by Anthology
The lady didn’t answer with anger, instead putting on a polite mask of curiosity, her face inquisitive in the way small wrinkles formed around her eyes.
“Then who can? If not you, then who?”
“I need a lot of time, and effort…”
“And I can pay you for both.”
“Yes, ma’am, I understand, but…”
“What seems to be the problem?” The lady set down her glass, sitting up straight, adjusting a curl of her hair behind her pierced ear. “Miss, why do I have a feeling you’re failing on purpose? Avoiding my notes, refusing to give me any feedback on the assignment I ordered…this isn’t a game to me. You may be as fickle as a child, and very well, for you are still one, but I am not. If you don’t want my business, just say so, and I’ll send my assistant to search for it elsewhere.”
Rosie didn’t acknowledge the frustration building up, but when her fingers clenched too tight around the teacup she’d been handed just minutes before, suddenly too warm, too slippery, too uncomfortable, she broke.
“Then search for it elsewhere!” She threw the teacup at the wall, where it broke and scattered, staining the wallpaper, transforming the floorboards into a porcelain minefield. The lady’s hand rose to clutch her pearls, as if comfort lived in the texture of the string of masterpieces around her neck, the result of a hundred underwater jobs well done, never disturbed by the sensory overload of death, the entrails in trash bags discarded by the entrance, the dismayed looks on the faces of innocent young assistants. Her breakdown seemed out of place in the shadowy room, and she cradled her head in her hands, pressing fingers against the cane of her nose to keep from crying. “Forgive me. Forgive me, ma’am, I don’t know what got to me.”
“I will ask you again, Miss…” The lady touched Rosie’s bare wrist, then her fingers, until she had them trapped in her own. She pulled them out, as if relaxing the claws of some murderous animal, and carefully placed her own cup between them. Rosie let herself be maneuvered, herself a doll, but not much of a companion. “…what seems to be the problem? I don’t know about machines, or whatever else your work consists of. But I know about fear, and frustration, and if what you need is help coping, I might be able to offer it.”
“The only thing you can offer me is your understanding. What you’ve asked of me…it’s not possible.”
“I thought you made dolls for dreamers. I thought you could make anything work.”
“I’ve started to doubt that myself.”
“What is it that you don’t want to achieve, Miss? Fame? Fortune? Is my generosity not enough for you? Or do you pity me, like everybody else?”
“It’s nothing of the sort, ma’am, nothing. It’s just I haven’t found the solution to this particular problem yet, and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t do it until inspiration…until the solution comes to me.”
The lady bent forward, setting her sharp chin on the back of her folded hand.
“Is that the way you work? You sit and wait for inspiration to strike you? For the solutions to come to you? Doesn’t seem too productive to me, Miss. What if inspiration doesn’t feel like coming?”
“Then I disappoint my customer, ma’am.”
The lady laughed, looking away, sitting back in the chair, disturbing the blanket over her legs as she crossed them underneath the fabric. “And that shouldn’t ever be an option, should it? Lest disappointment be something they can’t handle.”
She dared look up at the woman, but her skin was perfect and powdered and her hair fell in ideal curls over her shoulder, and her earrings were long cascades of jewels that mingled between them, and she was so alluring that she couldn’t bear the thought of having disappointed her.
“If I may ask…why haven’t you considered escaping?”
The lady blinked, closed her eyes for a moment as the corner of her lips rose, cat-like, in a satisfied smile.
“Do you think me stupid, Miss?”
“No. No, not…not at all.”
“Nothing you can possibly say to me about my own life or condition will make more sense to me than what I can already say to myself. You don’t know me. I didn’t invite you here to give me life-changing advice.”
She stood. “You are correct. I will return to work.”
The lady let her walk away, a few tentative steps, before putting out her cigarette on the marble surface of the side table. She rose, and Rosie had never seen her stand—if not exactly tall, she looked ominous, wrapped in a dark shawl with only her claws for front clasps.
“Will you?”
“Yes. Yes, I will. I will try the best I can.”
The woman inched closer, running thin fingers through Rosie’s blonde locks. “And answer my notes this time, will you? I’m very interested in knowing how you work. Since I can’t…go out to see it myself.” She closed the distance between them, and Rosie felt herself freeze, until the lady planted a soft kiss on her jawline—then she melted. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to invite you to come work here until you’re done.”
It was a threat disguised with a kiss, and Rosie caught it somewhere in the air between the skin her lips had touched, and the fingers she brought up to trap their fading presence.
***
The solution came to her a few days later, after two hours of sleep and a cup of despicable tea, as she leaned on Theo’s silk-covered shoulder and coached him into painting a doll’s eye just right. She didn’t let him know, but she counted every minute, every second until he boxed the doll and announced he was leaving for its delivery. Like a dutiful wife standing guard by the window, following her undutiful husband’s footsteps until the nearest corner obscured him from view, she waited. And then, she flipped the sign. Dolls for dreamers, absolutely, but not always, not then.
She planned carefully, drew letters and diagrams, collected all the materials and contacts she would need to make it work. From the cash register, a heavy stash of bank notes. From behind the counter, her tool bag. She walked out a little after sunset, turned right in the direction of the shady inns and alleys where drug dealers and similar night crawlers made their living, and didn’t come back.
***
The doll was delivered by Rosie’s own hands—with the assistance of Theo’s and Aiden’s—to the infamous house of mirrors a few days later, two weeks, in an elaborate box remade from a white coffin. It was life-sized, as expected, as ordered, and wrapped in white tissue paper, thin as the wings of a cabbage butterfly.
It was brighter than usual inside the living room, and the lady awaited her small entourage standing by the nearly opaque white curtains, wrapped in a floral shawl. She looked over at the box, but didn’t let her face fall into any show of emotion.
“Do you bring me a dead man, Miss?”
Rosie felt like laughing, but Theo caught her eye—and he didn’t seem at all amused.
“I will explain everything once my helpers leave, ma’am.”
Helpers. The word seemed to linger over Theo’s shoulders, dripping like acid rain from his wavy hair. “Fine.” He gave the lady a small bow, she nodded in his direction, and then he was gone, with only Aiden and a slight suggestion of anger on his trail.
They were alone. Just the two of them, women from different walks of life, two different types of criminal. The mastermind and the wrecking ball. The wizard—perhaps the witch?—and the dragon. The lady walked forward, and Rosie half expected to hear killer heels on the floor boards, but no—she was barefoot, and her toenails were painted the same bloody shade as her finger nails.
“Shall we unwrap it, then?”
“Of course.” First the locks on the side of the coffin, then the layers and layers of tissue paper. It wasn’t a boy, that time, but a girl. A girl with long black hair that fell straight around her shoulders, small breasts and protruding hipbones. She—it, perhaps—came clothed in a two piece black suit, the jacket long and the neckline deep, deep enough to reveal the Y-shaped, hand-stitched incision that marred her chest. Rosie
was willing to admit defeat for how much she looked like Max, if only in the proud features—but when she sat up, after a little coaxing from Rosie’s part, she even seemed to move like him. Cautious, but full of unused potential. Built for carnage, first, and for love, later. Rosie helped her up and out of the box, careful not to strain muscles cold from lying in a tight space for too long. Her eyes were empty—they couldn’t be emptier if Rosie had pulled them out of their sockets and replaced them with glass spheres.
“Does it have a name, Miss V?”
“I haven’t named her, ma’am. I was expecting you would want to do it yourself.”
The lady stepped closer, blew into the doll’s eye. She blinked.
“Should it do that?”
Rosie had kept her fingers crossed. Hoped the lady wouldn’t ask questions she could not answer, because the answers had come while she’d been too artificially dazed, somewhere between Theo’s and Max’s apartments, to remember to take notes.
“She…. I mean, it…. Forgive me, ma’am…” She wasn’t yet good at extracting the humanity from the parts, from the skin and bone and skull and lips of the human who stood just inches from her, a face and body framed in black, tarnished only by a Y-shaped scar over the chest. “The shell is very much human. If you touch h- it, you will realize the skin feels warm, like a human’s would. The shell is human, and it works like a human’s, which means there will be some needs you will need to attend to. Think of it as recharging your companion—perpetual motion is still very much beyond my skill set.”
“How does this creature you offer me differ from a human, then?”
Rosie reached out, and touched the doll. Touched her, not it, running a finger upwards over the stitches. “It’s different here.” She let the finger rest on the doll’s forehead. “And here. The shell is human. The rest is as empty as it looks. And it’s yours to change, and create, and improve as you see fit. I’m sure it will suit your needs. Any changes you feel like making, on the outside or the inside, I will be more than happy to take care of.”
“Anything else I should know?”
No. No, most definitely not.
There was, after all, method to what others saw only as Rosie’s madness—but she had no interest in showing it to them.
***
The stitches came out ten days later. The doll served tea. Her name was Gemma, and she moved with the trained delicacy of a creature conscious of eyes lingering over her figure every second of the day, and probably the night.
***
You lied. -G
The note was simple, and it arrived four days later written in golden ink over pale pink, thick paper with a vague scent of roses. It deviated from every other note simply in the fact that it reached the shop tied to a box, a white box with gold locks filled with white tissue paper, thin as the wings of a cabbage butterfly. Inside, a kitchen knife, tainted red, and a bundle of paper stained just as dark.
She unwrapped it, and found someone’s heart in her hands.
Sam Fleming
http://www.ravenbait.com
She Gave her Heart, He Took Her Marrow(Short story)
by Sam Fleming
Apex Magazine, Issue 79, and Best of Apex Magazine Volume 1
Chancery hissed at the sudden pain of a splinter in her palm. She took a deep breath filled with the scent of dust and woodsap, and exhaled the hurt as steam to dissipate in the cold air.
"See? She's people," Hedron said. "People are a distraction. They always spoil everything, given a chance. You mustn't give them one." He bared his tiny, needle-sharp teeth, a distant storm glimmering behind his moonstone eyes.
"Kay's not people," Chancery said. "How do you know she's coming, anyway? You promised you'd stay away from the harbour." She put the dropped log on the stack at the back of the shed and pulled the splinter out with her teeth. It tasted of resin and woodlice.
Hedron took her hand and kissed it better. Spores cried like fading ghostly mice as they died.
"I promised I wouldn't go inside the fence and I haven't," he said. "One of ours was wandering along the road by the compound, and Kay was talking to the site manager just inside the gate."
He perched on the tree stump Chancery used as a platform for splitting the logs and ran fingers like knobbly twigs around the brim of his hat.
Chancery didn't like his hat. It was too big and sagged over his head in a floppy, shapeless mass of purple felt attracting dust, cobwebs, fluff, and stray hairs. Once a week or so, he went away for a few hours and came back with it clean. It stayed clean for a day or two at the most. He'd warned her not to touch. She wouldn't have tried anyway; looking at it made her bones restless and itchy.
He rubbed his fingertips together, sniffing them. They squeaked like soaped glass. A twist of hair fell from the hat and he herded it back with a cupped hand. "She brought chocolate." He offered no explanation as to how he knew this, but all their people had his eyes and ears. He told them what to do.
"Will she visit?"
"Would the Oilers care about cocoa content?"
"No."
"Then she'll be here tomorrow."
It had been a year since Kay's last visit, a year since the fight. Chancery couldn't manage the monthly trade with the Oilers without Hedron telling her what to say, and they didn't matter much. They were just people, interchangeable.
Kay wasn't.
Chancery's vision swum with panic. What if she said the wrong thing?
"She's not worth getting in a state over," Hedron said. "Think of all the things you could do with that chocolate." He stretched out his long, spider-thin legs and leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head. Dust spilled from his hat and returned as if it were sheep separated from a flock.
Chancery imagined bitter chocolate mousse with honeyed damsons, soufflé, and drowned cherries. She concentrated on the shape of the flavour and all the things that could slot into it, a jigsaw for her tongue, until her breathing settled and her heart stopped racing.
She placed the last three logs. "You just don't like her."
"She wants to ruin things, take you away. Of course I don't like her."
"Don't be stupid. Why would she want that?"
"Not because she loves you, no matter what she says." He kicked some of the bark that had fallen from the logs as Chancery split them.
She shook her head. "I'll make tea. We'll try the biscuits I made this morning."
Hedron slouched to his feet, hat brushing the shed roof, and stuffed his hands back inside his smock. "I'm going to check the goats."
"Fine." No point arguing if he was in a sulk.
Hedron had brought her to the farm after he found her. It was self-sufficient in all the ways that mattered, and the farmhouse kitchen alone was the size of the flat she had shared with Annabel; they hadn't been able to afford anything bigger. Back then, hardly anyone could.
Now, no one else wanted it.
***
It had happened suddenly. One day, everything was fine; the next, Annabel said she was leaving.
Annabel was the only one who had seen past the lack of eye contact, the silences that could last for days, the finicky obsessions and pedantry; the disability that wasn't enough to get Chancery support in a world where everyone was expected to pull their weight. The wasted talent. She was the only person since Chancery's mother died to make her feel safe and loved; the only one not to have been people.
She might as well have stabbed Chancery in the heart with a boning knife.
The world sublimated; standing at the kitchen window, Chancery could see everything trembling, crumbling around the edges. Furniture, grass, trees, birds, work tops, next door's dog, all shivering into fragments.
Everything was ruined.
She hadn't known what to do.
She tried hugging her. "I can come with you."
"No." Annabel said, disentangling herself. "I love you, but I don't have the energy to go on like this, looking after you, keeping you safe. I'm not helpi
ng you by letting you rely on me so much. It's best for us both if I leave."
She didn't even kiss Chancery goodbye, just turned and walked out the door.
Chancery knew she had to stop her. This was absolute, a searing, hot-cold certainty. It sliced Chancery in two and poured acid on the cut.
Chancery stumbled after her, tripped on the doorstep, and fell on her face, smashing her nose against flagstones. The pain was white, explosive, awful but irrelevant. All that mattered was, if Annabel got away, she would become just like everyone else. She would become people.
Chancery couldn't talk to people. She did her best to avoid them.
Out on the street, people were having seizures, vomiting, screaming, thrashing on the ground. Chancery climbed to her feet, shuddering at the noise slicing against her skin, and tried to help Annabel, but what could she do? Nothing she said made any difference. It was as if Annabel could no longer hear her.
After a while, people stopped screaming and the world turned quiet. Eventually, over the course of several days, they all began to walk. They went to the beach, flocking to the sea in skeins and drifts like slow-motion, ground-trapped starlings.
When Annabel went, Chancery went with her, following the silent masses to the ocean. It was a rare day of heat, the sun blazing, the sea both sparkling and smooth, as if covered in partially crumpled foil. It rolled in an easy, steep swell, fat breakers crashing in spumes of froth like whisked eqq whites. About a mile out, the frequent sea fog they called the Haar was a thick, impenetrable wall of white; an endless roulade of candyfloss cloud across the horizon.
People milled on the beach before aiming for the wall. Once in the water, they floundered in the surf, drowning, unable to swim, unable to stop. Bodies bobbed on the waves, a grotesquerie of marker buoys, and lay puffed and bloated on the beach. Crows squabbled with seagulls over a surplus of glistening, crimson ribbons of flesh. The stink of rotting meat and seaweed coated Chancery's tongue like a mouthful of rancid fruit drenched in iodine and soy.