by Ellen Datlow
The blizzard howled on.
Snow rose to the knees of the rare few who persisted in trudging their way through the biting cold. Then it went higher, barricading families within their homes. The mood remained jovial, nonetheless. Children sang from second-story windows. Their fathers gossiped for hours on the phone as their mothers clumped in the kitchen, straining for news, for anything, the barest gasp of change, from static-plagued radios, half-filled mugs of lukewarm tea spread over every surface. This was a strange time, a new epoch, one without apparent compass, and Cedarville moved rudderless through each pale week. If not for what happened with Mr. Wong, they might have felt an incursion of despair. But Cedarville persisted, propelled by something not dissimilar to hope.
However, even optimism requires feeding. The congeniality ebbed as the blizzard seared away to blue sky. In the beginning, Cedarville regarded this as a reprieve. Though the temperatures were too arctic for anything to melt, snowfall at least was no longer accumulating. But it was cold in a fashion it had not been for decades and the air lacerated skin. To breathe was to abrade lungs, leave mouths bloodied from the kiss of the chill. Cheeks did not pink but inflamed. And it hurt to be outside so people withdrew indoors, burrowing close to their radiators and their fireplaces, wrapping themselves in promises this would be over soon.
For this reason, it took a week for Mrs. Gagnon’s body to be found.
The corpse was discovered crammed into a woodshed, propped upright against the back wall so that, from afar, it appeared as though Mrs. Gagnon was surveilling the stacked timber, and perhaps disapproving of what she saw. The old woman bore no wounds; her death was prescribed to exposure. What no one could answer was the why of the circumstances leading to Mrs. Gagnon’s passing. She had no cause to be in the woodshed and while foul play was not improbable, it seemed a negligible hypothesis. When Mrs. Gagnon’s cadaver was extracted, it had worn a small thoughtful frown: the expression of a woman grappling with an inconvenience rather than her murder.
But if not murder, then what drove Mrs. Gagnon to squeeze herself into that dark space and wait there until her blood blued under her skin? And wasn’t that the same look that dressed the face of the corpse they had found in the homestead? That poor woman with her similarly frost-smudged stare, mouth bloodied into a new shape; she had been beaten first—tenderized—before being affixed to the tree by the hems of her flayed skin. It had been ritualistic and cruel and inhospitably strange, even here where farmers talked sometimes of black dogs in the woods, hounds with a corona of headlight eyes floating where they shouldn’t. Despite what had been visited on her body, she had looked more thoughtful than tortured, even melancholy. “Pitying,” someone had told Mr. Carpenter, who wished immediately he had not been told such; it unsettled him to think of a corpse despairing over the fortunes of the living.
As much as he found such thoughts alarming, what troubled Mr. Carpenter more were the maudlin rumors seeping through Cedarville. He foresaw misfortune coming for the township if he did not mitigate their transmission. So, as best able, Mr. Carpenter steered the bavardage, first to the notion that Mrs. Gagnon, weary of an illness she’d kept private, might have killed herself; and then, when that failed to take hold, to the idea her demise could be attributable to whoever was responsible for the travesty in the neighboring homestead. The thought brought no comfort but that was not its purpose. Mr. Carpenter’s intention had been to circumvent any belief that the culprit, if there was indeed one, might have been one of Cedarville’s own, and at this he succeeded.
A new energy shortly possessed the township, replacing the malaise. When Mr. Jacobson returned, bringing with him meat in exchange for produce, he was run out of the township before he could cross the bridge to Cedarville, chased back down the road by a coalition of laughing youth with beautiful antique rifles and the chatter of the latter’s spent casings upon the shining ice. No one chastised the boys—and they were boys, could not be anything but boys, their sisters having lost too much sleep counting the dwindling cans in the pantries to come out—when they returned. Instead, the girls queued at their windows to wave, as though it were war heroes they were welcoming home.
Mr. Carpenter wrote letters to his constituents the following day, reminding them there were deer in the forests, elk and fat grey rabbits, turkey even—for those lucky enough to spot what rare few remained following the harvest culling. If such game wasn’t sufficient, there were fish under the ice of the lake: fat trout, walleyes, needle-teethed pike, all dreaming sweetly of summer. Cedarville’s larders would stay filled if not fat from Asbestos’s tithing. It was unfortunate, yes, but Cedarville, he noted, had survived worse recently: the tragedy of Mrs. Gagnon’s passing, for one, and the more regrettable elements of what happened with Mr. Wong. Things would be well.
Then the phone lines went.
The constable quickly established the damage as natural, the wires a casualty of the blizzard. Ice had toppled several utility poles, taking with them a snarl of cables. Satellite service continued to function, albeit at reduced capacity, and Mr. Carpenter wrote again to the residents of Cedarville, suggesting that the community take this period of inconvenience as an opportunity for reflection, a chance to interrogate one’s interiority as the year shambled to the solstice. It was so easy to deprioritize family, to forget oneself and one’s values in the capitalistic existence espoused by the urban elite. This new silence, even if flawed, should be treated as what it was: a homecoming of a kind, a reversion to a more naturalistic state.
In support of this, the church began hosting Mass daily. When the pastor, Mr. Lambert—soot-haired, despite his advancing age, but spry still in that way some men became when sapped of youth’s insecurities—grew too hoarse from the new schedule, the municipal council enlisted volunteers to create a rotation, and the nature of the services—although never deviating from Christian phylum— diversified infinitesimally. The residents of Cedarville, between boarding up their properties, brought tea cakes and book clubs, ad hoc celebrations to the church, and for a few weeks things were as Mr. Carpenter prophesied: they were well.
Up until the Sunday when they discovered Mr. Lambert pinioned to the Christ in the church, belly split from the floor of his throat to the roof of his groin, his entrails the same festive crimson as the decorations limply garlanding the gutters trimming the roof outside. There were no messages, no meaning in the butchery, no calling cards, no clues as to who might have killed him or why; only a knife on the ground beneath where his viscera drooped. Flies clotted his flayed body and sang as piously as any choir. The Elliots’ oldest daughter, who had been the one to find Mr. Lambert’s corpse, said she saw a woman’s silhouette flickering in the window of the dead man’s office. She claimed too that there had been a smell: incense, thick as what clung to Mr. Wong’s skin.
But the old man was gone, as was the altar he had built for his sister, and the house in which he lived alone with her ghost was gored of its contents; its doors were locked, strung with police tape. As such, it was a surprise to Cedarville when a pack of teenagers, looking for privacy, discovered the body of the Elliots’ oldest daughter dangling from a rope lashed to a ceiling beam, her expression pensive and unexpectedly relieved.
Mr. Carpenter called an immediate assembly. The township gathered to comfort the Elliots, who endured the knowledge of their daughter’s suicide with a pragmatic silence, husband and wife clinging to one another, neither shedding tears. Their sons stood in a line behind them. Like their parents, they did not cry, although their eyes gleamed wetly in the wan grey light of the afternoon. Upon delivering his condolences, Mr. Carpenter proceeded to warmly remind his constituents that they were not alone, that the church still operated, that there were neighbors, that there was no cause to succumb to grief as that poor girl had, and that he himself was there and available at any hour, ready to provide company to anyone in need.
At the close of his speech, Mrs. Elliot rose from her seat.
“What happe
ned with Mr. Wong wasn’t right,” she said. Mrs. Elliot had lived in Cedarville for twenty-five years, but her accent was still that of her bayou past. “The woods know it. It’s punishin’ us for that.”
Mr. Carpenter, who believed in nothing save the tangible, nodded. “Sometimes, tragedies happen.”
“It wasn’t right,” said Mrs. Elliot with more insistence. “My daughter’s dyin’ wasn’t right either.”
Mr. Carpenter nodded again. “You have our condolences.”
The woman went silent. She tucked grey curls behind a small round ear, looking to her husband for support, before speaking up again, this time with oracular diction, her expression grave.
“We’re going to die for what happened.”
“Mrs. Elliot.”
She shook her head. “It’s just how it is. We did wrong. It’s going to make it right.”
“Mrs. Elliot,” said Mr. Carpenter. “I understand that it is easy to catastrophize during moments of such grief, but, believe me, there is no magic adjudicator waiting invisibly to pass judgment on us.”
The woman laughed then, a bitter noise. “Naw. Of course not. S’because it already has.”
“Mrs. Elliot,” said Mr. Carpenter for the second time.
“We’re going to die,” she said, as though the statement alone was sufficient explanation, and sat down again. “And it said you’re next.”
No one said anything after that.
The postwoman, Allegra, found Mr. Carpenter the next morning, with the door to his cottage slightly ajar. He sat slumped, very delicately, in his favorite armchair, a bloom of grey brain coating the wall behind him. The interior admitted no evidence of robbery. It stood as neatly as the bowl of cold oatmeal, the glass of milk, the gun, and the stack of unopened letters atop the late Mr. Carpenter’s desk. Like Mrs. Gagnon, like the Elliots’ oldest daughter, like Mr. Lambert, like Ms. Wong when they dragged her from the water all those years ago, he was found adorned with a small, thoughtful frown.
The constable died the subsequent day.
Then the Elliots, immolated in their farmhouse.
Then Mistress Smith, whose corpse supplied one last meal to her hounds.
As Mrs. Elliot had predicted, the deaths continued, inexorable as time.
Something Like Living Creatures
John Langan
JENNA sat cross-legged at the top of the ladder, where it was nailed to the loft. Either of the beds at her back would have raised her another two feet into the air, but she didn’t think the extra height would make much, if any, difference. Besides, she liked the spot here, where the ladder connected the house’s two levels, at the gap in the railing which ran the length of the loft. It allowed her to survey the house’s living room, dining area, and kitchen. The only parts of it not visible to her were under the loft: the bathroom, on the far side of the front door, and her parents’ room, directly beneath her, behind a heavy yellow curtain. Her position allowed her a view out the large window set high in the wall opposite the loft. Through its expanse of panes, she could see the crowns of the trees staggered down the hill below the house, and beyond them the broad Penobscot River, its surface flat gray under the overcast sky. A line of fog hid the far shore. Faintly, Jenna could hear the foghorn droning. She wasn’t certain of its location. Mother and Father liked the sound: like so much in this part of Maine, it reminded them of the old country.
From where she was sitting near the foot of the ladder, leafing through her Catholic Bible, Samantha said, “Do you see anything?”
“Not yet,” Jenna said.
“She isn’t trying,” Kayla said. She was seated at the kitchen table, her back to the scene out the kitchen window, her attention focused on the deck of playing cards that she continued to turn over in front of her. She had wrapped one of the bath towels around her hair because she said it made her look like a psychic. Jenna thought it made her look as if she had just come out of the shower. She said, “I am trying,” though she wasn’t, not the way she did when she truly wanted to look far.
“This Bible talks about creatures with four faces,” Samantha said. “Actually, it says they were something like living creatures. How is something like a living creature?”
“I don’t know,” Jenna said.
“Beats me,” Kayla said. “That’s why I prefer to stick to Virgil. Plus, you know, tradition.”
“You and Virgil,” Jenna said.
“It says the creatures had the face of a human being in the front, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and then it says they had the face of an eagle, but it doesn’t say where. It would have to be on the back, right?”
“Makes sense,” Jenna said.
“If you say so,” Kayla said.
From the nearer edge of the curtain across Mother and Father’s room, a finger of buttery light stretched across the living room floor, fading as it approached the opposite wall. Samantha was turning the onionskin pages of her Bible on the oval rug to the left of the light. Jenna wished she wasn’t so close to the reaching light.
“Not that anyone’s asking,” Kayla said, “but the cards are talking.”
“What are they telling you?” Samantha said.
“The hearts are gathering,” Kayla said. “The four kings are in alignment.”
“Hearts mean family, right?” Samantha said.
“And kings mean power,” Jenna said.
“Yes,” Kayla said. “But.”
Samantha snickered. “You said butt.”
“Shut up,” Jenna said. “It isn’t that kind of but.”
“I know,” Samantha said.
“The ace of spades keeps showing up mixed in with the hearts,” Kayla said.
“He means violence, doesn’t he?” Samantha said.
“It’s a card,” Kayla said, “not a ‘he.’ But yes, it does mean violence.”
“Bad violence,” Jenna said.
“Is there any other kind of violence?” Kayla said.
“I mean,” Jenna said, “violence so bad, it tears everything apart, throws everything down. Like an earthquake. Or a hurricane.”
“Or one of the living creatures,” Samantha said. “At least, I think so. They have four wings, too. Did I mention that?”
“No,” Jenna said.
“Do you see anything?” Kayla said.
“Not yet,” Jenna said.
“She isn’t trying,” Samantha said.
“Shut up,” Jenna said, “I am trying.”
The finger of light on the floor dimmed, as if something was occluding it.
“This Bible,” Samantha said, “says that if you cook a fish’s heart, it will drive away devils.”
“How did they find that out?” Kayla said. “Did they experiment? ‘Let’s try a bird’s heart. Anything? No? Okay, what’s next? I know! A fish!’”
“It says the fish was a monster,” Samantha said. “Well, monstrous.”
“Which just means it was big,” Kayla said.
“Not necessarily,” Jenna said, although she thought Kayla was probably right.
“So will any fish’s heart work,” Samantha said, “or does it have to be a monster fish?”
“Monstrous,” Kayla said.
“You can also use its gall bladder to cure blindness,” Samantha said.
“That’s some fish,” Kayla said. “I wonder what its small intestine does? How about its spleen? Its left eyeball?”
“This Bible mentions Asmodeus,” Samantha said.
“Hush,” Jenna said.
“Which one is he?” Kayla said.
“You know,” Jenna said.
“He’s the limping one,” Samantha said. “He has a chicken foot.”
Jenna couldn’t help herself. “Rooster.”
“Right,” Kayla said. “His domain is lust.”
“Okay,” Jenna said.
“Lust,” Samantha said, and giggled.
“I’m going to try to see now,” Jenna said.
&nb
sp; “I thought you were trying,” Kayla said.
“You said you were,” Samantha said.
“I’m going to try harder,” Jenna said.
“Whatever you say,” Kayla said.
The finger of light on the bare wood floor brightened, as if whatever was in its way had moved.
“There’s the ace of spades again,” Kayla said.
Jenna gazed out the large window across from her. She looked over the quiet treetops, over the calm river, to the fog bank. She looked past green leaves, past gray water, to white fog. She looked over emerald, over pewter, to silver. She felt her connection to her body loosening. In the fog, in the white, in the silver, there was a speck, a spot, a figure, tiny then bigger then life-sized, as if Jenna was sitting beside it, beside her, beside a woman, a tall woman, a grown-up woman, her mother. Her mother was wearing a dark green sleeveless dress. Her mother’s arms were circled by serpents with flashing green scales. Her mother’s hair was piled high on her head and threaded with smaller green snakes. A dark green blindfold obscured her mother’s eyes. In her right hand, Mother was holding a short knife with its curved blade pointing down. In her left hand, Mother was holding a knot of writhing serpents. Mother’s mouth dropped open, and ebony pearls poured over her lips. The vision retreated, speeding away; as it did, Jenna had the impression of a shape looming behind her mother, something with a shaggy pelt and dull eyes, canted to one side. She returned to her body feeling as if she had plunged down a steep slide into a pool of cold water. Her head swam. She gripped the railing to steady herself.
“You saw something!” Samantha said.
“Did you?” Kayla said.
“Yes,” Jenna said.
“What did you see?” Samantha said.