“I’ve kept this pair all these years,” he said, and gazed at them with his good eye. “It still fits.”
He slipped his heirloom tip-first into the center of what remained of his eye, not an act that appeared to cause him pain. It hurt to watch, though, and Peter’s stomach rolled. When Snip-Snap left them there, content to wear them as in days gone by, Peter forced himself to look.
Snip-Snap leaned forward and down, to make sure Peter missed nothing. “Say the right thing,” he whispered. He urged. “Tell me just the right thing.”
Riddles now? Peter’s confidence sank. He could only speak from the heart, and when he did, for the first time his voice shook. “What did you want to do to them right after they did that to you?” he said. “Whatever it was … that’s how all of us are now.”
Snip-Snap drew back to his full imposing height. He crossed his arms for a long moment’s thought, then withdrew the scissors from his eye and, mercifully, put his glasses back on. He opened his coat and exchanged scissors once more.
“Right enough,” he said.
And, for Peter, shock-headed and slovenly no longer, what a strange thing it was to sit on the edge of his bed and watch these bits and pieces of him drop away to the floor. Nail after long, grimy nail; lock after lock of springy, serpentine hair. It was not as welcome a feeling as he’d thought it might be, nor as freeing, for what had they been if not the identity of him, and a shield behind which to hide?
Who would he be without them?
Snip-Snap stepped back to appraise his work and seemed to find it done. “One last thing, you said?”
“Right. Not for me, though.”
Peter led him across the hall to Jenny’s room, where she sat gazing at stars through the ceiling because she had no choice. He patted her on the shoulder, then swept aside her hair, touching it with his fingers now, his fingers and nothing but, to reveal the ugly black thicket of stitches.
“I know you can get through those,” said Peter. “The thing is, can you do it without hurting her?”
“I’m right here, you know,” Jenny huffed. “Don’t stand there talking about me like I’m not.”
Snip-Snap folded at the knees, bracing his hands on his thighs as he levered down for a closer look. He went “Hmmm” a lot. When he stood tall again, he did not appear discouraged. Only resolute.
“This one will cost,” he said.
Peter had been afraid of that.
Although he still got to choose the finger.
A key goes into a lock, the lock goes click, a door creaks open … These were such small things to be the end of all that was past and the start of all that was new.
He let the Black Boys through and gave them time to get into position, although it was still night and dark, with only the dimmest of lights burning in the first-floor hallway, where one shadow was likely to be as good as another. Then he shut the door after them.
“Good and loud, and don’t stop,” Peter told Cruel Frederick. “Like you mean it.”
Frederick looked at him with a sneer, but after all this time, he couldn’t help himself. “You don’t have to tell me how to beat on something and make a row.”
Peter stepped aside to let him at it, Frederick banging and kicking and bellowing with such ferocious enthusiasm that surely no greater racket had ever been heard here in this brownstone where the sun never shined and the rain was always cold.
The apartment door flew open and out stormed Mr. Crouch, for the last time.
“See here now, you shock-headed little beast!” he shouted. “If you’re so sick of being attached to those other nine fingers, there’s something we can do about it, there is!” He stopped abruptly when he saw that it was Frederick. “You, now? What’s got into you?”
The Black Boys were on him then, ink-dyed skin out of ink-black shadows, and Mr. Crouch never saw them coming. They swarmed over him and took him to the floor as Peter once more used the key to let Cruel Frederick through this time, so that Frederick could do what he did best.
It was better that the hallway need as little cleaning as possible, so once Mr. Crouch was subdued, they dragged him back into the apartment he shared with his lovely missus, and the dog that had bedeviled Frederick every day of his life. There was more racket and fuss, muffled now, coming as it did from behind closed doors, and this was just as well, for the sounds were unpleasant in the extreme.
It didn’t take long … although it still might have taken a good deal longer than was strictly necessary.
Hours later, they were open on time for business as usual, with Peter out front to greet the gloating grown-ups and nervous children who’d come for the morning tour, and Jenny seated in the ticket office window to smile brightly and take their money.
If unexpectedly young, perhaps, Peter still looked the part. Snip-Snap was by trade a tailor, and with a little cutting here and sewing there, it took not much work to fit him with one of Mr. Crouch’s old suits. The feel of it made his skin crawl, not so much the fabric as the history, but he would not have to wear it for long.
“If you’ve paid us a visit before, I’m sure you’ve noticed a change in routine already,” Peter told his audience, taking care to keep his left hand down, and hide the bandage where his littlest finger once was. “It’s only temporary, you’ll be pleased to know. Sometimes even such formidable good folks as my Uncle Eben and Aunt Lizzy can be no match for a dose of ague. No worries, though! You’ll still see what you came for!”
And he was right. He’d overheard it all so many times that as he led them up the stairs, he was able to take over Mr. Crouch’s spiel without missing a beat.
“Now, this sullen fellow’s name is Caspar,” he told them as the tour began on the second floor. “And you’ll not find a more fitting name for the likes of him, because if he keeps up his naughty habits, he’ll waste away to a ghost, just you wait and see.”
“What’s wrong with him?” asked a horse-faced woman. “He doesn’t look sick.”
“Decided he was too good for the food he was being served. His poor parents had such a time trying to get a morsel down him, he might as well have stitched his own face together. So what could they do but bring him here, right? He was a healthy boy once. A plump boy, you might say. But look at him now.” He paused for the usual drama here. “Show ’em your ribs, kid. Show these fine people your ribs.”
When Caspar tugged up his shirt, this time he inspired only confusion.
“Why, he looks positively gorged!” a father protested. “What’s he been into?”
“Whatever it was, we’ll see to it he never has a chance to get into it ever again,” Peter promised … leaving unsaid, for the good of all, that Mrs. Crouch hadn’t weighed so little in many, many years.
He unlocked Caspar’s door and flung it open, barging in and bristling with so much umbrage he could scarcely keep a straight face. Caspar was no better, even as Peter grabbed him by the ear and pretended to drag him out into the hall.
“Get a move on, you crumb-snitching cur!” Peter shouted. “Turn your prissy nose up at the fine food we provide, will you, then stuff your face with junk?”
Solemnly, sternly, the good parents made way, and understood. They knew the type, all right. He continued to drag Caspar through the parting crowd, shouting as they went.
“A thing like this, you can’t very well let it go unpunished, can you? How’s our Caspar going to learn, eh?”
A father nodded vigorously and wet his lips. “Make it good. Make it hurt.”
“Oh, I promise you it will, sir. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t invite the young ones along to watch it happen. Watch and learn, we always say.” Peter looked from child’s face to child’s face and beckoned them to follow. “The rest of you can stay right here and we’ll be back in five. Consider it a bonus! You’re getting more for your money today, and who’d argue against that?”
And with the children down the stairs and past the great barred door, Peter locked it behind h
im, and hurled the key where no one was likely to find it ever again.
They all gathered across the street then, everyone who’d called this hateful place a home, kept for so long on the wrong side of cold bars and staring eyes by crimes so petty he wondered who was not guilty.
To Pauline, Peter gave a box of matches taken from the Crouches’ kitchen, a giant box whose matches she’d been getting one at a time, thrice a day. No one, girl or boy, could’ve been happier to now get them all at once.
“Pretty,” she said, past her blackened lump of tongue, then dashed back into the building without another look behind.
They waited five minutes. They waited ten.
“She’s not coming out again, I don’t think,” Jenny said.
But when he started across the street after Pauline, Jenny caught his arm and shook her head no, sorrowfully no, and while he didn’t like it a bit, she was right. No matter how much you wished to, you could not save everyone from themselves.
Caspar and Fidgety Philip were the first to go, led away by Snip-Snap, who thought it best to leave before the fire grew visible. Philip, who’d only ever needed something to focus his energies on, had ably assisted in resizing the suit for Peter, and as Snip-Snap could always use help at his tailor shop, he offered Philip an apprenticeship. There was no apparent reason why he should have offered Caspar one too. But given the gusto with which the starved boy had partaken of his most recent meal—a prodigious fillet of Crouch—there seemed something a bit monstrous in him now, and so perhaps Snip-Snap, who knew more than a bit about being monstrous himself, thought it bore watching.
The rest? Cruel Frederick and Conrad watched until the flames were showing in the windows, then slipped away as well, together, for even Frederick had to admit that life on one’s own would never be easy for a boy devoid of thumbs. With his arms and legs left twisted by his fall, Flying Robert needed help and always would … but the Black Boys had been the ones to bring him down from upstairs, and weren’t giving up on him now, and soon they, too, disappeared with the morning.
At last the smoke and flames were enough to start drawing a crowd, and the children brought for lessons were certainly getting one. They all watched as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing, some wiping their eyes and rubbing their noses, but they got over it, resilient to the core, then even they began to drift away from the scene …
Until it was just the two of them left, Peter and Jenny-with-Her-Head-in-the-Clouds, who was looking nowhere near the sky.
“I liked you better the other way,” she said. “You look like anybody else now.”
He understood. “But I don’t feel like anybody else.”
He gazed down the street and beyond it, toward more streets, and beyond those, to the roads leading everywhere but here, and there were so many they could take that it made his head spin.
They could be anything now.
So he would be what the grown-ups had made him.
Or be something better, in spite of it.
Time would tell.
BRIAN HODGE is the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical. He’s also written more than one hundred short stories, novelettes, and novellas, plus five full-length collections. Recent works include No Law Left Unbroken, a collection of crime fiction; The Weight of the Dead and Whom the Gods Would Destroy, both stand-alone novellas; a newly revised hardcover edition of his early postapocalyptic epic Dark Advent; and his latest novel, Leaves of Sherwood. He lives in Colorado, where more of everything is in the works. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photography, loves everything about organic gardening, except the thieving squirrels, and trains in Krav Maga, grappling, and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
The Elves #2
There was once a poor servant-girl who was industrious and cleanly and swept the house every day, and emptied her sweepings on the great heap in front of the door.
One morning, when she was just going back to her work, she found a letter on this heap and, as she could not read, she put her broom in the corner and took the letter to her employers. And behold, it was an invitation from the elves, who asked the girl to hold a child for them at its christening.
The girl did not know what to do. But, at length, after much persuasion, and as they told her that it was not right to refuse an invitation of this kind, she consented.
Then three elves came and conducted her to a hollow mountain, where the little folks lived. Everything there was small, but more elegant and beautiful than can be described. The baby’s mother lay in a bed of black ebony ornamented with pearls, the covers were embroidered with gold, the cradle was of ivory, the bathtub of gold.
The girl stood as godmother, and then wanted to go home again; but the little elves urgently entreated her to stay three days with them. So she stayed, and passed the time in pleasure and gaiety, and the little folks did all they could to make her happy.
At last she set out on her way home. But first they filled her pockets quite full of gold, and then they led her out of the mountain again.
When she got home, she wanted to begin her work. She took the broom—which was still standing in the corner—in her hand and began to sweep. Then some strangers came out of the house, who asked her who she was and what business she had there.
And she had not, as she thought, been three days with the little men in the mountains, but seven years. And in the meantime her former masters had died.
The Artemis Line
PETER CROWTHER
“A certain mother had her child taken out of its cradle
by the elves, and a changeling with a large head and
staring eyes, which would do nothing but eat and
drink, lay in its place.”
—The Brothers Grimm (“The Elves #1”)
“Fairies are magical … and they’ll just kill you
before you can kill them.”
—Karen (from Outnumbered)
Prologue
Charles Cavanagh pulled the car off the main road and onto what amounted to little more than a neat track barely wide enough for one car. They had visited the house twice before. Turning a sharp right onto the tiny bridge that led to the wide gates and the little orchard beyond it, Charles stopped the car and shifted into park. He whistled and shook his head.
“Are we there?”
Geraldine Cavanagh pulled off her headphones and slapped her brother on the arm. “Does it look like we’re there?” There was no answer so Gerry followed it up with “Lame brain.”
Tom looked over and saw his sister carefully writing the name “Julien Tibbets” and drawing little hearts all around it. He fashioned a pretend cough around the word “whore” and Gerry hit him again.
“Geraldine!” Trudy Cavanagh snapped from the front seat.
“He called me a name.” Gerry hid the notebook under her arm so that her mother wouldn’t see what she was doing.
“Yeah,” Tom sneered, “Hortense.”
Gerry took a wider swing this time and caught her brother on the cheek.
“Ow!” He split the word into two, giving it multiple syllables—“Ow-whirr”—and rubbed his arm.
“Gerry, I will not tell you again.”
Good, that’ll suit me, she thought. “Okay, sorry,” she said.
“Not to me, to your brother.”
“Sorry, Brother,” she said. There was no conviction there at all.
“I need to pee,” Tom said.
“Tom!” Now it was Tom’s father’s turn to get in on the debate.
Tom shrugged and in what he considered to be his most reasonable voice said, “Just tell her not to look.”
“We’ll be there in a minute, sweetie,” Trudy said. “Just nip the end and you’ll be fine.”
Tom already had his right hand clasped tightly around his crotch, and when his sister saw it she made a face and turned to the window. “Totally gross.”
“‘During th
e whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone—’”
“Sweetie?”
“Dad, are you okay?”
“It’s from ‘Fall of the House of Usher,’” Charles said. He turned back to the window and lowered it.
“Dad,” Gerry bleated. “Cold.”
“‘I had been passing alone on horseback,’” Tom Cavanagh continued, “‘through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher …’”
Charles shook his head and watched the house across the fields as though it was about to do something spectacular.
“Isn’t it wonderful?”
Nobody answered.
“Poe had it right.”
Trudy reached her right hand across and patted her husband’s knee affectionately. Tom, who was now leaning against the back of his mother’s seat, saw the gesture, and though he was not able to articulate what he had seen, saw something there, in that smallest of exchanges, that he was to remember all of his life … with the memory coming back when he least expected it. Or, indeed, wanted it.
“There’s sadness there, sure.” Charles pointed a hand, jabbing his index finger repeatedly at things of which nobody else was aware. “But there’s solidity and there’s history, and there’s—”
“There’s shelter, sweetie.” This time the pat suggested it was time to move. “And Tommy wants to go wee-wee.”
“Mom! That’s even worse than ‘pee.’”
“Tom, I told you al—”
“But you told me … Oh, forget it.” He pushed himself back into the Jaguar’s seat and made a face. He was astonished when Gerry leaned over and whispered, “Two minutes and we’ll be there.” And then she patted her brother’s leg, just the way her mother had patted Dad’s.
“Looks like it’s going to rain,” Trudy said as they passed over the bridge and headed up the track for Grainger Hall.
And it did. The sky stretching across to the west looked like a bruised knee, purple and a strange greeny-yellow.
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