Dangerous Women

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  She walked to the door. I watched her go. Yeah, right, I thought. I have power over her. As if. I have power over her until they decide not to charge her, until the headlines disappear. Then where am I? Then I’m her Lord and Master. Just like Jim was.

  She passed close to me. Close enough to hear my thoughts. She glanced up, surprised. She laughed at me. “What. You think I’d kill you too?”

  “I’d always have to wonder, wouldn’t I?” I said.

  Still smiling, she jogged her eyebrows comically. “Whatever turns you on,” she said.

  It was the comedy that did it. I couldn’t resist the impulse to wipe that smile off her murdering face. I reached out and grabbed her hair in my fist. Her black, black hair.

  It was even softer than I thought it would be.

  Dangerous Women - Penzler, Otto Ed v1.rtf

  MR. GRAY’S FOLLY

  JOHN CONNOLLY

  I

  t was, said my wife, quite the ugliest thing she had ever seen. I had to admit that she was correct in her assessment.

  This was not, generally speaking, a typical occurrence in our relationship. As she approached late middle age (with all the grace and ease, it should be added, of a funeral party stumbling in a cemetery), Eleanor had grown increasingly intolerant of views that diverged from her own. Inevitably, mine appeared to diverge more often than most, so agreement in any form was a cause for considerable, if muted, celebration.

  Norton Hall was a wonderful acquisition, a late-eighteenth-century country residence with landscaped gardens and fifty acres of prime land. It was an architectural gem and would make us a wonderful home, since it was simultaneously small enough to be manageable yet spacious enough to permit us to avoid each other for significant portions of the day. Unfortunately, as my wife had duly noted, the folly at the end of the garden was another matter entirely. It was ugly and brutal, with unadorned rectangular pillars and a bare white cupola topped with a cross. There were no steps leading up to it and the only way of gaining access to the interior appeared to be by clambering over the base. Even the birds avoided it, preferring instead to take up positions in a nearby oak tree, where they cooed nervously amongst themselves like spinsters at a parish dance.

  According to the agent, one of Norton Hall’s previous owners, a Mr. Gray, had built the folly as a memorial to his late wife. It struck me that he couldn’t have liked his wife very much if that was what he had built in her memory. I was not overly fond of my wife much of the time, but even I didn’t dislike her enough to erect a monstrosity like that in her memory. At the very least, I would have softened some of the edges and stuck a dragon on the top as a reminder of the dear departed. A little damage to the base had been caused at some point by Mr. Ellis, the gentleman who had owned the house before us, but he seemed to have thought better of his original impulse and the area in question had since been repaired and repainted.

  All things considered, it really was a frightful eyesore.

  My first instinct was to have the blasted thing destroyed, but in the weeks that followed, I started to find the folly appealing. No, “appealing” isn’t the right word. Rather, I began to feel that it had a purpose, which I had not yet surmised, and that it would be unwise to meddle until I knew more about it. How I came to feel that way, I can trace to one particular incident that occurred about five weeks after we took occupancy of Norton Hall.

  I had taken a chair and placed it on the bare stone floor of the folly, as it was a beautiful summer’s day and the folly offered the possibility of both shade and a pleasing aspect. I was just settling down with the paper when the strangest thing happened: the floor moved, as if, for a single moment, it had somehow become liquid instead of solid and some hidden tide had caused a wave to ripple across its surface. The sunlight grew sickly and weak, and the landscape shrouded itself in drifting shadows. I felt as if a strip of gauze from a sick man’s bed had been placed across my eyes, for I could faintly smell decay in the air. I stood up suddenly, experiencing a little lightness in the head, and saw a man standing among the trees, watching me.

  “Hullo, there,” I said. “Can I help you with something?”

  He was tall and dressed in tweeds: a distinctly sickly-looking chap, I thought, with a thin face and dark, arresting eyes. And I swear that I heard him speak, although his lips didn’t move. What he said was:

  “Let the folly be.”

  Well, I found that a little rum, I have to admit, even in my weakened state. I’m not a man who is used to being addressed in such a way by complete strangers. Even Eleanor has the good grace to preface her orders with a “Would you mind… ?” followed by the occasional “please” or “thank you” to soften the blow.

  “I say,” I replied, “I own this land. You can’t come in here telling me what I can and can’t do with it. Who are you, anyway:

  But blast it all if he didn’t repeat the same four words.

  “Let the folly be.”

  And, with that, the fellow simply turned around and vanished into the trees. I was about to follow him and escort him off the property when I heard a movement on the grass behind me. I spun around, half-expecting him to have popped up there as well, but it was only Eleanor. For a moment, she was a part of the altered landscape, a wraith among wraiths, and then all gradually returned to normal and she was again my once-beloved wife.

  “Who were you talking to, dear?” she asked.

  “There was a chap hanging about, over there,” I replied, indicating with my chin toward the trees.

  She looked in the direction of the woods, then shrugged.

  “Well, there’s no one there now. Are you sure that you saw someone? Perhaps the heat is bothering you, or something worse. You should see a doctor.”

  And there it was. I was Edgar Merriman: husband, property owner, businessman, and potential lunatic in his wife’s eyes. At this rate, it wouldn’t be very long before a couple of strong men were sitting on my chest until the booby carriage arrived, my wife perhaps shedding a small crocodile tear of regret as she signed the committal papers.

  It struck me, not for the first time, that Eleanor appeared to have lost some weight in recent weeks, or perhaps it was simply the way the light reflecting from the folly caught her face. It lent an air of hunger to her appearance, an impression reinforced by a brightness to her eyes that I had not seen before. It made me think of a rapacious bird and, for some reason, the thought caused me to shiver. I followed her back to the house for tea but I couldn’t eat, partly because of the way she was looking at me over the scones like an impatient vulture waiting for some poor chap to give up the ghost, but also because she talked incessantly of the folly.

  “When are you going to have it demolished, Edgar?” she began. “I want it done as soon as possible, before the bad weather sets in. Edgar! Edgar, are you listening?”

  And damn it if she didn’t grip my arm so tightly that I dropped my cup in shock, fragments of pale china littering the stone floor like the remnants of young dreams. The cup was part of our wedding china, yet its loss did not appear to trouble my wife as once it might have. In fact, she barely seemed to notice the broken cup, or the tea slowly seeping through the cracks in the floor. Her grip remained tight, and her hands were like talons, long and thin with hard, sharp nails. Thick blue veins coursed across the backs of her hands like serpents intertwining, barely restrained by her skin. A sour scent seeped from her pores, and it was all that I could do not to wrinkle my nose in disgust.

  “Eleanor,” I asked, “are you ill? Your hands are so thin, and I do believe you’ve lost weight from your face.”

  Reluctantly, she relinquished her grip upon my arm and turned her face away.

  “Don’t be silly, Edgar,” she replied. “I’m fit as a fiddle.”

  But the question seemed to make her uncomfortable, because she immediately busied herself among the cupboards, making the kind of racket associated more with anger than purpose. I left her to it, rubbing my arm where she had gripped it
and wondering at the nature of the woman to whom I was married.

  That evening, for want of something better to do, I went to the library of the house. Norton Hall had been put on the market by some sister of the late Mr. Ellis, and the library and most of its furnishings were part of the sale. Mr. Ellis appeared to have met a bad end: According to local gossip, his wife left him and, in a fit of depression, he shot himself in a hotel room in London. His wife did not even turn up for his service, poor beggar. Actually, there was still some speculation among our more fanciful neighbors that Mr. Ellis had done away with his good lady wife, although the police were never able to pin anything on him. Whenever a particularly likely set of bones turned up on waste ground, or was found buried near a riverbank by an inquisitive dog, Mr. Ellis and his missing wife tended to receive a mention in the local newspaper reports, even though twenty years had passed since his death. A more superstitious man might have balked at buying Norton Hall under such circumstances, but I was not such a man. In any case, from what I knew of Mr. Ellis he appeared to have been an intelligent man and, therefore, if he had killed his wife he was unlikely to have left her remains lying about the house where someone might trip over them and think, “Hullo, that’s not right.”

  I had only visited the library once or twice-I’m not much of a man for books, truth be told-and had done little more than glance at the titles and blow dust and cobwebs from the older volumes. It was a surprise to me, then, to find a book sitting on a small table by an armchair. I thought at first that Eleanor might have left it there, but she was even less of a reader than I was. I picked it up and opened it at random, revealing a page covered in elegant, closely written script. I flicked back to the title page and found the inscription: A Middle-Eastern Journey by J. F. Gray. A small, tattered photograph marked the page and, as I looked at it, I couldn’t help but feel a nasty chill down my spine. The man in the photograph, obviously the titular J. F. Gray, looked uncannily like the chap who had been wandering around the grounds offering unsought-for advice about the folly. But that couldn’t be possible, I thought: After all, Gray had been dead for almost fifty years now and probably had other things on his mind, like choirs eternal or heat rash, depending on the life that he had led on earth. I put the thought to the back of my mind and returned my attention to the book. It was, it emerged, much more than a journal of Gray’s trip to the Middle East.

  It was, in effect, a confession.

  It seemed that, on a trip to Syria in 1900, John Frederick Gray had acquired, through theft, the bones of a woman believed to be Lilith, the first wife of Adam. According to Gray, who knew a little of the biblical apocrypha, Lilith was reputed to be a demon, the original witch, a symbol of the male fear of untapped female power. Gray heard the tale of the bones from some chap in Damascus who sold him a part of what he claimed was Alexander the Great’s armor, and who subsequently directed him to a little village to the far north of the country where the bones were reputed to be kept in a locked crypt.

  The journey was long and difficult, although such challenges always seem to be grist to the mill for chaps like Gray, who appear to regard a comfortable chair and a good pipe as vices on a par with the actions of the Sodomites. But when Gray reached the village with his guides he found himself made unwelcome by the natives. According to his journal, the villagers told him that entry to the crypt was forbidden to strangers, and most especially to women. Gray was asked to leave, but he set up camp for the night some small distance from the village and mulled over what he had been told.

  It was after midnight when one of the local ne’er-do-wells made his way to the encampment and told Gray that, for a not insignificant fee, he was prepared to remove the casket containing the bones from its resting place and bring it to him. He was a man of his word. Within the hour he returned, and he brought with him an ornate, and clearly very ancient, casket, which he said contained the remains of Lilith. The box was about three feet long, two feet wide, and a foot high, and securely locked. The thief told Gray that the key remained always in the possession of the local imam, but the Englishman was unconcerned. The tale of Lilith was a myth, merely a creation of fearful men, but Gray believed he might be able to sell the beautiful casket as a curiosity when he returned home. He packed it away with his other acquisitions, and thought little more about it until he was back in England and reunited with his young wife, Jane, at Norton Hall.

  Gray first began to notice a change in his wife’s behavior shortly after the bones arrived in their home. She grew strangely thin, almost emaciated, and began to evince an unhealthy interest in the boxed remains. Then, one evening when he had thought her to be in bed asleep, Gray found her prying at the lock with a chisel. When he tried to take the tool away from her, she slashed at him wildly before making a final strike at the lock, shattering it so that it dropped to the floor in two pieces. Before he could stop her, she had wrenched open the lid and revealed its contents: old brown bones curled in on themselves, with patches of tattered skin still adhering, and a skull almost like that of a reptile or a bird, narrow and elongated while still retaining traces of a half-developed humanity.

  And then, according to Gray, the bones moved. It was only the slightest thing at first, a rustling that might simply have been the bones settling after their sudden disturbance, but it quickly became pronounced. The fingers stretched, as if powered by unseen muscles and tendons, then the bones in the toes tapped softly against the sides of the casket. Finally, the skull swung on its exposed vertebrae and those beaklike jaws opened and closed with a faint click.

  The dust in the casket began to rise and the remains were quickly surrounded by a reddish vapor. But the vapor came, not from the casket, but from Gray’s own wife, emerging from her mouth in a torrent, as though her blood had somehow dried to powder and was now being wrenched from its veins. As he watched, she grew thinner and thinner, the skin on her face crumpling and tearing like paper, her eyes growing wider as the thing in the casket sucked the life from her. Through the mist, Gray caught a glimpse of the most terrifying face reconstituting itself. Round green-black eyes devoured him hungrily, the parchmentlike skin turned from gray to a scaly black, and the beaked jaws opened and closed with a sound like bones snapping as it tasted the air. Gray sensed its desire, its base sexual need. It would consume him, and he would be grateful for its appetites, even as its talons ripped into him and its beak blinded him and its limbs enfolded him in a final embrace. He felt himself responding, moving ever closer to the emerging being, just as a thin membrane slipped across the creature’s eyes, like the blinking of a lizard, and its spell was briefly broken.

  Gray recovered himself and dived at the casket, sending the lid shooting down hard on the creature’s head. He could feel the foul being hammering and thrashing from within as he look the chisel and jammed it through the loop of the lock, locking and sealing the casket. The red vapor instantly disappeared, the thing’s struggles eased and, as he watched, his beloved wife crumpled to the floor and breathed her last.

  There was only one page remaining in the narrative, and it detailed the origins of the folly: the digging of its deep foundations, the placing of the casket at the very bottom, and the construction of the folly itself above it in an effort to restrain Lilith forever. It was a ridiculous tale, of course. It had to be. It was a fantasy, Gray’s attempt to scare the servants or to earn himself a mention in some penny dreadful.

  Yet when I lay beside Eleanor that night, I did not sleep and I sensed a wakefulness to her that made me uneasy.

  The days that followed did little to calm my feelings of unhappiness, or to improve relations between my wife and me. I found myself returning again and again to Gray’s tale, nonsense though it had initially seemed. I dreamed of unseen things tapping at our bedroom window and when, in my dream, I approached the pane to ascertain the cause of the noise, an elongated head would emerge from the darkness, its dark, predatory eyes gleaming hungrily as it broke through the glass and tried to devour me. As
I fought it, I could feel the shape of its sagging breasts against me, and its legs wrapped around me in a mockery of a lover’s ardor. Then I would awake to find a small smile on Eleanor’s face, as though she knew of my dream and were secretly pleased at its effect upon me.

  As we grew increasingly alienated from each other, I took to spending more time in the garden, or walking along the boundaries of my land, half hoping to catch some sight of the anonymous visitor who bore such a marked resemblance to the unfortunate J. F. Gray. It was on one such occasion that I spied a figure on a bicycle making laborious progress up the hill that led to the gates of Norton Hall. Constable Morris hove into view-quite literally, for he was a large man and his considerable girth, combined with the blurring effect of the day’s heat, gave him the appearance of a great, black ship appearing slowly upon the horizon. Eventually he seemed to realize the futility of his continued effort to master the hill on two wheels when gravity appeared determined to frustrate him, and he duly dismounted and walked his bicycle along the remaining stretch until he came at last to the gates.

  Constable Morris was one of two policemen assigned to the little station at Ebbingdon, the town nearest to Norton Hall. He and the local sergeant, Ludlow, had responsibility for maintaining order not only in Ebbingdon but in the nearby villages of Langton, Bracefield, and Harbiston, as well as their surrounding areas, a task that they accomplished using a combination of a single dilapidated police car, a pair of bicycles, and the vigilance of the local populace. I had spoken to Ludlow only on a handful of occasions, and had found him to be a rather taciturn man, but Morris was a regular sight on the road by our property and was more inclined to spend a spare moment talking (and catching his breath) than was his superior.

  “Hot day,” I remarked.

  Constable Morris, red-faced from his exertions, wiped his shirtsleeve across his brow and concurred that, yes, it was indeed a devil of a day. I offered him a glass of homemade lemonade, should he choose to accompany me back to the house, and he readily agreed. We talked of local matters on the short walk from the gate, and I left him by the folly while I went into the kitchen to pour the lemonade. Eleanor was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear her moving about in the attic of the house, making a dreadful racket as she tossed aside boxes and scattered crates. I chose not to disturb her with news of Morris’s arrival.