by Laird Hunt
“It was our bargain.”
“Tell her!”
Instead of telling me, he brought bow and violin down to his lap and began to sing. His voice started small then grew grand. It was like a giant from one of my old grandmother’s stories had entered the room. As his voice flooded the tunnels of my ears and flooded the room and went through the plaster of the ceiling and the plank of the floor, Captain Jane pointed at the pocket of my dress, then mimed that she would borrow a moment what was there. As soon as he started singing my thoughts had scuttled away from veal calves and pigs and back to his face and his voice and his violin and on to the memories of warmth and the soft bed he had promised me, so it was distractedly that I pulled it from my pocket and distractedly that I put it in her hand. Captain Jane beamed, tossed the egg-shaped thing up into the air, and caught it when it came down. She waited a moment until the singer’s mouth was open wide, then winked and shoved what she held into the hole.
At once the man’s singing stopped. He tried to speak, then seemed to choke. His face went dark, then pale. He gave a great gasp, then sucked hard at the air. Then he began to scream. And such a scream! It was louder than the song he had been singing. It was deeper than the well in which I had swum. It was wilder than the rushing of the wind and the swarming and howling I had heard in the woods. Captain Jane laughed when I stepped back and put my hands over my ears and again when I quickly took them off for they did nothing to dim the ever-rising sound.
“What have you given him? What did I give you?”
“You gave me a scream. One grown special in dark water, fed by word, dusted by night.”
“A scream?”
“I am letting him warm it for us and show its worth. Let’s see how very loud and lovely we can make him, shall we?”
Captain Jane reached down and pulled a piece of crumpled paper off the floor. She smoothed it, studied it carefully, then threw it aside and winked at me. “One is you,” she said. She crooked her arms and snapped the fingers of both her hands. Immediately the handsome singer’s scream leaped higher and sharper. “Two is me!” she cried and cocked her hip and slapped her leg and the scream became as rich as a cake brought away from the oven just before it begins to burn. “Three is her,” she hissed and rolled her head slowly around and around and the scream became thin as gruel and weaker still when she started to stalk around him and leaned in at intervals to puff on his face and head.
“Did you know I used to play? I don’t think I’ve told you that,” she said to me as the quiet screaming continued. “Not half as well as this sweet marvel, but yes, oh yes, I did.”
“Play?” I whispered.
“Anything I could put my hands on!” She stopped her circling and reached out and plucked at each of the violin’s strings. Then she cupped the singer’s chin with her fingers and brought her face close to his. “Four is she,” she whispered and jerked at his face and the scream burst back loud. “Four is she!” she roared and jerked his face again and the scream grew louder still. Ever closer she brought her face to his as she jerked it back and forth until it seemed their lips might touch.
“This is the song for our woods, don’t you think, dear Goody? You could wait a hundred years and not hear a song as fine as this!” she yelled.
“Make it stop,” I pleaded.
“Do you wish it to stop?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain? This is just a beggar’s portion of what he has to offer us. That’s a grand scream in his throat, a mighty scream. I’ve never seen or dreamed its like. It could pull the walls in on us. It could bring the ceiling down on our heads.”
I nodded sharply. Captain Jane rolled her eyes and shook her head as if to say she had expected more from me. She let go of his face, patted his cheek, took a short knife from her cloak, and stuck it in his neck.
As quickly as he had stopped singing, the man stopped screaming and in the new-struck silence the violin and bow slid off his lap and onto the floor.
“But what is this? Why have you made him scream and now murdered him? What has he done? He is beautiful and his singing and playing are beautiful. Is this your mercy?” I said.
“Is it indeed?” said Captain Jane. “Have you truly not grasped what we have before us, what you had before you? You may have some small gift of sight but it’s true it needs focusing.”
“I had a bit of bark—” I said.
“I know about your bark and how it helped you squint,” Captain Jane cut in. “But there are other ways it can be done.”
Quick as you like, she leaped behind me, brought her hands over my eyes, raised her elbows, flipped her palms outward, then opened a gap like a long, squashed diamond between her fingers for me to look through. Immediately what sat thrashing and grasping at his throat went from murdered angel to murdered fly or monkey, one grown human-size.
For a moment after Captain Jane snapped the mask of her fingers away from my face, his mouth stayed empty of all but his terrible moaning, and his skin sagged and spilled from his fine clothes as if it were Granny Someone’s brother stuffed into a gentleman’s costume, then my eyes cleared, or fogged, and he was beautiful again.
Captain Jane, seeing my expression, which I could feel had straightaway softened, spat and said, “You see well what’s there or ought to be and I have helped you see better, but you don’t think. I had taken you for sharper by far than that!” She now stepped alongside the handsome man and with one strong gesture shoved him and the chair he sat on over sideways. The back of his head hit the low table where long ago he had served me my biscuits as he fell. With a flourish, Captain Jane then pulled up a small carpet that had sat below the man’s chair to reveal a trap in the floor.
“Open it now and tell me if you understand! You won’t need the tricks of my fingers to see what he has been keeping and fattening for our friend Granny Someone!”
With these words, I saw again the boat descending from the air, floating above the stocks, the hooded figure within. Blood was pulsing from the man’s throat, pooling on the wood plank, spilling into the cracks. Written here in bloody ink was the other ending to the story I had told Captain Jane in the woods. I stepped forward, took the trap by its iron ring, and pulled. The door was lighter than it looked but still gave up a deep grinding when it rose. A narrow stair, smaller and steeper than I remembered, dropped away into darkness. Captain Jane came and crouched beside me.
“Go down if you wish to meet what he was making his songs for, your handsome lad, see what he sang and played to every night before climbing up to his bed, see what he offered Granny Someone in exchange for his gifts of youth and beauty.”
Captain Jane nudged me.
“I have been on these stairs before. I did not follow them then and think I will not follow them now,” I said.
“Then wait a moment and they will climb up. They are timid, though, as well they should be. The light, even soft as it is, will be too bright at first, for they have not looked upon it for many a day. I have been held below the ground. I have been kept in the dark to ripen, to grow sweet and soft. To be eaten up like them. I was blind for hours after I came free from Granny Someone, as those below are like to be.”
“Were you held like they are? Below the floor and down the stairs?”
“Oh, not quite like them. I was beneath the woods and there were no stairs and the walls were wet earth. But I had visitors as they did. Mine was Granny Someone and her wolves and spirits, and they came to look at me, fresh to the forest as I was, and lick their lips. He would climb down sometimes and drop sweets in their mouths and hold their soft and pale hands.”
“Did the boat tell you all this?”
Captain Jane smiled. The man had stopped moving, all but his lips, which trembled still. The ends of his fingers were now red, not black. The blood had spread and caught some of his crumpled pages and kissed at the edges of his violin. For a moment the blood pouring from the knife hole in his throat stopped and the scream I had fetched from th
e well slipped its way out along the blade. It came forward in a rush of blood, rolled slowly down his crimson front, over his velvet pant leg, and lay blotched and bloody on the sodden floor.
“Look now!” said Captain Jane. “I see something. Can you see it? Lean close! Something stirs!”
I brought my eyes back to the stair and peered down into the dark. It was like looking into wave-washed water that has been flushed with sand. Or into the far corners of a dream that has come to the end of its shaping and does not know what colors to conjure next for itself. As I watched, a fat pale hand appeared. It placed itself onto one of the lower steps. And then I saw a fat naked shoulder, and then another, and then a fat neck and then eyes, farther down, one pair after the other, peering weakly up into the light.
Captain Jane nudged me with her elbow. A sly look had come over her face. “Perhaps you would like to play with them,” she said.
“Play with them?”
“Or pray for them!”
“I thought you said it couldn’t be done.”
“We’re not in the woods here. You could pray for them in this house, deary, and pray for him…”
She nudged me again. I tried pressing my hands together and easy as that, they touched.
“Go on,” said Captain Jane.
“I do not wish to pray,” I said.
“Not even for those poor little bulbs and roots trapped down there in the dark?”
“Those are children.”
“And so they are.”
“Did Granny Someone tell him that day to come and find me? After she had ended that woman’s trial in the stocks? Is that how he knew I was there?”
“Do you begin to understand?”
“And he would have done this to me?”
“Of course he would have. He almost did. He has done it many times.”
“And she would have eaten me after?”
“And ground your bones or built a little boatlet of them and stopped your story long ago. Are you sure you don’t want to see? I want to see! Let’s go down together. Will you fetch me my knife, deary? Look at them!” I looked and thought of Eliza’s pigs. I half expected the pale things, which were gathering in ever greater numbers at the bottom of the steps, to give a greasy oink or grunt meaningfully.
“So soft they are and no doubt sweet. This is how she was keeping up her strength even as I was stealing away her meals in the woods! Well, no more of these treats for her!”
She asked me again to fetch the knife. “It’s just it’s struck me that, now that you have seen what he meant to do to you, you might like to at least hold its handle a moment, even give it a twist.”
I looked at her, then looked at the dead man and at the knife, which had come looser as the scream had pushed its way out.
“No. It’s the scream I want, not the knife.”
Captain Jane raised her eyebrows. “You want to taste that scream, do you?”
“I don’t want to taste it, I want to shove it in his mouth again!”
Captain Jane gazed at me, sat down on the floor, flung back her head, and roared. “Now we see your spirit!” she said, wiping at her eyes and sitting up again. “But that scream won’t work on him now that he’s dead.”
“Won’t it?”
“It will only get stuck. And then we’ll have to take him apart to fetch it. That’s a different kind of diving, that is. Give the knife a good twist or take a teardrop from his cheek. I see there are several. Go on. A good tear can come in handy. There is much can be done with a tear.”
I crawled close to the dead man. Captain Jane crawled with me. We stopped at the edge of the pooled blood. I reached out with my right hand and touched one of the tears that clung to his cheek. It stuck to my finger like a warm jelly at the fair and sat quivering when I held it up to the light. “Give it a moment,” Captain Jane said. I watched it sag and spread and form itself around my fingertip. As I touched, gingerly, at its spongy wetness, Captain Jane scooped up the scream and slipped it into her cloak. Then she took my hand and inspected my finger. “That’s a good one and well stuck,” she said.
“I have tears of my own if I need them,” I said.
And she said, “You can never have too many tears.”
“Teach me how to make a mask of my fingers.”
Captain Jane brought a hand up to her face, flipped the palm outward, made a gap between her second and third fingers, and looked through it at me.
“What do you see?” I said.
“I see that it’s not yet time for such teaching.”
“When will it be time?”
Captain Jane gave a chuckle. She looked at me another moment then dropped her hand.
“Who knows, young Goody, who knows?”
I stood and left the room then. I left without another look into the hole in the floor or at the dead man. I did turn to the table where he had once served biscuits to me, took up the bowl, and tipped most of its bright red berries into my pocket where the scream had been. The street was as empty as before. Captain Jane came up quickly behind me, leaving the door to the handsome man’s house open to the cold.
“Did you fetch your bloody knife or leave it in his throat?”
I said this with what I thought must sound like a fine and proper snort, for I felt suddenly tired of her and her secrets and her endings to stories I had not asked to know. Whether Captain Jane heard my tone or not, she simply patted the side of her cloak. The boat, as if it had been waiting for our return, now dropped from the snowy reaches of the dark above to float before us again just a hand’s height above the cobbles. Already Captain Jane, smiling brightly, was stepping toward it.
“There is nothing so fine in Red Boy’s world as a boat!” she said.
“What does Red Boy have to do with it?”
“Everything!”
I stepped in beside her. The bone planks below us creaked and crackled as they settled under our weight.
“Does it speak to you even now, this boat? Does it tell you other awful stories? Will it tell you where to go next?”
“Of course it does. Or they do. It has more than one voice, for it was more than one skin! Can you not hear them when they speak? Of course you can’t. If they have somewhere they think we should go, they will tell me. I think, though, that our work of mercies is done for this night.” She patted a bit of sturdy thighbone, ran a fingernail gently through the sheen of ice covering a long, stretched length of hide.
“Now,” she said. “Shall we let the neighborhood know what’s lived hidden among them all this time?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. The boat took us first to one window, which Captain Jane broke with a blow of her elbow, and then another. “Fire!” Captain Jane bellowed. “Murder!”
When lights began to appear in the windows of the houses around us and doors were flung open, we rose in a silent rush. The snowy dark pressed close and Captain Jane’s cloak came back around me.
“They’ll find him,” I said, after we had flown in silence for some time.
“And them.”
“So there’s the mercy.”
“Their being fished up from the dark? No, not that…”
“Then what?”
“Think.”
I thought. We flew straight up, then shot forward and through a flock of geese. Captain Jane tried unsuccessfully to grab one as we passed.
“Killing him was the mercy, like it was for the woman in the stocks,” I said. “And it was right. He was a prisoner of the gifts Granny Someone had given him. He would have kept on but said he wished to stop. His torture must have been great.”
My thinking seemed to fill Captain Jane with pleasure. She patted my cheek with her blood-sticky hand and said, “True enough, my dear, that I had to do it. But killing that monster was no mercy; killing him was simple turn and turnabout. You heard him. He had made a promise to Granny Someone and was refusing to keep it any longer. And making a promise to Granny Someone and not keeping it cannot be allowed!”
&nbs
p; “You speak as if you were Granny Someone.”
“Not quite. Not yet. But soon, perhaps.”
“Then it was a mercy to me,” I said. “To ease a pain I’d long forgotten.”
“We all have pains we’ve long forgotten. But you said yourself this wasn’t one. You left his house when it was still possible to think he truly had a soft bed and more biscuits for you! If you couldn’t find it after and that troubled you, it was because Granny Someone worked to keep it hid.”
“Then what was the mercy?”
“I told you earlier that you see but don’t think, and it will undo you, deary,” she said. “The mercy was for the children, but not in the way you imagine. The mercy, my deary dear, was closing and concealing again that cellar trap, for that is what I did before I left. Don’t worry; they’ll be found, those piggies, yes. We’ve seen to that. But not straightaway.”
“Why not straightaway? How can that be a mercy?”
Captain Jane leaned in so close then I could feel the roughness of her lips.
“Let them stay safe in there a little longer,” she said. “There is no hurry. How could there be any hurry? Haven’t you seen how very dark it is out here?”
Chapter 22
We flew then in long silence. I saw the handsome singer’s face appear before me as it had been when I was young and as it had been before it had had its throat stabbed open and as it had looked through the mask of Captain Jane’s strong hands. I stretched out my finger and felt an extra thrill of cold where I’d harvested his tear. The knife had been small but had quickly done its work. One little hole in the right place and the life leaks out. No need for many. I saw too the long staircase and the little figures below and the darkness that had closed back upon them. But my mind kept going back to the singer, to his song and to his scream, which now seemed as like in my thoughts as well-made twins. Captain Jane poked me, and my eyes came open and I saw we had gone skidding up and out over the snow clouds. The moon hung fat near the horizon. Stars loitered in the blackness all about.
“I would like to go home now, please,” I said. I spoke softly, but Captain Jane heard me for I felt the boat softly turn and she spoke. “It is fine that you want to go home and that you are going home. I might go home too if I could.”