Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  The monster made no reply.

  “I would have given anything to be clever or to have had some artistic ability,” the old woman added. “Those are assets with which a body can grow old.”

  She drew her tattery shawl closer, hunching her thin shoulders against the cold. Her gaze went to her companion. The monster was looking at the blank expanse of wall above her head, eyes unfocused, scars almost invisible in the dim light.

  “Yes, well,” she said. “I suppose we all have our own cross to bear. At least I have good memories to go with the bad.”

  * * *

  The snow was coming down so thickly that visibility had already become all but impossible. The fat wet flakes whirled and spun in dervishing clouds, clogging the sidewalks and streets, snarling traffic, making the simple act of walking an epic adventure. One could be anywhere, anywhen. The familiar was suddenly strange; the city transformed. The wind and the snow made even the commonest landmarks unrecognizable.

  If she hadn’t already been so bloody late, Harriet Pierson would have simply walked her mountain bike through the storm. She only lived a mile or so from the library and the trip wouldn’t have taken that long by foot. But she was late, desperately late, and being sensible had never been her forte, so there she was, pedaling like a madwoman in her highest gear, the wheels skidding and sliding for purchase on the slippery street as she biked along the narrow passageway between the curb and the crawling traffic.

  The so-called waterproof boots that she’d bought on sale last week were already soaked, as were the bottoms of her jeans. Her old camel hair coat was standing up to the cold, however, and her earmuffs kept her ears warm. The same couldn’t be said for her hands and face. The wind bit straight through her thin woolen mittens, her cheeks were red with the cold, while her long, brown hair, bound up into a vague bun on the top of her head, was covered with an inch of snow that was already leaking its wet chill into her scalp.

  Why did I move to this bloody country? she thought. It’s too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter …

  England looked very good right at that moment, but it hadn’t always been so. England hadn’t had Brian whom she’d met while on holiday here in Newford three years ago, Brian who’d been just as eager for her to come as she had been to emigrate, Brian who walked out on her not two months after she’d arrived and they had gotten an apartment together. She’d refused to go back. Deciding to make the best of her new homeland, she had stuck it out surprisingly well, not so much because she led such an ordered existence, as that she’d refused to run back home and have her mother tell her, ever so patronizingly, “Well, I told you so, dear.”

  She had a good job, if not a great one, a lovely little flat that was all her own, a fairly busy social life—that admittedly contained more friends than it did romantic interests—and liked everything about her new home. Except for the weather.

  She turned off Yoors Street onto Kelly, navigating more by instinct than vision, and was just starting to congratulate herself on having completed her journey all in one piece, with time to spare, when a tall shape loomed suddenly up out of the whirling snow in front of her. Trying to avoid a collision, she turned the handlebars too quickly—and the wrong way.

  Her front wheel hit the curb and she sailed over the handlebars, one more white airborne object defying gravity, except that unlike the lighter snowflakes with which she momentarily shared the sky, her weight brought her immediately down with a jarring impact against a heap of refuse that someone had set out in anticipation of tomorrow’s garbage pickup.

  She rose spluttering snow and staggered back towards her bike, disoriented, the suddenness of her accident not yet having sunk in. She knelt beside the bike and stared with dismay at the bent wheel frame. Then she remembered what had caused her to veer in the first place.

  Her gaze went to the street, but then traveled up, and up, to the face of the tall shape that stood by the curb. The man was a giant. At five-one, Harriet wasn’t tall, and perhaps it had something to do with her low perspective, but he seemed to be at least seven feet high. And yet it wasn’t his size that brought the small gasp to her lips.

  That face …

  It was set in a squarish head which was itself perched on thick broad shoulders. The big nose was bent, the left eye was slightly higher than the right, the ears were like huge cauliflowers, the hairline high and square. Thick white scars crisscrossed his features, giving the impression that he’d been sewn together by some untalented seamstress who was too deep in her cups to do a proper job. An icon from an old horror movie flashed in Harriet’s mind and she found herself looking for the bolts in the man’s neck before she even knew what she was doing.

  Of course they weren’t there, but the size of the man and the way he was just standing there, staring at her, made Harriet unaccountably nervous as though this really was Victor Frankenstein’s creation standing over her in the storm. She stood quickly, wanting to lessen the discrepancy of their heights. The sudden movement woke a wave of dizziness.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry,” she meant to say, but the words slurred, turning to mush in her mouth and what came out was, “Redfolly shurry.”

  Vertigo jellied her legs and made the street underfoot so wobbly that she couldn’t keep her balance. The giant took a quick step towards her, huge hands outstretched, as a black wave swept over her and she pitched forward.

  Bloody hell, she had time to think. I’m going all faint.…

  * * *

  Water bubbled merrily in the tin can that sat on the Coleman stove’s burner. The old woman leaned forward and dropped in a tea bag, then moved the can from the heat with a mittened hand.

  Only two more bags left, she thought.

  She held her hands out to the stove and savored the warmth.

  “I married for money, not love,” she told her companion. “My Henry was not a handsome man.”

  The monster gaze focused and tracked down to her face.

  “But I grew to love him. Not for his money, nor for the comfort of his home and the safety it offered to a young woman whose future, for all her beauty, looked to take her no further than the tenements in which she was born and bred.”

  The monster made a querulous noise, no more than a grunt, but the old woman could hear the question in it. They’d been together for so long that she could read him easily, without his needing to speak.

  “It was for his kindness,” she said.

  * * *

  Harriet woke to the cold. Shivering, she sat up to find herself in an unfamiliar room, enwrapped in a nest of blankets that carried a pungent, musty odor in their folds. The room itself appeared to be part of some abandoned building. The walls were unadorned except for their chipped paint and plaster and a cheerful bit of graffiti suggesting that the reader of it do something that Harriet didn’t think was anatomically possible.

  There were no furnishings at all. The only light came from a short, fat candle which sat on the windowsill in a puddle of cooled wax. Outside, the wind howled. In the room, in the building itself, all was still. But as she cocked her head to listen, she could just faintly make out a low murmur of conversation. It appeared to be a monologue, for it was simply one voice, droning on.

  She remembered her accident and the seven-foot tall giant as though they were only something she’d experienced in a dream. The vague sense of dislocation she’d felt upon awakening had grown into a dreamy kind of muddled feeling. She was somewhat concerned over her whereabouts, but not in any sort of a pressing way. Her mind seemed to be in a fog.

  Getting up, she hesitated for a moment, then wrapped one of the smelly blankets about her shoulders like a shawl against the cold and crossed the room to its one doorway. Stepping outside, she found herself in a hall as disrepaired and empty as the room she’d just quit. The murmuring voice led her down the length of the hall into what proved to be a foyer. Leaning against the last bit of wall, there where the hallway opened up into the larger space, she studied the odd s
cene before her.

  Seven candles sat in their wax on wooden orange crates that were arranged in a half circle around an old woman. She had her back to the wall, legs tucked up under what appeared to be a half-dozen skirts. A ratty shawl covered her grey hair and hung down over her shoulders. Her face was a spiderweb of lines, all pinched and thin. Water steamed in a large tin can on a Coleman stove that stood on the floor in front of her. She had another, smaller tin can in her hand filled with, judging by the smell that filled the room, some kind of herbal tea. She was talking softly to no one that Harriet could see.

  The old woman looked up just as Harriet was trying to decide how to approach her. The candlelight woke an odd glimmer in the woman’s eyes, a reflective quality that reminded Harriet of a cat’s gaze caught in a car’s headbeams.

  “And who are you, dear?” the woman asked.

  “I … my name’s Harriet. Harriet Pierson.” She got the odd feeling that she should curtsy as she introduced herself.

  “You may call me Flora,” the old woman said. “My name’s actually Anne Boddeker, but I prefer Flora.”

  Harriet nodded absently. Under the muddle of her thoughts, the first sharp wedge of concern was beginning to surface. She remembered taking a fall from her bike … had she hit her head?

  “What am I doing here?” she asked.

  The old woman’s eyes twinkled with humor. “Now how would I know?”

  “But…” The fuzz in Harriet’s head seemed to thicken. She blinked a couple of times and then cleared her throat. “Where are we?” she tried.

  “North of Gracie Street,” Flora replied, “in that part of town that, I believe, people your age refer to as Squatland. I’m afraid I don’t know the exact address. Vandals have played havoc with the street signs, as I’m sure you know, but I believe we’re not far from the corner of Flood and MacNeil where I grew up.”

  Harriet’s heart sank. She was in the Tombs, an area of Newford that had once been a developer’s bright dream. The old, tired blocks of tenements, office buildings and factories were to be transformed into a yuppie paradise and work had already begun on tearing down the existing structures when a sudden lack of backing had left the developer scrambling for solvency. All that remained now of the bright dream was block upon block of abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots generally referred to as the Tombs. It was home to runaways, the homeless, derelicts, bikers, drug addicts and the like who squatted in its buildings.

  It was also probably one of the most dangerous parts of Newford.

  “I … how did I get here?” Harriet tried again.

  “What do you remember?” Flora said.

  “I was biking home from work,” Harriet began and then proceeded to relate what she remembered of the storm, the giant who’d loomed up so suddenly out of the snow, her accident … “And then I suppose I must have fainted.”

  She lifted a hand to her head and searched about for a tender spot, but couldn’t find a lump or a bruise.

  “Did he speak to you?” Flora asked. “The … man who startled you?”

  Harriet shook her head.

  “Then it was Frank. He must have brought you here.”

  Harriet thought about what the old woman had just said.

  “Does that mean there’s more than one of him?” she asked. She had the feeling that her memory was playing tricks on her when she tried to call up the giant’s scarred and misshapen features. She couldn’t imagine there being more than one of him.

  “In a way,” Flora said.

  “You’re not being very clear.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  But she didn’t appear to be, Harriet realized.

  “So … he, this Frank … he’s mute?” she asked.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” Flora said. “A great big strapping lad like that.”

  Harriet nodded in agreement. “But that doesn’t explain what you meant by there being more than one of him. Does he have a brother?”

  “He…” The old woman hesitated. “Perhaps you should ask him yourself.”

  “But you just said that he was a mute.”

  “I think he’s down that hall,” Flora said, ignoring Harriet. She pointed to a doorway opposite from the one that Harriet had used to enter the foyer. “That’s usually where he goes to play.”

  Harriet stood there for a long moment, just looking at the old woman. Flora, Anne, whatever her name was—she was obviously senile. That had to explain her odd manner.

  Harriet lifted her gaze to look in the direction Flora had pointed. Her thoughts still felt muddy. She found standing as long as she had been was far more tiring than it should have been and her tongue felt all fuzzy.

  All she wanted to do was to go home. But if this was the Tombs, then she’d need directions. Perhaps even protection from some of the more feral characters who were said to inhabit these abandoned buildings. Unless, she thought glumly, this “Frank” was the danger himself.…

  She looked back at Flora, but the old woman was ignoring her. Flora drew her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and took a sip of tea from her tin can.

  Bother, Harriet thought and started across the foyer.

  Halfway down the new hallway, she heard a child’s voice singing softly. She couldn’t make out the words until she’d reached the end of the hall where yet another candlelit room offered up a view of its bizarre occupant.

  Frank was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, the contents of Harriet’s purse scattered on the floor by his knees. Her purse itself had been tossed into a corner. Harriet would have backed right out of the room before Frank looked up except that she was frozen in place by the singing. The child’s voice came from Frank’s twisted lips—a high, impossibly sweet sound. It was a little girl’s voice, singing a skipping song:

  Frank and Harriet, sitting in a tree

  K-I-S-S-I-N-G

  First comes love, then comes marriage

  Here comes Frank with a baby’s carriage

  Frank’s features seemed more monstrous than ever with that sweet child’s voice issuing from his throat. He tossed the contents of Harriet’s wallet into the air, juggling them. Her ID, a credit card, some photos from back home, scraps of paper with addresses or phone numbers on them, paper money, her bank card … they did a fluttering fandango as he sang, the movement of his hands oddly graceful for all the scarred squat bulk of his fingers. Her makeup, keys and loose change were lined up in rows like toy soldiers on parade in front of him. A half-burned ten dollar bill lay beside a candle on the wooden crate to his right. On the crate to his left lay a dead cat, curled up as though it was only sleeping, but the glassy dead eyes and swollen tongue that pushed open its jaws gave lie to the pretense.

  Harriet felt a scream build up in her throat. She tried to back away, but bumped into the wall. The child’s voice went still and Frank looked up. Photos, paper money, paper scraps and all flittered down upon his knees. His gaze locked on hers.

  For one moment, Harriet was sure it was a child’s eyes that regarded her from that ruined face. They carried a look of pure, absolute innocence, utterly at odds with the misshapen flesh and scars that surrounded them. But then they changed, gaining a feral, dark intelligence.

  Frank scattered the scraps of paper and money in front of him away with a sweep of his hands.

  “Mine,” he cried in a deep, booming voice. “Girl is mine!”

  As he lurched to his feet, Harriet fled back the way she’d come.

  * * *

  “The hardest thing,” the old woman said, “is watching everybody die. One by one, they all die: your parents, your friends, your family.…”

  Her voice trailed off, rheumy eyes going sad. The monster merely regarded her.

  “It was hardest when Julie died,” she went on after a moment. There was a hitch in her voice as she spoke her daughter’s name. “It’s not right that parents should outlive their children.” Her gaze settled on the monster’s face. “But then you’ll never know that
particular pain, will you?”

  The monster threw back his head and a soundless howl tore from his throat.

  * * *

  As Harriet ran back into the room where she’d left Flora, she saw that the old woman was gone. Her candles, the crates and stove remained. The tin can half full of tea sat warming on the edge of the stove, not quite on the lit burner.

  Harried looked back down the hall where Frank’s shambling bulk stumbled toward her.

  She had to get out of this place. Never mind the storm still howling outside the building, never mind the confusing maze of abandoned buildings and refuse-choked streets of the Tombs. She just had to—

  “There you are,” a voice said from directly behind her.

  Harriet’s heart skipped a beat. A sharp, small inadvertent squeak escaped her lips as she flung herself to one side and then backed quickly away from the shadows by the door from which the voice had come. When she realized it was only the old woman, she kept right on backing up. Whoever, whatever, Flora was, Harriet knew she wasn’t a friend.

  Frank shambled into the foyer then, the queer lopsided set of his gaze fixed hungrily upon her. Harriet’s heartbeat kicked into double-time. Her throat went dry. The muscles of her chest tightened, squeezing her lungs so that she found it hard to breathe.

  Oh god, she thought. Get out of here while you can.

  But she couldn’t seem to move. Her limbs were deadened weights and she was starting to feel faint again.

  “Now, now,” the old woman said. “Don’t carry on so, Samson, or you’ll frighten her to death.”

  The monster obediently stopped in the doorway, but his hungry gaze never left Harriet.

  “Sam-samson?” Harriet asked in a weak voice.

  “Oh, there’s all sorts of bits and pieces of people inside that poor ugly head,” Flora replied. “Comes from traumas he suffered as a child. He suffers from—what was it that Dr. Adams called him? Dissociation. I think, before the accident, the doctor had documented seventeen people inside him. Some are harmless, such as Frank and little Bessie. Others, like Samson, have an unfortunate capacity for violence when they can’t have their way.”