The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “We found out various as they came back,” my dad says, “a little by little. But that first boy, Willem Canker, no. He came in, shocked and shivering, eyes all over the place, and as they brought him on the boat all the men were at him, question-and-poking, weeping on him and embracing, each asking after his own sons.

  “Some thought Willem had gone simple, there under the waters all that time, or perhaps half-drowned on the way up and it had affected his brain, because he did not utter a proper word all the way, only moaned somewhat and seemed to suffer to be with us.

  “We put him away in his house. Joel Canker laid him in his bed, and milk-and-breaded him back to life, and every now again he would come out and say, Oh he is coming good, every day a wee bit more our lad. He was sitting by the boy, talking and talking whenever he was awake to usen him to the sound of words again, to bring him back his memory. And today he answered me, he might say. Today he said yes, when I asked him did he want for milk.

  “Which the rest of us found little consolation of, one word here or there when such bright little buttons you’d been all of you, never stopped rattling and singing morning to night, every one of you, questions questions. And the last five years along at Wholeman’s every word you had spoke we had turned over and wet with our tears and polished with our examinations and nostalgias. Besides which, Canker might be imagining, from the strength of his own wishing, and Willem truly damaged and never to think a clear thought nor speak a clear word again.

  “But then the boy came out. I remember the day. ’Twas a whole new weather and season, bright and blowy, and suddenly there was color in the sky and flowers on the hills around town.

  “And the boy come out, good as new, Willem Canker, good as gold; I opened my curtains and there he was walking up the town long and limber with his easy man-stride—just like yours, Dan’l, only of course I’d not seen yours then. Had no surety of ever seeing it, always I reminded myself. I remember he looked up—not at me nor no one but just up, at the town, at walls, and maybe at hill and sky above, and the look of him—of all our boys and our wives and our selves rolled into the one—the sight of him near split me down the middle. And Canker out ahead—he did not need to sing, just his face was singing, the joy of it. They say it is a sin, envy. You must not covet, they say. Well, your old man, Dan’l, he’s a sinner I hope you don’t mind, cloven by envy, hating Joel Canker for having what I had not.”

  He beams around his pipe; takes the thing from between his teeth with one rheumaticky hand, reaches out the other and bats my face with it, softly, and takes it purple-gray away, trailing soap-scent.

  Then a thought scoops his smile away and he’s a codger again, all belligerent, his eyes a-swim with window-light. “ ’Course, there’s some that only got that ever, only ever got that envy and no more. Corris Snow, bless his soul, and the Greens, none o’ theirs came back.” His gaze is like a pressure on my face, feasting on me and guilting about it.

  Sometimes it can be simple pleasure seeing each other, but not often; net after net of past event and slippery feelings drops between us, until sometimes I can barely make him out through the masses.

  When that happens I will up and sigh, and fetch us teas, maybe, that the two of us can sip staring out over the roofs and water, while it all dissipates. You cannot have that stuff drawn in on yourself too close and constant. It will drive you mad; it will drive you off Chisel Top like Corris Snow, into the arms of your wife as you think, into the rocks, crushed cold there forever. Sometimes you must just stand, upright on the earth as you are or cupped in an armchair like Dad or propped on a barstool; sometimes you must just breathe and be, with your small land-lungs and your stuck body. You must cease your wishing for things you cannot have, and just proceed towards the grave, kind as you can be to your fellow travelers, not raising any great hopes or moaning any great miseries.

  This is the truest way for us boys, and the hardest, bred as we are from two great tribes-ful of yearning. Not all of us can steady ourselves so, and none of us are balanced aright all of the time.

  We were all put to fishing, of course. Gratefully the older men passed us their places on the boats, while the ones with still a little fire in them leaped to ordering and instructing us with almost glee.

  It was good for us. It was better than sitting at home net-mending with the sadder dads. The sea was the best place for us, halfway between our two homes and with a job to do. And it tired us properly, all that hauling and winding. And you never knew what curious-familiar thing would come up squirming in the net and make you wonder.

  This was going to be our lives then, these the components, unless Grinny enacted his scheme of starting Trudle knitting again, unless Raditch and Cawdron took up theirs, of rowing to the mainland for a look at the women there.

  I am not much for venturing. I had no such schemes. I tend to stop where I am brought or put, and endure whatever yearning is my lot there. It has been before me all my life in my mam, and now it is in me, and in my dad, and that is only natural, the whole town with its head full of sea and seals, enraged or grief-ridden or both. Us boys—well, I did not know about the others, it was not as if we named things to each other. For myself I felt too freshly arrived, too newly born yet to do more than walk and work from day to day. I thought if I waited, equanimity might come, my father’s slow eating of himself, after all these years, notwithstanding.

  I came home early from helping at Fisher’s store. The smell was all through the house: wild salt sweat of mams, caverns of ocean, turning the air blue-green. I walked through it with my arms out; it all but swirled about them.

  In the kitchen, at the heart of the smell, at the heart of the home, Dad sat at the slab table with his white plate and a spoon and a caught-red-handed look disguised as normal every-dayness up at me.

  “What brings you so early?” he accused me.

  “Done all I had to do.” His chin was tilted up, his eyes craven, and then there was the thing on the plate—hairy, with a rubbery inner lining with a blob of orange curd on the lip. The spoon hovered.

  “Here,” he says. “There’s another.” Points with his thumb to the pot on the stove. As if this were an ordinary dinner.

  I tried for both our sakes to pretend it was. Crossed and spooned it from the pot, clanked out a plate and rattled a spoon from the drawer. Cut the cap off, with my big capable hands—last time I et one of these, my mam had to open it for me, that tough skin.

  The steam flooded up and the smell: bodies, wet hair, boiled shellfish, sour seawater, the coziest of winter nights, her clear pale skin with a hint of green; her hair like black water made thread, made silk.

  I spooned up a bit and there it was in my mouth now, all my childhood, warm and free of worry, before the future came down out of its scratchy gray cloud and began to bother and itch me. Days of play and safety, our mothers laughing together, my mam and dad laughing, too, looking to each other, leaning arm to arm. I would do things; I would perform; I would stand on my hands against the wall so they would look at me again, include me with them. Always it was my fight when Dad was there, to have her eyes and her mind on me.

  Well, I got that, did I not. The curd sat cooling on my tongue; it slid down my throat, soaking my head with the sweet-saltness. Up sprang tears, but not so far as to fall.

  I saw what we had done to them, the mams and boys to the dads. It weren’t necessarily worse than what the dads done in the beginning. What a thing to weigh up: would you rather be born of redheads both, or would you be silky-dark and big-eyed? Would you prefer another mother? There is no way of trying that out. Maybe mainland children love their scour-haired mams just as fiercely as we love our silkies, maybe they learn to lose themselves in pale eye-depths whereas here with our mams’ darknesses beside them, our dads’ blues and greens revealed no more than blue-or-greenpainted curves of china.

  Anyway we took all that away, the polish off the china, the shine of purpose and determination. I had not known what we were doing bac
k then. I did not know, looking back now, whether we ought not to’ve, with Dad there across from me, head bent over the rubbish-looking heart, scooping up more orange.

  And once we’d gone, us and the mams, each man had a choice, either to go like Bannister into breakage and mourning, and slope around Potshead like a sprite lost between this world and the next, or to go rocklike with rage like Martyr or Green, and shout and rally everyone, and proclaim how things were all right, an improvement in fact, now that those sly enchantresses had loosed their holds on our hearts.

  But they had not, of course. They never would. You could not be free if you were born of them, and looking at our dads the husbanding of them was much the same: you thought you had caught and confined them, but really it was you as was tangled in the weed nets; you could not breathe properly either in air or in water, were the seal-women not there to encourage the life in and out of you.

  Raditch ran up, and stood all outlined in the sunny doorway. “Ho, Daniel. There looks to be another witch coming in.”

  “What do we want one for?” I did not stop sweeping. “Trudle is young yet, and when she goes there is all those daughters.” All wall-eyed skitterish four of them.

  “She’s here unaxed,” said Raditch. “Come down and watch. I’m going to.”

  “Someone told Trudle?”

  “Jakes and Wretch.” The names floated back to me through the empty doorway.

  Dad would be down there already; it was something the dads did, watch the unloading, some of them swap worldly words with the lumping-men. I propped the broom by the door and walked down through the sunshine.

  Between the cottages I could see the Fleet Fey cutting towards us, the spot of red hair at her prow. A very straight figure, I thought, not like our Trudle, who had hunched into Messkeletha’s old shape by now, taken over the posture as well as the witching, so as we should know it at a distance—know to turn and run, in good time, before she could enchant another daughter out of our loins.

  Everyone gathered to meet the boat, just about: such men as would leave their houses and most of us long-shanked boys, trickling down from the streets and the men already on their bench and bollards on the front. “What is this, then, eh? What is this?” said Grinny’s dad happily, taking up position against the warmed storehouse wall.

  Trudle came down out the town at the moment the gangway-end clacked to the cobbles. Her daughters preceded her wild in their grubby print frocklets, all of the same flowers; she carried the boy against her shoulder who anyone could tell would grow up simple, he stared so slack-mouthed.

  She met the visitor with the little suitcase at the plank-end, stood fast there so that the girl could not step off.

  “What do you think you are about, young miss?” At the sound all the daughters swilled in around her and stared.

  The girl looked Trudle over, and all the eyes around her. “Who are you,” she said, “that I should account to you?” She asked it plain, with no sneering. “Are you mayor or police or officialdom?”

  “What business has you in this place?” Trudle pointed her chin at her. “We’ve all the women we want here and no more.”

  The girl’s gaze traveled from one end the crew of us behind the witch to the other. “Are you sure? It seems a touch unwomaned to me. But I have property here,” she said, “if you must know my business, though it is none of yours, as far as I know you yet.” She stepped neatly around Trudle and the daughters in her skirts.

  “Property? What property?” Trudle swung and followed her, as if she were attached with string.

  The girl crossed half the dock and stood there surveying us. “This is the way you welcome strangers, then?” she said, not loud but we could hear her, every syllable. “Let them be harassed and harridaned even before they’ve set foot?”

  “What property would a mainland girl have here?” said Trudle at the girl’s elbow and fear all over her.

  “Quieten, woman,” said old Baker.

  Trudle bristled and chin-poked at him, drew herself up as much as she might.

  But he went on, to the visitor, “Now I see you, you must be Dully Winch’s girl, of his wife Mary.”

  “You have it,” she said. “Lory Winch, I am.”

  “Lory, that’s right.” The woman-name was uncertain in his mouth.

  “My mother died in the winter.” No one looked or offered anything, so she went on. “She has left me a cottage here, she said.” And straightway I saw it in my mind, the house called Winch’s, a boarded-up box on the road out to the Hill. It was the first time I realized it belonged to anyone, and was not there just to say out beyond Winch’s with, a landmark only.

  We followed them up, Lory Winch and Baker, with Trudle there too, in close, still suspicious, and the daughters flowing around, and the boy staring dumbly at us over Trudle’s shoulder. Up the sunshiny lanes we went, after those red hairs—for all the witch’s girls had piles of it too, flags of it, bunches of it haphazardly pinned. The visitor’s was all tied in, two plaits clambering back over her head from her temples and joining to one down her back. I had seen such plaiting on mams’ dark heads, but theirs had lain obedient, while this seemed on the point of bursting its bindings did it but get half the chance.

  Winch’s stopped where it always had, only I saw it for the first time in a long time. It was black boards; it seemed to lean, the slope threw your eyes off so much, to lean back into the hill, for a better hold, maybe. The yard was thick angelweed up to the fencetop, up to the windows, like a bowl of wild salads, and sea pinks clumped and sea rocket trailed off through the pickets into Asham’s fields around.

  I thought she would be disappointed, a town girl like her. I had seen Knocknee houses. But “Yes,” she said into our silences. “It is exactly as Mam said. I could have found my way alone with her directions, and a little black house is what she said.”

  We stood in the road and watched the creature encounter the gate. Raditch stepped forward to help. “No, I have it,” she said. She opened it to the extent it could be opened, by which she could sidle onto the broken path, and then she waded up to the door. She took a key from her belt that was all the bigger and blacker for being in her small white hand, and she slid it into the keyhole and turned it, and we heard from the sound of that the house had insides, as well as the outsides we knew.

  And we saw them, when she pushed the door wide into an upcurl of dust: papered walls, with pictures, and beyond the far door some furniture-back looming, shadow on shadow.

  The miss put her case on the floor, a little way into the hall. She looked at us all out there with our stares on.

  “Thank you for your help, gentlemen,” she said, and it was hard to say how much she was laughing at us. “Let me settle myself here awhile, and then I’ll out with a thousand questions, I’m sure.”

  “Did you want them battens taken off your winders, miss?” said Raditch. “I can fetch a claw and have it done soon as looking.”

  “Maybe in a while,’ she said. “For now, I need the place to myself, if you don’t mind.”

  She turned her back on us and darkened away down the hall, an upright young woman. We were not used to seeing that type of figure.

  “Well,” said Grinny as we walked slow away, hoping rather she would call us back for some question or favour. “That has livened up our morning.”

  “What’s she want here?” fretted Trudle among us. “Who would want acoming to this place?”

  “You heard. She inherited. She wanted to see what she had,” said Baker’s dad. “I don’t reckon she means to take your place, Trudle. She isn’t got a spelling look about her.”

  “Why did her mam go, though? The widder?” This was Cawdron, gormless still. I didn’t know the answer, but I knew it was one of those questions no one wanted asked.

  “Sem reason they all went,” snapped Martyr, Toddy’s dad that had beat his wife, and to whom Toddy had not returned.

  And what was that? Cawdron’s face said it, but he didn’t allo
w it out of his mouth. All of a sudden the older men found the spirit to walk, and closed their faces down, and went preoccupied with important and worrisome thoughts, so that they did not have to answer him.

  “And so she is up there now, settling herself.” I laughed. “Like a little red hen.”

  My dad had not come up to Winch’s with the crowd. He bit into his breakfast bread and dealt with it, nodding and nodding to keep me quiet.

  But she’d done something, that little hen; she’d pushed something over in my brain that now was falling, stone by stone. “They used to be all red, didn’t they?”

  He nodded towards the door.

  “Why did they go? Widow Winch? Everyone?”

  I saw him realize that I would not be put off. “There were no prospects here for them.”

  “Prospects?”

  “Norn to wed, boy,” he said crossly, and bit the bread again.

  “Ha, there is nothing but men here. Was there such a crowd of red girls, then? Too many to go round? Couldn’t some of them have stayed?”

  But he was shaking his head and chewing.

  “How did it happen, then? You tell. Then I’ll not bother you by guessing wrong over and over.”

  He dabbed his bread at his plate. He chewed as long as he could and then swallowed, and did not bite again, only sat there dabbing, picking up crumbs with the damp bread-edge.

  Stubborn old coot, he would not say, all that morning. I did not sit and badger him; now and then in passing I would say. “You are going to have to tell me some day. Well, it may as well be today, no?” or the like. But all he would do was chew at his teeth and look as if I had smacked him.