by Stephen King
‘When will you go to collect?’ he asked.
‘This afternoon, when the wake is done.’
He nodded, and kept his thoughts to himself.
Lucette brings a black lacquered tray, balancing a teapot, two cups and saucers, a creamer, sugar boat and silver cutlery. There are two delicate almond biscuits perched on a ridiculously small plate. The servants have been given the afternoon off. Her mother is upstairs, resting.
‘The house has been so full of people,’ she says, placing the tray on the parquetry table between us. I want to grab at her, bury my fingers in her hair and kiss her breath away, but broken china might not be the ideal start. I hold my hands in my lap. I wonder if she notices that I filed back my nails, made them neat? That the stains on my skin are lighter than they were, after hours of scrubbing with lye soap?
She reaches into the pocket of her black dress and pulls forth a leather pouch, twin to the one she gave me barely two days ago. She holds it out and smiles. As soon as my hand touches it, she relinquishes the strings so our fingers do not meet.
‘There! Our business is at an end.’ She turns the teapot five times clockwise with one hand and arranges the spoons on the saucers to her satisfaction.
‘At an end?’ I ask.
Her look is pitying, then she laughs. ‘I thought for a while there I might actually have to let you tumble me! Still and all, it would have been worth it, to have him safely away.’ She sighs. ‘You did such beautiful work, Hepsibah, I am grateful for that. Don’t ever think I’m not.’
I am not stupid enough to protest, to weep, to beg, to ask if she is joking, playing with my heart. But when she passes me a cup, my hand shakes so badly that the tea shudders over the rim. Some pools in the saucer, more splashes onto my hand and scalds me. I manage to put the mess down as she fusses, calling for a maid, then realises no one will come.
‘I won’t be a moment,’ she says, and leaves to make her way to the kitchen and cleaning cloths.
I rub my shaking hands down my skirts and feel a hard lump. Buried deep in the right hand pocket is the tin. It makes a sad, promising sound as I tap on the lid before I open it. I tip the contents into her empty cup, then pour tea over it, letting the poisoned tooth steep until I hear her bustling back along the corridor. I fish it out with a spoon, careful not to touch it with my bare hands and put it away. I add a little cream to her cup.
She wipes my red-hot flesh with a cool wet cloth, then wraps the limb kindly. Lucette sits opposite me and I hand her the cup of tea and give a fond smile for her, and for Hector who has appeared at her shoulder.
‘Thank you, Hepsibah.’
‘You are most welcome, Miss D’Aguillar.’
I watch her lift the fine china to her pink, pink lips and drink deeply.
It will be enough, slow-acting, but sufficient. This house will be bereft again.
When I am called upon to ply my trade a second time I will bring a mirror with me. In the quiet room when we two are alone, I will unwrap Lucette and run my fingers across her skin and find all the secret places she denied me, and she will be mine and mine alone, whether she wishes it or no.
I take my leave and wish her well.
‘Repeat business,’ says Father gleefully as he falls into step beside me. ‘Not too much, not enough to draw attention to us, but enough to keep bread on the table.’
In a day or two, I shall knock once more on the Widow D’Aguillar’s front door.
ANGELA SLATTER is the author of two short story collections: Sourdough and Other Stories (Tartarus Press, UK), and The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales (Ticonderoga Publications, Australia), both published in 2010. The Girl with No Hands won the Aurealis Award for Best Collection in 2011 and her story with Lisa L. Hannett, ‘The February Dragon’, won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story the same year.
Her short stories have appeared in the anthologies The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Twenty-Two, Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again, Tartarus Press’s Strange Tales II and III and Twelfth Planet Press’s 2012, as well as such journals as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Shimmer.
In 2012 she will have another collection of short stories published by Ticonderoga, Midnight and Moonshine, a collaboration with friend and writing-partner-in-crime, Lisa Hannett.
Slatter is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006.
‘When the editor emailed me, asking for a submission for this anthology that needed to be “more horror than fantasy”, I was casting about for ideas with a bit of personal terror,’ recalls the author. ‘I don’t really think of myself as a horror writer. My first effort was deemed “Good, but I think you can do better”. After some fist-shaking and howling (on my part), I went back to work. I was listening to Florence and the Machine’s Lungs for the first time … when “My Boy Builds Coffins” came on, I started to think about a society that regarded coffin-making not simply as a necessary service, but also as an art form. On top of that, it was an eldritch art form required to keep the dead beneath the earth. I wanted a story that had layers of unspoken secrets.
‘When I heard “Girl with One Eye”, I got a picture of Hepsibah in my mind’s eye – this thin girl standing in front of a heavy door, with a short gamine haircut that had started to grow out and curl a bit because she wasn’t overly given to worrying about her appearance. She was wearing a brown woollen dress, a bit Jane Eyre-like, with long sleeves, buttons up the front and long skirts, and she had on a kind of baker boy’s cap. At her shoulder was the ghost of her father, and Hector is a nasty piece of work. I could hear his voice and knew how adversarial their relationship was; but that no matter how much Hepsibah hated her father, she shared some characteristics with him and that’s why he was still hanging around. The society was a kind of Victorian setting, but mixed with some elements similar to the world of Sourdough and Other Stories.
‘Hepsibah is one of my favourite characters – she’s a terrible mess of a human, but really fascinating.’
Roots and All
—BRIAN HODGE—
THE WAY IN was almost nothing like we remembered, miles off the main road, and Gina and me with one half-decent sense of direction between us. Do you need us to draw you a map, our parents had asked, hers and mine both, once at the funeral home and again over the Continental breakfast at the motel. No, no, no, we’d told them. Of course we remember how to get to Grandma’s. Indignant, the way adults get when their parents treat them like nine-year-olds.
Three wrong turns and fifteen extra minutes of meandering later, we were in the driveway, old gravel over ancestral dirt. Gina and I looked at each other, a resurgence of some old telepathy between cousins.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘We never speak of this again.’
She’d insisted on driving my car, proving … something … and yanked the keys from the ignition. ‘I don’t even want to speak about it now.’
If everything had still been just the way it used to be, maybe we would’ve been guided by landmarks we hadn’t even realised we’d internalised. But it wasn’t the same, and I don’t think I was just recalling some idealised version of this upstate county that had never actually existed.
I remembered the drive as a thing of excruciating boredom, an interminable landscape of fields and farmhouses, and the thing I’d dreaded most as a boy was finding ourselves behind a tractor rumbling down a road too narrow for us to pass. But once we were here, it got better, because my grandfather had never been without a couple of hunting dogs, and there were more copses of trees and tracts of deep woodland than the most determined pack of kids could explore in an entire summer.
Now, though …
‘The way here,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t always this dismal, was it?’
Gina shook her head. ‘Definitely not.’
I was thinking of the trailers we’d passed, and the forests of junk that had grown up around them, and it seemed like there’d been a time when, if someone had a vehicle that
obviously didn’t run, they kept it out of sight inside a barn until it did. They didn’t set it out like a trophy. I was thinking, too, of riding in my grandfather’s car, meeting another going the opposite direction, his and the other driver’s hands going up at the same moment in a friendly wave. Ask him who it was, and as often as not he wouldn’t know. They all waved just the same. Bygone days, apparently. About all the greeting we’d gotten were sullen stares.
We stood outside the car as if we needed to reassure ourselves that we were really here. Like that maple tree next to the driveway, whose scarlet-leafed shade we parked in, like our grandfather always had – it had to have grown, but then so had I, so it no longer seemed like the beanstalk into the clouds it once was. Yet it had to be the same tree, because hanging from the lowest limbs were a couple of old dried gourds, each hollowed out, with a hole the size of a silver dollar bored into the side. There would be a bunch more hanging around behind the house – although they couldn’t have been the same gourds. It pleased me to think of Grandma Evvie doing this right up until the end, her life measured by the generations of gourds she’d turned into birdhouses, one of many scales of time.
How long since we’ve been here, Gina?
Ohhh … gotta be … four or five gourds ago, at least.
Really. That long.
Yeah. Shame on us.
It was the same old clapboard farmhouse, white, always white, always peeling. I’d never seen it freshly painted, but never peeled all the way down to naked weathered wood, either, and you had to wonder if the paint didn’t somehow peel straight from the can.
We let ourselves in through the side door off the kitchen – I could hardly remember ever using the front door – and it was like stepping into a time capsule, everything preserved, even the smell, a complex blend of morning coffee and delicately fried foods.
We stopped in the living room by her chair, the last place she’d ever sat. The chair was so thoroughly our grandmother’s that even as kids we’d felt wrong sitting in it, although she’d never chased us out. It was old beyond reckoning, as upholstered chairs went, the cushions flattened by decades of gentle pressure, with armrests as wide as cutting boards. She’d done her sewing there, threaded needles always stuck along the edge.
‘If you have to die, and don’t we all,’ Gina said, ‘that’s the way to do it.’
Her chair was by the window, with a view of her nearest neighbour, who’d been the one to find her. She’d been reading, apparently. Her book lay closed on one armrest, her glasses folded and resting atop it, and she was just sitting there, her head drooping but otherwise still upright. The neighbour, Mrs Tepovich, had thought she was asleep.
‘It’s like she decided it was time,’ I said. ‘You know? She waited until she’d finished her book, then decided it was time.’
‘It must’ve been a damn good book. I mean … if she decided nothing else was ever going to top it.’ Totally deadpan. That was Gina.
I spewed a time-delayed laugh. ‘You’re going to Hell.’
Then she got serious and knelt by the chair, running her hand along the knobbly old fabric. ‘What’s going to happen to this? Nobody’d want it. There’s nobody else in the world it even fits with. It was hers. But to just throw it out … ?’
She was right. I couldn’t stand the thought of it joining a land-fill.
‘Maybe Mrs Tepovich could use it.’ I peered through the window, towards her house. ‘We should go over and say hi. See if there’s anything here she’d like.’
This neighbourly feeling seemed as natural here as it would’ve been foreign back home. The old woman in that distant house … I’d not seen her in more than a decade, but it still felt like I knew her better than any of the twenty or more people within a five-minute walk of my own door.
It was easy to forget: really, Gina and I were just one generation out of this place, and whether directly or indirectly, it had to have left things buried in us that we didn’t even suspect.
If the road were a city block, we would’ve started at one end, and Mrs Tepovich would’ve been nearly at the other. We tramped along wherever walking was easiest, a good part of it over ground that gave no hint of having been a strawberry field once, where people came from miles around to pick by the quart.
But Mrs Tepovich, at least, hadn’t changed, or not noticeably so. She’d seemed old before and was merely older now, less a shock to our systems than we were to hers. Even though she’d seen us as teenagers she still couldn’t believe how we’d grown, and maybe it was just that Gina and I looked like it had been a long time since we’d had sunburns and scabs.
‘Was it a good funeral?’ she wanted to know.
‘Nobody complained,’ Gina said.
‘I stopped going to funerals after Dean’s.’
Her husband. My best memory of him was from when the strawberries came in red and ripe, and his inhuman patience as he smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and hand-cranked a shiny cylinder of homemade ice cream in a bath of rock salt and ice. The more we pleaded, the slyer he grinned and the slower he cranked.
‘I’ve got one more funeral left in me,’ Mrs Tepovich said, ‘and that’s the one they’ll have to drag me to.’
It should’ve been sad, this little sun-cured widow with hair like white wool rambling around her house and tending her gardens alone, having just lost her neighbour and friend – a fixture in her life that had been there half-a-century, one of the last remaining pillars of her past now gone.
It should’ve been sad, but wasn’t. Her eyes were too bright, too expectant, and it made me feel better than I had since I’d got the news days ago. This was what Grandma Evvie was like, right up to the end. How do you justify mourning a thing like that? It should’ve been celebrated.
But no, she’d got the usual dirge-like send-off, and I was tempted to think she would’ve hated it.
‘So you’ve come to sort out the house?’ Mrs Tepovich said.
‘Only before our parents do the real job,’ Gina told her. ‘They said if there was anything of Grandma’s that we wanted, now would be the time to pick it out.’
‘So we’re here for a long weekend,’ I said.
‘Just you two? None of the others?’
More cousins, she meant. All together, we numbered nine. Ten once, but now nine, and no, none of the others would be coming, although my cousin Lindsay hadn’t been shy about asking me to send her a cell phone video of a walkthrough, so she could see if there was anything she wanted. I was already planning on telling her sorry, I couldn’t get a signal up here.
‘Well, you were her favourites, you know.’ Mrs Tepovich got still, her eyes, mired in a mass of crinkles, going far away. ‘And Shae,’ she added softly. ‘Shae should’ve been here. She wouldn’t have missed it.’
Gina and I nodded. She was right on both counts. There were a lot of places my sister should’ve been over the past eight years, instead of … wherever. Shae should’ve been a lot of places, been a lot of things, instead of a riddle and a wound that had never quite healed.
‘We were wondering,’ Gina went on, ‘if there was anything from over there that you would like.’
‘Some of that winter squash from her garden would be nice, if it’s ready to pick. She always did grow the best Delicata. And you’ve got to eat that up quick, because it doesn’t keep as long as the other kinds.’
We were looking at each other on two different wavelengths.
‘Well, it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘The skin’s too thin.’
‘Of course you’re welcome to anything from the garden that you want,’ Gina said. ‘But that’s not exactly what we meant. We thought you might like to have something from inside the house.’
‘Like her chair,’ I said, pretending to be helpful. ‘Would you want her chair?’
Had Mrs Tepovich bitten into the tartest lemon ever grown, she still wouldn’t have made a more sour face. ‘That old eyesore? What would I need with that?’ She gave her head a stern shake. ‘No. T
ake that thing out back and burn it, is what you should do. I’ve got eyesores of my own, I don’t need to take on anyone else’s.’
We stayed awhile longer, and it was hard to leave. Harder for us than for her. She was fine with our going, unlike so many people her age I’d been around, who did everything but grab your ankle to keep you a few more minutes. I guessed that’s the way it was in a place where there was always something more that needed to be done.
Just this, on our way out the door:
‘I don’t know if you’ve got anything else planned for while you’re here,’ she said, and seemed to be directing this at me, ‘but don’t you go poking your noses anywhere much off the roads. Those meth people that’ve made such a dump of the place, I hear they don’t mess around.’
Evening came on differently out here than it did at home, seeming to rise up from the ground and spill from the woods and over-flow the ditches that ran alongside the road. I’d forgotten this. Forgotten, too, how night seemed to spread outward from the chicken coop and creep from behind the barn and pool in the hog wallow and gather inside the low, tin-roofed shack that had sheltered the pigs and, miraculously, was still standing after years of disuse. Night was always present here, it seemed. It just hid for a while and then slipped its leash again.
I never remembered a time when it hadn’t felt better being next to somebody when night came on. We watched it from the porch, plates in our laps as we ate a supper thrown together from garden pickings and surviving leftovers from the fridge.
When she got to it, finally, Gina started in gently. ‘What Mrs Tepovich said … about having anything else planned this weekend … meaning Shae, she couldn’t have been talking about anything else … she wasn’t onto something there, was she? That’s not on your mind, is it, Dylan?’
‘I can’t come up here and not have it on my mind,’ I said. ‘But doing something, no. What’s there to do that wouldn’t be one kind of mistake or another?’
Not that it wasn’t tempting, in concept. Find some reprobate and put the squeeze on, and if he didn’t know anything, which he almost certainly wouldn’t, then have him point to someone who might.