And for a kiss she shows him the place where Lovecraft is buried, the quiet place she comes when she only wants to be alone, no company but her thoughts and the considerate, sleeping bodies underground. The Phillips family obelisk and then his own little headstone; she takes a plastic cigarette lighter from the front pocket of her jeans and holds the flame close to the ground so that Adrian can read the marker: AUGUST 20, 1890–MARCH 15, 1937, “I AM PROVIDENCE,” and she shows him all the offerings that odd pilgrims leave behind. A handful of pencils and one rusty screw, two nickels, a small rubber octopus and a handwritten letter folded neat and weighted with a rock so the wind won’t blow it away. The letter begins Dear Howard, but she doesn’t read any farther, nothing there written for her, and then Adrian tries to kiss her again.
“No, wait. You haven’t seen the tree,” she says, wriggling free of Adrian Mobley’s skinny arms, dragging him roughly away from the obelisk; two steps, three, and they’re both swallowed by the shadow of an enormous, ancient birch, this tree that must have been old when her great grandfather was a boy. Its sprawling branches are still shaggy with autumn-painted leaves, its roots like the scabby knuckles of some sky-bound giant, clutching at the earth for fear that he will fall and tumble forever toward the stars.
“Yeah, so it’s a tree,” Adrian mumbles, not understanding, not even trying to understand, and now she knows that it was a mistake to bring him here.
“People have carved things,” she says, and strikes the lighter again, holds the flickering, orange flame so that Adrian can see all the pocketknife graffiti worked into the smooth, pale bark of the tree. The unpronounceable names of dark, fictitious gods and entire passages from Lovecraft, razor steel for ink to tattoo these occult wounds and lonely messages to a dead man, and she runs an index finger across a scar in the shape of a tentacle-headed fish.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she whispers and that’s when Dead Girl sees the eyes watching them from the lowest limbs of the tree, their shimmering, silver eyes like spiteful coins hanging in the night, strange fruit.
“This shit isn’t the way it happened at all,” Gable says. “These aren’t even your memories. This is just some bitch we killed.”
“Oh, I think she knows that.” The Bailiff laughs and it’s worse than the ghouls snickering for Madam Terpsichore.
“I only wanted him to see the tree,” Dead Girl says. “I wanted to show him something carved into the Lovecraft tree.”
“Liar,” Gable sneers and that makes The Bailiff laugh again. He squats in the dust and fallen leaves and begins to pick something stringy from his teeth.
And she would run, but the river has almost washed the world away, nothing left now but the tree and the moon and the thing that clambers down its trunk on spider-long legs and arms the color of chalk dust.
Is that a Death? And are there two?
“We know you would forget us,” Gable says, “If we ever let you. You would pretend you were an innocent, a victim.” Her dry tongue feels as rough as sandpaper against Dead Girl’s wrist, dead cat’s tongue, and above them the constellations swirl in a mad, kaleidoscope dance about the moon; the tree moans and raises its swaying branches to Heaven, praying for dawn, for light and mercy from everything it’s seen and will ever see again.
Is Death that woman’s mate?
And at the muddy bottom of the Seekonk River, in the lee of the Henderson Bridge, Dead Girl’s eyelids flutter as she stirs uneasily, frightening fish, fighting sleep and her dreams. But the night is still hours away, waiting on the far side of the scalding day, and so she holds Bobby tighter and he sighs and makes a small, lost sound that the river snatches and drags away toward the sea.
Dead Girl sits alone on the floor in the parlor of the house on Benefit Street, alone because Gable has Bobby with her tonight; Dead Girl drinks her Heineken and watches the yellow and aubergine circles that their voices trace in the stagnant, smoky air, and she tries to recall what it was like before she knew the colors of sound.
Miss Josephine raises the carafe and carefully pours tap water over the sugar cube on her slotted spoon; the water and dissolved sugar sink to the bottom of her glass and at once the liqueur begins to louche, the clear and emerald bright mix of alcohol and herbs clouding quickly to a milky, opaque green.
“Oh, of course,” she says to the attentive circle of waxwork ravens. “I remember Mercy Brown, and Nellie Vaughn, too, and that man in Connecticut. What was his name?”
“William Rose,” Signior Garzarek suggests, but Miss Josephine frowns and shakes her head. “No, no. Not Rose. He was that peculiar fellow in Peace Dale, remember? No, the man in Connecticut had a different name.”
“They were maniacs, every one of them,” Addie Goodwine says nervously and sips from her own glass of absinthe. “Cutting the hearts and livers out of corpses and burning them, eating the ashes. It’s ridiculous. It’s even worse than what they do,” and she points confidentially at the floor.
“Of course it is, dear,” Miss Josephine says.
“But the little Vaughn girl, Nellie, I understand she’s still something of a sensation among the local high school crowd,” Signior Garzarek says and smiles, dabs at his wet, red lips with a lace handkerchief. “They do love their ghost stories, you know. They must find the epitaph on her tombstone an endless source of delight.”
“What does it say?” Addie asks and when Miss Josephine turns and stares at her, Addie Goodwine flinches and almost drops her glass.
“You really should get out more often, dear,” Miss Josephine says and “Yes,” Addie stammers. “Yes, I know. I should.”
The waxwork named Nathaniel fumbles with the brim of his black bowler and, “I remember,” he says. “‘I am watching and waiting for you.’ That’s what it says, isn’t it?”
“Delightful, I tell you,” Signior Garzarek chuckles and then he drains his glass and reaches for the absinthe bottle on its silver serving tray.
“What do you see out there?”
The boy that Dead Girl calls Bobby is standing at the window in Miss Josephine’s parlor, standing there with the sash up and snow blowing in, small drift of snow at his bare feet and he turns around when she says his name.
“There was a bear on the street,” he says and puts the glass paperweight in her hands; glass dome filled with water and when she shakes it all the tiny white flakes inside swirl around and around, a miniature blizzard trapped in her palm, plastic snow to settle slow across the frozen field, the barn, the dark and winter-bare line of trees in the distance.
“I saw a bear,” he says again, more insistent than before, and points at the open window.
“You did not see a bear,” Dead Girl says, but she doesn’t look to see for herself, doesn’t take her silver eyes off the paperweight; she’d almost forgotten about the barn, that day and the storm, January or February or March, more years ago than she’d have ever guessed and the wind howling like hungry wolves.
“I did,” Bobby says. “I saw a big black bear dancing in the street. I know a bear when I see one.”
And Dead Girl closes her eyes and lets the globe fall from her fingers, lets it roll from her hand and she knows that when it hits the floor it will shatter into a thousand pieces. World shatter, watersky shatter to bleed Heaven away across the floor, and so there isn’t much time if she’s going to make it all the way to the barn.
“I think it knew our names,” the boy says and he sounds afraid, but when she looks back she can’t see him anymore. Nothing behind her now but the little stone wall to divide this field from the next, the slate and sandstone boulders already half buried by the storm, and the wind pricks her skin with icing needle teeth. The snow spirals down from the leaden clouds and the wind sends it spinning and dancing in dervish crystal curtains.
“We forget for a reason, child,” The Bailiff says, his rust-crimson voice woven tight between the air and every snowflake. “Time is too heavy to carry so much of it strung about our necks.”
“I don’
t hear you,” she lies, and it doesn’t matter anyway, whatever he says, because Dead Girl is already at the barn door; both the doors left standing open and her father will be angry, will be furious if he finds out. The horses could catch cold, he will say to her. The cows, he will say, the cows are already giving sour milk, as it is.
Shut the doors and don’t look inside. Shut the doors and run all the way home.
“It fell from the sky,” he said, the night before. “It fell screaming from a clear, blue sky. No one’s gone looking for it. I don’t think they will.”
“It was only a bird,” her mother said.
“No,” her father said. “It wasn’t a bird.”
Shut the doors and run …
But she doesn’t do either, because that isn’t the way this happened, the way it happens, and the naked thing crouched there in the straw and the blood looks up at her with Gable’s pretty face. Takes its mouth away from the mare’s mangled throat and blood spills out between clenched teeth and runs down its chin.
“The bear was singing our names.”
And then the paperweight hits the floor and bursts in a sudden, merciful spray of glass and water that tears the winter day apart around her. “Wake up,” Miss Josephine says, spits out impatient words that smell like anise and dust, and she shakes Dead Girl again.
“I expect Madam Terpsichore is finishing up downstairs. And the Bailiff will be back soon. You can’t sleep here.”
Dead Girl blinks and squints past Miss Josephine and all the colorful, candy-shaded lamps. And the summer night outside the parlor window, the night that carries her rotten soul beneath its tongue, stares back with eyes as black and secret as the bottom of a river.
In the basement, Madam Terpsichore, lady of rib spreaders and carving knives, has already gone, has crept away down one of the damp and brick-throated tunnels with her snuffling entourage in tow. Their bellies full and all their entrail curiosities sated for another night, and only Barnaby is left behind to tidy up; part of his modest punishment for slicing too deeply through a sclera and ruining a violet eye meant for some graveyard potentate or another, the precious vitreous humor spilled by his hand, and there’s a fresh notch in his left ear where Madam Terpsichore bit him for ruining such a delicacy. Dead Girl is sitting on an old produce crate, watching while he scrubs bile from the stainless steel tabletop.
“I’m not very good with dreams, I’m afraid,” he says to her and wrinkles his wet black nose.
“Or eyes,” Dead Girl says and Barnaby nods his head.
“Or eyes,” he agrees.
“I just thought you might listen, that’s all. It’s not the sort of thing I can tell Gable, and Bobby, well …”
“He’s a sweet child, though,” Barnaby says, and then he frowns and scrubs harder at a stubborn smear the color of scorched chestnuts.
“But I can’t tell anyone else,” Dead Girl says; she sighs and Barnaby dips his pig-bristle brush into a pail of soapy water and goes back to work on the stain.
“I don’t suppose I can do very much damage, if all I do is listen,” and the ghoul smiles a crooked smile for her and touches a claw to the bloody place where Madam Terpsichore nicked the base of his right ear with her sharp incisors.
“Thank you, Barnaby,” she says and draws a thoughtless half-circle on the dirt floor with the scuffed toe of one shoe. “It isn’t a very long dream. It won’t take but a minute,” and what she tells him, then, isn’t the dream of Adrian Mobley and the Lovecraft tree and it isn’t the barn and the blizzard, the white thing waiting for her inside the barn. This is another dream, a moonless night at Swan Point and someone’s built a great, roaring bonfire near the river’s edge. Dead Girl’s watching the flames reflected in the water, the air heavy with wood smoke and the hungry sound of fire; and Bobby and Gable are lying on the rocky beach, laid out neat as an undertaker’s work, their arms at their sides, pennies on their eyes. And they’re both slit open from collarbones to crotch, stem to stern, ragged Y-incisions and their innards glint wetly in the light of the bonfire.
“No, I don’t think it was me,” Dead Girl says, even though it isn’t true, and draws another half-circle on the floor to keep the first one company. Barnaby has stopped scrubbing at the table and is watching her uneasily with his distrustful, scavenger eyes.
“Their hearts are lying there together on a boulder,” and she’s speaking very quietly now, almost whispering as if she’s afraid someone upstairs might be listening, too, and Barnaby perks up his ears and leans toward her. Their hearts on a stone, and their livers, and she burns the organs in a brass bowl until there’s nothing left but a handful of greasy ashes.
“I think I eat them,” Dead Girl says. “But there are blackbirds then, a whole flock of blackbirds, and all I can hear are their wings. Their wings bruise the sky.”
And Barnaby shakes his head, makes a rumbling, anxious sound deep in his throat, and he starts scrubbing at the table again. “I should learn to quit while I’m only a little ways behind,” he snorts. “I should learn what’s none of my goddamn business.”
“Why, Barnaby? What does it mean?” and at first he doesn’t answer her, only grumbles to himself and the pig bristle brush flies back and forth across the surgical table even though there are no stains left to scrub, nothing but a few soap suds and the candlelight reflected in the scratched and dented silver surface.
“The Bailiff would have my balls in a bottle of brine if I told you that,” he says. “Go away. Go back upstairs where you belong and leave me alone. I’m busy.”
“But you do know, don’t you? I heard a story, Barnaby, about another dead girl named Mercy Brown. They burned her heart—”
And the ghoul opens his jaws wide and roars like a caged lion, hurls his brush at Dead Girl, but it sails over her head and smashes into a shelf of Ball mason jars behind her. Broken glass and the sudden stink of vinegar and pickled kidneys, and she runs for the stairs.
“Go pester someone else, corpse,” Barnaby snarls at her back. “Tell your blasphemous dreams to those effete cadavers upstairs. Ask one of those snotty fuckers to cross him,” and then he throws something else, something shiny and sharp that whizzes past her face and sticks in the wall. Dead Girl takes the stairs two at a time, slams the basement door behind her and turns the lock. And if anyone’s heard, if Miss Josephine or Signior Garzarek or anyone else even notices her reckless dash out the front doors and down the steps of the big, old house on Benefit Street, they know better than Barnaby and keep it to themselves.
In the east, there’s the thinnest blue-white sliver of dawn to mark the horizon, the light a pearl would make, and Bobby hands Dead Girl another stone. “That should be enough,” she says and so he sits down in the grass at the edge of the narrow beach to watch as she stuffs this last rock inside the hole where Gable’s heart used to be. Twelve big rocks shoved inside her now, granite-cobble viscera to carry the vampire’s body straight to the bottom of the Seekonk and this time that’s where it will stay. Dead Girl has a fat roll of gray duct tape to seal the wound.
“Will they come after us?” Bobby asks and the question takes her by surprise, not the sort of thing she would ever have expected from him. She stops wrapping Gable’s abdomen with the duct tape and stares silently at him for a moment, but he doesn’t look back at her, keeps his eyes on that distant, jagged rind of daylight.
“They might,” she tells him. “I don’t know for sure. Are you afraid, Bobby?”
“I’ll miss Miss Josephine,” he says. “I’ll miss the way she read us stories,” and Dead Girl nods her head and “Yes,” she says. “Me too. But I’ll always read you stories,” and he smiles when she says that.
When Dead Girl is finally finished, they push Gable’s body out into the water and follow it all the way down, wedge it tight between the roots of the sunken willow tree below Henderson Bridge. And then Bobby nestles close to Dead Girl and in a moment he’s asleep, lost in his own dreams, and she closes her eyes and waits for the world to
turn itself around again.
THE NIGHT STAIR
Angela Slatter
Angela Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award and six Aurealis Awards, and she was the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award. She’s published a number of short story collections (including Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings from Tartarus Press), has a PhD, and occasionally teaches creative writing.
Jo Fletcher Books published her debut novel, Vigil, in 2016, followed by the sequels Corpselight and Restoration.
“Like many of my disposition and vintage I grew up watching Hammer Horror Films,” recalls the author, “and a lot of those were vampire movies, so the imagery of the bloodsucker as a weird dichotomy of upper-class sensitivity and vicious murdering instinct always stayed with me—although, on further consideration, perhaps those two things aren’t natural oppositions.
“Dracula, The Vampire Lovers, Twins of Evil, Countess Dracula, I loved—love—the aesthetic of those movies, the wondrous mix of lush set-dressing, fantastic frocks and frock-coats, and all the gore one could desire! The vampire is the best warning to us that the dead envy the living.
“It might seem strange then that I didn’t actually read Stoker’s Dracula until I was fourteen, nor ‘Carmilla’ until about twenty. I remember both giving me nightmares, but that not being enough to turn me away. Over the years I have read a lot of vampire lit, and my favorites include Kim Newman’s magnificent Anno Dracula series and Barbara Hambly’s James Asher series; what I think I love most about those two bodies of work is that the vampires aren’t simply mindless creatures. They live longer than anyone, some suffer for it, some revel in their immortality, but none of them remain untouched by the drawbacks of existing so long, and it’s up for debate as to whether or not the likes of Geneviève Dieudonné or Don Simon Ysidro are lacking in souls.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 64