Flo came downstairs and washed her hands so she could help Jessie. “Where’s Tanner?”
Jessie kept her hands and eyes on the dough she was kneading, “Tanner mopping the front down with saltwater. How’s Newt? Sleep yet?”
“Newt’s fine. I rubbed him all over with rum and laid him on his side until his nose stops bleeding.”
“What nose-bleeding you talking about, Miss Flora?” Tanner asked, coming into the kitchen for more water. “Newt ain’t been having nosebleeds.”
“I thought it might be peculiar but then I figured he was having a tough time getting back from the other side. No fever, no sweats, but his nose is bleeding.”
“Out the nose, hunh?”
“Where else you bleed from, Tanner? Yes, out his nose.”
“Let’s all go check him. Jessie wash your hands good and grab the salt.”
Jessie and Flo turned to Tanner with widened eyes but nothing to say. Flo retraced the morning in her head: the four of them up early, deciding to send Newt down the road, feeling happy, Newt laid out in the couch grass, Tanner gone to get him, Tanner’s cane tip covered in dust, Newt’s skinny feet, Newt in the bathtub cradled in her arm the way she used to nurse him. His heartbeat returned, shallow. Nothing was different about the boy except the blood coming from his nose. And who doesn’t bleed a little coming back to life?
Tanner wiped her brow with the back of her hand and wiped the sweat from it on her pant leg. “I used to know a boy whose nose bled all the time. Boy was bumped up and bruised up all over his body. Lost a tooth and bled for two gotdamn weeks. Couldn’t go to school, couldn’t go out to play. Those kids with it bad like that don’t live past eleven, twelve.”
“With what, Tanner?” Jessie asked.
“Doctors called it hemophilia. I known it to be called bleeding. Just bleeding.”
“Bleeding? I never heard of no children bleeding, Tanner, where you get this mess from?” Jessie demanded.
Miss Flora interrupted Jessie’s question, her arms folded. “But what happened to the boy? What happened to the little boy you knew?”
“He died, Miss Flora, he died and every time he died, his mama brought him right back.” Tanner didn’t wait for her women to piece the puzzle of it together. “Glenn was Maud’s favorite boy. And her last.”
Jessie grabbed onto Tanner and Flo just stared. “You trying to tell me there’s a haint in my boy, Tanner? You trying to tell me the boy upstairs ain’t my own? Like I didn’t spend the last half hour washing his ass, you going to tell me that ain’t Newt up there?”
“Miss Flora, I’m not saying you wrong, I’m saying we should go check. Can we go check on the boy?”
“You want to go check on my boy with salt in your hands? That’s what you want to do?”
“I’m afraid so, Miss Flora.”
“Jess, you hear this woman? This woman climb in your bed and mines the same and now she talking about killing my son.”
“I ain’t talking about killing, Flo, I said let’s check him.”
“Checking sounding a lot like killing. Ain’t nobody killing my child but me. You got that? Only shot’ll be fired is mine.”
Tanner opened Newt’s bedroom door and found the boy sitting up in bed putting on his shoes, trickles of blood hanging from his nostrils. Jessie and Flo flanked Tanner’s sides, Jessie with a fistful of salt, Flo carrying a musket.
“Glenn, you got to leave this place,” Tanner said. The boy did not look up from lacing his shoes. “I said Glenn you got to leave this place now.”
The boy looked at the trio, stood and walked toward them. “That’s exactly what I intend to do, Uncle Tanner. I’m going to bring this body back to Maud like she told me.”
“What you say, haint?” Flora screamed at the boy, aiming the gun off-center.
Newt began to laugh. “So it is in life, so it is in death. Heard something you didn’t like, woman? I can’t call her Uncle Tanner no more? You didn’t like that?” The boy put one hand on his hip and continued, “Maud found a way to settle this here debt of Tanner’s. Nine sons for one. Nine boys for one boy. That’s the new math. All my brothers and me for Newt.”
Miss Flora let off a shot over the child’s shoulder. “You ain’t leaving here with my boy, haint.”
“I don’t think you got much of a choice, Flora, seeing as though your boy is dead. He died out there in the couch grass this morning. I’m just wearing him. He died a natural death. Tanner is a fan of that, those natural deaths. Your boy gone on, girl. You and your friend sent his soul off mighty right this morning. He dancing right now with the little colored niggers on the colored side of heaven. How you like that?”
The man-boy passed between Jessie and Tanner. Neither of them moved to stop him. The man-boy called out over his shoulder as he marched down the steps, “Your debt is clear. Nine sons and one son paid in full.” Then he twisted the door handle, walked off the porch, made it past the quarter of a mile mark where Newt had dropped dead that very morning and kept on going.
Miss Flora remained laid out on the floor like a pile of dirty clothes. Tanner sat on Newt’s bed. Jessie went downstairs first, salt in fist. The sun was high. She closed the front door hard, turned the VACANCY sign on and stood at the lobby desk, waiting.
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
–
Bus Fare
SHE KNOWS THERE was a town here once, because the deserted streets are lined with deserted, boarded-up buildings. The roofs of some have sagged and collapsed in on themselves, and one has burned almost to the ground. If there was a town here once, there must have been people, too. So, she thinks, maybe only their ghosts live here now. She’s seen plenty of ghosts, and they usually prefer places living people have forsaken. These are the things the albino girl named Dancy Flammarion is thinking, these things and a few more, while the black-haired, olive-skinned girl talks. The girl is sitting on the wooden bench with Dancy. She’s barefoot, and her clothes are threadbare. She might be fourteen, and she could pass for Dancy’s shadow. Dancy glances from her duffel bag to the faded bus sign, but she doesn’t look into the talking girl’s eyes. She doesn’t like what she’s seen there.
“Are you sure the bus still stops here?” she asks, interrupting the girl, who said her name was Maisie. Maybe, Dancy thinks, people named Maisie look different in South Carolina than they do in Florida and Georgia, because the girl doesn’t look much like a Maisie.
“Last anyone bothered telling me,” the girl replies. She doesn’t have any luggage, not even a duffel bag, and Dancy is pretty sure she isn’t waiting on a bus that may or may not come. “I still don’t understand why you gave up a perfectly good ride and decided to Hound it instead.”
“Hound it?” Dancy asks, and the girl who might be named Maisie jabs a thumb at the faded Greyhound sign. The thumbnail, like all her other fingernails, is thick and chocolate colored.
“The sun was setting,” she says. “That’s why I didn’t stay in the car. The dead boy and girl in the trunk were waking up, and the Bailiff said they’d be hungry, and how it would be best if I walked a while.”
“The Bailiff,” Maisie says and smiles. “Yeah, I heard of him. Man ain’t got no right name, you know.” And then she stares silently at Dancy for a while. Dancy watches the empty streets of the empty town. She sees a huge black dog cross the street.
“You sure seem to know an awful lot of things,” Dancy says to the girl.
“That I do,” Maisie admits. “That I do. You’re getting a reputation, Dancy.”
That’s what the monster in Waycross told her, and the crazy women in the big house in Savannah, and the Bailiff, he seemed to know, too.
“You’re like Joan of Arc, right?” the girl asks.
“No,” Dancy tells her. “I’m not like Joan of Arc.”
“How’s that?” Maisie wants to know. “You got yourself an angel who tells you where to find the monsters, and then you kill them. You’re just a crazy girl doing the righteous work of the Lor
d. Sounds like Joan of Arc to me.”
“I’m not like Joan of Arc,” Dancy says again. “And I’m not crazy.”
“Have it your way,” Maisie sighs and lights a cigarette. She offers one to Dancy, but Dancy’s never smoked a cigarette in her life, and she doesn’t mean to start tonight. “How old are you, anyway? Fifteen?”
“Sixteen,” Dancy tells her. “Seventeen soon now.”
“You ain’t got no folks?”
“Not anymore.”
Of course, Dancy suspects Maisie already knows the answers to all the questions she’s asking, and this is just going through the motions. She knew about Bainbridge, and the old man with the caged panther, the cat who was really a woman, and Maisie knew about the Bailiff and the vampire children, the monster in Waycross who wore other people’s skin because it didn’t have one of its own. She knew about the nine women in Savannah who were cannibals and dug up corpses and …did other things she’d rather not wonder about. She knew how many of them Dancy’s killed. So, she knows all that, surely she knows how old Dancy is, and that her mother and grandmother are both dead.
Dancy sits back down on the wooden bench near the Greyhound sign, trying not to dwell on how thirsty she is, or whether or not a bus will ever show up, or what it means that the girl calling herself Maisie knows so much. The night is almost as hot as the day was, though at least there’s no sun. No sun, so she doesn’t need the raggedy black umbrella leaning against the bench. The air smells like cooling asphalt, kudzu, and pine trees. And it also smells like dog, which is the way that Maisie smells.
“Why do you smell like dog?” Dancy asks, gazing at the street, trying to catch another glimpse of the big black mutt she spotted a few minutes before.
“That’s not a very polite thing to ask a stranger,” Maisie says, pretending to be offended.
“The way you keep asking me questions, didn’t think you’d much mind. You ask a lot of questions.”
“And you don’t smell so sweet your own self, Dancy Flammarion.”
It rained a few days ago, and that’s the closest Dancy’s come to a bath since the night she stripped down and bathed in a muddy stream. And that bath, it was before the Bailiff and the dead children found her hitchhiking along Route 76, but she’s having trouble recalling exactly how many days have passed since then.
“It’s just sweat,” Dancy says. “Just dirt and sweat. I don’t smell like a dog.” There’s an old Coke machine outside an abandoned gas station across the road, and she wishes the gas station weren’t abandoned and she had change for a cold drink.
Maisie sighs, very loudly, and she asks, “So, you just wanna cut to the chase, then? Stop dancing round the truth of the matter?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” Dancy tells the girl for the second time. And finally, she makes herself turn and look directly at the dark-haired girl. In the moonlight, the girl’s eyes glint iridescent red, like the eyeshine of alligators and possums.
“The night’s young,” the girl tells her. “And I like some sport before dinner. Didn’t think you’d mind all that much. Didn’t think you’d care one way or the other.” The girl who says her name is Maisie smiles and shows off a lot more teeth than she ought to have. Maisie takes a last draw off her cigarette and flicks it away.
“I ain’t scared of you,” Dancy says, trying hard to sound like she means it. She looks at the duffel bag, but tries not to look like she’s looking. The handle of the big carving knife is sticking out of the bag. Maisie, she’s one of the one’s the seraphim didn’t bother to tell her was coming. That happens sometimes.
“Hardly thought you would be, not after all you done and seen, little Miss Joan of Arc cutting a swath across the countryside, laying all the bad folk low. Figure you ain’t smart enough to be scared of nothing.”
“Someone sent you?” Dancy wants to know. “The women in Savannah, did they send you after me?”
“No one sent me. We got curious, when we heard you’d be passing our way. Then this bitch made a bet. I drew the short straw, that’s all.”
“Sometimes I don’t know they’re coming.” Dancy says it out loud, though she hadn’t meant to, had only meant to think those words to herself.
“Well, that makes it a tiny bit more fair, don’t you think, not getting the drop on people.”
“You ain’t people. I don’t kill people.”
“Strictly speaking, Snow White, that’s not exactly factual. Not Gospel truth, I mean.”
Dancy gives up on the duffel bag, because there’s no way she’d
ever have time to reach it and get hold of the knife before the olive-skinned girl who smells like a dog will be on her. She turns back to Maisie.
“You ain’t the first ever called me that, you know. Snow White, I mean.”
“I expect not. That mop of cornsilk hair, those pink rabbity eyes, that skin like you been playing in the flour bin. Figure you hear it a lot.”
“Ain’t never met one quite like you before,” Dancy says, which isn’t true, but she’s stalling for time. If she has another minute or two, maybe she can think of a way to reach her knife or some other way to stop Maisie from eating her. “I never really believed in werewolves. Didn’t know they were real.”
Maisie furrows her brow and leans a little nearer Dancy. Her breath stinks of raw meat. “You’re kidding me. You hitch rides with vampires, but you don’t believe in werewolves?”
“Oh, now I do,” Dancy says. “Sure. Just not before.”
A warm wind stirs the underbrush at the edge of the road and the beard of Spanish moss in a nearby stand of live oaks. Dancy smells herself sweating—fresh sweat, not stale—and Maisie wrinkles her nose and flares her wide nostrils (which didn’t seem quite so wide only a few seconds before).
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Maisie says, and she produces something from …well, Dancy isn’t sure where she was hiding it, but now there’s an old cardboard cigar box in the girl’s hand.
“That’s mine,” Dancy tells her. “I lost it—”
“—when you murdered them poor folks down in Waycross.”
“Weren’t folks, neither of them.”
“Kinda depends on your point of view,” says the olive-skinned girl who claims her name is Maisie.
“Well, it’s mine. So you should give it back.”
“I should?” the girl asks, and looks inside. “Mostly just a bunch of junk,” she says.
And maybe it looks that way to her, or to anyone who isn’t Dancy. In her head, Dancy counts off the contents of the cigar box, all that’s left of her life before all that was left to her was the road and her knife, the seraphim and the parade of horrors it expects her to kill. She glances over her shoulder, and she’s not at all surprised to find the angel looming behind the bench, looking over her and Maisie. The seraphim’s tattered muslin and silk robes are even blacker than the night, than the dark inside the deserted shop fronts. They flutter and flap in a fierce and holy wind that touches nothing else. The angel’s four ebony wings are spread wide, and it holds a burning sword high above its four shimmering kaleidoscope faces, both skeletal hands gripped tightly around the weapon’s silver hilt. It stares down at her, and makes a sound like thunder that surely isn’t thunder.
Just this once, she thinks, while Maisie paws through the cigar box. Just this once, you could do the deed your own self. Seems like I earned that much.
The angel doesn’t answer her, but Dancy knows its moods well enough to know it’s not about to intercede. Those aren’t the rules, and it never breaks the rules. She looks at Maisie again, who’s taking stuff out of the box and lining it up on the bench between them. So far, there are two plastic checkers (one black, one red), a tiny, battered copy of the New Testament that had been her mother’s, and her grandmother’s rosary, a spent shot gun shell she found at the edge of the road, two buttons, a green crayon, and a little statue of the Virgin Mary.
“It’s mine, and you should give it back,” she says to Maisie.
<
br /> “You know better. Ain’t nothing ever that easy.” Maisie takes out a Patsy Cline cassette and a rubber band, then lines them up with all the rest.
“Maybe I could win it back,” Dancy suggests, not taking her eyes off all the meager treasures she’d never hoped to see again. “Maybe we could have some sort of contest, and if I win, you gotta give it back.”
Maisie looks up from the box. Her red eyes glimmer, and Dancy sees that her eyebrows meet in the middle, though they hadn’t before. Maisie is holding a matchbox between those dark nails that have become claws. Inside the matchbox is thirty-five cents in pennies, dimes, and nickels that Dancy found along the highways.
“What do you have in mind? And what’s in it for me? I had in mind I’d just eat you and be done with it. Why go complicating the situation?”
“Thought you wanted some sport?”
Maisie stars at her, and Dancy wonders how her eyes can have eyeshine, when there’s no light shining on them. There’s the moon, she thinks, then pushes the thought away.
“What you got in mind,” the girl asks her.
“You any good at riddles?”
The girl, who is very slowly becoming not so much a girl, but something else, replies, “Not too shabby. Is that what you propose, a riddle game?”
“Yeah, and if I win, I get my box back, and you let me go. You win, I won’t put up a struggle.”
The girl thing scratches at her chin and seems to consider the offer. “Just three riddles,” she says, “so there can’t be no tie.”
“Fine, just three riddles.”
“And I go first.”
“Fine, you go first.”
“But how do I know you ain’t gonna up and renege if you lose?”
“Everything you heard about me, ever heard of me telling lies?” Dancy asks.
“No, but still and all. I’d like some insurance.”
Dancy Flammarion glances at the angel again, and it stares back at her with all its eight eyes. Maybe you’re gonna help after all, she thinks directly at it. “Yeah, okay,” she says to the werewolf. “I swear on the name of my angel I won’t go back on my word.”
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Page 13