All at once, sound returned; the rustling leaves, the howling dogs, and Doe felt that she could leave.
* * *
In the morning, the only tragedy found was Mrs. Crouch, strangled with her own hands clenched around her neck, her eyes wide, tears dried in a map across both cheeks.
There was reward to be had though.
On clearing the Crouch’s house, their secret fortune was found, and this was shared amongst them all. Not only that, but for a dozen years to come the crops grew tall and golden and brought good fortune to them all.
As for Doe . . . as her mother aged, they looked for a baker to take her place. One day he came to them, and Doe felt soft on the inside as she had never felt before.
His hands were warm and she could feel her flesh shift at his touch. He could mould dough like an artist and needed only four hours sleep a night.
All the village was happy for their Doe.
And that is all to explain why, each year on December the 21st, the villagers all buy the perfect Lady Bread, thus bringing good luck upon themselves and upon the village and all who pass through her.
The Sleepover
Terry Dowling
The only celebrity touch was the white stretch limo that took Jane Bastion to one of the side gates of Sydney’s vast Rookwood Cemetery at the discreet hour of 11 PM. Those gates were quickly, miraculously it seemed, opened for the vehicle and just as quickly closed behind, showing that money can open doors in almost any world.
Eccentric millionaire visits grave of beloved father for solitary midnight vigil.
That was the official story if anyone raised a fuss, though Jane’s sense of mischief added one more line. Has friends over.
That’s where it all fell down. And as she watched the dark cemetery streets and lawn precincts pass beyond the limo’s wide windows, she devised even more appropriate headlines.
Dead Meet the Living
Savini family tomb renovated for clandestine midnight soiree.
And less generously:
Ladies Only
The height of sacrilege and bad taste. Eccentric socialite Anabella Savini last night excelled herself by inviting eight of her friends to a special do in the recently cleared family crypt.
Cleared, that was the thing. What had they done with the eight bodies once interred there? Nine counting Anabella’s father Tomaso, dead these past ten years. Relocating them might be legal, but was never really acceptable and rarely spoken of. The rumours had been worrying. Still, all would be revealed soon enough.
The limo moved into a newer section of dark tomb streets, finally stopped before the bronze door of one large crypt. The façade was featureless except for a dim amber memorial light to the right of that door. There were no architraves, no pilasters or niches, none of the urns, statues and photographs that marked the other tombs in the street. Either the renovations were incomplete or this was a new look for a new age. Austere. Minimalist. Stylish in the overpowering way the ancient funerary precinct of Djoser at Saqqara was stylish, though with one wonderfully discordant touch. A Portaloo was parked discreetly by the building’s front left corner, no doubt a convenience hired for the evening’s guests rather than left over from last-minute renovations.
How much money did it take to make this happen, Jane wondered yet again. Even as the chauffeur opened her door and helped her out with “Have a pleasant evening, ma’am,” she went back to it. What favours, briberies, phonecalls? How did one begin to work this?
But after the mystery of the invitation, the insistence on a non-disclosure agreement and a ban on mobile phones, now the late-night pick-up, she was glad to be standing out in the night at last, despite the cool breeze and the macabre setting. Cemeteries had never bothered her overly much, though at 36 she was finding herself suddenly susceptible to the downright eeriness of Anabella’s venue for this particular occasion, a little too keenly aware of her own mortality in the 30 down, 40-plus to go “wisening” that hits most of us once we reach age 30. Hair still dark enough, glossy enough, certainly, skin and muscle tone still good, but her favourite evening dress was a bit too snug, and her moderately high heels did have a dash of trying too hard about them. The mortal dreads pressed close.
Jane watched the limo pull away oh so quietly, heading back to the gates and the real—other real—world, all part of a brilliantly orchestrated fetch and deliver. Full marks so far, Anabella.
A cool wind blew along the funerary street. Trees rustled close by. Leaves scraped along the empty pavements. Jane drew her shawl closer about her shoulders.
Mid-autumn. Mild enough still, but time to be inside.
She approached the heavy door. What did one do, knock?
For it was so quiet, too quiet, just the wind in the trees, the skip-scatter-scrape of leaves.
It made her stop, kept her standing there, hesitating, wondering. Was she first to arrive (it was that quiet), the last (if so, where were the voices, the—dare she expect it—music?). Was she the only one to actually be invited? Though this was the family crypt. For all Anabella’s quirks, her deserved reputation for con-jobs and frivolity, this event had to be important to her.
Jane did the logical thing then, the “Jane thing” as Anabella had once described it in the early days, back when it was still eccentric third-generation mining heiress meets acting sub-editor for the debut online issue of Wellsprings. She stepped a half-dozen paces back to the opposite side of the tomb street and simply took it all in.
The Savini crypt stood in a row of twenty or more tombs of various shapes and sizes in one of the circa-1960s sections of what was famously called the Sleeping City, facing another row of crypts opposite. Many of the vaults she could see showed the expected degree of opulence and ornamentation, but Jane confirmed that Anabella truly had—what was the best term?—uncluttered? neutralised? purged?—her family’s vault. Already large before the renovations, the former architraves and pilasters had actually helped mask its true size, a building as large as a double garage at least. Now it loomed like a wall of Black Forest cake amid the meringues, with just that single heavy bronze door set above its doorstep, and the solitary eye of the amber memorial light burning to one side. And a Portaloo, for heaven’s sake, a crucial concession to the living. You had to hand it to her.
Jane glanced up and down the street. The main cemetery gates were somewhere behind her to the west, the closer gates they’d entered by a kilometre away at least, and probably locked again by now. That was how these things worked in the movies and urban myths, people doing silly things in silly ways at anything but sensible hours. Well, she’d knock once on the metal door, just once, and be gone.
But when she raised her hand to pound on the dull metal, a proximity sensor activated a recorded male voice that was startling, deeply unsettling and comical all at the same time.
“Please come in—“ There was the smallest hesitation as a digital menu was consulted. “—Ms Bastion. The others are waiting.”
* * *
They were indeed. As Jane pushed the bronze door inwards and stepped through the opening, she found herself in a pleasantly warm interior lit by dozens of candles arranged in five standing and three elaborate table candelabra. Their light revealed eight smiling women seated about a large dining table covered with a white muslin table-cloth, laid with matching napkins, shining silverware and sparkling champagne flutes. Anabella Savini had spared no expense, and she sat at the centre of the group on the side facing the door. They had been waiting for her, and were clearly aware of her arrival ten minutes before. She could imagine Anabella even making fun of her caution. “Be kind now. It’s the Jane thing.”
Not surprisingly the crypt’s interior had been masked to conceal its original purpose. Heavy floor-length drapes of rich red velvet covered the side and back walls, giving the impression of a fin-de-siècle orientalist’s salon or a desert pavilion out of Hollywood antiquity. There were even two male servants standing silently by Anabella’s chair, two wel
l-built, slender young men wearing black bodysuits, white domino masks and white cotton gloves, poised in the act of serving canapés and topping up the champagne flutes. They had paused for her entrance. The faintest strains of Chopin’s Piano Concerto Number 1 in E Minor could be heard and the air smelled wonderfully of spices and incense and the fragrances of a fine supper no doubt being warmed in hot-boxes discreetly out of sight behind the curtains.
Jane recognised all the faces, if only casually, from previous Savini gatherings, the parties and soirees that marked forever-to-be-unwedded Anabella’s often louche, always fascinating and inventive lifestyle. Pretty faces for the most part or, at the very least, handsome, but allowably attractive every one.
To Jane’s left as she stood with her back to the closed door, on one of the table’s short sides, sat Candace Waygard and Claire Heymanns, the formidable, hard-edged ladies who served on the boards of two of Anabella’s corporations as her “eyes and ears.” She clearly wanted them seated together in plain view rather than next to her so she didn’t have to turn her head this way and that to speak to them. On the short side to the right sat Anita Pike and Alana Goodrich, if Jane remembered correctly, while to Anabella’s immediate left on the long side facing the door was Tory Mangan; to Tory’s right the dark-eyed fashion designer Seyer McNeil. Turned in her chair on the long side close to where Jane now stood, smiling up at her warmly, was Maggie Ardron. The empty chair next to Maggie was even now being pulled out by one of the young servants.
“Welcome, dear girl,” Anabella cooed in the patently oversolicitous queen-of-the-world tone Jane hated most. “Now that our wonderful group is complete, supper can begin.”
And so it did once Jane was seated alongside Maggie, her purse and shawl taken and her glass filled. The masked servants disappeared behind the curtains and returned with platters of small seafood vol-au-vent that were spicy, smoky and absolutely delicious. Two main dishes followed in leisurely succession, simple dishes really, easy to transport, easy to re-heat: a chicken casserole in a rich wine sauce and then a beef goulash that was sublime and left a smoky aftertaste that the vintage Moet matched perfectly. Small silver bowls of steamed vegetables accompanied each dish.
“Such largesse!” Alana Goodrich said, raising her glass in a private salute.
Anabella raised her own glass in return. “There is a point you reach, Alana, when you’re wealthy enough that the connoisseurs and gourmands no longer presume to tell you which wines go with what. As the wisest Europeans have always known, ‘Olympus decides for itself and mortals scramble to allow’.”
“Which translates as ‘Money talks!’,” Claire Heymanns said.
Anabella smiled quite mischievously. “As we shall soon see, I’m sure.”
While the dishes were cleared and a dessert of profiteroles with King Island cream was being served, along with coffee and tea, Jane raised her glass several times as if to drink but only pretending, using the action to let her study her fellow guests.
They’re all around my own age, she realised. No-one over forty but Anabella who—what?—had to be close on 55, but hardly more than that, despite her grande dame affectations. Candace and Claire were both 38, Jane was reasonably sure. Alana and Anita Pike, 37, Maggie and Seyer both 36 at least. Tory Mangan was the youngest at around 35. Jane was wondering if there was any significance to that when Alana Goodrich set down her dessert fork and broached a subject that had to be on all their minds.
“Anabella, I must ask. What happened to the—how shall I put this?—previous occupants? We’ve been dying to know.”
Good on you, Alana, Jane thought. At least eight rellies disposed of, eight guests tonight. All a bit suss. The others had to have been wondering.
Anabella gestured with the back of one hand to the curtained section behind her chair. “I had hoped to spare you during supper but very well. Papa is behind this curtain here. The others are, well—“ She indicated their surroundings, the walls of the crypt itself. “Let’s just say they’re still with us.”
The table went silent as the implications sank in.
Anita Pike actually snorted into her champagne. “You walled them up?”
Tory Mangan giggled. “Anabella, how very Poe of you.”
Anabella gave her throaty laugh. “Hardly, Tory. These old dears have been out of it a long time. No premature burials in this lot, though a few may have deserved it from what I’ve been told. No, look upon it as going modern, more like scattering the ashes, building a better tomorrow. They’re earning their keep.”
Maggie Ardron was shaking her head at the sheer boldness of it all. “You’ve made a literal House of the Dead out of them.”
Candace Waygard’s thin mouth was set in an approving grin. “You devil. You had them ground up for the mortar. Powdered rellies. It could start a trend.”
“Only if you decide to tell, Candace dear. Naturally I’d prefer you didn’t.”
Tory Mangan giggled again. “Look around you, Ana. You invite us here and tell us this—us!—then expect us to keep it to ourselves.”
“You’ll do as you will, Tory love, of course, but you did sign a non-disclosure, and, anyway, telling would mean that you’d forfeit your chance at tonight’s special prize.”
“Which is?” Seyer McNeil asked. The designing mogul for Palifrey didn’t try to mask her curiosity like some of the others.
“Aha, Seyer, it concerns the tomb’s remaining occupant. The one remaining in corpore—what’s the term?—intacto, de facto, dura? No matter. Something Latin.”
The table went silent again.
“Your father?” Jane asked.
“Of course. My beloved Papa. Marco, if you please.”
The white-masked, white-gloved factotum moved to the rear curtain, pulled on concealed draw-strings. The heavy drapes parted to reveal a single brushed-silver metal casket leaning upright at a slight angle against the tomb’s rear wall. It had been dusted off, its anodised surfaces obviously polished for the occasion, though there was an indefinable quality about it that still suggested the passage of time: the ten years since it was last sealed.
The sight of an actual casket with its occupant inside had an immediate effect on Anabella’s guests. Eyes glittered in the candlelight. Mouths opened in surprise. Anita and Tory actually had their hands at their throats, giving a distinctly Victorian or Edwardian cast to the whole thing, as if, like much of the vast boneyard around them, they were indeed more than a hundred years away from a world of Portaloos, stretch limos, propane hot-boxes and mobile phones.
Jane sat marvelling at it all. They were having a late-night supper in a crypt in honour of a deceased parent and yet many of her fellow guests seemed surprised to find his corpse present at the event!
“You didn’t reduce him to powder then,” Alana Goodrich said, and was probably the only person present who could have put such a comment so dismissively. “He’s still with us.”
Again, the implications set in. Too fresh to grind down. Not desiccated enough.
Candace Waygard braved the awkward silence as well. “You are totally unique, Anabella.”
“We are all of us unique, Candace dear. I have chosen the eight of you to be here tonight both for your personal charms and for the very real esteem my Father had for each one of you.”
I met the old lecher twice, Jane thought, just twice, barely spoke to him. She noticed that several of the guests wanted to remark on that as well.
But Anabella had raised her hand in another of her imperious gestures, one more suited to a woman twenty years her senior. “So let’s move on to the special event of the evening. It is now 12:30, nearly one o’clock in the morning. I propose that each of you remains here the night and keeps my beloved Papa company in his new digs.”
Tory Mangan raised her glass. “I’m game, if there’s more of the bubbly! And so long as I can borrow the torch and use the Portaloo.”
Candace was more composed. “Not much to ask, Ana. It’s nearly one, like you say.
I’m comfortable enough.”
Anabella stood for effect. “Well, that’s it, Candace dear. Not in your comfy rented chairs, I’m afraid.” She made yet another gesture, proceeding according to whatever script she had devised for the occasion. The factotum to her left tugged at the cord for the curtains along the northern wall. The servant at the curtains to the right did the same. The concealing drapes slid aside to reveal eight identical funerary caskets, four along the northern wall, four along the southern, all the same split-lid kind used for viewing the deceased. They were propped upright in customised black metal frames that held them at a gentle twenty-five degrees from vertical. Their anodised metal shone wanly in the candlelight.
Anita Pike and Tory Mangan had their hands to their throats again.
“I don’t believe you, Ana!” Anita said.
“Coffins!” Tory cried. “You can’t be serious!”
Anabella seated herself once more. “But of course I’m serious, Tory, Anita. And they’re caskets, not coffins. Coffins are wide at the shoulders, tapered at the head and feet. Caskets are rectangular like these. Don’t worry, they’re brand new, rented just for tonight, and really quite comfortable. And you’ll notice they have mercy holes where your heads will be. You’ll be able to breathe, I promise.”
Jane studied the sinister shapes, saw that the upper section of each casket did indeed have a small rosette of perforations to allow breathing, which made her wonder at Anabella’s use of the word “rented.” Did people actually make caskets with breathing holes these days—mercy holes, she called them—if ever they had?
Maggie Ardron drained her glass and set it down. “Forgive me, Anabella, but why would anyone in their right mind agree to do such a thing?”
“Because, Maggie dear, I will give each of you who chooses to stay one million dollars in cash for participating. Not a bad fee for a five-hour sleepover. If only one of you agrees to do it, that person gets the whole eight million, provided they remain for the duration, until 6 AM. I’m serious. Two of you, four million each. Papa coveted each one of you when he was alive—you were his girls, if you like. It seems only fitting that we honour his memory in an appropriate fashion on this tenth anniversary of his passing.”
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