The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 1

by Paula Guran

  When you see the house, you’ll understand—why it means so much to me. And why I am not going to move out.

  Rarely did Alexander speak directly of N.K. Usually obliquely, and in such a way that Elisabeth was not encouraged to ask questions.

  In itself, suicide would be devastating. The suicide of a spouse. But conjoined with murder, the murder of a child—unspeakable.

  The dead must present a sort of argument, Elisabeth thinks. The argument must be refuted by the living. The dead who have taken the lives of others, and their own lives, must especially be refuted by the living if the living are to continue.

  After several minutes Alexander says sharply to Ana who has been hovering in the background: “Look for him! Please.”

  Elisabeth winces. The way Alexander gives orders to the housekeeper is painful to her.

  Ana hurries away to call, “Stefan! Stefan!”

  Elisabeth lays down her napkin. She will help look for the child.

  “No. Stay here. This is ridiculous.”

  Alexander is flush-faced, indignant. With his fork and knife he slides something onto Elisabeth’s plate. At first she thinks it is quivering with life, slimy like a jellyfish, then she sees that it is just pureed mushroom, seeping fragrantly from the roasted peppers.

  Ana is on the stairs to the second floor. A short stout woman, heavythighed. Out of breath. “Stefan? Hello?”

  They listen to her calling, cajoling. If only Stefan will answer!

  But Ana returns panting and apologetic. Can’t find him, she is so sorry—not in his room, not in any bathroom. Not in the kitchen, or the back hall, or—anywhere she could think of.

  “God damn. I’ve warned him, if he played this trick one more time . . .”

  Alexander lurches to his feet. Elisabeth rises also, daring to clutch at his arm.

  “Maybe he’s sick, Alexander. He was looking sad—maybe he just doesn’t want to see anyone right now. Can’t you let him—be?”

  Alexander throws off her hand. “Shut up. You know nothing.”

  He stalks out of the glassed-in porch. Elisabeth has no choice but to follow, hesitantly. Hoping that Ana has not overheard Alexander’s remark to her, not the first time her fiancé has told her to shut up.

  Stomping on the stairs calling “Stefan? Where the hell are you?”

  Elisabeth follows into the hall. Not up the stairs. Not sure what she should be doing. Weakly calling, “Stefan? It’s me—Elisabeth. Are you hiding? Where are you hiding?”

  Where are you hiding. An inane remark, such as one frightened child might ask another.

  Desperate minutes are spent in the search for the child. Upstairs, downstairs. Front hall, back hall. Kitchen, dining room. Living room, sitting room. And again back upstairs, to peer into closets in guest rooms. In the master bedroom where (Alexander says grimly) the boy “wouldn’t dare” set foot.

  Finally, there is no alternative. The distraught father must go to look in the forbidden place: the garage. Telling Elisabeth and Ana to stay where they are. By this time Alexander is very upset. His face is ruddy with heat, his carefully combed hair has fallen onto his forehead. Even the handsome blue silk necktie has loosened as if he’d clawed at it.

  Elisabeth hears the man’s impatient voice uplifted, at the rear of the house—“Stefan? Are you in there? You had better not be in there . . .”

  That place. Where she’d died. And your little sister died.

  Anxiously Elisabeth and Ana wait in the hall for Alexander to return. It is not likely (Elisabeth thinks) that the father will easily find the son, and haul him back in triumph.

  “Stefan has done this before, I guess?” Elisabeth asks hesitantly. Ana, protective of the child, or not wanting to betray a family secret, frowns and looks away as if she hasn’t heard the question.

  Saying finally, choosing her words with care, “He is a good boy, Stefan. Very sweet, sad. There is something that comes over him—sometimes. Not his fault. That is all.”

  To this Elisabeth can’t think of a reply. She is steeling herself for Alexander’s reappearance. The loud angry voice like a spike driven into her forehead she must make every effort not to acknowledge gives her pain.

  And then, almost by chance, Elisabeth happens to glance back into the glassed-in porch, which she knows to be empty, which has to be empty; and sees at the table a child-sized figure, very still—can it be Stefan? In his chair, at his place?

  Elisabeth hurries to him. So surprised, she doesn’t call for Alexander.

  “Oh!—Stefan. There you are.”

  As if he has been running the child is out of breath. Almost alarmingly out of breath.

  His face is very pale, clammy-pale, coated in perspiration. His eyes are dilated with excitement, his lips seem to have a bluish cast. And there are bluish shadows beneath his eyes.

  Oxygen deprivation? Is that it?

  Even as she is profoundly relieved, Elisabeth is astonished. She would like to touch the child—hug him, even—but does not dare. A faint, subtly rancid smell lifts from him, like a sour breath.

  Ana hurries to tell Mr. Hendrick that his son has returned safely. Elisabeth approaches the child calmly, not wanting to overwhelm him with her emotion, dares to grasp his hand another time and this time the small-boned hand is pliant and not resistant, a child’s hand, slightly cold, but containing nothing repulsive, to terrify.

  So relieved to see him, Elisabeth hears herself laugh nervously. She will not allow herself to wonder why he is so breathless, and so pale.

  Nor does she accuse the child except she must ask where has he been?—hadn’t he heard them calling him, for the past ten minutes or more?—hadn’t he heard his father?

  Evasively Stefan mutters what sounds like: “Here. I was here.”

  Nothing sly or mischievous, nothing deceitful about the child. Elisabeth is sure. But how strange!—where had he been? And how had he slipped past her and Ana, to return to the dinner table on the porch?

  In the pale freckled face there’s a look of adult anguish, cunning. And the skin is still clammy-cold, with the sweat of panic.

  As the angry father approaches, footsteps loud in the hall like a mallet striking, Stefan cringes. Elisabeth holds his small weak hand, to protect him.

  “You! God damn you! Didn’t I warn you!”—for a terrible moment it seems that Alexander is about to strike his son; his hand is raised, for a slap; but then like air leaking from a balloon Alexander’s anger seems to drain from him. His eyes glisten with tears of frustration, rage, fear. He drags out his chair to sit down heavily at the table.

  “Just tell me, Stefan: where were you?”

  And Stefan says in his small still voice what sounds like: “Here. I was here . . .”

  Alexander snatches up his napkin, to wipe his eyes. “Well. Don’t do anything like this again, d’you hear me?”

  2.

  Bollingen Prize Poet N.K., Child Found Dead in Wainscott, MA

  Asphyxiation Deaths “Possibly Accidental”

  Bestselling Feminist Poet N.K. Takes Own Life

  Four-Year-Old Daughter Dies With Her

  “Shocking Scene”—Wainscott, MA

  Always Elisabeth will remember: the shocked voice of a colleague rushing into the library at the Radcliffe Institute. “. . . terrible. They’re saying she killed herself and . . .”

  Lowered (female) voices. Solemn, appalled. Disbelieving.

  Glancing up from her laptop as talk swirled around her.

  Who had died? A poet? A woman poet? And her daughter?

  Wanting to know, not wanting to know.

  That evening at a reception at the Institute for a visiting lecturer all talk was of the suicide. And the death of the child.

  Asphyxiation by carbon monoxide poisoning.

  “. . . wouldn’t have done it. I don’t believe it.”

  “. . . herself, maybe. But not a daughter.”

  “. . . not possible. No.”

  How shocking the news was! The voi
ces were embittered, incredulous. How demoralizing for women writers, women scholars, women who declared themselves feminists. Nicola Kavanaugh—“N.K.”—had been a heroine to them, defiant and courageous and original.

  “. . . murder, maybe. Someone jealous . . .”

  “. . . that husband. Weren’t they separated . . .”

  “. . . but not the daughter! I know her—knew her. N.K. would never have done that.”

  Of course they had to acknowledge that N.K. had written freely, shockingly of taboo subjects like suicide—the unspeakable bliss of self-erasure.

  Elisabeth listened. Grasped the hands of mourners that clutched at hers in anguish. She had not been a fellow at the Institute several years before when N.K. came to give a “brilliant”—“impassioned”—“inspiring” presentation on the “unique language” of women’s poetry but she’d heard colleagues speak admiringly of it, still.

  At the Institute Elisabeth was researching the archives of the Imagist poets of the early twentieth century. She’d read no more than a scattering of N.K.’s flamboyant, quasi-confessional poetry, so very different from the spare understatement of Imagism; she wouldn’t have wanted to acknowledge that she found N.K.’s poetry too harsh, discordant, angry, unsettling. Nor had she been drawn to the cult of N.K., that had begun even before the poet’s premature death.

  What is a cult but a binding-together of the weak. So it seemed to her. The excesses of feminists, she hoped to distance herself from. A certain physical/erotic posturing, needless provocations. Not for her.

  Soon then, reading an obituary of N.K. in the New York Times, Elisabeth discovered that N.K. had allegedly named herself, or rather renamed herself, as “N.K.” in homage to the Imagist poet H.D.; she’d wanted a pseudonym “without gender and without a history.”

  Names are obscuring, misleading. So N.K. argued. Surnames—family names—have no role in art. Artists are individuals and should name themselves. “Naming”—the most crucial aspect of one’s life, the name you bring with you, blatant as a face, should not be the province/ choice of others.

  Essentially, your parents are strangers to you. It is not reasonable that strangers should name you.

  And so, Nicola Kavanaugh had named herself “N.K.” The poet’s vanity would help brand her, help to guarantee her fame.

  Soon after, Elisabeth found herself staring at a poster on a wall in Barnes & Noble depicting the gaunt, savagely beautiful N.K. in a photograph by Annie Leibovitz. The poet had been wearing what looked like a flimsy cotton shift, almost you could see the shadowy nipples of her breasts through the material, and around her slender shoulders a coarse-knitted, fringed shawl. Her thick disheveled hair appeared to be wind-blown, her eyes sharp and accusing. Beneath, the caption—Live as if it’s your life.

  3.

  “And what did you say your name was, dear?—‘Elizabeth’? I didn’t quite hear.”

  “Elisabeth.”

  Gravely he laughed at her. Leaning over her.

  “Is that a lisp I hear?—‘Elis-a-beth’?”

  “Y-Yes.”

  By chance, months later, when the last thing on her mind was N.K., Elisabeth was introduced to Alexander Hendrick. A tall gentlemanly man of whom everyone whispered—D’you know who that is? Alexander Hendrick—N.K.’s husband.

  He was older than Elisabeth by nearly twenty years. Yet youthful in his manner, even playful, to disguise the gravity beneath, even as he had to shave (Elisabeth would learn) twice a day, to rid his jaws of graying stubble, sharp little quills that erupted not only on his face but beneath his chin, partway down his neck.

  She’d known something of the man’s identity, apart from the disaster of his marriage: he was the director of the Hendrick Foundation, that had been founded by a multi-millionaire grandfather in the 1950s, to award grants to creative artists at the outset of their careers.

  Including in 1993, the young experimental poet-artist Nicola Kavanaugh, as she’d called herself then.

  Had Alexander Hendrick and Nicola Kavanaugh met before Nicola received the grant, or afterward?—Elisabeth was never to learn, with any certainty.

  “Tell me you aren’t a poet, my dear Elisabeth.”

  “No. I mean—I am not a poet.”

  “You’re sure?”—Alexander Hendrick was grimly joking, unless it was his very grimness that joked, that made such a joke possible.

  Elisabeth laughed, feeling giddy. Since adolescence she’d been waiting for such a person, who could intimidate her yet make her laugh.

  4.

  You tell yourself: the new life is sudden.

  The new life is a window flung open. Better yet, a window smashed.

  Sometimes it is true. The new life is flung in your face, you have not the capacity to duck the flying glass.

  What was it like, to visit that house? Will you have to live there as his wife—permanently?

  Can you—permanently?

  Are there traces of her? Is there an—aura?

  Oh Elisabeth. Take care.

  The (civil) wedding in March is very small, private. Few relatives on either side.

  Immediately afterward they leave for a week in the Bahamas. And when they return it is to the house on Oceanview Avenue, Wainscott, where the surviving child awaits, looked after by the housekeeper Ana.

  Are you prepared for him? A ten-year-old stepchild whose mother tried to kill him?

  In death, N.K.’s notoriety has grown. Articles about her appear continuously in print and online. An unauthorized video titled Last Days of the Poet N.K. goes viral. An unauthorized Interview with the American Medea N.K.—in fact, a pastiche of several interviews—appears, with photographs of the starkly beautiful woman over the course of years, in Vanity Fair. There are Barnes & Noble posters, T-shirts, even coffee mugs—a cartoon likeness of N.K. with an aureole of fiercely crimped dark hair and a beautiful savage unsmiling mouth.

  Of these outrages Alexander never speaks—perhaps he is not aware. (Elisabeth wants to think.) The posthumous cult of N.K. is like a cancer metastasizing—unstoppable.

  Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and now Nicola Kavanaugh—“N.K.” For each generation of wounded and angry women, a deathly female icon.

  At first the mainstream media contrived to believe that N.K. had been mentally ill, to have killed her daughter as well as herself. It was known that she’d “struggled with depression” since adolescence, she’d tried to kill herself several times in the past. But then, newer readings of N.K.’s poetry suggest that her horrendous act had been deliberate and premeditated, a “purification” of the self in a rotten world.

  It seemed clear that she’d meant to kill Stefan as well, initially. She’d given the seven-year-old a sedative, as she’d given the four-year-old a sedative, and brought him into the garage with her, and into the Saab sedan; then for some reason she’d relented, and carried him back into the house and left him, and returned to the car with the running motor, filling the garage with bluish smoke for the stunned Alexander to discover, hours later.

  The dead woman lying in the front seat of the car with the little girl, Clea, in her arms, the two of them wrapped in a mohair shawl.

  Was there a suicide note?—Alexander saw nothing.

  It would be his claim, he’d seen nothing. Emergency medical workers, law enforcement officers, investigators—suicide note discovered in the car.

  Yet, it came to be generally known that there’d been “packets of poems” scattered in the back seat of the car. (As well as the left sneaker of a pair of sneakers—belonging to Stefan.) Not new poems by N.K. but older poems, among her more famous poems, that quickly took on a new, ominous prescience. The posthumous cult of N.K., so maddening to Alexander and his family, quickly fastened upon these poems—the small bitter apples of extinction.

  Ana had been given the entire day off by Nicola. The housekeeper hadn’t been expected to return until eight o’clock in the evening by which time Nicola and Clea had been dead for several hours.

 
Stefan, missing, was eventually found by searchers inside the house, partially dressed, and shoeless, at the rear of an upstairs closet. (The mate to the child’s sneaker in the rear of the Saab would be discovered in a corner of the garage amid recycling containers, as if it had been tossed or kicked there.) He was curled into a fetal position, so deeply asleep he might have been in a coma. His blood pressure was dangerously low. His skin was deathly white, his lips had a bluish cast. Emergency medical workers worked to revive him with oxygen.

  The surviving child was slow to come to consciousness. Not only carbon monoxide poisoning but barbiturate would be discovered in his blood. He would remember little of what had happened. Except—Mummy gave me warm milk to drink, that made me sleepy. Mummy kissed me and told me she would never abandon me.

  Yet, the child’s mother must have changed her mind about killing him with his sister. A short time after she’d started the Saab motor, when the seven-year-old was unconscious, but before she herself had lapsed into unconsciousness, she’d pulled him from the back seat of the car, dragged or carried him all the way upstairs to a hall closet . . .

  Elisabeth ponders this. Why did N.K. relent, and allow one of her children to live? The boy, and not the girl? Did in fact this happen, as it’s generally believed?

  Elisabeth wonders if the seven-year-old might have crawled out of the car, and saved himself. Yet, why would he have hidden upstairs in a closet? And he’d been deeply unconscious, when his father discovered him.

  More than three years after the deaths the Wainscott police investigation is closed. The county medical examiner issued his report: homicide, suicide. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Heavy barbiturate sedation. Still, no one knows precisely the chronology of events of that day. The surviving child cannot be further questioned. The surviving husband will never speak again on the subject publicly, he has declared.

  And privately? Elisabeth knows only what Alexander has chosen to tell her, which she has no reason to disbelieve. N.K. had suffered from manic-depression since early adolescence, she’d been a “brilliant poet” (Alexander had to concede) afflicted by a strong wish to harm herself, and others unfortunate enough to be caught up in her emotional life. She’d been coldly ambitious, Alexander said. Always anxious about her reputation, jealous of other poets’ prizes, publicity. Ultimately she’d cared little for a domestic life—though, for a few years, she’d tried. Perversely the children had adored her, Alexander said bitterly.