The air that rushed out as she opened the door had a meaty, metallic tang. Her stomach roiled with hunger; her vision swam. She shielded the candle flame with her body. Peter took her hand and led her into the crypt.
Helen had seen crypts before. They didn’t frighten her. At age five she’d seen her mother shut away in a Highgate Cemetery tomb. She’d kissed her first girl in the crypt at St Bride’s, after stealing the key from the deacon. And she’d attended parties in the Paris catacombs, drank champagne watched by thousands of gaping skulls.
But this was no crypt.
The passage opened into a wide cavern, its walls caked with salt crystals and honeycombed with human-sized alcoves, rough indentations hacked out of the rock with some primitive tool. Some were deep, as if they might be passages, some gaped shallow and empty, and others were scabbed over with a crusted mess the color of dried blood, leaking filth down the crystalline walls. One of these was just over her left shoulder. Tiny bones were embedded in the bloody grime. It smelled like fresh meat.
A few—just a few here and there—were furred over with cobwebs the same bloodless pale pink as Peter’s skin.
At the bottom of the cavern, a wide pool of oily water quivered and sloshed.
“Mama,” Peter said. “Papa.”
“I don’t think they’re here, Peter,” she whispered, pulling him back toward the door.
His hand slipped from her grasp. He ran to a cobwebbed alcove and plunged his hand deep inside. She grabbed his jacket and pulled him away. The strands clung to his arm, stretched and snapped. When his hand appeared, he held tight to a squirming grub the size of his head. His fingers pierced its flesh; the wounds dripped clear fluid.
Its eyes were dark spots behind a veil of skin. Its tiny, toothless maw opened and closed in agony.
“Brother,” Peter said. He raised the grub to his lips and opened his mouth.
Helen swatted it out of his hand. The grub rolled across the floor of the cavern and plopped into the pool.
She ran, dragging Peter behind her by his elbow.
Helen slammed the door and braced it with her shoulder, throwing her weight against it as she jabbed the lock with the letter opener. Getting the door open had been sheer luck. She’d never get it locked again, not if she worried at it for a hundred years.
She couldn’t believe her stupidity. Opening doors that should stay shut. Going places she didn’t belong. Trusting Bärchen, as if she actually knew him. As if he were human.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said under her breath.
The lock clicked. She fell to her hands and knees, weak with relief. Pain shot up her leg. Her vision darkened.
Peter lifted the candle. “Yes, Miss York?”
She sucked air through her teeth and wrenched herself around to sit with her back against the door. She would get away from Peter, run as fast and as far as possible. Into the mountains, into the forest, anywhere but here. But she didn’t think she could stand. Not yet.
“Do you remember your mother? Your father? Do you know what they are?” Monsters, with hollow staring eyes. Her voice rose to a shriek. “Do you know what you are?”
“No, Miss York. I know you.”
He sat at her feet and slipped his hand into hers. His fingers were sticky with fluid from the grub. It stank like rot, like old meat turned green and festering with maggots. Her gorge rose once, twice. She took two convulsive gasps for air and then the stench changed. Her stomach growled. She raised Peter’s fingers to her mouth and licked them clean, one after another. Then she sucked the last of the juice from his sleeve.
There was more on the other side of the door, puddled on the stone floor. She could open the door again. But Peter looked so tired. His eyelids were puffy and the skin under each eye was stained dark with exhaustion.
“Come here,” she said, and the boy climbed right into her open arms.
• • • •
Helen watched Mimi undress Peter and tuck him into bed. When the nursemaid tried to leave the bedroom, Helen stopped her.
“No. We’re staying here. Peter can’t be alone. We have to take care of him.”
Mimi hung her head.
“Do you understand?”
“Oui.”
“I don’t think you do. You let Peter go—every time. You don’t even try to stop him. Why don’t you care for him? He’s just a child.”
The boy watched them, hands folded between cheek and pillow. Mimi stared at the floor. A tear streaked down her cheek.
“We have to keep Peter safe, you and I, so he can grow up healthy and strong like his uncle. And then like his parents, out in the lake.” Helen sighed. “I wish we could talk properly, you and I.”
“Oui.”
“Wait here,” she said.
Helen ran to fetch a pencil and paper. When she returned, Peter was asleep.
“Tell me why you let him go.”
Mimi fumbled with the pencil. She couldn’t even hold it properly, and the only mark she could make on the paper was a toppling cross inside a crude shape like a gravestone.
Mimi’s lower lip quivered. A tear dropped onto the paper. Helen took the pencil from Mimi’s shaking fingers. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
Mimi climbed onto the bed and lay beside Peter.
Helen pulled a heavy chair in from the hallway and slid it in front of the door. It might not keep him from getting out, but if he tried to drag it away the noise would wake her. Then she kicked off her shoes and climbed onto the bed, reaching around Mimi to rest her palm on Peter’s arm.
The girl was crying. Her back quivered against Helen’s chest.
“It’s all right,” Helen whispered, holding her close. “Everything is going to be all right.”
Mimi cried harder.
Helen expected to be awake all night, but Peter was safe, the room was warm, the bed cozy, and Mimi’s sobs were rhythmic and soothing. Helen slipped into sleep and tumbled through slippery dreams of inky shapes that writhed and grasped and tore at her skin. When she woke, the moon shone through the window, throwing the crossed shadows of the windowpanes over the rug. Her leg throbbed. The clock struck four. And Peter and Mimi were both gone.
On the pillow lay two bright pieces of copper wire, six inches long, worried and kinked, their ends jagged. The pillow was spotted with blood.
Helen ran down to the kitchen and fumbled with a candle, nearly setting her sleeve on fire as she lit it on the oven’s banked coals. She plunged downstairs, bare feet on the freezing steps, and when the smell hit her she stumbled. She slipped on a bone and nearly sent herself toppling headfirst.
She panted, leaning on the wall. The smell pierced her. It coiled and drifted and wove through her, conjuring the last drip of whiskey in her father’s crystal decanter, the first strawberries of summer, the last scrap of Christmas pudding smeared over gold-chased bone china and licked off with lazy tongue swipes. It smelled like a sticky wetness on her fingers, coaxed out of a pretty girl in the cloak room at a Mayfair ball, slipped into a pair of silk gloves and placed on a young colonel’s scarlet shoulder during the waltz.
The smell was so intense, so bright it lit the stairwell. The air brimmed with scents so vast and uncontainable they poured from one sense to the next, banishing every shadow and filling the world with music.
Helen fell from one step to the next, knees weak, each footstep jarring her hips and spine. Her vision spun. The cellar brimmed with haloes and rainbows, a million suns concentrated and focused through a galaxy of lenses, dancing and skipping and brimming with life.
The only point of darkness in the whole cellar was Mimi.
The nursemaid crouched in front of the crypt door. She humped and hunched, ramming her face into the wood as if trying to chew through it. The threshold puddled with blood.
Mimi’s jaw hung loose. It swung against her throat with every thrust. Her nose was pulped, upper lip shredded, the skin of her cheeks sloughed away.
The remains of her teeth
were scattered at her feet.
Helen grabbed her foot with both hands and heaved, dragging her away. Mimi clawed at the floor, clinging to the edges of the stones with her shredded fingernails.
“Miss York?”
At the sound of Peter’s voice, the air cottoned with rainbows.
Peter stood at the head of the stairs, lit by a euphoria of lights. It cast patterns across his face and framed his head in a halo of sparks.
Mimi threw her head back and screamed, her tongue a bleeding live thing trying to escape from a gaping throat, a cavitied maw that was once the face of a girl.
Mimi lunged up the stairwell. Helen chased her.
“Peter, run!” Helen howled.
Mimi threw her arms around the boy. The huff of breath through her open throat spattered the walls with blood. She lunged down the hall, dangling Peter like a rag doll. Helen pitched after her, grabbing at the nursemaid’s hair, skirt, sleeves. In the foyer she caught hold of Peter’s leg and yanked the boy away.
Mimi dug her fingernails into the heavy chest and pulled. It scraped over the floor, throwing splinters across the foyer. She yanked the door open and turned. Blood puddled at her feet. Her tongue wagged from deep in her throat. She raised her arms, as if yearning for Peter to enter her embrace.
Helen clutched Peter to her chest. She forced his head against her neck so he couldn’t see his nursemaid’s pulped face.
Mimi yowled. Then she plunged out the door and clattered across the terrace. At the edge of the water she teetered for a moment, arms wheeling. In the moment before she fell, an inky shape welled up from the water. Its jaws welcomed her with barely a splash.
• • • •
The boy knelt on the nursery window seat beside Helen, his nose pressed to the window pane. Two sinuous forms floated in the lake, lit by the pale rays of dawn poaching over the mountaintops.
“Come sit over here.” Helen patted the stool in front of her.
When the sun broke over the peaks, Peter’s mother and father were gone, sleeping the day away at the bottom of the lake, perhaps, or in the crypt pool, keeping watch over their precious, delicious children.
Helen kept Peter by her day and night. She barely took her eyes off him, never left his side. To him she devoted all her care and attention, until her lashes scraped over dry and pitted eyeballs, her tongue swelled with thirst, and her ears pounded with the call from below.
The scent slipped into her like welcome promises. Lights spun at the edge of her vision, calling, guiding her down to the cavern.
At night, the serpents tossed back and forth in the waves, dancing to the rhythm shuddering through the house. She didn’t have to look out the window to see them; every time she blinked they were behind her eyelids. Beckoning.
Helen made it three days before she broke. When her pen turned clumsy, when her handwriting dissolved into crude scratches, she was past caring. The crypt was all she could think of. Hunger gushed through her, overflowing and carrying her down each flight of stairs as if floating on a warm river to the source of everything left in the world worth wanting.
Her hands were too clumsy to open the door, but it didn’t matter. She could eat her way through it. The scent itself was nourishment enough. Every bite was a blessing. She drowned herself in it. Gave herself over until her mind hung by a thread.
Her world collapsed into pain when Peter pulled her out of the cellar. She resisted, a little, but she couldn’t fight him. Not if it might hurt him. When he got the wires through what was left of her teeth and jaw and twisted them tight, the light abandoned her, the call receded, the house darkened.
“Will you be all right now, Miss York?” Peter asked.
“Oui,” she said.
* * *
Kelly Robson is an award-winning short fiction writer. In 2018, her story “A Human Stain” won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and in 2016, her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the Prix Aurora Award. She has also been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, and Sunburst awards. In 2018, her time travel adventure Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach debuted to high critical praise. After 22 years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica, now live in downtown Toronto.
The Worshipful Society of Glovers
By Mary Robinette Kowal
Outside the cracked window of the garret, the cockle-seller hollered, “Cockles an’ mussels! Cockles an’ mussels!” Her voice blended with the other London morning street sounds to mean that Vaughn was going to be late.
“Botheration.” He tied off the thread in the fine blue leather of the gloves he was stitching and snipped it with the little pair of silver shears he’d snuck out of the master’s shop. Be his hide if he were caught taking them home, but worse if he bit the thread off instead of snipping it neat. No telling what his saliva would do when the guild brownie added the beauty spell to it.
Shoving back his rickety chair from their equally rickety table, Vaughn tucked the shears into his pocket and tied it to the belt of his jerkin. He grabbed the gloves with one hand and a slice of rye bread with the other.
His sister laughed, “Are you going to be late again?”
“Was trying to finish these gloves for Master Martin.” He slid the gloves into the pocket, heading for the door. “I’ll be glad when this damn journeyman period is over.”
Behind him, Sarah made a coughing grunt. Vaughn’s heart jumped sideways in his chest. Not again. He dropped the bread and spun, but not in time to catch her.
Her chin cracked against the worn wood floor as she hit. Every muscle in her body had tightened and she shook, grunting with another seizure. Vaughn dropped to his knees next to her and rolled Sarah onto her side, brushing her hair back from her face.
She couldn’t hear him when one of the fits came over her but he sang to her anyway, just because that’s what their Gran had done.
“As I walked forth one summer’s day,
To view the meadows green and gay
A pleasant bower I espied
Standing fast by the river side,
And in’t a maiden I heard cry:
Alas! alas! there’s none e’er loved as I.”
The tremors subsided, but her eyes still had the glaze about them. Drool puddled from her mouth onto the floor. At least she hadn’t vomited this time.
Vaughn gave a breathless laugh. The things he was thankful for these days.
Sweat ran down his back like it was chasing him through the streets of London. Vaughn dodged around a fine lady in ruddy silks with her fairy chaperone and slid around a pair of gentlemen, wearing green antlered gloves for cunning. He skidded around the corner into the alley between the perfumers and the glovers.
Slowing to a walk, he tried to keep his breath slow, as if he hadn’t been running flat out for ten streets. If the master were only in the front talking to customers…
He needn’t have bothered. Master Martin stood square in the middle of the workshop, glaring. “Vaughn Johnson! Do ye not hear the bells?”
“Yes, sir.” Vaughn swept his hat from his head. “Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again, sir.”
“‘Tis the third time this fortnight!”
“I know, sir, and I’m very sorry.”
Across the workshop, Littleberry, the guild brownie who worked with his master, continued to concentrate on the gloves he was ensorcelling as if Master Martin weren’t yelling at the top of his lungs.
Sweating, Vaughn pulled the blue gloves from the pocket tied to his jerkin’s belt. “I finished the commission for Lady Montrose.”
The master glover snatched them out of his hands. “Was it that sister of yours again?”
He tried not to notice Littleberry’s long ears prick up with interest. Brownies valued an honest man, and if Vaughn wanted to join the guild, he had best tell the truth. “She had a fit this morning but is as well as anything now. I’ll be on time tomorrow, sir.”
“They have places for such
as her.”
Vaughn swallowed. After Gran died, he looked into a sanitarium but the places that he could afford were no fit place for a sixteen-year-old girl. No fit place for anyone really, but he couldn’t send Sarah there. “I can’t afford that. Sorry sir.”
“Eh—I’m not talking about some fine and mighty place such as a lady might go. There’s almshouses.”
Rage flooded through Vaughn and it pushed words out of his mouth. “Maybe I should simply take the master test and then you’ll be shut of me.”
“Oh ho! The mouse bites.”
“Sorry, sir. It was only an idea, sir.” But what he wouldn’t give to already be a master so he could make Sarah’s gloves. With those, he wouldn’t have to worry about leaving her alone. “But if you think I’m ready…”
A bell jingled at the front of the store.
“Ye’ve made a contract with me, and I’ll not waste a minute more of it than I already have. Not with King Henry’s ball coming up. Bring on another journeyman, after I’ve spent all this time getting ye trained up?” He barked a laugh and strode through the curtain that separated the workshop from the front of the store. Master Martin’s tone changed immediately to something honeyed and without the burr of his native accent. “Ah, my dear Lady Flannery, so honored to have you grace our store.”
Vaughn clenched his fists and his jaw. Of course, his master was too cheap to give up a journeyman early. Stalking over to the workbench, he glanced at the other end of the bench to be sure that Littleberry was occupied. The brownie’s back was bent over his work, eyes wrinkled shut.
Slipping the shears from his pocket, Vaughn set them on the bench and hoped Littleberry wouldn’t notice. He had half a mind to make a bargain with the brownie on his own. Guild rules said that he couldn’t sell unlicensed gloves, but if it was just for Sarah—
Right. If he didn’t mind making a deal without the auspices of the Worshipful Society of Glovers, losing his guild membership, and winding up in the streets.
But he couldn’t keep leaving Sarah alone. It wouldn’t hurt to simply ask Littleberry his terms for ensorcelling gloves to control seizures.
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 36