He kicked the leering gargoyle viciously with the sole of his heavy boot and shoved it back farther into the fire.
Delia ran screaming to the corner. She sagged down until she was sitting. She began rocking herself to and fro. “Oh, my baby’s going to die.” She held her stomach and cried out in pain.
The obscene carving went dead black. Tom piled more kindling on top of it, and saw the blaze leaping higher still. He watched the sparks fly up the kitchen chimney with more glee than he would have thought possible.
***
Her breath was coming very hard. Gasping for air, Delia clutched her small chest. Suddenly she vomited up a huge rolling spray of liquid and half digested food. She moaned.
Tom ran to her side. He knelt. Her skin was ice cold, her face was covered in sweat.
She sat up and spread her legs as wide apart as they would go. “It’s pushing, pushing,” she panted. “In me.” She began to shriek.
He took her hand. “No, it’s too soon, Delia, no.”
“Oaannnnnh,” she grunted, and her teeth were set on edge. He saw blood flow in fast pool underneath her. She vomited again, and he saw her eyes roll up in her head. Her mouth dragged down in a sharp spasm and she screamed in agony. Her hands flew to her chest.
“Delia. Delia.” He cradled her on his lap.
“Meat, meat for the baby.” Her hair was matted with sweat, her hand fumbled at her crotch.
He screamed, unable to help himself.
“Did you eat it? Answer me, oh mother of Christ, Delia answer me!” Her legs splayed wide and he felt the wet flow of her blood onto his trousers. Her body jerked, and she cried out again, her small hands pressing her heart.
“Gran says meat,” she breathed. “Eat it for the baby. Hungry.” The words were indistinct, slurred. Her lips formed a thin half smile. “Papa says getting fat. Waited till you went to wash—”
The potatoes, he thought, and clutched her small body to him. He buried his head against her. God, God, she’d eaten the meat from the poisoned stew.
Her eyes opened and she looked at him. She nodded, barely. “Yes.” It took her a long time to say it.
He heard the sharp intake of breath, then her body stiffened. He watched until her eyes clouded over. She was gone.
***
He heard a light step and turned to look over his shoulder. Rose stood alongside the table, one misshapen hand curled around a small paring knife.
“An abortifacient. You don’t know that word, do you boy? No. You wondered what could stop the baby, but you never heard those women in town say, did you? Oleander works on the heart,” she said. The short blade gleamed between her fingers.
He kept his eye on the knife, her words swirled like oil in his mind.
“Knew it would kill a pig didn’t you? But not how much would kill a man or a poor slow witted girl, either, huh, boy?”
She’d been inching toward him slowly; he realized her voice held him—as if he’d been paralyzed—to the spot.
“I’m going to have your manhood!” Rose cawed.
At the same instant, from three feet away he saw the knife glide out of her hand. The vision was quite clear, she hadn’t thrown it; it floated toward him at the level of his eyes, the thin curve where it had been honed too often gleaming like a sickle.
Rose laughed. “Trophies. Life is all about getting trophies, boy. Think of it,” she said, and the knife took a sudden dive downward like a kite dropped by the wind. “You’ll never know a woman.”
He watched the blade begin a slow windmill spin.
The door banged open, Rose started at the noise, and Tom heard the knife clatter against the floor.
“What’ve you done to Delia?” Cedric shrieked, running forward; then he sagged to his knees in front of the fireplace and began wringing his hands. “Oh, my book, my precious precious book.”
Tom saw the old woman’s eyes flick toward Cedric and he seized his chance. He hurled himself at her and knocked her down. He heard her head strike the floor with a hard dull thud. She was half-conscious, moaning. He would deal with her later, he got to his feet, scrabbled sideways and snatched up the heavy soup kettle, dumping it over on Cedric. Cedric began spluttering and screaming in a blind rage.
“Oh Christ, mother of the dear Christ, I can’t see. I’m scalded!” His hands circled and flailed like wounded birds around his face.
Cedric tried to hoist himself up, he flung his hands wide trying to find the wall, a chair, the bench—something to guide him. Tom lifted the burning kettle. He ignored the hot searing pain in his hands and brought it down against Cedric’s head as hard as he could. Cedric fell sprawling on his face in the puddling stew.
Then he fell on Rose. He got astride her chest, his knees clamping her bony form. He yanked her hair and banged her head as hard as he could against the floor. The sound of her head striking the boards urged him on. He kept at it until he felt her go limp. A thin line of blood ran from one ear to the hollow of her shoulder.
Her words cut through the haze of his shock.
You can light fires with your mind.
Maybe it was a trick, her last try to overpower him. He didn’t know, didn’t care. He sensed there would be danger if he hesitated or delayed.
Tom jerked open the cupboard drawer where there was a small supply of linens. He shook the kerosene from a lamp over the napkins and cloths and tossed them in the four corners of the room. He spread the rest of the reeking liquid over the floorboards and furniture, close to their bodies, away from the door. He would need a place to escape. The oily smell was sharp, his nose ran, his eyes blurred from the fumes.
Rose groaned.
“Your burning is my trophy,” he whispered.
Tom grabbed the pothook and scattered the fire.
The instant it touched the kerosene, he heard it suck up the oxygen with a loud whump. The flames jumped in a high savage dance.
He slammed the kitchen door, and ran out of the house.
***
“I never went back to the house in Meath,” Tom said. “Never even went to see what was left after the fire. Ashes, bones, charred timbers,” he shrugged. “I don’t really know if my father and grandmother died—not that it matters with Delia gone…and Ellie.”
“Phew.” Jack Cahill glanced down at the bottle that was nestled in the triangle of his crossed legs. “It’s got the ancient mariner beat by a mile—course I was never one for poetry,” he grinned. His gaze met Tom’s. “If all you say is true, I’d give an eyeball to own one of them dollies, a sheila na gig—”
“No,” Tom said, exhaling deeply. “No, you wouldn’t—”
“Why the hell not?” Jack poured them both another round of gin.
“Look here,” Tom said. He unfastened the flaps of a frayed tapestry carpet bag, and tilted the opening toward Jack.
Jack peered in, whistling. “Say, it’s one of them things—where’d you get it?” He reached out, and Tom jerked the mouth of the bag away.
“Don’t touch it.” Tom shook his head. “It’s the same one—”
“What? You said you burned it up—”
“I did; this wasn’t in my pack when I got aboard the ship. I found it three days ago.” He shivered looking at the fire-blackened toad woman, the moist inky slit in her vulva.
“Oh, your Granny’s mophole,” Jack flapped a hand at him. “C’mon, you spun a good one, I’ll grant you that—but tell the truth now—you picked it up in one of those junk shops on the docks.”
Tom stared at the older man and shook his head slowly. “Maybe Granny’s not dead,” he said. He shut the bag up and pushed it deeper into the shadowy hold. “This thing, it sucks from a man at the same time it makes him think he’s getting what he wants or needs. My father thought so—but it was draining him—as if there was a spigot in his spine leaking and dribbling out his blood.”
“Well I’d take a flyer at it—if I thought I’d get what I wanted—including some tasty young piece to wrap around my wh
anger.”
“I think the old hag used it—and used my father and Delia and Ellen to make herself stronger. They got worn down, and she got wound up.”
“Give it to me—I’ll run Wall Street inside of a week.”
“Do you always drink this much, Jack?”
“Huh? Ah hell, there’s nothin’ to do, crammed down here below decks. What are you saying, anyhow?”
Tom folded his hands quietly in his lap. “I think maybe it doesn’t matter whether you touch it or not, I think it can get at you just being near it.”
“It’s stone, Tom. A dirt-covered stone that was carved into ugliness by old savage ladies back when every Brit was still howlin’ at the moon.”
Tom didn’t answer. Sure it was only dead rock, an object, a symbol. But what it stood for was his grandmother’s power—and that could reach across time and miles and distance.
Souls don’t die, they go into the bodies of the living.
The sheila na gig witched into his pack was just a nasty little reminder of Rose’s future intentions, he thought. She lied about needing a man to dig it up, what else had she kept from him? What more could she do?
Your manhood’s my trophy, boy.
Jack seemed to read his mind. “If I were you, I’d forget all this.” He waved an arm to include Ireland, his grandmother, the carving, “just put one foot in front of the other, and build yourself a new life, lad.”
“After we dock tomorrow, I’m going down South somewhere,” Tom said. “Virginia or the Carolinas….”
“Me, for New York.” Jack grinned, held up his cup in salute and clinked it against Tom’s.
“Maybe I’ll go to school, change my name to Grainger or Garner or—”
“Granville,” Jack put in, winking.
“Granville’s good,” Tom agreed, thinking and even if she won’t let me go, maybe my children will have a chance—become lawyers, businessmen, doctors….
He saw Jack’s eyes were riveted on the worn carpet bag.
Tom would’ve offered to give the obscene carving to the older man, and gladly—Jack was greedy for it, that was plain—but somehow he didn’t think he’d have to. And Jack wouldn’t steal it, Tom was sure. The sheila na gig wanted the older man now, too, he thought sadly. It would tap into him until the sap poured out of him like maple running in the spring. And his grandmother would live again.
Jack was hunched over, brooding, a silent bird of prey guarding its bloody kill.
And Tom knew when he left the ship, his carpet bag would be lighter by the weight of the stone.
Author’s Notes and Acknowledgements
I wrote both these novellas after completing a trunk novel, which I wrote just after finishing The Gentling Box while that book was out making the rounds and both that novel and I were in limbo. (Some years later The Gentling Box eventually won the Bram Stoker Award which meant that I could pretty much stop worrying that I’d never be published or win an award I really coveted.)
But, an interesting thing about both these stories is, not only did I think (hope, surmise, pray) they were much better than that nameless hag-ridden trunk novel, but I began to really enjoy writing again and found myself in love with voice and character and all those interesting flourishes and details that make a story worth telling to readers and to myself.
Since at that point, The Gentling Box was a no go, it was with trepidation that I asked my mother, who was not only erudite, but an excellent critic of my work, to read both novellas.
When she finished the first one some hours later, we sat down with a couple of glasses of wine and talked a long time about Dissolution and how I was influenced by Ethan Frome. I recounted how I was simply amazed that information I could not find for love or money on Google was instantly obtainable through the Brooklyn Public Library. I called them up because I needed to know where a person who was adjudged criminally insane in 1893 would be sent, and they had an answer for me in under a minute: Matteawan State Hospital. The young man who answered the phone found an article from a contemporary newspaper about a fugitive from justice who was caught on a train in Florida and shipped back up north. A journey that perhaps wasn’t so different from Stuart Granville’s odyssey. My mother countered with a couple of stories of her own including the time she was in nursing school and a patient of hers who scarcely weighed 90 pounds soaking wet had managed, in an instant, to rip off her canvas and leather strait-jacket, whip it around in one deft arc, and catch my mother with the buckle-end in the throat; and how it took four big orderlies to pull the woman off my mother who was 17 at the time.
We said our good nights, and in the morning, I was in my office working on something or other when I heard weeping from my living room.
I’m pretty impervious to disturbances of the human variety when I’m writing, (although I do curse a hell of a lot when I hear chain saws and leaf blowers) but since I knew my mother was out there, I went to check.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
She had a big box of Kleenex, the chubbiest of my three cats, and the telephone tucked among the down pillows of an antique love seat, and the pages of the manuscript of The Sheila Na Gig spread out on the space the cat wasn’t occupying, the floor around her, and her knees.
My mother’s eyes turned even greener whenever she cried and it was very obvious she’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked again.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“Then why are you crying.”
“I can’t help it,” she said… it’s so good and I’m so sad about what happens to Delia.”
***
My mother wasn’t all that much of a crier when it came to books or movies as I knew. In fact, for example, while The Exorcist literally scared the shit out of me and I had to sleep with the light on for months and I warned her not to watch it alone, she reported laughing throughout the entire film.
***
I can’t tell you what it meant to me to have her say those words: “It’s so good and I’m so sad about what happens to Delia.” Up until that point, the closest I’d come to any kind of validation (aside from garnering a couple of agents who could not sell The Gentling Box) was having one of my professors in graduate school tell me I should write and, because my best friend Barbara McGill Grant knew I was madly in love with William Styron’s work and she was an acquaintance of his, a signed copy of A Tidewater Morning with the inscription, “Best of luck in your literary endeavors.”
When I saw my mother crying and she told me how much she loved this collection, it was everything to me. Sure, I’d cried when I wrote scenes in Dissolution and wept throughout the last 20 pages while madly typing out the last of The Gentling Box, but to actually see someone who was a pretty tough cookie and definitely not afraid to pan my writing, and really was a good literary critic moved to tears really affected me. It made me realize that my work did have a power of its own….
A year or so later when she was ill and not just visiting, but living at my house, she was on the phone with my nephew, John, when I got the news (via e mail) I’d just made my first professional sale for a short story and she excitedly told my nephew about it and recounted the entire plot of that particular tale. The instant she was off the phone, she threw her arms out for a hug and said, “I’m so proud of you.”
You see, it didn’t matter to her whether I wrote a book, or a couple of novellas, or a story, or whether the material got published or not. What mattered to her was that I kept on writing, and kept on trying, and kept on trying to move and engage her emotionally
through how I wrote.
No writer can ask for or receive a greater gift, a higher accolade.
So, this collection comes to a public life with thanks and gratitude to my mother, Anne L. Mannetti, my nephew John Peter Mannetti, my best friend Barbara McGill Grant, and finally, to Dr. Steve Ross, another believer in my work—even through times when I doubted myself.
Two of you are gone now, but I sense your pr
esence, always, in whatever I do and whatever I write.
I’d also like to thank Beth Blue, my superlative editor for Deathwatch who went over the manuscript in what has to be record time. She has a keen eye for those small gaffes and, manages to ferret them out and correct them accurately and, (from the writer’s perspective) painlessly.
And as always, I’m truly grateful for my inimitable publishers, Brent and Alisha Chapman of Shadowfall, who consistently go way above and beyond what I or any writer could expect or dream of.
Grazie.
Mille Grazie.
—December 9th, 2010
Deathwatch
by
Lisa Mannetti
©2010 by Lisa Mannetti. All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional and any resemblances to real people, living or dead, are purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without the written permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN: 978-1-936457-01-4
Shadowfall Publications
Livermore, CA
www.shadowfallpublications.com
About the Author
Lisa Mannetti’s debut novel, The Gentling Box, garnered a Bram Stoker Award.
She has authored a macabre gag book, 51 Fiendish Ways to Leave your Lover, as well as non-fiction books, and numerous articles and short stories in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Her story, “Everybody Wins,” was made into a short film by director Paul Leyden starring Malin Ackerman and released under the title Bye-Bye Sally.
Lisa lives in New York.
Visit her author website: www.lisamannetti.com
Visit her virtual haunted house: www.thechanceryhouse.com
Table of Contents
Start
Deathwatch - Final Page 17