She could abandon him; she could walk away and never look back. Abigail was capricious. Given a chance, she would run after some imagined Heathcliff and forget to return, leave him to rot in his own house. He stopped mid-stride and held the limp thing out in his arms. The head tipped brokenly to one side, pale face wearing the sheen of fine porcelain, sightlessly gazing over his shoulder, through the walls and away to the far horizon where Heathcliff awaited her.
The doll was the most abhorrent thing he had ever touched. Greyson threw it away from him. It collapsed and clattered across the floor, limbs crooked in ways that no living body could ever manage. Three years of his life on this lifeless device that would steal Abigail away from him. He scrambled for a hammer or a saw or any other implement on the table. She would never be able to walk away from him. He would never let her leave.
The saw would do. He cracked the legs, splinted the wood in rough strokes. It did not yield easily under his hands; he cut gouges, threw the saw aside, bent the legs with the hammer and stomped on the wounds until the hardwood snapped and the cloth ripped.
Shavings covered the floor, two severed stumps stuck out from under the carefully layered petticoats. He stood and brushed his coat up, glanced around the room with sudden dread. Idiot, idiot! He’d worked so hard and ruined it. He took up the hammer again and smashed the mirrors, too, so that Abigail couldn’t see him. If they didn’t break when he swung at them he pried them off the wall and tossed them facings-down onto the floor. Every creak made him nervous; the house settling, or Abigail? A mouse in the wall, or his wife come to ask what was wrong? She wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t understand.
The locket burned. The room creaked. A misty form, a woman’s shadow, wavered in the heart of the room. Her visage stared out from every mirror shard. Greyson dropped the saw.
“It was an accident,” he said, stepping backwards. Wood crunched under his feet. “The legs were too frail. I’ll just have to remake them. It won’t take long, my dear.”
“And the mirrors?” she hissed. He could hear her, see her lips move in her reflections, all the little shattered pieces, fragments of Abigail. Anger congealed her form. If only there were more amicable conditions. “You claim you love me,” her voice echoed, a thin whisper that filled the room like old spiderwebs. “Heathcliff would never betray his love so.” Her reflection reached down and picked up the saw.
“As I recall, he could, and he did,” Greyson said, and then regretted his words.
In the mirror, Abigail struck him across the face with the saw.
In the mirror, Greyson readjusted his glasses, ignoring the warm rivulet that crawled down his cheek. “Also, Heathcliff is fictional.”
“Fictional!” A rising wail accompanied the word. “I love you, I love you, and this is how you repay me?”
“Swear you’ll never leave me,” Greyson said. “Because you care so deeply. Isn’t that right?”
“Why won’t you join me in death? I asked you even before you proposed to me, when you were just a student of the occult and I a lost shade in that depository. You could have joined me then and none of this would have happened. How can you claim to love me?” She grew closer with every word, skeletal, rotting. His beautiful wife. Anger made her vile, and his revulsion made him guilty. She was right; he should be able to love her no matter her petty faults, no matter the situation. And he could, if she would pay attention to him instead of that damned novel. “You teach me now how cruel you’ve been—cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart?”
“Stop quoting that infernal book at me!” Greyson yelled back, throwing out his hands. “And you—how can you claim to love me? All you ever profess is your obsession with Heathcliff, with never a thought for me. Me, your husband! I’ve done everything for you. I carry pieces of your bloody book around next to my heart, for God’s sake! But soon enough you’ll have nought but a statue to love! Is that steadfast enough?!”
“You broke my body,” she said sadly, so sadly, but at least they were her own words. “You gave it to me, then you take it all away. I wish I could hold you until we both were dead.” The fragmented remains of her skeleton reached out, grabbed him around the throat, before melting away completely.
And then came the sudden pain, crippling needles and the razor edges of knives. Every clock in the house rang out, a clamor that drowned Greyson’s cry even to his own ears.
Greyson tore the locket off and threw it across the room as far as his shaking hands could manage. Abigail shrieked, and her presence left him. Chasing the locket. Maybe there was a God after all and this was Greyson’s last reprieve. He sat gasping until the pain subsided some, then staggered across the room, ripped the door open, and stepped through it without looking at his destination. Didn’t matter, as long as it was as far away as possible. It wasn’t abandonment, or if it was, she had made the first move away.
He slammed the door behind him and then sank to his knees. He was facing the ocean at night, some unwitting person’s unlocked beach house at his back. It was too cloudy and dark for stars. Abigail was trying to kill him. Abigail was honestly trying to murder him. After all the sacrifices he had made for her, ungrateful bitch, after all those decades they’d lived together.
Greyson forced himself up and picked his way slowly, unsteadily, across the idiot’s property and down to the sound of crashing waves. High tide, low tide, who cared? It wasn’t as if he were capable of drowning.
When the sand got damp and his boots sunk into the ground, he stopped and lay down, and stared up at the moon’s silhouette shifting through the clouds. She should understand that he couldn’t just let her leave. What if she decided not to come back?
What if she decided not to take him back?
He lay there in the mud until dawn, ruining his suit in the salt water, contemplating how many pretty seashells would purchase Abigail’s renewed affection, when some fool spotted his body and approached. He didn’t look up when he heard a voice.
“Hey, are you all right?” A Yankee accent; a young man.
“I’m fine,” Greyson muttered back. “Waiting for the end of the world.”
The man leaned over, then stepped back. “I’ll get help,” the man said, puzzlement all over his face, before rushing back into the house.
Like Hell he’d wait around. Once the man was back inside, Greyson rolled to his feet, dripping wet, and walked to the house. He opened the door to another locale where he could sulk in peace.
It would have been much simpler if he had just died. They would be together in Heaven or in Hell, or to wander the earth forever as shades until Armageddon came. He wanted to see the end, the War to truly end all wars, but to be without Abigail was another sort of end, a worse one, an empty gouge in his chest that left him listless. He wandered for weeks, aimlessly, ticking off the days in his mind. From city to city; no matter how many people crowded the streets, he was alone.
Greyson thought of Abigail in the house, waiting. Did she miss him? Would she hate him when he returned, growing angrier and hungrier by the moment?
Of course she would forgive him. She had to. Who else loved her, who else did she love? Anyone she may have had a chance to love had become dust long ago; now it was just she and he and her damnable beloved book, rotting in the house with her. He would have to be presentable, though. He cleaned himself up in his radial apartment in Paris, washed and shaved and changed his suit.
He opened a door in Paris and stepped back though to his study. All but one of the doors in the house yawned open, exposing their nails, their empty portals into adjacent rooms. Useless to him. An opened door could not be opened again until closed, and so could not take him back outside. A trap, most likely. Nothing left to do but fall for her again. He shut the door carefully behind himself and then called out cheerfully, “Abigail, I’m home!”
Nothing. He sighed and stepped into the room, towards the locket which still lay untouched on the floor where he had thrown it weeks a
go. Beside it lay what remained of the doll, hand stretched out as if it were reaching for the locket. The air in the study stilled.
Abigail was here, waiting, watching him. Forgiving him, he hoped. “I missed you,” Greyson said. The doll stirred.
What little light there was winked out. The air thickened; the room became stuffy, muggy, difficult to breathe. It stank like mildew and sludge dredged up from the bottom of the Thames. Abigail appeared before him, eyes glittering like exposed bone deep in their sockets, soaked, so solid that silt and water dripped from her hair and clothes and pooled on the floor around her reflections.
“How dare you step foot in this house again,” she said. “You promised me, you promised, and you broke the promise and its legs and then abandoned me. I hate you.”
“It was an accident.”
“Why even pretend I didn’t see you?! I see everything you do!”
“Then you’ll see how I’ve been heartbroken and wandering the Earth looking for trinkets to appease you with. I was afraid that you would leave me.”
“Yet you arrive empty-handed," Abigail spat. She was hardly transparent. Solid as flesh. Her voice carried well in the thick air.
“I thought you might forgive me simply because you also missed me.”
She fixed him with a hollow glare, reached for him with thin fingers. He would not back away this time. Greyson strode forward; the doll dragged itself upright to meet him, and he knelt, kissed her, twined his hands into her hair. It was just the doll’s body, but wasn’t this what he had built it for? In the reflections fragmented across the floor it was Abigail herself who embraced him, who returned the kiss, deeply, hungrily. She dug her fingers into his back. Her hair and her brine-soaked dress dampened his suit.
For a moment he thought that in her lust she might have forgiven him, until the pressure blossomed into pain. Greyson tried to pull away, but she didn’t loosen her grip, just dug in deeper. She’d tricked him. Stabbed in the back by his own desperation, perhaps by a sliver from one of the mirrors. Pathetic. Struggling would just deepen the wound.
She pressed his head to her shoulder and murmured something like the strain of a lullaby, the same words that he had whispered to the doll.
“Abigail, please forgive me,” he said, lying limp in her embrace.
“I’ll forgive you," she promised. Her cold hand stroked his cheek. “I’ll forgive you very soon.”
“If you mean that you’ll forgive me when I die, I’ll take this chance to remind you that I can’t, not even for you. I would in a heartbeat, I swear, if I could, but I was young and foolish once, you know.”
“Are you scared? You talk so much when you’re scared.”
“Of course not. I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“I wouldn’t,” she agreed, and in what would have been the same breath for anyone living, said, “Offer me your heart.”
“You have my heart, darling. You always have.”
“No. Your heart.” Her fingers trailed down to rest over his chest.
“Really?” How could she say that after all he’d done for her? “Really, I need that to circulate blood through my decrepit body. Do you know how long it will take me to heal from that? Months at the least—” She made some small movement that sent pain down his side and he gasped. “If you’re just going to leave me bleeding on the floor, Abigail, please, I’ll bring you someone else’s heart. Please, Abigail.”
“I don’t want anyone else’s heart.” She unbuttoned his vest, slid her cold fingers against his skin. “I realized, when you were gone. What’s been missing, what I want. Only you.”
“Heathcliff,” he said. “I’ll bring you Heathcliff’s heart.”
“He doesn’t exist, darling. You keep telling me that. But it doesn’t matter, because you love me more than Heathcliff ever loved his dear Catherine, don’t you? There’s no use for the book or the doll, any of that. I want your love to fill me. Don’t you want that, too?” She was pleading, the hunger turned to desperation turned on him. Inevitably. He couldn’t leave her to suffer, never let her cry alone without respite. What was one more little sacrifice, to ensure that she wouldn’t leave him?
“Of course I do,” Greyson said. What was the use of struggling? It was true. He closed his eyes, pressed his face against Abigail’s damp collar. “And if I give you this, will you never leave me?”
“I will never leave you. I keep all my promises.”
Of course she had to make one last dig at him. He smiled crookedly. “Ah. I’ll even make the first cut for you.”
“Oh, my love, you don’t need to.” Abigail lifted his chin slightly and kissed him. She held him still, drawing out the caress even as she cut him open, even as she dug into his chest. It hurt. He gripped her tighter, but it wasn’t as painful as he had feared. His flesh was clay; no doubt the nerves had hardened and died. Blood and sediment pooled on the floor over his shoes, mixing with her river water. No matter. The suit was already long past ruin.
Greyson clutched her in his tight embrace until she held his barely-beating heart in her hands. She knelt down with him, laid him on the floor, and lifted his heart to her lips and took a tentative bite.
He hoped it was the sweetest meat she ever tasted.
***
Greyson woke lying on the ground like Abigail’s broken doll. Abigail sat over his body. He had to squint to focus on her. Her figure seemed odd; she was dressed loosely in his clothes, his glasses tucked neatly into the waistcoat breast-pocket. She fitted together small brass springs and gears and pipes. Though she was by his side, he could only conjure up the vague memories of affection. Take my heart, and all my love for you, darling. Dried blood made his skin sticky. The room smelled like wet earth and rot.
“I suppose I didn’t need it after all,” he said, through his parched throat. “Maybe you’ll have more use for it.” He laughed until it turned to coughing, a hollow grating noise, the dying strikes of a wound-down clock, and lifted a hand to probe at the wound in his chest. All the warmth had drained out of him, down into a distant well that he could not draw from.
“Hush, darling Greyson,” Abigail said, and traced his lips with her fingertips. She was as warm as life and love, save for the cool band of the wedding ring. The locket’s bare chain dangled from her neck. “Lie still. I’m building you a new heart, to tick away the seconds until the world ends. I burnt the book, dear. Only your love sustains us.” She sprinkled damp ash among the workings. Though he tried, Greyson could not bring himself to care.
A FRIEND, THE SPIDER
Caitlin Hoffman
She used to watch spiders dance and zoom and play around with their webs, making skirts out of them and entertaining each other at parties. She used to watch their pinchers click with a funny sort of arachnid laughter at minuscule jokes she could not understand.
Then those nasty pills came, and tried to stomp out all the spiders.
Every once in a while, she could hear their clicking again, their delicate tiptoeing across an empty dance floor, reminiscent of times and parties long past. Sometimes they would lean into her ear, tickling her epidermis. With their fangs curled into a juicy smile, they’d whisper,
“Come play with me!”
She’d reach out to grab them, but then the pills would come stomping in with their big, ugly boots. Full of nasty dyes and suspicious substances, they would boom, boom, boom, and stomp, stomp, stomp, making all the spiders scatter away. The pills would smile grimly, having done their duty, and she would be left alone again.
She didn’t understand why everyone hated the spiders. They were nice to her, and they played with her when everyone else told her to go away. Why couldn’t she have friends like everyone else did? The spiders were the only ones who had never abandoned her, even in the darkest hours. And then the evil men with red eyes and white gloves told her the spiders made her sick. They strapped her down and fed her things that hurt her belly and made her lips go numb, and soon the pills were doing nightly check
s inside her brain, checking the corners for spiders.
Every night, when the pills were hitting her hard on the head, telling her to go to sleep, she would start to cry, wondering why the bad men had to suffocate the last beautiful part of her.
The spiders became scarce. They would squeal in fright, whisper warnings to their brethren of the nasty pills and their ominous ways. Quietly, they escaped her ears, full of tearful goodbyes. She begged them not to leave her, but all were too afraid to stay. They were refugees, not soldiers.
All except one.
He would hide in the toolbox of her brain when the pills came in to do their work. Their flashlights would almost catch the tips of his scruffy hair, but God and guile would save him. He scuffled awkwardly throughout the empty cabinets in her mind. Nearly all had been cleared by the pills; the pills had been determined to establish cleanliness and vacancy. He tiptoed past the armed guards and slipped down into her eye socket, and there, while she mumbled prayers and choked out tears, he dangled down to her cheek and tapped on her.
“Psst!” he whispered urgently.
She gasped at the noise, and eyed him. For the first time in the midst of those barren, white walls, she smiled.
“I thought you’d all gone!”
“Everyone but me! I’m still here.”
The spider dawdled along her fingertips, kissing each one with politeness and delicacy. She giggled; her fingers were ticklish.
“I hid in the toolbox,” he explained to her. “The pills don’t ever look there.”
She thought of the ugly circles with their bright blue jackets and nasty green hats, and made a face. Their taste still chalked up her lips, stole her dreams, and she hated it.
“You’ll stay?”
“Promise.”
The spider nuzzled her nose, then hopped back into her brain before the hairy-armed woman with her stretchy white gloves came in to stab her with needles.
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