by Laird Barron
Dear Master! I write because you said “tell me everything.”
G.
And two years ago, the last time you came, you rushed past the house just as you were, all grimy from the journey, and you ran off into the meadow, and I ran after you, like a lunatic Mother said later, and we kicked through the grass, releasing a green, bruised odor, and you threw yourself into the arms of the cypress tree, the most somber tree in the meadow, certainly more funereal than the ones in Italian pictures, and perhaps there is something about our northern clime that makes them grow that way, almost black, absorbing all the light, not reflecting it at all, or perhaps it is only the paler light here, the paler sky against which they stand like sentries, and you seized a branch in your teeth and chewed it savagely, and I too pressed my face to the needles and bit, and you muttered Freiberg Freiberg, and I imagined that you were repeating my name.
My Dear Sigmund,
So, you persist in your silence. This is no more than I expected. Emil assures me that you will certainly not come now. Your zoology examination, it appears, is set for the end of the month. Well! I wish you success; though it is clear you need no encouragement from me.
You are resolved, he says, to become a man of science.
Perhaps you are thinking of my Nathanael, and wondering if he lives? Please do not distress yourself. Nathanael is quite well. Only last week I observed him consuming cakes on a balcony with his Olimpia. She, of course, ate nothing. It seems she is conscious of her figure. I peered at them from under my parasol, and walked on. I try not to let Nathanael see me these days. I imagine he and his darling will marry, and produce a line of human children with wooden hearts.
Sigmund, I know the secret.
Emil took me out this morning, at Mother’s urging. The air was raw, the streets a rough mixture of frost and mud. To my amazement, the marionettes were again dancing in the square, before a paltry audience of mostly poor children. Pierrot’s little face was so hard and sad, it brought the tears to my eyes. Columbine’s hand mirror, I realized, is a lorgnette. She peered at me with an eye as gray as a clam. Her gaze quite went through me; but the magnification also revealed a great crack in her plaster forehead.
Thanks to the improved health I have enjoyed recently, I am very nimble and strong. I tore away from Emil and dashed behind the theater. The dirty little boy was sitting there, quite comfortable on an overturned pail, blowing vigorously on his gloveless hands. I could only see his father, the puppet-master, from the waist down: a pair of baggy trousers tucked into hobnailed boots. The boy stood, but I pushed past him and tugged the puppet-master’s shirt. He lifted the spangled curtain and glared at me.
“What is it, miss?”
On the other side of the theater, the children had begun to roar their disapproval at the sudden collapse of the show. Emil rushed up behind me. The puppet-master, breathing white fog from his black beard, told us to be off, using a vulgar expression. “I know the secret,” I told him. Emil had seized me now, and was pulling me away. He gave me a terrible lecture all the way home. I did not mind. Every time I raised my hand, as if sprinkling sugar, a host of swallows rose into the sky.
To climb. To climb.
This morning my eyes were crusted shut again. When I rubbed them, my fingers came away covered with brown flakes. Has the cold weather caused it somehow, or is it blood?
Now that I am avoiding Nathanael, I have had the chance to explore more of the dream city. I often find myself in black, narrow, odorous, humid streets: the streets where I used to chase him in merrier days. There is a certain alley that reminds me of the one behind the smithy in Freiberg, the one with a plaque commemorating the burning of witches. I always feel nervous in that dark dream street—yet at the same time I am drawn to the place. Last night, as I wandered there, a curious scraping echoed from the walls. A slow, uneven, tortured sound, the groan of an object moving with great difficulty over the slimy stones.
I paused. There was very little light—the buildings on either side shut out the moon—but the stones of the alley themselves possess a strange, greenish radiance. In that eldritch light, a figure came toward me, dragging itself painfully, a towering thing with an outline like a crag.
Closer, closer! I watched, frozen to the spot. For the first time in that place, I was terrified. The creature lurched toward me on heavy, jointless legs. I saw it was made of wood. And not just wood, but a wild patchwork of wood, painted pieces fixed haphazardly together. It was as if a crazed puppeteer had taken all the pieces left over from building his marionettes, and constructed one fabulous, horrible puppet, a creature taller than a man, its shoulders built up like buttresses, its sad face hanging down upon its chest. For it had a sad face, Sigmund, such a sad face! A face of flesh, very pale, the face of an invalid. Bloody tear-tracks descended from its eyes. I knew at once that it was the Sandman. It raised a clumsy arm and pointed toward the sky.
To climb. To climb.
The last time I saw you: Vienna, New Year’s Eve. Your mother was distressed, as your father had not yet arrived. She kept running out to the landing to see if he had come. The parlor was hot from our dancing. I wore a white holiday dress and a black velvet ribbon. I had decided that there would be no more shyness on my part, no pretense. The flavor of bitter cypress was in my mouth. I had tucked a sprig of it inside the bosom of my dress, to bring you, there in the city, the delirious freshness of Freiberg. When we danced, I pressed close to you so that you would smell it. You pushed me back with a cold look. Later that night I heard you talking in the kitchen. “As for Gisela Fluss,” you said, “once she was a decorous doll, and now she has become an indecorous flirt.”
A doll, a flirt. But I shall become an artist. And you: you will be a man of science.
The Sandman jerked his arm, signaling to me. I realized that he was pointing to the single lighted window in the dismal tenement above the street. There, at a table, a man sat writing. His brown hair was tied in a pigtail. His coat was not clean. I thought, astonished, that this must be my Nathanael. Then he raised his head and looked out the window, eyes narrowed, pencil against his teeth, and I saw that he was an entirely different person. With his mobile face and pensive, furrowed brow, he looked more like the Sandman than Nathanael. He was, of course, the double of them both. Father, devil, puppeteer: he was Hoffmann. I glanced at the Sandman, who gestured eagerly at the drainpipe on the wall.
I am no fortune-teller, Sigmund. But I will make you a prediction. I predict that one day you will regret your choice. I predict that you will try to go back, to find your way to the dream city and the winding streets that might have made you a poet. You will search for Hoffmann, and you will not find him. It will not be your destiny to embrace him and kiss him on the mouth. Nor will it be your destiny to wind your apron string about his neck, and set free his collection of wooden birds.
The Sandman gestured to me, weeping blood.
I went to the wall and examined the drainpipe. Now I could no longer see Hoffmann in his room. The edge of the lighted window shone like frost.
I handed the Sandman my wig, grasped the pipe in both hands, and began to climb.
Livia Llewellyn
* * *
FURNACE
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror and erotica. A 2006 graduate of Clarion, her fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Sybil’s Garage, PseudoPod, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011 by Lethe Press. Engines received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations, for Best Collection, and Best Novelette (for “Omphalos”). “Furnace” has received a 2013 SJA nomination for Best Short Fiction. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.
Everyone knew our town was dying, long before we truly saw it. There’s a certain way a piece of fruit begins to wrinkle and soften, caves in on itself around the edges of a fast-appearing br
uise, throwing off the sickly-sweet scent of decay and death that always attracts some creeping hungry thing. Some part of the town, an unused building sinking into its foundations, a forgotten alleyway erupting into a slow maelstrom of weeds and cracked stone, was succumbing, had festered, succumbed: and now threw off the warning spores of its demise. Everywhere in the town we went about the ins and outs of our daily lives and business, telling ourselves everything was normal, everything was fine. And every now and then a spore drifted into our lungs, riding in on a faint thread of that rotting fruiting scent, and though we did not pause in our daily routines, we stumbled a bit, we slowed. It was the last days of summer, I had just turned thirteen, and the leaves were beginning to turn, people were gathering the final crops of their fine little backyard gardens, culling the lingering remains of the season’s foods and flowers, smoothing over the soil. My grandfather had placed a large red-rusted oil barrel off the side of the garage, and every evening he threw the gathering detritus of summer into the can, and set it on fire. Great plumes of black smoke rose into the warm air, feather-fine flakes of ash and hot red sparks. I stood on the gravel path, watching the bright red licks of fire crackle and leap from the barrel’s jagged edges as my grandfather poked the burning sticks and leaves further down. An evening wind carried the dark smoke up into the canopy of branches overhead, tall evergreens swaying and whispering as they swept and sifted the ash further into the sky. We watched in silence. The air smelled gritty and smoky and dark, in that way the air only ever smells at the end of a dying summer, the smell of the sinking sun and dark approaching fall. The trees shifted, the branches changed direction, and the sickly-sweet scent caught in our throats, driving the smoke away.
—What is that? I asked.
—I don’t know, my grandfather replied. He rubbed ash from his eyes, and stared out into a distance place neither of us could see. —Something’s wrong.
Summer officially ended, school began, and the town continued. It was easy for all of us to say that everything was fine. The dissonance in the air was the usual changing of the seasons, we told ourselves. Near the downtown area, on a small lonely street along the outskirts of the factories and warehouses that ringed the downtown district, that strange and troubling area where suburbia fizzled out to its bitter end and the so-called city proper began, a number of small businesses closed with no warning to their loyal long-time customers or to those who worked for them. I knew of this only because my mother drove down that particular street one early afternoon, having taken me out of school for a dentist appointment. My mother had frequented most of these stores in her childhood, and she loved driving down the street as an adult, pointing out to me all the various places she had been taken by my grandfather. A small confectioner's store that supplied those queer square mint-tinged wafers that were both creamy and crunchy, the pastel sweets popular at weddings and wakes. A stationers store, where my mother's family had bought boxes and boxes of thick cream paper and envelopes with the family crest, a horned griffin rampant over a field of night-blooming cereus, and where my grandfather bought business cards and memo pads with his name printed neatly in the middle, just above his title of supervisor for the town's electric and water company. A dilapidated movie theatre that showed films in languages no one had ever heard of, from countries no one could ever seem to recall having seen on our schools and library's aging maps and globes. A haberdashery where my father once had his soft brown wool felt fedoras and thick lambskin winter gloves blocked and stitched to his exact measurements and specifications. It had been taken over just that spring by the son of the former owner, an earnest and intense young man with perfect pale skin and unruly black hair, and unfortunately large black eyes. All three of those stores and more sat dark and fallow all along the block, faded red CLOSED and OUT OF BUSINESS signs swinging against padlocked doors, display windows choked with cobwebs and dust, the now familiar odor of sickly sweetness lingering in the air.
—Why do I keep smelling that, I said, pinching my nose shut.—What is it?
—It smells like camphor, my mother said.
—What's that?
—Like the moth balls in our closets, she said. —You know, what I use to keep your father's and grandmother's things from molding and rotting away. To preserve things.
—Preserve? Like jam?
—In a way. To protect things. So they'll never grow old, and always stay the same.
That afternoon as my mother steered the car along the narrow meridian dividing the street in two, the pale young man stood outside the haberdashery's doors, his long arms wrapped around a bolt of fabric as if he were carrying the body of a dead child. I started in shock to realize it was not a bolt of fabric, but a length of thick grey wool wrapped around the stiff body of a large bird with two beaks twisted into a hideous spiral and a spider-like cluster of lidless coal-colored eyes. My mother stopped the car, and we stepped onto the dry worn street sitting under a cool and cloudless sky crowned by telephone wires. No one else was here this time of the afternoon in this part of the town, a part of the town in the middle of everything yet nowhere in particular, where the buildings rose no more than two stories before flattening out in resignation and despair, where you could walk down the sidewalks for hours, see no strip mall or market or house that didn't look like the one behind it and before, hear only the soft crinkle of your shoes against cracked cement and the occasional miserable distant bark of a dog. In hindsight, we should have been more vigilant, more aware that these were the places of a town where septicemia and putrification creep in first, those lonely and familiar sections we slipped into and through every day without concern or care—not the seedy crumbling but flashy edges where decay was expected, and, from a certain element of our small society, even accepted and encouraged. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts, these were the places we never gave a single thought about, because we thought they would be here forever, unchanging in the antiseptic amber of our fixed memories. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts were always the first to go.
—Don't come any closer, said the pale young man to my mother as she stepped onto the sidewalk.
—What happened to all the stores? my mother asked. —When did everything close?
—Don't go near the windows, said the pale young man. —It's terrible, don't look. He stepped forward as if to block her, his already too large eyes widening further, the rims and lids as purple-red as the leaves on the trees, as if he had been weeping for hours, for centuries. My mother, a woman who, like her father, my grandfather, did not pay much heed to the general spoken and unspoken rules of a town, brushed past him, and I followed in her wake, already at thirteen very much a similar stubborn member of my family. My mother stepped up to one of the display windows, and I to the other, cupping my hands around my eyes to block out the sun as I pressed my face against the glass. —Don't look, the young man repeated, but he did nothing to stop us, only stood on the sidewalk cradling his many-eyed black-feathered bird wrapped in fabric, shivering in the afternoon sun. Inside the store, everything appeared covered in the light dust typical of such a place, but nothing appeared out of the ordinary. I had last been in the store five years ago, to help my mother pick out a fine linen handkerchief for my father for the holidays, before he had disappeared in the deep network of tunnels and passages owned by the town's electric and water company. I kept staring through the glass. Bowlers and fedoras slumping over the resigned foreheads of cracked mannequin heads, weary trays of uneven chevron-covered ties, unpolished cufflinks depressed into velvet folds of faded burgundy. My breath fogged the glass, and I wiped it away with a pass of my hands. Everything was quiet, peaceful, still.
—I don't see anything different, my mother said. —Everything looks the same as I remember. This is the way it should be.
—I know, the young man said. —It all looks the same on the outside. It always has. You have to look underneath.
—How can one look
underneath? I asked.
—You just do. You just know.
I'm not certain how long we stood on the quiet sidewalk of the lonely street in that empty part of town, staring through fingerprint smeared windows into darkness. I now only remember how after a time had passed and as the afternoon sun hitched further down toward the town's jagged horizon, everything in the store seemed to recede, sink into an interminable black fuzz not unlike mold spreading across fruit. Soft sweet mold and mannequin heads, and no life at all in the displays and counters and fixtures and heavy folds of fabric, only the amber-tinged cool approaching dark. My eyes adjusted to the fading light, and everything in the haberdashery blurred and shifted into a single indistinct mass: for one wild terrible second I felt like I was staring into the only place left in the world, that there was only my face pressed to the glass front of a dead forgotten store endlessly out of the reach of my immovable limbs, and everything and everyone behind me, including myself, was forever gone.
—Nothing's changed except the sign, my mother said. —This is unacceptable. The stores must be reopened, so we can shop here, as we've always done. That's how it's supposed to be.
The young man replied, —Yes. And it will never end.
My mother looked at him, but did not reply.
I stepped back from the glass, and as I did, I caught a glimpse of the pale young man's face, reflected beneath the faded gold letters of the haberdashery that bore his father's name. I saw underneath him. I saw his wide unmoving mouth, his tiny painted teeth, his lidless lashless eyes, his cool matte porcelain skin. It was then I remembered I had crushed on him briefly, that last spring. I'd told my mother how handsome he looked, how comforting and familiar, and she'd laughed me into embarrassed silence, and so I'd driven it from my mind. The young man turned from us, and as he walked down the sidewalk back into suburbia, trailing oily iridescent feathers at his feet and the numbing sweet smell of camphor through the air, I caught a glimpse of his neck below his black, black hair, and the straight bloodless seam like a strange new road, slicing through every part of the town I'd ever known.