“What are you going to do?” Nadine murmured. Moved to touch his arm.
The Collector let her. Even squeezed back, once. Then he said, “I think I’m going to go down and listen to the radio.”
And Nadine let him. And that’s where she found him once they’d moored once more at Spook’s berth. Sitting by the shortwave, still tuned to the band where Radio-man’s station had been. Listening to the blankness. The spits of static on the empty air.
CLAIRE MASSEY
Marionettes
CLAIRE MASSEY lives in Lancashire, England, with her two young sons. Her short stories have been published in Best British Short Stories (Salt), Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds (Two Ravens Press), Still (Negative Press), The Screaming Book of Horror (Screaming Dreams Press) and elsewhere.
“Marionettes” was first published as a limited-edition chapbook by Nightjar Press. Her other Nightjar story, “Into the Penny Arcade”, was recently reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year Volume 5.
“I have only visited Prague once,” admits the author. “The marionette shop in the story was there, but I’m not sure I’d ever be able to find it again.”
KARL WANTED TO keep looking for the American bar they’d had breakfast in seven years ago. It had been winter then. They’d stumbled into its warm fug from snow-coated cobbles. It was spring now and dusk.
“Can we just have a quick look in here first?” She lingered in front of the marionette shop’s window.
He kept walking. “I’m starving.”
“I don’t know why we have to find that particular bar.”
“Because I liked their omelettes. I don’t feel like eating dumplings and cabbage. It’s too warm.”
The window of the shop was barely lit. A gathering of witches, flanked by shadows, peered out at her. It looked like a page from a storybook. “You wouldn’t let me look in here last time.”
“We never even saw this shop.”
“We did.” She moved towards the entrance and ducked slightly, ready to step beneath the jester marionettes strung from the doorframe. “Please.”
Her heels clicked on the stone floor. The shop stretched back much further than she’d expected it to, a white walled cavern of dangling heads, legs and arms. It would be impossible to say the shop was empty because there were so many eyes watching her. There was no sign of a shopkeeper, though. No other customers. She glanced behind her and saw Karl’s bulk silhouetted in the doorway.
The marionettes hung in tiers. She stuffed her hands into her coat pockets to prevent herself from touching them. Chiselled contours gave them impossibly soft-looking skin that rucked and wrinkled as though it stretched and sagged over bones. Each character’s expression looked impermanent, as though it would shift the second you turned away.
“Look at this thing.” Karl hovered over an antiquated till.
“Don’t touch it.” She heard herself use the same tone she would with the children.
There were more witches like the ones in the window, a row of wizened faces. She tried to avoid their canny gaze. There were simpering princes and princesses in medieval dress. Smiling devils thrust out bulbous tongues. But there were contemporary characters too. The attention to detail was amazing. One elderly man in a cagoule stooped under the weight of the rucksack on his back. A small boy in a perfectly miniaturised football shirt and shorts had grazed knees.
“Right, come on, you’ve had a look at the puppets now. We’ve been in Prague two hours and I’ve not had a beer. That’s madness.”
* * *
The next morning she left Karl in bed with his hangover. “We’re on holiday, we can actually have a lie-in,” he’d said. But when she opened the curtains onto a brilliant blue sky, she wanted to be down on the cobbled street below. She couldn’t tell him the thought of wandering the city alone thrilled her. She said she wanted to shop.
It wasn’t quite 9:00 a.m. and the Charles Bridge was already swarming with people. Jostled along in the crowd, she could barely see the sparkling surface of the Vltava, or the artists plying their work. Blackened statues punctuated the sky above the heads of American pensioners and Japanese students. There was a bottleneck in front of the statue whose bronze plaque it was lucky to rub if you wanted to return to the city. At the other end of the bridge rose the Old Town Bridge Tower. She remembered the view from the top of it in a biting cold wind. Karl with his coat unzipped wrapping her into it.
She entered the web of streets of Old Town. Streets too narrow for the number of tourists that surged though them. Sometimes she paused before a doorway or a sign and had the impression she’d stood there before, but with Karl, and talked about buying tickets for this recital, wondered where that alleyway led. The jumble of memories was confused by the fact that so many of the shops and passages looked the same, repeating themselves along with the cobbles.
When she came to the marionette shop she stopped. She hadn’t realised she was so close to it. She’d already passed several other marionette shops that had cheap-looking Pinocchios in garish costume dangling outside. This was a proper marionette shop. The scene in the storybook window had changed. The gaggle of witches had gone and there were now just two marionettes behind the glass. A man and a woman. They had pale faces and dispirited eyes. They were both dressed in jeans. The man had a black coat on, the woman a green one. She touched her fingers to the glass as she realised it was a perfect, hand-stitched miniature of her own. The woman had brown eyes with dark shadows beneath them. Her eyes. And there was a line etched into her forehead between her brows. Karl always reminded her of that line when he saw her frown. The man had Karl’s blue eyes, his mousey, receding hairline. The scar in his eyebrow from a teenage piercing. His marionette had hold of the string just above her marionette’s hand.
“It was us.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It was. They looked just like us.”
“No one can carve a puppet that fast.” He’d still been in bed when she got back to the hotel and was only just pulling on his jeans. “And anyway there was no one in that shop last night to see us.”
“Your marionette had hold of one of my marionette’s strings.”
“Well that’s definitely not us then; you do all the string pulling.”
“Just let me show you.”
They were planning to go to the castle so they could have lunch in the café with the vines painted on the ceiling, but a quick walk into Old Town wouldn’t take long. They joined the stream of tourists on Charles Bridge. As they reached the Old Town Bridge Tower she saw Karl glance up at it but he didn’t say anything. Her pace slowed as they wound through the alleyways. What if she’d been wrong? Or made too much of it? He’d love that. She paused outside shops selling wooden toys, saying they should get something for the children, although she knew they’d prefer something overpriced and plasticky from the airport.
“Are we nearly there yet?” He stuck out his bottom lip in perfect imitation of Meg, their youngest.
“It’s just down this way. I remember that door.” The arched wooden door was studded with ironwork. She didn’t admit they’d already passed several very like it.
“Have you got the guidebook with you?” He looked like he’d had enough.
“I didn’t pack it. I didn’t think we’d need it. That shop wasn’t in the book anyway.”
They trawled the rambling maze of passages. When they emerged at one point into the Old Town Square, the sudden space and light above made her think of a glade in a forest. There was no escaping the crowds though. They passed the black house with the strange white sgraffito figures on the walls. A knot of people stood before the Astronomical Clock. There was an appreciative exhalation from them as the little Death dinged his bell. The parade of wooden characters began. Karl strode on, past the huts where they’d bought a Christmas bauble that had long since smashed, past the van selling mulled wine – it smelt cloying in the warm spring air.
&nb
sp; A horse and carriage made lackadaisical progress round the square. An older couple sat in the back, a blanket on their knees, holding hands.
“It’s not this way,” she said. “We need to go back into the lanes, back towards the river.”
“How can you tell which way the river is?”
She walked ahead and he trailed just behind. When she felt his presence missing, she turned. He’d stopped in front of a window full of tarnished silver jewellery set with garnets, or maybe red glass.
“I bought you a ring from here.”
“You did. You didn’t want me getting too many ideas, said it could be our engaged to be engaged ring.”
“Where is it?”
“I had to stop wearing it when Charlie was born. I was scared I was going to catch him with it.” She had no idea where she’d put it. Somewhere safe. “Come on, I give up, let’s forget about the marionettes.”
When they got to the castle complex and finally found the café with the vines on the ceiling it was closed for refurbishment. Karl didn’t say anything, just stalked back in the direction they’d come from. As they passed though the courtyards she tried to take in the grandeur, the Gothic palaces, the ornate mass of St Vitus’ Cathedral that towered over everything. “Don’t you want to look at any of it before we go?”
“We’ve seen it all.”
Outside the gates he stopped by the low stone wall, the red-roofed, blue-domed, grey-spired city spread out below them. The woods of Petřín Hill rose across from them, dark against the skyline. The Observation Tower pierced the canopy.
“We’ve stood here before,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “We had an argument about a flag.” She couldn’t remember why. “Does the view look different to you?”
“We were different then.”
The next morning she packed their things. She tucked empty bottles into the bin beneath some tissues, trying to disguise the fact Karl had drunk everything in the mini-bar. A tradition. She made the bed. They left their bags at reception saying they’d collect them later.
Karl had suggested they visit Petřín Hill. It was a drizzly day. As they walked through Malá Strana, along an unusually wide road, she didn’t want to admit to herself that some of the pale pink and grey stone buildings looked drab. There was graffiti on the wall of a chemist’s. Trams whirred past.
Too impatient to wait for the funicular railway, Karl led the way up a steep woodland path. Every so often, he’d pause beside a tree on the pretence he was taking in the view. She remembered him carving their initials. It wasn’t into a tree, but a tree stump. She was sure she wouldn’t have let him do it on a living tree.
Near the summit, they came to a stop on a grassy knoll. The air was damp and chilled. She wished she had a scarf. The castle was across from them. They were looking at the place where they had stood the day before. She almost wanted to wave to the memory of them, or at the memory of them stood there years before, to distract them from a pointless argument about a flag.
On the descent, they skirted the crenellated Hunger Wall. The whitish stone was stained with patches of lichen. Sodden mulch gave way beneath her feet.
“We should get a drink, something to eat before we have to get back for the transfer,” Karl said. He must have given up on the trees.
She left him in a bar. Told him she still needed to pick up something for the children, something really from Prague, not just from the airport. Being pressed between the multitude of bodies and chatter on the streets of Old Town felt almost comforting after the stark quiet of the hill. She ambled round gift shops, fingered bright wooden animals, snow globes with miniature castles inside, tubes of colouring pencils. She eventually settled on a wooden duck and a crocodile. Each was wrapped in its own paper bag. She stuffed them into her handbag, which then wouldn’t zip up, and stepped back out into the drizzle.
It seemed she could only find the shop when she wasn’t looking for it. She headed down a narrow passage she thought would take her back to the bar and found herself in front of the familiar, dimly lit window. There was now only one marionette behind the glass, hers. She felt a strange release. A nervous weight settled between her chest and her stomach. The eyes of the marionette had more depth to them than paint on wood should allow. Tiny blood vessels crowded the whites at the inner corners. The indent of the frown line on the brow had softened. The arm strings were slack. The hands tucked into the coat pockets. She saw her own reflection overlaying the marionette that in turn mirrored her. She had her hands in her pockets. She stepped back. Where had Karl’s marionette gone? Maybe he had got there before her, bought them both as a surprise. He was inside, and any minute now the shopkeeper’s hand would reach her marionette from the window to wrap it and place it in the bag alongside his. She shrank back across the alley and shielded herself in the doorway opposite. It was a ridiculous fantasy, but she waited. Rain dripped from the eaves and pattered on the cobbles.
The flow of tourists slowed to a trickle. The shadowy glow in the window faded and she realised that on her previous visits the shop door had never been shut. There had always been marionettes strung up above the doorway. There weren’t today. She crossed and tried the handle. It was locked.
The lanes had emptied. Everyone else was sheltering from the rain in warm bars and tea rooms. Faces watched her from the windows. She tried to retrace her steps but the tangle of passageways disorientated her. Her handbag was collecting rainwater. The paper bags inside it were disintegrating and the vividly painted wood of the toys poked through. She jammed them further down and managed to get the bag to zip up. She strode on and tried to sense which way the river lay. There was a door studded with ironwork that she definitely recognised, but she turned a corner and soon met its double. Bewildered, she stepped into another passage. It was as though the daily flood of visitors carved new alleys and inlets into the already labyrinthine folds of Old Town. Her heart beat faster as her heels struck the cobbles.
She found herself standing in front of the window again.
Her marionette remained in isolation on the bare sill, a crowd of shadows behind. Trying to smother her panic, she stared into her own eyes and willed the streets behind her to rearrange themselves, to let her go. Her breath touched the window and for a moment it hung on the other side of the glass.
Each raindrop found a new path down the pane. The string attached to her left hand had been pulled taut so that her palm was raised in a permanent wave. Faces peered in at her, bulbous and lined. A parade of witches and devils. No one waved back. The face she waited for didn’t appear. The memory of his features dispersed into the flat grey picture of the world behind the glass. Behind her, the air stirred with silent breath and the beating of wooden hearts. She longed to turn around.
When she was lifted, the tug shivered through her scalp and hands and feet. She was swept across the stone floor to a recess near the back of the shop and strung up beside the elderly man with the rucksack. He was mute company. She could no longer see the window. In time she forgot it was there.
REGGIE OLIVER
Between Four Yews
REGGIE OLIVER has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorised biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed; two novels, The Dracula Papers and Virtue in Danger; and six collections of stories of supernatural terror, of which the fifth, Mrs Midnight, won the Children of the Night Award for Best Work of Supernatural Fiction in 2011 and was nominated for both a British Fantasy Award and a World Fantasy Award.
Tartarus Press has recently reissued his first and second collections, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, in new editions with new illustrations by the author, as well as his latest (and sixth) collection, Flowers of the Sea. His stories have appeared in more than fifty anthologies including, prior to this one, four in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series.
As the author explains: “This stor
y was written for an anthology entitled The Ghosts and Scholars Book of Shadows. The brief was to write a ‘prequel and/or a sequel’ to a story by M. R. James. I chose to write both a prelude and sequel to James’s ‘A School Story’, because it is one of the author’s most enigmatic tales with plenty of gaps and loose ends to it that I felt needed filling.
“I wrote it also so that it could stand on its own and be understood even by a reader unfamiliar with the originating story. The title derives from the cryptic note that, in the original tale, the schoolmaster Sampson receives in class, saying (in Latin): ‘Remember the well between four yews’.”
“I AM SURE THEY have improved a great deal since my day,” said Uncle Edward. “I sincerely hope so. In the fifties they were still remarkably similar to those described so vividly by Orwell and Waugh. At my public school we referred to them as our ‘privates’.”
His nephew Peter looked startled. Conversations with Uncle Edward often took unexpected turns as his view of the world was refreshingly indifferent to contemporary concerns and prejudices. It was one of the reasons why Peter liked to stay with him at his cottage near Aldeburgh. He used to refer to these sojourns, privately to himself, as “going on retreat”.
His Uncle smiled. “No! Not those sort of privates. It may have been a term peculiar to Eton. M. R. James certainly used it at the turn of the century. We would say ‘I did so and so at my private’. Short for private school. The usual term is of course ‘prep’ or ‘preparatory school’. Curious how these locutions survive, though not perhaps surprising. Boys under the age of puberty are the most conservative of creatures. Where was I?”
“Your private, or prep school.”
“Ah, yes. Well, they were very odd institutions in my day. I generalise, of course, but mine certainly was. Abbey Grove, it was called. They went in for these rather grand Gothic nomenclatures: it added cachet, I suppose. But there was nothing of the abbey about this one. It was more of an overgrown country house: 1820s, I should say. Attractive, slightly nondescript white stucco buildings; extensive rather fine grounds, as I remember. It was in the Thames Valley, not too distant from London. It’s a housing estate now, of course. Every physical trace of it has been wiped out: it lives only in the memory of a dwindling few and when we who can still recollect it are gone it will have ceased to be altogether. Or possibly not.”
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