by Paula Guran
“When she’d married my father, her own family disowned her—she was better than him, of course, but when a woman marries down she loses all her status, while the man’s increases ever so slightly. I found a woman willing to take me as an apprentice—although truth be told, I was the least able milliner-in-training ever to grace her establishment. We struggled along on my wage for a while, but we weren’t making ends meet and Lucius’ condition didn’t make things any easier.
“She went to her family, begged her mother to take her back if only for the sake of the grandchildren. And the woman refused. Wouldn’t even offer a basket of food to help tide us over—what kind of impoverished spirit refuses such a basic kindness?” Kit looked at her hands, clasped tightly in front of her. She rose and began to pace the pretty room.
“And so, one night—this was before we moved in with Mrs. Kittredge, you understand, in another boarding house less salubrious than our last and less likely to poke into one’s business. My mother would kiss us goodnight, and when she thought us asleep, she’d pinch her cheeks and carmine her lips, paint kohl about her eyes like a gypsy. She’d loosen her hair and wear the only dress she’d kept from her previous life as a rich woman’s daughter, a scarlet ball gown, with black lace and jet beads sewn across it like dark stars.
“I’d hide and watch from the top of the stairs as she walked down to the front door with all the dignity of a queen and go out into the evening to earn whatever she could to keep us fed, Inspector. Judge as you will, but that was what my mother was willing to do for us.”
“What happened?” asked Makepeace quietly, as if he feared the sound of his voice might break the spell of her story; that she would stop talking and he would cease to be here, in this place where she wove words to conjure another time and place, other people who were not then as they were now.
“She came home late one night, battered and bruised, one ear almost torn off, her dress ripped. They’d cut her, too, there are scars on her belly you’d never wish to see. She survived, but not really. Not up here,” Kit tapped her own temple, then over her heart. “Nor here. And if that wasn’t enough, one of those filthy bastards infected her.”
“Syphilis?”
She nodded. “She’s rotting from the inside out. She’s rotting from her brain down to her very core, Inspector. Growing more unstable by the day, and I can’t look after her anymore.”
“So she’s . . . ”
“Sir William has been very generous—it makes me wonder sometimes if he knew her before, but he will not say. I think about what Mary Kelly said about him visiting the girls before he was incapacitated. He’s arranged a place for her at a sanatorium near Windsor. Lucius, Mrs. K and I visit her once a week, although she still will not speak to me, quite rages when she catches sight of me, so mostly I sit in the foyer and read.” Kit laughed mirthlessly. “I find it fascinating, don’t you, Inspector, that she judges me more harshly for dressing as a man and entering your world than I ever judged her for being a whore?”
He didn’t know how to reply, so he changed the subject, “And all that . . . magic I saw in you, all that fire—is it gone?”
She answered obliquely. “It wasn’t me, wasn’t any power of mine. It was theirs, the witches, I was just an instrument.”
“What will you do now?”
“Oh, there are things to keep me busy, matters to look into,” she said and offered no further explanation.
They sat in silence for a while until Kit smiled and said, “I don’t wish to be rude, Inspector, but it’s time for Lucius’ physical therapy.”
“Of course.” Makepeace rose and she saw him out the door, brushing close by him and it seemed to paralyze him. He towered over her, staring down. He lifted one large hand and placed it on her shoulder, where he could feel the bandages that still bound her flesh. He opened his mouth to speak, leaning towards her.
“Do not mistake me, Makepeace. I’ll be no man’s whore.” Kit’s lips were tightly compressed into a single angry line. Makepeace blushed and muttered an apology, shrugging on his overcoat and hurrying down the steps.
Kit wondered if she would see him again or not, then decided it probably didn’t matter.
She watched him stride along the street until a movement caught her eye. Over by the fence around the private park, the spot where she would have the footman carry Lucius every day when spring came, where she hoped he would walk someday, there stood a woman.
Small with dark brown hair, wearing a forest green dress, a black short jacket over the top and a clean white apron. But she wasn’t quite right—her outline shivered and shimmered, hovering between this world and the next. Behind her ephemeral skirts stood a child, holding onto her mother’s legs, peeking at Kit as if shy.
Kit wondered at the ghosts, that the child who’d not ever drawn breath would look this way, then she figured Mary Jane could probably imagine her daughter any way she wanted now, could fashion her ectoplasmic flesh as she wished. The other woman smiled, a cocky sort of quirk that said See? I’m still here. I won.
Kit returned the grin and raised her hand in greeting, in farewell. Mary Jane picked up the little girl and set her on her hip. She gave Kit a jaunty wave and walked right through the fence into the snow-covered park, fading as she got further away. When she could be seen no more, Kit shook herself and went inside.
There were things to do.
Angela Slatter is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award, author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, World Fantasy Award-winning The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Sourdough and Other Stories, Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett), Black-Winged Angels, and The Female Factory (again with Hannett). Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Fantasy, Nightmare, Lightspeed, A Book of Horrors, and Australian, UK, and US “best of” anthologies. Slatter’s debut novel, Vigil will be released by Jo Fletcher Books this year, as will her first US collection, A Feast of Shadows: Stories (Prime Books).
All our understanding of time is made up of slipshod words that you can rearrange to cover up the fact that somewhere, somebody was wrong.
SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN
Nadia Bulkin
A ghost town lived down the road from us. Its bones peeked out from over the tree line when we rattled down Highway 51 in our cherry red pickup. I could see a steeple, a water tower, a dome for a town hall. It was our shadow. It was a ghost town because there was an accident, a long time ago, which turned it into a graveyard.
I used to wonder: what kind of accident kills a whole town? Was it washed away in a storm? Did God decide, “away with you sinners,” with a wave of His hand—did He shake our sleeping Mount Halberk into life? My parents said I was “morbid” when I asked these questions, and told me to play outside. So I would go outside, and play Seven Minutes in Heaven—freeze tag with a hold time of seven minutes, the length of time it takes for a soul to fly to God—with Allie Moore and Jennifer Trudeau. When the sky turned dark orange we would run back to our houses and slam our screen doors, and after my parents tucked me in I would sketch a map of the ghost town by the glow of my Little Buzz flashlight: church on the bottom of Church Street instead of the top, school on the east of the railroad tracks instead of the west. Then I would draw Mount Halberk, and take a black Sharpie, and rain down black curlicues on those little Monopoly houses until every single one was blanketed by the dark. When I got older, and madder, I would draw stick-people too—little stick-families walking little stick-dogs, little stick-farmers herding little stick-cows. And last, the darkness.
When I was in junior high school they told us the truth: the accident was industrial. The principal stood up in the auditorium and said there used to be a factory over there, in that town, and one day there was a leak of toxic gas, and people died over there, in that town. A long time ago, he said, nothing to worry about now. Some parents were angry; they said kids were getting upset. But a gas leak sounds a lot less scary than a vo
lcano, ask any kid.
Nobody would talk about it, except when we needed to dwell on something bad. Some families said a little prayer for the ghost town during Thanksgiving, so they could be grateful for something. My uncle Ben, the asshole, told my cousins that he would leave them there if they misbehaved. Politicians in mustard suits pointed across the stage of the town hall and said, “My opponent supports the kind of policies that lead to the kind of accidents that empty out towns like Manfield.” That was the ghost’s name: Manfield. I lived in Hartbury.
Allie Moore was afraid of bats; she didn’t like the way they crawl. Jennifer Trudeau was afraid of ice cream trucks, and nobody knew why. We only knew that when she heard the ring-a-ling song coming around the corner she’d rub her scarab amulet, to remember the power of God.
Me, I was afraid of skeletons. It was mostly the skull, the empty hugeness of the eye sockets and the missing nose and the grin of a mouth that could bite but couldn’t kiss. But I also hated the rib cage and the pelvic butterfly and the knife-like fingers splayed apart in perpetual pain. It made me sick to think about what waited for me on the other side: the ugliness, the suffering. My parents took me to church and Pastor Joel promised that there would be none of that in Heaven, when I finally exhausted the cherished life that Almighty God had given me, when I finally decided my seven minutes were up and I was ready to go. “But that won’t be for a long, long time from now,” he said, patting my head. “So run along.”
That was all well and good, but Pastor Joel didn’t stop the nightmares. He didn’t stop that Hell-sent skeleton from crawling out from under my box spring, clacking its teeth, tearing my sheets and then my skin. I would try to run but could never move, and those rotten bones would clamp like pliers around my neck, squeezing and squeezing until I woke up. I stopped telling my parents; their solution to everything was sleeping pills. The only thing that calmed me down was drawing and destroying Manfield, to remember that I wasn’t dead like them.
It was Miss Lucy who stopped the nightmares. Miss Lucy loved Halloween, and come October she decked the classroom in pumpkins and sheet-ghosts and purple-caped vampires. She also hung a three-foot skeleton decal from the American flag above the white board. I could not stop staring at it, because it would not stop staring at me. “I know ol’ Mr. Bones is kind of creepy,” Miss Lucy whispered after I refused to go to the board to answer a math problem. “But you shouldn’t be scared of skeletons, Amanda. You’ve already got one inside you.” Then she reached out her finger and poked me in the chest, in what I suddenly realized was bone. I’m proud to say that I only wanted to dig myself apart for a few gory seconds before I realized that Miss Lucy was right, that a skeleton couldn’t hurt me if it was already part of me.
“Memento mori,” Miss Lucy said. My parents thought she was witchy, and corrected things she told us about the Pacific Wars—we never promised that we would help Japan, we never threatened Korea. She was gone by next September, and a woman with puppy-patterned vests had taken over her class. Mrs. Joan didn’t like Halloween. Parents liked her, though.
I was seventeen the first time I went to Manfield. Allie Moore’s boyfriend, Jake Felici, decided it would be a hardcore thing to do for Halloween. Jake was a moody, gangly boy who played bass guitar, and Allie’s hair had turned a permanent slime-green from years on the swim team. They were the captains of hardcore. Allie invited me and Jennifer Trudeau. Jake invited Brandon Beck, who I loved so frantically that I thought it might kill me. So while other kids in Hartbury were drinking screwdrivers in somebody’s basement or summoning demons with somebody’s Ouija board, we piled into Jake’s beat-up Honda Accord and drove down Highway 51, Brandon and his perfect chestnut hair smashed between me and Jennifer Trudeau.
We were expecting something like those old Western gold-miner towns—wood shacks, rusted roadsters, a landscape still dominated by barrels and wheelbarrows. We were expecting something that had been cut down a hundred years ago, when companies were still playing around with chemicals like babies with guns, before regulations would have kept them in line. But that was not Manfield. Manfield had ticky-tacky houses and plastic lawn gnomes and busted minivans. There was a Java Hut coffee house, a Quick Loan, a Little Thai restaurant. That is, Manfield looked just like Hartbury—only dead. Only dark.
We were standing in what had once been the town’s beating heart. Jake’s flashlight found a now-blinded set of traffic lights. Allie’s flashlight found something called Ram’s Head Tavern. Taped to the inside of the tavern’s windows were newspaper clippings from twelve years back: the local high school had won a track meet; an old man had celebrated sixty years at the chemical plant that would kill them all; and they had held a harvest fair not so different from the one we celebrated in early October. Kids in flannel struggled to hoist blue-ribbon pumpkins, white-haired grandparents held out homemade pies, a blond girl with a sash that read Queen of Mount Halberk waved, smirking, to the camera. Hartbury was the only town on Mount Halberk now.
“Are you sure this is safe?” asked Jennifer. “What if there’s still poison in the air?”
“It’s not like it was radiation,” said Jake, trying to muster up the certainty to be our Captain Courage. “Gas dissipates, so it’s all gone now.”
Allie echoed him enthusiastically, but she also pulled her plaid scarf higher up her neck. I looked at Brandon, but he wasn’t looking at me. No, Brandon was hanging back with meek, slight, big-eyed Jennifer—telling her that it would be all right, kicking pebbles in her direction. None of it seemed real. I saw the five of us standing like five scarecrows, five finger puppets, five propped-up people-like things that were, nevertheless, not people. My heart was pounding like a wild animal inside my chest. I wanted to get out—out of Manfield, out of my body. I don’t know what I thought was coming after me. I could only feel its rumbling, unstoppable and insurmountable, like the black volcanic clouds I had once drawn descending upon this town.
No one else seemed worried about the fact that everyone had lied about how recently the accident destroyed Manfield, and in the years to come we would never ask our parents why. I suppose we assumed that they had been so traumatized, so saddened by the loss of their sister-town, that they decided to push Manfield backward into the soft underbelly of history. “They never said when it was exactly,” Jake said, in their defense, “just that it was a while ago.”
A while. All our understanding of time is made up of slipshod words that you can rearrange to cover up the fact that somewhere, somebody was wrong. In a while, Brandon Beck started dating Jennifer Trudeau. In a while, I decided to leave the state for college. For a while, I dreamt of my parents driving five-year-old me to a harvest festival, buying me a pumpkin, crowning me Queen of Manfield, and then leaving me to vanish into a gently swirling fog.
I gave myself an education at Rosewood College. I learned that Seven Minutes in Heaven was not, in fact, a kind of freeze tag, because it was not, in fact, the length of time it took for a dead soul to reach God. I learned that boys would lie to you about hitchhiking across the Pampas to get you to sleep with them, and I learned they probably wouldn’t call. I learned that I had no memory of several headliner incidents that took place the year I turned six—not the three-hundred-person Chinese passenger aircraft that was mistakenly shot down over Lake Dover a hundred miles from where I grew up, not the earthquake that killed sixty in Canada, not the Great Northeastern Chemical Disaster that saw a pesticide gas cloud submerge Manfield and then float westward toward Hartbury—and that I actually had no memory of kindergarten at all.
My parents couldn’t help me. I would call and they would grunt and hum and rummage through the kitchen drawers; when they got anxious, they needed to fix things. My mother remembered so many of my little childhood calamities—how I once tied our puppy Violet to my Radio Flyer and made her pull me “like a hearse”—but she didn’t remember much from the year that Manfield gave up the ghost. So I tried to forget that I’d ever forgotten anything by drinking, makin
g sure I met enough new people at each party that I’d be invited to another. I’d eventually cycle through everything and everyone, throw up in every floor’s bathroom, memorize every vintage posters for every French and Italian liqueur on every dorm room wall.
I had hoped to get along with my freshman-year roommate, a poker-faced redhead named Georgina Hanssen who was also from a small town, but Georgina was not the bonding type. She lived and breathed only anthropology. She had pictures of herself holding spears in Africa and monkeys in Asia, and eventually the truth came out that her parents had been missionaries, and she had been raised Mennonite. Sometimes she ate dinner with me in the white-walled cafeteria, and we would take turns insulting the slop that passed for food, but she didn’t give me any ways in, and at night she would turn down hall parties to hunch over her weird yellow books and munch her mother’s homemade granola bars. One morning I woke up drunk—half in, half out of my bed—and found her staring at me like a feral animal, like she was seeing me for the first time. “What are you reading,” I asked, the only question that could start a conversation with her.
“A History of Forgotten Christianity,” she said. Her finger scratched an itch on the open page. “For Professor Kettle’s class. I’m on the chapter about cults of universal resurrection.” She paused, then started reading: “ ‘Cults of universal resurrection have experienced cyclical fortunes throughout American history, typically reaching peak popularity during periods of economic depression.
‘An estimated three hundred and fifty such communities have been documented across the Northeastern region. They are commonly found in small towns with high mortality rates due to exposure to natural disasters, poor medicine, and unsafe industrial conditions.’ ”
Something slithered around my shoulders. “So?”