Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  My husband, she thought, and wondered where he was.

  Adolphus Wollstonecraft.

  Surely he’d not have deserted her? Not so soon at any rate. Then she recalled they’d only just been married. That this morning she was preparing for her marriage, surrounded by Adolphus’ girl cousins, so numerous that she’d had to pause before addressing each one so as not to get a name wrong and thereby cause offence (excepting Cousins Enyd and Delwyn, of course, they’d become so close!). All of them dressed as bridesmaids for she had neither sisters, nor cousins, nor aunts, nor friends who might stand her this service; all of them a whirl of pastel colours and soft fabrics, the light from the candelabra picking out the rich necklaces and earrings, brooches and hair ornaments, finer than any queen might own. Yet none as lovely as those Isobel brought with her, inheritances from mother and grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts, the items that came to Isobel because she was the last of her line, the single point where all things might end or begin again depending on the whims of her womb.

  She ran her tongue over her teeth, prodded at the wires and was able to dislodge them with a dull, wet clink against the bone of her teeth. But there was something else: her canines were larger, augmented, and polished, a series of cool smoothnesses and sharp edges. She caught the tip of her tongue on one of those edges and tasted a burst of iron tang, imagined the bleed as a red blossoming.

  She opened her mouth wider, felt the weight on her lips half-fall into the cavity; she turned her head, spat, and the mouthpiece fell away; the wires, reluctantly giving up their grip on her dentition, hit the softness she was lying on with a slithering plink. Whatever had been attached to her canines remained, however, so firmly affixed she was wary of interfering with them after that first cut. They would wait.

  The weights over her eyes and face had also loosened with the movement of her head. She shook harder and with a tinkle and a chink they were gone, landing wherever the other things had. Whatever she reclined upon was soft but compacted by the weight of her body. How long had she been there?

  Where was she?

  Isobel opened her lids, though the lashes felt glued with sleep, with the sandman’s dust. She blinked vigorously, but there was only blackness even when she widened her eyes. She closed them again, breathed slowly to calm herself, then shallowly when she realised the air was stale with a hint of old decay.

  I am asleep, she thought. I am asleep and dreaming in my marital bed. But she still could not summon the details of her wedding eve, of neither feast nor fornication, and surely she should? Surely good or bad, she would remember that? The touches, the sighs, the delight? The pain, the weight, the imposition? Surely she’d recall at least one of the things the other girls at St. Dymphna’s had whispered of at night in their dormer attic when they should have been resting?

  “I am asleep,” she said out loud. “I am asleep and in my bridal bed.”

  “Oh no, you’re not,” came a voice from the darkness, brittle and raw, with a hint of amusement. Not Adolphus, no. A woman. A woman who’d not spoken in a very long time by the sound of it.

  Isobel startled, jerked; things that weighed on her chest slipped and slid off with a jingle. She sat up, but her head connected with a rough low rock shelf; the skin parted at her hairline and she felt a slow welling of blood on her forehead. It took a while before she could speak.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” The Misses Meyrick had always instructed their pupils to ask questions whenever they could: You never know what skerrick of information might help you survive.

  “I am you,” answered the woman, and Isobel wondered if she’d gone mad, prayed to wake from the dream. “Well, you before you, I suppose. And you are me, after me.”

  “Don’t speak in riddles! Tell me how to wake! I bid you, spirit, release me from this delusion!”

  “Oh, you think yourself ridden by the mare of night?” The pitch lightened with surprise, then fragmented into giggles, each as sharp as a pin. There was an echo, too, wherever they were. Then the tone steadied, though mirth remained in evidence. “Oh, no. Oh no, poor Isobel. You are sadly awake. Alert at long last.”

  “Who are you? Why am I here? Where is my husband? I was at my wedding banquet…” she trailed off, not truly able to remember if there was any trace of the feast in her mind. She thought she remembered someone—Adolphus’ mother?—tugging the veil down over her face, readying her for the procession through the castle. Or was it Cousin Enyd? Or Cousin Delwyn? Or? Or? Or?

  Someone had lifted the veil, certainly, for it was bunched behind her head, pillowing her neck. Surely later, after volo had been said, the echoes of the vows running along the walls and floor and vaulted ceiling of the small chapel, barely big enough to hold that fine family. So small a chapel, in fact, that only relatives had been bid to attend at the Wollstonecrafts’ isolated estate.

  And the Misses Meyrick. She cannot forget them.

  Isobel’s erstwhile school marms, not invited, had come anyway to watch, to witness the choice she’d made, all their good training, her mother’s good money, gone to waste. They did not speak to her, neither Orla nor Fidelma, not a word of congratulation nor censure. Naught but disappointed looks as she and Adolphus walked down the aisle as man and wife.

  There!

  A memory, solid and stable. Pacing beside her handsome new husband, and the Misses Meyrick so far from their school for poison girls and looking at her as if she’d left their house to burn; left them to shame. So, not a happy memory but a memory nonetheless. A real one. A true one. Something to hold on to.

  And another memory: the Misses Meyrick once again at the wedding feast, waiting by the doors while the happy couple were greeted and congratulated by their guests. Isobel thinking I must speak to them for they loved me in their own fashion! so she’d picked her way through the crowd until she stood before her old instructors in their gowns magnificent, their eyes bright, Orla’s left blue, her right yellow; in Fidelma the colours were reversed. Long moments passed before Fidelma spoke.

  “Your mother,” she said, “would be ashamed.”

  Orla stepped behind her and Isobel felt terror like she never had before; but the woman merely said, “Pish!” and showed her a hairpin with a long silver shaft and a jewelled head shaped like a daisy; the outer petals were of diamonds, and the floret, divided distinctly into two halves, of yellow topazes. Then she slid it into Isobel’s finely constructed hairstyle, beneath the long veil so no one might see the ornament and note how exquisite it was. “This,” said Orla, “is the last thing we can do for you.”

  Before she could reply, the Misses Meyrick seemed to fade from the room, although she knows she saw them move, saw them walk away with elegant contempt, yet somehow it seemed that it was not a mere exit they committed, but a Departure.

  Then the other voice repeated, “Wedding feast?” and Isobel was brought back to the stygian confines of…wherever she was.

  “Wedding feast, I remember my own. All those fine families, all those relations of blood, all of Adolphus’ cousins and aunts and uncles. I had no one, myself, being an orphan of very rich parentage, but he said to me, ‘Kitten’—‘Kitty’, actually, for he called me by that endearment—‘Kitty, my sweet, they all adore you! It’s like you’re one of our very own, a true Wollstonecraft. Cousins Enyd and Delwyn say the same.’ And those very cousins sat beside me at the wedding feast, making sure I drank from my goblet the wine my husband poured for me and they considerately topped up.” The woman in the darkness cackled. “Does this sound familiar?”

  “Where am I?’ asked Isobel in a very small voice. She did not say that it all sounded very familiar indeed. She carefully raised her hands until the fingertips touched the rough stone of the low ceiling. She inched them along, felt the scrape of rock, found a place where roof joined wall; but there was only the hint of a line, a thin parsimonious suggestion on her skin, not a chink, not a gap where air or light might creep in.

  How many feet between where she lay and t
he ceiling? Two? Three? Ceiling? Lid? That last thought made her shudder and she shook it away.

  “You’re where you’ve been these past twelve months, sleeping like the dead.” The voice dropped low, secretive. “But I knew you yet lived. I could hear the slow, slow beat of your heart, the slug-slug of your blood, the base breath that made your chest only just rise and fall.”

  “Twelve months? Don’t be a fool. I’d have died!”

  “And you were meant to! But when you’re so very nearly dead, everything becomes unhurried, blood, breath, appetite. You’ll be ravenous soon, now that I’ve mentioned it.”

  As if in response Isobel’s stomach growled and cramped. She put a hand to it, discovered a kind of armour there, a lumpen embossed corset that might well turn aside a knife blade. At its sides she located small latches, which opened easily; presumably no one expected the deceased to undress themselves.

  “The poison they used,” mused her companion, “is a strange mix: too little and it will render you ill, too much it will send you into a sleep undiscernible from true death, but if the amount is juuust right, then and only then you’ll die. And it was new when used on me, so I died. It was old when used on you and Adolphus panicked and used too much, so you but slept.”

  “You’re lying. You’re mad.”

  “Oh, ho! Mad am I? That’s possible, I suppose, I’ve been here a long while with only my thoughts, waiting for you to wake, and before that no one but myself to talk to. Who wouldn’t go a little mad?’ A sigh shifted the blackness, Isobel was almost certain she could see it. “Shall I show you? Where we are? Then we can discuss my mendacity or otherwise. Well?”

  “Yes,” said Isobel faintly.

  For a second there was nothing, no sound, no movement, and then: a light. A tiny pinprick of luminous green, a point that pulsed and grew, strengthened and increased its ambit. The glow lit upon the things that had fallen from Isobel when she sat so precipitously; it caught at their lovely edges, lodged in facets, made it appear as if a hundred small fires had kindled on the musty purple silk.

  She was distracted by a king’s ransom in jewellery, but not of a common sort. Rich and rare, the cut and settings were of ancient design, almost foreign it was so antique, and Isobel could not think of where she’d seen its like before. None of it was hers, not one piece of the Lawrence family jewels to be seen, not a single thing she recognised. She put a hand to the back of her head, beneath the veil which had become odd in its texture, and found the one gem no one knew she had—no one but the Meyricks—the hairpin, its cool hard daisy arrangement reassuring.

  Then she gazed around the space, found it to be a box, six feet by six feet by two and half, a flattened mattress beneath her. Such a small room! A bed-closet perhaps, but no sign of a door, of any egress. And that mattress…not like any she’d ever seen, without either ticking or calico, neither down nor rushes to make it plump, but there was the smell of old lavender…no, more like…the lining for a death bed.

  She sought her companion. Saw…

  Saw…

  Saw nothing but a skeleton in a jaundiced wedding dress, blue and gold boots with silver buttons up the side, a manically grinning skull from which red hair and a lopsided veil hung. The body was adorned with strange bijoux akin to those Isobel herself had worn.

  And the body was glowing; glowing with the same green luminescence that had shown Isobel her location.

  Isobel remembered at last that she’d seen such exquisite corpses before, in places where the wealthy venerated their dead and turned them into glittering saints. Old families and High Church. The Wollstonecrafts carried both in their bloodline.

  And Isobel, comprehending at last where she was, began to scream.

  The room, the Master’s Chamber, is redolent of stale alcohol, spent seed and strong tobacco or perhaps incense. Some kind of drug? Isobel notices a kind of pipe in one corner, perhaps three feet high, made of blown glass in colours that have the same sheen as oil on water. There are silken tassels and a mouthpiece and tubing. She’d heard of such things at St. Dymphna’s: Hepsibah Ballantyne had averred it a fine way to poison someone. Mistress Ballantyne had always said that to best murder another, one should discover their habits and run parallel to them, insert your lethal blow into the usual flow of their life, so that way the difference you made would most like not be noticed.

  Isobel looks to the bed which is located beneath a bank of diamond-paned glass. In said bed, so enormous that it might fit six, she sees three figures. The covers are thrown back, as are the window shutters, for the eve is balmy, moonlit; one of her nannies always said that sleeping in moonlight let madness in. How many Wollstonecrafts have slept thus?

  Summer, she thinks, as it was when I married. A summer bride, lying winter-cold for so very long. No mourning for Adolphus, she notes, and no sleeping alone.

  Her husband lies between the recumbent figures of Cousins Enyd and Delwyn, their dark Wollstonecraft locks spread tousled across crisp white pillowcases, their naked forms on crumpled sheets. Two girls Isobel had thought friends or like to become so. Their slumber is that of the well-used. There can be no mistaking it; the dead bride did not lie. She did not need to when she’d said The Wollstonecrafts breed only amongst themselves and they are prolific, hiding those whose parents are too closely related to each other in attics and cellars, hiding those who show too much the double, triple, quadruple blossoming of blood.

  Isobel thinks, memories flooding now, of all those Wollstonecrafts at the wedding feast, watching her so avidly. She wonders how she ever thought their eyes gleamed with love and happiness, their lips curved in welcome, not avarice. Perhaps she could not see their greed because her own was so intense as she gulped from the bridal cup held by Adolphus, offered so generously to her first—against tradition!—a sign of his devotion, his love for his young wife. She has, even now, no recollection of falling asleep at the table, of drifting into what her new family thought was death. There is only the memory of the cup, the dark liquid within, her husband’s tender smile.

  Nor does she even now recollect crossing the wide room, yet somehow she is standing beside the great bed, staring down at Cousin Enyd whose tiny waist she’s always admired; on Enyd’s left wrist is a diamond bracelet that had belonged to Isobel’s mother. Isobel’s hand goes to the back of her own head, fidgets beneath the friable veil and finds the hair pin that was the final gift of Orla and Fidelma Meyrick. The gems and metal are cool against her fingers and the pin comes out with no complaint. Isobel looks at it carefully, remembers the instructions from one of the weaponry classes, then gives a nod of satisfaction. These three have been drinking, smoking, heavily; all of them snore. They’ll not wake easily.

  She leans over Cousin Enyd, lowers the hairpin point-first to the cockleshell of the ear facing her, then depresses the left side of the daisy’s centre. A single tiny drop of paralytic poison, so powerful she fears to get it on her own skin, oozes from the tip of the pin and drips into the shadowy coil of Enyd’s ear. Isobel waits for a count of five, then swiftly plunges the shaft into the narrow canal; her fingers push the right side of the daisy design and the length of the pin splits into four very fine, very sharp, very tough lengths which tear into the brain. Cousin Enyd hardly moves, giving just the tiniest of shudders as she voids her bladder and bowels, but the stink of it barely registers above the other rich scents in the room.

  Isobel creeps softly around the other side of the bed and repeats the process on Cousin Delwyn, whose rich thick curls she’d often envied; around this one’s swan-like neck is the emerald and pearl locket that had belonged to Isobel’s grandmother. Delwyn dies no more noisily than did Enyd, though she is fleshier, larger, there is less poison and the paralysis is not so entire; she twitches, kicks too close to Adolphus and Isobel must swiftly grab at the limb, hold it in place until the tremors still. Isobel feels a twinge of pride; the time at St. Dymphna’s was neither wasted nor its lessons lost. Orla Meyrick herself couldn’t have executed these de
aths any more tidily.

  Adolphus still has not stirred.

  Isobel slips her stolen jewellery into the hidden pocket of her dress, then steps away, takes up position between the bed and the door. Her breathing remains steady—it did not change even as she slaughtered those false cousins—and what she feels moving through her is a cold thing, a passionless fury, a determination to one end. She takes a breath and begins to sing.

  “Are you quite finished?” came the voice when Isobel at last ran out of breath and fear. “Pride of St. Dymphna’s you are.”

  “How do you know—?”

  “I’ve had twelve months to wander around in your sleeping mind—no point looking like that. I’m bored and have been for a very long time. A saint couldn’t have stopped herself. I can’t do anything else, can’t move from here. I’ve only got a little energy and I’m saving that for something rather more special than comforting you or a mere haunting.”

  “How did I get here? How did you get here?” wept Isobel, stung by the corpse’s callousness.

  “Our husband, you little fool! Adolphus Trajan Wollstonecraft. We’re not the first brides he’s disposed of for the sake of their fortunes, but you were the first one who was supposed to kill him. And failed to do so quite spectacularly. Imagine all the trouble you could have saved. No doubt, there’ll be more betrotheds after us when his goodly period of mourning is done, and all your wealth run through!”

  “How many?” asked Isobel, shocked out of her sobs.

  “Four. Buried on the other side of the altar. I’m sure they’ve got fresh new maidens picked out to take up residence beside us in the fullness of time.”