One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries
Page 5
In the pantry, there is dried nettle and yarrow to staunch the flow.
Her feet are leaden on the stairs.
She doesn’t give M’Amie a second thought until she reaches the kitchen. Sees the carmine trail dragging from the fireplace to the closed pantry door. It takes all her strength to push it open. To step aside and let a sliver of morning light splash across the girl’s shivering, huddled form. Her twisted, desperate face. The bloat in her nightdress. The blood.
Little bitch, she thinks again, but half-heartedly. Little bitch, little bitch, that baby should’ve been mine.
Might be it still can…
Cora grabs the herbs she needs, enough for herself and for the ailing maid. “Come. Now,” she says. She’ll make a quick poultice for each of them, jam it between M’Amie’s legs herself if she has to — the girl can’t lose the baby. A tisane, too, to slow things down, to keep the child within. The baby must be saved. Her grip on M’Amie’s arm — her young, plump arm — is harder than it needs to be. The maid squirms, but Cora’s hold tightens.
“Get up,” she says, adding a boot to her command. “We’re going back.”
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When tipped, the jars’ contents glide into the tub, graceful and playful as otters. The cunning woman stirs once or twice with a long wooden spoon, then abandons it in favour of flesh upon flesh. Water froths with the flickering slickering of overfed leeches. Brona’s lips twitch with a twickering smile. Once they’ve all latched, round mouths to round tracings, she hooks them in place with careful, precise whispers. Fixes them to Cavan’s skin.
Her fingers, though soak-shrivelled and thick at the knuckles, are nimble. Submerged in the tub, they squeeze and stroke. Careful of the wyrms’ tender flesh, so delicate when engorged. They frisk gently, rubbing and tugging. Quick, confident motions. Ones she’s practised many times before, when accepting and returning favours. Giving and taking comforts. She milks the leeches, resisting the urge to clench, to rush. Rushing doesn’t return any favours. Rushing takes more than it gives. Time. Effort. Joys. Boys.
Her fingers work and work, massaging. Coaxing spurts of her son’s soul from wriggling fat bodies, grey-white gouts of the spirit the leeches have feasted on in the Grumnamagh all these years. She lifts a flaccid thigh from the preserving fluids, pinning a leech with her thumb. Has the boyish hide stretched? Has her son grown while she wasn’t looking? Cavan, dear hollow one, always in such a hurry. Always rushing.
She strokes and strokes and strokes.
He’s filling out, she thinks, the slurry in her veins slurping and sloshing through a heart that hasn’t beat so quickly since the child rushed his life short. Barely three, and he hadn’t quite learned to run, hadn’t toughened his muscles. But he could plod, stomp, hurry from place to place. He could sneak though the smallest gaps: in the cottage’s siding, the sapling briars, blades of grass on the soggy shores. Cavan hadn’t been a runner, not quite, but he’d sure had a stride on him. An inexorable, unforgettable stride.
One small step into the Grum and Cavan’s foot caught on a dented brass arm-ring. Or a sword bowed by time. A thief’s crooked ribcage. Brona had imagined it thousands of times. She could picture it perfectly. The twist of her son’s ankle, shackled to muck. Nightjars taking up his screech, sending it back, beak-shrill. Surprise turned panic, just for a second, before his precious face was swallowed. Gone beneath the surface with the other treasures and bones, gone gone until Brona had woken from her untimely doze. Until she’d splashed and scooped and sobbed and searched, having slept just a minute — just a few minutes — drowsing in the afternoon heat… Until she’d liberated his limp shell from the drowning-shallows.
Until now, at last, when she’d harvested every last skerrick of his soul from the wet.
It’s working.
Soon there is meat to him, not just wrinkled skin, not just leather. Finally. Certain of it now, her hands are a blur. Finally, it’s working.
Another moment and Cavan’s torso begins to lift on its own. His limbs flail, contorting into grotesque positions. Brona slips her hands under his legs, feels sinew and cord. Not toddler’s legs, pudgy even as they stretched into boyhood. The knees, once pink and dimpled, are wizened and black, bending backwards like a nag’s. They press into her palms, sharp and knobbly. Covered in a pelt of slimy hair.
Not to worry, she tells herself, a bit too quickly. It’s just a bit of sludge, a bit of soul-scum. We’ll scrub you up nicely, my boy, once the spirit’s settled. Not to worry.
Webbing gums the spaces between Cavan’s fingers and toes. Now his cheeks and chin lengthen, equine. Once-bright irises are muddied; orbs of gold and rust bulge from the sockets, wide-set and rolling with a wild horse’s glare.
The thing whinnies, shakes its weedy mane, claps its scaled hands against the walls. Splat splat splat, erasing the five-fingered prints with its own. The leeches, spent, fall off the swollen skin. Splat splat splat into the filthy water, too exhausted to flee as the púca flips onto its belly and plunges face-first into the tub.
Púca.
Brona doesn’t gasp — she doesn’t believe it. Will not.
She grabs a cake of lye and lard, and starts to grind it across her son’s spine, shoulder blades, ribs. We’ll scrub you up nicely… Not to worry… But Cavan’s ears point and droop. Bristles sprout from his neck and spike all the way down to his long-tailed rump. And the smell — oh, the smell! — sweat and rot and meat. Mouthfuls at a time, he crunches and slurps and snorts all the leeches until the bath is depleted. There are none left to restore him, none to rescue. Left too long in the Grum, the boy’s spirit has diluted, decayed, mingled with unsavoury wights. Mischief-makers with a mind to drown their riders, not carry them safely across bog and fens. Letting loose a loud burp, the beast rolls over and smiles. His teeth are wood-tinged and covered in moss.
Not púca, Brona thinks, unable to deny what’s in front of her. Kelpie. Look how he runs—
And it is this speed — as he leaps out of the tub, past hazelrood wickers and cunning woman alike, and skitters across the cottage — this unnatural pace, that convinces Brona the creature is not her boy. Her Cavan scuttled, meandered, waddled. He did not rear or gallop.
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The cottage door opens.
“Close it! Close it!” Brona cries, hobbling, a small-stepper, just like her son. “Stupid girls,” she says, startling Cora and M’Amie. The fury in her voice overwhelms their own ire, cuts it down and makes it stillborn. “He’s getting out! He’s taken my son!”
The women stare at the creature hurtling towards them. Black fairytale incarnate, legend made flesh, nightmare given form. Their concerns, their aches and agonies give way to self-preservation; despite Brona’s exhortations they scamper out of the thing’s way. The cunning woman’s scream is something to hear. Fast and shrill, it doesn’t waste its time in the shanty’s cramped space, but shoots through the narrow door, almost as quick as the kelpie with his jumping, kicking gait.
Brona can guess why the women have returned so soon. In her haste, she was careless. Inattentive in distraction. She’d given them the wrong herbs. Too few or too many ribbons. Perhaps she’d spoken the words for another bewitching. Her fingers on the clay were sluggish, too slow to quicken the manikins. She had not repaid the girls’ favour with her own.
Even so, Brona is cunning. These dull maids are helpless without her, she knows — just as she is without them. Even so, even so. She hasn’t yet got what she wants, what she needs. But neither have they.
“Catch it! Catch him! Or you’ll have no remedy from me, though you beg until the last sunset!”
The women scurry as quickly as they can, both with bellies aching and hearts dimmed. Their feet, driven by misery, fear, despair, thud the packed earth, chasing after the kelpie. The fae colt lets loose shattering cries, mocking laughter as it teases, now trotting, now cantering, now slowing almost to a walk. Giving the women a chance to catch up. Making them belie
ve they’ve a hope of grabbing his long tail, pulling him to a halt.
Brona shuffles along behind, still some distance away, her feet aching, aching, aching. She can only see what happens from afar; her shouts make no difference. Even so, even so. She screeches her son’s name. Sees his fall recreated, just as she’s imagined so many times.
One small misstep.
His hoof catches on a dented brass arm-ring. Or a sword bowed by time. A thief’s crooked ribcage. It doesn’t matter, she realises. There was nothing she could do. Nothing she can do. He is caught, well and truly. He flails and topples, with M’Amie and Cora close behind.
M’Amie leaps clumsily after the creature, tries to balance her new-found weight, fails. She lands on top of him, begins to tip, to tumble. Cora, anxious as a mother hen, follows in M’Amie’s wake, close enough to touch. To wrangle. Her attack is more confident, her aim more precise. She reaches past the snorting, struggling kelpie. Scoops her arms around the pregnant girl, and keeps her from falling.
Dragging Cora with her, M’Amie wraps her hands — her strong, red-skinned, scullery maid’s hands — around the kelpie’s throat and begins to squeeze. The creature thrashes, its hooves catching at her shins and ankles. Still, M’Amie squeezes. Frail bones give way beneath her fingers. Tighter, and its cries diminish, muffle, mewl. Its scrunched face, purple and white, covered in mucus. Shrivelled as an old man’s.
M’Amie squeezes and squeezes and squeezes until the last gasp soughs from the kelpie’s mouth, until the rough hairy body goes limp at last, until its substance melts away, and M’Amie is left with nothing more than a brown, desiccated skin sack that once held a boy.
Even then, her grip does not loosen — nor does Cora’s, who has encircled the girl’s broad waist, holding her up, arms cradling the distended belly. Protective and protecting.
Brona puffs up to them, cheeks wan and wet. She takes in the depleted skin. The women’s depleted expressions. Splashing, scooping, sniffling, she slouches beneath the weight of all she has done. All she still needs to do.
Her feet throb, soles shredding again and again, but she refuses the crutch of the women’s arms. Instead, she takes the leather draped across them. Strokes it, folds it, cradles it in the crook of her elbow.
“That’s good blood you’re wasting there,” she says, gesturing at the spill on Cora’s skirts, the seep on M’Amie’s arse. “We’ll need that to fix this mess. We’ll need as much as we can get.”
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Indigo Gold by Deborah Biancotti
“Don’t you hate that, Kaneko?”
He said it like they were in the middle of a conversation.
Ai Kaneko looked up from her desk. Looked up, squinted, took off her glasses, and leaned back so she could see him better. Merv was wide, but also tall. He had the bulk of a man who really shouldn’t loom over desks blocking out the dawn.
“I’m suppose to say, ‘hate what, exactly, Merv’, aren’t I?” Kaneko asked. She tried and failed to keep the frustration out of her voice.
“It’s good you’re playing along,” Merv replied. “Keep it up. Let’s pretend I’m the boss around here for a while.”
He dropped a scrap of paper on her desk. Literally a scrap, since it was torn from the bottom of a broadsheet. It was the story of a car-jacking in the southern suburbs. He’d made a note in thick blue marker over the top of it.
Merv really was the boss, so she had to pick it up and try to decode what he’d written.
“Something, something,” she muttered, “and then another something, and a phone number.”
“Oh, yeah, coming back to our earlier conversation. This is what you’re meant to hate,” Merv said. “When crackpots call taking credit for crimes that’ve already been solved.”
“That’s what this is?”
Merv shrugged. “It’s something.”
“You want me to ring up and ask what kind of crackpot they are?” Kaneko offered.
“I want you to call up, get an address, and go meet her.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s got one hell of a story. And you know what stories do?” Merv asked.
Kaneko didn’t bother to suppress her sigh. “They sell papers, Merv.”
“Right. Go make a story, Kaneko.”
She got to her feet. “And if there’s nothing there to report?”
“I said make the story, Kaneko, not find the story. Be a journalist.”
She waited too long to come up with a witty response. By the time she opened her mouth, Merv was checking his pockets.
“Wait, here’s another one,” he said.
“Another what?” Something sour-tasting lodged in the back of her mouth.
“Another guy claiming to have some kind of special, super-duper power.” He found the scrap of paper and was holding it at arm’s length. “Says he can find numbers. Whatever that means.”
“Find them? What, even the imaginary ones?”
Merv didn’t take the bait. “You tell me, it’s your story.”
He dropped the scrap of paper on the desk in front of her. It had been folded and refolded, the burr of the edges eating away at the numbers marked in heavy pen.
“Kaneko, story-maker, Kaneko, lone journo-warrior,” he said.
“Is that racist, Merv?” she asked. “I think that’s racist.”
Merv took a step backwards. Kaneko liked when he did that. She resumed her seat and leaned back, staring up at him.
“Why are you filling up my time with these fakers?” she asked.
“Fakers?” Merv looked hurt, and the hurt looked almost genuine. “You see this second number here?”
He pointed to the folded scrap of paper on the desk.
“Yeah?” she said.
He leaned in and whispered loud enough to be heard two desks away, “You should ask them about fakers.”
Kaneko returned his dramatic whisper with one of her own. “Who is this ‘they’, Merv?”
“The cops. Turns out, there’s a taskforce.”
“Wait, they’ve set up a taskforce? You sure about that?”
“And abracadabra!” Merv straightened. “I knew we’d make our story in the end.”
Kaneko hesitated. “Great.”
She surprised herself by meaning it.
Merv said, “Be careful with the numbers guy. Sounds like a real nut.”
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She dialled the second number first. It was answered on the first ring. That could be a good sign or a bad one. It meant someone who was keen to talk, or someone who was keen to get the talking done so they could hang up the phone.
A deep woman’s voice answered. “Detective Palmer here.”
“Detective Palmer? Of the … special powers taskforce?”
Kaneko held her breath. Palmer might’ve been doing that also.
“Depends,” Palmer said a moment later. “Who’s calling?”
“My name is Ai Kaneko—”
“What’s your interest, Ai?”
Nothing for it. “I’m calling from City Tribune—”
The line went dead. Just like that, like Palmer had been holding her thumb over the phone cradle the whole time.
Kaneko pulled the phone from her ear. Great. One of those stories where she got to chase her own tail. She loved those.
She called the ‘numbers’ guy and listened to his voicemail message. His voice was smooth and old. He could have been a radio announcer, back when having a good voice meant something to the trade. She left her number and a message that she was calling about a report he’d made to the City Tribune. Then she headed for the door.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
“Got a drink, love?”
The alley smelled of piss and muck. In the middle of it — sprawled indifferently, like he was lounging on a sofa — was a man, dirty from his matted hair to his bare feet. His toenails were long and yellow and his beard was so full of grit it stood out straight across his chest like a bib.
It was dark in the alley; even the pavement was dark, a giant oil spill of a spot, filled with the mess of a life lived in the open. In contrast, the quiet, suburban street two metres away looked to be lit by Klieg lights.
Kaneko wrote Klieg lights in her Moleskin.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Who’s asking?”
“I’m Ai Kaneko,” she said. “I’m a journalist for the City Tribune.”
“You’re what?”
“You can call me Annie,” Kaneko said. “And you are?”
“I’m the King around here.”
Kaneko breathed shallowly, not wanting to take in the smell of the place. Already it was in her clothes and coating her skin like an oil bath.
“Well, that’s great,” Kaneko said.
“Isn’t it, though?” The man grinned.
Impossible to judge his age. His face was unlined but his hair was grey. Kaneko put him somewhere between forty and sixty. Maybe seventy; his eyes were rimed with some kind of gummy glaze. He wasn’t who she had come to see, he just happened to be in this miserable alley when she moved through it for a better view of the apartment block.
She wrote the stink of human detritus, the age-old smell of waste and loss in a city too long grown used to it. Her writing was uneven, more a scrawl than actual words. It didn’t matter. One prompt by a pen mark on a page and the smell would come flooding back.
The apartment block was old and plain, four storeys high and about a dozen metres wide. Not wide enough, Kaneko would’ve thought, for the sixteen letterboxes lined up on the front wall. It looked like it had been dropped there, a forgotten building that was all red brick and corners, windows added as an afterthought. Like a coffin standing on its end, she thought. Like a place people came when they didn’t care about living anymore.
She wrote coffin on the page.