by Neil Gaiman
‘Nem, Emilia,’ her mother had answered firmly, gently, Rusalky is not a good story for bedtime.’
And as her sister pleaded, Magda had sat straightbacked on the edge of the bed, silent, watching the window, watching the red and starless sky, and already, that had been two weeks after the men with the buckboard and the white mare had brought her home, two weeks after her mother had cried and washed away the dirt and blood, the clinging semen. Two weeks since her father had stormed down from Prospect Hill with his deer rifle and had spent a night in jail, had been reminded by the grave-jowled constable that they were, after all, Hungarians, and what with all the talk of the Company taking on bohunkie contract workers, cheap labour depriving honest men with families of decent wages, well, it wouldn’t do to look for more trouble, would it? And in the end, he’d said, it would have been the girl’s word against anyone he might have brought in, anyway.
In that space of time, days stacked like broken dishes, not a word from Magda and no tears from her dark and empty eyes. When food was pressed to her lips, a spoonful of soup or gulyas, she’d eaten, and when the sun went down and the lamps were put out, she had lain with her eyes open, staring through the window at the seething sky.
‘Please, Mama, kérem,’ her sister had whined, whined and Magda turned then, had turned on them so furiously that a slat cracked gunshot-loud beneath the feather mattress. Emilia had cried out, reached for their startled mother. And Magda had pulled herself towards them, hands gone to claws, tetanus snarl and teeth bared like a starving dog. And all that furnace glow gathered, hoarded from the red nights, and spilling from her eyes.
‘Magda, stop this,’ and her mother had pulled Emilia to her, ‘you’re frightening your sister! You’re frightening me!’
‘No, Mama. She wants to hear a story about the Rusalky, then I will tell her about the Rusalky. I will show her about the Rusalky.’
But her mother had stumbled to her feet, too-big Emilia clutched awkwardly in her arms, and the wobbly chair tumbled over and kicked aside. Backing away from the sagging bed and Magda, burning Magda, Emilia’s face hidden against her chest. Backing into the shadows crouched in the doorway.
‘She wants to hear, Mama, she wants to hear my story.’
Her mother had stepped backwards into the hall gloom, had slammed the bedroom door shut behind her, and Magda had heard the key rattle in the lock, bone rattle, death rattle, and then she’d been alone. The oil lamp still bright on the wobbly table, and a train had wailed, passing down in the valley, and when the engineer’s whistle and the rattle and throb of boxcars had faded away, there had been only her mother’s sobs from the other side of the door and the distant clamour of the mills.
Magda had let the lamp burn, stared a while into its tiny flame haloed safe behind blackened chimney glass, and then she’d turned back to the window, the world outside framed safe within, and she’d held fingers to her mouth and between them whispered her story to the sympathetic night.
All the lost and pretty suicides, all the girls in deep lakes and swirling rivers, still ponds, drowned or murdered and their bodies secreted in fish-silvered palaces. Souls committed to water instead of consecrated earth, and see her on Holy Thursday, on the flat rocks combing out her long hair, grown green and tangled with algae and eels? See her sitting in the low branches of this willow, bare legs hanging like pale fruit, toes drawing ripples in the stream, and be kind enough this sixth week past Easter to leave a scrap of linen, a patch or rag. Come back, stepping quiet through the tall grass, to find it washed clean and laid to dry beneath the bright May sky.
And there is more, after that, garlands for husbands and the sound of clapping hands from the fields, voices like ice melting, songs like the moment before a dropped stone strikes unseen well water.
Carry wormwood in your pockets, young man, and bathe with a cross around your neck.
Leave her wine and red eggs.
And when she dances under the summer moon, when the hay is tall and her sisters join hands, pray you keep yourself behind locked doors, or walk quickly past the waving wheat; stay on the road, watch your feet.
Or you’ll wind up like poor Jozef; remember Jozef, Old Viktor’s son? His lips were blue, grain woven in his hair, and how do you think his clothes got wet, so muddy, so far from the river?
And see her there, on the bank beneath the trees, her comb of stickly fish bones? Watch her, as she pulls the sharp teeth through her green hair, and watch the water rise.
This is what it’s like to drown, Magda thought, like stirring salt into water, as she drifted, dissolving, just below the lake, sinking slowly into twilight the colour of dead moss, the stones in her pockets only a little help. Her hair floated, wreathed her face and the last silver bubbles rose from her open mouth, hurrying towards the surface. Just the faintest, dull pressure in her chest, behind her eyes, and a fleeting second’s panic, and then there was a quiet more perfect than anything she had ever imagined. Peace folding itself thick around her, driving back the numbing cold and the useless sun filtering down from above, smothering doubt and fear and the crushing regret that had almost made her turn around, scramble back up the slippery bank when the water had closed like molasses around her ankles.
Magda flowed into the water, even as the water flowed into her, and by the time she reached the bottom, there was hardly any difference any more.
Thursday, wet dregs of Memorial Day, and Mr Tom Givens slipped quietly away from the talk and cigar smoke of the clubhouse front rooms. Talk of the parade down in Johnstown and the Grand Army Veterans and the Sons of Veterans, the amputees on their crutches and in faded Union blues; twenty-four years past Appomattox, and Grant was dead, and Lee was dead, and those old men, marching clear from Main to Bedford Street despite the drizzling sky. He’d sat apart from the others, staring out across the darkening lake, the docks and the clubfleet, the canoes and sailboats and Mr Clarke’s electric catamaran moored safe against the threat of a stormy night.
And then someone, maybe Mr D.W.C. Bidwell, had brought up the girl, and faces, smoke-shrouded, brandy-flushed, had turned towards him, curious, and
Oh, yes, didn’t you know? Why, Tom here saw her, saw the whole damnable thing, and so politely he’d excused himself. Had left them mumbling before the crackle and glow of the big sandstone fireplace, and by the time he’d reached the landing and the lush path of burgundy carpet that would carry him back to his room, the conversation had turned inevitably to iron and coke, the new Navy ironclads for which Carnegie, Phipps and Co. had been contracted to produce the steel plating. Another triumph for Pittsburgh, another blow to the Chicago competition.
Now he shut the door behind him and the only light was dim grey through the windows; for a moment he stood in the dark before reaching for the chain. Above the lake, the clouds were breaking apart, hints of stars and moonshine in the rifts, and the lake almost glimmered, out in the middle seemed to ripple and swirl.
It’s only wind on the water, Tom Givens told himself as he pulled the lamp chain hard and warm yellow drenched the room, drove the black outside and he could see nothing in the windows except the room mirrored and himself, tall and very much needing a shave. By the clock on his dresser, it was just past nine, and At least, he thought, maybe there’ll be no storms tonight. But the wind still battered itself against the clubhouse, and he sat down in a chair, back to the lake, and poured amber whiskey. He drank it quickly and quickly refilled the glass, tried not to hear the gusting wind, the shutter rattle, the brush of pine boughs like old women wringing their bony hands.
By ten the bottle was empty and Tom Givens was asleep in the chair, stocking feet propped on the bed.
An hour later, the rain began.
The storm was as alive as anything else, as alive as the ancient shale and sandstone mountains and the wind; as alive as the scorch and burn of the huge Bessemer converters and the slag-scabbed molten iron that rolled like God’s blood across the slippery steel floors of the Cambria mills. And
as perfectly mindless, as passionately indifferent. It had been born somewhere over Nebraska two days before, had swept across the plains and in Kansas spawned twister children who danced along the winding Cottonwood River and wiped away roads and farms. It had seduced Arctic air spilling off the Great Lakes and sired blizzards across Michigan and Indiana, had spoken its throaty poetry of gale and thunder throughout the Ohio River Valley, and finally, with its violent arms, would embrace the entire Mid-Atlantic seaboard.
As Tom Givens had listened distractedly to the pomp and chatter of the gentlemen of the club, the storm had already claimed western Pennsylvania, had snubbed the sprawling scar of Pittsburgh for greener lovers further east. And as he’d slept, it had stroked bare ridges and stream-threaded valleys, rain-shrouding Blairsville and Bolivar, New Florence and Ninevah, had followed the snaky railroad through Conemaugh Gap into the deep and weathered folds of Sang Hollow.
And then, Johnstown, patchwork cluster of boroughs crowded into the dark hole carved in the confluence of two rivers. The seething Cambria yards and the tall office buildings, the fine and handsome homes along Main Street. The storm drummed tin and slate shingled roofs, played for the handful of mill workers and miners drinking late inside California Tom’s, for the whores in Lizzie Thompson’s sporting house on Frankstown Hill. George and Mathilde Heiser, closing up for the night, paused in the mercantile clutter of their store to watch the downpour, and inside St Joseph’s parsonage, Reverend Chapman, who’d been having bad dreams lately, was awakened by his wife, Agnes, and they lay together and listened to the rain pounding Franklin Street.
Unsatisfied, insatiable, the storm had continued east, engulfing the narrow valley, Mineral Point and the high arch of the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct, and, finally, sleeping South Fork.
As alive as anything it touched.
The girl on the dam doesn’t know he’s watching, of that much he’s certain. He sits by open windows and the early morning air smells like the lake, like fish and mud, and something sharper. He’s been drunk more than he’s been sober since the night down in Johnstown, the night he sat in the balcony of the Washington Street Opera House, Zozo the Magic Queen on stage and some other fellows from the club with him, talking among themselves.
The girl from the dam is walking on the water.
He leans forwards, head and shoulders out the window because he can’t hear, Irwin braying like a goddamned mule from the seat behind and he can’t hear the words, the players’ lines, can only hear Irwin repeating the idiot joke over and over again. Beneath the window of his room, the audience is seated, and he stares down at men’s heads and ladies’ feathered hats, row after row on the front lawn of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club.
Somewhere, far away still but rushing like locomotive wheels, thunder, like applause and laughter and the footlights like lightning frozen on her face.
‘Ask Tom,’ the usher says, Tom saw the whole damnable thing,’ and Irwin howls.
And then she’s gone, if she was ever really there, and the crowd is on its feet, flesh smacking flesh in frenzied approval; if she was ever there. Lake Conemaugh is as smooth as varnished wood, and he knows it’s all done with trapdoors and mirrors and that in a moment she’ll rise straight up from the stage planks to take her bows. But the roses fall on the flat water and lie there and now the curtains are sweeping closed, velvet the colour of rain rippling across the sky.
‘… Saw the whole thing,’ Irwin echoes, so funny he wants to say it over and over, and they’re all laughing, every one, when he gets up to go, when it’s obvious that the show’s over and everyone else is leaving their seats, the theatre emptying into the front porch of the clubhouse.
Sidewalk boards creak loud beneath his shoes, thunk and mould-rotten creak; after the evening showers the air smells cleaner at least, coal dust and factory soot washed from the angry industrial sky into the black gutters, but the low clouds hold in the blast furnace glow from Cambria City and the sky is bloodier than ever.
Spring buggies and lacquered wagon wheels, satin skirts and petticoats held above the muddy street. The pungent musk of wet horsehair.
And he knows that he’s only stepped out of his room, that he stands in the hall, second floor, and that if he walks straight on he’ll pass three rooms, three numbered doors, and come to the stairs, the oak banister, winding down. But it’s dark, the sputtering white arc streetlights not reaching this narrow slit, inverted alley spine between Washington and Union, and the carpet feels more like muck and gravel, and he turns, starts to turn when thunder rumbles like animal whispers and cloth tearing and
Why, Tom here saw her, saw the whole damnable thing
the shadow things hunched, claws and grunts and breath exhaled from snot wet nostrils, and she turns her head, hair mired in the filth and standing water, face minstrel smudged, but eyes bright and she sees him, and he knows she’s begging him to help, to stop this, to pull the shadows off her before there’s nothing left to save.
But a shaggy head rises ox-slow from the space between her breasts and these eyes are nothing but the red sky, molten pools of stupid hunger, and Tom turns away, lost for a moment, feeling his way along the silken-papered walls, until his fumbling hands find the brass cool doorknob and the thunder splits apart that world. Splits the alley girl like an overripe peach, and he steps across the threshold, his bare feet sinking through the floor into the icy lake, and she’s waiting, dead hand shackle-tight around his ankle to pull him down into the fishslime and silting night.
Mr Tom Givens woke up, sweat-soaked, eyes wide, still seeing white-knuckled hands clasped, sucking air in shuddering gulps, air that seemed as thick, as unbreathable, as dark lake water. The crystal-cut whiskey glass tumbled from his hands, rolled away beneath the bed. And still the pain, fire twisting his legs, and outside the thunder rumbled across the Allegheny night like artillery fire and Old Testament judgement.
Both legs were still propped up on the four-poster and, as he shifted, the Charley horse began slowly, jealously, to relax its grip, and he realised there was no feeling at all in his left leg. Outside, furious rain pounded the windows, slammed the shutters against the clubhouse wall. Tom Givens cursed his stupidity, nodding off in the chair like a lousy drunkard, and carefully, he lowered his tortured legs on to the floor. Fresh pain in bright and nauseating waves as the blood rushed back into droughty capillaries; the room swam, lost its precious substance for a moment and the dream still so close, lingering like crows around the grey borders.
Lightning then, blinding sizzle that eclipsed the electric lamp, and the thunder clamoured eager on its heels.
He sat in the chair, waited for the last of the pins and needles stab to fade, listened to the storm. A wild night on the mountain, and that went a long way towards explaining the nightmare, that and the bourbon, that and the things he’d seen since he’d arrived at the lake two weeks before. He’d come out early, before the June crowds, hoping for rest and a little time to recover from the smoky bustle of Pittsburgh.
The loose shutters banged and rattled like the wind knocking to come inside, and he got up, cautious, legs still uncertain, but only two steps, three, to the window. And even as he reached for the latch, thumbed it back, even as he pushed against the driving rain, knowing that he’d be soaked before it was done, he heard the roar, not thunder, but something else, something almost alive. Immediate and stinging cold and the sashes were ripped from his hands, slammed back and panes shattered against the palsied shutters.
And through the darkness and the downpour he saw the white and whirling thing, impossibly vast, moving past the docks, dragging itself across the lake. Silvered clockwise, and the deafening roar and boom, and Tom Givens forgot the broken windows, the frantic drapery flutter, the shutters, ignored the rain blowing in, soaking him through, drenching the room. He watched as the waterspout passed by, and the girl, the girl standing there, her long dark hair whipped in the gale, her body an alabaster slash in the black night. She r
aised her bare arms, worshipping, welcoming, granting passage, and turning, her white gown a whirling echo of the thing, and her arms were opened to him now, and he knew the face.
The face that had turned to him, helpless, pleading, in the Johnstown alleyway, but changed, eyes swollen with bottomless fury and something that might be triumph, if triumph could be regret. And he knew as well that this was also the girl that he’d watched drown herself off South Fork Dam barely a week back.
Her lips moved but the wind snatched the words away.
And then lightning splashed the docks in noonday brilliance, and she was gone, nothing but bobbing canoes and the waves, and the trees bending down almost to the ground.
He passed the night downstairs, hours sobering into headache and listening to the storm from the huge main living room. He sat on pebble-grained calfskin and paced the Arabian carpeted floors, thumbed nervously through the new Mark Twain novel someone had left, finished or merely forgotten, on an end table. Occasionally, he glanced at the windows, towards the docks and the lake. And already the sensible, nineteenth century part of his mind had begun to convince itself that he’d only been dreaming, or near enough; drunk and dreaming.
Finally, others awake and moving, pot and pan noise and cooking smells from the kitchen, and the warm scents of coffee and bacon were enough to stall the argument, rational breakfast, perfect syllogism against the fading night. He smoothed his hair, straightened his rumpled shirt and vest with hands that had almost stopped shaking and rose to take his morning meal with the others.
Then young Mr Parke, resident engineer, shaved and dressed as smartly as ever, came quickly down the stairs, walked quickly to the porch door and let in the dawn, light like bad milk and the sky out there hardly a shade lighter than the night had been. And something roaring in the foggy distance.
John Parke stepped outside and Tom Givens followed him, knowing that he was certainly better off heading straight for the dining room, finding himself shivering on the long porch anyway. Before them, the lawn was littered with branches and broken limbs, with unrecognisable debris, and the lake was rough and brown.