F&SF BK OF UNICORN VOL1.indb

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Left to myself once more, I uncovered the sliver and picked it up delicately between thumb and forefinger. It twinkled with all the hues of prism-shattered light, but it was made of no substance I could name. The man on the stool next to me cast a curious glance at it, but promptly went back to reading his newspaper. People in this town don’t pry. Why bother, when every scrap of local news scoots around faster than a ferret on amphetamines? Sooner or later, everyone knows everything about everyone else.

  Well, I thought, it’s very attractive, whatever it is. I’ll bring it home; maybe Rachel can make something out of it. Rachel is my teenaged daughter. She has discovered the Meaning of Life, which is to make jewelry out of any object you find lying around the house, yard, or municipal dump, and pierce another part of your body to hang it from. At least this object was pretty, and I always say that a good soak in Clorox will clean anything, up to and including Original Sin.

  I was so fascinated by the way the light played off my little bit of found art that I didn’t notice Muriel’s return until I heard her say, “Uh-huh. Thought so.”

  Caught in the act, I tried to cover up my sorry attempt at willful misdirection by dropping the sliver onto the open pages of the magazine I’d brought into the coffee shop with me and slamming the glossy cover shut on it. Slapping my hand over the bare-chested male model on the cover, I gave Muriel a sickly smile. “Dropped a contact,” I said. “I don’t want it to fall on the floor.”

  No dice. You can’t fake out a woman who can tell good tuna salad from bad at fifty paces. “Honey, who are you trying to protect?” she said. “Greta Marie? You don’t even know her.”

  That was true. Greta Marie Bowman belonged to the third and smallest segment of Bowman’s Ridge society: Eccentrics. As my dear mother would say, an eccentric is what you call a lunatic who’s got money. Mom was speaking from the jaded, materialistic perspective of big city life, however. In places like Bowman’s Ridge, we realize that money doesn’t excuse abnormal behavior. You don’t have to be rich and crazy to be classed as an eccentric; you can be poor and crazy, so long as you’re also the scion of one of the town’s oldest families. Or in Greta Marie Bowman’s case, the scionette.

  Yes, she was the descendant of that Bowman. And yes, she was living in what the Victorians referred to as genteel poverty. Whatever mite of income she derived from her ancestors’ surviving investments needs must be eked out by the sale of apple pies to the coffee shop. This was one of those cold, hard facts that everyone knew and no one mentioned. A Mafia don brought up to follow the steel-jacketed code of silence, omertà, is a harebrained blabbermouth next to a resident of Bowman’s Ridge who’s got something not to say.

  “Look, it’s nothing,” I said. “I may not know her, but I certainly don’t want to get her in—”

  “Trouble?” Muriel finished for me. She sighed. “Babs, you want to know the meaning of the word? That thing you just found in your pie, what do you think would’ve happened if someone else had found it?”

  “Not much. Everyone around here knows Greta Marie and no one would say anything that would—”

  “Think that goes for the Summer People?”

  Na-na-na-naaaaah. Cue the sinister chords on the pipe organ. The only critters lower on the Bowman’s Ridge food chain than Transients are Summer People. I don’t know why the Natives despise them so. They are the single best thing to happen to the local economy since maple leaf–shaped anything. They swarm up here every June, July, and August, with a recurring infection come leaf-peeping time, and pay top dollar to stay in spare rooms that would otherwise be mold sanctuaries. They attend church bazaars and rummage sales, fighting to the death to buy the nameless tin and wicker doohickeys that the Natives clean out of Aunt Hattie’s attic. (Aunt Hattie could never tell what the hell that bug-ugly objet d’awful was either.) And of course if you’ve got any piece of house-trash, no matter how old, no matter how dilapidated, all you have to do is stencil a pig or a sunflower or a black-and-white cow on it and it’s outahere, courtesy of the Summer People.

  On the other hand, serve them a slice of pie that’s packing a concealed shiv and they’ll bring the Board of Health down on your head faster than you can sell them a busted butter churn.

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “But the season’s over, the Summer People are all gone, and—”

  “Skiers,” Muriel reminded me. “Snowmobilers.”

  “Oh.” I’d forgotten that, like weasels, when winter came the Summer People changed their coats and returned to our little town in swarms.

  “It really would be a kindness to tell her.” Muriel patted my hand in a motherly way. “Won’t you please?”

  “Ummmm. Why don’t you?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t!” She laid her hands to her bosom. “She’d just simply fold up and die if I did. She doesn’t take criticism too well, poor child.” Only Muriel would refer to a spinster pushing fifty-five as poor child, bless her. “She’d stop baking pies for us altogether. She needs the money, though she’d never admit it. What would become of her then? It’d be plain awful.”

  In my heart I agreed with Muriel, though more out of my love for the pies than any concern for the pie-maker’s welfare. “But if she doesn’t take criticism well, how could I say—?” I began.

  Muriel pish-tushed me like a champion. “But it’s different if it comes from you, Babs.”

  I didn’t need to ask why. Wasn’t it obvious? I was a Transient. My cautionary words concerning unidentified opalescent objects in the pastry wouldn’t shame Greta Marie the way a Native’s would. In fact, if I were to go to Greta Marie’s place and accuse her of using the fat of unborn goats for piecrust shortening, she could live it down.

  So I went.

  Greta Marie lived out on the Old Toll Road. This was a stretch of highway so narrow, frost-heaved, and godforsaken that the fact that someone had once collected real American money from travelers to allow them the privilege of breaking their axles in the ruts and potholes was a testimony to Yankee ingenuity, to say nothing of Yankee gall. There was hardly enough room for two cars to pass, unless one climbed up onto the shoulder at a forty-five-degree angle, bumping over the gnarled roots of pine trees flanking the way. Luckily, the Old Toll Road had gone from being a throughway leading to Montpelier to a dead end leading to nowhere when the bridge over Bowman’s Gorge collapsed in 1957. The town decided it would be a waste of money to rebuild it, since by then everyone took the state highway anyway, and that pretty much put an end to the two-way traffic problem.

  That is, it did unless you happened to be heading up the road at the same time that Greta Marie Bowman was headed down it. She drove an old Rambler the color of mud with a crumpled fender and enough dings in the sides to make it look like the only car on the road suffering from cellulite. Wonderful to relate, she could actually get that bundle of battered tin up to considerable speeds, even over the humps and hollows of the Old Toll Road.

  Wonderful to relate if you’re safely out of the way, terrifying to tell if you’re driving the car that’s right in her path. Like a deer caught in the headlights, I spied the glitter of Greta Marie’s Coke-bottle glasses and I froze. My hands spasmed tight to the steering wheel, my foot refused to move from the accelerator, and the only thing I could think was: Dear Lord, if I die, what the hell body part will Rachel pierce to commemorate the funeral?

  I felt like a complete idiot when Greta Marie brought her vehicle to a ladylike stop with room to spare and nary the smallest squeal of brakes to be heard. She peered over the steering wheel like a marmot testing the first sniff of spring air, then dropped from sight behind the dashboard. One hefty car door swung wide and she was walking toward me, all smiles. I lowered the window to greet her and was nearly bowled into the next county by her preferred scent, Eau de Mothballs, but in the name of preserving the honor of all Transients, I managed to dig up a smile of my own and paste it to my face.

  “You’re that writer-person!” was how Greta Marie Bowman cho
se to say hello.

  “Um, yes, I am.”

  “Oh, I knew you’d come! Really I did!” She clapped her hands together with girlish glee.

  “You did?” This was news to me. I wasn’t sure whether it was good news. In her oversized, out-at-elbows black cardigan, with her steel-gray hair anchored to the top of her head with at least three pairs of knitting needles, Greta Marie Bowman put me in mind of a large, amiable spider.

  “My gracious, and when I think that we almost missed each other entirely—!” She spoke in the chirpy, lock-jawed accent of a young Katharine Hepburn. “Now you just follow me up to the house and we’ll talk.”

  And then, as God is my witness, she gave me a roguish wink, went back to her car, and backed up at speed all the way to the ancestral Bowman property, which lay a good quarter mile or more up the Old Toll Road.

  From what I had gathered in my quarter century of Bowman’s Ridge residence, the Bowmans had always been farmers, but they made a better living selling off the land than tilling it. The hard soil of their property let a diligent man grow him a bumper crop of rocks, though only if he was willing to work for it.

  The last male Bowman to inhabit the place had been Greta Marie’s grandfather, dead lo these many years. By the time he was under his native soil, he’d sold most of it. The only exceptions were the ancestral apple orchard, a swampy meadow beyond that, and the homestead plot. This latter supported a meager vegetable garden, a dilapidated chicken coop and poultry yard, the half of the old barn that was still standing, and the Bowman house proper. All of these flashed before my eyes as Greta Marie hauled me out of my car and into the front parlor, where she assaulted me with tea.

  “Now the important family papers are mostly safe in the attic,” she said, pouring out some oolong strong enough to strip paint from metal. “I can let you have those today, but the best sources are Caroline Elspeth’s notebooks, and they’re over in Brattleboro at Cousin Victoria’s house. She said she was going to do something with them, but everyone knows how far that got. Vicky never finished anything in her entire life except her husbands.”

  I took a sip of tea, set the cup aside, and stammered, “I—I beg your pardon?”

  Greta Marie slapped a wrinkled hand over her mouth and, as I hope for glory, tittered like a chipmunk. “Oh mercy, there I go again. I forgot: You’re not from around here. You wouldn’t know about Vicky.” And with that, she proceeded to bring me up to speed on Cousin Victoria Bowman Randall Smith Chasen, her antecedents and her heirs. It was a lengthy recitation that left me knowing more about the Bowman family and any related Native families—which is to say everyone in town—than I’d ever wanted or needed to know.

  When she was done, I gazed down at my now-frigid cuppa and murmured, “That was . . . very interesting, Miss Bowman, but I don’t see—”

  “—how you can use all that for your book? Well, of course you can’t use all of it,” Greta Marie reassured me. “After all, I wouldn’t be very bright if I gave away everything. I simply must reserve some of it for my own book as well. I’m sure you won’t begrudge me that much? Mine won’t be nearly as fascinating as yours, but then you’ve had so much more experience, you have connections, and as Daddy always used to say, when you’ve got connections, who needs talent?” Another giggle, this one ending in a snort. “All I want to write about is the branch of the family that settled near Brattleboro, old Zerusha Bowman’s boys and that Martin woman—you know, she swore she came from Boston, but everyone here just knew she was from New York.” Pronounced Sodom.

  It was then that the diaphanous phantom of Understanding tiptoed up and tapped me gently on the cranium with an iron mallet. To this day I couldn’t tell you whether my subsequent spate of blather was more of an apology for not having come to use the generations of Bowmans past as raw material for my next book, or an explanation for why I had come.

  “Oh,” said Greta Marie, regarding the shining sliver I held out to her in my cupped hand. “I see.” If she were at all disappointed, she bore it well and swallowed it whole. “That certainly was careless of me. Thank you so much for bringing it to my attention.” She stood up from behind the tea things, which I assumed was my cue to scurry back into the Transient woodwork, duty done.

  As it happened, I was wrong. No sooner had I risen to my feet, stammering some social pleasantry about having to go home now, I’d left the children on the stove, but Greta Marie raised one briary brow and inquired, “Then you’d prefer to come back another time to see the unicorns?”

  Three minutes later, to the tick, I was outside the Bowman house with Greta Marie, leaning my elbows on the top of a drunken split-rail fence that marked the boundaries of the meadow. And there, prancing and pawing the spongy ground and bounding hither and yon in matchless beauty at the slightest provocation, were the unicorns. There were three of them, all a luminous white so pure as to be almost ice-blue, with flossy manes the color of smoke glimpsed by moonlight. Even without the time-honored single horn in the middle of the forehead, it would have been impossible to confuse these entrancing beasts with the most thistledown-footed thoroughbred.

  Which was a good thing, because . . .

  “Their horns,” I gasped. “Where are their horns?” I leaned farther over the fence, staring at the three dancing shapes in the meadow. “All they’ve got are these . . . lumps.”

  “Lumps?” Greta Marie shaded her eyes, as if that gesture could hope to counteract a truly heroic case of myopia. She sighed. “Oh dear. It’s happened again. Wait here.” She left me teetering on the gateway to Wonderland as she trudged off to a nearby tool shed, to return with a small, bright hacksaw in hand. Setting two fingers to her lips, she blew a piercing whistle.

  The unicorns heard and the effect was galvanic. They paused in their frolic, heads up, ears pricked forward, a pose of frozen loveliness so exquisite that it hurt my heart to see it. Then they broke from a standstill to a gallop, three clouds of lightning racing across the meadow. For an instant I was afraid that they meant to charge right through the fence—God knows, it didn’t look strong enough to halt a stampede of bunny rabbits—but I needn’t have worried. Dainty cloven hooves planted themselves hard and decidedly in the earth just a hand span from the fence, bright garnet eyes twinkling with amusement. I could have sworn that the critters were laughing at me.

  Just so I wouldn’t make that mistake in future, the largest of the three curled his lips back from a double row of nastily pointed teeth and did laugh at me. It was a sound birthed at the junction of a horse’s whinny, a stag’s belled challenge, and a diva’s scorn. He did it loudly and at length, giving me more than enough time to study him.

  His eyes were, as I’ve mentioned, a deep, gem-like crimson, very large, highly intelligent, and possessed of an almost human capacity for malice. And yes, there in the place where tradition dictates the horn must be, there sprouted a pearly lump. Small as it was, I could see that it wasn’t to grow into the sleek pool-cue object some folks fancied, nor was it the twisty narwhal tusk others preferred their unicorns to sport. It was multi-sided, multi-edged, and the edges thereof fuzzy with the added menace of minute, vicious serrations, almost barbs. At full growth it would be deadly, and not an easy death either. Just looking at it made my skin go cold.

  The unicorn cocked his head at me as if to say, Seen enough, rube? Take a picture; it lasts longer. Then he swung his muzzle away to plant a long, snuffly kiss on Greta Marie’s withered jowl.

  “There’s a good boy, there’s a fine fellow.” Greta Marie stroked the slab of silky white cheek. “Now just hold still, this won’t hurt a bit.” Placing one hand on the unicorn’s nose, she used the other to ply the hacksaw. The steel blade bit into the base of the resurgent horn, which made a frightful screeching as it was severed. The unicorn submitted to the operation with that air of gallant indifference popularized by the better class of eighteenth-century highwaymen about to swing at Tyburn Tree. Greta Marie worked quickly. There was a dull plop as the horn-nub hit
the dirt.

  “There,” said Greta Marie. She fluffed up a little fur to cover the newly raw spot on the unicorn’s forehead and announced, “Next!”

  I watched with a combination of fascination and revulsion as she proceeded to treat the two remaining miracles as if they were parlor cats getting their claws clipped. When the third shining stub fell to earth, she sighed with satisfaction, then shouted, “Shoo!” Spooked like a flock of buff Orpingtons, the unicorns took off for the far end of the meadow, the place where boggy grassland melted into a small patch of wildwood. They flickered under the shadows of the leafless branches, then turned to fog and were gone from sight.

  “Well, we won’t be seeing any more of them today,” Greta Marie declared, stooping to gather the fallen nubbins. Still dumbfounded, I followed her back into the house, where I watched her set the horn-nubs on a butcher’s block cutting board and whack them to flinders with a cleaver. Using the flat of the blade, she scraped the resulting pile of iridescent toothpicks into an old stoneware crock marked Garlic.

  “You . . . save them?” I asked. She gave me a look that as good as accused me of Wastefulness, chief among the Seven Deadly Sins of Transients.

  “I use them,” she replied.

  “Er, how?” Visions of an alchemist’s lab hidden in the old Bowman root cellar taunted me. I pictured Greta Marie huddled over her bubbling alembics, a stuffed corkindrill suspended above her head while she added a pinch of unicorn’s horn to her latest batch of hellbroth.

  “Why, I simply— Never mind, it would be easier to show you. Do you have a minute to spare? Several?” And with that she opened a cabinet and donned not the wizard’s pointed hat, but the cook’s muslin apron. Still without waiting for my yea or nay, she proceeded to favor me with the privilege of witnessing the process by which Greta Marie Bowman took plain apples, sugar, spice, and pastry, and confected them into the food of the gods.