Fell Beasts and Fair

by C. J. Brightley

  "No," said Miss Faulkman. She squashed her annoyance. "Not your right-this-minute home. I mean, your real one. The one where you're supposed to be. Egypt? Mexico?" She let her arms fall by her sides. "Other-fill-in-the-blank?"

  The mummy's arm didn't waver. But his head swiveled slowly around to her.

  Miss Faulkman sagged. "Okay," she said. "We'll figure something out."

  She parked at the school and hurried around the car to open the door for the mummy. He had offered her his arm so that she might assist him to a stand when the oddity of the situation struck her: as if they were a pair of junior high students themselves, on an awkward date in a parent's borrowed car. A laugh burst out of her before she could smother it—the town already must think their out-of-towner librarian was odd, no reason to give them additional fodder on that account—and the mummy's great head drifted in her direction.

  "Sorry," she said, and gave another cautious yank. She wouldn't like to explain to the good people of Boirdeleau how she'd come to dismember their local mascot. "Just—look at the pair of us." Either of them as plainly from out of town as the other.

  The mummy silently lumbered to his feet. She was just about to turn toward the school when a cold, well-wrapped hand tucked itself in the inside of her arm. When she turned to gape up at him, his head was canted to one side. "I didn't know mummies made jokes," she said, and a sound like sifting sand came out of his throat as he led her off toward the school's main doors.

  "He's here!" someone squealed, as Miss Faulkman and the mummy edged their way into the back of the auditorium (which was really just the cafeteria with a row of risers dragged in). Several children ran up to wrap hugs around the mummy's knees, while their parents pressed him with firm handshakes. Miss Faulkman ducked out of the way, tucking herself into a seat at a ketchup-sticky lunch table, where shortly thereafter, the mummy joined her.

  The concert, ostensibly to celebrate the end of the school year, proved to be a bit of a mummy-themed love fest. Aside from the usual songs devoted to academic achievement and the niftiness of the fifty United States, there were at least three lauding the local hero. Based on the liberal use of slant rhymes and awkward meter, these had been written by either the current crop of schoolchildren or a previous one. In any case, the mummy slowly bobbed his head in time to the beat.

  Thirty-five increasingly sweaty minutes later (the school was not and probably never would be air-conditioned), Miss Faulkman finally unbent her cramped knees and stood. The mummy required some assistance untangling himself from the little bench, and by the time that task was accomplished, the cafeteria had half-emptied, as parents swarmed the risers to congratulate and collect their offspring. Miss Faulkman, of course, had no relations here; she carefully dodged eye contact as the room cleared out. Best if she made her way clear fast, before someone had to take pity on her with an attempt at small talk. They had their own friends and families already; no sense in her stealing that precious time with forced questions about the weather or the Packers or the cost of gasoline.

  She glanced up and smiled only for Mr. Robinson, the retired librarian, as she guided the mummy back out to the waiting car. How did you do this for fifty years? she wanted to ask, but she certainly didn't know the man well enough to ask such a silly question, and so it went unsaid. Instead she offered only a solemn nod.

  But Mr. Robinson caught her by the elbow. "Was that Gene Mitchell I saw going into the library this morning? How long is he in town for? Lori—that's Lori Mitchell who works for the postal service—didn't mention at Euchre Night that he'd be here to visit."

  "I'm sorry," said Miss Faulkman. She glanced up at the mummy for reassurance, which was hardly forthcoming. "There was just the Ladies' Knitting Circle in this morning, and a gentleman from—from out of town." She swallowed the words "historical society." Best not to start a mummy-related panic in the middle of the elementary school cafeteria.

  "Oh! Oh, well my eyes must be playing tricks." That would be no great surprise; Mr. Robinson's glasses must have been half an inch thick at the outsides. He gave Miss Faulkman's elbow one more kindly pat and released her. "That makes sense. The big Follett reunion isn't till August, anyway."

  "Follett!" Miss Faulkman repeated. An electric jolt of she-wasn't-quite-sure-what shivered through her. "I thought you said Mitchell?"

  "Lori Mitchell, nee Follett," Mr. Robinson explicated with the patience of a lifetime librarian. "Bill and Sandra Follett's middle girl." He smiled, and nudged those Coke-bottle glasses back up his nose. "There's not so many people in Boirdeleau, you'll learn them up in no time, dear."

  "I'm sure I will," said Miss Faulkman. Her fingers tightened on the mummy's reed-thin arm. "Remind me. Gene is the one who went off to school in Madison?" She had no idea which, if any, of the expansive Follett clan might have gone to the University, but she waited for the side serving of small-town gossip that would come alongside the inevitable correction.

  "No, no. Close, though! That was Sandra's sister's boy, Jonathan." Mr. Robinson tapped the side of his nose. "Gene's been in and out of some trouble, you know. Nice young man. Just made some bad decisions along the way." Miss Faulkman leaned away from the sudden gleam in Mr. Robinson's eyes. "Say, he's about the same age as you. When he comes around for the big get-together, I'll send him down by the library, I'm sure you two would hit it off something beautiful."

  "I'm sure that won't be necessary! Thank you! Have a lovely day!" Miss Faulkman glued a smile to her face as she hustled the mummy outside. How much were those old bones worth to a collector, or in some Internet auction? How much more, if its seller knew exactly the value of what was on offer?

  Money, she reckoned, was the best—or at least the most common—sort of solution to the kinds of trouble that a young man was likely to get himself into.

  For the duration of the afternoon, the mummy puttered around toward the back of the library while Miss Faulkman answered questions, checked books in and out, and planned for the summer reading festival. Once, she caught him ducking out of her office, and broke her own library rule in shouting from the circulation desk to mind that he didn't mess up her carefully organized paperwork.

  When she finally locked the front door and went to retrieve her purse and coat from the back, she found a rumpled piece of notebook paper lying atop her desk. In a wobbly scrawl, someone had drawn the outline of a knife, and the sort of sad face a child might draw, with two dots and a rainbow-shaped frown. She picked it up and held it at the full length of her arms, as if that would focus it into something like clarity. Finally, purse and coat in hand, she stopped at the mummy's case and held the drawing up to the glass. "You made this?" she asked.

  The mummy's head canted slightly.

  "An unwilling sacrifice." Her voice trembled.

  But the mummy's head shook slowly, side to side. Miss Faulkman's brow creased, and so did the paper between her fingers. "Willing, then. But how is it any different here? You sacrifice for them every day, nurse them, give them nearly anything they ask. You live in a tiny glass box, for heaven’s sake!" She leaned forward until her nose smudged the glass. "What do you want, really want, from life? Or, I mean—from undeath? Not to be somebody's collector item, I'm sure. But wouldn't you like to be helped, for once, instead of doing all the helping?"

  She stepped back and pulled the case open, and thrust the paper and dull-pointed pencil into his featureless face. But in answer, he only laid one hand on his chest, over the spot his heart might have rested if he still had a desiccated organ of that variety. They stared at each other while Miss Faulkman drew another ragged breath. "Fine," she said. "Fine. I'll see you in the morning. Once I've got this whole thing figured out."

  Miss Faulkman typically favored eight and a half hours of sleep, but that night she dipped down toward four and a quarter. Schemes, scribbled on notebook paper and increasingly elaborate, littered the floor of her little flat over the Chinese restaurant.

  She woke up with a start at a quarter to eight, and
the clarity of exhaustion blindsided her with most obvious idea of all: why not just hide the mummy in her own stupid apartment for the day, and keep hiding him until this ridiculous Follett scion simply ran out of patience or rental-truck money? But it might already be too late—she cursed her alarm clock as she floundered out of bed. Mr. Brzycki, or Gene, or whatever she should call him, might arrive at the library at any moment. If he had no qualms about returning to his hometown in disguise to abscond with the local mummy, he also might not object to forcing the rather shaky back door of a public building. She flung on the first clothes from the laundry pile and crashed out the door and into her car with an armful of supplies. She had never engaged in anything remotely resembling a heist or even an escapade before, but a roll of duct tape, a skein of twine (she didn't have any rope), and the baseball bat she usually kept by her bed seemed enough to cover all eventualities.

  When she arrived, there was a U-Haul parked behind the library, and she found the back door open. She called out as she rushed through her office, but no one answered—she dropped the twine and duct tape, which bounced off her foot, to brandish the bat as she came out into the library proper.

  The glass case was open, and the mummy was out of it. He stood in front of Gene Mitchell-Follett-Brzycki, who had crumbled to his knees. His head, though, listed sharply backward. The mummy's hand was wrist-deep in his cranium.

  "No!" cried Miss Faulkman, who certainly had not had jotted down murder on her list of potential outcomes for the day. "What are you doing? Stop!"

  The mummy's empty face swiveled around to her, but his hand stayed where it was. A soft moan came out of Gene's mouth, as did a long tendril of saliva.

  "I mean it!" Miss Faulkman said, and she realized she did. If she had to rough up Boirdeleau's oldest friend to save the life of one irritating man, she would do it. The loss of a job didn't amount to much next to that. She hefted the baseball bat and edged closer. Which joint might be more most vulnerable: a wrist? Possibly a shoulder? The anatomy shelves were two rows over and hopelessly out of reach. "Put him down!"

  She braced herself for impact, and jabbed at the mummy's left elbow as hard as she could with the far end of the bat. He simply sidestepped. Miss Faulkman cursed her lack of Little League experience, and readied for another go.

  But as the mummy moved, his hand pulled back from Gene's forehead. With it, there followed a slender trail of something like spider-webbing, but more delicate. It came free of Gene without a sound, and Miss Faulkman lost sight of it then. Gene staggered, but did not fall. Miss Faulkman clutched her bat and looked between the two. "What did you do?" she whispered. "What did you take from him?" Brain cells. Neurons? The spiderweb she'd seen had been spun out of secrets and memories.

  "What did I take from who?" asked Gene Mitchell, and clambered to his feet with the mummy behind him. Miss Faulkman took a step back in spite of herself, and dropped the bat behind the display of newly arrived books. Gene looked around. "I'm... early for the family reunion, I think."

  "Also for the library," said Miss Faulkman, cautiously feeling her way onto surer ground. Behind Gene's back, the mummy retreated quietly to his case and closed the door "We don't open till ten on Thursdays."

  "Oh," said Gene. He looked down at his shoes, then around at the tidy shelves. "Sorry?"

  "Quite all right," said Miss Faulkman, and mustered an absolute rictus of a smile. "As long as you're here, is there a book I can help you find?"

  Gene Mitchell spent the next ten minutes browsing the paperback mysteries. When he'd finally selected a promising volume, Miss Faulkman checked him out, then unlocked the front door of the building to usher him on his way.

  The very second the door shut behind him, she stormed across the library to the mummy. After a moment's hesitation, she flung open the door of his case to get in his face in the most satisfying way. "What the devil was that?"

  The mummy held out both hands in a shrug. There was nothing to see on his fingers; whatever he had taken out of Gene Mitchell had disintegrated, or been absorbed into those many-stained bandages. "You can't just," Miss Faulkman said, and had to pause to decide what it was that the mummy couldn't just. "You can't just rewire a person to make them do what you want!"

  The mummy's head craned over the New Arrivals bookstand to peep at the discarded bat, and Miss Faulkman's face flushed red. "Well, that's not the same thing at all!" she cried. "You just—you just fixed him, just like that! All this time you could do that, and you never... you never let me think I could belong here."

  She was already moving toward him when he lifted one hand, his fingers right at head level. She walked into that outstretched hand without hesitation, and she choked as his fingers slipped inside.

  A pounding at the front door slammed Miss Faulkman back into herself. She spun, stars bursting behind her eyes, to see Mrs. Lorson peering in through the blinds. Mrs. Lorson shook the door again, as if that might suddenly unlock it, and it rattled on its elderly hinges.

  Miss Faulkman tossed her head to clear it, which didn't work. She looked back over her shoulder at the mummy, who stood just in front of his case. His fist was closed around a few sparse threads of absolutely the finest spidersilk she'd ever seen. When she peered closer, he opened his hand, and she lost the threads to a trick of the light. She grimaced. "Didn't the pages dust for cobwebs just two days ago?" she asked, and shook her head as she hurried down the central aisle to open the front door. "I'm sorry! I'll check their work more closely next week."

  "Is everything all right in here?" Mrs. Lorson said, pink-faced and out of breath, as soon as she was inside. She waved across the stacks of books at the mummy, who lifted a hand in answer. "I just saw someone driving a moving van out of here like the devil was after him, and I thought you'd been mugged or robbed or something!"

  "Oh," said Miss Faulkman, for the second time that day. "Oh! Patty! It was just Gene Mitchell back in town to steal our old friend."

  "Gene Mitchell!" Mrs. Lorson gasped, delightedly scandalized. Miss Faulkman laughed. And Miss Faulkman, to her own great astonishment, flung an arm around Patty Lorson's shoulders.

  "Don't worry! We took care of everything, our friend and I. Come on; I'll make you a cup of coffee in my office. It's quite a story."

  Patty said she couldn't wait to hear it, but wouldn't it be better over some fresh lefsa? She'd left the oven on and didn't want to burn down Ole and Lena's, after all. Miss Faulkman agreed and locked up the library behind her. She paused with the key in the door, and stuck her head back inside to promise the mummy she'd be back in time to open the library at the proper hour. Then she followed Mrs. Lorson down the hill.

  The mummy climbed back into his case, and shut the door carefully behind himself. He sat down on the floor, folded his arms across his chest and his legs in front of him. He leaned back, back, back, until his head touched the glass behind him and his stiff legs lifted ever so slightly off the ground.

  About the Author

  Aimee Ogden’s work has also appeared in Apex, Shimmer, and Escape Pod. Find her on the web at http://aimeeogdenwrites.wordpress.com/.

  The Gallows Maiden

  Francesca Forrest

  On some spring evenings, when the breeze feels soft on your face, when you can smell earth again, and even, here and there, see stiff, fresh, new green beginning to push aside last year’s leaves, then you can skirt the base of the gallows hill and not even shudder. You can see the crows clustered in the high branches of the great sycamore there and maybe not turn your mind back to hangings. So John William Tracey thought to himself, but the very thinking of the thought called to mind the hanging of Joseph Hawes for housebreaking and assault last summer—and so he quickened his step, kept his eyes down, and was nearly past the hill when he stumbled upon a knot of boys with sticks and stones, tormenting a crow trapped on the ground by an injured wing.

  “Here, leave off,” he said, grabbing the wrist of the biggest boy. John William himself was no more than seventeen, but tha
t gave him several years on the lad, and a stronger arm. “Drop that. Don’t you know better than to tease crows? Look at her eye, see how she’s staring at you? She’ll remember your faces, all your faces, and tell her sisters and brothers, and they’ll come after you. They have a taste for human flesh, you know. No doubt they’ll go for your eyes first, and who knows what next, after that? But maybe, just maybe, if you beg her pardon most sweetly and run off home, she’ll forgive you. Maybe.”

  The boy’s endangered eyes were round as coins, his face pale as the moon, and when John William released his arm, the boy stammered out an apology, then fled away, the others at his heels.

  John William looked at the crow and shivered, remembering last summer, how the crows had circled the body of the dead man, alighting on him in a black cluster by his limp head. But this crow was flying nowhere; the next dog or fox to pass by would make a meal of it. John William peered at it, trying to see which wing was hurt, but the bird hopped behind a briar bush, not yet in leaf but such a tangle of arching canes that it easily hid the crow. A few steps, and John William was behind the briar bush as well, and here before him was no crow, no; it was a girl with hair as black as crow’s feathers, clutching a gray shawl tight around her with her left hand and her right arm limp. Her eyes were as black as her hair and seemed like chips of coal in her pale, pale face, no flush of pink on her cheeks, just bruising the color of a stormy sky along the line of her jaw.

  John William’s mouth went dry, and when he took a step backward, his legs were like water, and now the briars were grabbing at his coat. The crow girl just stared at him with her black eyes and didn’t move, so a little of his fear left him.

  “Have-have you hurt your… arm?” he ventured. She cocked her head to one side and continued to watch him, but still didn’t speak.