by Ted Kosmatka
And then I am holding, not a pale baby pumpkin in my hand but a pale baby skull.
Grinnan and the mudwife bellow together in the house, and something else crashes broken.
The skull is the colour of white-mud, but hard, inedible—although when I turn it in the moonlight I find tooth-marks where someone has tried.
The shouts go up high—the witch’s loud, Grinnan’s whimpering.
I grab up a handful of earth to eat, but a bone comes with it, long, white, dry. I let the earth fall away from it.
I crouch there looking at the skull and the bone, as those two finish themselves off in the cottage.
They will sleep now—but I’m not sleepy any more. The stars in their map are nailed to the inside of my skull; my head is filled with dark clarity. When I am sure they are asleep, I scoop up a mouthful of earth, and start digging.
Let me go and get the mudwife, our father murmured. Just for this once.
I’ve done it twice and I’ll do it again. Don’t you bring that woman here! Our mother’s voice was all constricted, as if the baby were trying to come up her throat, not out her nethers.
But this is not like the others! he said, desperate after the following pain. They say she knows all about children. Delivers them all the time.
Delivers them? She eats them! said our mother. It’s not just this one. I’ve two others might catch her eye, while I feed and doze. I’d rather die than have her near my house, that filthy hag.
So die she did, and our new brother or sister died as well, still inside her. We didn’t know whichever it was. Will it be another little Kirtle-child? our father had asked us, bright-eyed by the fire at night. Or another baby woodcutter, like our Hans? It had seemed so important to know. Even when the baby was dead, I wanted to know.
But the whole reason! our father sobbed. Is that it could not come out, for us to see! Which had shamed me quiet.
And then later, going into blackened towns where the only way you could tell man from woman was by the style of a cap, or a hair-ribbon draggling into the dirt beneath them, or a rotted pinafore, or worst by the amount of shrunken scrag between an unclothed person’s legs—why, then I could see how small a thing it was not to know the little one’s sex. I could see that it was not important at all.
When I wake up, they are at it again with their sexing. My teeth are stuck to the inside of my cheeks and lips by two ridges of earth. I have to break the dirt away with my finger.
What was I thinking, last night? I sit up. The bones are in a pile beside me; the skulls are in a separate pile—for counting, I remember. What I thought was: Where did she find all these children? Kirtle and I walked for days, I’m sure. There was nothing in the world but trees and owls and foxes and that one deer. Kirtle was afraid of bats at night, but I never saw even one. And we never saw people—which was what we were looking for, which was why we were so unwise when we came upon the mudwife’s house.
But what am I going to do? What was I planning, piling these up? I thought I was only looking for all Kirtle’s bits. But then another skull turned up and I thought, Well, maybe this one is more Kirtle’s size, and then skull after skull—I dug on, crunching earth and drooling and breathing through my nose, and the bones seemed to rise out of the earth at me, seeking out the moon the way a tree reaches for the light, pushing up thinly among the other trees until it finds light enough to spread into, seeking out me, as if they were thinking, Here, finally, is someone who can do something for us.
I pick up the nearest skull. Which of these is my sister’s? Even if there were just a way to tell girls’ skulls from boys’! Is hers even here? Maybe she’s still buried, under the blackberries where I couldn’t go for thorns.
Now I have a skull in either hand, like someone at a market weighing one cabbage against another. And the thought comes to me: Something is different. Listen.
The pigs. The mudwife, her noises very like the pigs’. There is no rhythm to them; they are random grunting and gasping. And I—
Silently I replace the skulls on the pile.
I haven’t heard Grinnan this morning. Not a word, not a groan. Just the woman. The woman and the pigs.
The sunshine shows the cottage as the hovel it is, its saggy sides propped, its sloppy roofing patched with mud-splats simply thrown from the ground. The back door stands wide, and I creep up and stand right next to it, my back to the wall.
Wet slaps and stirrings sound inside. The mudwife grunts—she sounds muffled, desperate. Has he tied her up? Is he strangling her? There’s not a gasp or word from him. That thing in the cage gives off a noise, though, a kind of low baying. It never stops to breathe. There is a strong smell of shit. Dawn is warming everything up; flies zoom in and out the doorway.
I press myself to the wall. There is a dip in the doorstep. Were I brave enough to walk in, that’s where I would put my foot. And right at that place appears a drop of blood, running from inside. It slides into the dip, pauses modestly at being seen, then shyly hurries across the step and dives into hiding in the weeds below.
How long do I stand there, looking out over the pigsty and the chicken house to the forest, wishing I were there among the trees instead of here clamped to the house wall like one of those gargoyles on the monks’ house in Devilstown, with each sound opening a new pocket of fear in my bowels? A fly flies into my gaping mouth and out again. A pebble in the wall digs a little chink in the back of my head, I’m pressed so hard there.
Finally, I have to know. I have to take one look before I run, otherwise I’ll dream all the possibilities for nights to come. She’s not a witch; she can’t spell me back; I’m thin now and nimble; I can easily get away from her.
So I loosen my head, and the rest of me, from the wall. I bend one knee and straighten the other, pushing my big head, my popping eyes, around the doorpost.
I only meant to glimpse and run. So ready am I for the running, I tip outward even when I see there’s no need. I put out my foot to catch myself, and I stare.
She has her back to me, her bare, dirty white back, her baggy arse and thighs. If she weren’t doing what she’s doing, that would be horror enough, how everything is wet and withered and hung with hair, how everything shakes.
Grinnan is dead on the table. She has opened his legs wide and eaten a hole in him, in through his soft parts. She has pulled all his innards out onto the floor, and her bare bloody feet are trampling the shit out of them, her bare shaking legs are trying to brace themselves on the slippery carpet of them. I can smell the salt-fish in the shit; I can smell the yellow spice.
That devilish moan, up and down it wavers, somewhere between purr and battle-yowl. I thought it was me, but it’s that shadow in the cage, curling over and over itself like a ruffle of black water, its eyes fixed on the mess, hungry, hungry.
The witch pulls her head out of Grinnan for air. Her head and shoulders are shiny red; her soaked hair drips; her purple-brown nipples point down into two hanging rubies. She snatches some air between her red teeth and plunges in again, her head inside Grinnan like the bulge of a dead baby, but higher, forcing higher, pummelling up inside him, fighting to be un-born.
In my travels I have seen many wrongnesses done, and heard many others told of with laughter or with awe around a fire. I have come upon horrors of all kinds, for these are horrible times. But never has a thing been laid out so obvious and ongoing in its evil before my eyes and under my nose and with the flies feasting even as it happens. And never has the means to end it hung as clearly in front of me as it hangs now, on the wall, in the smile of the mudwife’s axe-edge, fine as the finest nail-paring, bright as the dawn sky, the only clean thing in this foul cottage.
I reach my father’s house late in the afternoon. How I knew the way, when years ago you could put me twenty paces into the trees and I’d wander lost all day, I don’t know; it just came to me. All the loops I took, all the mistakes I made, all laid themselves down in their places on the world, and I took the right way past them
and came here straight, one sack on my back, the other in my arms.
When I dreamed of this house it was big and full of comforts; it hummed with safety; the spirit of my mother lit it from inside like a sacred candle. Kirtle was always here, running out to greet me all delight.
Now I can see the poor place for what it is, a plague-ruin like so many that Grinnan and I have found and plundered. And tiny—not even as big as the witch’s cottage. It sits in its weedy quiet and the forest chirps around it. The only thing remarkable about it is that I am the first here; no one has touched the place. I note it on my star map—there is safety here, the safety of a distance greater than most robbers will venture.
A blackened boy-child sits on the step, his head against the doorpost as if only very tired. Inside, a second child lies in a cradle. My father and second-mother are in their bed, side by side just like that lord and lady on the stone tomb in Ardblarthen, only not so neatly carved or richly dressed. Everything else is exactly the same as Kirtle and I left it. So sparse and spare! There is nothing of value here. Grinnan would be angry. Burn these bodies and beds, boy! he’d say. We’ll take their rotten roof if that’s all they have.
“But Grinnan is not here, is he?” I say to the boy on the step, carrying the mattock out past him. “Grinnan is in the ground with his lady-love, under the pumpkins. And with a great big pumpkin inside him, too. And Mrs Pumpkin-Head in his arms, so that they can sex there underground forever.”
I take a stick and mark out the graves: Father, Second-Mother, Brother, Sister—and a last big one for the two sacks of Kirtle-bones. There’s plenty of time before sundown, and the moon is bright these nights, don’t I know it. I can work all night if I have to; I am strong enough, and full enough still of disgust. I will dig and dig until this is done.
I tear off my shirt.
I spit in my hands and rub them together.
The mattock bites into the earth.
© 2008 by Margo Lanagan.
First published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Margo Lanagan has published five collections of short stories (White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes, Yellowcake and Cracklescape) and novels, Tender Morsels and The Brides of Rollrock Island. She is a four-time World Fantasy Award winner, two of her books are Michael L. Printz Honor Books, and her work has also been nominated for Los Angeles Times Book Prize and twice been placed on the Shirley Jackson shortlist and the James Tiptree Jr Award honor list, as well as being shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Margo lives in Sydney. Her house is small and tumbledown, but it is not made of gingerbread, and she is friendly with the neighbors.
Blackbirds
Norman Partridge
On an August morning in the summer of 1960, a man dressed in black shattered the kitchen window at the Peterson home.
The house was empty. Major Peterson was at the base, writing a report on the importance of preparedness in the peacetime army. Mrs. Peterson was shopping for groceries. Their daughter Tracy was doing volunteer work at the local hospital.
Billy Peterson was the youngest member of the family. He was ten years old. Like the rest of his family, Billy was not at home when the man in black shattered the kitchen window.
Billy was pedaling his bicycle down Old MacMurray Road.
Billy was pedaling very fast.
Billy’s Daisy BB gun was slung over his shoulder, and he was wearing a small army surplus backpack.
There were only a few things in the backpack.
For one, there was a blackbird’s nest. In the nest were three eggs.
And there were two more things. Two items that, just like the backpack, had once been the official property of the United States Army.
One was a canteen, which Billy had filled with gasoline siphoned from his father’s lawnmower.
The other was a hand grenade.
The man in black had a pet of sorts. A blackbird which perched on his shoulder.
A blackbird with a BB hole in its chest.
But the bird did not seem inordinately bothered by the injury. No doubt it was well-trained. It did not make a single sound. Its head mirrored the movements of its master’s, searching here and there as the man in black explored the empty house.
But in the view of the man in black, the house was not empty.
In his view, he was surrounded by the Peterson family.
In his view, they were all around him.
Mrs. Peterson’s coffee cup stood abandoned on the kitchen counter, bearing a stain of frosted pink lipstick.
But the man in black passed it by.
The scent of Tracy’s girlish perfume drew him to the upstairs bathroom. He touched her uncapped perfume bottle, touched the damp towel Tracy had abandoned on the floor, touched Tracy’s soap, touched the heap of girlish clothes she had tossed in the laundry hamper.
And the man in black left the room.
He followed the track of Major Peterson’s bare feet on plush new carpet until he came to the major’s walk-in closet.
The closet held many uniforms. The man in black ran his fingers over these.
When he was done, he did not leave the closet.
Instead, he bent low and spun the dial on a safe which Major Peterson had bought at Sears.
He spun the dial with a calm sense of surety.
The numbers clicked into place.
The man in black opened the door.
There were many valuable things within the safe.
But the hand grenade was gone.
The mouth of the cave gaped wide.
Billy knew that it was a mouth that could not speak.
Shivering, Billy stared at it. He did not want to look away.
He could not look away. That was what he had done just the other day. He’d been staring at the mouth of the cave, staring into that black mouth that could not utter a single word, when his buddy Gordon Rogers said something stupid.
And, just for a second, Billy looked away.
Just for a second. Just long enough to give Gordon Rogers a poke in the ribs.
And when Billy looked back, a man was standing at the mouth of the cave.
A man dressed all in black.
Billy swallowed hard, remembering.
He wished that Gordon were here.
Maybe, in a way, he was.
No. That wasn’t right. Billy knew that he was all alone now. Gordon was gone—as good as dead, really. And no one stood at the mouth of the cave.
No one stood there dressed all in black.
No one said, “Don’t you know that caves are dangerous?”
No Gordon to answer, “If caves are so dangerous, what’re you doing in one?”
“Guess,” was the single word the man in black whispered, but there was no one to whisper it.
No one but Billy.
He stared at the mouth full of nothing.
“You’re a mining engineer,” he guessed.
But no one shook his head, as the man in black had done.
“You’re a spelunker,” Billy said.
And no one laughed.
“If you want me to ask, I’ll ask.” Billy said. “What are you?”
“I am an army.”
“An army?” Billy shook his head. “You’re just one guy!”
“I am an army, all the same.”
“From where, then? You don’t look like a Ruskie.”
“I am not from Russia.”
“Then where are you from?”
The question hung in the air. The mouth of the cave yawned wide, but there was only silence.
The man in black was not here.
So he could not answer, “I am an army . . . from hell.”
Being an army was an occupation fraught with hazards. Violence was often unavoidable. People lied. And reconnaissance reports were sometimes less than accurate.
For example—there was no hand grenade in Major Peterson�
�s safe. Which meant that there was no shiny hand-grenade pin to be had.
But the man in black found many other attractive things in the Peterson house. Things that could be of use.
He found Billy’s baseball. The one with pretty red stitches sewn with surgical precision.
He found Tracy’s jump rope. Tracy had abandoned it long ago, of course. But not so long ago as she might have wished.
In addition to these things, the man in black found a towel used by both parents. The towel was the color of skin, and it bore telltale smudges of Mrs. Peterson’s foundation cream, and from it Mr. Peterson’s hair seemed to sprout, for just this morning he had trimmed his moustache before departing for the base, and the bristling hairs had adhered to the towel.
The man in black bunched the towel between his large palms. Then he twisted it, as if wringing it out.
Bunched again. Twisted again.
He worked faster and faster. Strange shapes appeared in the material. Shapes vaguely recognizable, but only for a moment, and then they were gone.
A nose. An eyebrow.
A woman’s cheek daubed with foundation cream.
A man’s graying moustache.
The man in black smiled as he wrapped the baseball in the towel and snared it with the jump rope.
Then he wrung the towel again, quite viciously this time.
Almost sadistically.
Soon the towel began to bleed.
Blood spattered the carpet as the man in black crossed Mr. and Mrs. Peterson’s bedroom.
Soon each and every drop had been wrung from the towel.
The man in black shattered the bedroom window.
No one noticed.
No one was home.
And the neighbors, the man thought with a wry smile, had flown.
Billy was about to unzip his U. S. Army surplus backpack when something moved within.
Billy gasped. The canvas material seemed to pulse before his eyes. He watched it, but he couldn’t move.
Until he heard the sound.
A faint cracking. The same sound Billy heard every morning when his father tapped a spoon against his soft-boiled egg.