by Ellen Datlow
Coloradans love a good survival story, and this one, it would be the best.
Still, what kind of birth would this be, I wondered.
Would Marion, momentarily, use her blackened index finger to slice the top of her belly skin open, and then pull a struggling, still-dead infant up from it, for me to breathe life into?
Because I would.
Was this to be a more natural birth, one that would literally split her in two, leaving me to sweep up what was left so the kids didn’t crawl through their mother later? And, if so, would I be the one to bite through the umbilical cord, and perhaps hold it to the navel of either Zoe or Keithan, siphoning a breath or two of their life, for their mother’s?
Because I might.
Now Marion was darting her eyes around the room, at first lighting on the fireplace tools, perhaps gauging the sharpness of the ash shovel’s edge, the fineness of the poker’s point, but then moving on, to the next possibility, and the next, almost desperate.
The cesarean, then.
She needed to be able to open herself up to deliver herself, and could already tell that the nail on her index finger would only fold stickily back, were she to try to use it like that.
“Just, just—” I told her, and rose, not wanting to leave her for an instant, since each moment was one moment more with her, but knowing she needed an actual knife, too. From the kitchen.
Crossing past her, I let my fingertips brush the skin of her forearm. I shouldn’t say this, I should leave this between me and her, but since I’m telling you everything, I’ll include this: that one slight brush, that single contact, it explained to me why she’d sat alone in her father’s chair, and not by me. Her skin tore like the most delicate tissue, and underneath was the dark wet soil and undulating, shiny worm shapes I’d expected to spill from her mouth the first time her lips parted.
I pretended not to have seen. I pretended this was nothing.
It was Marion, I mean, worms and all. I would take her any way she presented herself.
Any husband would.
In the kitchen, I of course found myself instantly entrenched in the same battle that had been being waged ever since Denora had her first son: child-safety locks. They were on all the cabinets, all the drawers. They were why there were no sharp implements in the living room.
And, because Zoe and Keithan were just starting to explore on their own two feet, my fingers were still too dumb to bend these locks to my will. So, in order to open the stupid knife drawer, what I had to do was come down to its level like always, to get a mental picture of the mechanism at play, which in turn reminded me how I had always been just such a mechanism to Marion.
Bear with me for this, Detective. I’m not just making it up.
Of me and Marion, she had always been the smarter. I didn’t mind, but I was appreciative that, when she needed to manipulate me to this work party, to that weekend with friends, she could always set things up such that she was playing on beliefs I already held, or could be prompted into, such that, in the end, when I agreed to go, it was more that I was convincing myself than that she was talking me into anything.
To her I was as simple as this child lock.
And, the thing was, she was usually right. The party did turn out to be important to attend. That weekend did turn out to be a good time.
I pushed the button in the unintuitive way that opened the silverware drawer—there was no knife block, of course, as Denora’s oldest son was a climber—and the instant the drawer sighed open on its plastic rollers, I realized that that soil-and-worm interior I’d glimpsed inside Marion…wasn’t that just what I’d been expecting?
And—and had she, by saying nothing, by just directing her eyes around the room here and there, by wearing a mask that would focus all my attention on where and how she looked, had she allowed me to fill all the empty or dead places in the conversation with wish fulfillment? With my own fantasies?
Or, or: I mean, initially, and without hesitation, I’d accepted her presence, her return, but did that then crack the door open on everything I wanted to be true, such that it all came spilling out, past my ability to effectively herd it?
Conditions indeed.
Wasn’t it just like me to ascribe rules on the return of a dead wife?
And, is it not pure unadulterated wishful thinking that would allow me not just to believe that my wife is smuggling her own self out of the realm of death in her own stomach, but that I needed to assist her by coming into the kitchen to retrieve her a knife?
My throat dropped into my stomach. That’s what it felt like.
“Marion?” I said, loud enough to risk waking the kids.
Instead of a reply, a lone pine needle dislodged from the baseboard under the cabinet the sink was sitting in.
It was dislodging because of a slight draft. The slightest of drafts.
Still holding the knife, I rushed into the living room, saw only black-and-white cowhide where Marion had been, and the mask upon it, its backside unspeakable, and even then the story I was already spinning in my stupid, idiot head, it was that she’d known she was going to dissipate, and, not wanting to make me see that, had tricked me into the kitchen in her way, such that she could leave unseen.
I was partly right.
The front door was open.
And the table the kids’ car seats had been resting safely on, it was empty.
I fell to my knees but was up just as fast, crashing through the front door, immediately miring in the snow already up to my waist.
There were no tracks to follow, Detective.
What I did find, finally?
In the bank of snow on the north side of the porch, where it had crested against the railing, there was a hole of sorts. A burrow. A tunnel.
The two car seats were there, because they would have been too awkward in such a confined space. Because mothers, they like to hold their babies close to them. The way I knew she’d taken them into that snowbank was that a mound of wormy soil had sheared off when she forced herself in. It was crumbled, of course, but it was the same as I’d seen wriggling inside her forearm, just under the tissue-thin skin. Go up there, Detective, you’ll find a pile of dirt on the porch, I promise. That’s how you’ll know for sure. That and that waffle.
In short, here’s what happened, if this fits better on your form there: my wife Marion, a new mother, she died fourteen months ago, and then this Halloween, she came back not for me, but for her children.
As for where she took them? That’s got to be the next question. That’s the only question.
From summer hikes around that cabin—guided hikes, I should say, the guide being a woman who had grown up spending her summers there—I can tell you with assurance that there are fissures in the rock for miles around that cabin. What you’ll think, what I can see you’re already thinking, it’s that any one of those fissures, they could hold a small body long enough for it to disappear. Not even a year, right, the bones still being so soft?
You’re wrong, Detective.
You want the version of the story where the father succumbs to the same cycle of grief the mother did, so goes to the mountain for his cure, and, when he can’t find it, he forces it, he makes an offering on that most holy of nights, to try to conjure his wife up from the rocks.
Better you should think I slathered my own two children in strawberry jelly and left them just past the porch for the raccoons to find, and gnaw into. Better you should think that I watched.
As for what Marion’s family will think when they all get back from Paris, that’s a foregone conclusion: I did it. As evidence, they’ll probably offer that it had always been Marion who was paranoid about accidentally leaving the kids in the car after arriving at the bank or the grocery store. Or, in this case, the cabin.
Granted, for fourteen months, I hadn’t had to be the one to keep track of who was where, car-wise. And, for the few months before that, Marion had been on the job.
But what kind of father
would I be?
Would I not, at some point in the snowy night, get off email at last and spy the shopping bag on the counter, an inchworm and a little devil peeking out of their cardboard there?
I never logged in to email from the cabin, that’s the thing. Check the logs.
If I did anything, it was use Marion’s father’s precious bandwidth to watch through her movie one last time and pause it at exactly that moment she falls back, into space.
She’s looking right at me, I can tell.
She’s telling me that the kids, the kids—
What she’s telling me, what I know, it’s that Zoe and Keithan, they’re all right now. They’re with their mother.
She died hanging on to one side of a rock face. She now lives on the other. And, on one night when the membrane was more permeable than it is all the other nights of the year, she crawled back for her babies.
You’ll never find Zoe. You’ll never find Keithan.
I’m sorry, this doesn’t make your job any easier, but it’s true.
I can see you’re already drawing your own conclusions, too.
That’s fine, really. I understand.
In your shoes, in your uniform, I might too, right?
We’re rational people here.
But, what I want you to do here, Officer—Detective, I’m sorry, it was a long trudge through the snow—what I want you to do mainly here, it’s hold on to your position for as many years as you can. Or, if you hire away, or retire, then keep a line of communication open back to here.
Why?
Before too many years have passed, I’m pretty sure reports are going to start trickling down the mountain, see. Reports of a large blind grub moving through the shale. Reports of a squat red demon watching from an abutment, its eyes bored with humankind.
There will even be, at some point, word of a woman with matted hair and hollow eyes, running barefoot through the trees alongside a mountain biker.
And then you’ll know, Detective.
That will be the sequel to the television movie, only, you’ll be the only one piecing it all together, as I’ll be long gone by then, dispatched by the law, eaten by the media, driven into hiding, suicided in a closet with a twice-bitten waffle that should have proved everything, it doesn’t matter.
What will matter, it’s that woman running through the trees, her eyes locked with this mountain biker’s.
What she’s saying, it’s not stay away, this is my mountain.
What she’s saying, it’s wait until October.
Come back this way when there’s snow on the ground, and I can pull you close, my long fingers to the base of your skull, my dry lips covering yours, so my dirtmouth can vomit across into yours, and it’s like that we never really die.
My wife should have washed up on a creek bank this spring, and the spring before that, too.
Ask yourself why she hasn’t, sir.
See what you believe.
A Small Taste of the Old Country
Jonathan Maberry
1
Campan Deutschargentinierrio Cantina
El Chaltén Village
Santa Cruz, Argentina
October 31, 1948
“WOULD YOU GENTLEMEN like something fresh from the oven?”
The two men seated at a small table by the window looked up with wary eyes. The question had been asked by a very old man with a face that seemed to be composed entirely of nose and wrinkles from which small, bright blue eyes twinkled. He held a wicker basket with a red cloth folded over the heaped contents.
“No,” said the older of the two seated men. He was about forty and had very black hair. His mouth was a hard horizontal slash bracketed by curved lines. Laugh lines, perhaps, though he was not smiling at the moment. “We did not order anything.” His Spanish was rough and awkward, fitted badly around a thick foreign accent he had difficulty trying to disguise.
“I’m sure you will both enjoy what I have.” The intruder nudged the basket an inch closer.
The rest of the cantina was quiet; a few clusters of men bent close for discreet conversation over tall glasses of beer. There was no laughter in the place. No music. No one who entered did so with a happy laugh or with a boisterous call to a friend. There was a large fire in the hearth because the temperature had dipped during the cloudy day, and stiff winds blew inland across the Falkland Current.
The second man at the table was a young bull with blond hair and huge shoulders. “Does the landlord know that you’re peddling your crap here?”
“Sir,” said the old man, “I am a baker, and the landlord is a regular customer.”
The black-haired man leaned a couple of inches toward the basket, then cut a look at his friend. “Did you smell this?”
“Smell what?” said the younger man, whose chair was set on the far corner of the small table.
Encouraged by the expression on the black-haired man’s face, the baker said, “I have something here that you might enjoy, my friends.”
“I doubt that.”
“May I show you?” asked the baker, his smile obsequious but earnest. “I can guarantee you both that this is something you cannot get here. Not even in the houses of your friends who understand such things. Alas, no. The recipe is an old family one and is, perhaps, too regional and specific to be popular among the locals here. It is something that you probably thought you would never smell or see again, and certainly never taste again. Not truly. Not, if I may be allowed a liberty, authentically.”
“Oh, very well,” grumbled the blond. “Show us and be done with it.”
The intruder bowed, plucked a corner of the cloth, and folded it back with great ceremony to reveal small loaves of dark bread. Steam rose in soft curls, and a delicious aroma filled the air. The black-haired man smiled and let out a long, soft breath. His friend’s eyes widened.
“Schwarzbrot…?”
“Indeed, my friends,” said the baker. “I’m delighted you’ve heard of it, even here in Argentina. Yes, schwarzbrot it is. And it is a German recipe for it, handed down from my grandmother’s grandmother. With some Austrian touches, of course. The very best wheat and rye blended with caraway, anise, fennel, just a little coriander. And, of course, a touch here and there of allspice, fenugreek, sweet trefoil, celery seeds, and cardamom. I grind each of the spices by hand and then grind them again together and mix them into the dough. Everything is done the old way. Everything is done right, because such things deserve precision, do you agree?”
The men nodded absently, their eyes fixed on the hot bread. They both swallowed over and over again as their mouths watered.
“Baking is a tradition as worthy as any other,” continued the baker. “In Austria and Germany each family of bakers guards its own recipes for making schwarzbrot jealously. Go on, my friends, try them.”
The men exchanged a brief look and a briefer shared nod, and then they each took a loaf of the black bread. They sniffed and then took tentative bites. The baker watched their eyes, saw the eyelids flutter, and he smiled as the men chewed, swallowed, and took larger bites.
“Mein Gott,” murmured the black-haired man. “This is heaven. This is pure heaven. I’d never thought…” He stopped, shook his head, and took a third bite, leaving only a nub pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
The young blond man ate the entire loaf without comment and then eyed the basket. “How much for another?”
The baker smiled and placed it on the table. “Consider these a gift. It is a great pleasure to know that you not only enjoy them but also truly appreciate them. So, please, enjoy a small taste of the old country.”
Each man snatched seconds from the basket and bit into them. After a few moments of undisguised gustatory lust, the black-haired man looked up, his jaw muscles bunching and flexing as he chewed. “Which old country would that be, exactly? We are Argentinians. Santa Cruz is our home. We are from here.”
“Of course,” agreed the baker, returning the nod and adding a sma
ll wink. “We are all clearly Argentinian.”
“Yes,” said the black-haired man.
“Yes,” said the blond. “I have never been out of the country. Born and bred here.”
“Of course,” agreed the baker.
They all smiled at one another. When the two younger men finished their loaves and explored the basket, they found it empty, and their faces fell.
“I have more in my shop,” the baker said quickly. “It’s near here, on a side street off the square. Becker’s Breads and Baked Goods.”
“And you are Becker?”
“Josef Becker, sir,” said the old man. “And you gentlemen are…?”
The black-haired man said, “I’m Roberto Santiago, and this is Eduardo Gomez.”
Becker looked amused. “Santiago and Gomez? Of course.”
Santiago eyed him. “Your name is not Spanish. Are you Deutschargentinier?”
“No,” said Becker, “I am not a descendant of immigrants, as I imagine you are.”
“Sure,” said Gomez without conviction. “That is what we are.”
“My great-grandmother was born in Berlin but married an Austrian, and I was born in Hallstatt, which is in Austria,” said Becker. “Perhaps you have heard of it? Such a lovely place in the Salzkammergut, located on the southwestern shore of a lake. Those of us from Hallstatt, there is great pride in who we are, and what we are, and what we have endured.”
“I have never heard of Hallstatt,” said Gomez in a guarded tone.
“Have you not?” said Becker, looking sad.
“We are Argentinian,” insisted Santiago. His eyes were hooded.
“Of course, of course,” Becker soothed. “As are so many here in Santa Cruz, and in Buenos Aires, Misiones, La Pampa, Chubut, and a hundred small villages.”
The men said nothing.
“We are all Argentinians because it is such a lovely place,” continued Becker amiably. “A lovely and very safe place to be. The brisk and breezy nights, the tequila…”