by Rich Horton
“Maybe she did,” I said. And I did hope she had.
“Who knows?” the woman in the window seat said. “Maybe.”
The flight attendant came down the aisle with drinks. I will be honest. I badly wanted a real drink. But I had a Coke instead. The woman in the window seat had a gin and tonic and the woman in the aisle seat asked for a tomato juice. She said, “I used to know a girl like that. In New York. A long time ago.”
We both looked at her, me and the woman in the window seat.
“She worked in advertising,” the woman in the aisle seat said. She drank her tomato juice and then wiped the red off her lips with the back of her hand even though there was a cocktail napkin right there on her tray. “She’d come to poker nights with a friend of mine. Tuesday nights. Penny something. My friend said Penny had the nicest apartment you’d ever seen. This enormous prewar apartment up near Columbia that no one could have afforded, but Penny was subletting it for hardly anything at all because it was haunted. No one else could live there. Apparently you couldn’t even spend the night without seeing things or hearing things, really awful things, but Penny slept there like a baby.”
“Some people just don’t see ghosts,” the woman in the window seat said. “They’re not sensitive or whatever.”
“No,” the woman in the aisle seat said. “Penny could see the ghosts just fine. She could see them, she could hear them, for all I know she played poker with them on every night of the week except Tuesdays. She just didn’t care. She wasn’t afraid of them. She wasn’t afraid of anything.”
“I’m not really afraid of ghosts either,” the woman in the window seat said. “All that kind of stuff is kind of stupid. No offense if that’s not what you think.”
The woman in the aisle seat said, “No, you don’t understand. I mean this Penny literally wasn’t afraid of anything. She wasn’t afraid of snakes or the dark or thunderstorms or serial killers or being mugged or dogs or heights. She told my friend that she didn’t really understand what fear even was. Her mother used to hide behind doors and then jump out at her, to try to scare her when she was a kid. Took her on roller coasters and to therapists. She was mugged at gunpoint twice in one week in New York and my friend said she just laughed about it. But she was curious about what it was like, to be afraid. So she and my friend would go to horror movies and afterward she would ask my friend why they were scary. What it felt like.”
“That would be nice,” the woman in the window seat said. “Not to be afraid of anything. I’m not afraid of ghosts, but I’m afraid of everything else. I don’t even know what that would be like, not to be afraid of everything.” She turned to me. “I mean, you’re afraid of something, right?”
“Flying,” I said. “Myself.”
“Right?” the woman in the window seat said. “Right! I mean, imagine not being afraid of anything.”
“Straight and curly hair,” the other woman said. “People with straight hair wish they had curly hair and people with curly hair wish they had straight hair. You wish you weren’t afraid of anything, and my friend said Penny wished she could be afraid of anything, even though she had this gorgeous apartment because she wasn’t. She had a lot of girlfriends, but the relationships never lasted very long because none of the girlfriends would sleep over at her place. The ghost or whatever was there frightened them away the first time they slept in her bed. Nothing Penny could do could make them stay, and Penny didn’t want to give up her apartment. But eventually she fell in love with this girl Min Jie, and she gave up the apartment for her and they moved in together and got married. My friend went to the wedding. Min Jie was a cheesemonger. She knew everything about cheese. Did you know that for a while you could buy a cheese made from women’s breast milk? Min Jie said it was a soft cheese. A little like a goat cheese. She worked in this shop in Midtown that had every kind of cheese, imported chocolate, pâtés, tongue, marrons glacé. Lobsters, Golden Osetra caviar, tupelo and lavender honey, Sacher tortes, so the spread at the wedding was amazing, my friend said. The wine was some of the best wine she’d ever tasted, and there was plenty of it. Fountains of it. Tables of smoked fish and shrimp and mussels in carved ice bowls. Penny got up and toasted her bride and said that perhaps she would never know fear, but now she knew love.”
“Very romantic,” the woman in the window seat said. “Nobody’s ever said anything like that to me.”
The woman in the aisle seat said, “That night they went home and they made love and afterwards Penny lay in their bed in their new bedroom, which was so much smaller and dingier than the bedroom in her old apartment had been, and she was happy. And Min Jie came out of the bathroom with a bucket of live eels she’d procured at work, and she dumped the eels over the bed and all over Penny. And my friend said Penny sat straight up in the bed and started screaming because she finally understood what fear was.”
“Seriously?” the woman in the window seat said.
“That’s what my friend said,” the other woman said.
“That’s fucked up,” the woman in the window seat said.
I said, “Excuse me” to the woman in the aisle. In the last few minutes I’d become aware that I was getting my period, days before I should have had it. Everything was wrong, everything was happening that shouldn’t have been happening. But I was almost home. Surely we would be home soon.
I went in darkness down the aisle of the plane, passing women sleeping, women playing games on their phones or their iPads, women talking. That delicious smell from my dream was in my nostrils. Blood that shouldn’t have been there was between my thighs. But we have no control over our own bodies. The things we feel. The things that happen to us, over and over again. The things we crave.
At the back of the cabin, there was an Out of Order sign on one toilet. The other was occupied. So I waited as patiently as I could. I tried to picture Dido, who would be asleep in her bed. Or perhaps she had had another nightmare and Martine was letting her sleep in our bed.
What my wife shared with former lovers does not diminish what we have together. It isn’t as if, before, she killed a lot of people. She just fucked them. And perhaps we would not be together now, if Martine had not been who she was then. She was one person then, and is another person now. I never met that other person. That other Martine. And yet sometimes when I think of those years when I did not know her, I am filled with such a frenzy of jealousy that I imagine, as if compelled, finding those lovers in whatever homes or lives they occupy now. I imagine tearing at them with my nails, rending their flesh with my teeth. Making blood run in thick streams, enough to fill ten thousand swimming pools. So much blood it obliterates everything that came before she and I—
I pictured my swimming pool, cool and green and empty. Why would anyone be afraid of eels? Why be afraid of a creature, harmless, caught in a bucket? They only want to get out. In a plane, too, you are suspended. You cannot do anything. You cannot get out. You cannot always be the person you thought you were, no matter how badly you want to be her. Change is inevitable.
The toilet door opened and a woman came out. She said, “The toilet’s clogged. I wouldn’t go in there.”
In the galley just behind us, one of the flight attendants turned and said, “Oh, that’s not good. That’s not good at all.”
“Excuse me,” the woman who had come out of the toilet said. I let her go past.
I began to go into the toilet and the flight attendant put her hand on my arm. She said, “No. I’m sorry. You can’t go in there. We’ll be landing soon. Can’t you wait?”
The floor of the toilet was wet. The stench was intolerable. Swollen plugs of wet toilet paper sloshing in the metal basin. Writhing. I turned and looked at the flight attendant, and she recoiled. She took her hand off my arm and stepped back. She said something in such a small voice that I could hardly hear her over the sound of blood in my ears. Mice have louder voices. She said, again, “Are you okay?”
I could not answer her. I could not speak at all
. What she saw in my face was not the thing that is usually there. It was the other thing, the thing that lives inside my skin. I turned and went back up the aisle to my middle seat. The moon in the window in every row went with me like a cold white lozenge that I could have slipped under my tongue.
It went with me like a thing on a leash, all the way back to my seat.
They would be announcing our arrival soon. I might get a little blood on the seat, but what’s a little blood? Women bleed. Everyone bleeds.
The women on either side of me had been talking to each other. The woman in the window seat had a car in long-term parking, and she was asking the other, who didn’t have a car, if she would like a ride into Northampton. She said to me, “Do you have a car, Abby, or is someone picking you up? Do you need a ride? Where do you live?”
I had a feeling as if I could have run the whole way home, all thirty miles or so. But I wanted to be home with my wife and my child. My appointment was waiting for me, though I thought perhaps I might be a little early for it this time.
“Sure,” I said. “I would really appreciate that.”
Ink, and Breath, and Spring
by Frances Rowat
The wheelbarrow thumped a jolt into Palwick’s arms with every third step as he led Mattish back to where he’d found the corpse, out in the northern reaches of the garden. The trees waved dimly at them under the grey sky, and the thin morning light crept across the rolling ground with its whispering carpet of dead grass. Out in the north of the garden, the wind never really stopped.
Mattish had sent for a page when Palwick told her about the corpse, and had scarcely said anything since. She certainly hadn’t offered to take the wheelbarrow for a little while.
The flat silver sun had cleared the trees and eastern wall by the time they reached the corpse. Palwick had found it on the ground, gloveless and naked. He’d wrapped it in his overcoat and set it upright against the bayberry bushes before going to find Mattish; he’d never dealt with a corpse before, but couldn’t stomach the indecency of letting it lie there.
Three birds squabbled in the air above it; two crows and something paler. As Palwick and Mattish approached, the smaller of the crows darted off, shedding a feather. The pale bird shrieked after it, a flat sound in the wet morning.
The corpse was a man who might have been a little taller than Palwick himself, but waxen and crisp as a rose petal. Its left hand was missing, and it had an oddly unremarkable smell, like laundry and a rasher of raw bacon. The skin left on it—Palwick’s coat hid the raw wound covering its back—had withered a little from the cold. He guessed it had been there a week or more, even if nothing had been at it yet.
Mattish glared at the corpse for a minute. When it failed to apologize and leave, she reached for its remaining hand. The joints were stiff, but she wrenched it palm up and examined it.
“Well,” she said after a moment, dropping the hand. “He’s soft-handed; unless he’s from inside, or new staff from somewhere else in the gardens, he must have come over the wall. The page’ll know.”
She started working the corpse free of the bayberries, glancing up as the birds wheeling overhead screamed again. Palwick stepped up to help. The bayberries smelled bitter and bright, and the thorns bit at his gloves. Their branches were pliant and strong, snagging the sleeves of his overcoat. “Might be easier to pull him out,” he offered after a moment. “You really think he came over the wall? With one hand?”
Mattish shrugged, pulling the bayberries free and keeping them away from the corpse with her elbow as she worked. She had thinner gloves than Palwick’s, but tough ones; the fingers were pieced and tanned leather, and she ignored the pricking thorns. “He might have been wearing more when he got in,” she said. “It’s still winter. If he snuck in and tried to hide in the garden, the cold might have taken him.”
Palwick nodded. Cold wet wind wouldn’t kill as fast as a winter storm, but it would cluster blood around your gut and heart and leave you stunned and sweating. Then you’d do something stupid, like strip from the heat, and then there was nothing left but to pray you were found sooner rather than later.
He’d found the corpse later, that was all.
Still. “I didn’t find his clothes.”
“Wind might have taken them.” The bayberries slipped under her elbow and sprang back to whip around the corpse and snag the overcoat anew, and she cursed and stepped back. “You’re right; get him out, and get the coat out later.”
The second crow broke away from the squabble above them and fled eastward, tacking into the wind. The remaining bird wheeled down and perched on a thin bayberry branch. Its white feathers were banded and speckled with rich black, like paper dashed with ink.
Mattish glanced after the fleeing crow, then straightened, brushing her gloves off on her coat. Palwick followed her gaze and saw a page approaching from the library. You could tell the pages at a glance, even from too far away to make out their white eyes and bare hands; they never seemed to carry anything, and they walked as if on carpets.
He turned his attention back to the corpse, slipping his arms gingerly under the overcoat and around its torso. The thorns clung to his overcoat, but the corpse pulled stiffly free. The inkpaper bird bobbed its head and screamed as the raw bacon smell grew stronger. There were two small, blue dots on the corpse’s shoulder; he guessed they were a bit of winter mold.
“There’s something wrong with his back,” he warned. Mattish peered as it was exposed to the thin morning light, then let out a disgusted bark. The corpse’s back was an expanse of raw flesh, studded with tatters of dead grass. The wound stretched the width of the corpse’s shoulders and the length of its spine, bordered by the tiny toothmarks of a sharp knife.
“It’s flensed,” she said, her voice shivery, and gulped air. She took a step back as the page drew up beside her, gazing thoughtfully in the direction of the corpse with fog-white eyes.
The page was a page of key; her marker hung around her neck on a green-black ribbon, a dark iron piece of teeth and scrollwork as long as Palwick’s hand was wide. Her hands were bare; none of the pages needed to wear gloves, within the library or without. This one was dressed for an indoor room, a single long skirt and a sleeveless cowled shirt. She wasn’t wearing shoes, but neither did the frost melt under her feet.
“Which of you found him?” Her voice was mild. The pages all spoke mildly, even standing barefoot near a part-flayed corpse with a missing hand in a damp winter chill.
“That’s I, milady,” Palwick said. The page appeared to consider the corpse, but you couldn’t really tell what they were looking at. There was a moment’s pause while Mattish wrestled with her gorge as quietly as she could, and the inkpaper bird grumbled screechily.
“You found him here?”
“On the ground.” Palwick looked away from the page’s bare fingers. “Didn’t seem right to leave him there.”
“Have you ever seen such a thing before?” The page glanced between them.
Being spoken to by a page calmed Mattish a little. “The cutting? I’ve not.” She gulped air again and blew it out slowly as she peered at the wound. “I think it was done a while back. See, he wasn’t bleeding; he must’ve begun to heal.” She pointed at the clean hard lines where the skin had been cut away. “Must’ve happened outside. Same time someone took his hand, maybe. No-one in here could have— he must have climbed the wall in, been desperate to get away. Then the cold got to him, and he died, and lay here until Palwick found him.”
The page of key reached with bare fingers towards the wound’s border and the inkpaper bird launched itself towards her. Palwick threw his arms up between them, dropping the corpse, which tumbled to the ground like wet firewood. The bird’s wings beat the air like silk ripping, and then it sank its claws into his sleeve and ra-kaawwwked miserably.
Close up, Palwick could see that the black and white on it wasn’t as crisp as he’d first thought; the markings’ edges smudged into ashy grey. He pulled hi
s head back; the bird was the size of a rabbit or a cat, and he thought it might eat meat. Better to keep his face clear of its beak.
The page of key looked to Palwick. “It’s a guest’s animal,” she said. “The guest is in the library. Will you mind it until it leaves or they come for it?”
Palwick blinked at the bird. “Surely,” he said.
But the bird flew away shrieking when Mattish bent to pick up the corpse, and he had to help her get it into the wheelbarrow after all, and roll it back for keeping in the cold cellars until the ground thawed enough to dig a grave.
• • •
Palwick hadn’t dug the spring midden-pit in years, but Mattish was upset about the corpse, so when the frost on the ground thinned out four days later she put him on the job. The first morning, he went out to the fallow ground where Pemberly had chalked the outlines on the dead grass and lined up the spades.
A woman he didn’t recognize waited there, huddled into a thick sweater and long skirt with a short-sleeved overcloak belted atop that. She had a long nose and mushroom-pale skin, and her brown hair had a bruised purplish tint. It was oddly long, but maybe the color had put the wig-makers outside off buying it. A thin blue tracery spindled beneath her left eye, an uneven triangle with dots along its lines, looking like the lichen growing on some of the older garden stones.
A bird the size of a cat squatted by her boots; Palwick would have thought it the one that had been by the corpse except it wasn’t as white, and its soft-edged markings were only slate grey. Mattish was talking to her, and she nodded with sober concentration as she listened.
“Palwick, this is Essa,” Mattish said. “Mind her during the digging, would you? She’s new, from outside. Now, do you have—oh, good,” she interrupted herself as Essa held up her hands to show that they were mittened in thick fulled wool. Mattish worried off, and the bird by Essa’s feet parped a low grumble and shuffled its wings.