“Why?” I asked. I was curious—did she know that a monster was her neighbor?
“It was my daughter that was his second wife. Anna. She told me that he would be a home to her, and so I gave her my blessing. But she never came back to visit, and then she never came back at all, and then there was another girl in a white dress in the cathedral and I knew.
“That’s why I have a room to let out.” She turned away from me and into silence. I set my hand, gentle, on her shoulder.
“She was a good girl, and I miss her. You remind me of her a bit. You have a smile like she did, a kind one. Be careful of him.”
I was not here to be careful. He asked. I said yes.
• • • •
I am not going to tell you about him. He does not even deserve a name.
• • • •
I found Saoirse the first night I spent in his house.
When I turned on the tap to run a bath, wash myself clean of the dust of travel and the feel of his hands on my body, her voice poured out with the water. There is nothing like water to hold the spirit of a banshee, nothing that carries their voices, all tears, so well.
I sank below the surface, and let her words pour over me.
They were all together, she said, all the dead wives. Trapped, their ghosts unable to free themselves. Forced to linger and bear witness each time he brought in a new wife.
They were in a room, she said. A room that he would tell me not to enter, and as soon as he warned me, I would want to go into that room like I had wanted nothing before. A curse, she said. A compulsion. I wouldn’t be able to eat or sleep until I had taken down the key from the way, and turned it in the lock.
Once I did, the key would turn from silver to red, the rustred of blood.
That was how he would know. That was why I would die.
She told me to get out, to run from the bath, to go now, before he forbade me the room and set the curse in motion. There was no magic, she said, that would break it.
I did climb from the bath and I did run, but not out of the door and away. I ran down. Down to the room where the wives were. To where Saoirse and Irena were.
At the door, I reached for a key. Not the one that hung beside it, that would bleed and give away my guilt, but the one around my neck. I set it in the lock, and turned it to the right. The door opened.
He’d kept the bodies.
I clapped my hands over my mouth, holding back the sob, the bile, the rage that bubbled up through my throat. Beyond horrible. I should have known—it is easier to bind a ghost when its body remains. Still. Knowing someone is a monster is one thing. Seeing the proof of it is another.
This is how you bring back a ghost, if you are a witch: You call their name. If the body is there, you place your hands on it, so it will remember having a body, being touched. You look. You see. You remind them of what it is to be seen. You call their name a second time. You offer them reasons to return. Vengeance. Love. Unanswered questions.
You call their name one final time. You give them a choice.
Irena returned first. “I saw. I knew you would come. Thank you.” She passed her fingers through me, a ghost of an embrace.
I turned the key to the left, and opened the door to St. Medusa’s. Irena walked through. Home.
In the end, I sent the ghosts of two of the other wives, Eva and Larissa, to St. Medusa’s with Irena. There were two who chose not to return. Tania was one of them. My landlady’s daughter, Anna, was the other.
And Saoirse. Saoirse had chosen to bind herself to the water in order to preserve her voice, to be able to speak a warning to anyone else who followed after her. She had known what that choice meant when she made it. “It won’t be so bad,” she said, “being here now. It was my choice to stay.”
St. Medusa stood on the other side of the door. “Agatha. It’s enough. Come back.”
We could, I knew, see him dead after I was safely away. But I had put my hands on their bodies. I had seen what he had done. And a ghost will linger where it dies. “It’s not enough,” I said. “Not yet.”
I closed the door to St. Medusa’s, and I left that room. The silver key that hung in the hallway dripped with blood.
He stood at the top of the stairs, smiling as he watched me walk up. I smiled, too. I smiled as I stabbed my key between his ribs, and turned it. I smiled as a door opened, and his life walked through. I closed the door behind it—I couldn’t bring Saoirse home, but I could make sure he wasn’t here with her.
The coils of my hair hissed. Snakes now, after such magic. I turned the key to the left, opened the door to St. Medusa’s, then dropped the key into the water with Saoirse’s ghost. I couldn’t bring her home, but I could leave this piece of it with her.
I stepped through the door.
© 2016 by Kat Howard.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kat Howard is the author of Roses and Rot, named one of the best SFF books of Summer ’16 by Publishers Weekly. Saga Press will also be publishing her next novel in late summer ’17, and a short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, in early 2018. Her novella, “The End of the Sentence”, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, is available from Subterranean Press. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and performed on NPR.
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October’s Son
Will Kaufman | 3442 words
When my wife began to swell, I wondered what seed infected her womb, my own having long proved fruitless. As she grew, her cravings turned to dirt and water and long spells naked in the yard under the bare trees and what sun pierced the clouds, and I asked her, Who have you loved? Who have you fucked? Why is your belly growing round?
She told me she had only loved me, had only fucked me, and if she was fucking pregnant then I was not the one owed an explanation.
I threw her precious record player out the window, scattered gears and belts across our lawn, and she shed her clothes and went to lie in the yard, walking over the sharp wreckage. After an hour I went outside with a bag and collected all the belts and gears, including one I picked off the sole of her foot, where it had stuck. I bent to the ground over and over, a clucking hen pecking for poor food among the grass, and she lay down on the chill concrete, smiling when sunlight shafted over her body despite her goose bumps, her stiff nipples.
• • • •
My wife expanded with remarkable haste, growing so like a pumpkin that I joked she must have fucked a pumpkin and she asked if I would like to feel the baby kick. I put my hand on her stomach and realized it was the first time we had touched in days. I felt no movement, only her taught skin and my own partial erection.
I asked if she wanted to go to Lamaze class, she told me she damn well knew how to breathe.
Then my wife screamed, she hollered and beat whatever was in reach: tables, chairs, cabinets, doors, me. I said that we should go to the hospital. No, she said, no hospital, dirt. She stumbled into the yard, trying to hold her belly and the walls at the same time, leaving a trail of mucous and blood on the floor.
She squatted down on the lawn, digging with her fingernails while she grimaced and groaned. I told her not to fuck up the grass, it took me months to get that shit green and lush, and she screamed that she was squeezing a fucking pumpkin through her vagina and best she knew it was my fucking pumpkin and could I shut the fuck up.
I don’t know. I got down on my knees and held her hand, and I was sweating all over, maybe even more than she was, and there were sounds and smells I was unprepared for. I said we should have gone to Lamaze and she told me to get some scissors for the umbilical cord.
By the time I came back outside, my wife was limp on the ground, blood and shit streaked down her thighs and a bright orange pumpkin slick with afterbirth between her legs. The pumpkin stem was part and parcel of a woody vine that led into her torn sex. She told me to cut the umbilical, but the scissors were meant for pa
per, not the tough cellulose of a pumpkin stem. I hacked at it while my wife faded and wilted and paled.
Yes, we had used that word, both said pumpkin, formed the shape with our mouths, but to see the thing come true shook me. Had my wife known all along, or was she just as lost as me?
Finally I cut the pumpkin free and I picked up my wife and carried her, with the stem that hung from her slapping against my knees, to the car. The blood that poured from her had become a rich red, and something was wrong.
• • • •
I returned from the hospital, alone, to find the pumpkin sitting where I had left it on the lawn, the last of my wife’s living blood dried in its ridges and caked in its dents. It was not a well-shaped pumpkin, but flat on one side. I kicked at it, and it rolled a short distance, and what hollow anger I felt turned to shame. This was, after all, the fruit of my wife’s body, a body I had loved and held.
Felix for a son, Anna for a girl. That’s what we’d decided. In happier times. Times when I would pack us a picnic but forget the forks so we’d eat potato salad with our fingers and lick them clean, and a small brown bird decided my wife’s hair would be perfect for nesting and darted at her head again and again no matter how my wife yelped and ducked or how I tried to shield her with a paper plate or how we fell about laughing at the seriousness of our upset in the face of such a foe. The bird finally triumphed and carried off the strand it had plucked to line its nest, and somewhere birds are singing that were hatched into my wife’s hair.
The pumpkin’s weight surprised me. I held it, and the blood flaked from its hard skin, and fell into the grass, into the dirt.
In happier times, before my wife had been my wife, when she was just Emelia, and we only suspected that we might love each other, and found ourselves more and more together on one couch or another, leaning against each other, and she traced a heart in the dust on my television screen, and when we lay in bed spent and naked she told me about her mother and her father and the time she went to Greece and stood before the Parthenon and thought it was a building she had walked by in some earlier life when it was young and painted bright colors and that night a boy in a dance club grabbed her breast and she punched him in the ear, I was jealous of whatever lives she’d had before we’d met, of any person who shared that time with her I could never touch. I still am.
I held the pumpkin to the sharp stubble on my cheek and I cried so that for a last time I would share fluids with my wife, and we would both touch the life she’d made, and I thought that here, with tough skin and woody stem, was a Felix in my arms.
• • • •
My neighbors brought me pots of soup and pans of lasagna burnt black as asphalt around the edges, and when they saw Felix on my kitchen table they said, How good that you are getting into the spirit of the season. How good for you. I screamed at them and chased them from my house and threw their food into the garbage.
My lawn grew ragged and weeds took hold. Was the last thing I said to my wife truly an admonition concerning the grass? I could no longer remember what I’d muttered and yelled to her in the car as I brought her, running stop signs and red lights and yet still too slowly, to the hospital. Whatever I might have said, whatever she might have still been able to hear, in my memory all of it became don’t hurt the grass, don’t hurt the grass, don’t hurt the grass. So I let her have the lawn, whatever of her remained soaked into the soil, I let her nurture what she chose while I struggled to understand how I should care for this child we had wrought.
• • • •
I walked Felix through our neighborhood, among the clean houses with their leaf-blower clean driveways, the first paper skeletons beginning to appear in windows, plastic tombstones in the hedges, and I said to Felix, We are not always so nonchalant about death, so willing to welcome it to our doors. I said, I miss her, too. I said, I have to figure out the funeral.
I said, But you don’t have to worry about that, leave it to me.
I miss her, too.
A boy from the neighborhood asked what I was doing, and I said that I was talking to my son, Felix. He asked if I was teasing him, and I said no. He asked how my son could hear me, being a pumpkin, without ears, and I said I did not know, but I was sure he did. The boy asked how I could be sure, and he asked where my wife was, and he asked and asked and I looked him over, his skinny legs and tangled hair and dirty fingers, and I interrupted his inquiry. Felix is younger than you, I said, but perhaps you could still be his friend. A boy needs friends, and my son more than most, his mother being gone.
The boy asked if I was crazy, and ran off.
I said to my son, He had so many questions. Have you no questions, Felix? Isn’t there anything you want to know?
Felix shone orange amongst all the black, all the grey of the headstones, and compared to him, even the green of the grass seemed drab and dry. My wife’s relatives did not comment on his presence, even when I held him over the open grave so he might see his mother planted.
The hole dug for my wife was lined with concrete, and I almost panicked. If I had not had Felix to clutch to me, to comfort me with his bright calm, I would certainly have thrown myself into the pit to keep my wife from being lowered in. She had always told me to cremate her, to spread her ashes by the ocean. She said, I never want to go in a box.
But the nature of her child, the nature of her death, these were not things of the ocean, not things of dust and wind. Her nature was of the earth, rich as dirt, and it was dirt to which she belonged. When I arranged for her burial, I bought the meanest pine box in the hopes that it would decay all the sooner. I had not been warned about the concrete.
Don’t worry, I whispered to Felix, while some priest of my wife’s family’s choosing lied prettily about a woman he had never met. Don’t worry, it may take longer, but the concrete too will rot, the concrete will crack and split and crumble. No box can keep your mother’s spirit trapped forever.
Did I ever tell you, I whispered, about the time a cabbie tried to cheat us by driving three or four blocks out of the way, thinking we were too lost in each other’s company to notice, or strangers to that city, or some such thing, and your mother refused to pay the man a penny more than she thought he deserved, which was nothing, so he locked the doors and said he would not let us out until we paid, and your mother so cursed at him, so pelted him with words that he opened the doors just to escape from her.
My wife’s relatives shushed me, gave me dark stares and stern brows. I said, loudly, And you all built a box around her of your god and his strange rules, but she broke that, and found meaning elsewhere in the world. And I know you blame me for that, but I could not control her, could never make her change her mind. Once she threatened to leave me, so I locked her in our bedroom. She said if I did not let her out she would truly leave, and I did not want to be a broken box, so I opened the door. Even death is broken through by her, for she left me with a new life that holds some part of her life.
I held Felix up for them all to see and I cried, She left me a son, in defiance of all nature, because nothing could hold the force of her. Then I took my son and left those people to the confines of their ceremony.
• • • •
The month wore on and more and more other pumpkins on the street and on the television were carved with faces, some with the loving intricacy of a Fabergé egg and some clumsy as a toddler’s finger-painting, and lit with flickering candles, their skulls all charred and smoke-stained on the inside in payment for the light that poured from their eyes and mouths and filled darkness with life.
Felix met this change in the world with silence and constancy, and I realized he had not changed since the day of his birth, and I knew this was not the way a child should be. A child must change.
What choice did I have but to sit Felix down at the kitchen table and take a sharp knife to his flesh? The face that waited to be revealed already seemed obvious to me, so I did not mark him, did not draw my intentions as though my own son’s ap
pearance might be a mystery to me. I told him, Tell me if you want me to stop. I pressed the point of the knife into a spot some three inches from Felix’s stem.
My hand shook, but I would not have passed that happy duty to any other living man. This was a rite of passage, a becoming, and Felix’s mother would not have wanted anything but this, anything but her husband and her son together, moving on, moving forward. I felt her there, felt her fingers steadying mine, felt her breath on my cheek, smelled her lilac shampoo, as I had any day I cared to take her in my arms, any moment I cared to bury my nose in her neck, let her hair catch in my stubble, and how she was warm, and how we would hold each other, how we would wait for some signal we should part, and no signal ever came, and the end of every embrace was awkward, was an awkward, tiny death, like a spider caught in a tissue by its legs and broken apart, and how unlike a candle, how unlike a flame, how unlike a fire was every moment we consumed each other. I felt her hand on mine, and I plunged the knife into our son.
Felix was tough, Felix was strong, and I sawed into him, and he did not tell me to stop, because what else could he want but to become?
The prodigious, slick fiber, heavy with seeds, heady with stink, that I scooped from my son, filled a metal mixing-bowl first, then a blue coffee mug, a wineglass, and the tureen my wife and I received for our wedding but never used. I thought it might be endless, that my son might never be emptied. Eventually he was. I took this part of his flesh and I scattered it on the lawn where his mother had bled and birthed him, which made some circle whole and bound tight, and seemed right to do.
Then it was time to reveal his face. With a paring knife I began the tear duct of his left eye, which I would make almond shaped, and though it could not be brown like mine nor green like my wife’s, it would be filled with light, and that was enough.
I cut his right eye too high, and slanted as though in anger, and his mouth smiled too much, because perhaps my hopes guided my hand. Perhaps I wanted him to smile, even, after all the loss and pain we had shared, needed him to smile, to be happy in his life, but that choice was not rightfully mine to make.
Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016 Page 12