakage, and it was running down the metalwork too, down those ladders I was clinging too. And my hands, my hands were wet with Jurie’s blood, but I pull myself up, I pull myself up until after a while I can hear Jurie singing, “go forward, go forward” in that crazy, pain-mad voice of his, or maybe I’m just dreaming it by then.
Because it is just like being underwater. It is just like that, the darkness close around me, and my muscles burning, burning. But I know that if I slack for a moment now, then I will plummet all that way and the dark will take me too.
So I start saying a word.
I started saying that word that Jurie taught me years before, and with every hoist upward I am saying that word now, I am breathing that word out and I am breathing that word in again and I am getting higher and higher and higher away from the blood and the cage and the pool of light beneath me.
And as I climb higher, it is like I am swimming up from deep water now, swimming from the ocean floor up and up and upto sunlight and the Sunday morning air.
But I know I will not make it. I know my strength is failing me.
I am a hundred meters up now. I am a hundred and twenty meters up. If I fall, I will die.
And there is something in the darkness with me. Something in those dark waters of my mind, something that I sensed was always there with me, has always been with me since I was a child, since the day I was born. And she is sleek, gorgeous and deadly. This thing with me. This thing I know is my own death.
The killer. The man-eater. The slipway gray.
She is coming for me now, drifting along the currents, slick and terminal. Cold and quiet as the lights turning off one by one by one. Her mouth open and tasting. The wide, dark, liquid space of her eyes. The shadow of her, the shape of her. My death come for me at last.
I said, my bokkie, that I have never told this to another person, and that is true. But it was real. It was real to me. I swear it to you and I swore it to your Ouma and, for everything, I know she believed me.
I could feel my hands going slack on the ladder. My back humping out into the open shaft of the mine.
She was beautiful. I wanted her to come for me.
But then. But then, my bokkie, there was something else. Three boxes. I could see them as well as I can see you here, all dressed up fine for Sunday church and maybe a bit impatient no?—with your Oupa’s stories. Three boxes.
So my hands are slipping and in my mind I am opening those three boxes. And do you know what I find? In the first is your Uncle Mika who had taken on the National Service for me. In the second is Jurie, lying in the darkness below me, singing that damn stupid song of his. And in the third is your Ouma who was everything to me. My piece of sunlight. My Sunday morning air. In those three boxes were all the things worth living for.
So I set myself to climbing again and oh, even though it hurt, even though it hurt more than anything, it was still easier than dying. So up I am coming, and I can see that shape of darkness so near me I could touch her. I can see those teeth of hers.
But for the second time she passes me by. For the se
cond time she lets me go, and up I came out of the mine. Up I came into the light, and there was the winding engine driver and all the others, waiting for me.
They got Jurie out, not fast, of course, not fast enough to save his thumb but fast enough that even though he was pale and shaking he was still alive. Still singing that damn song of his. “Go forward, go forward,” he was singing, “you are running away on those mountains, the train from Zimbabwe.”
Now, as I said to you, your Ouma and I, we could never much agree on what it all meant, what it was that I had seen there drifting in the darkness. But let me tell you this one thing, my bokkie, this one thing that I have not told another soul. At the end, after your Ouma and I had come to that decision together and I could see that the lights were going out, one by one, she drew me close to her. Her skin was as pale as old silk, and her touch was as light as a moth’s wing, but she pulled me close to her and she whispered into my ear, “I see it. Oh, love, I see it, and I am scared, and I see it, and she is come for me.”
Now I know you do not want to listen longer to an old man’s ramblings, but as I said, this is a true story. Not a fable. Not a fancy. And I swear to you that it has not grown in the telling. But even now. Even now as I am drawing in breath through these raggle-taggled lungs of mine, these lungs that the doctors tell me will not last much longer, these lungs that feel as if they are breathing in water instead of Sunday air. Even now I know she is coming for me. The grand dame of the river. The slipway gray.
There are three boxes.
Jurie has gone into one, your Ouma has gone into another, and I fear, my bokkie, the last box is mine. But this is how it should be. A man should not live forever.
Because that is what death is. That beast in the darkness where no beast should be. Death is the thing that hooks you and will not let you go. Death is the slow undoing of beautiful things.
You should know this, my bokkie, while you are young. Your father will not teach you this.
But here is another secret. The slipway gray has her own kind of beauty, and when you meet her you will know that. There is more to her than the teeth. This is how it is, my bokkie. I want you to know that. When she comes for me the third time, I shall be ready for her. I shall welcome her as an old friend. And when she comes to you, and pray God let that be many years from now, I know that you will do the same.
Helen Marshall is an award-winning Canadian author, editor, and doctor of medieval studies. Her debut collection of short stories Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications, 2012) was named one of the top ten books of 2012 by January Magazine and won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, will be released from ChiZine in September 2014. She lives in Oxford, England—that is, medieval Disneyland.
Knowing of his family’s curse, Kyle Murchison Booth
was determined never to marry . . .
TO DIE FOR MOONLIGHT
Sarah Monette
I cut off her head before I buried her.
I had no tools suitable to the task—only my pocketknife and the shovel—and it was a long, grisly, abhorrent job, but I had to do it, and I did.
I could not leave the chance that she might return.
I had been weeping when I started; by the time it was done, the last tattered string of flesh severed, I had no tears left in me, and my mouth and eyes and sinuses were raw with bile and salt.
I stuffed her mouth with wolfsbane, wrapped a silver chain around her poor hands, placed silver dollars over her staring eyes.
Then, at that most truly God-forsaken crossroads, under a full and leering moon, I began to dig Annette Robillard’s grave.
How, exactly, the Robillards were connected to Blanche Parrington Crowe, I never discovered. Cousins in some degree of her long-dead husband, but whether it was a Crowe daughter who married into the Robillards, or a Robillard daughter who married into the Crowes, the link was many generations in the past–surely not enough to count as kinship except in the genealogical sense. Nevertheless, I was informed, Mrs. Crowe considered the Robillards to fall under the umbrella of her family obligations; thus, when Marcus Justus Robillard asked for a cataloguer to come make sense of his family’s long-neglected library, Mrs. Crowe felt it incumbent upon her to send one.
By which, I was further informed, she meant me.
I tried to argue that one of the junior archivists—all of whom certainly needed the practice more than I did—would be both eminently suited to the task and far less disruptive to the Parrington in his absence, but Dr. Starkweather glared me into silence, and then said, “Mrs. Crowe was very specific, Mr. Booth. It appears that she trusts you.”
The grim incredulity in his tone told me that if Mrs. Crowe could have been talked out of the idea of sending me to Belle Lune, the Robillard estate, he would have done it. He had been heard on more than one occasion to say, publicly and loudly, that I could not be trusted to come in out of the rain.
“Then I suppose I, er, have no choice,” I said. “Does Mrs. Crowe anticipate . . . er, that is, is it supposed to be a long job?”
“No,” Dr. Starkweather said, even more grimly. “I have been instructed to release you from your duties for a week. That will be sufficient, Mr. Booth. I trust I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and was occupied for the rest of the day in the unsatisfying tedium of preparing my office for a week’s absence.
It would be unwise to specify the location of Belle Lune. I will say only that it was in the mid-Atlantic states, close enough to the coast that the wind, when in the right quarter, would bring the smell of salt. Robillards had lived there since sometime in the seventeenth century, and the house had been expanded and remodeled so many times that nothing of its original character remained. It was more brick than wood, with the columns beloved of the Neoclassical Revival added to the front as a dowager pins a diamond brooch to her bosom, and it stood on the edge of a tarn. I call it a tarn, although there are no mountains in the vicinity of Belle Lune, because I do not know of a word that better conveys the secretive aspect—dark and uninviting—of its waters. The Robillards called it the Mirror, although I never saw it to reflect anything at all.
I was met at the train station on Monday by a young man and a horse-drawn trap. He had apologized as he introduced himself: “Justin Robillard—I’m sorry about the antiquated transport, but my grandfather has an abhorrence of engines and won’t have them at Belle Lune.”
“Kyle Murchison Booth.” His gloved grip was strong, but not punishing; I was glad to be released from it all the same. “And I, er, I have no objection to horses.”
His smile revealed strong white teeth and made his brown eyes glint almost yellow. “That’s good. I appreciate it, Mr. Booth. Is it ‘mister’? Or ought I to say ‘doctor’?”
He swung my suitcase into the back of the trap, and swung himself up just as easily.
“I don’t have a doctorate,” I said, climbing up beside him.
“Good. Don’t want to be rude.” He smiled at me again, and the impression of teeth was so strong that it took an effort to keep from edging away from him. I upbraided myself for being nervy and ridiculous, but I was nevertheless glad when his attention shifted from me.
He clucked the horse into motion and said as we rattled out of the yard, “We’ll have to make one stop. My sister Annette insisted on coming with me. She wanted to go shopping without my mother or any of my aunts.”
He seemed to be waiting for a response, although I could not imagine what he thought I might say. I could hardly insist that he abandon his sister. I mumbled awkward compliance, and that was the end of the conversation until the trap drew up in front of a building with the words FOLKOW BROS. emblazoned in gaudy red and gold script across its windows.
“She promised she’d be waiting,” said Justin Robillard, but he did not sound surprised that she was not. He consulted his watch. “I’ll give her five minutes, then I’ll have to go in after her. We
want to get home before dark.”
Again, he seemed to want a response from me. “ . . . Yes,” I said, and was either rewarded or punished with another tooth-baring smile.
At the four-minute mark, Annette Robillard appeared, a young man at her side. She was much younger than Justin; I guessed him to be twenty-five or twenty-six, and she was no more than eighteen. She was slight-boned, brunette, and very pretty, with large dark eyes of the sort referred to in novels as “speaking.” The man with her was close to her own age, little more than a boy, blond where she was dark, and obviously, hopelessly smitten. It was notable that neither of them was carrying any packages.
Justin Robillard jumped down from the trap. “So this is why you wanted to come to town,” he said unpleasantly, and to the younger man, “Clear off, Folkow.”
“Justin!” protested Annette. “Don’t be horrid. Roy was bringing his father a message, and we just happened to bump into each other as I was coming in.”
“Grandfather’s already spoken to you, Annette. There’s no excuse for this.”
“Love doesn’t need an excuse,” Roy Folkow said, and perhaps if he had been even slightly older, it would not have sounded quite so pompous.
Justin laughed, and the sound made me shiver. “Is that the kind of bilge he’s been filling your head with, Annette?”
“It isn’t bilge!” But her voice wavered.
“Get in the trap,” Justin said, his voice a snarl almost like a dog’s, and he turned his head sharply to glare at Roy Folkow. “Come near my sister again, and I’ll tear you to pieces.”
It should have been as much a cliché as Folkow’s platitude, but it was not. Justin sounded not merely as if he meant what he said, but as if it would be no difficulty to him to carry out the threat.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 53
