She was ice cold and weighed about as much as a handful of air. She lay on me, and her kiss was colder than deep space, hotter than lightning. It numbed me from the center of my skull outward until my skin felt only her will. Her eagerness to die. No, to be killed. That lust for inflicted death.
That’s what scared me.
I struggled then. My hands came up to grip her throat. Squeezing was easier than letting her go. I twisted at her as if trying to pull her head off. I snarled and bit at her breasts. Her nipples made my tongue burn the way a pepper does. When I bit down it was like eating snow. My teeth left no mark on her. I swallowed empty cold.
My cock hardened in transubstantiation, and she freed it. She slithered onto me and I rose to meet her. I tried to split her. I hammered upward like a lumberjack racing to chop down a tree, then rolled on top of her. I pinned her, rage and lust brimming.
Inside she was that weird mix of cold and hot. It spurred me to more exertion even as my fists began hammering at her face and shoulders. Each punch felt solid but left no mark.
When I came my semen evaporated into wisps of grey smoke that wormed into the air above us. I wanted to cry.
Nothing I did hurt her in any way that I could see. I thought about that for a long time, and finally I had to tell her I did not know how to kill her.
“No one ever does,” she said. “And yet you’ll do it. You’ll see.” She snuggled into a fetal position, a faint smile making her lips look kissable.
I was afraid to nod off but exhaustion tore at me. I let myself doze only after stoking the fire as high as I dared. I used my blanket but shivered anyway.
She slept beside me, changing positions now and then. She was so still and quiet between bursts of movement that each twitch startled me. Unless she moved, I began to forget she was there. She still glowed faintly.
When I woke it was bright and silent. She was not there that I could sense. I pissed on my fire’s embers and went outside to find a white world of snow. It looked pretty. It looked pure. It glowed in a healthy way.
I walked out to the main road and waited for the plows to come along. One did by late afternoon, and the crew gave me a ride to the next town. I remember passing a wreck and thinking, I’ll bet there’s a Cadillac under that snow mound. I asked what was known about the wreck. “Was it a vintage Caddy?”
The snow plow driver assured me it was a Ford 150, and no one had been killed in it. “Juss kids out rammin’ around, skidded off, couldn’t get their daddy’s truck out uh the ditch.”
Sounded about right, I thought.
“Any women killed around here lately?”
“What, with this here storm? Nah, ain’t been since that one over toward Dayton. Seen her with my own two eyes, yessir, what a damn mess. Big fat woman, I’ll tell ya, wheel about went clean through ‘er. Hadda pry her off with one uh them there jaws uh life things.”
Well, that wasn’t it.
I asked him about that little abandoned church in the woods, expecting to hear it had burned down years before. Probably I was still thinking in terms of stories I’d heard.
“Oh that? Yeah, old chapel, some reverend built it when times was good, then his congregation drifted off the way they do and he left, what? Oh, year or two back. Pity, nice little place. Always thought about I might could salvage some uh that stuff from there. Some uh that there wood’s rare now. Why you ast?”
“No reason. Just saw it and wondered about it.”
So that wasn’t it, either.
We got to town, and I thanked him. He took a twenty from me without a blink or word, and I walked to a coffee shop. I never did find out where Clara Mitchell came from, or what her story was. Had business of my own to attend to. Had places to get away from and things I’d done to shrug off.
I know you want this to end with the snow plow driving off the road into the ditch with Clara Mitchell’s ghost, or whatever it was, showing up to lead me to perdition, but, I’m sorry, that’s not what happened. All that happened I already told you.
It was just one more thing for me to get as far from as I can. Before I end up in the ditch, too.
Or maybe I’m already there. Maybe I’m just like Clara Mitchell but don’t know it. Sure seems like I’ve been on the road a long time. You don’t suppose the better part of a man can end up in the ditch long before the rest of him, do you? Like maybe I’m mostly dead inside already and just waiting for my person shape to give up the running and fall off the road.
Or get knocked off. Either way, that would finish it.
Unless it wouldn’t.
That’s why the ditch scares the hell out of me.
It’s where I left my wife and kids, too. I don’t want them to hate me for running away. I tell myself I went for help. What I really did was run from their blood. Their smashed bodies.
Maybe Clara Mitchell is the woman we hit head-on when I drifted into the wrong lane while trying to find a radio station. Maybe I put her in the ditch, too. Maybe I’m responsible for helping them all die.
All I know for sure is I’ve got to keep moving.
Sara Taylor on Diana Wynne Jones's
“The Master”
When I was fifteen I picked up Diana Wynne Jones’s collection of stories Unexpected Magic while between novels. The dreamlike quality and uncertainty of “The Master” made my skin crawl almost as much as the unknown woman with her throat ripped out that the narrator describes at the beginning of the story. I love the duplicity of Jones’s characters, the dichotomy between what is thought and what is said, and what is said and what is done.
◙◙◙
Practical Necromancy
Sara Taylor
When we got to the viewing, Mallory threw herself into Mom’s coffin. Alice tried to pull her out without causing a scene, but she held on by handfuls of Mom’s hair, shrieking and crying. She kicked Alice off and clung to the tie that Dad never wore when he was alive, until the sexton and two of our cousins pried her off and carried her into the back.
No one said anything. They were all too stunned, and the undertaker rushed forward to neaten our parents in their caskets. Mallory sobbed the whole way home. When I went to get her for dinner, I found she’d gathered up everything of Mom’s and Dad’s and brought it to her room—the photo albums from when they were dating, the wedding pictures from the wall in the hallway, the hairbrush from their bureau, Dad’s razor, and Mom’s bath towel with the brown splotches from where she’d cut herself shaving her legs the day they had the accident. Mallory lit candles everywhere, more than there’d been at the church, but even though she was still crying, she’d stopped screaming. I just told her to blow them out before she came down.
After dinner, she wanted to visit their graves, but Alice said no. It was too far, too dark, and she was too young. She didn’t start screaming again, so we weren’t surprised when she tried to climb out the bathroom window when she went for her pre-bed shower. I figured we should have let her go, but you can’t argue with Alice. When I heard the front door creak open around eleven p.m., I just rolled over and went back to sleep.
Mallory’s eyes were red in the morning, and there was dirt under her fingernails and caked into the creases on her hands and knees. I asked what she’d been up to, but she didn’t say anything.
She’d stopped talking completely.
I thanked god for it, at first. She did her chores when I told her to, she ate what we gave her, and she didn’t pitch a fit when I borrowed my favorite skirts back. It was what I’d always wanted, a generally clean house without any fighting. Alice was busy with getting control of all the paperwork my parents had left behind, and when she wasn’t doing that she was busy with her boyfriend Doug, who had more or less moved in the night we got the bad news.
But then I started feeling cheated. This wasn’t my Mallory—my water-balloons full of cherry Jell-O, bed sheet tents in the hallway, baby frogs in the bathtub, ice cream for breakfast Mallory. I mentioned it to Alice one afternoon, while she
was hunkered down in a drift of blue-inked insurance forms on the dining room table.
“There’s something wrong with Mal,” I said.
“If she’s mouthing off too much, smack her and give her extra chores," she answered without looking up.
“That’s just it. She isn’t mouthing off.”
“Hide the chocolate chips, then. She only behaves when she’s sneaking junk and doesn’t want to get caught.” She signed her name, flipped the form over, and picked up the next one.
“That’s the weird thing. She’s not sneaking junk. This afternoon I gave her chicken and broccoli for lunch, and she just ate it. No complaining, no bargaining, no faces even.”
“Maybe she’s finally growing up,” Alice said.
“This isn’t growing up. This is turning into a robot!” I shouted. “This is like Stepford Wives! This is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers! Something is wrong with our little sister!”
“Annie," she finally looked at me, “what does it mean that when Mal finally starts acting her age instead of her shoe size, you freak out? Maybe she feels like Mom and Dad’s death was her fault and by eating chicken she can atone for it. If she’s eating chicken without fighting you, just thank god and keep feeding her chicken.”
She went back to her forms, so I left her alone.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Every time I drifted off I snapped back awake to lie there, not quite conscious, listening to sounds just on the edge of my hearing. Around two a.m. I woke up all the way, annoyed as hell. Doug was sleeping over. I assumed what I was hearing was their fault, and I rolled out of bed to go and give them a piece of my mind.
The hallway was dark, so I almost walked into Mallory before I saw her. She was standing outside her door, perfectly silent and eyes wide open. I jumped back and shrieked a little when I realized she was there.
“Mal, for the love of Christ, why are you up?” I hissed. She tilted her chin up so she could stare right at me, and the ambient light was just enough to make her eyes shine in the dark. She didn’t say a word.
Doug was suddenly behind her. He must have come out when he heard me scream.
“She’s probably sleepwalking, Annie,” he said, and put his hands on her shoulders. “I’ll take her back to her room. What are you doing awake?”
“I heard things, and I figured it was you guys. How do you know it’s sleepwalking? She’s never done it before.”
“You three have been through a lot recently. It’s probably just the wind; the creaking woke Alice up earlier.” He turned Mallory by her shoulders and gently pushed her back towards her bedroom. I went back to my own bed, but I was almost asleep before I realized that I hadn’t heard him go back to Alice’s room.
◙
The next morning things were almost too normal. Alice was at the dining room table surrounded by drifts of paper when I came down, and when I asked, she said Mal had finished her chores early and gone down to Fisher’s Lake. I ate some eggs, found my bathing suit, and wrestled a bike out of the garden shed so I could follow her.
It was a nice day, the kind of clear-blue-sky day you only get a dozen or so of a year. The lake was down a long dirt road from our house, about two miles, and the gravel made a pleasant crunchy sound under the tires.
As I coasted down the last long hill, I scanned the lake, but couldn’t see Mallory at all. There was no one else either; it wasn’t hot enough yet. Then I caught sight of her, laid out on a towel just above the waterline. She had borrowed one of Alice’s bathing suits, an excuse of a bikini, and was soaking in the sun. I dropped my bike next to hers and wandered down.
“What are you doing up here?” I asked. She squinted at me, but said nothing. “You always said that tanning was for bimbos and idiots who want skin cancer.” Still nothing, not even a smile. “Come on. Let’s get in the water.”
I reached down to help her up, but she ignored my hand and flipped over onto her stomach.
“Suit yourself. Alice is going to be pissed if you borrowed her bikini without asking.” I dropped my towel next to her, took off my clothes, and set off for the center of the lake.
Once the bottom dropped out from under me I stopped, swung my legs up, and floated on my back with the sun turning the inside of my closed eyelids red. Water filled my ears and strange sounds filled my head, echoes and thrums that I could pretend were whales and fish swimming hundreds of feet below me.
A churning broke through the underwater sounds, and I bobbed up to see Mal paddling to me through the clear tea-colored water. Her hair spread out behind her like a curly cape, drifting on the surface.
“Changed your mind then?” I asked. She put a hand on either shoulder and pushed me under.
Okay, I’d been as annoying as possible lately, trying to get a response out of her, so I guess I deserved the dunking. The bottom was two yards down, and when my feet touched, I tried to bob back up. She kept her hands on my shoulders, and my feet churned up soft silt, sliding and sinking into the bottom, but not getting enough resistance to push off. I whacked at her arm, trying to signal my surrender, but she ignored the tap-out. Lungs burning, I flipped back-first towards the lake bottom, dragging her with me. She let go the moment I pulled her head under water, clearly not ready for it. I kicked away, gathered my feet under me, and shot to the surface.
“What the hell was that?” I screamed when I’d gotten my breath back. She was treading water awkwardly, gasping and scraping hair out of her face. “Were you trying to drown me?”
She didn’t answer.
I swam back to shore, dried off, and pulled my clothes on. As I picked my bike up, I looked back. Mallory was standing at the edge of the lake. Alice wouldn’t like me leaving her, but she was old enough to take care of herself.
“You’re back quick,” Alice observed, as I slammed into the house.
“Mallory tried to drown me,” I barked, and stalked to the kitchen.
“What did you do to her?”
“Me? Nothing! And she’s wearing your bathing suit.” I pulled a tub of yogurt out of the fridge. “She’s been acting weird, Alice. You can’t ignore it any more. There’s something wrong with her."
“I don’t blame her. There’ve been times I’ve wanted to drown you myself. We’re not going to recover on your schedule, Annie. Not everything is clear-cut and controllable. Leave her alone.”
When Mal got back, Alice gave her an earful about taking the bikini without asking, but Mal just stood there and stared at the floor until Alice gave up. I’d taken a book into the living room. Mal plunked down on the chair across from me and stared at its cover. I ignored her until it got to be annoying.
“You can apologize any time,” I said.
She didn’t answer, just sat.
“This whole silence thing is getting annoying, Mal. If you’re practicing to be a nun, great, start talking and I’ll help you fill out the paperwork. If you’re trying to drive me crazy, congratulations, you’ve succeeded. If you’re psychologically distressed and this is a desperate, uncontrollable cry for help, blink twice and we’ll get you a shrink.” She didn’t even grin at that, so I went back to my book. I could feel her staring at it still. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I wondered if we were about to have a repeat of the lake, Othello style with one of the couch pillows. When I reached the end of the chapter, I closed the book and found my shoes.
“I’m walking into town. Want anything?” I asked Alice.
“Nope. But ask Mallory if she wants to go. It might cheer her up.”
“Wanna go?” I called back to the living room. She was looking at me still, but of course, she said nothing. “Nah, she doesn’t feel like it,” I told Alice.
We live in the woods a couple of miles outside of town, just far enough for privacy but close enough to be able to walk it when we’re really out of milk. As I set off down the driveway, I felt a weight on my shoulders. When I looked back, Mallory was at her bedroom window, watching me. I broke into a jog. Just to get there
faster, I told myself.
◙
That night I fell asleep almost as soon as I turned off the light, but around three a.m. I jolted awake, completely conscious all at once, like jumping into cold water.
Mallory was standing over me.
She hadn’t made a sound, but I’d woken up anyway. Her hair was hanging down on either side of her face like vines, and her eyes were glinting. A dark shadow, looming over my bed. Watching me sleep.
I choked on my own air.
“The hell you doing?” I hissed at her.
She didn’t move.
“Go back to bed and stop creeping me out.”
Her hand rose, brushed up my shoulder towards my neck. I noticed then what I hadn’t noticed in the lake: her skin was ice cold, soft and dead-feeling. I shuddered.
“Get the hell out of my room!” I jumped out of bed and shoved her backwards towards the door. She went over with a soft thud: Doug cushioned her fall. He had been standing in the hallway, outside my room.
“Here,” I said, and pulled her up. Doug looked at me blankly. I felt a chill run through my gut. I stepped around him and helped Mallory to her feet, guiding her back to her room. When I turned around he was still there, staring at me. His gaze followed me as I went around him to get to my own room.
“Go to bed, dude. She’ll be all right.” I closed and locked the door and leaned there, listening, until I heard his footsteps go slowly down the hall to Alice’s room. As I drifted off to sleep I thought I heard, again, a door creaking open, but I couldn’t tell whose it was.
◙
The next morning I told Alice about it, while she was slumped over coffee. Doug left for work at half past six every morning, so if I wanted to catch her alone, I just waited until I heard his car pull out of the driveway.
“Did Doug tell you about last night?” I asked her.
“What happened last night?” She had a vague, puffy look without makeup, and the steam rising off her mug made her squint.
Deep Cuts Page 6