The preparation of the food, pampered idiot that I am, was beyond me. I set my servants to work with terrible threats. What emerged on platters from the steaming dungeons was an insult to Caitlin’s loveliness. I took a skewer from the filthy meat and showed the leading servant my disgust, stopping before fatality only to avoid the inevitable distraction that dragging another body to the dead orchards would cause. Their second offering was many times better. When I put the sauce to my lips, I could only wonder at the contrast with the foul stuff I was normally forced to tolerate. But still, it failed to match Caitlin’s perfection. As, inevitably, did the third offering. But nevertheless I carried the abject dishes up to her myself, rare fruits and savories, sweetmeats that the City had long forgotten, riches on the palate beyond dream.
I watched as she ate, seated on that gilded chair. Her movements were swift with hunger, yet delicate, fluttering like leaves in sunlight. I poured wine from a bottle furred with the centuries of dust into her silver goblet. The light of the candelabra formed a heart within the hall, intimate and yellow. I moved the plates and dishes with my ugly, clumsy hands, drawing her attention to this or that culinary treasure. Music played from my newly discovered box, trembling the shadows around us. She looked at me and smiled, her fingers twisting the frayed edge of the cloth. With each flicker of movement another facet of her beauty stung my eyes.
Finally, she sat back, and I asked there if there was anything else she wanted.
She shook her head, and I asked her if she was happy.
A shadow crossed her face for a moment. Then her clear eyes fixed on mine, that green that seemed to flicker with more than flamelight.
She told me that she had lost her mother when she was still a child. She told me how she heard rumours that she had been taken from the market, just as I had taken her. Someone with riches, it was said, someone such as I. Eventually, she had found her mother’s body in the dead orchards, dangling upside down, her guts hanging out over her face, not living, but somehow not yet dead.
I nodded. But of course, I had no way of telling whether Caitlin’s mother had once been my guest. In truth, my memories of my many guests had flooded together like the blood-scent of their hidden jewels. And Caitlin outshone any from the past. But still, I was pleased with the symmetry that should bring my guests here, generation on generation.
Certain in the knowledge than I could not be lying, I told Caitlin that she was infinitely more beautiful than her mother.
She nodded gravely. She had seen herself in the mirror; she knew that there was no point in arguing. I watched her eyes travel across the dishes and condiments, the glowing candelabra, the crystal glass filled with crystal water.
I asked if she was thirsty.
Slowly, she shook her head. To my astonishment, I felt a rush of well-being, almost equal to that which I had felt as I watched the throats of my previous guests move to swallow. My heart raced at the thought that here, at last, I had found something new. A guest who survived the feast! Weeks and months stretched before me in my delirious excitement. Caitlin and I together, her beauty and my power, King and Queen of this City.
Then what, she asked, what shall we do?
My face must have betrayed my sudden confusion. I wanted us to become lovers, I wanted to drown in her blossom-honeyed scent. After I had stammered out some inadequate expression of this, Caitlin put her head back and began to laugh.
Laughter. The sound rebounded from the wet walls. Laughter. Unheard in centuries. Laughter. Thick, ugly laughter. I gazed at Caitlin in disappointment as her lips twisted back with the cackle and bray, as knotted roots of tendon formed in her neck, as her face distorted beyond recall. She sniffed and gave a last bark.
I was sickened, but I forced myself to shrug. So quickly, the possibilities had faded.
Her face was smoothly solemn now, but it was only a sick parody of my memory of her beauty. Love is impossible in this City, she said. So what would you have me do?
Knowing it was true, I lifted the glass. The words were easy now. I suggested that we could share the crystal water together. Her, and then me.
Caitlin nodded. Unhesitatingly, she took the glass in both her slender hands and lifted it to her lips. The facets danced light on her cheeks. I felt coolness and calm wash through my agitation as I witnessed the movement, that familiar part of the ritual. She tipped the glass up. Inch by inch. Degree by degree. Her eyes were momentarily closed like the child she almost was. In the last moment, as the water broke into her mouth, I even saw her beauty reassert itself.
The glass tumbled and broke. She slumped from the gilded chair, down into the filth below the table. It drew a black streak across her flaccid face, as though nature was reasserting itself. Gazing at her strewn there, eyes open again and staring wide at me, I pondered for a moment my old pleasures, the way the inner jewels of a body could be drawn out gleaming for display. But I shook my head, knowing that to do that would only sour further an already bitter memory. I called for my servants. I bid them carry her to the orchard, fresh and as she was, with her skin unmarred. And recalling Caitlin’s grim story of her roughly pinioned mother, I decided to accompany them.
The moon was howling in the sky, the light of madness breaking over blind chimneys, shattered towers, seed husks of broken rooftops. The City was still seething alive. The night people, gory rags of flesh and fabric, scuttled their trails in the solemn wake of our procession. My servants bore Caitlin on a stretcher of silk, albeit blackened with the stains of its previous occupants. Although motionless, her eyes stared unrelentingly at me as I walked beside her along ways where firelight bloodied the darkness, beyond the deep pools of sickness where the nightbirds fluttered, through the empty market itself ransacked by the day. Now that she was stilled by the water, I could see her in abstraction, the planes of flesh, the intersections of beauty and imperfection.
We reached the dead orchards, grey boughs weaving the grey light. The wind was faint, but everywhere there was the scratchy sound of movement. We passed along the avenues of withered flesh and stopped at a tree that was tenanted only by chattering ancient bones. My servants put Caitlin down and hovered fretfully, awaiting their instructions. I waved them away and crouched down close to Caitlin, over her face. My shadow blocked the wild moon. Her eyes glittered. As I had done many times before, I wondered how it must feel to be trapped in a body that possesses every faculty but movement, that sensed my foul breath and the ripe smell of decay. That felt pain. I moved a fraction closer still and bit a piece from her nose. Just a small piece: I had already disciplined myself not to spoil this moment with petty disfigurement. I chewed it slowly. My Caitlin was bitter-sweet, unlike any human flesh I had tasted before, yet still resonant with memory. I closed my eyes momentarily, glimpsed dappled light, the moist white flesh of a golden-green fruit offered to me in the hand of a smiling child. I blinked, and gazed lovingly down at Caitlin, at the sweetness she contained. When I took another small bite of her nose, a bead of moisture broke from her eye and ran down her cheek. A pretty cheek, yes I could see that now. Still imperfect, but possibly less so than any other I had known.
You should never have laughed, I said. Never.
The eyes poured back at me, wet stones in the stillness of her face.
I lifted her from the stretcher alone. My servants shivered around the distant trees, whinnying and muttering in pitiful excitement. Her flesh was warm and living, youthful and elastic. Pushing it onto the spears of the branches was difficult and messy work. My hands grew slickly black in the moonlight. Her sweet-apple smell grew stronger. I licked my glistening fingers, expecting the salt taste of blood, but discovering instead a stronger, sappy sweetness. My Caitlin, I thought, you are so, so beautiful, so unlike the rest. The limbs of the tree skittered and creaked. Although there was little wind, the surrounding orchard grew agitated in sympathy. I felt a cold rising of fear, but forced myself through it. And soon, almost too soon, the job was done.
I stood back. My
Caitlin, hanging there in the moonlight. In the orchard, the living amid the dead. She now possessed a different kind of beauty – something dark and impossible to explain. I shivered in anticipation, knowing that it would give me pleasure to visit this spot in the grey months and years to come.
My Caitlin. As my servants gathered closer to see, I stretched up to her. Wetly stained branches projected through both of her arms. It was an inexpert job, but far better than my foolish servants could ever have managed. The sweetly scented blood was still flowing from the wounds, splattering the earth, betraying life: somehow, it spoiled the effect, but I didn’t doubt that she and the tree would gain equilibrium as she began to wither and rot.
I leaned forward to kiss her, and the howling moonlight softened to a glow around her, spinning green rainbow webs, filling my heart to the choking. Caitlin. My Caitlin. I touched her lips, breathed the apple scent of love and memory and childhood.
But something was wrong. The tree shuddered movement and her arm shook on the branches, breaking loose and spraying sappy petals of blood. She circled me with it and drew me in, her lips seeking mine, pressing, her tongue a strong root, inexorably parting my lips.
Holding me like ivy, she spat the contents of her mouth out into mine. A flood of crystal soaked my lips and tongue. My throat contracted. I held the poison tight in my mouth, wanting to vomit it out with all the contents of my stomach, but held back by the knotted pressure of her lips. Then her other arm curved out from the tree and drew me deeper into the embrace. I felt the leafy fire of her beauty. I felt living branches clawing at my flesh. I felt my throat weaken and dissolve, the cool crystal flood of magic through my body.
The sky span up.
The earth thudded my back.
Lying motionless, I heard the rasping scream of fresh wood on old bark as Caitlin pulled herself fully away from the barbed branches. I smelled her greenly resinous tang. She stood over me, the sap still dripping from the gleaming white rents in her limbs, revealing the knotted intricacies of grain within.
She leaned over me with her leafy-apple scent. I heard her voice like the whisper of spring, quiet and strong.
“My Lord,” she said, “the story that I told you at our banquet is true. You did kill my mother, or at least bring her to hang in that frozen place which is worse than death. Yet when I said that I was a child, I revealed less than all of the truth.”
I gazed up at her, suddenly conscious of the huge silence of my heart and lungs. She said, “My Lord, you lifted me from my mother’s womb. And doubtless you toyed with me a while before eventually you grew disgusted or bored, and pushed me back in with the other entrails, bidding your servants take my mother to these dead orchards.
“But I was living too. And I did not drink your magic potion – for magic is not like poison or dreamsmoke or alcohol, it does not pass through the blood. I was not caught in your spell.
“So the boughs of the dead orchards received my poor mother – hanging upside down in much the way I described – and the trees found within her something untainted by that dreadful paralysis, a life that still lay on the brink of living. It was a life that the tubers and roots revived and nourished, tended, caused to grow and be brought out as a new fruit, half human, and yet half of the wood.”
She blinked slowly, as though at a happy memory. But her beauty was terrible, and her hair was drifting like a forest in a storm. “My Lord,” she whispered, “do you understand what I am saying?”
Yes, I understood, and although I had no way of showing, she knew that I did. My thoughts now were quick, freed from all the normal distractions of living. My senses were heightened too – every nerve receptive and glowing – which made me realise the delicious, searing torment that my guests must have experienced.
Caitlin unbowed into the moonlight. She turned away from me and towards my servants. I could not see them, but I knew from the sounds I heard that they were bowing and muttering in fear of this new and terrible wood-God.
Caitlin said one word. She said, “Now.”
My servants’ clumsy hands were on me, around me. They lifted me up. My feet were in the air, and I then felt the pressure of the tree. Splintered boughs breaking through my clothing, on into the flesh. For once, they did a good job. They skewered me deep on the branches through belly and limbs.
And I tried to scream, as I have been trying ever since.
Caitlin visits me often, brushing the dead things from my yawning mouth, lovingly smoothing each new tendril as it works its way through my spine. She talks to me about life in this unchanging City, about the discoveries she has made in my house since she became its tenant. Sometimes her face crinkles with disgust, like old bark. But after all these years, she still retains her beauty. And when the pain is no more than bitter agony and a small corner of my thoughts remain my own, I find time to wonder if the fresh wood in her heart and the timber of her bones will ever die.
Yes, Caitlin visits me often. She smiles like sunlight and brings the memory of snow-flurried blossom, of waiting for the one-who-loved, the one who never came.
I pray to the Gods that she will never desert me.
ELIZABETH MASSIE
What Happened When Mosby Paulson Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book
ELIZABETH MASSIE HAS published a large number of horror and dark fantasy stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Horror Show, Iniquities, Grue, Gauntlet, Borderlands, Borderlands 3, A Whisper of Blood, Book of the Dead II: Still Dead, Hottest Blood, Voices from the Night and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
She has won the Horror Writer’s Association Bram Stoker Award for her novelette “Stephen” (published in Best New Horror 2) and her début novel, Sineater. A collection of her short fiction, entitled Southern Discomfort, was published in 1994. Rhymes and Reasons, a PBS television special for which she wrote the teleplay, was awarded a Parents’ Choice Award in 1991.
More recently, her novella “Fixtures of Matchstick Men and Joo” appeared in Douglas E. Winter’s epic Millennium anthology, and a collaborative story with her son Brian was published in the Random House collection Great Writers and Kids. Silver Salamander Press has published another collection, Shadow Dreams, and she is currently working on a series of middle-grade horror novels, American Chills. A series of young adult historical fiction novels, Young Founders’ Diaries, are due to appear in 1996, along with a new adult suspense novel, Wire Mesh Mothers.
Like many of the stories in this year’s volume, the following tale also has its basis in fact, as the author explains: “Back when I was a middle school teacher, I had a student like Elliott, until he began to receive homebound instruction. We rarely heard from him after that . . .”
MAIL WAS IN.
Elliott Mitchell stepped out onto the front stoop, pleased and shocked, as he usually was, at the cool roughness of the concrete beneath his bare feet. From the mailbox he pulled assorted flyers and bills, several final notices, and two copies of the new phone book, wrapped in brown paper. Elliott flipped through the collection, taking mental notes of the exciting variety of places from where the mail had come and filing this information away in the hungry places of his mind.
Washington, D.C. Chicago, Illinois. Pueblo, Colorado.
If there had been an atlas in his home like there had been in school, he would have looked them up. But the names themselves were intriguing enough.
He moved back into the house. His feet found the familiar, sticky warmth of the worn living room carpet. The cats peed here, and food from Elliott’s mother’s tray was spilled here. Elliott couldn’t keep up with it all anymore, and so the cats continued to pee and his mother’s trembling hands continued to knock portions of her dinners onto her lap and onto the floor.
Elliott dropped the stack of mail onto the top of the console television. He moved into the small kitchen. The windows were closed and locked in defiance of the cool May air. Orange flowered curtains hung, dead weights against grease-iced window g
lass.
There was a two-litre Dr Pepper in the refrigerator. Elliott took a long swig from the bottle.
“Ellie?”
Elliott’s stomach fluttered. He turned toward the call. A drip of Cola caught in the corner of his mouth then slid to his chin.
“What, Mom?”
“Can’t hear my set. Come turn it up, honey.”
Elliott put the drink back and closed the refrigerator door. On the door, held by an eclectic collection of magnets, were some of Elliott’s best school papers from seventh grade. A spelling test, “A+!” A letter written in social studies to George Washington, “96, Good job Elliott!” Numerous charcoal, pastel, and watercolor artworks, each praised in red ink on a Post-It Note by Mrs Pugh, the middle school art teacher. He would have had Mrs Pugh in eighth grade this year for advanced art if he had not been so sick.
But he was on homebound now.
He was sick. He knew it, Mom knew it. So very, very sick.
Just like me, Ellie.
If you go to school today I might just be dead when you get home.
“Ellie? The set, I can’t hear it and I can’t get up. My back’s doing it again.”
Elliott went down the short dark hall to his mother’s room. The door was open. Smells of stale cigarettes, medicated vaporizer, and illness hung around the doorway, a heavy, eye-stinging, invisible fog.
“Set, baby, fix it for me.”
He stepped into the bedroom. The floor here was bare linoleum. It was not the pleasant coolness of the front stoop; it was clammy on the skin of his soles. But it was familiar. It was never a shock.
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