Jane’s heart stopped when she heard a voice upstairs. Chris calling for her. It wouldn’t do for him to see her here. Not at all. She dashed to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the basement hallway. She had barely locked the door and hidden the key in her blouse before he came down the staircase.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, striding over to give her a hug. She cringed away from his touch. Sensing something wrong, he took her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said. She knew Chris could see through her lie—he could read her like a book—but he let it slide.
He took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Remember that you can tell me anything. Anything at all. I love you, Jane.” Somehow, in a way Jane couldn’t explain, his love stung more than a slap would have. She backed out of his grasp.
Chris looked over Jane’s shoulder at the door behind her. “What’s in there?” he asked. “In all the time we’ve been together I’ve still never gone into that room.”
It can end now, she thought. For a split second she considered telling Chris everything, letting him take care of it. But only for a split second.
“Nothing!” She felt like a stuck record, repeating the same lie over and over again. “Nothing important, anyway.”
He raised his eyebrows at her, but again didn’t press the issue. Instead, he shrugged, took her by the hand and began to lead her toward the staircase, up to the main part of the house. “Jane dearest,” he said, in a soft voice, “do you love me?”
She barked nervous, mechanical laughter. “What a silly question! Of course I love you!”
He nodded. There was no hint of irony in his expression. “Just checking.”
Back in the dirty cube of a room, the fly landed on Eddie’s face and crawled into the empty socket that used to contain his right eye. His rotten lips and cheeks were peeled away from yellowed teeth, stretching the lower half of his face in a permanent grin. He sat still, grinning at nothing and nobody under the flickering light, his withered hand, still wearing his wedding ring, hanging limp at his side.
She’d be back. He’d wait.
SWEET DREAMS
Fran Walker
I watched my cousin Julia descend the steps of the summerhouse, her wide skirts swaying like a church bell at a funeral. A butterfly drifted up from a peony bush and fluttered before Julia’s face. A chill stroked my arms.
I knew she would be dead within days.
My mother appeared at my elbow, her crinoline rustling. “Julia, darling,” she called. “Come meet your cousin Billy.”
“William,” I said, though I knew my mother would ignore it. Her fan rapped against my shoulder. I obediently rose.
Julia strolled across the fresh-cropped lawn. Her dress was cut low enough to display a curving bosom. Rosy lips with a similar curve begged to be kissed. For a moment, her blue eyes seemed to darken to green, and her blonde curls shimmered with a silvery light. I wanted to scream aloud.
It was too late. The death-woman had shown her face.
“A pleasure,” I said to Julia, lifting my hat.
She inclined her head. “Cousin Billy.”
“William.” Would I ever stop having to say it?
“You’ll always be Billy to me,” Julia said. “My only real memory of you is when you asked me to dance at a holiday party. You couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and I suppose I was thirteen. You fell down the stairs and ripped the seams in your trousers clean through.”
“The infamous Christmas ball of 1846,” my mother said. “Billy made such a spectacle of himself!”
Julia and my mother shared a laugh, two adults enjoying a child’s peccadillo. Heat flared in my cheeks. Our age difference was still an unbridgeable gulf. Nineteen-year-old Julia prepared for her marriage bed, but I was no more a man at sixteen than I’d been at ten. When I turned nineteen, would they admit me to their ranks?
“Billy, did my aunt tell you?” Julia said. “We’ve decided to marry in October instead of January. I’m here to shop for my trousseau.”
The anger that had stabbed me melted in a heartbeat. My cousin wouldn’t live long enough to choose her clothes. I had seen the butterfly. I’d felt the sudden cold on my skin and seen in Julia’s face the death-woman’s green eyes and silver hair. Soon I would sleep. I would see my cousin, for the last time, through the clouded green of the death-woman’s eyes.
I followed my mother and Julia up the pebbled path lined with peach trees whose branches sagged with orange-yellow fruit. A profusion of flowers crowded up toward the white columns of the porch. June sunlight streamed through casement windows and across the parlor’s wood floor, bringing the scent of ripening peaches to mingle with the smell of beeswax.
My mother flicked her fingers at the downstairs maid. “Moira, we’ll take tea in here. Ask my daughter to join us.”
“Yes, ma’am." Moira bobbed a curtsey. I held the door open for her. She avoided my questioning look and skittered from the room.
I forced myself to sit down, my fingers picking at the horsehair cushions of the settee. If my mother and cousin had not been present I would have run after Moira. I would need her tonight, though I knew it was better not to arrange our rendezvous until the last minute. Too often Moira had not come to my bedchamber, explaining the next morning that she’d been given extra duties. Our housekeeper was a dour woman. I was sure she plotted to keep Moira locked away from me.
My sister Caroline came into the parlor and perched on a footstool near my feet. She offered Julia a shy smile, and myself a warmer one.
“Naturally, Julia, you don’t want to trust anything as important as your trousseau to some third-rate seamstress in Albany.” My mother rearranged her skirts. “New York City is, after all, the center of fashion. It’s a pity your dear mother couldn’t accompany you, but I quite understand her decision to nurse your brothers herself. The summer ague can be fatal.”
Julia’s eyes widened. “I didn’t think—Oh, I hope—”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” my mother said briskly. “They’re sturdy boys, just like Billy. Meanwhile, we have your trousseau to consider.”
My cousin’s smile returned. “Mama told me to be guided by you in all matters of taste, and to bring her back something pretty.”
“I am at your disposal, my dear.” The gleam in my mother’s eyes suggested that our household budget, as well as my uncle’s, would be ravaged over the next few weeks. She never seemed to consider that it was my money she spent so freely. But my uncle, who held my deceased father’s property and shipping business in trust for me, always supported my mother’s decisions.
Caroline murmured something about spoon bonnets. No one expected me to take part in a discussion of ladies’ fashions. My tea grew cold as my thoughts wandered.
I’d first seen the harbinger of death when I was twelve. I had watched my mother sob over my youngest sister’s bed while the doctor shook his head and murmured “influenza” in a grave voice. A wasp battered itself against the window with the same futility as my sister’s tortured breathing. I tiptoed forward and leaned over the bed. The cold crept down my neck and across my shoulders, despite my heavy woolen shirt.
The rounded cheeks and silky dark curls of my five-year-old sister melted away. Instead, I saw a woman’s green eyes watching me through a curtain of silvery hair. I cried out. My mother turned and slapped my face. I ran from the room, her angry screams echoing in my ears.
I woke the next morning flushed with pleasure. I didn’t remember having dreamt anything. I must have, though. With childish innocence I hugged the delight to myself, not thinking to wonder at its source, until our nursemaid told me my sister had died in the night. The pleasure turned to black ice in my belly and I vomited in my bed.
Now, at sixteen, I understood. It could not be coincidence. Too often I’d felt the chill when the lady’s winged messengers marked her victims, I who should notice insects no more t
han coal in a scuttle or fur on a cat. Each time a person—my baby sister, my nursemaid, my grandmother, or a chance-met woman—had for a moment taken on the face of the death-woman. Each time I’d been enchanted in my sleep by the lady with silver hair and leaf-green eyes. And each time, afterward, I’d attended a funeral or read a death-notice in the Herald.
I knew not why the lady had traded her eyes for mine. I assumed she needed to use my vision to make her kills. I’d watch the death-woman’s eyes turn to brown—my brown—while she showed me her victim, whom I would see through an emerald veil. The veil always blurred when I erupted in ecstasy.
Today, as the evening progressed, my anxiety grew. I paced my room while Julia and the others slept. I’d not seen Moira since teatime. I rang the servants’ quarters nearly every hour to request black coffee or tea, but each time it was brought by the housekeeper. I wilted under her grim scrutiny, and dared not ask her to send Moira.
Participating in the deaths of strangers had not jaded me as deeply as I’d feared. No matter how much pleasure the lady of death brought me in my dreams, I didn’t want to see her tonight. Sweet dreams, my mother had trilled as we retired for the night. My pretty cousin Julia deserved her own dreams.
Memories of the seductive death-woman battered my mind. I forced them away, dwelling instead on my previous meetings with Moira. Though she wouldn’t lie with me properly, citing both the sin and the danger, she would allow me to kiss and fondle her while her fingers closed around me in an escalating rhythm.
My weariness increased. Sometime near dawn I lay on my bed, allowing images of Julia to guide my hand until I shuddered with relief. Yet this, like my memories of Moira, seemed a pale imitation of the rapture the death-woman brought.
***
Breakfast found me bleary-eyed. The dull skies matched my mood. Thunder rumbled like the headache that pounded against my temples. The inclement weather suspended the proposed five-mile trip to the Marble Dry-Goods Palace on Broadway.
“Caroline, dearest, why don’t you entertain us?” My mother riffled through a stack of sheet music as my sister obediently moved to the pianoforte. “I’m sure Julia hasn’t heard this Stephen Foster ballad.”
Caroline sat on the polished mahogany bench.
“Our own little Jenny Lind,” my mother proclaimed, ignoring the blush that stained Caroline’s cheeks.
My sister’s fingers floated across the keys. Her voice soared over the clatter of rain against the windows.
“I would not die in Spring time
When all is bright around,
And fair young flowers are peeping
From out the silent ground.”
I fled the room without any pretense of an excuse.
Caroline found me in the dining room, my head pressed against the blue-striped wall covering. Her arm circled my waist.
“William, dearest, what’s wrong? Are you ill?”
“Just a headache.” I forced myself to smile. Exhaustion dragged at my muscles so that even the motion of my lips seemed slow. “Go back and sing, Carrie-wren.”
“Julia, please accept my apologies for Billy’s behavior.” My mother’s voice, strident as a banshee, shrilled through the house. “Children can be so trying.”
Julia murmured something indistinguishable.
“Have some more tea," my mother said. “And here is the most recent issue of the Godey’s Lady’s Book. If you will excuse me for just a moment, I’ll see what is keeping my daughter.”
“Mama’s angry.” Caroline’s eyes, the same soft brown as my own, swam with tears. But I knew her distress came as much from worry over me as fear of our mother.
I squeezed Caroline’s hand. “If you scamper back and finish your song, darling Carrie, she’ll only be angry with me. I don’t fret over her tantrums.”
“She’s coming!”
I steered Caroline towards the door, then hid myself behind the heavy curtains in the corner. Lightning crackled outside.
My knees sagged. I slumped to the floor. I would sit and rest for a minute, no more.
The smothering darkness wrapped around my face, pressing against my lips and eyelids. Familiar eyes locked on mine, leaching the color from my own, borrowing my vision. I saw Julia through the haze of the death-woman’s green eyes.
A reverberating boom brought me awake. I lurched forward. The curtains stroked my skin, silky as a dream-lover’s silver tresses. Rain drummed against the windows in a symphony of triumph. My groin felt pleasurably heavy, reminding me of my stolen hours with Moira.
I cursed and scrambled to my feet. Through my mother’s shrieks rose Caroline’s wails and the screams of the servants. I knew I’d not hear Julia’s voice among the cries. The death-woman had stolen my cousin as she had my sister, my grandmother, and all the others.
I did my best to take charge of the disaster.
A massive oak in the back garden had split, half its trunk still upright and distanced from the house as if disclaiming any responsibility. Caroline’s pianoforte lay in splinters. Moira and the cook’s assistant draped blankets over the shattered windows. Rain-slick oak leaves adorned Julia’s brow, a living wreath that made a mockery of her broken body. I flung a sheet over her.
I cursed my body for betraying me in sleep. I cursed dreams, the door through which the death-woman could steal my eyes and use them to take her victims.
Caroline took to her bed for a week, overcome. I arranged for Julia’s body to be returned by train to Albany and for the parlor to be repaired. Men came to cut down the damaged oak tree and cart it away. Guilt plucked at my belly when I touched the wooden box that contained my cousin’s remains.
***
In the weeks that followed, our lives turned inward. Caroline no longer sang or laughed. My mother remained impassive even when typhus stalked across the water from Staten Island and caused a panic in the city. The housekeeper changed the servants’ schedules, keeping them busy and paired off, so that I never had the opportunity to see Moira alone.
I rang for a servant on a day when the oppressive July heat had relented. I would order the barouche brought around and tempt Caroline out for a drive. Perhaps some fresh air would bring the roses back to my sister’s cheeks. I hoped for diversion as well; earlier that week the death-woman had taken the life of a neighbor child and left me in shameful ecstasy.
After waiting several minutes, I strolled down to the stables myself. The carriage house door stood open. Moira lay in the straw, her hair half-unbraided, her skirt bunched up. A man’s body, burly as a plow horse, lay over hers. His hips jerked up and down. My breathing came faster.
The man grunted. Moira’s eyelids fluttered as she clung to him, one foot sliding up to caress his calf.
My boot scraped a cobblestone. Moira squealed. The man turned his head.
“Master William!” Moira shoved at the man. The pair scrambled to their feet. Moira half-squatted while she pulled her skirt down.
I knew the fellow: a neighbor’s servant whom I’d noticed loitering around our house too often. Once or twice I’d even sent him off with a sharp word. Now he bent and rustled through the straw, then handed a pair of shoes to Moira. She slid them on her feet.
My mouth felt stuffed with candle-wax. I moved my lips, but no sound emerged. The man’s eyes flicked to my crotch and he murmured something to Moira.
Her gaze followed his. His hand rose, as if to hide a smile. I took a step forward, letting my anger at Moira’s betrayal divert me from the humiliation of my too-obvious arousal.
A dragonfly zoomed through the carriage house. Its wings fanned cold air across my wrist before it landed on a beam behind Moira’s head.
I snatched the dragonfly and crushed my fingers together. My hand felt empty. I unclenched my fist. Bits of the insect’s broken body trickled onto my boots.
Moira looked away. Her companion’s mouth curled in a sneer. “Killing a creepy-crawly ain’t enough to make a man, Master William,” he said. “Or should I say, ‘Master
Billy?’”
My fist cracked against his shoulder. He reeled backwards. Moira flapped her hands at him. He scrambled out the door.
Moira tugged at her bodice. “He didn’t mean nothing, Master William. You—you won’t be telling the mistress, will you?”
I deliberately paused for a long moment. “That depends.” She’d been mine long before he’d come into the neighborhood, yet she’d allowed that oaf everything she’d withheld from me. We would meet tonight, Moira and I, but it was her turn to do the asking.
I waited.
Her gaze lowered. “I’d best be getting back to my duties,” she said, turning away.
I grabbed her hand. She yelped. I tried to kiss her, but my mouth banged against her ear.
“You let him have you. Why not me?” I hated myself as soon as I’d asked the question.
“No, sir. He—he made me. I’m a good Catholic.”
I didn’t believe her. I grabbed her chin, as if by forcing her to look at me I could rouse her desire. Moira’s pretty face dissolved into that of a siren whose green eyes seemed to say, You are more my servant than this girl will ever be yours.
My arms fell woodenly to my sides. Moira ran from the carriage house.
Bile scorched my throat. For a long time I stayed there, slumped against the barouche. I’d destroyed the messenger. Would it be enough?
I longed to ask others if they loaned their vision to a death-woman. But I knew my mother would dismiss my dreams as childish fancy; the servants would only gossip. My classmates had whispered about their dreams of women, but those were water beside the rich, intoxicating burgundy of my own.
Caroline, whom I loved more than any other, did not mock me, but she shook her head in confusion when I asked about hearing voices in one’s mind. I dared say no more.
The next morning I woke at dawn, my bones tingling with fulfillment. The death-woman had danced through my dreams. I could not resist the pleasure she brought me, any more than I could resist her plundering my vision. She’d stolen my eyes again, turning mine jade for a brief time, showing me Moira through a green veil.
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