by Nancy Fulda
“This will work?” Thomas asked.
The conjure man nodded. “Oh yes, and you’d do well to thank them;” he gestured towards the corpses, small and pathetic; “for all they done for you.”
“Thank you,” Thomas said, “thank you, thank you, thank you.” He was crying. Thomas cried often these days. He found that he could not stop.
Hating Mr. Witting didn’t make him wrong. Florence remembered the days before Officer Clark and the deal he’d struck up with Miss Em. Periodic raids, and half the girls spending the night in jail. Any copper who liked could come in and demand a free frenchy for the privilege of not being arrested. A reasonable dirty copper was a whore’s best friend; an unreasonable one could ruin her.
Florence gritted her teeth over the accounts ledger. Taxes on the house, room and board for seventeen girls, salary for Jerome, food, drink and clothing. And now she had to make space for a man’s greed. It wasn’t the money; at least, it wasn’t all the money. Florence hadn’t run away from home before even her first bleeding had come upon her, on foot, in the deep winter, all to spend her life with a boot on her neck anyway.
And so, when Jerome came in to tell her about the gossip he’d heard, how that DeRoss boy had hired out a conjure man, it was like striking steel against a flint.
Florence had lit a three-week candle for the boy and placed it in her window. When the wick sputtered out in a pool of melted wax, Thomas DeRoss would be dead and Alice would be back in fighting shape. Florence stared at the candle now, trying to decide whether it had noticeably altered since the day before. She should have been paying more attention; it could have been days since the wax had stopped dripping and the candle had stopped shrinking.
Florence knew what Miss Em would have told her to do. Calling down the dead was unsafe; dead want life more than anything else, they’d chase your breath down and burrow inside you. They’d ride you back into the world of the living and suck you dry, if you weren’t careful. Miss Em would have told Florence not to bother with it; Miss Em would have told Florence that the boy had suffered plenty and they could call themselves square now.
But Florence didn’t go to see Miss Em.
Who was he to run away clean? Miss Em always said that magic worked better when invoked by the wronged party. “It’s a way of smoothing the world out,” she said. Florence couldn’t hurt Thomas with her hands; the law was a laughing sigh, an option for other sorts of people. Florence owed it to Alice and to Miss Em not to lie down and suffer. If the cold white woods drew in on you, if the wolf came to the door, you pulled your rifle down and fired the first shot. First chances were too few and far between to go hanging your hopes on second ones.
Florence used Thomas’ candle to light three more. She set them in front of her in a triangular shape. Thomas’ candle she sat directly in front of her crossed legs. Florence told Jerome to slice the lobe of her right ear off. The gates of death demanded a gift of flesh.
Florence did not flinch; it was important not to flinch. Jerome’s hands were shaking. He had known, without ever really thinking about it, that things like this must have gone on in the house, but Miss Em had never let him see it so close. He held his handkerchief against Florence’s throat, so that her blood did not drip down and stain her collar.
Florence went stiff in front of him; her eyes were glassy and sightless. She spoke to herself, but her voice was so low and so deep that Jerome heard it only as a animal rumble. For the first time since he was a child, since he stood at his mother’s death bed and felt the madam standing behind him, owning him, Jerome was afraid.
Florence knew that there was only one way to lay the sort of wards that could keep her out. They came to her shyly, skittishly, thin fuzzy shadows dripping something dark. Florence stretched her fingers out to them; they licked at her with pink tongues, nipped at her with white little fangs.
Jerome watched Florence stretch her fingers out, curl them inwards, in a vacuum of air. Her guttural muttering was the only sound. She had said: “don’t touch me. It’s just like waking a sleepwalker.” Jerome looked at the carriage clock on the desk he still thought of as Miss Em’s. Three minutes, Florence had said, not a tick more.
In her haze, Florence smiled. “We carry the dead with us whether we like it or not,” Miss Em told her. “You can feel them in weak moments, when you can hardly carry your own weight, let alone theirs. You can hear them when you dream at night and your mind is unprotected. They’ll steal your breath like a cat, little one.”
He didn’t have words and he couldn’t take shape, but Florence recognized Elias Barnes out of the corner of her eye. She pretended not to see him; she coaxed one of the small, mewling shadows into her lap. It leaked something on her. It was the color and consistency of ink, but it moved over her flesh like a living thing and left no stain behind.
Elias tried to speak. Humans aren’t meant to know the language of the dead; it would drive them mad, muttering, chattering, screaming on every streetcar and corner. Miss Em said you could learn it, but you’d lose more than an earlobe.
Elias Barnes was closer now, close enough to put his hand on her shoulder.
Florence lifted the tiny shadow in her hands; it was strangely dense, much heavier than it should have been. “I’ll give you your own back,” she whispered.
Elias’ hand was cold; it made her whole shoulder cold. Florence remembered crying “mama, mama, mama,” in the kitchen; she’d learned that there was no reasoning to be done with her daddy. She remembered the way her mother looked at her, face like the side of a mountain. Cold and impassable; beautiful but lonely. Florence couldn’t imagine having come out of her; Florence didn’t think her mother had anything soft inside of her, anything that could feed a baby. The night before she left, Florence said as much to her, still grieving over the slimy purple remnants of the baby they had been going to name Daniel. “They don’t want to be inside of you,” Florence had said. It was the only time Florence’s mother had ever hit her; it was the only time Florence had ever seen her mother cry.
Florence turned to face Elias Barnes. He was a shadow with not even the slightest striations to suggest a human face, a mouth or eye sockets. But she knew him all the same. She carried him with her and saw something of him whenever she looked at mirrors in the candlelight.
“I couldn’t save you then,” Florence said to him, “and I can’t save you now.”
Miss Em had said, “If you’re going to call down the dead, make sure you have an excellent reason and make sure you are prepared to accept whoever answers you. This is the oldest magic, Florence; we are shouting into a dark forest.”
Florence reached out. Foggy black wrapped around her hand like a caress. “I am truly sorry, Elias.”
Florence turned her white face towards Jerome. Her eyes were sightless and such a shocking blue, like the hottest part of the flame. Jerome remembered when he’d first seen her, hardly older than himself. A mouse girl who quivered and listened. He’d thought she was a child. But Florence’s face... oh god, it was old. It was so old.
“I’m sorry,” Florence said to him, but not to him, “but you have to go back where you come from.”
Something whispered in the dim. The room was full of invisible movements, sightless hungers. Florence was white as a stone. She would hold them at bay.
Jerome held her shoulders tightly. If he let go, he expected he might have shuddered all the way down to the floor.
With Thomas’ money, the conjure-man had first procured for himself a fine Irish breakfast; baccy, eggs and boiled beans. He bought himself a wash and shave, a trip to the seamstress and the laundress’. And then he bought himself a berth in an upright opium parlor, a nice one, where when you came out from under, you still had all your change in your pockets.
The conjure man had plans for the rest of the money; he always did. He would just pay his dross for the night but soon he’d rent out a real room in a respectable boarding house, like the one Thomas was staying in. Then he could se
nd for Elna and Charles; he could do the things he’d promised them.
Dross for the night became two nights, then three, then seven. He spent his mornings in the opium parlor, his afternoons reminding Thomas all he’d done for him.
At night, before he slept, the conjure man thought about Charles and Elna, resolved again to make everything up to them. In the morning; just one more morning. Charles must be so big now; he’d barely been walking when the conjure-man’d lit out. He was tow-headed, the conjure-man remembered, but children grew out of that. When the conjure-man was that age, his mother had told him that hell was eternal twilight, neither light nor dark, day nor night. She said the in-betweenness of it tormented a good soul. In one more morning, when the sun came up, the conjure-man’s new life would begin.
He heard them before he saw them.
They were dripping. He could hear the drops pitter-pitter-patting on the wood floor. It sounded like a soaked man come in out of the rain. Then he heard the little tack noise of separation, sticky piddy-paws coming away from the floor.
The conjure-man’s mother had taught him all about how to catch a soul in a glass jar, all about how to make a person fall in or out of love, how to dodge a curse. About how to turn magic back on its maker. You had to be powerful, she said, or mad. Or both.
They were the softest of weights on the bedclothes. The conjure-man had started to sweat. His neck prickled. He couldn’t raise his arms; he couldn’t sit up to look into the darkness.
They made sounds, gurglings and hissings, interfered cries, as monstrous as the leavings of a pregnancy unfinished.
The conjure-man hadn’t thought he was going to die this way; the conjure man hadn’t thought he was ever going to die. His mother always said him was a great one for getting in over his head. He should have stayed away from the city, from the pipe, from that rich boy and that vicious, evil woman.
They was on his chest now. They looked like pieces of the night, cut out and set into motion. The conjure-man looked them straight-on.
Their eyes was opened now.
“I’m sorry,” said the DeRoss boy, who could not stand up on his own and slouched in a weak and disgusting way against the back of a chair. He was pathetic, and Florence had a sudden urge to knock the chair out from underneath and watch him fall to the floor.
“You’re sorry you’re hurting,” she said instead.
“I swear.” His hands gripped the chair so tightly at they had gone all white and drowned-man blue. Florence wondered if the design of grapes and flowers that was carved into the chair’s back would be carved in his flesh when he let go. “I swear I’ll never do it again, I’ll pay you for her…I still have money, lots of it.”
Florence said nothing for a long minute and just looked at him; looked at his hair thin on his skull and tender little threads on his shoulders, the dark blue hollows of his eyes, his bleeding hands. She turned to Jerome, who was standing in the doorway with a carefully blank expression. “Bring Alice here,” she said, and gestured towards the hallway where a girl was waiting, hesitant in the shadows.
Alone with the boy, Florence shook her yellow head. “What made you think you was special? You know, I’ve known a thousand of you.”
The boy’s eyes were rheumy like an old man’s. “I don’t understand you,” he said.
Alice entered then, flanked by Jerome. In front of the big man, she looked very small and very vital, like the kind of small creature that quivers and jitters in the deep woods. She worked her hand in her skirt and looked at the boy. She was afraid; it came off her like a sigh. Florence reached out a kind hand and took Alice’s shaking one.
“Would you show me your stomach, honey?”
Alice nodded. She tilted her face down and let her hair tumble over her like a protecting fall of water. She took off her jacket, her skirts, her blouse and her corset and stays. She lifted her shift over her head and discarded it. She peeled down her pantalets until she stood in front of them, slender and ivory as a wax candle. She was goose-bumped and expressionless. Her arms hung heavy at her sides and she made no motion to cover her nakedness.
Florence peered carefully at the ghost of red words on her abdomen. It was healing well. Miss Em would have been proud of her. “What’s that say?” she asked, softly.
“Thomas,” said the girl. Oh, and what a girl she sounded like. Not a woman at all. She was rocking back and forth on her heels very slightly.
The DeRoss boy seemed to have been infected with her shakes; a shorter chair leg wobbled audibly against the floor. “Thomas.”
The boy’s hand strayed to the inside of his bed shirt, looped with dark and light stains, and felt the raised texture of the terrible artwork there. It was weeping blood and he wore a bandage over it, but it never seemed to get any better.
Florence turned her head like a dog, sly, to face Alice. “Your scars are fading. I hurt him to save you. Would you like him to die?”
Tears welled up in her dark eyes, rimmed the edges of her lashes. Thomas thought about the first time he’d been with her and she’d smiled up at him through those lashes and told him that she didn’t use cosmetics because they were naturally that way. The tears spilled over the edges of her eyelids, trailed down her cheeks and flattened out in the a slug-trail of slick wetness. “I want him to die,” she said.
The boy went slack against the chair; his blood crept through the white of the bandage and the white of his shirt, and red carnation flowers bloomed across his abdomen.
Alice, naked and new, stood up straight. Her fingers traced the contours of his name on her body; they seemed to move independent of her. He stared at her; the blueish spot alongside her ribs where her veins showed through, the softness of her white shoulders, the dark, heart-shaped cusp of her pubis. Thomas could remember when she, that flesh, those bones, hair, eyelashes, sweet breath and pink lips, was the only thing he wanted in the whole world.
“I want him to die,” Alice said again.
Florence nodded. “You can put your dress back on now, sweetie.” Alice nodded and gathered up her clothing, pulling her shift over her head as Jerome guided her out the door. Jerome paused once in the door; looked to Florence, as if for direction. Florence inclined her head gravely towards the open door and the hallways behind it. Jerome shut the door behind him.
When they were gone, when Florence and the boy were alone once again, she drew close to him, tugged the chair gently out of his hands until he tumbled to the floor. He made a weak and sighing sound, with his fingers pulling restlessly at the fringe of carpet. “I won’t...” Thomas said, “I won’t.... I won’t ever do it again.”
Florence moved the boy’s chin with the toe of her boot until he was staring hopeless up at her.
For the first time he’d seen, there was something of sadness, something of horror in her sweet and sharp face. When she spoke, it was so soft, it was like a prayer, like grief. “I know that you won’t, honey,” she said.
That night, when Florence brought Miss Em her supper and her needle, she did not tell her how things had gone with the DeRoss boy, and Miss Em didn’t ask. Florence left the old woman in a narcotic stupor and, that night, she started another set of ledgers. Ones she wouldn’t show to Mr. Witting and Officer Clark.
When she was done, she took Miss Em’s flowers out of the vase in the window and her daguerreotypes off the desk. She put them deep in a desk drawer and marveled at the cleanness, the newness, of the space before her.
Florence moved out on to the landing, Miss Em’s dead flowers still in one fist. She stood at the top of the staircase and looked down; yellow lamplight lapped at her like a foamy tide. She could hear the girls laughing, the rustling of their gowns. From up there, it felt as though, if she could simply stretch her arms wide enough, she could enfold the whole of them.
Copyright © 2012 Nicole M. Taylor
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Nicole M. Taylor is a freelance writer and copy editor, recently relocated to
Los Angeles. She likes alphabetizing things and looking at pictures of bewildered kittens. She bloggerates at www.nicolemtaylor.com/blog/.
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COVER ART
“Lost Citadel,” by Jonas De Ro
Jonas De Ro is a Belgian digital artist specializing in concept art and photography. He also has experience in animation, visual effects, and sound design. He has worked on commercials and music videos and is currently a concept artist for the upcoming science-fiction movie Jupiter Ascending, directed by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix). Visit his website to view a selection of his works..
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1066
Published by Firkin Press,
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Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press
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