‘Please,’ he said, ‘I’ve come from the house in Gallows Wood. My parents and sister are weak with fever. We haven’t eaten for days, and the snow has killed the few crops we had. Please, will you help me?’
The lady gazed at him for a moment, before licking her lips and giving him a pitiless sneer. ‘Help you, you say? And why would I want to do such a thing? To save a few peasants? Keep a few more beggars living?’
“‘But they’re dying, miss. My family is dying.’
“‘So you said,’ she replied and smiled. ‘And it’s no concern of mine. Now, if you don’t get off my land, you shall pay a hefty price. One far worse than your current malady.’
And then, with one last tantalizing blast of warmth and the succulent scent of roasting pig, she slammed the door in his face. James stood for a moment, the thought of turning and facing the white, merciless waste more than he could bear. But then he heard the sound of her laughter, and it squeezed his heart like the coldest, cruelest vise.
And so he made his way back, trudging on through the falling snow, but as he passed the barn, where he could hear the soft cluck of hens and the snuffle of pigs, he stopped.
He’d never stolen a thing in his life, but at that moment, he knew if he didn’t take something back with him, he’d be burying his family in a snowy grave. One he’d soon be following them into.
So, he unlatched the door, for only a latch sealed it, and he made his way into the barn. Here, the hay was free of snow. Pigs occupied the main part, their stench heavy in the air. And behind the pigs, a henhouse, crammed and packed with chickens. A row of birds sat roosting upon a bar, and it didn’t take him long to find the plumpest and to wring their necks just like his father had shown him. He stuffed them, still twitching, into his coat, and as he turned to leave, he screamed. For there, standing before him, was the old woman.
“‘I warned you, boy. Do you know, the only reason I spared you was to know you’d die of wretchedness and a broken heart? I like to see hearts break, for I have none of my own. Do you know what I am?’
“‘A monster,’ James Maybury replied.
“‘Indeed. And the people in these parts usually know better than to cross me. But you didn’t know better, did you? Even though you were warned.’
“‘My family is dying. I had no other choice.’
“‘Stop talking, boy. It will hurt less.’ She stepped towards him, her smile violent and cruel.
“‘Get away from me, you old hag. Leave me be!’ James cried.
“‘I told you not to speak,’ she said as she reached up and snatched James’s mouth from his face.
I do not need to tell you how it felt, for you already know.” The man shook his head and paused for a moment, before continuing. “James could only watch in horror as she dropped his mouth inside her pocket and rubbed her corpulent fingers together. A spark of light appeared, amber and fluttering. She pinched it between her fingers and thrust it up his nose. He fought, his chokes catching in his throat as the light blazed around inside his head.
She laughed as she watched him struggle. But she was not finished.
Next, she closed her eyes and bunched her fingers into tight fists and as she did, the chickens around them began to squawk and cry and one by one they dropped to the ground, dead as doornails. It was as if she’d somehow drawn up their lives into her fists. When she opened her eyes, they were pure white; below them, her mouth was a gaping hole.
“‘So it’s done,’ she said. ‘You are less than you were when you arrived. And so is your home in the hollow. Half a house you now have, and an eternity of starvation. But your hunger will not kill you, for the spark I have given you will keep you alive. And only I, or my kin, can free you…and that will never be so.’
She pointed to the door. ‘So go on your way, child. Go home.’
James’s feet began to take him away, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. As he glanced back with one last, pleading look, it was to see the creature leaning low and thrusting dead chickens into her mouth. Bones, feathers, and all.
When he reached the hollow, his house, just as she had promised, was cleaved in half. The other half had vanished into thin air. He opened the door, waiting for the sound of his dying family, knowing he wouldn’t hear them. For they were gone with the missing part of the house, gone to whatever hell the witch had sent them to.”
The man turned from the window and regarded Robert. “You know who the old hag was, don’t you, boy?”
Robert nodded. It was one of his first memories. A giant old woman with huge eyes and terrible, black moods.
“She was your blood, boy.”
No, she was not. She couldn’t be.
“Ah, but she was. Your real mother. I knew from the moment I saw you in the woods. You have the same aura. The same bad blood. You’ve just never found it in you, not yet, at least. I’m sorry for you, boy, really I am. But this is what your kin did to me, for I am James Maybury, and now her curse is broken and met upon you.”
Robert leaped from the chair and grasped the man’s tattered shirt. Please, he thought, his voice screaming in his mind. Please!
“There is nothing I can do for you. I’ve served my time in this house, silent and alone, robbed of a means to feed myself, to speak and tell people of the curse. To find my family. Starvation would have been kinder than the punishment given to me, which is why she ensured I couldn’t starve. But now the bond is broken, and I shall leave this tomb where it stands.” James Maybury gazed at Robert for a moment and shook his head. He was about to say something else when the sound of barking dogs echoed through the trees.
Robert ran to the window, James Maybury close behind him.
Outside, in the dusk, he could see his father running, Bessie at his heels and two other dogs close behind. Sam and his father, who was clutching a rifle, followed, and behind them, more of the villagers. A pang of hope filled Robert as he watched them.
“Here they come,” James Maybury said. “Fresh from the farm and baying for the blood of a monster. Ironic that the monster is one of their own. If there’s help to be had for you, boy, I’ll send it.”
The front door crashed against the wall downstairs as the men raced into the house.
James Maybury ran from the room to the door across the hall as the sounds of feet pounded up the stairs. Robert chased after James as he kicked the door open and passed through a bare, desolate room, crossed his arms over his face, and threw himself through the window. He crashed through in a storm of glass and vanished from view.
Robert stood before the broken window, watching as the man who had stolen his mouth flitted through the trees, his stick-like figure vanishing among the tangle and weave of the twisted branches.
He turned back to find Bessie and the other dogs racing into the room. They stopped as they saw him and began to whine and howl, before scuttling away. Tears sprang into his eyes as he held a hand over the place his mouth had once been.
Robert’s father appeared first, Sam and his father close behind. “Are you alright, son? What happened?”
Then Robert’s mother reached the top of the stairs. As she saw Robert, she ran towards him, throwing her arms around him and clasping him so tight he thought he might snap. The men from the village checked the other room before joining them.
Robert looked over his mother’s shoulder at Sam, who was staring at him in bewilderment. Robert let his hand drop from his face, closing his eyes, unable to bear seeing the terror on his friend’s face.
The room filled with cries as the men, once standing brave with scythes and rifles, screamed like frightened babies. Robert’s mother’s hands slipped away, and she began to cry. “He’s not a monster. Not Robert!”
Robert stepped through the crowd. They parted before him as he walked back to the empty room, lit the candle upon the chair, sat and gazed into the growing dusk.
Eliza closed the book, leaving her finger inside to mark her place. “That was horrible,” she whisper
ed.
She ran her fingers over her lips, wondering what it would be like to lose her mouth. She pictured trying to draw a breath only to find her mouth gone, panicking as she forced air through her nose.
Eliza shook her head, forcing herself to return to the present. Maybe her mother was right. Maybe imaginary stories were a waste of time and a useless distraction. She glanced back at the book. Where the story ended, another passage of writing started, in the same style of writing as the introduction. Her great-great-grandfather’s hand? Edwin Drabe.
Eliza fought the urge to close the book and sneak it back to the study in the morning. To forget about it. But as she stared at the writing below her finger, she picked it back up and began reading.
James Maybury found me in London.
He’d spent many weeks searching for someone who might undo the terrible thing that had been done to him and, in turn, to poor Robert. James placed a map before my young assistant and me and pointed. “Go here. And if you can, undo what has been done. I’ve heard you can write things away, things that are not as they should be. Write this story, make a kindly death.”
“I shall judge whether or not it’s to be a kindly death,” I told him.
“Well, do whatever you can for him.”
“You could do that. You could give him back what’s rightfully his,” I replied.
He tensed, his eyes traveling to the gun upon my desk. “Will you challenge me? I only took what was taken from me.”
“You did. And only you can decide whether that was right or wrong. It’s not my place, not in this matter. But you have come to me, and that shall stand for you, Mr. Maybury. Pack our bags, Sarah,” I told my young assistant. “We shall leave at first light.”
I watched James Maybury as he left, shoulders hunched, the scars of his cursed life still weighing him down.
We arrived in the village of Buryton the following day. The villagers swore they’d never heard of Robert or his family. Their home, standing alone in the village, blackened and empty, told a different tale.
We left Buryton and soon found the house in Gallows Wood. It was exactly as described, half a building and no more. A light shone in an upper window.
I knocked upon the door. Moments later, it was answered by a drawn-looking man, brandishing a rifle. He glanced from me to Sarah.
“I’m here to see your son. I’ve heard of his…affliction and I wish to help,” I told him. “I have experience of such matters.”
He lowered the rifle, nodding for us to follow, and as we entered the place, we were forced to turn sideways through the narrow opening.
The smell of cooking wafted from a dank kitchen, where a pot hissed and bubbled upon a hearth. Standing before it was a woman. She grasped her sleeves as we approached and nodded to the ceiling. “He’s up there,” she said.
“Before I go to Robert, tell me,” I replied, “how did he come to live with you?”
“We adopted him when he was little more than a baby,” his mother said, “after his real mother fled, if you could call her such a thing. She’d been caught eating another family’s livestock. Such a terrible hunger. We all knew she was a… monster, and we were scared of her. The others from the village chased her from her home; when they did, Robert’s father and I went and rescued him.”
“And what happened to his real mother, the malefactrix?” I asked, as tenderly as I could.
“No one knows,” Robert’s father replied. “They cornered her in a tunnel near Portdown. They covered it from both ends, but there was nothing to be found, nothing in the middle. She was gone, vanished into thin air.”
“I will need to see this tunnel, and then I may need to destroy it,” I told him. I glanced around the disheveled kitchen. “So, why are you out here, hiding in the woods?”
“Because the other villagers think we might be tainted, like him,” the father said as his eyes traveled to the ceiling.
“Well, they are wrong,” I told him. “I hunt for the beings that we call monsters. I send them back to where they belong, or I write their tales into my book and they find peace. A kindly death, if you will. I can write Robert’s tale, if you and he agree to it.”
“Will it hurt him?” The mother asked.
“No,” I promised.
“Then please,” she begged, “do whatever needs to be done. We can rest if we know he’s at peace.”
“I will ask him. If Robert agrees, it will be done and you can leave and start over somewhere else. But never, ever utter a word of this matter to anyone.”
We found Robert upstairs, sitting in his chair, staring out the window. He turned and looked at me, his face gaunt, his stare hard.
I left Sarah to her business. She had a gift for communicating without speaking. Slowly, she noted down Robert’s story in her journal as they gazed at one another, talking in silence but for the scratch of her pen on paper.
When she was finished, I asked Robert if he wanted to be written away, or to venture to a place where monsters dwelled. A place he wouldn’t be judged. He asked to cross over.
I took the book from my bag and began to write his story, just as you have read it, Sarah relaying each word of his sorrowful tale. And when it was done, I took my pen and handed it to Robert and he signed on the place just where he should.
And then he was gone. Gone from this world and into the other.
7
The Watcher
Eliza switched the bedside lamp on and set the book down. She was glad for the light as she glanced at the book with its cracked black cover. She pushed it aside. There was something very wrong with it. It wasn’t normal, and that hadn’t been a normal story, either. And even though she hadn’t read anything even slightly imaginative since early childhood, Eliza knew stories didn’t work like that.
Stories remained on paper. But that one felt as if it had followed her into the room. And it wasn’t written like a normal story, but more like someone recording an event that had actually happened.
Outside, the birch tree’s branches scraped at her window, taking Eliza back to Gallows Wood. She could still see Robert’s face, his skin blank beneath his nose, his eyes bulging with terror as the stick-thin man darted through the trees, taking Robert’s mouth with him.
The scene was broken when a light blinked through the gap in Eliza’s curtains.
Eliza gazed ahead, and it blinked once more.
Slowly, she crept across the room, drawing the curtains and peering through the window. Beyond the dark expanse of her grandfather’s garden, a light shone in a neighboring house. It came from a bare bulb that shone harsh and sickly yellow in an empty room.
Or was it empty?
No, someone was inside. They passed across the light, a perfectly black silhouette, pacing back and forth, as if agitated. And then they flitted to the window, cupping their hands against the glass as they peered out. At her.
Eliza’s breath caught in her throat, mesmerized as they watched each other across the night-filled garden. Time crawled to a stop as neither moved, until Eliza finally managed to summon the will to close her eyes and break the connection. She grabbed at the curtains blindly and snapped them closed. When she opened her eyes, the watcher was gone, sealed away behind the curtains. She allowed her breathing to calm before climbing back into bed.
“Just a neighbor,” she whispered. “Forget it.”
The black book rested on the soft white sheet. She thought of returning it to the hidden study, but knew she wouldn’t. Because even though her heart was still thumping, Eliza knew she’d never be able to settle until she knew what the book was.
And what it meant.
And why her grandfather had left it out upon the desk. Did it hold a clue to his disappearance and where he’d gone?
As she placed a hand on the book’s old cover, Eliza knew she would read it until the end. That this was what she was somehow meant to do. Her curiosity, so often curtailed by her mother, was beginning to grow, and with it, an almost insatiable
lust for knowledge was building inside of her. Even if the knowledge was terrifying.
“Be brave,” she told herself. “You’re part Drabe, after all!”
Eliza turned the flashlight on, switched the lamp off, and picked up the book.
The pages she’d just read were sealed once more, but as she tilted the book, it fell open to the next story.
8
A Pocketful of Souls
Victoria Stapleton chose not to cover her mouth as she yawned. Usually, she’d at least attempt to hide her boredom, if only to avoid a stern lecture in the way polite young ladies should behave. But today, on the anniversary of her thirteenth year on this dismal planet, she didn’t care a jot for manners as her anger boiled like lava in her veins.
The main focus of Victoria’s malice stood before her.
The magician.
She tutted as he flipped his gloved hands into the air, producing yet another puff of green smoke from the hat balanced on the stool.
The village children, a sea of filthy brown clothes and greasy heads, sat cross-legged before the magician, crying and cooing with delight as he baffled them with his tricks. When he pulled a scrawny white rabbit from his hat, they screamed with wonder, clapping as fast as their hands would allow.
In a strange way, Victoria almost envied the audience their simple amusement. The only time she ever felt even a vague sense of happiness was at night when it was time to go to sleep.
“Amazing!” cried a scraggly boy, as the magician pulled a bright red handkerchief from his sleeve.
The Book of Kindly Deaths Page 5