The old woman turned away, twisting the hose nozzle to shut the water off, and reeling in the sinuous length of its body as she shuffled up her drive before Anne could say anymore.
Returning across the road, Anne saw the front door of her own house opening and Madrigal flew out, for all intents and purposes a little girl happy to see her mother home with the shopping, hopeful of a treat or two. It was only as they drew closer that Maddie’s expression changed, twisted, became hateful, her nose twitching, nostrils widening to take in some odour Anne wasn’t sensitive enough to detect.
Maddie steamtrained towards her and latched onto the nearest wrist, her nails digging into the skin, and her teeth—those lovely small teeth!—tore into the flesh. Anne registered the white-hot pain of something that grew and dug deeper than it should, Brian’s shout from the doorway, D-fer’s whimpering, then passed out from an agony that seemed all out of proportion.
* * *
“It wasn’t her fault,” she said desperately to Dr Marten, sitting on the edge of the trolleybed. “Not her fault at all.”
“Anne, she could have killed you.”
You don’t know the half of it.
“Look, it was me, my fault. Maddie hasn’t been sleeping well and I … I put half a Valium in her hot chocolate last night. Maybe it reacted with the anti-anxiety meds?” Anne knew she was clutching at straws but saw him pause, considering. She went on.“ She’s been through so much, Terry. It’s not her fault. Surely, she was due some kind of a fit like this? Jason was telling me that she’s bound to have some anger issues that we didn’t find her, that we left her to whatever happened. It’s not a conscious thing.”
“Well, I’m no psychologist, but…”
“Let us take her home. If she’s calm now, please just let us take her home. I can’t bear to leave her here. She needs us and we need her.”
“She’s calmed right down, but she’s still restrained. I’ll tell the nurses to release her.” He shook a finger. “I’m not best pleased about this.”
“I know, Terry. But I’m her mum. I know her. She needs me.” She kissed his wrinkled cheek. “Thank you.”
The painkillers took the edge off the physical pain but not the mental anguish. Anne paused outside the door of Madrigal’s private room. She’d seen Brian disappear down the corridor towards the cafeteria and figured she didn’t have long. She slipped inside and found the not-daughter staring at her, as if it had known she was coming.
“I’m sorry,” it said formally, briskly. “The child remains and she is strong. She smelled the scent on you, and she overwhelmed me. It is … it is not how I would have had it. I am … poisoned by her, compromised.”
The thought gave Anne a little pleasure, a tiny pride that her baby clung on so tenaciously, but she put sternness into her tone. “Will it happen again?”
“She knows now it was not you, that she was mistaken. She is calm. She is sorry.”
“Maddie?” said Anne, talking beyond the creature, addressing her daughter as if she stood over its shoulder. “Maddie, hang on, love. We’ll finish it tonight.”
* * *
Brian didn’t argue when she offered him the tablets before bed. The way his eyes seemed to shuttle back and forth, left to right, the way his leg bounced up and down restlessly as he sat, even as he drove them home from the hospital, the way his fingers tapped and his hands shook, and he kept swallowing.
When her husband was snoring, if not happily then at least consistently, Anne dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, sneakers so old she wouldn’t care if she had to get rid of them, then went to her daughter’s room.
Madrigal was already prepared, neat in identical attire, her hair pulled into a tidy bun. She sat on the edge of the bed, small feet dangling, kicking as if she was waiting for a play date. She responded to the jerk of Anne’s head and trotted along beside her. As they stepped outside into the midnight dark, she slipped her little hand into Anne’s, who felt that not only were her fingers being squeezed, but her heart as well.
They’d not put the car in the garage that night. Don’t bother, Brian, we’re too tired, straight to bed, the lot of us, she’d said, and he hadn’t insisted. She released the brake and let it roll down the slope of the drive, then strained to push it along the street a little ways before getting in at the next intersection and starting the engine. All the windows in the cul-de-sac were blackened eyes, bar one. Anne thought she saw a curtain twitch at Mrs Flynn’s but didn’t pay much attention. She didn’t think the old lady would be a problem.
Twenty minutes later, out beyond the town’s boundaries, Anne turned off the headlights and slowed, hoping they wouldn’t hit anything. She was about to swing into a long winding driveway until she saw headlights coming towards her; she slammed into reverse and back off the road, into a stand of tall fescue grass, praying the vehicle wouldn’t go right because then they’d have no chance of staying hidden.
“What—” Maddie began.
“Shhhhh!” Anne hissed as if they might be heard, laying a finger against the girl’s lips. When the other car turned left with barely a tap of the brakes, Anne sighed. She turned the key in the ignition, keeping the lights off, and followed. Ten minutes, and her quarry took another left, and Anne continued on for a kilometre. When she pulled over, she nosed behind a cluster of dwarf banksia shrubs. She closed her door quietly, knowing how sound travelled at night. Maddie copied her.
“This way,” said Anne, and the little hand returned to hers, and this time, she squeezed back.
Deadman’s Mount sat roughly in the middle of the north paddock of Hanrahan’s farm. It rose like a burial mound, twenty-odd feet high, dotted with rocks and sheep droppings, scraggy grass and bindi-eyes. Even if her sense of direction hadn’t been so good, Anne would have been able to navigate from the silhouette it made against the night sky, blotting out the stars. Unspeaking, they walked carefully, attentive to the ground pitted with animal tracks, the holes cattle had made during the wet season, and which had dried, hardened into an obstacle course that could break an ankle or twist a knee.
They had to circumnavigate half of the tumulus before they found him, Maddie’s little nose sniff-sniff-sniffing all the way.
Anne watched a little while as he dug a hole in the side of the Mount, a small hollow, not quite a tunnel, just a niche where a child might be hidden, nestled, cocooned. He’d parked the police car, one of its back doors open, so the headlights were directed to where he worked. She could see patches of sweat dark against the light green T-shirt. He’d wiped his forehead at some point and left a smear of dirt across it.
“Why, Jasper?”
He stopped at the sound of her voice but didn’t drop the shovel.
“I’m sorry, Annie.” And she thought from his tone he probably was. “Normally, I don’t take from home, not from Finnegan’s Field, but … I’d driven around and around; I’d tried all the towns near and far, and found no one. Time was running out, and I couldn’t fail. I saw Maddie walking home from school. I’m sorry, Annie. I would never have hurt you if I’d had a choice—and I had no choice.”
She marvelled that he didn’t try to deny it; she wondered if he thought she’d just shrug and say, Well, that’s all right, then, if you had no choice. Or did he think it wouldn’t matter if he told her everything because she and her daughter wouldn’t last long this night? She’d been pondering, since she’d woken in the hospital, how he’d not been to their house since Madrigal came home, but only ever phoned. He’d been on leave when she was found and not seen Maddie at all, not then and not since. At the time, Anne thought perhaps he’d been embarrassed by his failure, but maybe, somehow he knew … sensed … Had he lain awake at night, wondering if the little girl would name him? If his own constables would arrive at his door to ask questions that would destroy him? As the days and weeks dragged on, did he fear less or more? Anne thought of him with his career as mindless and repetitive as a hamster wheel, his trophy wives who never stayed, the emptiness of t
he power he’d claimed as a reward from the Fae in return for all these tiny lives …
There was too much inside Anne; she thought she might burst, that the cyclone of sadness and rage would corkscrew up and tear her apart. She swallowed and swallowed again, forcing all the emotions down, forcing them not to hurt and not to burn, making them hibernate, until at last she could bring herself to give Madrigal a single nod.
The girl leapt at Jasper, taking him so swiftly that all he had time to do was drop the shovel but not raise his hands to protect himself. He seemed utterly surprised by the child’s speed and strength, possibly because, having once carried her off all unresisting to Deadman’s Mount, he simply didn’t believe her a serious threat. But Maddie bore him to the ground in a matter of seconds and began her work.
Anne did not look away. She found neither regret nor sorrow, neither satisfaction nor disgust inside; she thought she might be empty now. She wondered if sensations, emotions, would return, but it didn’t bother her, the idea of permanent lack.
With a bite, Jasper’s muscular neck was torn open, exposing for a few seconds sinews and oesophagus, before the dark red welled and the creature took more mouthfuls, barely chewing before she swallowed. The shifting of her throat as the morsels moved down, down, down to her gullet for a long digestion was hypnotic. Soon, Jasper’s head hung loosely by a few bloody threads and the child’s tongue wound itself through the white vertebrae peeking above his shoulders, picking them clean of meat. Anne watched as her daughter subjected Jasper to the same kind of scavenging she had the drifter. Soon, there was nothing left of Anne’s former lover, nothing left of Finnegan’s Field’s Mr Underhill.
“What now?” she dully asked the gore-covered child, who shrugged as she cleaned her face much as a cat would, with a licking of hands and a rubbing of cheeks and forehead.
“I go back beneath. Your child will let me be at last.”
“Release her,” said Anne quietly. Then louder, but more pleadingly. “Please give her to me.”
The creature shook its head. “There is not enough of her left. She would not fill this body, this brain. There has only been the desire for revenge and that is fulfilled … She will fade quickly. Nothing remains for a mother to hang her heart upon.”
In the years that Madrigal was gone, Anne had kept her daughter’s voice in her mind, kept it clear and crystal as a bell, but now … now she didn’t think she could recall it. The sound of the many voices had replaced it; the old creaking tones, the echo of creeping roots and soughing boughs, of myriad timbres braided into one, had overwhelmed the last thing she’d retained of her child. Tears welled and broke.
The creature seemed nonplussed, then for a moment, just the tiniest moment, Anne’s true daughter appeared; the vagueness the thing had worn was sharpened into something she recognised, and the girl-suit fit properly for the first time in months. Madrigal lifted her arms. Anne’s knees gave way, and she collapsed into the hug; thin limbs wrapped around her neck and held her tight. She ignored the smell of blood and meat on Maddie’s breath, of the mess that Jasper had left in his death throes, the lasting stink of shit and piss hanging in the air where he’d died, where he’d been disappeared.
When at last the little girl pulled away Anne saw that her daughter was gone, all trace of Madrigal eased, shrugged off as easily as an unwanted coat. The sense of a second being under the skin was stronger, the way the body’s outline vibrated in time with a different rhythm. The not-daughter stepped back, nodded, and turned.
Anne saw the shovel Jasper had dropped. Its great pan of a head beckoned. The handle was smooth, mostly, but in some places, there were splinters; fragments pricked at her palms as she grasped the shaft, then dug in deep as she swung the tool, even deeper when it connected with the back of Madrigal’s head.
The impact sounded like a melon on cement.
The hole Jasper had made in the Mount was the perfect size and shape, and Anne began to slide Maddie into it. When she was done, she thought, she would replace the piece of turf Jasper had carefully cut away; no one would know.
“Annie?” The voice behind her was familiar, and Anne’s head snapped around so fast, she felt muscles pull.
Mrs Flynn looked strange in the light, so pale, almost lost but for the determined expression on her face. The woman didn’t appear afraid or horrified. She just said, “Not together, Annie. Don’t bury it intact.”
Understanding, Anne said, “Just the small hurts. That’s what it said. Only the small hurts heal.”
“And are you willing to risk it?”
Ten minutes later, Anne had used the spade to separate head and body, and dug another hole deep enough to satisfy Mrs Flynn. The bloodied ball was gently interred and covered over, the corpse laid as if to sleep in the hollow space.
Together, they made their way to Jasper’s car. On the back seat, another stolen child curled, deep in slumber. They peered at the little boy, their mothers’ hearts aching but somehow not in the same way as before. They’d been broken too well, fractured too entirely. What now filled the cracks between the fragments, holding the pieces together and allowing the women to go on, was cold, hard iron.
“Do you recognise him, Annie? I don’t.”
“No, can’t say I do. Probably from a town further over, maybe a property somewhere.” Her hand hovered over his forehead, dark curls damp in the heat, but she didn’t touch.
“He’ll not wake for a while,” said Mrs Flynn, speaking low.
“Can you be sure?”
The older woman shrugged. “I’ve read a lot.”
The police radio squawked, the voices of two young constables blared across the paddock. “Got a GPS fix on the Inspector’s car. He’s parked by Deadman’s Mount. Get out there, Robbo, and see why he’s not responding.”
“Young Robertson’s got a foot like lead; he’ll be here in no time at all. He’ll take care of the little one. We’d best get cracking; I’m parked not far from you. Grab a branch and wipe away your footprints as you go. Did you touch his car?” Mrs Flynn asked. Anne shook her head, but she raised the shovel. The old woman nodded. “Then take that with us. It’ll be handy.”
* * *
When Anne finally crawled into bed beside Brian a few hours later and closed her eyes, all she could see was the blackness of a hole in the hillside of Deadman’s Mount, of the inside of a pit where dead eyes tried to stare up to the sky that had once mirrored their colour. All she could think of was a small, headless body curled in an anonymous grave without the benefit of a coffin or the respect of final words.
Anne drifted back to the day Maddie had first gone, how she’d not come home from school, how panic had finally set in when none of her friends had seen her. Anne thought of the hours she’d spent, searching alongside the other men and women who couldn’t simply sit around and wait, how they’d tramped across Hanrahan’s paddocks and others like it, circled Deadman’s Mount, and found nothing, seen nothing to say it was a doorway. A place where the missing had been laid to wait while they made passage through to under the hill. She wondered how Brian would react when they woke and found Maddie gone again. She didn’t think he’d take it well. She didn’t think he’d stay.
She began to make plans for the future. Plans for dissolution, for moving, for carrying on life elsewhere after the inevitable furore of Jasper’s disappearance had died down. For hunting all the Mr Underhills there might be amongst the children of Eire.
About the Author
Specialising in dark fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award, five Aurealis Awards, and is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award. She’s the author of, among others, The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, as well as the novellas Ripper (Horrorology), and Of Sorrow and Such, one of the new Tor.com novella series. Forthcoming from Jo Fletcher Books is the novel Vigil (2016) and its sequel Corpselight (2017). You can sign up for author updates here
.
Copyright © 2016 by Angela Slatter
Art copyright © 2016 by Greg Ruth
The convenience store smells like Solarcaine and orange soda. Lolly’s bubble pops and gum plasters over her mouth while the delivery man smooths a Band-Aid in place on his elbow. The door rattles shut behind him and the mini cathedral bell from the dollar store clinks. Lolly picks the waxlike bubble gum off her chin. She remembers she needs to get a new razor, because in a week or so she’ll have to shave her legs.
A woman comes in, her skin the color of caramelized onions and her hair a dark cocoa pulsing with yellow highlights. The flesh of her face is stretched taut, as if she’s pinned all the wrinkles back behind her ears, except for the crow’s feet at her eyes, which are more like sparrow’s feet. She’s wearing a billowing coat of brown leather, lined with mustard yellow fur, that doesn’t particularly match her slinky turquoise scarf.
Lolly doesn’t realize the woman’s brought the boy until he pops out from behind her cavernous coat. His skin is a shade lighter than his mother’s, his hair a shade darker, his sunglasses framed in orange, hers, leopard print.
Lolly scrapes the gum off her upper lip so roughly it tears off a few overgrown hairs. The woman goes to the cooler in the back of the store, where they keep the alcohol. Lolly can just see the green of her scarf between the bags of tortilla chips on the chip rack. The boy shuffles over to the counter, gaze scanning the rows of colorful lotto tickets he’s too young to buy. He puts a candy bar on the counter and Lolly waves it under the bar-code scanner once, twice, staring blindly at the image of milk chocolate pieces with white chocolate centers. A streak of fluorescent light catches across the metallic candy wrapper, cutting the chocolate image in half and blurring the bar’s name.
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016 Page 42