by Jeffrey Ford
At lunch one day, three weeks after Mrs. Apes’s disappearance, I saw a familiar face in the college pizza shop. She was wearing all black but looking exactly the same as when I had last seen her. I took my lunch over to her table and sat down.
“Do you think you could put a spell on this pizza and make it taste better?” I asked.
She looked up at me and shook her head. “It’s dangerous to mock powers that are greater than you,” said the witch and smiled.
She filled me in on what she had been doing since going on to study at the state university in graduate-level anthropology. I was always happy to hear when my students hadn’t opted for a degree in business. On this particular day she had come to the college, which was near her house, to do some research on her thesis, concerning the importance of written language in magic and witchcraft.
“How are your eyes?” she asked.
“I haven’t had a problem since,” I told her. “It’s not my eyes I’m having a problem with now, it’s my head.”
“Such as?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “you’ll love this.” I proceeded to tell her the entire story of Mrs. Apes in all of its convoluted detail. When I got to the part about the buck I had hit and the word I believed I had heard it speak, she laughed. When I was done, I asked her, “What do you think of that?”
She looked into my eyes and her expression became serious. “You’ve missed something,” she said.
“Like the boat?” I asked.
“It’s important,” she said.
“I think I was shaken by the incredible synchronicity of the whole thing,” I told her.
“Listen,” she said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll read my thesis over before I submit it, I’ll look into things for you.”
“I’ll read your paper anyway,” I said, unsure if I wanted any more involvement in the supernatural.
I had to run to class after that, but before I left, she told me she would be in touch.
Weeks passed and although I had learned to keep my uneasiness at bay, it was always there, hovering in the background. At the end of the semester, I had a hard time giving Mrs. Apes an F for the course, but I was required to because she had “phantomed” halfway through the semester. She had definitely learned something, though what it was exactly I wasn’t sure.
On the last day, I still had quite a few papers to read before I could make out my grade sheets. I envied all those who had fled in a mass exodus after the final class had let out. The place was as still as a ghost town while I sat in my office reading. Just when I finished and was about to enter the final grades, the phone rang. It was Jean from the library.
“I think we’re the only ones left on campus,” I said.
“Count me out,” she said. “I’m home, but I just remembered something I had meant to tell you.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I thought I was done with Avramody,” she said, “but I found something else.”
“What’s that?”
“There was a student at the library yesterday, a young woman. She said she was doing research on a paper about vanity for one of your classes. She was rather outlandishly dressed in all white. Said her name was Maggie Hamilton.”
I laughed. “I know who you mean,” I said, “but her name isn’t Margaret Hamilton.”
“Well, she had me pull some microfilm for her from the local newspaper. She took it over to the machine, cued up the reel, and started reading through it. When I walked back over there a little later to see if she needed help, she was gone. I left the reel on the machine for a while in case she came back but she didn’t. Before I took the reel off, out of curiosity, I glanced at the page she was on and the name Avramody jumped out at me.”
“More about the honeyed knot?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” she said. “Do you remember about six years ago a student who went to the college here who raped and murdered a little girl?”
I said nothing.
“Hello?” said Jean.
“I’m here,” I finally said.
“The little girl’s name was Melissa Avramody. I don’t know what you can do with that,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I remember now.”
After I hung up, I got out of my chair and paced back and forth in the confines of the office. This pointless journey finally ended at the window that overlooked the empty parking lot. I leaned my forehead against the glass and looked out. The sun had nearly set and twilight was creeping out from the trees of the nature preserve that bounded the asphalt expanse. I saw my car sitting there like a lonely student who has stayed in class long after dismissal. A few seconds later my attention was drawn to something moving in the shadows by the edge of the woods. It stamped its hooves and, startled by the approach of night, turned to show me its rack of bone, one branch growing down into its jaw. At the sight of it, a feeling welled up from deep within me, and my own jaw opened to release a word made only of consonants.
When you are a teacher, you are ever vigilant to instruct, to correct, to lecture, to advise, to care. The residue of this responsibility accumulates around you through time and can serve to make you a poor student. That night in my office, in the last hours of the semester, I passed them all, Kevin Wheast, Melissa Avramody, Mrs. Apes, by setting myself an assignment to stand for those I never received. I did not ask how long it had to be or if I could have an extension but turned on my computer and began typing. Somewhere in all those words, I found the rhymes. Then the final loop of the honeyed knot tightened and drew me back into its jumbled heart.
I’ve been a professor of writing and literature for the past twenty-five years, fifteen of that at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey. I know a lot of writers say that they would never want to teach writing for a living because it would deaden them to their own work. That hasn’t been my experience. My students’ writing has really helped me with my own. The idea for “The Honeyed Knot” was sparked by the fact that I actually did have a student in my class one semester who raped and murdered a little girl in his neighborhood. There was nothing I could have done to prevent it from happening, but for some reason I still felt a measure of responsibility for the tragedy. It haunted me for quite a while and left me cold to teaching for a time—something I had always loved. The story is not a confession, nor an expiation, nor an explanation, but merely an attempt to express what I was feeling about the situation. The strangest thing about it is that, I swear, it’s 99.9% true.
Gordon Van Gelder accepted this story for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and suggested some changes to certain parts, especially the ending. The story benefited from these changes, but still I was very wary of the piece because of the great emotional connection it had for me. I think Gordon had far more faith in the story than I did. Only when the piece was published and I reread it again in the magazine did I fully allow myself to like it. The process of writing it, editing it, and seeing it published helped me to exorcise some ghosts and reminded me about the importance of my work as a teacher.
Something by the Sea
Maggie ran ahead of him down the path in the failing light, the sleek gray whippet, Mathematics, moving gracefully at her side. Her Uncle Archer came hobbling slowly along behind with his cane, a picnic basket draped over one arm.
“Watch that tree root at the turn,” he called, “it will try to grab your ankle.”
Her laugh came back to him and he smiled.
It was a warm twilight of sudden, billowing breezes that rushed through the leaves and made the boughs sway. Night was mixing quickly into the last faint glow of red, filling the woods with shadows. Off in the distance could be heard the calm and methodical heartbeat of the ocean, while closer a night bird sang melancholic, trilling its low whistle from within a tangled thorn bush.
He rounded the bend in the path and beheld his niece—powder-blue pajamas, pigtails, and bare feet—standing uncharacteristically still, head cocked
back, and gazing at a firefly floating erratically midway between her nose and the rustling green canopy above.
“Look, Uncle Archer, the first one of the night,” she turned and said when she heard him behind her.
“There will be more,” he said. “Soon they’ll all be out and we’ll have to put on dark glasses.”
“Silly,” she said matter-of-factly and continued on her way. “Come, Math,” she called back to the dog.
The path meandered for a quarter mile through the woods, and by the time they reached the observatory, as Archer called the small clearing, they had only the moon and fireflies to light their way. Two fan-backed wicker chairs and a low, glass-topped table were there waiting for them. Archer put the picnic basket down on one of the seats and drew back its leather cover. From within, he retrieved a candle and placed it on the table. Leaving his cane propped against the arm of the chair, he stepped uneasily over to the trunk of an oak tree at the boundary of the clearing.
Maggie took her uncle’s arm and steadied him as he unwound the cord that, at their end, was twined around a cleat driven into the trunk and, at the other, looped up over the one branch that jutted out above the furniture. Once the line was clear, he released it slowly, a handful at a time, lowering an orange globe the size of a beach ball from where it had hung, up near the sheltering branch. When the lantern had descended, twirling and swaying, to a foot above the table, he rewound the extra cord around the cleat.
“Can I light it?” she asked, as they moved back to where the orange ball swung.
“Absurd,” said Archer, reaching into his vest pocket. He took out a cigarette lighter that had the form of a derringer. “You can get the hatch, though,” he told her.
Maggie climbed upon the other chair and, reaching for the globe, unhooked the curved panel that opened on delicate hinges, while her uncle shot a spark of flame at the wick of the candle. “Hold it still, now,” he said, and she steadied the lantern. He carefully fitted the candle into its place inside the globe and then closed it. A warm glow filled the sphere and radiated subtly throughout the observatory.
“Hoist it,” he said to her and she did the honors at the tree, unwinding the cord from around the cleat. As she slowly pulled back on the line, she watched the rising lantern and thought of it as a miniature sun, and then a soul. When she had the line secured, she turned back to her uncle, who had taken from the picnic basket a folded quilt that he was just then unfurling. She stepped forward as he held it up in front of him like a bullfighter’s cape. “Madame Margaret,” he said. When she was before him, she turned her back, and he draped the cover of a hundred different textures and colors over her shoulders.
A queen in a procession, she marched to her chair and, with the blanket wrapped around her from her neck to her shins, sat back onto her throne. Mathematics curled up at her feet, and she rested the soles of them lightly, one on his rib cage, one on his haunch. Archer placed the picnic basket on the ground next to him, seating himself in the chair. Leaning over, he then took from the basket a thermos and two glasses, and what appeared to Maggie to be a tall, slender-necked vase ending in a kind of cup, with a base like a bulging belly etched in a flower motif. There was a thin hose attached to one side that tapered into a nozzle.
“Is that a magic lamp?” she asked him.
“Sort of,” he said, as he opened the thermos. He poured her a glass of tea and then lifted the top off the odd contraption and poured some tea inside it as well. Fitting the bowl top back in place, he said, “It’s called a hookah, or a narghile.”
“Does a genie come out when you rub it?”
Archer laughed. “This part here” he said, pointing to the bowl at the top, “is called the lule.” His finger then moved to the neck. “This is the marpuc,” he said. “The govde,” pointing to the body. “And this is the agizlik,” he told her, and put the end of the nozzle momentarily into his mouth to test its draw.
Maggie leaned forward to take her glass of tea from the table, and her uncle thought he caught a glimpse of what she would look like when she was older. There was an expression of seriousness in the brow, a slight indication of uncertainty around the eyes that he feared would become more pronounced with time.
“The narghile should always sit on the floor or ground,” he said to her. “That is proper etiquette, but I am too old and crippled to sit down there with my legs crisscrossed like a pretzel.”
“What does it do?” she asked, lazily reaching out for but missing a firefly that passed by her head.
“For smoking,” he said. With this, he lifted his cane and twisted the onyx crow’s-head handle, which came away from the stick in his hand. Very carefully, he moved the ornament over the top of the hookah and tilting it, watched as a fine dark powdery substance fell in grains from a tiny hole at the end of the beak, filling the water pipe’s bowl.
“Can I try it?” asked Maggie.
“You are too young,” he said as he reattached the black head to the cane. “I need the smoke sometimes to keep my internal engine running, to, as they say, get up a full head of steam. You have all of the energy you need. Besides, the smoke teaches contemplation and patience, and it is a child’s job to be impatient.”
“Is that tobacco like what my father puts in his pipe?” she asked.
“Hardly, my dear. This is the house blend, the recipe of sultans—mixed with perfume and crushed pearls.”
“What’s inside a pearl when you crush it?” she asked. “A yoke?”
“No,” he said, “that’s an egg.”
“What?”
“Something,” he said and pulled the trigger on the derringer, lighting the contents in the bowl until it began to smolder. He pocketed the lighter and then lifted the nozzle at the end of the hose to his mouth. For the duration that he drew in, Maggie sipped her tea. Its flavor was a mix of orange and peach and some other soothing ingredient. She imagined she was drinking the glow of the lantern.
Archer exhaled slowly, and the pale violet smoke grew up into the night from his open lips like the ghost of a vine, spiraling, knotting, nearly taking the form of a blossom before dissipating.
“Where’s the telescope?” asked Maggie.
“There is none,” he answered.
“But you call this the observatory,” she said. “I thought that was a place where you looked at the stars.”
“Precisely,” he said, took another toke, exhaled, and then leaned back in the chair with a faint smile.
“They will be coming for me tomorrow,” she said.
“I’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“Will you bring Math with you and visit us in the city at the holidays?” she asked.
“Perhaps.”
“Yes,” she corrected. There was a pause and then she asked, “Do you think my parents have been arguing while I’ve been away?”
He had meant to tell her, “Of course not,” but instead he heard himself saying, “I don’t know.”
“My father is going to leave us,” she said. “Mother told me he might.”
“Well, let’s wait and see what happens,” he said. “And while we are here, I believe I promised to tell you a story, one that you will remember until next summer.”
“Tell me one that will make me remember the beach and you and Math even when it’s dark and snowing. Something by the sea, please,” she said.
He leaned forward to relight the bowl of the hookah. This time as he drew on the nozzle, she peered through the dim light at him, studying his features—long beard, thinning hair, high forehead, and round cheeks with a scar across the right side—in order to commit them to memory, like a photograph for her mind.
“I left home at a very young age,” he said, his eyes closed, “and went to sea as a cabin boy on a large vessel out of Kelmore, bound for exotic locales, with the sole mission of capturing a strange creature for the garden zoo of a millionaire.”
Maggie put her tea down and leaned back in her chair to listen, all the time thinking wh
at a wonderful father the dog at her feet, Mathematics, would make.
“The name of the ship was The Mare, and it had three masts, three bright yellow sails, and a crow’s nest. The figurehead was that of a wild horse with a mane of wooden flames and eyes made from what were rumored to be the two largest rubies in the world. Our captain was a fine old man named Karst, easy going and just, who could split a proverbial hair with his tongue and a real one with a dagger at twenty paces.”
Maggie pictured the wild horse, which melted into Math, who rode her on his back to school, made her hard-boiled eggs for lunch, and read stories to her at night next to the fireplace. She saw her mother, tears in her eyes, sitting at the kitchen window of their apartment in the city, staring out at the rain-washed streets while Math sat beside her, quietly, patiently, with his paw resting gently atop her forearm.
“The crew of The Mare was an odd and interesting lot, men who had spent so much time on the ocean that their eyes, no matter the color they were born with, had all turned blue, and their faces were like dark leather, cured over time by the sun and salt spray. There was a man named Farso, who had once been a pirate and whose entire body was tattooed in aquamarine and rose with scenes of the war between Heaven and Hell—fierce angels and cunning demons battling with broadswords amongst the clouds, amidst the flames. On our first day at sea, he gave me the nickname Beetle, and it stuck to me the way the jagged legs of that insect fasten themselves to a sweater.”
“Did he ever kill anyone?” asked Maggie, thinking of Math standing upright, with his concave stomach and ridged back, a long gray paw placing the shiny tin star atop the Christmas tree while her mother applauded.
“Farso?” said Archer. “I should think so, for he kept a cutlass in the sash that was his belt, the blade of which was stained red. I don’t believe it was raspberry juice that had discolored the metal, if you catch my drift. One night, when we were becalmed in the Sea of Dolphins, as we sat in the rigging of the main mast in the moonlight, he told me how he had witnessed the birth of a child in a tavern of Sechala, the pirate town of Peru. This incident tipped the scales, and the war, the one depicted upon his flesh, between good and evil that had raged inside him since his own birth, was finally won by Life. He had only glimpsed the child for an instant, he said, but its wide eyes, taking in the new world around it, shot out an invisible beacon that bore into his heart and vanquished his fear of Death.”