So why was it so suspenseful, when it wasn’t a surprise?
2 MARCH 1908
White ice rimming dark channels. Gwennie passed last night.
It wasn’t a surprise. She’d been vanishing by degrees all winter. Coughing her useless cough, too weak to get anything up. Her mother never got to say goodbye, but Mary did. Gwennie looked an angel, dressed to be buried with the best of Mary’s tatted collars round her neck.
Addie and Mary walked all that morning, round and about in as good a circuit as they could hope to do on their rotten little island with its overgrown shores and icy crusts of snow, not to mention the raspberry prickers, which seemed to have been sharpened by the ice.
Back at the cottage, Mary opened Addie’s basket: more white thread and more gray wool, for more sweaters for more orphans—and the Sunday paper and also a piece of mail she’d picked up at the office.
It was Freddie. He’d been in jail. I dreamed of you, when I found the wherewithal to dream, he wrote. So now he knew what it was like to be cooped up. When she finished the letter, she thought a moment, then read it aloud to Addie.
“I envy you,” she said.
“How could you envy me?”
“Because you have Freddie.”
“I haven’t his flesh. I haven’t his child. I haven’t even his company, damn it,” she said. “All I have is the thought of him. No—all I really have here, Addie, is you.”
“And I have you,” said Addie, reaching for her hand.
Mary knew the others on the island shunned Addie now.
4 SEPTEMBER 1909
Rain smacks windowpanes, night seems to have crept up into afternoon—and yet it is strangely warm.
“For you, Mary,” said Addie as she folded her sopping umbrella, extending a canvas bag.
The bag was heavy, and Mary smiled. Her Ladies’ Home Journal and whiskey, the one notable absence in her weekly box of provisions.
“Help pass a dreary afternoon, won’t it now?” asked Addie.
“I’d take a dram to scare off the damp.”
“What are you making today, Mary?”
“Just socks, socks for the children. I had nothing but remnants, and socks are the thing to get rid of them. Now I can get back to sweaters.”
“What about a blue for once? Or red?”
“Gray’s what the nuns require. It’s suitable for either sex, and the children have nothing to squabble over, if they’re all alike, now do they? But if you brought me some red, I’d knit you a shawl. Red would become you.”
Addie blushed. “I could hardly stand it if a shawl for me took you away from your calling.”
“I bore of gray.”
Addie smiled. “To red then!”
“To red!”
They laughed and topped up their glasses. Then Mary put the needles down and shook out the paper. After a few minutes, she looked up.
“Another ferry wrecked.”
“What? Where?”
“Oyster Bay. But they saved all souls. Every one.”
“Why, it’s a miracle then.”
“How is it that some gain by miracles and others are neglected?”
“You’ll have to ask your nuns.”
“They’ve got no answers, just more nonsense to do with Job. I’d sooner ask Tyrone.”
They looked at the dog, licking his groin, and laughed. Mary reached down to scruffle his jowls, and he groaned.
19 FEBRUARY 1910
Pink, orange, blue, and flaming gold. Is it possible I’ll miss this view?
The ferry heaved against the pilings of the small pier. Addie stood beside her, watching.
Mary thought about the letter that had come, granting the thing she’d dreamed of—freedom. Now she felt queasy.
The ghosts of the Slocum were there in the wavelets that broke against the shore. She was glad to be leaving them behind. But as for the ghost of Carrie Bowen, Mary knew it would come with her, wherever she went.
The violent dawn had dimmed to a simple blue-sky day streaked with thin clouds. A fish hawk screeched.
Her trunk was packed and buckled, and the hospital porter wheeled it ahead of her to the gangway. Tyrone was on a lead by her side.
“I never thought it’d be you leaving me, Mary.” Addie’s eyes on the far shore.
“We can see each other anytime now. Weekends, even!”
“Of course we can. We can meet in the city. I’ll take the bus.”
“Or I will.”
But they both of them knew they wouldn’t.
Mary was going home. To Fred, Fred, who had waited for years and was waiting even now, on the other side of the water.
Would he still love her, three years older and a different person than she’d been when the Health Department snatched her? Would she feel the old yearning when she smelled his skin?
“Mary?”
Mary turned and Addie kissed her, for the first time in all those three years. And there it was: a yearning right through her body, right where it didn’t belong.
As the ferry backed away from the pier, Addie wrapped the red shawl round herself and waved. Tyrone barked, and Mary barked too: a word, a farewell, almost a plea.
15 JANUARY 1915
Ferry ride back to North Brother took five minutes, a lifetime. Sun beat the cold away. And I am back with the bodies—and her.
Addie.
As she made her way from the ferry with her carpetbag in hand, she remembered walking arm in arm with Addie on the pebbled path, their skirts swishing as they strode. She’d dreamed so many nights of Addie.
What if those weren’t dreams?
She peered from outside the door through the loops of white thread of the curtain she’d tatted years before. Inside, everything exactly as she’d left it, just dustier.
“I came back,” she said to Addie that afternoon.
“Oh, Mary,” said Addie and wrapped her in her arms.
But later, it was, “How could you do it? You cut their lives short just to work.”
“I didn’t do anything. It was no surprise, that outbreak, not with the conditions there. It wasn’t ever my fault.”
“But Mary, a lying-in hospital? You swore you wouldn’t work as a cook.”
“I did it for you,” she whispered.
Addie groaned, the red shawl dangling slack from her shoulders.
Mary thought of Freddie with his rough beard and whiskey tongue. At least he believed in her innocence.
In the slapping tide, the ghosts of the Slocum were joined by Carrie Bowen and a new row of women great with child.
“Addie?” Mary pleaded. “It wasn’t me. It isn’t true. It can’t be.”
And after a time, Addie replied, “No, of course not, Mary. It’s madness.”
“Madness,” said Mary
“I’ve missed you, my darling,” said Addie quietly and took Mary’s hands.
Mary looked up.
NOTE. Mary Mallon was quarantined on North Brother Island from 1907 to 1910, after being identified as an asymptomatic typhoid carrier and the cause of several outbreaks in and around New York City. On North Brother Island, she met and was befriended by Adelaide Jane Offspring, a nurse who worked at the quarantine hospital. Mallon repeatedly petitioned in writing for release from custody and was eventually granted her freedom in 1910, on the condition that she never again work as a cook. In 1915, however, during a typhoid outbreak among the patients at the Sloane Hospital for Women, she was discovered working in the kitchens under the name of Mrs. Brown. Mallon, who never believed she was a vector of the disease, was arrested and returned to her cottage quarantine for the remainder of her life. The friendship between Mary Mallon and Adelaide Offspring lasted from 1907 to Mallon’s death on the island in 1938. Offspring, who was retired by then, returned to the island to nurse Mary Mallon in her last week of life.
Roll for Initiative
Andrew Ervin
I set up my screen and get out my maps and dice. “Roll for initiative,�
� I say.
A good dungeon master doesn’t kill the players in his charge. He lets them kill themselves. That’s how I see it anyway. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m a great DM. On the contrary, if the last three weeks have taught me anything it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing. I never should have agreed to this.
Having the party sacrifice their own lives—be it through inaction or poor decision-making—will be the only way to end this reunion. It will also provide the illusion of free will while in actuality I’ve been in charge of their fates the entire time.
I am sitting at the head of my dining-room table. To my right sit Jamin and Carlo and across from them is the new guy, Gregor. He lives at the end of the street. Dig Doug is at the opposite end of the table.
Jamin’s a dwarf fighter and Carlo rolled a half-elf wizard. Gregor is playing a wood elf rogue and Dig Doug is a human cleric. They will all be dead soon.
All the lights are on and the detritus of five pizzas covers the table. Gregor is eating a slice with a knife and fork. I’m on my second IPA or maybe my third. Moira has taken the boys to a neighbor’s house to use the pool and watch movies on an outdoor screen. They know that daddy is a big nerd.
Dig Doug has eaten enough of Moira’s hummus to spackle the garage. He will die first.
For tonight’s session I found my copy of the “Queen of the Demonweb Pits” module in the attic and spent a few hours redrawing parts of it because Carlo has probably committed every word to memory. Instead of spiders I have skeletons. The Demonweb is now a series of catacombs. Using graph paper I remade the Spidership into a skull shape. Because I didn’t run them through “Vault of the Drow” first I will need to fudge the start. No big deal.
Queen Lolth is going to destroy them. She can only be hit with magic weapons and she can dispel magic each round. I will enjoy every moment of their agony.
I want their characters to die so slowly and with such humiliation that they never ask me to play again. In a matter of hours—by midnight tonight—every man at this table will have unfriended me on Facebook.
Nevertheless I should have read more of the Dungeon Master’s Guide before now so Carlo would stop lawyering me about the rules. Except of course that I’ve already put far too much time into this game. Not to mention the inconvenience for Moira.
She and I have known Jamin and Carlo since college. I had not seen them again until they begged me to run this campaign. Dig Doug graduated the same year that Moira and I did but I don’t remember him playing with us back then. The fact that he’s the most polite member of the group will not save his skin.
Looking over the assembled party it occurs to me that as far as my social life goes, my greatest ambition is to have a series of lifelong friends whom I am never—and I mean never—required to spend time with.
I roll a d20 behind my screen: seven. I have a habit of rolling for initiative right away so the players don’t know when there is danger lurking beneath their feet. “I rolled an eighteen,” I tell them. “What did you guys get?”
I write down their order of attack. Not that it matters. I push back my chair and go to the kitchen for another beer.
Our deck overlooks the yard and Wissahickon Valley Park. The lawn glows with lightning bugs. My son Harry still thinks they are will-o’-the-wisps. He and Jason have an authentic, full-sized tepee at the edge of the property in which they play European Occupiers and Lenni-Lenape. Harry once came inside crying because his brother put smallpox in his sleeping bag. I think it was baking soda.
Here’s why I never should have agreed to do this.
Twenty years ago me and Jamin and Carlo lived in the same dorm. The Main Line was never exactly a hotbed of intellectual stimulation and I had what we will call trouble adjusting to life away from home. That antisocial behavior lasted until my sophomore year when I got accepted to join Jamin and Carlo’s three-nights-a-week campaign. My first character was a half-orc assassin. The rules were different then.
Everything was different then.
Those guys were a year ahead of me. Their game—and it remained their game no matter how long I participated in it—ran until the winter break before they graduated. They had a rolling roster of temporary players, all of whom got kicked out after a week or two. The three of us and Farley were the only regulars.
The idea for this new campaign started a month ago on Facebook. Like all rational and sentient beings, I hate Facebook with a frothy passion. And like all rational and sentient beings, I check it at least twice an hour.
Carlo had posted a scanned-in photograph from an old session. The four of us sit around the common-room table. Carlo’s head sticks up like whack-a-mole from behind his DM screen. There must be three hundred dice on the table, several dozen painted miniatures, a Fiend Folio, and at least two copies of the 144-page, Elric- and Cthulhu-era Deities and Demigods. Farley is wearing a Viking helmet. He was the smartest person I’ve ever met. He made the people around him smarter, even us idiots. We look happy.
Within minutes of the photo going up, Dig Doug sent me a friend request. What I normally do in these situations is accept the request and then unfriend the person a few days later. I never got the chance. Doug began pestering all of us to put together a campaign like we had in college and then Jamin and Carlo jumped in.
We have to do it, they said.
It will be like old times, they said.
I held out as long as I could, but every excuse I could muster soon dried up. Even Moira said I should do it.
It will do you some good, she said.
There was no way I was about to venture into whatever dank werebear cave I assumed Jamin and Carlo were still living in. Their dorm room had squirmed with month-old take-out cartons. I can still smell it. They run a hobby shop in a strip mall out in the Brandywine Valley. It must take them an hour to get to Manayunk. That’s without Schuylkill traffic.
My wife said she would be cool with having everyone over as long as she didn’t need to clean up after us. She knows what Carlo and Jamin are like.
I look out over our manicured yard. According to the Monster Manual, will-o’-the-wisps are riddled with despair. They are agents of evil.
Moira and I hooked up for the first time the night Farley crashed my Honda.
Back at the table, Queen Lolth grows ever more hungry. I get myself situated. “You are in a tavern,” I say.
“Seriously?” Jamin asks. His hair is so dirty it looks wet.
“Yes.”
“You suck at this,” he says.
“Why isn’t Carlo DMing?” Dig Doug asks.
“Ask Carlo,” I say. “You are fully rested and have all your hit points back. A tall humanoid in a hooded cape stands at the bar with his back to you, but you get the sense he’s aware of your presence.”
“I conduct a perception check,” Gregor says. This is his first campaign. He and his wife are German. They are the closest thing to friends we have in the neighborhood. Moira is at their place right now.
“I’m already DMing two games,” Carlo says.
“He wanted to do it anyway,” Jamin says, “but I talked him out of it. My mistake.”
“Roll perception.”
“Fourteen.”
“All day?”
“Add your modifier and prof bonus.”
“I thought Germans were supposed to be fastidious about rules.”
“Sechzehn.”
“You perceive that he is tense but not necessarily aggressive.”
“Sex what?”
“That’s not how perception works.”
“Perception is more for seeing things that are hidden.”
“Jesus, fine. Whatever. You don’t perceive anything being hidden in the tavern.”
“How many people are inside?”
“Do you mean people or humanoids?”
“Humanoids, I guess.”
“Try attacking them with Preparation H.”
“That’s hemorrhoids.”
“I roll
a saving throw against ass pain.”
The game will go on like this for several more hours and then they will all die.
“Queen of the Demonweb Pits” is one of the most challenging modules ever published and my modifications make it even deadlier. The party needs to be balanced, which I suppose this one is, but there should be at least eight characters. Tough shit. It’s a TPK waiting to happen.
The humanoid at the bar is Cropaz, an emissary from the village council who has come in search of adventurers for hire. The party’s job tonight is to travel to the nether plane and descend into Lolth’s lair and retrieve the town’s sigil. First, however, they must make peace with the huntsmen of the Feywild, in whose protected land they will find the portal to Lolth’s massive royal lair. Cropaz gives them each a healing potion and the choice of weapon upgrades from the local armory. They set off.
What the guys don’t yet know is that the only way to return from the abyssal plain is by opening a locket around Lolth’s neck. It will be impossible to escape until she lies dead. If they are to return to the village and collect their rewards they must first defeat her and her handmaidens.
They will not make it back.
During one finals week Farley heard about an off-campus bash some Bryn Mawr students were throwing. Twelve women had rented a mansion next to a golf course. They were getting evicted at the end of the month. The party had been going on for a week. Even Jamin and Carlo agreed to go. It was my turn to be designated driver.
A loose jazz combo huddled around a baby grand covered in puma-spot watermarks. A card game involved bowling pins and shots of rum. The Rolling Rock pony races had begun in the dining room and in the kitchen six two-person coed teams played Edward Fortyhands with their khakis and boxer shorts and panties at their ankles. Smoke clung to the windows. As usual, people gravitated toward Farley. He reached for the duct tape and I went out back for some air. A moderate snow fell on the skinny-dippers and empty kegs bobbing in the pool. The cold chewed through my flannel shirt.
The irony, of course, is that I did stay sober.
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