“I don’t mind, Mummy,” Maddie was saying. “It’s amazing what you can see, even in a quiet street like this. I mean, that’s why I like this room. Because you can see out.”
Margaret looked out of the window. Yes. You could see a stretch of pavement, a bit of Mrs. Creswell’s hedge, a lamppost, the post box and Mrs. Monkton’s gate. It was not precisely an enticing view, and she exclaimed, “Oh, darling!” again.
“You’d be amazed who visits Mrs. Monkton in the afternoons,” Maddie said demurely.
“Good heavens, who—” Margaret exclaimed, but Maddie gave a reassuringly naughty giggle.
“That would be telling! You’ll have to sit up here one afternoon and watch for yourself.”
“I might,” Margaret said. But how could she? There was always so much to do downstairs, letters to write, shopping to do, and cook to deal with. (Life to get on with?) She too, she realized, dropped in on Maddie, left her with things to sustain or amuse her. And went away.
“Perhaps we could move you downstairs, darling,” she said. But that would be so difficult. The doctor had absolutely forbidden Maddie to use the stairs, so how on earth could they manage what Margaret could only, even in the privacy of her thoughts, call the bathroom problem? Too shame-making for Maddie to have to ask to be carried up the stairs every time she needed—and who was there to do it during the day? Maddie was very light—much too light—but her mother knew that she could not lift her let alone carry her by herself.
“But you can’t see anything from the sitting room,” Maddie said.
“Oh darling—” Margaret realized she was going to have to leave Maddie alone again. Her husband would be home soon and she was beginning to have serious doubts about the advisability of re-heating the fish-pie . . . She must have a quick word with Cook about cheese omelettes. If only Cook wasn’t so bad with eggs . . . “What’s this about sunset anyway?” she said briskly.
“Sunset comes a bit earlier every day,” Maddie said. “And just at sunset a man walks down the street.”
“The same man, every night?” Margaret asked.
“The same man, always just after sunset,” Maddie confirmed.
“Perhaps he’s a postman?” Margaret suggested.
“Then he’d wear a uniform,” Maddie said patiently. “And the same if he was a park-keeper I suppose—they wear uniform too, don’t they. Besides he doesn’t look like a postman.”
“So—what does he look like?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Maddie struggled for the right words, “but—can you imagine a beautiful skull?”
“What! What a horrible idea!” Margaret stood up, clutching the gray foulard at her bosom. “Maddie, if you began talking like this I shall call Dr. Whiston. I don’t care if he doesn’t like coming out after dinner. Skull-headed men walking past the house every night indeed!”
Maddie pouted. “I didn’t say that. It’s just that his face is very—sculptured. You can see the bones under the skin, especially the cheekbones. It just made me think—he must even have a beautiful skull.”
“And how is he dressed?” Margaret asked faintly.
“A white shirt and a sort of loose black coat,” Maddie said. “And he has quite long curly black hair. I think he might be a student.”
“No hat?” her mother asked, scandalized. “He sounds more like an anarchist! Really, Maddie, I wonder if I should go and have a word with the policeman on the corner and tell him a suspicious character has been hanging about outside the house.”
“No, Mother!” Maddie sounded so anguished that her mother hastily laid a calming hand on her forehead.
“Now, darling, don’t upset yourself. You must remember what the doctor said. Of course I won’t call him if you don’t want me to, or the policeman. That was a joke, darling! But you mustn’t get yourself upset like this . . . Oh dear, your forehead feels quite clammy. Here, take one of your tablets. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
And in her very real anxiety for her daughter, worries about the fish pie and well-founded doubts about the substitute omelettes, Margaret almost forgot about the stranger. Almost but not quite. A meeting with Mrs. Monkton one evening when they had both hurried out to catch the last post and met in front of the post-box, reminded her and she found herself asking if Mrs. Monkton had noticed anyone “hanging about.”
“A young man,” that lady exclaimed with a flash of what Margaret decided was rather indecent excitement, “but darling, there are no young men left.” Margaret raised a hand in mute protest only to have brushed aside by Mrs. Monkton. “Well, not nearly enough to go round anyway. I expect this one was waiting for Elsie.”
Elsie worked for both Mrs. Monkton and Margaret, coming in several times a week to do “the rough,” the cleaning that was beneath Margaret’s cook and Mrs. Monkton’s extremely superior maid. She was a handsome girl, with, it was rumored, an obliging disposition, who would never have been allowed across the threshold of a respectable household when Margaret was young. But nowadays . . . Mrs. Monkton’s suggestion did set Margaret’s mind at rest. A hatless young man—yes, he must be waiting for Elsie. She might “have a word” with the girl about the propriety of encouraging young men to hang about the street for her, but, on the other hand, she might not . . . She hurried back home.
Bunty’s mother came to tea, full of news. Bunty’s elder sister was getting engaged to someone her mother described as “a bit nquos, but what can you do . . . ” Nquos was a rather transparent code for “not quite our sort.” The young man’s father was, it appeared, very, very rich, though no one was quite sure where he had made his money. He was going to give—to give—outright, Bunty’s mother had gasped, a big house in Surrey to the young couple. And he was going to furnish it too, unfortunately, according to his own somewhat . . . individual taste . . .
“Chrome, my dear, chrome from floor to ceiling. The dining room looks like a milk bar. And as for the bedroom—Jack says—” she lowered her voice, “he says it looks like an avant garde brothel in Berlin. Although how he knows anything about them I’m sure I’m not going to ask. But he’s having nothing to do with the wedding,” she added, sipping her tea as if it were hemlock. “I wonder my dear—would dear little Maddie be well enough to be a bridesmaid? It won’t be until next June. I want to keep Pammy to myself for as long as I can . . . ” she dabbed at her eyes.
“Of course,” Margaret murmured doubtfully. And then, with more determination, “I’ll ask the doctor.”
And, rather surprising herself, she did. On his next visit to Maddie she lured him into the sitting room with the offer of a glass of sherry and let him boom on for a while on how well Maddie was responding to his treatment. Then she asked the Question, the one she had, until that moment, had not dared to ask.
“But when will Maddie be—quite well? Could she be a bridesmaid, say, in June next year?”
The doctor paused, sherry halfway to his lips. He was not used to being questioned. Margaret realized that he thought she had been intolerably frivolous. “Bridesmaid?” the doctor boomed. And then thawed, visibly. Women, he knew, cared about such things. “Bridesmaid! Well, why not? Provided she goes on as well as she has been. And you don’t let her get too excited. Not too many dress fittings, you know, and see you get her home early after the wedding. No dancing and only a tiny glass of champagne . . . ”
“And will she ever we well enough . . . to . . . to . . . marry herself and to . . . ” But Margaret could not bring herself to finish that sentence to a man, not even a medical man.
“Marry—well, I wouldn’t advise it. And babies? No. No. Still, that’s the modern girl, isn’t it? No use for husbands and children these days—” and he boomed himself out of the house.
Margaret remembered that the doctor had married a much younger woman. Presumably the marriage was not a success . . . then she let herself think of Maddie. She wondered if Bunty’s mother would like to exchange places with her. Margaret would never have to lose her daughter to the son
of a nouveau riche war profiteer. Never . . . and she sat down in her pretty chintz covered armchair and cried as quietly as she could, in case Maddie heard her. For some reason she never asked herself how far the doctor’s confident boom might carry. Later she went up to her daughter, smiling gallantly.
“The doctor’s so pleased with you, Maddie,” she said. “He thinks you’ll be well enough to be Pammy’s bridesmaid! You’ll have to be sure you finish her present in nice time.”
Margaret had bought a tray cloth and six place mats stamped with the design of a figure in a poke bonnet and a crinoline, surrounded by flowers. Maddie was supposed to be embroidering them in tasteful naturalistic shades of pink, mauve, and green, as a wedding gift for Pammy, but she seemed to have little enthusiasm for the task. Her mother stared at her, lying back in her next of pillows. “Peak and pine! Peak and pine!” said the voice in her head.
“Do you ever see your young man any more?” she asked, more to distract herself than because she was really concerned.
“Oh, no,” Maddie said, raising her shadowed eyes to her mother. “I don’t think he was ever there at all. It was a trick of the dark.”
“Trick of the light, surely,” Margaret said. And then, almost against her will, “Do you remember that story I used to read you? About the changeling child?”
“What, the one that lay in the cradle saying ‘I’m old, I’m old, I’m ever so old?’ ” Maddie said. “Whatever made you think of that?”
“I don’t know,” Margaret gasped. “But you know how you sometimes get silly words going round and round your head. It’s as if I can’t stop repeating those words from the story—‘Peak and pine!’—to myself over and over again.” There, she had said it aloud. That must exorcise them, surely.
“But that’s not from the changeling story,” Maddie said. “It’s from ’Christabel,’ you know, Coleridge’s poem about the weird Lady Geraldine. She says it to the mother’s ghost ‘Off wandering mother! Peak and pine!’ We read it at school, but Miss Brownrigg made us miss out all that bit about Geraldine’s breasts.”
“I should think so, too,” Margaret said weakly.
Autumn became winter, although few people noticed by what tiny degrees the days grew shorter and shorter until sunset came at around four o’clock. Except perhaps Maddie, sitting propped up on her pillows, and watching every day for the young man who still walked down the street every evening, in spite of what she had told her mother. And even she could not have said just when he stopped walking directly passed the window, and took to standing in that dark spot just between the lamp post and the post box, look up at her . . .
“Where’s your little silver cross, darling?” Margaret said, suddenly, wondering vaguely when she had last seen Maddie wearing it.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Maddie said, too casually. “I think the clasp must have broken and it slipped off.”
“Oh, but—” Margaret looked helplessly at her daughter. “I do hope Elsie hasn’t picked it up. I sometimes think . . . ”
“I expect it’ll turn up,” Maddie said. Her eyes slid away from her mother’s face and returned to the window.
“How’s Pammy’s present coming along?” Margaret asked, speaking to that white reflection in the dark glass, trying to make her daughter turn back to her. She picked up Maddie’s work bag. And stared. One of the place mats had been completed. But the figure of the lady had been embroidered in shades of black and it was standing in the midst of scarlet roses and tall purple lilies. It was cleverly done: every fold and flounce was picked out . . . but Margaret found it rather disturbing. She was glad that the poke bonnet hit the figure’s face . . . She looked up to realize that Maddie was looking at her almost slyly.
“Don’t you like it?” she said.
“It’s—it’s quite modern, isn’t it?”
“What, lazy daisies and crinoline ladies, modern?” How long had Maddie’s voice had that lazy mocking tone? She sounded like a world-weary adult talking to a very young and silly child.
Margaret put the work down.
“You will be all right, darling, won’t you?” Margaret said, rushing into her daughter’s room one cold December afternoon. “Only I must do some Christmas shopping, I really must . . . ”
“Of course you must, Mummy,” Maddie said. “You’ve got my list, haven’t you? Do try to find something really nice for Bunty, she’s been so kind . . . ”
And what I would really like to give her, Maddie thought is a whole parcel of jigsaws . . . and all the time in the world to see how she likes them . . . She leaned against her pillows, watching her mother scurry down the street. She would catch a bus at the corner by the church, and then an underground train, and then face the crowded streets and shops of a near-Christmas West End London. Maddie would have plenty of time to herself. She knew (although her mother did not) that Cook would be going out to have tea with her friend at Mrs. Cresswell’s at half-past three, and for at least one blessed hour she would be entirely alone in the house.
She pulled herself further up in the bed, and fumbled in the drawer of her bedside table to find the contraband she had managed to persuade Elsie to bring in for her. Elsie had proved much more useful than Bunty, or Cissie or any of her kind friends. She sorted through the scarlet lipstick, the eye-black, the face-powder, and began to draw the kind of face she knew she had always wanted on the blank canvas of her pale skin. After twenty minutes of careful work she felt she had succeeded rather well.
“I’m old, I’m old, I’m ever so old,” she crooned to herself. She freed her hair from its inevitable pink ribbon, and brushed it sleekly over her shoulders, then she took off her lacy bed-jacket and the white winceyette nightie beneath it. Finally she slid into the garment the invaluable Elsie had found for her (Heaven knows where—although Maddie had a shrewd suspicion it might have been stolen from another of Elsie’s clients—perhaps the naughty Mrs. Monkton). It was a nightdress made of layers of black and red chiffon, just a little too large for Maddie, but the way it tended to slide from her shoulders could have, she felt, its own attraction.
All these preparations had taken quite a long time, especially as Maddie had had to stop every so often to catch her breath and once to take one of her tablets . . . but she was ready just before sunset. She slipped out of bed, crossed the room, and sat in a chair beside the window. So. The trap was almost set (but was she the trap or only the bait . . . ?) Only one thing remained to be done.
Maddie took out her embroidery scissors, and, clenching her teeth, ran the tiny sharp points into her wrist . . .
The bus was late and crowded. Margaret struggled off, trying to balance her load of packages and parcels and hurried down the road, past the churchyard wall, past Mrs. Monkton’s red-brick villa, past the post box—and hesitated. For a moment she thought she had seen something—Maddie’s strange man with the beautiful skull-like face? But no, there were two white faces there in the shadows—no . . . there was nothing. A trick of the dark . . . She dropped her parcels in the hall and hurried up the stairs.
“Here I am, darling, I’m so sorry I’m late . . . Oh, Maddie—Maddie darling . . . whatever are you doing in the dark?”
She switched on the light.
“Maddie. Maddie, where are you?” she whispered. “What have you done?”
When Gretchen Was Human
Mary A. Turzillo
“When Gretchen Was Human” is a story about love, but that doesn’t mean—as you will see—it is romantic.
Mary Turzillo’s Nebula-winning story, "Mars Is No Place for Children," and her novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl, have been selected as recreational reading on the International Space Station. Her poetry and fiction appears in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Weird Tales, Crafty Cat Crimes, Electric Velocipede, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Ultimate Witch, Dark Terrors, Oceans of the Mind, and anthologies and magazines in the U.S., Great Britain, Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Her p
oetry collection, Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, was a Pushcart nominee. Her most recent book is The Dragon Dictionary, with Marge Simon (Sam’s Dot, 2010), and she has a vampirish tale coming out in Ladies of Trade Town from Harp Haven. She lives in Ohio with her mad scientist-writer husband, Geoff Landis and four cats with surprisingly long canines.
“You’re only human,” said Nick Scuroforno, fanning the pages of a tattered first edition of Image of the Beast. The conversation had degenerated from halfhearted sales pitch, Gretchen trying to sell Nick Scuroforno an early Pangborn imprint. Now they sat cross-legged on the scarred wooden floor of Miss Trilby’s Tomes, watching dust motes dance in August four o’clock sun. Gretchen was wallowing in self disclosure and voluptuous self-pity.
“Sometimes I don’t even feel human,” Gretchen settled her back against the soft, dusty-smelling spines of a leather-bound 1910 imprint Book of Knowledge.
“I can identify.”
“And given the choice, who’d really want to be?” asked Gretchen, tracing the grain of the wooden floor with chapped fingers.
“You have a choice?” asked Scuroforno.
“See, after Ashley was diagnosed, my ex got custody of her. Just as well.” She rummaged her smock for a tissue. “I didn’t have hospitalization after we split. And his would cover her, but only if she goes to a hospital way off in Seattle.” Unbidden, a memory rose: Ashley’s warm little body, wriggly as a puppy’s, settling in her lap, opening Where the Wild Things Are, striking the page with her tiny pink index finger. Mommy, read!
Scuroforno nodded. “But can’t they cure leukemia now?”
“Sometimes. She’s in remission at the moment. But how long will that last?” Gretchen kept sneaking looks at Scuroforno. Amazingly, she found him attractive. She thought depression had killed the sexual impulse in her. He was a big man, chunky but not actually fat, with evasive amber eyes and shaggy hair. Not bad looking, but not handsome either, in gray sweat pants, a brown T-shirt, and beach sandals. He had a habit of twisting the band of his watch, revealing a strip of pale skin from which the fine hairs of his wrist had been worn.
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