Obsidian: A Decade of Horror Stories by Women

by Tanith Lee

  The man stepped round the fire. His shadow fell across her. She shivered. The man said, carefully, “Gracielis, don’t. She hasn’t hurt me.”

  “Yet,” said the wolf.

  “I would be dead,” the man said, “if she hadn’t helped me. Do you understand that?”

  “I understand death,” said the wolf.

  The man said “She’s done no harm.”

  “I know.” The wolf smiled. His smile was unlike all the smiles of the man. It was full of knowing, full of the things which ran through the land, which held together rock and sand, which held her together. His smile knew her, all of her, and made her less than she had been. Her skin was cold. The wolf said, “You’re the one that’s done the harm. Look at it, Thierry.”

  The man’s gaze turned to her. The wolf said, “It’s not meant to be human. It has a place. It has a role; it exists and that’s all it should do. You’ve confused it. You’ve pulled it out of shape.” The soft, wounding voice turned gentle, so that the pain grew all the sweeter. “What is it now? Not what it should be. Not human, either. It’s power, only power, and it’ll give you anything you want, if you can only teach it to understand. You’re the danger, my heart.”

  “If I am,” said the man, “why hurt her?” The wolf was silent. “Let her go,” said the man.

  “I can’t,” the wolf said. Under her feet, the dull sand shivered. The fear ran through her, leeching strength from fingers and eyes and hands. She shook. She could not hold onto herself. She could call no shadows. She was bleeding away through the sand.

  “Don’t,” said the man. “Please don’t. I can leave. We can both just go. What harm does that do?” She shaped ‘leave’, felt herself shrivel, felt the first breath of emptiness. Spaces opened up inside her, black and clawing like the tide. There was nothing to fill them. The man said, “I’m begging you. Don’t hurt her.”

  The wolf turned his head. The stone eyes released her, boneless and shivering, onto the sand. It made no sound, receiving her. It was not hers. The wolf said, “Don’t you understand? You’ve changed it. You’ll leave it with nothing.” His voice cut slivers from her, buried them under the sand. She curled about herself, bold hands hiding eyes, legs drawn up, body awash with fear.

  The man said, “Can’t you put her back to what she was?”

  The wolf laughed. Her hands filled with the sand, seeking denied comfort. The wolf said, “You know I can’t. I can’t heal. I only destroy.”

  “Don’t,” said the man.

  There was a silence. In her dry fingers, the sand lay heavy. The sea whispered. The man said, softly, “Just take me away from here. Don’t hurt her.”

  “Thierry,” the wolf said, and the word tripped his voice. “Thierry, I’m not causing the pain.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the man, and the words lifted her head, brushing it with a pain outside herself. Water streaked the man’s face, water with the same salt shape as the sea.

  She had drawn him from the sea and the sea was still within him. The sea was everywhere, stripping everything away. Soft and soft, she filled her hands with the sand. The wolf stepped away from her and held out his hands to the man.

  “Hush,” he said, and his words excluded her utterly. “Hush, then, love. We’ll leave.”

  His hands took the man, drew him close, hid his face, hid the murmur of his thoughts. The sand trickled behind them, wiping away their footprints, out of the dunes, onto the strand. She could not stand. On sore palms and knees, she pulled herself after them, hampered by the sand. They outstripped her with ease. On the edge of the sea was a sound wooden boat. They stepped into it and the tide drew them away. She could not follow. The waves moved in and became a barrier.

  The tide had brought the man. The tide had taken him back. She lay down on the sand for the tide to take her also.

  Underfog (The Wreckers)

  Tanith Lee

  Oh burning God,

  Each of our crimes is numbered upon

  The nacre of your eternal carapace,

  Like scars upon the endless sky.

  ‘Prayer of the Damned’

  (Found scratched behind the altar in the ruined church at Hampp.)

  We lured them in. It was how we lived, at Hampp. After all, the means had been put into our grip, and we had never been given much else.

  It is a rocky ugly place, the village, though worse now. Just above the sea behind the cliff-line, and the cliffs are dark as sharks, but eaten away beneath to a whitish-green that sometimes, in the sunlight, luridly shines. The drop is what? Three hundred feet or more. There was the old church standing there once, but as the cliff crumbled through the years, bits and then all the church fell down on the stones below, mingling with them. You can still, I should think, now and then find part of the pitted face of a rough-carved gargoyle or angel staring up at you from deep in the shale, or a bit of its broken wing. The graveyard had gone, of course, too. The graves came open as the cliff gave, and there had been bodies strewn along the shore, or what was left of them, all bones, until the sea swam in and out and washed them away. Always a place, this, for the fallen then, and the discarded dead.

  By the days of my boyhood, the new church was right back behind the village, uphill for safety. The new church had been there for two hundred years. But we, the folk of Hampp, we had been there since before the Domesday Book. And sometimes I used to wonder if they did it then too, our forebears, seeing how the tide ran and the rocks and the cliff-line. Maybe they did. It seemed to be in our blood. Until now. Until that night of the fog.

  My first time, I was about nine years. It had gone on before, that goes without saying, and I had known it did, but not properly what it was or meant. My nine-year-old self had memories of sitting by our winter fire, and the storm raging outside, and then a shout from the watch, or some other man banging on our door: “Stir up, Jom. One’s there.” And father would rise with a grunt, somewhere between annoyance and strange eagerness. And when he was gone out into the wind and rain, 1 must have asked why and Ma would say, “Don’t you fret, Haro. It’s just the Night Work they’re to.”

  But later, maybe even next day, useful things would have come into our house, and to all the impoverished houses up and down the cranky village street. Casks of wine or even rum, a bolt of cloth, perhaps, or a box of good china; once a sewing machine, and more than once a whole side of beef. And other stuff came that we threw on the fire, papers and books, and a broken doll one time, and another a ripped little dress that might have been for a doll, but was not.

  On the evening I was nine and a storm was brewing, I knew I might be in on the Work, but after I thought not and slept. The Work was what we all called it, you see. The Work, or the Night Work, although every so often it had happened by day, when the weather was very bad. Still, Night Work, even so.

  My father said, “Get up Haro.” It was the middle of the night and I in bed. And behind the curtain in my parents’ bed, my mother was already moving and awake. My father was dressed. “What is it, Da?” I whispered. “Only the usual,” said my father, “but you’re of an age now. It’s time you saw and played your part.”

  So I scrambled out and pulled on my outdoor clothes over the underthings I slept in. I was, like my father, between two emotions, but mine were different. With me that first time, they were excitement, and fear. Truly fear, like as when we boys played see-a-ghost in the churchyard at dusk. But in this case still not even really knowing why, or of what.

  Out on the cliff the gale was blowing fit to crack the world. There were lanterns, but muffled blind, as they had to be, which I had heard of but not yet properly seen.

  Leant against the wind, we stared out into the lash of the rain. “Do you spot it, Jom?” “Oh ah. I sees it.” But I craned and could not see, only the ocean itself roughing and spurging, gushing up in great belches and tirades, like boiling milk that was mostly black. But there was something there, was there? Oh yes, could I just make it out? Something like three th
in trees massed with cloud and all torn and rolling yet caught together. “You stay put, Haro,” said my father. “Here’s a light. You shine that. You remember when and what to do? As I told you?” “Yes, Da,” I said, afraid with a new affright I should do it wrong and fail him. But he patted my shoulder as if I were full-grown, and went away down the cliff path with the others. Soon enough 1 heard them, those three hundred feet below me, voices thin with distance and the unravelling of the wind, there under the curve of the crumbled white-green cheese of the cliff-face. Though I was quite near the edge, I knew not to go too far along to see, but there was a place there, a sort of notch in the crag, whereby I could see the glimmer of the lamps as they uncovered them. And I knew to do the same then, and I uncovered my lantern too.

  So we brought it in. The thing with the clouded trees that was adrift on the earthquake of great waters. The thing:that was a ship.

  She smashed to pieces on the rocks below, where the tallest stones were, just under the surface at high tide, against rock and shale, and the faces of angels and devils, and against their broken wings.

  This was our Night Work then. In tempest or fog we shone our lights to mislead, and so to guide them home, the ships, and wreck them on the fangs of our cliffs. And when they broke and sank, we took what they had had that washed in to shore. Not human cargo, naturally. That counted for nothing. It must be left, and pushed back, and in worse case pushed under. But the stores, the barrels and casks, the ironware and food and, if uncommon lucky, the gold, those were rescued. While they, the human flotsam, might fare as wind and darkness, and their gods – and we – willed for them, which was never well.

  I saw a woman that night, just as the great torn creature of the vessel heaved in and struck her breast, with a scream like mortal death, to flinders on our coast. The woman wore a big fur cloak, and also clutched a child, and in the last minute, in intervals of the storm-roil, I saw her ashen face and agate eyes, and he the same, her son, younger than I, and neither moved nor called, as if they were statues. And then the ship split and the water drank them down. But there was a little dog, too. It swam. It fought the waves, and they let it go by. And when it came to land – by then I craned at the cliff’s notch, over the dangerous edge – my father, Jom Abinthorpe, he scooped up the little dog. And my reward for that first night of my Night Work was this little innocent pup, not yet full-grown as neither I was. Because, you will see, a dog can tell no tales, and so may be let live.

  But the ship and her crew, and all her people, they went down to the cellars of the sea.

  I was always out to the Work with the men after that. By the time I was eleven, I would be down along the shore, wading even in the high savage surf among the rocks, with breakers crashing sometimes high over my head, as I helped haul in the casks, and even the broken bits of spars that we might use, when dried and chopped, for our fires.

  Hampp is a lorn and lonely place; even now that is so. And when I was a boy, let alone in my father’s boyhood, remote as some legendary isle in the waste of the sea. But unlike the isles of Legend, not beautiful, but bony bare. There were but a dozen trees that grew within a ten mile walk of the village, and these bent and crippled by the winter winds. In summer too there were gales and storms, and drought also. What fields were kept behind their low stone walls gave a poor return for great labour. And there was not much bounty given by the ocean, for the fish were often shy. The sea, they said, would as soon eat your boat as give you up a single herring. No, the only true bounty the sea would offer came on those nights of fog or tempest, when it drew a ship toward our coast and seemed to tell us: Take it then, if you can. For to do the Work, of course, was not without its perils. And to guide them in too required some skill, hiding the light, then letting out the light, and that just at the proper angle and spot. But finally the sea was our accomplice, was it not, for once drawn into that channel where the teeth of the rocks waited in the tide, and the green skull faces of the outer cliffs trod on into the water and turned their unforgiving cheeks to receive another blow, the ocean itself forced and flung each vessel through. It was the water and the rocks smashed them. We did not do it. We had not such power, nor any power ever. And sometimes one of our own was harmed, or perished. Two men died in those years of my boyhood, swept off by the surge. And one young boy also, younger than I was by then, he broken in a second when half a ship’s mast came down on him with all its weight of riven sail.

  But ten ships gave up their goods in those years between my ninth and fourteenth birthdays, and I was myself by then a man. And the dog had grown too, my rescued puppy.

  I called him Iron, for his strength. He had blossomed from a little, black soft glove of a thing to a tall and long-legged setter, dark as a shadow. He was well-liked in our house, being quiet and mannerly. Also I trained him to catch rabbits, which he killed cleanly and brought me for my mother’s cooking. But he hated the sea. Would not go even along the cliff path, let alone to the edge with the notch, or down where the beaches ran when the tide was out. Whenever he saw me set off that way to fish, he would shift once, and stare at me with his great dark eyes that were less full of fear than of disbelief. Next he would turn his back. And here was the thing too; on those nights when the weather was bad, and the watch we posted by roster spied a ship lost and struggling, Iron would vanish entirely, as if he had gone into the very air to hide himself.

  I thought after all he did not know what we were at. Certainly, he would eat a bowl of the offal of any beef or bacon or whatever that came to my family’s portion out of a wreck. By then, I suppose, it had no savour of the sea.

  He had not known either that we let his ship, his own first master likely on that ship, be drowned. Iron only knew, I thought, that my father, and next I, had plucked him from the water after all else was gone.

  For a while I had recalled the cloaked woman and her son. I said nothing of it, and put it from me. And soon I had seen other sights like that, and many since that time. The worst was when they tried to save each other, or worse yet, comfort each other. Those poor souls. Yet, like my dog, I would stare then turn my eyes away. I could not help them. Nor would I have, if I could. We lived by what we took from them, lived by their dying. All men want and will to live. Even a dog does, swimming for the shore.

  Iron is here now. He leans on my leg and the leg of the chair. Strange, for there is iron metal there also, but he does not know this. They are kind, compassionate to have let him in. Well then. Let me tell the rest.

  I had seen fogs often, and of all sorts. Sea-frets come up like a grey curtain but they melt away at Hampp and are soon gone. The other sort of fog comes in a bank, so thick you think you might carve it off in chunks with your rope-knife. And it will stay days at a time, and the nights with them.

  In such a fog sometimes a ship goes by, too far out and never seen, yet such is the weird property of the fog that you will hear the ship, hear it creak and the waves slopping on the hull of it, and the stifled breathing of the sails if they are not taken in and furled. It is often worthwhile to go down with extra lanterns then, and range many lamps too along the cliff by the notch, for the ship’s people will be looking for landfall and may see the lights, even in the depths of the cloud. But generally they do not. They pass away like ghosts. After they were gone men cursed and shrugged, wasting the lamp-oil as they had and nothing caught. But now and then a ship comes in too far, misled already by the fog and by the deep water that lies in so near around our fanned rocks. For surely some demon made the coast in this place to send seafarers ill, and Hampp its only luck. These ships we would see, or rather the shine of their own lanterns, and they were heard more clearly, and soon they noticed our lamps too, and sometimes we called to them, through the carrying silence, called lovingly in anxious welcome, as if wanting them safe. And so they turned and came to us and ran against the stones.

  That night of the last fog I was seventeen years, and Iron my dog about eight, with a flute of grey on his muzzle.

&n
bsp; I had been courting a girl of the village, I will not name her. But really I only wanted to lie with her and sometimes she let me, therefore I knew we would needs be wed. So I was preoccupied, sitting by the fire, and then came the knock on the door. “Stir up, Jom Abinthorpe. Haro – waked already? That’s good. There is a grey drisk on the sea like blindness, come on in the hour. And one’s out there in it, seen her lamps. Well-lit she is, some occasion she must have for it. But sailing near, the watch say.”

  So out we went, and all the village street was full of the men, shouldering their hooks and pikes and hammers, and the lanterns in their muffle giving off only a pale slatey blue. By now I did not even look for my dog Iron, though a few of the men had their dogs with them, the low-slung local breed of Hampp, with snub noses and big shoulders, that might help too pulling the flotsam to shore.

  We went along the cliff, near the edge now all of us, but for the youngest boys, three of them, that we posted up by the notch. Then the rest of us went down to the. beach.

  It was a curious thing. The fog that night was positioned like a fret, one that stayed only on the sea, and just the faintest tendrils and wisps of it drifted along the beach, like thin ribbons of smoke from off a fire.

  The water was well in, creaming clear on the shale, the tide high enough, and not the tips of the fangs below showing. even if the vessel could have made them out. But the ship was anyway held out there, inside the box of the fog, under the fog’s lid, like a fly in thick grey amber.

  It was a large one, too, and as our neighbour had said, very well lit. In fact crazily much-lit, as if for some festival being held on the decks. We all spoke of it, talking low in case our words might carry, as eerily they did through these fogs. The watchman came and said he reckoned at first the ship had caught fire, to be so lighted up. For she did seem to burn, a ripe, rich, flickering gold. How many lamps? A hundred? More? Or torches maybe, flaming on the rails –