The ride wasn’t a comfortable one. Apart from the stench, some of it from the bodies, most of it from the cart and the man driving it, there were the jolts as it went over rocks or uneven terrain.
On one particular bump, Ted found himself rolling over to face a girl who’d had her eyes plucked out, the black sockets staring back at him (what had been her name? Jackie, Debra, Sandra? Who the Hell knew?). He couldn’t even muster a scream and was thankful when the next jolt came and righted him again.
They seemed to be travelling quite fast though, hardly enough time for Ted to worry about where this guy would be dumping them: burying them in a wood, weighing them down in a lake perhaps? In a deserted quarry?
He was wrong on all counts, because when the cart eventually arrived at its destination, the Rag and Bone Man had returned to his home (one of Audrey’s dad’s old places perhaps? Had this bloke bought it?). Ted took in the yard when they rode through the gates – a typical scrap merchant’s, with bits of old bicycles, worn-out beds, washing machines and every other bit of discarded detritus you could imagine piled on every side. It wouldn’t be hard to lose a few bodies in that lot. The perfect place, in fact.
The man pulled his horses to a standstill and clambered down. The moon was slipping behind a cloud so Ted still couldn’t get a good look at the man’s face as he began to unload the contents of his cart. He needed to see him, for when he got away – he’d need to describe him to the police. Audrey first. Then this guy. The cops would throw the book at them both.
(Oh yes, and what happens when they go digging around in your past? What happens when they find out about Frank?)
The huge figure began picking up the corpses again, putting them over his shoulder. He whistled once more as he worked, which made what he was doing all the more disturbing. He tossed them on the heaps of rubbish as if he was flinging old tyres.
Ted tried to twist away, to get his legs and arms moving, to climb out and get free of this place. Run, find a phone and—
But he was going nowhere. They were down to the last few women in the cart, which didn’t take the man long to clear.
“Look . . . Hey, I have money,” Ted managed. (Oh yeah, whose?)
The man ignored him, heaving the last of the scrawny bodies onto a pile of trash.
He turned and began making his way back towards Ted.
“Can’t we at least talk about it, please?”
“Help me. P-Please!” The words of that woman back in the cellar rattled around in his head.
The man was drawing nearer. “Please, I don’t want to die!” shouted Ted, with more force than he’d been able to muster since he woke.
His captor paused then, lingering as if mulling something over. Then he began to walk off to one side.
Yes! I’ve got through to him, thought Ted. Maybe I should offer him some money again? He frowned, though, as he watched the man rooting around in the rubbish there, fishing something out. As the large figure turned, Ted saw he was holding up a cracked mirror.
And, as the guy came back, the moon passed from behind those clouds at the same time as the Rag and Bone Man lifted his head. Ted just about had time to register those features – and realise just how appropriate his name was – before the mirror was lifted.
Then it all fell into place. Flashes of the man’s face, so similar to Frank’s, something he himself had inherited through a bloodline and profession that went back so far. (A lot of people think that Rag and Bone men only go back a couple of hundred years, but some say it’s further. To the middle ages, or maybe even before that . . .)
A trade plied during plague times, when they would carry the dead away from infected areas? You don’t, you can’t, do something like that without being granted some kind of immunity by Death himself. They were His helpers, in effect: some even changing to resemble their master.
The rags and bones, all that was left of the dead, were collected by them. By people who were little more than rag and bones themselves. It was a bloodline that had been broken when Ted came along – not simply persuading Audrey to sell up, but engineering the little “accident” that would take Frank’s life and provide the means for her to do so.
Frank was an old man, his heart weak: it wasn’t that hard to sneak inside the house and give him a little . . . scare.
Just like Ted was scared now. Because not only was he seeing something he really didn’t want to in the mirror, he was also remembering. That it hadn’t been the first time he’d woken up back there in the cellar, that Audrey had already done things to him which made the others look like she was just getting started. Pain so intense he’d blocked it out, kept alive – barely – while he watched her cut up the women.
But not kept alive long enough.
The image, the face – or what was left of it – staring back at Ted was barely recognisable as his own. It had been shredded, along with the rest of him: skin flayed from his body so that you couldn’t tell where his clothes ended and his flesh began. Ted recalled the whipping now with some kind of cat o’ nine tails, spiked ends digging deep with each swipe. He howled then, just as he had when Audrey had done her worst, finally getting up close and personal, pulling off his finger- and toe-nails, doing hideous things to his privates that meant he’d never be capable of cheating on anyone again.
Ted looked away and the Rag and Bone Man dropped the mirror. His charge had seen enough obviously, but things were only just getting started.
Ted looked past the skeletal figure, whose coat could no longer conceal its ribcage, open to the air. This representation of everything Frank held so dear, this figure that was all the Rag and Bone Men there’d ever been rolled into one, had made its home in a fittingly nightmarish place.
Because the more Ted looked, the more he saw of the yard, filled not only with ordinary rubbish, but the more specific junk of human waste. Bones, organs, scraps of clothing, all plugged the gaps where he’d dared not look before.
Ironically, Ted felt like laughing. He’d been pleading for his life when all along there was no life to spare. No wonder Audrey had been ignoring him – had he really been speaking at all? Had any of this actually been happening? It certainly felt real to him, but that didn’t mean anything.
Somehow Ted knew he would soon fill the spaces here, just like those women who wronged Audrey, who’d wronged the line. Trapped in their own private Hell. (For a moment, Ted wondered if they were seeing this, or something else entirely; perhaps this little treat had been reserved only for him?)
But it was time, he saw. When the Rag and Bone Man came for him now, Ted surrendered without protest.
To be carried over to the pile of junk, of scrap human life.
To join the walls of organs, body parts and muscle.
To join . . . no, finally to become the rag . . .
. . . and the bone.
GEMMA FILES
Some Kind of Light
Shines from Your Face
GEMMA FILES is a former film critic/film history teacher. She is now probably best-known for either her 1999 International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction Award-winning story “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, or her Weird Western “Hexslinger Series” trilogy (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones) from ChiZine Publications.
She has stories upcoming in the anthologies Magic, A Season in Carcosa and A Mountain Walked, and is currently hard at work on what she hopes will be her first contemporary horror novel.
“I wrote this piece very quickly,” explains the author, “in a sort of frenzy, while deep in the middle of putting together my second novel. I’d agreed to contribute something to Conrad Williams’ anthology Gutshot, a collection of ‘weird west’ tales from PS Publishing, and this was what came out.
“At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure if it fit the bill, but Conrad liked it enough to pick it up, so who am I to say?
“As for influences: I’ve been a Greek mythology buff from childhood on, so I’d always wanted to do something about
Medusa and her sisters, the Gorgonae.
“I’m also a huge fan of HBO’s sadly defunct Dustbowl Gothic series Carnivàle, which probably shows, but there’s some input there as well from Robert Jackson Bennett’s first novel, Mr Shivers, and even Peter Crowther’s Depression-era werewolf tale ‘Bindlestiff’, which I read in his collection The Longest Single Note.
“I also stole the title from a line in a Barbra Streisand song, ‘Prisoner (Theme from Eyes of Laura Mars)’.”
It is immediately obvious that the Gorgons are not really three but one plus two. The two unslain sisters are mere appendages due to custom; the real Gorgon is Medusa.
—Jane Ellen Harrison
COOCH’S THE ONE thing always plays, Miz Forza told me, right from the start. And damn if I didn’t come pretty quick to believe her ’bout that, just like I did ’bout so much else: Better than freaks, better than tricks, safer and more sure by far than creatures that required twice the feed of a grown man, not to mention a whole heap of mother-lorn care lest they catch ill and shit ’emselves to death, run wild and kill the rubes, or just bite at their own bellies ’til their guts fell out on the road.
Not that anything was really safe back then, in them dustbowl days of endless dirt and roaming; it was our stock in trade to hook folks in and get ’em riled up, after all, then see how much money we could pull from between their starving teeth before the inevitable backlash. The whole damn world was a half-stuffed firecracker, just as like to fizzle as it was to take your face off, and waiting on the spark – or maybe a mine dug deep in the mud of La Belle France of the kind Half-Face Joe used to tell tales on, a-whistling into Skinless Jenny’s ear and flapping his flippered hands along for accompaniment, as though he was making shadow-dogs bark on Hell’s own wall. After which Jenny would translate, her own uncertain voice sweet and slow as stoppered honey, while the lamplight flickered so bad it looked like every one of her Thousand and Ten Tattoos was dancing the low-down shimmy with each other.
Joe’d been a handsome young man once, ’fore them Europe kings and such got to squabbling with each other. Now he took tickets with a bag over his head ’til it was time to stump up on-stage and exhibit himself, making women and kids squeal and grown-ass men half-faint with his flesh’s horrid ruin. In an odd way, he made a perfect palate-cleanser for the cooch show, too . . . always boiled the crowd off a bit, sent the ladies scurrying, leaving their menfolk ready to pay big for a bit of sweet after all that sour.
Them gaiety-gals was the real stars of the show, though, for all they came and went right quick – got picked up in one shit-hole town, dropped off again three more over, and never seen since. I didn’t ever tend to look too hard at their faces, myself – why bother? Be it on-stage or off-, wasn’t a one of us didn’t know how with them, all true interest began to build strictly beneath the neck.
Five gals on either side, one in the middle. Ones on either side did their Little Egypt harem dance, the classic shake and grind, in outfits that flashed their hips, thighs, the fake jewels in their belly-cups, ’fore popping their front-closed brassieres apart to let their boobies sway free. One in the middle, though, whoever she might be that week – she was the real deal, the star attraction. The one who risked the full blow-off and lifted her split skirt high, let the rubes gape at the hidden-most part of herself while up above the Mask of Fear nodded and grinned, all pallid skin and bruisy eyes and dead snake hair hung in clusters like poison vine, adding a very particular sting indeed to her all-too-naked tail.
“I don’t suppose you even know what this is,” Miz Forza said to me, the first night I turned up shivering at their campfire with my hand half-out, half-not, just in case they took a notion to whip me for it. She had it hung up on a stand, like for wigs, and was stroking it all over with some foul-smelling stuff meant to keep it supple; the other gals all just sort of looked ’round it, shoving Miz Farwander’s stew inside as fast as it’d go, like they was trying to forget how one of ’em would have to stick her head inside ’fore the next work-a-day was done.
What the Mask was made of I didn’t know then, and didn’t want to – but I sure did want me some of what else they had. So I squinted hard, then back up at the caravan’s walls, which were covered in similar figures, their paint weather-worn yet still somehow bright, like fever.
“Looks like the Medusa, to me,” I said, finally. “That old hag-lady with hissers for locks, who could turn men t’stone with one look-over. Some Greek fella cut her head off for her, hung it on his shield, an’ used it to get him a princess t’marry. And then a horse with wings come out her neck, if I don’t misremember.”
The Mizes exchanged a glance at that, near to surprised as I’d ever seen ’em come. From the start, they read like sisters to me, though their names was different: Miz Forza was the smaller, dressed like a fortune-teller in a hundred trailing skirts and scarves, all a-riot with colour; Miz Farwander was tall as some men and tougher than most, never wore nothing more elaborate than a pair of bib overalls and a greasy pair of cowboy boots, with her hair crammed down inside an old newsboy’s cap so tight she might as well be bald. Come to think, they neither of ’em liked to show their hair none – Miz Forza’s was wrapped like rest of her in a scarf the colour of money, wound ’round with a string of old pewter coins. And she wore gloves, too, right up to her elbows, while Miz Farwander’s hands were covered so deep in grime and such it was like they’d been dyed – black and grey, with no easy way to tell their fronts from their backs, except by what she was doing at the time.
And: “That’s good,” she said, approvingly, and grinned at me wide, so’s I could see her teeth were all capped and shod in metal from east to west – metal of every sort: Silver, tin, steel, bronze, and even a hint or two of gold. “Ain’t it, sister? Most don’t know the old tales, not anymore.”
Miz Forza nodded back. “That’s right, that’s right; they do not, sad to say.” To me: “And who was it taught you the right way of things, dear? Your mother, maybe? Grandmother?”
“That’d be my Ma. She loved all that old stuff.”
“But you don’t have no true Greek in you, do you, even so? Not by the shape of your face, or the colour of your eyes . . .”
I blushed a bit at that, though I tried not to, for I’d been twitted over these things often enough, in previous days.
“Don’t rightly know,” I said, shortly. “Don’t rightly care too much, either . . . not ’less it’ll get me a job, or some of that stew you’re ladlin’ out there. ’Cause if it will—”
Miz Farwander laughed. “If it will, then you’re Greek through and through, ain’t you – both sides for a hundred generations, all the way back to Deucalion’s mother’s bones? Aw, you don’t have to answer, child; I can see you need feedin’, sure as sin. And the storm-bringer Himself knows we got enough to go ’round.”
Miz Forza cast eyes at her, sidelong, as though to warn her not to speak so free. But Miz Farwander just shrugged, so she turned back to me instead, asking—
“And what might your name be, gal? If you don’t mind me askin’.”
“Persia,” I said. “Persia Leitner.”
“That German?”
“For all’s I know.”
“Your Ma might be able to tell us.”
“Might, if she was here,” I allowed, the pain of that old wound seeping up through me once more. “But . . .”
Miz Forza nodded as though she’d heard all this before, which she probably had. “And you don’t know your Pa either, I s’pose,” she suggested, without any malice.
I grit my teeth. “S’pose not,” I answered. “But I sure ain’t the only one like that, ’round these parts.”
“Oh, no, no, no. No, Persia . . . you surely ain’t.” A pause. “Sounds a bit like ‘lightning’, though, that name. Don’t it?”
I’d never thought so, but that smell was making my mouth water hard, so I nodded. The gals all murmured amongst ’emselves, like a flock of cooing doves. And:
; “It does, yes, now you mention,” Miz Farwander told Miz Forza, musingly, as she passed the last cup they had on over – and even as I sunk my face in it, through one more glance back and forth again right overtop me, like I wasn’t even there. “It certainly does, at that.”
You’ll recall the pictures, no doubt – migrant mothers, carts jam-packed with Okies bound to pick or beg, Hoover camps in every mud-field and vacant lot. Houses buried window-deep in sand and milk-starved babies buried shameful shallow, or not even buried at all. They look like a bad dream now, or even lies, but they sure wasn’t; I saw it all. Hell, I lived it.
When the crops dried and the dust come down to scour us clear, it was like every drop of colour just went out of the world – drained slow, like a man can die from one little cut alone, he only gets caught the exact wrong way. Like we was all of us being poisoned by coal-dust, or tin, or cheap nickel coating boiled off of pot-bottoms along with our daily mush, and didn’t even know it. Oh, there was symptoms and that, which we mainly put down to hunger, a powerful thing; hunger will make your head ache and give you double vision, sure enough, under any circumstances.
But I can’t think it was hunger alone that drove my Ma stark crazy, always following things from the corners of her eyes that simply weren’t there to any other person’s reckoning – not that, nor having no money, doing things with all manner of men that weren’t none of ’em my Pa, always living hand to mouth, chased from town to town like dogs and thrown rocks at for grappling at scraps.
My Ma said my Pa was some gangster in Kansas City, and she’d had to run from him – or maybe it was her Pa she’d run from, who’d paid men to cram her in a car’s trunk and dump her far from her home, to fend off the shame of her falling to ruin. But then again, sometimes she said my Pa was a wolf, or a burst of lightning, or the wind. Said he’d come winding through sunlight-wise under her window-shade one day, and fell headlong into her lap like a shower of gold.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books) Page 15