The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  The owl that watched Ujváry János bury the girl is perched on the stone balustrade. The doors to the balcony have been left standing open. Draperies billow in the freezing wind.

  CLOSE UP: Owl’s round face. It blinks several times, and the bird’s eyes flash an iridescent red-gold.

  The Countess sits in her bedchamber, in that enormous chair with its six savage feet. A wolf pelt lies draped across her lap, emptied of its wolf. Like a dragon, the Countess breathes steam. She holds a wooden cross in her shaking hands.

  “Tell the cats to come to me,” she says, uttering the prayer hardly above a whisper. There is no need to raise her voice; all gods and angels must surely have good ears. “And hasten them,” she continues, “to bite the hearts of my enemies and all who would do me harm. Let them rip to pieces and bite again and again the heart of my foes. And guard Erzsébet from all evil. O Quam Misericors est Deus, Pius et Justus.”

  Elizabeth was raised a Calvinist, and her devout mother, Anna, saw that she attended a fine Protestant school in Erdöd. She was taught mathematics and learned to write and speak Greek, German, Slovak, and Latin. She learned Latin prayers against the demons and the night.

  “ O Quam Misericors est Deus. Justus et Paciens, ” she whispers, though she’s shivering so badly that her teeth have begun to chatter and the words no longer come easily. They fall from her lips like stones. Or rotten fruit. Or lies. She cringes in her chair, and gazes intently towards the billowing, diaphanous drapes and the night and balcony beyond them. A shadow slips into the room, moving across the floor like spilled oil. The drapes part as if they have a will all their own (they were pulled to the sides with hooks and nylon fishing line, you’ve read), and the gypsy girl steps into the room. She is entirely nude, and her tawny body and black hair are caked with the earth of her abandoned grave. There are feathers caught in her hair, and a few drift from her shoulders to lie on the floor at her feet. She is bathed in moonlight, as cliché as that may sound. She has the iridescent eyes of an owl. The girl’s face is the very picture of sorrow.

  “Why did you bury me, Mother?”

  “You were dead…”

  The girl takes a step nearer the Countess. “I was so cold down there. You cannot ever imagine anything even half so cold as the deadlands.” The Countess clutches her wood cross. She is shaking, near tears. “You cannot be here. I said the prayers Anna taught me.”

  The girl has moved very near the chair now. She is close enough that she could reach out and stroke Elizabeth’s pale cheek, if she wished to do so.

  “The cats aren’t coming, Mother. Her prayer was no more than any other prayer. Just pretty words against that which has never had cause to fear pretty words.”

  “The cats aren’t coming,” the Countess whispers, and the cross slips from her fingers.

  The gypsy child reaches out and strokes Elizabeth’s pale cheek. The girl’s short nails are broken and caked with dirt. “It doesn’t matter, Mother, because I’m here. What need have you of cats, when your daughter has come to keep you safe?”

  The Countess looks up at the girl, who seems to have grown four or five inches taller since entering the room. “You are my daughter?” Elizabeth asks, the question a mouthful of fog.

  “I am,” the girl replies, kneeling to gently kiss the Countess’ right cheek. “I have many mothers, as I have many daughters of my own. I watch over them all. I hold them to me and keep them safe.”

  “I’ve lost my mind,” the Countess whispers, “long, long ago, I lost my mind.” She hesitantly raises her left hand, brushing back the girl’s filthy, matted hair, dislodging another feather. The Countess looks like an old woman. All traces of the youth she clung to with such ferocity have left her face, and her eyes have grown cloudy. “I am a madwoman.”

  “It makes no difference,” the gypsy girl replies.

  “Anna lied to me.”

  “Let that go, Mother. Let it all go. There are things I would show you. Wondrous things.”

  “I thought she loved me.”

  “She is a sorceress, Mother, and an inconstant lover. But I am true. And you’ll need no other’s love but mine.”

  The movie’s score has dwindled to a slow smattering of piano notes, a bow drawn slowly, nimbly across the string of a cello. A hint of flute. The Countess whispers, “I called to the King of Cats.”

  The girl answers, “Cats rarely ever come when called. And certainly not ninety all at once.”

  And the brown girl leans forward, her lips pressed to the pale Countess’ right ear. Whatever she says, it’s nothing you can make out from your seat, from your side of the silver mirror. The gypsy girl kisses the Countess on the forehead.

  “I’m so very tired.”

  “Shhhhh, Mother. I know. It’s okay. You can rest now.”

  The Countess asks, “Who are you.”

  “I am the peace at the end of all things.”

  EXT. COURTYARD BELOW COUNTESS’ BALCONY. MORNING.

  The body of Elizabeth Báthory lies shattered on the flagstones, her face and clothes a mask of frozen blood. Fresh snow is falling on her corpse. A number of noisy crows surround the body. No music now, only the wind and the birds.

  FADE TO BLACK: ROLL CREDITS. THE END.

  As always, you don’t leave your seat until the credits are finished and the curtain has swept shut again, hiding the screen from view. As always, you’ve made no notes, preferring to rely on your memories.

  You follow the aisle to the auditorium doors and step out into the almost deserted lobby. The lights seem painfully bright. You hurry to the restroom. When you’re finished, you wash your hands, dry them, then spend almost an entire minute staring at your face in the mirror above the sink.

  Outside, it’s started to rain, and you wish you’d brought an umbrella.

  The Crane Method

  by Ian R. MacLeod

  Despite the elegiac tone of his many portrayals in the popular and academic press, few people who knew Professor Crane actually liked him. He had, it was true, advanced the study of Anglo Saxon history further than anyone in the modern age. He had, it was also true, overseen the expansion and development of Welbeck College until it could hold its head—and indeed, raise its new brick tower—high over the more antique and established seats of leaning in Cambridge. His personal manner and appearance were also impeccable. It was often said that there was something of the medical man about him—a tang of formaldehyde, perhaps—and that he studied people through those heavy glasses much in the way a physician might study a patient. Because of his extreme slimness and height and the furled umbrella he often affected to carry with him he also, it was frequently muttered, although rarely within his earshot, possessed a remarkable resemblance to the bird with which he shared his name, right down to that patient yet predatory stoop.

  Professor Matthias Crane was intent upon nothing other than the advancement of his college and his field of learning, and both of those objectives coincided conveniently with the advancement of Professor Crane himself. Students and post-graduates whose avenue of research looked particularly promising were invited up for tea and seed cake in his large and comfortable study, and then perhaps a little more Amontillado than they were used to drinking, although he himself always abstained. They would find themselves quizzed and encouraged and given tips and suggestions to advance their chosen project. Most often, these tips proved extraordinarily useful, or happened to link in with the work which another fellow was pursuing, which had also been discussed on some afternoon sat beside the crackling applewood of Professor Crane’s ever-convivial hearth. There would then be a subsequent period of dazzled excitement and discovery, which was always followed by dazed disbelief, and then a more permanent sense of betrayal. Professor Crane’s output of books, lectures, essays and pamphlets was legendary. It was often said that they issued forth with a profligacy which could scarcely be the work of just one man. In this, there was an element of truth.

  The sponsors of Welbeck College’s n
ew halls and exhibits found themselves similarly used and then discarded, although in ways about which it was impossible to complain. There was always that occasion when the professor had perhaps bent a rule, studiously ignored a small personal infraction or performed some other act of vaguely underhand generosity which at the time had seemed purely altruistic, but which was nevertheless mentioned once or twice afterwards with what came to be seen as chilling casualness. Many a night’s sleep—indeed, many a promising career and marriage—had been wrecked on the remembered cold appraisal of Professor Crane’s gaze.

  No-one was at all surprised when the professor disappeared for a few months during the summer of 1928. It had always been his habit to head off alone on his researches with little if any word about where he was going, and usually to return burdened with some literal or figurative treasure. The Saltfleetby Codex which had brought a new understanding of the Christianisation of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms, and the reattribution of the previously ignored carvings in the Suffolk church of Beck, both owed their origins to such excursions. So did many of the finest items in the small but exquisite college museum. All, of course, came with full and detailed provenance. But there was always a sense with each new wonder of a conjurer producing a fresh rabbit out of a hat. Those who knew Professor Crane better than they probably wished speculated that he had some secret horde from which all of these discoveries somehow originated.

  At any rate, his delayed return in the autumn of 1928 was taken as nothing more than the prelude to the announcement of a particularly dramatic breakthrough in Anglo Saxon studies. There was certainly no sense of any concern for the much esteemed professor. He was one of those people who were thought to be inextinguishable.

  Richard Talbot, BA and MA (Hons), recently appointed Junior Assistant Tutor and Keeper of the Keys of the Welbeck Museum, was at least as unconcerned by Professor Crane’s absence as anyone. He had grown up with a love of history, and especially that vague yet glittering era between the fall of Classical Rome and the Norman Conquest, which bordered on obsession. It was a love which had absorbed his childhood and concerned his stolid parents back in Penge, and which had been fuelled in no small part by the works of Mathias Crane. To become an undergraduate at the great professor’s college and then to attend his famous lectures was the fulfilment of a dream. To be invited into the professor’s private confidence on the new method of indexing and cataloguing on which he was working for his master’s thesis was beyond his wildest imaginings. Also beyond imagining was how Professor Crane could then describe the same method to his fellow academics at a symposium held shortly after as if it was something entirely of his own invention.

  Richard was livid. Richard was desolate. Richard felt totally betrayed. But who could he complain to, and where could he go? Specialists in the cataloguing of Anglo-Saxon artefacts were hardly in great demand. The only other obvious refuge lay in Oxford, where Professor FreethlyChillmorn had long been reduced to academic impotence and chronic alcoholism by his shambling attempts to compete with Professor Crane. So the long and damning letter to The Journal Of Early English Studies, with copies to as many fellow academics as he could think of, and another to the Times, remained undrafted, and he found that he attracted many a sympathetic smile in the college library or the snug of the Eagle and Child. He had been—well, there was no real word for it because no one had ever spoken up… But whatever had been done to him by Professor Crane had been done before and would be done again. Meanwhile, he would have to swallow his pride and quietly put aside his stolen thesis and scrabble around for another less promising subject.

  So it was that Richard Talbot gained his MA through wearily reworking the existing evidence regarding Saxon agricultural practice. He was then offered a junior tutorship for his pains. He of course had no choice but to accept, and—and this was the final insult—was granted a new role in reorganising the records, displays and artefacts at the college museum on the basis of a fabulous new system which was universally described as the Crane Method.

  It was now almost three weeks into term, Cambridge was basking in the warmth of an Indian summer, and Professor Crane had still not returned. Welbeck College, it had to be admitted, was a somewhat happier, if rather more aimless, place without him. Meanwhile, Professor Meecham fulfilled the role of Acting Temporary Head of Department, although the man was far too good-natured to be anything more than a makeweight.

  To Richard, this was all a matter of some frustration. What the college needed to apply itself to, he decided, was the careful grooming of a proper successor. After all, Professor Crane couldn’t carry on forever, even when he did make his inevitable and irritatingly discovery-laden return from wherever he had been hiding this long summer. The college should be looking for a younger man capable of publishing ground-breaking works of great technical brilliance, but also with a popular touch which could reach the best-seller lists. The sort of man who could be equally at home supervising a summer dig in some windy field in East Anglia (although not actually doing any digging) as dining in the finest clubs in London amongst the great and famous. The sort of man whose face would fit well in the national papers and whom the undergraduates would look up to as a paragon of erudition, elegance and self-effacing charm. The sort of man, indeed, whom Richard Talbot believed he saw gazing back at him as he shaved each morning. Still youthful by outward appearance, of course. But with those high cheekbones and darkly solemn eyes. A fine physique, as well; he was especially proud of his long-fingered hands, with nails which he kept well-manicured and pared despite the occasional demands of his curating work. A voice which was made for compelling command. He was even known to possess a fine light tenor which he occasionally employed for the singing of popular ballads in certain back bars.

  It was most, most frustrating. All, however, was not lost. Fortune favoured the brave, and time the young. As Richard sat in his tiny office in the Welbeck Museum on a stiflingly warm afternoon in early October, he still firmly believed that, Professor Crane notwithstanding, his moment would come. Although this particular day, it had to be admitted, hadn’t been particularly propitious. You might have expected at least a few visitors to want to view the five high-ceilinged rooms which displayed the major items of the collection he curated, but today not a single one had appeared. Nor had he received any recent letters of enquiry from other researchers, or invitations to speak at some or other academic convention. Whilst the telephone remained frustratingly silent on his desk.

  At about a quarter to four, he told his secretary Mrs Marbish—a wizened old bird—that she might as well go home. Then he slid the museum sign to CLOSED and locked in the main door with the key he kept on the chain of his watch fob. Of course, curating a museum certainly wasn’t merely about visitors. Work to be done, always work to be done… Beyond a door marked REPOSITORY, a near endless array of potshards laid in dusty boxes on even dustier shelves awaited his cataloguing according to the so-called Crane Method. But, he told himself as he wandered amid the glass cases in the sun-threaded gloom, there were consolations…

  There it all was: gold and bronze and silver, gleaming. A woman’s locket found still with a strand of her auburn hair. A small iron blade, bereft of its bone handle, but nevertheless beautifully engraved. And here… One of his favourite objects: a particularly large and fine example of the broadbladed weapon characteristic of the finest Saxon workmanship, with the hilt’s jewelling almost intact and the blade decorated in exquisite silver and gold pattern-weld. Nearly perfect. So nearly perfect, in fact, that Richard often took the sword out to execute a few parrying and stabbing motions.

  He opened the cabinet with another of his keys. Holding this weapon, it wasn’t so very hard to imagine himself a brave Saxon warrior in full gear of battle. What foes would withstand me, he thought as the blade sliced the air like a thickened gleam of sunlight. What lands I might have conquered, what maidens bedded, what battles fought! He was about to the replace the sword in its cabinet when he noticed something whic
h he had never noticed before. The pommel, sadly, had been missing since the item was first catalogued by one of Richard’s predecessors back in the 1700s, but now it seemed to him that there might actually be something curled inside the hilt’s hollowed metal core. Strange indeed, but Richard’s heart only started racing when he used a pair of fine tweezers to draw the object out.

  That evening in the murmurous pipefug warmth of the college refectory, as he spooned out beer pie, soggy potatoes and boiled beetroot, Richard Talbot kept himself more than usually to himself. Then, he scurried up to his rooms. Only there, with his door locked and his hands slightly trembling, did he proceed to make a full and proper examination of his find. It was, as he had realised immediately, a scrap of extremely antique parchment, written in the kind of very early Old English which even the Venerable Bede would have struggled to understand.

  The parchment referred to a warrior named Cynewald, who the authorities agreed had most probably been King of Mercia in the period between Cnebba and Creado in or around the year of Our Lord 550, although the documentation then current was thin to say the least. Confirmation of Cynewald’s existence in this hidden scrap of funerary prose was in itself a significant find. But the scrap then went on to refer to his burial in a place which it described as being at Fllotweyton, and beside a burna, or clear stream, near to the brym or surf, which presumably meant sea. A quick check of a modern atlas confirmed that a small village named Flotterton still existed in Lincolnshire, which would have been a significant part of the Kingdom of Mercia at this time, and also that the village was, indeed, very close to the sea. Richard barely needed to refer to the standard textbooks to know that the place had never been associated with the discovery of any significant Saxon remains. At least, not until now.

  As to the final portion of text which could be deciphered before the partial document faded, the cursing of a burial site was, for the Saxons, fairly standard fare. Rather disappointingly, instead of some fearsome tomb-guarding dragon, this one mentioned a lesser creature from the Anglo-Saxon beasterie known as a ketta, which was basically little more than a shadowy cat. The actual curse seemed odd—at least, it did to Richard, who was no specialist in Anglo Saxon linguistics. It said that the first person to disturb the tomb would find that the ketta took gild nebbhad. Gild being their concept of value, and nebbhad meaning something like identity. Which struck Richard as a peculiarly abstract curse, considering how brutal the Saxons usually were.