Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

The dark line didn’t undulate or widen or even suck us all into oblivion. It simply waited, like me, like the townspeople. Frozen. Neither alive nor dead.

  I began to climb out of my alcove, blood dripping onto my jacket, my shirt. A wave of nausea pounded my abdomen and white dots spotted my vision. The air grew even colder. The thought “absolute zero” flitted around my mind.

  The old lady had been right. Kristina was young, hopeful. She thought she might be able to let the outside world break into her town. Her grandmother knew better. I had to flee.

  I took one last look at the dark line hovering over the good citizens of Marrowvale and what I saw set me running from the field. Somehow, from within the line were emerging long, whip-like arms the same odd colour and hue as the helmets. These arms ended in perfectly human hands that held out to the masked people of Marrowvale an assortment of unnameable and unclassifiable objects. Treats.

  As soon as I gazed upon those spindly arms stretching out from the line, the hands so bizarrely human yet clearly not, I turned to the forest and sprinted. I wasn’t a journalist or a travel writer then. I was a human fighting to remain human.

  Though my thoughts came fuzzy and my vision still popped with bright dots, I managed to follow the path we’d taken to reach the field. I fell over stumps and roots, skinning my hands, bruising my knees, but the farther I crept from the dark line in the forest, the warmer the air became and the more alive I felt.

  I arrived in the Pittlebachs’ backyard exhausted and near the verge of collapse. My nose had stopped bleeding, so I felt sure that I could drive, that I could make my getaway. I dragged myself to the rental car and blasted away from Marrowvale. I drove for hours; I drove until my eyes drooped and I nearly ran off the road.

  When I finally stopped at a large, well-lit chain motel, I asked the desk attendant where I was.

  “Almost in Pittsburgh,” she said. “Just ten miles out. Where are you coming from?”

  I considered telling her. I considered asking her if she knew about Marrowvale. I considered not speaking at all.

  “Nowhere you’ve ever heard of,” I said, and paid for a room.

  GEMMA FILES

  HAIRWORK

  GEMMA FILES was born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada. She won a 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction for her story ‘The Emperor’s Old Bones’, and five of her stories were adapted into episodes of The Hunger, an erotic horror anthology TV show produced by Tony and Ridley Scott.

  Her first novel, A Book of Tongues from ChiZine Publications, won the 2010 Dark Scribe Magazine Black Quill Award for Best Small Press Chill; it was followed by two sequels, completing the “Hexslinger Series”. She has also published two short fiction collections, two chapbooks of poetry, and a story cycle (We Will All Go Down Together, 2014). Her latest book, Experimental Film, won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of 2015.

  “The minute I heard about the anthology She Walks in Darkness, a project specifically aimed by its editors (Paula R. Stiles and Silvia Moreno-Garcia) at re-interpreting H.P. Lovecraft’s monstrously feminine characters through a slightly less male-slanted lens, I started thinking about what story I’d like to re-tell, and from whose POV.

  “Naturally, my mind went to ‘Medusa’s Coil’, because Jesus, is that a doozy: a one-two punch of racism and gynophobia combined, with what has to be the single most skeevy last line in weird fiction history, even though Lovecraft co-wrote it with Zealia Bishop (under whose name it first appeared in Weird Tales, two years after his death).

  “One way or the other, I thought that if any one character in Lovecraft’s stable deserved the opportunity to speak for herself, it was that story’s Marceline Bedard de Russy. I really liked the idea of doing something similar to what Joe Lansdale did with his graphic novel adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s equally dicey ‘Pigeons From Hell’, in which he deliberately made the characters contemporary descendants of the central family, mixed-race, almost like a living rebuke to or reflection of the tangled historical issues at the tale’s heart.

  “I wanted Marceline to be the revenge of generations of slaves upon their slave-owners, a karmic bitch-slap the de Russys had literally bred for themselves and still not seen coming. Because this is why we don’t just let Lovecraft lapse into obscurity, from my angle: we keep him around specifically to be subverted, to look unflinchingly at the things he could only approach metaphorically. Hopefully I succeeded; if I didn’t I guess we all know why, but I’m glad I had the chance to try.

  “No plant can thrive without putting down roots, as nothing comes from nothing; what you feed your garden with matters, always—be it the mulched remains of other plants, or bone, or blood. The seed falls wherever it’s dropped and grows, impossible to track, let alone control. There’s no help for it.

  “These are all simple truths, one would think, and yet, they appear to bear infinite repetition. But then, history is re-written in the recording of it, always.”

  “ICI, C’EST ELLE,“ you tell Tully Ferris, the guide you’ve engaged, putting down a pale sepia photograph printed on pasteboard, its corners foxed with age. “Marceline Bedard, 1909—from before she and Denis de Russy met, when she was still dancing as Tanit-Isis. It’s a photographic reference, similar to what Alphonse Mucha developed his commercial art pieces from; I found it in a studio where Frank Marsh used to paint, hidden in the floor. Marsh was Cubist, so his paintings tend to look very deconstructed, barely human, but this is what he began with.”

  Ferris looks at the carte, gives a low whistle. “Redbone,” he says. “She a fine gal, that’s for sure. Thick, sweet. And look at that hair.”

  “‘Redbone?’ I don’t know this term.”

  “Pale, ma’am, like cream, lightish-complected—you know, high yaller? Same as me.”

  “Oh yes, une métisse, bien sur. She was cagey about her background, la belle Marceline, liked to preserve mystery. But the rumour was her mother came from New Orleans to Marseilles, then Paris, settling in the same area where Sarah Bernhardt’s parents once lived, a Jewish ghetto; when she switched to conducting séances, she took out advertisements claiming her powers came from Zimbabwe and Babylon, darkest Africa and the tribes of Israel, equally. Thus the name: Tanit, after the Berber moon-goddess, and Isis, from ancient Egypt, the mother of all magic.”

  “She got something, all right. A mystery to me how she even hold her head up, that much weight of braids on top of it.”

  “Mmm, there was an interesting story told about Marceline’s hair—that it wasn’t hers at all but a wig. A wig made from hair, maybe even some scalp, going back a long time, centuries…I mean, c’est folle to think so, but that was what they said. Perhaps even as far as Egypt. Her mother’s mother brought it with her, supposedly.”

  “Mummies got hair like that, though, don’t they? Never rots. Good enough you can take DNA off it.”

  You nod. “And then there’s the tradition of Orthodox Jewish women, Observants, Lubavitchers in particular—they cover their hair with a wig, too, a sheitel, so no one but their husband gets to see it. Now, Marceline was in no way Observant, but I can see perhaps an added benefit to her courtesanerie from allowing no one who was not un amant, her intimate, to see her uncovered. The wig’s hair might look much the same as her own, only longer; it would save her having to…relax it? Ça ira?“

  “Yeah, back then, they’d’ve used lye, I guess. Nasty. Burn you, you leave it on too long.”

  “Exactement.”

  Tully rocks back a bit on his heels, gives a sigh. “Better start off soon, you lookin’ to make Riverside ‘fore nightfall—we twenty miles up the road here from where the turn-off’d be, there was one, so we gotta drive cross Barker’s Crick, park by the pass, then hike the rest. Not much left still standin’, but I guess you probably know that, right?”

  “Mmm. I read testimony from 1930, a man trying for Cape Girardeau who claimed he stayed overnight, spoke to Antoine de Russy. Not possible, of course, given the tim
e—yet he knew many details of the events of 1922, without ever reading or hearing about them, previously. Or so he said.”

  “The murders, the fire?”

  You nod.

  “Yeah, well—takes all sorts, don’t it? Ready to go, ma’am?”

  “If you are, yes.”

  “Best get to it, then—be dark sooner’n you think and we sure don’t wanna be walkin’ ‘round in that.”

  A mourning sampler embroidered in fifteen different de Russy family members’ hair once hung upstairs, just outside my husband’s childhood bedroom door: such a pretty garden scene, at first glance, soft and gracious, depicting the linden-tree border separating river and dock from well-manicured green lawn and edging flowerbeds—that useless clutter of exotic blooms, completely unsuited to local climate or soil, which routinely drank up half the fresh water diverted from the slave quarter’s meagre vegetable patch. The lindens also performed a second function, of course, making sure de Russy eyes were never knowingly forced to contemplate what their negres called the bone-field, a wet clay sump where slaves’ corpses were buried at night and without ceremony, once their squeamish masters were safely asleep. Landscaping as maquillage, a false face over rot, the skull skin-hid. But then, we all look the same underneath, no matter our outward shade, ne c’est pas?

  In 1912, I took Denis’ hand at a Paris soirée and knew him immediately for my own blood, from the way the very touch of him made my skin crawl—that oh-so-desirable peau si-blanche, olive-inflected like old ivory, light enough to shine under candle-flame. I had my Tanit-wig on that night, coils of it hung down in tiers far as my hips, my thighs, far enough to brush the very backs of my bare knees; I’d been rehearsing most of the day, preparing to chant the old rites in Shona while doing what my posters called a “Roodmas dance” for fools with deep pockets. Frank Marsh was there, too, of course, his fishy eyes hung out on strings—he introduced Denis to me, then pulled me aside and begged me once again to allow him to paint me “as the gods intended”, with only my ancestors’ hair for modesty. But I laughed in his face and turned back to Denis instead, for here was the touch of true fate at last, culmination of my mother’s many prayers and sacrifices. Mine to bend myself to him and bind him fast, make him bring me back to Riverside to do what must be done, just as it’d been Frank’s unwitting destiny to make that introduction all along and suffer the consequences.

  Antoine de Russy liked to boast he kept Denis unworldly and I must suppose it to be so, for he never saw me with my wig off, my Tanit-locks set by and the not-so-soft fuzz of black which anchored it on display. As he was raised to think himself a gentleman, it would never have occurred to Denis to demand such intimacies. By the time his father pressed him to do so, I had him well-trained: Something odd about that woman, boy, I heard him whisper more than once, before they fell out. Makes my blood run cold to see it. For all she’s foreign-born, I’d almost swear I know her face…

  Ha! As though the man had no memory, or no mirrors. Yet, I was far too fair for the one, I suspect, and far too…different, though in “deceitfully slight proportion”—to quote that Northerner who wrote your vaunted testimony—for the other. It being difficult to acknowledge your own features in so alien a mirror, not even when they come echoing back to you over generations of mixed blood, let alone on your only son’s arm.

  You got in touch with Tully last Tuesday, little seeker, securing his services via Bell’s machine—its latest version, any rate—and by yesterday, meanwhile, you’d flown here from Paris already, through the air. Things move so fast these days and I don’t understand the half of it; it’s magic to me, more so than magic itself, that dark, mechanical force I hold so close to my dead heart. But then, this is a problem with where I am now, how I am; things come to me unasked-for, under the earth, out of the river. Knowledge just reveals itself to me, simple and secret, the same way soil is disturbed by footfalls or silt rises to meet the ripple: no questions and no answers, likewise. Nothing explained outright, ever.

  That’s why I don’t know your name, or anything else about you, aside from the fact you think in a language I’ve long discarded and hold an image of me in your mind, forever searching after its twin: that portrait poor Frank did eventually conjure out of me during our last long, hot, wet summer at Riverside, when I led my husband’s father to believe I was unfaithful expressly in order to tempt Denis back early from his New York trip…so he might discover me in Frank’s rooms, naked but for my wig, and kill us both.

  Workings have a price, you see, and the single best currency for such transactions is blood, always—my blood, the de Russys’ blood, and poor Frank’s added in on top as mere afterthought. All of our blood together and a hundred years’ more besides, let from ten thousand poor negres‘ veins one at a time by whip or knife, closed fist or open-handed blow, crying out forever from this slavery-tainted ground.

  After Denis’ grandfather bred my mother’s mother ‘til she died—before his eyes fell on her in turn—Maman ran all the way from Riverside to New Orleans and further, as you’ve told Tully: crossed the ocean to France’s main port, then its capital, an uphill road travelled one set of sheets to the next, equal-paved with vaudeville stages, dance-floors, séance-rooms, and men’s beds. Which is why those were the trades she taught me, along with my other, deeper callings. Too white to be black, a lost half-girl, she birthed me into the demi-monde several shades lighter still, which allowed me to climb my way back out; perception has its uses, after all, especially to une sorciére. From earliest years, however, I knew that nothing I did was for myself—that the only reason I existed at all was to bring about her curse, and her mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s.

  There’s a woman at Riverside, Marceline, ma mie, my mother told me before I left her that last time, stepping aboard the steam-ship bound for America. An old one, from Home—who can say how old? She knew my mother and hers; she’ll know you on sight, know your works, and help you in them. And so there was: Kaayakire, whom those fools who bought her named Sophonisba—Aunt Sophy—before setting her to live alone in her bone-yard shack, tending the linden path. It was she who taught me the next part of my duty, how to use my ancestors’ power to knit our dead fellow captives’ pain together like a braid, a long black snake of justice, fit to choke all de Russys to death at once. To stop this flow of evil blood at last, at its very source.

  That I was part de Russy myself, of course, meant I could not be allowed to escape, either, in the end. Yet only blood pays for blood, so the bargain seemed well worth it, at the time.

  But I have been down here so long, now—years and years, decades: almost fifty, by your reckoning, with the de Russy line proper long-extirpated, myself very much included. Which is more than long enough to begin to change my mind on that particular subject.

  So, here you come at last, down the track where the road once wound at sunset, led by a man bearing just the barest taint of de Russy blood in his face, his skin, his veins: come down from some child sold away to cover its masters’ debts, perhaps, or traded between land-holders like a piece of livestock. One way or the other, it’s as easy for me to recognise in Tully Ferris by smell as it’d no doubt be by sight, were I not so long deep-buried and eyeless with mud stopping my mouth and gloving my hands, roots knot-coiled “round my ankles” bones like chains. I’d know it at first breath, well as I would my own long-gone flesh’s reek, my own long-rotten tongue’s taste.

  Just fate at work again, I suppose, slow as old growth—fate, the spider’s phantom skein, thrown out wide, then tightened. But the curse I laid remains almost as strong, shored up with Kaayakire’s help: Through its prism, I watch you approach, earth-toned and many-pointed, filtered through a hundred thousand leaves at once like the scales on some dragonfly’s eye. I send out my feelers, hear your shared tread echo through the ground below, rebounding off bones and bone-fragments, and an image blooms out of resonance that is brief yet crisp, made and remade with every fresh step: you and Tully st
omping through the long grass and the clinging weeds, your rubber boots dirt-spattered, wet coats muddy at the hem and snagged all over with stickers.

  Tully raises one arm, makes a sweep, as though inviting the house’s stove-in ruin to dance. “Riverside, ma’am—what’s left of it, anyhow. See what I meant?”

  “Yes, I see. Oh, pute la merde!“

  Tree-girt and decrepit, Riverside’s pile once boasted two storeys, a great Ionic portico, the full length and breadth necessary for any plantation centrepiece; they ran upwards of two hundred slaves here before the War cut the de Russys’ strength in half. My husband’s father loved to hold forth on its architectural value to anyone who’d listen, along with most who didn’t. Little of the original is left upright now, however—a mere half-erased sketch of its former glory, all burnt and rotted and sagging amongst the scrub and cockle burrs. Like the deaths of its former occupants, its ruin is an achievement in which I take great pride.

  “Said this portrait you come after was upstairs, right?” Tully rummages in his pack for a waterproof torch. “Well, you in luck, gal, sorta…upstairs fell in last year, resettled the whole mess of it down into what used to be old Antoine’s ballroom. Can’t get at it from the front, ‘cause those steps is so mouldy they break if you look at ‘em the wrong way, but there’s a tear in the side take us right through. Hope you took my advice ‘bout that hard-hat, though.”

  You nod, popping your own pack, and slip the article in question on: It even has a head-lamp, bright-white. “Voilà.”

  At this point, with a thunderclap, rain begins to fall like curtains, drenching you both—inconvenient, I’m sure, as you slip and slide ‘cross the muddy rubble. But I can take no credit for that, believe it or not; just nature taking its toll, moisture invading everything as slow-mounting damp or coming down in sheets, bursting its banks in cycles along with the tea-brown Mississippi itself.

  Ownership works both ways, you see. Which is why, even in its heyday, Riverside was never anything more than just another ship, carrying our ancestors to an unwanted afterlife chained cheek-by-jowl with their oppressors, with no way to escape, even in death. No way for any of us to escape our own actions, or from each other.