And there was my son, Rowan Mays, smiling.
And should the binding be prevented, or left incomplete, the shape shall be twisted, and the death shall be the death of iron.
And there was a monster, covered in blood, wailing, roaring, screaming. I could not say which.
Nine days.
12.
I woke that night from a deep and drunken sleep—the house had provided comfort of its kind—to light streaming in from beneath the bedroom door. Soft footsteps, Row up from a nightmare. I rolled over, hoping my wife would tend him, but no. I stretched out an arm to touch her shoulder and wake her, and felt a warmth where she’d been, smelled a sweetness like dead leaves in the woods. She must be up to get him already. Outside my bedroom door, the hall was full of feet, running through the house.
I settled back into the bed, still half-sleeping, anticipating her return. She’d come back, warm and silky as a mountain lion, her smell of silver jewelry and cedar. She’d nestle into the bed beside me, her belly against my back, her thigh over mine, and her breath against my neck, her teeth—
There was a sound like something peeling back, a scratching and an unsealing. I jolted up, my heart racing. No, that was a dream. The sound, the weight in the bed, the sharp teeth and—
I turned my head.
There was light pouring in from beneath the door. Not the bedroom door. The painted door in the wall. I’d left the key on the dresser, and now it protruded from the plaster.
I stopped breathing. I’d painted over the red rectangle, and the new latex was still there, but light was beginning to come through it, all around its edges. Somewhere I heard sobbing, faint and desolate.
Was I awake? The smell of silver and cedar, and that was real. The invisible door started to open, outward from the room, into nothing, the rectangle of white paint remaining, stretched across an emptiness.
As I watched, the paint moved, something pressing against it from behind. A female face began to appear, white and gleaming, lips and cheekbones, nose and eyelids, pushing toward me, into my room. I recognized it, or almost did. It was dark, but light poured out beneath the painted door, from somewhere I didn’t want to see. Beside the first face, another began to coalesce. Strong brows, this one, a beard. A sharp nose.
I watched as their bodies pressed into the thin screen of paint separating us, and as they raised their left arms, I steeled myself, clutching the bedside lamp, for the moment they discovered they could claw through the barrier and into the room. They didn’t move. Their arms ended in nothing. No hands. They stood, holding them up, as if to show me the absence. At last, slowly, they receded, as though they’d walked backward. The light faded. The key fell out of the lock that wasn’t, and clacked on the floor, jolting me into a frenzy of shaking and shuddering.
I heard hoofbeats. A horse, somewhere, galloping away. Or something else in horseshoes.
The smell of coffee brewing. The house wasn’t sleeping, and neither was I.
I looked at the pillow beside me and saw an indentation in it. A long black hair. Coarse, yet soft as raw silk. I coiled it up, into a knotted tangle.
I got out of bed, my feet freezing on the floor, though I could feel the strange October heat pressing on the house already. I picked up the key, and the photograph of Row, and went downstairs, the hair in my hand to be thrown outside as soon as I could.
On my kitchen table, I wasn’t surprised to find the horseshoe, though I didn’t remember picking it up. In my hallway, I wasn’t surprised to find a new letter from Dusha Chuchonnyhoof.
In my hand, I wasn’t surprised to find the sledgehammer, heavy and perfectly weighted, the indentations in the handle sized to my grip. The end of the sentence was approaching, and there was work to be done. I had responsibilities.
I would find a person (HER) (not her) whose hands could be bound in an anvil marriage, and then I’d…
I’d turn the hands into horseshoes, blood and iron to bind to the feet of Dusha Chuchonnyhoof, someone else’s hands to keep his feet from touching the earth. If I did it right—I hefted the sledgehammer—if I followed the instructions, somehow everything would be fine and Row would be alive and the end of the sentence was approaching and I had a duty and I—
My coffee cup clattered on the table, bringing me back to my senses.
Jesus.
What was I thinking? What the hell was I thinking? Phantom advisors, horrible nightmares, and I was here thinking of taking—no, call it what it is, cutting off—someone’s hands?
Malcolm, Malcolm, you came here running from your past, and now you were thinking of doing something horrible to someone else? Because some creature instructed you to? Because you found a piece of paper telling you to commit a crime?
No. I sat down at the kitchen table (coffee, in front of me, steaming, comfort, refilled again to replace the cup I’d spilt) and wrote a letter on the brown paper sack from the hardware store.
10/23
Chuchonnyhoof,
I didn’t buy you with this land, and you don’t own me as part of your claim. You promise me something that can’t exist. I don’t invite you into my life. It belongs to me, even if nothing else does. Don’t look to me to do your work. Stay in prison, or go elsewhere, but you will not return here. The end of your sentence is nothing to me. I’m not your man. Someone put you in prison. If you come here, I’ll put you back there.
Don’t contact me again.
Malcolm Mays
I weighed it down with a rock, left it on the porch, and went back inside, slamming the door behind me. I wouldn’t just sit here waiting for letters. I’d felt passive, here in this house, fed, clothed and bathed like a child, and now I’d responded, however insane it seemed.
I should mail the letter like a normal person, not put it out for the post to pick up. As far as I could tell, there was no post. Still, the deliveries were to my door, and so I’d send it that way, too. As though the birds and wind would deliver my letter to someone who didn’t exist.
Ironhide, not a goblin but a murdering man, jailed a hundred and seventeen years ago. He would be a skeleton now, and I’d been summoned by the jail to give the money for the burial. It would be a potter’s field for him. I wouldn’t pay to have Ironhide come home, even in a box. What did I owe him? This land was cursed enough, or seemed to be. I wanted to grow things here, and sweep the dust out, and work my way back into living a life.
In my head, my wife said again the last things she’d said to me: “Get out of this house, Malcolm. You’re not even a sorry excuse. You’re nothing.”
She slammed my hand in the door as she pushed me out.
“You say you love me,” she yelled out the window.
“But you don’t love anyone but yourself. Poor Malcolm who accidentally killed his son. Poor Malcolm who accidentally broke his wife’s heart. Poor Malcolm who accidentally deserves nothing he ever had. Get the hell away from me. Never come back here.”
I thought again of Row, an avalanche of loss, and the promise this thing, this goblin (goblin?) had made to me. The return of my son.
That parchment hadn’t come into the house. I looked frantically around the kitchen. No. It wasn’t here.
Row, I thought, Row. These thoughts, the dreams, must only be my brain, trying to reorganize its contents. I thought of the stories I’d told my son before bed, the ship stories passed down from my grandfather. My granddad had been around the world, and collected things in ports, stories of goblins and haystacks, ships on roiling seas, the wolf Fenris, the Irish shifting creatures who tugged at hems and tore at skirts. He told them all like he was telling the truth. Row hadn’t really liked those stories. He wanted stories about beautiful things instead, and now I didn’t blame him. He wanted to watch princesses on the television. His mother, at his begging, bought him a crown and a dress, and he wore them. A little boy who insisted he was something other than the thing he seemed to be. That never went well in the world. I worried. But he was still so little.
&
nbsp; The last thing Row said to me was “I’m a princess, Daddy.”
And I thought, “There’s no such thing as that happy ending.”
I tucked him in, and went downstairs to fight with his mother, our traditional fight about money, lasting until we were both too tired to stop ourselves from saying the worst possible things.
I shut my eyes and rubbed my fists over them. A flash of satin. A cheap gilded crown with rhinestones all over it. Headlight, I thought. The kind of headlight you might not have bothered to get replaced, thinking you knew your way home on faith in the dark.
My coffee was full again. It was dawn, and I could see the sun rising out the windows.
I thought about iron shoes. Only sinners wore iron shoes.
The flap on the front door clicked open, but no letter fell through it. It set up a tremendous rattling, as if a tornado twisted on the other side of the door. The letters on the end table and in the woven basket flew into the air, and set up a whirlwind of their own, spinning and whiting out my vision.
“What the hell is going on?” I yelled. The letters dropped to the ground. The mail flap held still.
A knock on the door.
Lischen March stood on the dirt path, a plate covered by a red gingham cloth in her hands. “Good morning! I thought you might be feeling a little rough, so I brought breakfast. Well, they’re popovers, so good anytime, really. Sorry it’s so early, but I saw the light on.”
The hot, eggy scent of the popovers curled into my doorway. People had brought food, when Row died. Casseroles in heavy dishes and containers of soup, frozen, “for later.” They stop bringing the food when they realize the death is your fault. I felt nauseous.
I stepped back out of the doorway. “Thanks. Um. Come in.”
The letters were stacked, neatly, in the woven basket, under the table, and mostly out of sight. The sledgehammer was nowhere to be seen. Lischen looked around.
“How bad was the place when you moved in?” she asked.
“About what you’d expect, I guess,” I said. I poked my head into the refrigerator, looking for the pot of strawberry preserves, but the shelves were bare.
“I don’t have much besides coffee to offer you,” I said.
“Coffee’d be great,” she said. “Ralph said there was all sorts of scary graffiti on the walls.” She tilted her head and looked at me. “People always want to say stuff like that is done by Satanists, but I don’t think there are too many devil worshippers hanging out in Ione.” She laughed.
“It wasn’t good,” I said, “but it wasn’t like that either. It’s gone now. I painted over it.”
“You should’ve shown me. I’m a librarian—I like interesting things.”
Faces, pressing out from a wall. Handless arms reaching. No.
The light glinted against her left wrist as she reached for the mug. A cuff of two hands tightly linked together in shining white metal. “That’s a pretty bracelet.”
“Thank you. I do some metal working, as a hobby,” she said, and smiled.
A forge and a furnace and a hand hanging over a horn. I felt a sudden flood of relief. Maybe she was the one the letter meant, not me at all, maybe this was HER—
“Like a blacksmith?” I asked.
“Why, do you have a horse out back that needs shoeing?” She laughed.
Nothing like a horse, but oh, yes. Shoes were required. “Wouldn’t that be something if I did.”
Lischen set the mug back down on the table, next to a letter from the prison. I felt an urge to tug it out of her way, but she put her hand on it before I could.
“Is this one of the ones you’ve been getting?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling exposed. A fraud, somehow. I suddenly thought I might have written them myself.
Approved, said the letter. Red ink. The same as always. The house said nothing, and nothing moved but the two of us.
She slit the envelope with her long fingernail, and unfolded the contents. I found I wasn’t breathing.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Like Ralph thought. They just want to know what you want them to do with his hide. Says this is the final notice.”
I looked up. “His hide?”
“His body,” she said. “Hide? What did you think I said?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay,” she said, and smiled. “It’s weird out here, right? It’s too far out for most people. Gets too dark at night and too bright in the day. I’m working at the library today. Short hours on Sunday, but come by anytime if there’s something I can help you with. It can be hard, moving into a strange place, with all sorts of obligations that you weren’t expecting.”
I walked her back to the front door. “Thanks for stopping by. And the food. It was kind of you.” I realized I had a question. “Olivia Weyland. Did you know her?”
“Of course,” she replied. “She used to come into the library all the time. She knew a lot about the history of this area, got a correspondence degree from somewhere back East. It was sad what happened to her.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But no. That was a coward’s way. That was the old Malcolm.
“What happened exactly? I thought—I figured she just died of old age or something.” I had looked her up, at the library. What had I missed?
She looked steadily at me and my skin felt somehow both stroked and scraped. Her voice, maybe. The sweet roughness in it. Again, I wondered how old she was. In her thirties, I thought now, not twenties. My age, even. There were fine lines at the corner of her mouth, lines that suited her. Her fingernails were polished an iridescent pearl color. I wondered where she’d gotten the nail polish.
“Well, this is two years ago now, so that’s maybe why no one told you,” Lischen said. “It’s pretty bad, too. Nobody wants to talk about it. The people next door. Thought they’d rob her, but something went wrong. I went to high school with a boy from that family. They were trouble since forever. Famous in these parts for it. The Millers were some of the people that settled Ione, and they’d been going down a long time.” She shrugged. “They cut her hand off for her rings, the police said. I guess they couldn’t get them off. She had arthritis.”
“Her hand,” I said. “I thought—”
“What’d you think? Yeah,” Lischen said. “Her left hand. But then they all died too. There was an explosion and a fire over there. Well, you can see what happened. Scorched earth. The Millers are all gone now, and the Weylands too. My family’s the only one from back then still here and prospering.”
She laughed, and it rang out weirdly in the kitchen. We were talking about murder, about drugs, about an old woman’s hand being cut off. I tried to reshuffle my mind, the things I thought I knew.
She patted the table.
“Don’t worry. I wasn’t laughing about Olivia Weyland and the Millers. I was laughing about prospering. Library full of old paper, and a diner full of pie, those are my family heirlooms. Come in and get dinner if you want to, later. Blackberry pie tonight. They’re ripe to bursting. See these stains on my mouth? You’ve got some out back. Bring them by and I’ll make you some jam. Got to put something on those popovers.”
She grinned at me, and the grin was ridiculous, dizzy-making. She was right. Her lips were stained. I had to remind myself who I was, a man who’d fled his life, and for good reasons. I couldn’t have anything like what that grin looked like. Happiness wasn’t simple for me. I thought of my marriage. It was taking me too long to let her go, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t over. Once you run away, you can’t go back.
“Maybe I’ll see you later,” I managed.
“Hope so,” she said, and put her hand on my shoulder for a moment. I jerked back. It’d been a long time since anyone had touched me, and it felt wrong, until I remembered that this was what people did. They touched other people. It was normal.
“Sorry,” I said, embarrassed.
“No need,” she said. “Everybody comes from something. I figure you’ve got a histo
ry like anyone, don’t you, Malcolm Mays? I have a history too.”
I stood in the doorway and watched her hop into a faded red pickup truck, draping one arm out the window as she drove off. She hadn’t just appeared here. Of course she hadn’t, I reminded myself. The town was real. Lischen was real, not part of this house. I rubbed my shoulder, sore where she’d touched it, and watched the dust of her departure until she was all the way gone.
I looked down. My letter to Chuchonnyhoof was gone too.
There was silence in the house after she left. No breath, no singing, no sounds of dishes in the sink being washed. Maybe the house didn’t like visitors.
Maybe the letter had changed things.
I felt at peace for a moment, standing outside the house, even having heard the sad story of Olivia. The sun was out, and there was a breeze and my house was silent. Maybe I wasn’t going to live this way forever. I’d cleared the brush away from my old life, and resisted temptations. I could stay here. I felt, however insanely, however strangely, safe.
The sky was clear and blue. A haze of faint black smoke curled up from the scorched property, reminding me of what had been here. If I was going to clean the house of hazards, I’d need to make sure that chimney was clear.
The October sun hit me like a wall, but the patches of violets and mint, cool and green, had grown even further, as if they’d been planted in a different season. I walked five steps before yellow grass crackled beneath my feet. Behind the house were the blackberries she’d said were there, bushes by the door, leafed now and heavy with fruit, twisting up outside the kitchen windows, though I remembered bare vines. I put a berry in my mouth. Sour and sweet at once, the thorns on the vines scratching me as I reached for the berries, heavier than they looked, laden with black juice.
In the eastern corner of the scorched section, I found the hole in the ground, smoke drifting up from it. The earth felt hot. I tried again to realign what I’d thought the night before, with what Lischen had just told me. Ironhide was dead. Olivia Weyland was dead too, and in sad circumstances. The forge was below me, yes, but that meant nothing. This was a family of blacksmiths. It had said it in the newspapers, even. Something else too, some trigger to my memory, and I finally remembered. The Millers. Michael Miller was the other victim of Dusha Chuchonnyhoof.
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