by Paula Guran
Vasilissa is woken by a noise in the yard. She looks out the window and sees the skulls on the gateposts, their teeth clattering a warning. Beyond them, in among the tree trunks, she can see someone moving, a man, with the late afternoon sun glittering on the edge of his blade. She grabs Shura and rushes to the kitchen, unsure how much time she may have while he stalks around the dacha, trying to learn its defenses.
The little girl makes her offering to the doll and cries:
“There my little doll, take it. Eat a little, drink a little, and listen to my grief. A man comes, his axe sharp and bright. I fear for us all.” She takes Shura to the window where they can see him clearly, standing just outside the fence, angry and uncertain.
“The black rider is coming, I can feel the earth shaking beneath her tread. Tell her to cast her darkest night over us and I will deal with this man. Be brave!” Shura exhorts her daughter.
Vasilissa runs through the dacha and throws open the front door. The man is inside the gate. When he sees her, he moves faster: it seems his anger will be spread over anyone he can find. Vasilissa can hear the beat of hooves and she shouts.
“Black rider, black rider, come to my aid! Throw your darkest night upon us!”
Her last glimpse is of the man, tossed about by three sets of disembodied hands, then all goes black, as black as the inside of the deepest cave. She hears Shura’s voice rising, chanting, calling upon spells of forgetfulness, of disorientation, to send the man far away, with no memory of the path to this dacha. For a long while all is silent.
Vasilissa waits and waits. She stretches forth and finds the doll lying not far from her hand. She gathers Shura up, holding her in her lap. After a time (she does not know how long), the darkness does not seem so heavy and a torch flares. Baba Yaga stands at the door of the dacha and lights Vasilissa’s way inside.
Baba Yaga takes Shura from her granddaughter and rubs a drop of water on the doll’s lips, holds cake crumbs out for her.
“There my little doll, take it. Eat a little, drink a little, and listen to my joy.” She says quietly. “I will look after your daughter, Shura.”
The doll’s eyes shine, her painted mouth moving in a smile. “Thank you, mother. My Vasilissa is faithful above all things.”
“And when the time comes, Shura, I will let her go,” Baba Yaga promises. “As I release you now, daughter. Rest.”
Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales and (with Lisa L. Hannett), The Female Factory. Sourdough and Other Stories was a World Fantasy Award finalist and Midnight and Moonshine (again with Hannett) an Aurealis finalist. She’s also authored Black-Winged Angels and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Fantasy, Nightmare, Lightspeed, A Book of Horrors, Horrorology, and Australian, UK and US “best of” anthologies. She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award, holds an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing and was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow. Her first novel, Vigil, will be released by Jo Fletcher Books in 2016, and its sequel, Corpselight, in 2017. A collection of her dark fairy tales, A Feast of Sorrows, will be released later this year.
Elizabeth Bear combines what might seem to be some rather disparate elements in “Follow Me Light”: a fairy tale with a hint of “The Little Mermaid” (or any story about the inhuman struggling to be human), a difficult but righteous path chosen instead of the sinister, true beauty hidden by an ugly exterior, and, oxymoronically, “Lovecraftian romance.”
Follow Me Light
Elizabeth Bear
Pinky Gilman limped. He wore braces on both legs, shining metal and black washable foam spoiling the line of his off-the-rack suits, what line there was to spoil. He heaved himself about on a pair of elbow-cuff crutches. I used to be able to hear him clattering along the tiled, echoing halls of the public defender’s offices a dozen doors down.
Pinky’s given name was Isaac, but even his clients called him Pinky. He was a fabulously ugly man, lumpy and bald and bristled and pink-scrubbed as a slaughtered hog. He had little fishy walleyes behind spectacles thick enough to serve barbecue on. His skin peeled wherever the sun or the dry desert air touched it.
He was by far the best we had.
The first time I met Pinky was in 1994. He was touring the office as part of his job interview, and Christian Vlatick led him up to me while I was wrestling a five-gallon bottle onto the water cooler. I flinched when he extended his right hand to shake mine with a painful twist intended to keep the crutch from slipping off his arm. The rueful way he cocked his head as I returned his clasp told me he was used to that reaction, but I doubted most people flinched for the reason I did—the shimmer of hot blue lights that flickered through his aura, filling it with brilliance although the aura itself was no color I’d ever seen before—a swampy gray-green, tornado colored.
I must have been staring, because the squat little man glanced down at my shoes, and Chris cleared his throat. “Maria,” he said, “This is Isaac Gilman.”
“Pinky,” Pinky said. His voice . . . oh, la. If he were robbed with regard to his body, that voice was the thing that made up the difference. Oh, my.
“Maria Delprado. Are you the new attorney?”
“I hope so,” he said, dry enough delivery that Chris and I both laughed.
His handshake was good: strong, cool, and leathery, at odds with his parboiled countenance. He let go quickly, grasping the handle of his crutch again and shifting his weight to center, blinking behind the glass that distorted his eyes. “Maria,” he said. “My favorite name. Do you know what it means?”
“It means Mary,” I answered. “It means sorrow.”
“No,” he said. “It means sea.” He pointed past me with his chin, indicating the still-sloshing bottle atop the water cooler. “They make the women do the heavy lifting here?”
“I like to think I can take care of myself. Where’d you study, Isaac?”
“Pinky,” he said, and, “Yale. Four point oh.”
I raised both eyebrows at Chris and pushed my glasses up my nose. The Las Vegas public defender’s office doesn’t get a lot of interest from Yale Law School grads, summa cum laude. “And you haven’t hired him yet?”
“I wanted your opinion,” Chris said without a hint of apology. He glanced at Pinky and offered up a self-deprecating smile. “Maria can spot guilty people. Every time. It’s a gift. One of these days we’re going to get her made a judge.”
“Really?” Pinky’s lipless mouth warped itself into a grin, showing the gaps in his short, patchy beard. “Am I guilty, then?”
The lights that followed him glittered, electric blue fireflies in the twilight he wore like a coat. He shifted his weight on his crutches, obviously uncomfortable at standing.
“And what am I guilty of?”
Not teasing, either, or flirtatious. Calm, and curious, as if he really thought maybe I could tell. I squinted at the lights that danced around him—will-o’-the-wisps, spirit lights. The aura itself was dark, but it wasn’t the darkness of past violence or dishonesty. It was organic, intrinsic, and I wondered if it had to do with whatever had crippled him. And the firefly lights—
Well, they were something else again. Just looking at them made my fingertips tingle.
“If there are any sins on your conscience,” I said carefully, “I think you’ve made amends.”
He blinked again, and I wondered why I wanted to think blinked fishily when fishes do not blink. And then he smiled at me, teeth like yellowed pegs in pale, blood-flushed gums. “How on earth do you manage that?”
“I measure the distance between their eyes.”
A three-second pause, and then he started to laugh, while Christian, who had heard the joke before, stood aside and rolled his eyes. Pinky shrugged, rise and fall of bulldog shoulders, and I smiled hard, because I knew we were going to be friends.
In November of 1996, I lost my beloved seventeen-year-old cat to renal fail
ure, and Pinky showed up at my door uninvited with a bottle of Maker’s Mark and a box of Oreos. We were both half-trashed by the time I spread my cards out on the table between us, a modified Celtic cross. They shimmered when I looked at them; that was the alcohol. The shimmer around Pinky when he stretched his hand out—was not.
“Fear death by water,” I said, and touched the Hanged Man’s foot, hoping he would know he was supposed to laugh.
His eyes sparkled like scales in the candlelight when he refilled my glass. “It’s supposed to be if you don’t find the Hanged Man. In any case, I don’t see a drowned sailor.”
“No,” I answered. I picked up my glass and bent to look closer. “But there is the three of staves as the significator. Eliot called him the Fisher King.” I looked plainly at where his crutches leaned against the arm of his chair. “Not a bad choice, don’t you think?”
His face grayed a little, or perhaps that was the alcohol. Foxlights darted around him like startled minnows. “What does he stand for?”
“Virtue tested by the sea.” And then I wondered why I’d put it that way. “The sea symbolizes change, conflict, the deep unconscious, the monsters of the Id—”
“I know what the sea means,” he said bitterly. His hand darted out and overturned the card, showing the tan back with its key pattern in ivory. He jerked his chin at the spread. “Do you believe in those?”
It had been foolish to pull them out. Foolish to show him, but there was a certain amount of grief and alcohol involved. “It’s a game,” I said, and swept them all into a pile. “Just a child’s game.” And then I hesitated, and looked down, and turned the three of staves back over, so it faced the same way as the rest. “It’s not the future I see.”
In 1997 I took him to bed. I don’t know if it was the bottle and a half of Shiraz we celebrated one of our rare victories with, or the deep bittersweet richness of his voice finally eroding my limited virtue, but we were good in the dark. His arms and shoulders, it turned out, were beautiful, after all: powerful and lovely, all out of proportion with the rest of him.
I rolled over, after, and dropped the tissue-wrapped rubber on the nightstand, and heard him sigh. “Thank you,” he said, and the awe in that perfect voice was sweeter than the sex had been.
“My pleasure,” I said, and meant it, and curled up against him again, watching the firefly lights flicker around his blunt, broad hands as he spoke softly and gestured in the dark, trying to encompass some inexpressible emotion.
Neither one of us was sleepy. He asked me what I saw in Las Vegas. I told him I was from Tucson, and I missed the desert when I was gone. He told me he was from Stonington. When the sun came up, I put my hand into his aura, chasing the flickering lights like a child trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue.
I asked him about the terrible scars low on the backs of his thighs that left his hamstrings weirdly lumped and writhed, unconnected to bone under the skin. I’d thought him crippled from birth. I’d been wrong about so many, many things.
“Gaffing hook,” he said. “When I was seventeen. My family were fisherman. Always have been.”
“How come you never go home to Connecticut, Isaac?”
For once, he didn’t correct me. “Connecticut isn’t home.”
“You don’t have any family?”
Silence, but I saw the dull green denial stain his aura. I breathed in through my nose and tried again.
“Don’t you ever miss the ocean?”
He laughed, warm huff of breath against my ear, stirring my hair. “The desert will kill me just as fast as the ocean would, if I ever want it. What’s to miss?”
“Why’d you come here?”
“Just felt drawn. It seemed like a safe place to be. Unchanging. I needed to get away from the coast, and Nevada sounded . . . very dry. I have a skin condition. It’s worse in wet climates. It’s worse near the sea.”
“But you came back to the ocean after all. Prehistoric seas. Nevada was all underwater once. There were ichthyosaurs—”
“Underwater. Huh.” He stretched against my back, cool and soft. “I guess it’s in the blood.”
That night I dreamed they chained my wrists with jeweled chains before they crippled me and left me alone in the salt marsh to die. The sun rose as they walked away singing, hunched inhuman shadows glimpsed through a splintered mist that glowed pale as the opals in my manacles.
The mist burned off to show gray earth and greeny brown water, agates and discolored aquamarine. The edges of coarse gray cloth adhered in drying blood on the backs of my thighs, rumpled where they had pulled it up to hamstring me. The chains were cold against my cheeks when I raised my head away from the mud enough to pillow my face on the backs of my hands.
The marsh stank of rot and crushed vegetation, a green miasma so overwhelming the sticky copper of blood could not pierce it. The pain wasn’t as much as it should have been; I was slipping into shock as softly as if I slipped under the unrippled water. I hadn’t lost enough blood to kill me, but I rather thought I’d prefer a quick, cold sleep and never awakening to starving to death or lying in a pool of my own blood until the scent attracted the thing I had been left in propitiation of.
Somewhere, a frog croaked. It looked like a hot day coming.
I supposed I was going to find out.
His skin scaled in the heat. It was a dry heat, blistering, peeling, chapping lips and bloodying noses. He used to hang me with jewels, opals, tourmalines the color of moss and roses. “Family money,” he told me. “Family jewels.” He wasn’t lying.
I would have seen a lie.
The Mojave hated him. He was chapped and chafed, cracked and dry. He never sweated enough, kept the air conditioner twisted as high as it would go. Skin burns in the heat, in the sun. Peels like a snake’s. Aquamarine discolors like smoker’s teeth. Pearls go brittle. Opals crack and lose their fire.
He used to go down to the Colorado River at night, across the dam to Willow Beach, on the Arizona side, and swim in the river in the dark. I told him it was crazy. I told him it was dangerous. How could he take care of himself in the Colorado when he couldn’t walk without braces and crutches?
He kissed me on the nose and told me it helped his pain. I told him if he drowned, I would never forgive him. He said in the history of the entire world twice over, a Gilman had never once drowned. I called him a cocky, insincere bastard. He stopped telling me where he was going when he went out at night.
When he came back and slept beside me, sometimes I lay against the pillow and watched the follow-me lights flicker around him. Sometimes I slept.
Sometimes I dreamed, also.
I awakened after sunset, when the cool stars prickled out in the darkness. The front of my robe had dried, one long yellow-green stain, and now the fabric under my back and ass was saturated, sticking to my skin. The mud seemed to have worked it loose from the gashes on my legs.
I wasn’t dead yet, more’s the pity, and now it hurt.
I wondered if I could resist the swamp water when thirst set in. Dehydration would kill me faster than hunger. On the other hand, the water might make me sick enough that I’d slip into the relief of fever and pass away, oblivious in delirium. If dysentery was a better way to die than gangrene. Or dehydration.
Or being eaten. If the father of frogs came to collect me as was intended, I wouldn’t suffer long.
I whistled across my teeth. A fine dramatic gesture, except it split my cracked lips and I tasted blood. My options seemed simple: lie still and die, or thrash and die. It would be sensible to give myself up with dignity.
I pushed myself onto my elbows and began to crawl toward nothing in particular.
Moonlight laid a patina of silver over the cloudy yellow-green puddles I wormed through and glanced off the rising mist in electric gleams of blue. The exertion warmed me, at least, and loosened my muscles. I stopped shivering after the first half hour. My thighs knotted tight as welded steel around the insult to my tendons. It would have been mo
re convenient if they’d just chopped my damned legs off. At least I wouldn’t have had to deal with the frozen limbs dragging behind me as I crawled.
If I had any sense—
If I had any sense at all, I wouldn’t be crippled and dying in a swamp. If I had any sense left, I would curl up and die.
It sounded pretty good, all right.
I was just debating the most comfortable place when curious blue lights started to flicker at the corners of my vision.
I’m not sure why it was that I decided to follow them.
Pinky gave me a pearl on a silver chain, a baroque multicolored thing swirled glossy and irregular as toffee. He said it had been his mother’s. It dangled between my breasts, warm as the stroke of a thumb when I wore it.
Pinky said he’d had a vasectomy, still wore a rubber every time we made love. Talked me into going on the Pill.
“Belt and suspenders,” I teased. The garlic on my scampi was enough to make my eyes water, but Pinky never seemed to mind what I ate, no matter how potent it was.
It was one a.m. on a Friday, and we’d crawled out of bed for dinner, finally. We ate seafood at Capozzoli’s, because although it was dim in the cluttered red room the food was good and it was open all night. Pinky looked at me out of squinting, amber eyes, so sad, and tore the tentacles off a bit of calamari with his teeth. “Would you want to bring a kid into this world?”
“No,” I answered, and told that first lie. “I guess not.”
I didn’t meet Pinky’s brother Esau until after I’d married someone else, left my job to try to have a baby, gotten divorced when it turned out we couldn’t, had to come back to pay the bills. Pinky was still there, still part of the program. Still plugging away on the off chance that eventually he’d meet an innocent man, still pretending we were and always had been simply the best of friends. We never had the conversation, but I imagined it a thousand times.