by Mike Allen
“Well look at you,” the deputy said, stepping toward the donkey. “Handsome feller. That crazy old woman was really off her rocker to keep you in this place.”
The sheriff shushed him, whispering, “You hear that?”
Jacobs listened, and realized he heard music, thin notes that conformed to no melody. At first, given how they overlapped without rhythm, he thought they might be from a wind chime, but the sound was too continuous, too full of purpose, and somehow beautiful despite its chaos. And the sound, inside the decades-decayed barn, was also somehow frightening.
The trio advanced with the sheriff in the lead. The deputy edged toward the donkey, intending to approach it gently and lead it out. The rooster squawked again, startling them all. For a moment, Jacobs pondered shooting it. It held its ugly head sideways to glare down at them all with one baleful round eye.
The music didn’t get any louder. Jacobs looked right and left, up and down, but couldn’t pinpoint its source.
“There, there. Easy,” said the deputy as he put a hand on the donkey’s flank, running his palm across fur bristly as a wire brush.
Standing before a precariously balanced pile of timbers, the sheriff shined his flashlight over a suspicious-looking mound of straw packed underneath the boards.
The donkey shifted on its hooves at the deputy’s touch, but made no noise. Puzzled, the deputy squinted into the stall, and noticed something lying by the beast’s front hooves, clothed in dun and dark brown, the same colors as his own uniform. As the deputy realized what the shape on the floor must be, the donkey kicked him with bone-breaking force.
Neither Jacobs nor the sheriff saw what happened, though both heard a crunch, then a loud crash. They turned to see the deputy lying on his back atop a pile of broken wood, across the barn from the donkey’s stall. Then a deafening rumble filled the barn that resolved into a deepest-basso growl. The straw pile under the strewn timber erupted.
A jet black mastiff lunged at the sheriff, its mouth distended to reveal teeth like white daggers, its shoulders higher than the lawman’s waist.
But Jacobs was distracted by the rooster flapping past him, its talons nearly tangling in his hair. He stared at it in amazement, for its flight was no longer ungainly. Its long wings swooped in a manner impossible for such a bird. As Jacobs stared, he thought for a moment that he saw a completely different form flicker through the air, long sleek legs drawing up, muscled back rippling, a flash of something celestial and malevolent.
The rooster alighted, and the deputy screamed as it pecked his face.
The sheriff shouted too, firing his revolver point blank into the mastiff’s muzzle, the gunpowder flashes leaving spots in Jacobs’ eyes.
The prosecutor held out his pistol, wavering back and forth between the other two men, stymied as to what to do. Then he noticed the donkey. During the distractions, it had silently sidled up next to him, its huge shaggy head longer than one of his shins.
It was smiling at him. Its lips were stretched along its heavy muzzle in a manner that seemed impossible, showing teeth that seemed too large and too numerous, as if a human smile had been carved in some atrocious way into its countenance. The single black eye that met Jacobs’ wide-eyed stare sparkled with mirth.
The beast stretched its neck as if it intended to nuzzle. Then it bit down on his arm, and bit through it. The hand holding the gun dropped away to land in the straw.
As Jacobs reeled backward in pain and shock, a piercing yowl shredded the air, and a dark shape sprang from the rafters. The last thing the prosecutor saw was the blood-flecked donkey’s face, still regarding him with one mirthful eye, mouth still stretched in an unnatural, elongated grin. Then a hissing black thing with green eyes and needle claws landed on his shoulders, and the claws took his sight away forever.
With a wail, Jacobs fell.
As his life ebbed away, the bird stopped its attack on the prone deputy, and leapt, wings flapping in great sweeps, to the rafters where the cat had hidden. It opened its beak, and the sheriff distinctly heard words, bellowed loud as a vengeful angel’s trumpet:
BRING THE ROGUE TO ME.
The dog stopped growling and stood on its hind legs, as did the donkey, as did the cat.
The sheriff saw four figures, like men, but still beast-like—creatures out of Faerie, or Hell—each baring teeth in unnaturally elongated smiles. The strange music that had tickled the ear so maddeningly when he first came into the barn grew louder, and the air grew darker around the beings as they began to dance. The dance could have been a simple folk jig, but the smiles of the things performing it charged each motion with stomach-churning menace. Each raised their arms and turned, and as they did so, they vanished, taking the music with them.
The sheriff, heart pounding, rushed to the stall where the donkey had stood, to discover the musicians had also taken Edward Jacobs’ body.
* * *
After that, the robbers never dared approach the house again. But the house suited the four musicians of Bremen so well that they did not care to leave it anymore.
THE LEAD BETWEEN THE PANES
1.
With his tenth birthday only a week away, Rodney Muse hated to admit to his younger brother that he was too scared to go out the back door.
Why? The spiders. Seven of them, bodies round as dimes, legs striped like witch stockings, had stretched webs over the back porch light, from the porch rails to the tin roof, nets in every corner.
Little elfin Paul stood in the doorway, the overcast day beckoning over his shoulder, yelling,“C’mon!” and tugging the screen door so its hinges creaked. Rodney blurted, “Watch out for the spiders!” and instantly regretted it. Paul, only eight, had no fear of spiders.
He laughed. “Chicken!” He jumped, tore at a fistful of web. A big brown body landed in his hair.
Paul screamed, swatted the wriggling thing to the boards and crushed it under his sneaker. Then he started bawling.
Of course Mama blamed Rodney, her cold iron stare and pale scowl all for him, her smiles and coos for sniffling Paul and the red bite on his scalp. Mama doctored the wound at the kitchen table. She’s always told Rodney never to go into the horse barn that used to be grandpa’s, or the old chapel further up the mountainside, because they were infested with spiders. Rodney had never been bitten by one, and seeing the results made him that much more terrified. He stared until Mama noticed and smacked him.
The next morning all the webs were gone from the back porch. Rodney waited till after dinner, when Mama had curled on the couch with her knitting, herself thin and straight as her needles, and thanked her for banishing the spiders. Her smile held ice. “I didn’t do that. Could have been bats. Or owls. They eat spiders.”
Rodney lay awake that night, thinking of mouths that arrive suddenly in the dark to tear you out of the world. Beneath him in the lower bunk Paul breathed soft and easy.
2.
Light shone bruised through the stained glass window, which shouldn’t have existed at all.
It had of course been Paul who broke Mama’s edict and set foot inside the rotting church. He returned to recruit Rodney, eyes bright with what he’d found. “You won’t believe what’s in there. I bet it’s worth something.”
If a shark made of decaying wood had swallowed them, its gullet would have looked exactly like the inside of this old church, its floor strewn with the broken skeletons of chairs, the ribs of its ceiling beams skewed. The space reeked of mud and mildew. With each step Rodney feared his foot would plunge through the floorboards into the black hollow visible between them. Paul rushed past the leaning block of the altar after grabbing up a long flat board that had a few small sections of two-by-four nailed to it crosswise at irregular intervals. He propped up it against the back wall. It almost reached the base of the window.
“Hold this,” he said.
Rodney stared at the figure of Christ formed in panes of colored glass and lines of lead. Ablaze with the noonday sun, his gaze tracked R
odney as he approached. Blood trickled from his crown of thorns, the holes in his hands, the rip in his side. Though no cross was visible, he stood in the crucifixion pose, shedding blood-red tears. A horde of smaller figures swarmed at his feet. Almost all pointed up. Most appeared to be screaming.
Rodney shook his head, mute. His brother laughed. “You are so chicken. I want to see. Up close.”
Rodney stood under the board and gripped as Paul climbed, his arms and legs trembling either from the strain of the ascent or despite his bravado. Later, Rodney remembered the red light that bathed Paul’s face as he craned his neck to peer into the window. He remembered, too, a revelation that the pointing figures weren’t screaming. They were laughing, the corners of their mouths curled up. Even later, when he was old enough, he’d question this memory. He was at the wrong angle, he couldn’t really see them. Paul could.
Rodney tried and tried, when his mama shook him and raged with questions, when the doctors and police investigators worried politely at him for hours, but he could never remember what happened after Paul looked in the window. Or where his brother went. His mama blamed him. She wouldn’t accept that he couldn’t control his younger brother.
In his heart of hearts he knew she was justified.
The historical preservation society removed the window. Mama called him a liar, said it didn’t look at all like what he described. He fantasized about finding the place where they stored that window, breaking in with a bag full of rocks so he could smash out every pane. He never did track it down.
When he married Anne, Mama didn’t come—nor did she come to the hospital when Chris was born, the ceremony when he earned his GED, his community college graduation.
He and Anne and Chris attended Mama’s funeral. They were the only ones there.
3.
I see it now, Paul said.
But Rodney didn’t. He saw nothing. He hung in the dark, the rhythmic chirping in the far distance his only sensory anchor. That and a wind that iced his flesh.
He tried crawling away from the cold, yet as his back legs clung to the thread that was his only link to safety, his forelegs found nothing. The breath that buffeted him grew warmer.
Stay away, Roddy. It’s full of spiders.
Not Mama’s voice—that was Anne’s voice. He called out. “Sweetheart?”
Teeth closed around him. The unyielding edges split his flesh, crushed his bones, squeezed his neck shut as he tried to scream.
The scream he woke to wasn’t a human sound. The pulse of Anne’s heart monitor switched to a steady drone, the rasp of her labored breathing replaced by silence, breast cancer’s final statement.
He did scream then, and if he’d had any real power, that scream would have cracked the earth.
Anne’s body, nothing but bones in his embrace. Rotted wood strung into a mannequin. Gentle hands pried him away, levered him out of her hospital bed.
Chris, all of nine, watched silent from the door. Rodney blinked at the stains under his son’s eyes, saw they were just tears, filtered through his own blurred sight. Chris in a button-down and slacks, that Gwaltney boy beside him in jeans and a black T-shirt, a heavy metal devil on his chest. Rodney didn’t much like or trust Jimmy Gwaltney but at that moment he was grateful to see his son’s shifty friend sticking by him, because dear old dad was going to be useless for a little while.
For a long while.
4.
The storm pounded the office window glass. As Rodney’s cell phone buzzed in his trouser pocket, all the eighth floor lights went out. He fumbled for the device as lightning roped beneath the sky. The flare revealed one of the city’s decorative pear trees toppling into the street as the wind ripped it from its moorings. A van screeched to a halt just short of striking it.
The phone’s display flashed Chris’s name. He flipped it open. “Everything okay?” Crackling on the other end, a transmission from the Arctic.
He sought a stronger connection. By the time he reached the office tower’s roof garden, panting from the stair climb, he could actually see the shadow of the freak storm’s hindmost bulk retreating up the slopes of Bent Mountain, fleeing the valley, with smaller clouds overhead milling confused like cast-off ballast.
He opened the phone, saw he had a voice mail message. Within the shrinking darkness on the mountain slope something blinked bright.
Chris’s recorded voice faded in and out. “Dad, Jimmy just came by…blew over the old church on Granma’s…says we won’t believe…”
And then Paul’s voice whispered, “I want to see. Up close.”
Rodney looked up, following the whisper. He staggered as his head went light. The morsel of the sun hung muted in the post-storm haze as the remnants of cloud poured together into a silhouette, its wingspan stretching from horizon to horizon. Half-formed jaws closed around the sickly orb and blotted it. For an instant the city returned to darkness.
The clouds dispersed into blue.
Bent Mountain was released from shadow. The light shining from its slope remained. Rodney recognized the place where this light hung in the air. He squinted. A distinct outline: the Gothic arch of a stained glass window, an unanchored portal where the chapel stood. Had stood.
He pressed “Call.” His son’s phone rang, rang, rang. He pictured his boy arriving in the clearing on the back of Jimmy’s ATV, trundling toward the wet rubble, face bathed in light from Christ’s blood-rimmed gaze.
None of Rodney’s warnings, reservations or affections had ever saved anyone he loved.
Paul laughed. Chicken. And added, It’s dark and lonely, bro, once you’ve been eaten.
Rodney sprinted down the stairs three at a time.
STONE FLOWERS
Prologue
An elderly woman smiles wanly from a tiny photo on the newspaper’s front page, above the fold, off to one side.
The accompanying article describes how, inside 87-year-old Galina Brodsky’s body, doctors found and removed an object with the alien-sounding name “lithopedion”—more readily known by its romanticized common name, a stone baby. A fetus that starts its development in a place outside the uterus and then dies. The mother’s body protects her by calcifying the baby’s corpse, rendering it harmless, an undetected passenger. A woman could go on to birth other children—as Brodsky had—and never know she still carried a child inside.
No more than three hundred cases have been recorded in the last four hundred years, the story states. A Muslim woman in Casablanca was believed to have carried her unborn baby inside her for almost fifty years. That had been the longest documented case until last week. Galina’s doctor told the paper that he believes the lithopedion he removed could have been in her body as long as seventy years.
If so, the reporter writes, Mrs. Brodsky has made medical history.
Galina granted a brief interview only because the reporter was an old friend, the story says. She told the reporter she was embarrassed by the attention and that she’d be glad when she was out of her hospital room. Given her husband’s accident and stroke, providing a new answer to a medical trivia question seems completely unimportant.
She calls it freakish coincidence that the pain inflicted by what turned out to be the lithopedion overcame her when she discovered her husband lying injured in the basement.
The article sketches Brodsky’s extraordinary life in quick brushstrokes. How she and her husband Danilo escaped from three dictators—Stalin, Hitler, Perón—before coming to Virginia and building their dream house and art school atop Tinker Mountain. How, going by the name Daniel Broadsky, her husband became for a time the most sought-after sculptor in the nation. How they had raised three children, who all now have children of their own. How, after so many miracles, he’d been felled by that most mundane of misfortunes, a stroke, which sent him tumbling down the basement steps.
Astonishing, really, that he had even survived the fall.
Odessa, 1921
The skeleton-thin boy, his head a great thatched mel
on above scrawny neck and jutting ribs, played his crudely-cut reed in the prison yard. A man had given him this plaything, though he did not remember the man’s face or name. He believed the man had been a prison guard, though he could not remember a uniform.
Each day he woke with the sad women, in the cell with the stinking bucket and the blankets that crawled with lice. Then the feed hole slid up in the bottom of the door, and after the bowls slid through and the women gathered around them, scooping the scraps of bread from the water with their fingers, a jailor’s gruff voice would call to him. “Danilo,” the guard would say, “You may come out.” And he crawled through the feed hole, the gritty floor rough on his knees. They let him play in the prison yard, a child alone, surrounded by stone walls and forbidding doors.