It came as no surprise when the housekeeper reported Moira missing. Run away without a word of notice, the woman said with a sniff, hinting that nothing more could have been expected of such a flighty, Irish light-skirt. I hoped against hope that she was wrong. Perhaps Moira would return, or perhaps she would be found with her lover, the neighbor’s burly servant. I knew now she’d never been mine.
Days passed before we received any information. In a rare conspiracy, my mother and I lied to Caroline, telling my sister that Moira had taken a position at the Claremont Hotel. Caroline, who still paled at the mention of Julia’s name, didn’t need to know that Moira had fallen from a steamboat and drowned in the Hudson River.
July bled into August. Caroline exchanged mourning dresses for a black veil on her bonnet. My mother hired a new maid, who was thick and ugly.
***
I hated my mother’s insipid gatherings, but when she planned a morning party in early September I was relieved at her re-entrance into society. Caroline had been cooped in isolation too long. My mother arranged for extra servants and sent out gilt-edged invitations.
On the eve of the party I walked with my sister past the summerhouse. Caroline waggled her fingers at the pink-streaked sky, as if to caress the last rays of sunshine. “It’ll be a lovely party,” she said. “I look forward to seeing Mrs. Cheltenham and her daughters again.”
“And her son?”
Caroline’s blush made me chuckle. I held out a flat basket heaped with roses. She snipped another blossom and laid it on the pile. Their heavy perfume reminded me of funerals.
“Why not cut some of these white ones?”
Caroline looked at the flowers I indicated with my foot. “Petunias? They would droop before the iced cups are served!” She giggled. “It’s a good thing no one expects you to do anything more than tie your own cravat.”
I bent and kissed her cheek, delighted by the teasing note in her voice. “You’ll be the belle of the party, my little wren.”
“And you, in your new brocade waistcoat, will be the handsomest man,” she said, hugging my arm. Her lacy chemisette tickled, raising an icy wave of goose bumps across my skin.
“Gracious!” Caroline pointed to a bumblebee that hovered protectively over the basket of flowers. “I do believe he thinks these roses are still his!” Her voice was rich with laughter, but her brown eyes had turned green and solemn.
A roaring noise filled my ears. I backed away, shaking my head in denial. My boot heel caught. I tilted backwards and fell.
I came to as the servants carried me into the house. When I tried to sit up, nausea clamped my belly. “Don’t move, dearest,” Caroline said. She pressed me back. “Lay him on the settee. Fetch a cold compress and my mother’s smelling salts. Hurry!”
“I’m fine,” I said, patting her hand.
Caroline knelt beside me. “William, you hit your head on the sundial. Stay still. Mama’s coming.” Her voice cracked.
I prodded through jumbled memories. In the candlelight, dust motes wheeled like a swarm of bees. My sister’s hair smelled of roses.
Caroline’s breath caught in a tiny squeak. I eased my grip on her fingers. “Stay with me,” I begged. Eventually sleep would claim me, but I resolved to remain by Caroline’s side throughout. The death-woman would have to pry my sister from my grasp.
Caroline laid a cold cloth on my forehead. Hooves clattered down the drive: a servant, sent to fetch the doctor. The mere act of blinking sent daggers through my forehead. I clutched my sister’s arm. “Don’t leave, Carrie. Promise.”
“You two, take him to his room.” My mother’s voice sounded impatient. Her fan closed with a snap. “Caroline! Get off the floor. Straighten your shoulders, or I’ll pin a piece of prickly holly round your neck.”
My sister flinched. I heaved an arm across her back as sparks of light spun before my eyes. She rose, dragging me up to a half-sitting position.
“William…” Caroline’s voice held all the worry that my mother’s lacked.
“I’m fine. I can walk.” Leaning heavily on two servants, I reeled up the stairs to my room.
The walls moved in a lopsided circle around me. The new maid tapped on the door and brought in a tray laden with cold beef, ale and a few early apples.
“The doctor will be here shortly, sir.” She lit a lantern near the window. “Will there be anything else?”
I shook my head and promptly regretted it. My stomach lurched. The girl stumped out. I had no appetite, but I began to peel an apple, hoping this mundane activity would clear my thoughts.
The death-woman had marked my sister. I had to stop her. I had to save Caroline.
White-hot hammers thudded behind my eyes in rhythm with my mind’s voice. Stop. Her. Save. Caroline.
The winged messenger had come. The lady of death would come, too. I couldn’t stay awake forever.
Save. Caroline.
The silver-handled fruit knife winked in the lantern light.
Could I trade my life for Caroline’s? My head ached so, I couldn’t be sure if the idea was brilliant or ludicrous.
My sister would be coming to check on me. The doctor would arrive at any moment. I had to get out of the house.
I blew out the lantern. Darkness came as an abrupt relief. The hammers in my head slowed.
Clenching the knife in one hand and the lantern in the other, I crept from my room and down the servants’ staircase. Only the rooms in the front of the house were lit. I slipped out a back door and through the yard. The steps of the summerhouse seemed to undulate beneath my feet.
I unfastened my left cuff. My arm was nothing but dark against darkness. Fumbling, I pulled a friction match from the cylindrical holder on the lantern handle and lit the wick.
I winced and turned down the wick until only a flicker of flame remained, then lifted the lantern and perched it on the rail behind my bench.
People died when the death-woman took my vision, leaving me her green eyes in exchange. If I were gone, Caroline would be safe.
The knife felt smooth and cool in my hand. Long minutes passed. I placed the blade against my wrist.
A huge moth blundered into the lantern with an acrid sizzle. The lantern spat out a flaming piece of the moth’s body, which landed on my wrist. I yelped. My hand jerked back. My shoulder crashed against the base of the lantern. It bounced off a beam and tilted forward.
Scalding pain sloshed across my face. Fire raced down my sleeve. I screamed and rolled across the floor, seeing only brightness, feeling only the excruciating torment. My hands curled in agony as I scrubbed at the boiling lamp oil on my cheeks.
I slapped at my face and arms, unable to tell if I were still on fire. I couldn’t open my eyes. The scorching light I saw wouldn’t disappear. Finally, over the sound of my own screams, I heard other voices.
***
Time lost all meaning. Caroline told me it had been three days, then a week, then two. She changed my bandages and promised to stay with me always.
I remembered knocking the lantern over. I remembered going out to the summerhouse. After a long time, I remembered why. The doctor told my mother I must have wandered out of the house in a concussion-induced stupor. I didn’t correct him.
The pain gradually ebbed. The skin on my face felt slick and tight. Patches of my eyelashes and eyebrows began to grow back. Caroline assured me I was as handsome as ever. My mother avoided me; I could only consider that a blessing.
On a cold October evening, the clatter of sleet announced the first winter storm. The repairs to the parlor fireplace had proved shoddy, and choking smoke billowed from the hearth. I lay on the new settee. Caroline, in a rocking chair at my side, read aloud from the Bible.
I yawned. Since the accident, I’d found myself drifting off at the oddest times.
Caroline’s warm fingers stroked my cheek. “Rest, William. I’ll sing you to sleep.”
I groped for a cushion, then tucked it beneath my head. Caroline’s skirt rustled.
A trace of fruit scent in the wood smoke told me the servants had pruned the apple trees.
“Sweet dreams, dearest brother.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. In my dreams I was still able to see: the glossy ringlets of my sister’s hair, the yellow flare of a candle, the fringe swaying on my mother’s blue silk parasol. I saw the death-woman, too. When her eyes sought mine, green to brown, I felt all the old pleasure, but the colors never changed.
I’d escaped. A blind man’s dreams were sweet, indeed.
Caroline’s voice rose over the tinkling of the pianoforte.
“Ah! may the wind at midnight,
That bloweth from the sea,
Chant mildly, softly, sweetly,
A requiem for me.”
THE BUSINESS OF HERMAN LACZKO
Mark Beech
George King was, as I recall, devastated when news of Herman Laczko’s failing health reached him on the upstairs floor of King Publishing. The old actor had made King a lot of money over the years, after all, and more still rested on the imminent release of the unimaginatively titled Herman Laczko’s Yet More Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. King had already been pushing to get the book on catalogue before the end of the quarter, both to capitalize on the current BBC2 season of Laczko’s old horror movies and also his recent, many would say excruciating, cameo in a bad heavy metal video. With regard to the latter, King had got it into his head he might be able to tap into a new teen market, whilst remaining deaf to our inferences that Iron Gauntlet fans were not generally known for their bookishness. In any case, King’s plans were up in the air.
King was old-school publishing even for back then (this being 1984, or ’85, I forget). He’d emerged, along with this ramshackle publishing house, out of some squalid fringe of the post-war paperback market, never altogether kicking the habit of turning out austerity-era books with lurid covers and nasty yellowish pages of a paper they don’t even print free newspapers on anymore. There was, I suppose, in my mind a shabby old English cosiness about him and his set-up; it was funny. I liked King—I did, then—as a boss and just as some guy who shambled about the offices most of the day in a thirty-year-old suit, handing out cigarettes like they were sweets. But this business with Herman Laczko! Things were never going to be the same after all that.
It was a Friday afternoon, and most of us were getting ready for the pub when King called us all in. He was standing at the end of his desk staring intently into a sheet of notes and doodles he had been working on most of the day. I was junior copywriter; I didn’t even normally see the interior of his office.
He began by muttering, as if as a matter of obligation, his sorrow at Laczko’s hospitalisation, though clearly his heart wasn’t altogether in it, nor was his mind on such sentiment. When that was done with, he slumped back on his chair, causing a miniature avalanche of cigarette ash to go cascading down his lapel.
“Guys,” he said, “sad though this is for me—sadder still no doubt for Laczko’s family and many fans—we are now as a company burdened with the matter of where to go with this new book…”
Several hands shot up, and were promptly ignored.
“I think,” he went on with fake thoughtfulness, “it’s fair to assume that Laczko’s popularity isn’t likely to wane in the immediate aftermath of his… sad passing, and that any publication associated with him appearing immediately thereafter will yield very healthy sales. That said, I have been caught out in the past. Let me just say that Herman Laczko was—sorry, is—amongst the most ingenuous and decent fellows I’ve had the pleasure to meet, but we are entirely reliant upon what posterity has to say, and it only takes one frustrated little Fleet Street hack to go crapping in the man’s still-warm grave for the sake of a few salable headlines to put a big shitty spanner in our works! And listen, I can do without seven thousand untouchable books clogging the place up…”
And so it went on as, with scrupulous thoroughness and thorough tactlessness, King related to the room the many cold equations over which his day had been spent, and how in the end he had reached his conclusion.
“I do not believe in the case of Herman Laczko there is any unnecessary risk,” he said, “in going ahead with the planned publication, posthumously. However, I propose for the sake of business we pull out all the stops and get it out there and on the shelves by the beginning of next month.”
There was a lot of muttering around the room.
“Any questions?”
Again hands went up, again they were ignored. King had already got up and was making for the coat stand.
“Good. Then who fancies a pint?”
The fact was, and everyone knew this, that the Laczko book was already running behind schedule. A list of its contents had just been proposed—the usual mix of dusty old ghost stories from Wakefield, Benson, James et al. with a few medium-quality modern rejects from The Pan Books of Horror thrown in; in short, nothing we had to pay more than peanuts for—but it was all the licensing stuff that took the time, and that hadn’t even been looked into yet. With previous volumes we had had a contractual obligation to run all the contents past Laczko himself for approval, but while King had no doubt taken into account that the old actor’s passing would negate the necessity for this particular delay, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wondering what other corners King was about to cut for the sake of “business” and a contract with a man who’d almost certainly be dead by the time his new book was published.
For the moment, however, all anyone seemed concerned about was opening time, and after a pint or two I’m not sure I had so many scruples about where King was going with the Laczko book either. I’d never been under any illusions that Laczko had ever taken any real interest in the books King put out under his name, though they were published in his name, with introductions ghost-written for him, and cut-outs of his face at the foot of each garish cover—or his face as it had looked in his cinematic heyday, at least. That had been some time ago now, and it that wasn’t much of a heyday in my opinion.
“A cut-price Karloff,” I once heard him called. That was about it. He certainly had the look; an angularity of the features that lent itself to spooky underlighting. But he had appeared on the scene too late to benefit from black and white or to interest Hollywood in its golden age, and the washed-out soft focus of the sorts of sub-Hammer sub-Amicus British horror movies in which he had finally made his name—The Curse of Anubis, Gateway to Hell, Vampire Carnivale and such—afforded him little prestige.
How he and King had got together was it seemed lost in the mists of the mid-seventies. Probably at some point Laczko had started to fear for his future in an ailing British film industry and had sought out a fittingly shabby publisher as part of a retirement plan. King was that, all right! Laczko had sold him the use of his name and image for a few percent of anything he could make with it, and I suppose both men had done equally well out of it so far.
So I was standing in the pub lavatories that evening thinking about that “cut-price Karloff” dig when King came in.
“Martin,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. King?”
“Please, finish off! I was hoping I’d get a quick private word.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sure you know that McCulloch is caught up at the moment with this Crimson Velvet imprint. It can’t be helped.”
“No, I know.”
“Well, I know you’ve been after something a little meatier than ad copy for a while, and right now I need someone—someone reliable—to muddle together something for the introduction to this new Laczko book.”
“Well, I’m…” I can’t have seemed very enthusiastic.
“Look,” King interrupted. “It’s really not as bad as all that. A ‘welcome to my latest collection of gruesome and ghastly tales,’ a few made-up recollections from Laczko’s days on the film sets. Seven-hundred fifty words max. You’ve seen the other books…”
I nodded.
“But—hmm—this isn’t
really the time, is it? I just wanted to catch you and let you know. We’ll talk in the week. Get some ideas coming.”
I’m not sure I replied at all.
“Congratulations,” he said before he left me. “It’s a good thing!”
A good thing! So I was his accomplice!
***
I picked up more beers on my way home that evening; a prickly-cold November dusk was descending in fake eldritch colours over the town, setting the roofs and treetops alight. I dreamt of those colours all through that night, flickering and juddering like old film, replete with cue marks and hairs in the gate.
Next day I discovered I’d written down and crossed out: “Life inspires more dread than death.” And under that: “Welcome to my latest collection of gruesome and ghastly tales…”
***
Against expectations, Herman Laczko hung onto life until the early hours of the following Monday morning. There was nothing less than a celebratory air at the offices when I arrived. George King was already with his editorial team, and they remained shut away together for most of the day, their laughter winding down the stairwells. I sat at my desk staring emptily at the keys of my typewriter, thinking on how little sleep King must have managed that weekend, how he must have paced, how often he must have called the hospital in fear of being told that Laczko had miraculously stabilised. And I thought of the relief he must now have felt in the certainty that at last the actor was beyond interfering with his plans for the new volume, as well as any other Laczko projects King might have in mind for the future.
It wasn’t quite that simple, however.
***
In the days which followed it became clear that some unspoken other concern had entered the proceedings. King stayed late most nights, appearing to have lost his legendary passion for after-work pub visits, though I was told there was still sometimes the vague whiff of spilled whiskey about his office.
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