Hark! the Herald Angels Scream

by Hark! the Herald Angels Scream (retail) (epub)

  “What kind of question is this? I have my crucifix as you can well see.” She bristled, pulling her squat, strong body as tall as she might. “I am a godly woman, sir. Mr. Pike can assure you of that.”

  “Do you wear any other jewelry about your neck? Under your clothes. Any talismans or keepsakes?” His voice had calmed but there was no hiding the urgency.

  “I don’t see why you should—”

  “She does!” Elsie cut in, sudden and excited, alive in the mischief of it all. “I’ve seen it. When I took sick and stayed for the night. I saw her in her nightdress when she cared for me. They hang round her neck. Two small colored bags.”

  Mrs. Pike’s hand fluttered up to the high collar of her housekeeper’s dress. “I found them in the grounds. I knew they would upset you, so I kept them. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. I didn’t see any harm—”

  “Give them to me.” The hangman’s voice was cold, and Tom shrunk back against the wall slightly as Mrs. Pike glared at him. She turned her back to them while she undid the top of her dress, and then she pulled the cord around her neck free.

  “There.” Her voice was small as she handed them over.

  The hangman stared at the two beautifully embroidered bright silk pockets. “Enmusubi,” he said softly. “We chose them together when we pledged our love. She kept them until we were reunited.”

  “She must have thrown them away,” Mrs. Pike said, her chin high. “When she did what she did. I should have given them to you, I know. But you were so devastated and I thought it best to—”

  “She took them.” Tom’s words were but a whisper, but the weight behind them carried. He stood up and let the heat of the fire burn his knees. Unlike in Crockett’s house, this time he drew strength from the pain. She was in there somewhere, Yuki, and she was relying on him. One good thing. He could cope with his life, whatever might be left of it, if he could do this one good thing. “She took them. After she killed her.”

  Crockett was out of his chair and around the table, as Mrs. Pike gasped. “How dare you say such a thing? How dare you!”

  As punctuation to her words, Crockett slapped Tom so hard around his face that his teeth rattled, but the boy stood his ground, even as the earth spun and he saw the master sweep pulling his arm back for a second assault. A strong hand stopped him.

  “You do not hit a child in my house, Mr. Crockett. Not even a thief. My father would turn in his grave.”

  “He’s a wicked liar,” Mrs. Pike said, clutching a handkerchief to her eyes as her body trembled. “Possessed of the devil.”

  In reply the fire in the hearth suddenly spat and raged, and the candles that lit the room blew out as a gust of icy wind came down through the chimney. In the sudden gloom, Tom saw the crone-like cook, hovering by the pantry, make the sign of the cross against her cowed bosom.

  “She’s in the wood you burn from the tree where she died,” Tom continued. “She’s in the fires.”

  “Not only a liar, but mad,” Crockett growled. “I heartily apologize, Mr. Godwin, sir—”

  “I want to hear him,” the hangman said, as if Crockett did not even exist. “I do not say I believe him, but I want to hear him.” He looked at Tom and nodded. “Speak, boy, if you have something to say.”

  Tom swallowed hard and the room hushed, even Mrs. Pike ceasing to protest, all fascinated in the firelight as to what this chimney boy could possibly know of their secrets.

  “You were right when you said Mrs. Pike loves you and Miss Darkly,” Tom started. “She does. Too much. It’s why she did what she did. She wanted you to get married as you promised. She wanted her family to be happy with no new wife from a strange land coming to make a mockery of you in society. She didn’t go to her sister’s that night, although I’m sure her sister will say she was there if asked. But she was not. I know because Yuki showed me. Mrs. Pike had planned it all long before that final midwinter night.”

  The housekeeper dropped into a seat as if her legs wouldn’t hold her weight any longer and the hangman raised one hand to stop her protests. “For the love of God, boy, do not hesitate, but tell your story.”

  And so Tom did. He put into words what the dead bride had shown him. He told the hangman how his housekeeper had sent a letter, in his name and in a hand identical to his own, to Southampton for when Yuki’s ship landed. There was money too, and the young bride was instructed to buy herself some new dresses of the English fashion and that there were rooms booked for her at an inn, the White Horse, five miles from Thornfields, and she should lodge there until he sent for her when problems at home were resolved. She should not contact him directly but could send a letter to his housekeeper once she was established at the inn. She was alone and in a strange city, but being a loving and devoted wife, she did as the letter told her, presuming that old Mr. Godwin was sick or that there was perhaps some other trouble with the family, and she waited, patiently, until finally a letter came telling her to come to Thornfields, late that night.

  She dressed in her finest kimono, and made herself beautiful for her love, and then she came, lured into Mrs. Pike’s trap. Mr. Godwin was away on business, Mr. Pike to London with letters, and Mrs. Pike had induced a fever in Miss Darkly over the previous few days—her grandmother’s tinctures ever useful—and then gave her a sleeping draft before claiming to go to her sister’s for the night as Miss Darkly insisted she went. The cook had already gone, having left a cold plate out should Miss Darkly want anything, and so it appeared that the young woman was entirely alone in the house—which of course Mr. Godwin would never have allowed, but in his absence Mrs. Pike knew she could get away with it and plead forgiveness later.

  But Mrs. Pike did not leave. She came back, and waited, and when Yuki arrived, she brought the tiny exotic beauty into the kitchen and sat her by the fire with a hot drink to keep out the cold. Yuki had used her time apart from her husband to learn English, and she chattered about their future together and the children they would have and told Mrs. Pike of the two omamori that they’d chosen, blessed to give them protection and the promise of a long and happy life. She took them from around her slim neck to show the older woman, and she was so happy, so excited to soon be reunited with her husband, that she didn’t notice how drowsy she was feeling until she began to slide from her stool, and by then it was too late.

  Mrs. Pike undressed her down to her shift and then lifted her slight body into the wheelbarrow Mr. Pike brought wood to the kitchen in, added her clothing, and then took her out into that midwinter blizzard. She hung her from the branch of that strong, old tree with the silk obi of her kimono the rest of which the housekeeper laid out on the ground to appear as if Yuki had removed it herself.

  She watched as the young woman choked and twisted and her eyes started to pop and her tongue thicken, and when she could not take anymore, she grabbed the slim legs and pulled down hard to snap her neck. She went back inside, allowing the snow to cover her tracks, and stayed hidden until morning, when she claimed to have made the gruesome find.

  She did not know, however, that Miss Darkly, in her drugged fever, had heard the doorbell that night, and come to the top of the stairs and had caught a glimpse of Yuki, and heard her chattering, before deliriously wandering back to bed. When she recovered, and there were accusations against her of doing or saying something to drive Yuki to suicide, she was overwhelmed by guilt and uncertainty. She wished she had thought more kindly of her rival. She was afraid that she was mad like her mother and perhaps she had done something that night. She blamed herself for all of it, and that is why, when the chopped wood from the old tree began to burn in the fires and she saw Yuki’s haunted spirit, she believed she had come for vengeance, rather than to help her see the truth.

  “It is all lies,” Mrs. Pike spat when Tom had finished quietly telling what he’d seen. “What a ridiculous story. How can you possibly consider trusting a thi
ef? A street urchin with no mother and no morals?”

  “I did steal,” Tom said, avoiding the black, threatening look Crockett gave him. “But I am no liar. I have no cause to lie about this, sir. Yuki would never have taken her own life. She loved you. She had faith in you. You should send to the White Horse. They will remember.”

  The hangman, his face full of pain, looked at him long and hard, and then down at the omamori in his hands, and was about to speak when the door burst open and Mr. Pike came in pushing a barrow full of wood from the shed. “The blizzard has come again, sir,” he said, for a moment oblivious to the tension that filled the dark room. “No one is leaving Thornfields tonight.”

  And so it was that poor Tom was locked back up to lie awake all night in the dark on the cold sacks, and Mr. Crockett was given a room above the stables away from the main house, which he knew better than to grumble about, and perhaps, given the tales of ghosts and murder, he was pleased to be somewhere away from the flues and the chimneys the hangman’s bride lurked within.

  The hours passed and Tom sat in the cold with no fire to warm him as the blizzard raged, but he knew that he had done what Yuki wanted. It was as if he could feel it in the very bricks of the house itself. Upstairs, the hangman sat by Miss Darkly’s bed, the two omamori in his hands, lost in his own thoughts and regrets.

  Eventually, Mr. and Mrs. Pike went to bed. Mrs. Pike convinced that Theodore Godwin, who she had raised since he was a boy, loved her dearly and would dismiss any suspicions the chimney urchin could throw on her, especially as she had paid the innkeeper handsomely for his discretion those two years before.

  The long midwinter night passed, and finally, finally, the snow stopped.

  It was Elsie who found her. The poor girl screamed and screamed, and the cook could not calm her for hours, so awful were the contortions of terror on Mrs. Pike’s face. She lay, twisted, on her bedroom floor, as if she’d been trying to flee. The only clue as to what may have caused her fear were small footprints of soot that came from the fireplace. Mr. Pike, however, had slept through it all, and only woke when the poor servant girl’s hysterics served as an alarm bell for the entire house.

  The hangman had fallen asleep in the chair by Miss Darkly’s bed, and when the cries roused him, he found that the two omamori he’d been holding had moved. One now hung around his neck, and the other around that of the sleeping woman he had watched over in the night, Miss Beatrice Darkly, his once love. His anger at her had vanished after the chimney boy’s story, and in its place was something else. A peace. A regret. A need to make things right.

  He released Tom from the cellar, and all three—the boy, Miss Darkly, and the hangman—watched as a weeping Mr. Pike laid his wife out on the bed. None of them spoke. They all, even the housekeeper’s husband, knew that the Onryo had come for her now she had no omamori to protect her. They all knew that in its own way, justice had been done.

  Outside, the sun shone with a beautiful winter brightness and the snow glittered on the lawns and bushes. It was Miss Darkly who saw her first, standing as she was, so close to the window.

  “Look,” she said, breathless. “Come and look.”

  The hangman and the boy joined her and followed her gaze to the stump of the old tree. Yuki stood upon it, her head still hanging forward, hair blocking any sight of her face. Slowly, slowly, her neck straightened, the strands of hair falling back, a gloss shining on them as they did so, and as she looked up, she smiled, radiantly beautiful, before vanishing into the sunlight.

  * * *

  —

  “And what happened after that?” Alexander stared up at his grandfather, his eyes wide, lost in the story. The old man smiled. “What happened to Tom? Did he get sent away on the ships?”

  “Well,” the old man said, leaning forward and smiling cheerily. “The secret pocket in Tom’s trousers had not been the brightest idea of our greedy Mr. Crockett. It was clear to all, that surely Tom—William—hadn’t sewn it there himself, and that the master sweep was the orchestrator of the theft. But he wept and begged forgiveness, and after all the anger and hangings and bleakness that had been his life for the previous two years, Mr. Godwin didn’t have any more punishment left in him. He sent Crockett away, but with a promise that he must treat his boys well and feed and clothe and pay them, and a warning that Godwin would be checking up on him. Which he did, and surprisingly it seemed that being forced to become a better person actually turned Crockett into one. Harry became like a son to him, and eventually took over the business, which had grown quite large by the time Crockett retired. And what of Tom, you ask? Little William found frozen on the streets? Well, he stayed at Thornfields, where Mr. Godwin and Miss Beatrice Darkly became, after a cautious courtship during which they found that old love could blossom again, husband and wife and adopted him as their son. They changed the name of the house to dispel the last shadows of the past, but stayed there, and they lived long and happy lives together.”

  “And what happened to William when he grew up?” Alexander asked, stories of children always far more interesting to children than those of adults.

  “Ah, he went into business too, and was very successful at it. He kept his mother’s name, which the hangman, who did no more hangings after that night, thought was fit and right, and he stayed on land, always still fearful of those monsters of the deep, but he built on the Godwin business, and became very rich.” The old man paused, savoring the last he had to say. “William Charters was his name.”

  The little boy at his feet gasped, momentarily confused. “But, Grandfather, that is your name.”

  “That it is, young Alexander.” He smiled. “And that is how I know there are no ghosts in this house. For I laid them to rest a long time ago.”

  A few minutes later, Mrs. Carmichael, who like a housekeeper had with a charge a long time before, loved young Alexander as if he was her own, came to take the boy to bed, leaving the old man alone with only the crackle of the fire and the falling snow for company.

  Tomorrow, perhaps, he thought as he stared into the flames, he would take the boy out into the garden and show him the old stump, where each midwinter he never failed to go and say a prayer for the woman who died there. Yes, he thought. Perhaps he would.

  He gazed into the flames, lost in his memories for a while, and then, after touching the talisman that sat under his shirt, threw another log onto the merry, roaring fire.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Kelley Armstrong is the New York Times number one bestselling author of the Women of the Otherworld series, the Cainsville series, City of the Lost, Forest of Ruin, and many other bestsellers.

  Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling author of such novels as Snowblind, Tin Men, Of Saints and Shadows, and Dead Ringers. Christopher Golden is also the cocreator, with Mike Mignola, of two cult favorite comic book series—Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. As an editor, his anthologies include The New Dead, Seize the Night, and The Monster’s Corner. As a general rule, he frowns upon editors including their own work in an anthology, but for this project, he’s making an exception. (Once he came up with the idea for a story called “It’s a Wonderful Knife,” he couldn’t help himself.) (He also generally frowns upon people talking about themselves in the third person, but there is a protocol for these sorts of things, after all.)

  The author of fourteen cross-genre novels, Elizabeth Hand has received the World Fantasy Award (four times), the Nebula Award (twice), the Shirley Jackson Award (twice), and the James Tiptree, Jr. and Mythopoeic Society Awards. She is also a longtime critic and essayist for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and The Village Voice, among others. Her latest novel is Hard Light, part of her Cass Neary crime thriller series.

  Michael Koryta is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of such novels as Those Who Wish Me Dead, The Ridge, So Cold the River, and the upcoming
Rise the Dark. He has won or been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Edgar Award, Shamus Award, Barry Award, Quill Award, and International Thriller Writers Award, among others.

  Three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author of such novels as The Missing, The Keeper, and Audrey’s Door, Sarah Langan is also an American Library Association Award winner and is on the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

  Edgar Award–winning novelist and a unique voice in American literature, Joe R. Lansdale is the author of dozens of novels across a variety of genres. His work has been adapted into the films Cold in July and Bubba Ho-Tep, and the recent Sundance TV series Hap and Leonard, with other adaptations on the way.

  Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling author of more than forty novels. Recent books include Relics, The Family Man, The Silence, and the Rage War trilogy of Alien/Predator novels. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award. The movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released Hallowe’en 2015. The Silence, starring Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka, is due for release in 2018. Several other movie projects are in development in the United States and the United Kingdom. Find out more about Tim at his website, www.timlebbon.net.

  Author of The Three and Day Four, Sarah Lotz has quickly become one of Stephen King’s favorite horror writers. A novelist and screenwriter, she lives in London, England.

  The New York Times bestselling author of the Joe Ledger and Rot & Ruin series, Jonathan Maberry is also a five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, a popular comic book writer, and a frequent lecturer at writing and publishing conferences around the world.

  The author of the breakout horror hit Bird Box and Black Mad Wheel, Josh Malerman is also the lead singer and songwriter for the band the High Strung.

  Both under her own name and as Mira Grant, Seanan McGuire is the highly acclaimed author of the Newsflesh series, the October Daye series, and many others. She received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2010, and among her many other honors, she is the only writer ever to appear five times on the same year’s Hugo Awards ballot.