The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster

by Scott Wilbanks

  She stepped over to the crate, petted Bounder on the head, and went to the closet to unwrap Tom’s old shotgun. Fishing the cigar box from under the floorboard, she loaded a couple shotgun shells into the double barrel, stuffed another handful into the pocket of her frock, and eased back into her rocking chair to wait.

  Elsbeth glanced uneasily toward the door when Bounder’s hackles started to rise. “Easy now,” she said.

  The dog gazed at her mistress, then lowered her head to rest on the corner of the crate with a quick huff of air.

  Mr. Culler directed Danyer to the side of the cabin and headed for the front door as soon as they saw the rusty mailbox with Grundy painted on it. When Danyer was in position, Mr. Culler tethered his horse, unclasped the holster of his gun, and knocked on the door.

  There was a scuffling sound and the dull clank of a metal latch releasing. The door opened a few inches, and a shotgun snaked out to tap Mr. Culler on the forehead, causing him to look almost cross-eyed as he tried to focus on the barrel. He heard the click of a trigger being cocked as a disembodied voice floated from inside the cabin.

  “If this were a rifle, I’d try parting your hair down the middle and not lose a minute’s sleep if I missed. Now turn around and head back the way you came.”

  “Madam, please!” Mr. Culler could barely see the little woman peering through the sight of the shotgun. “Is this how you treat all your guests?” he asked.

  Elsbeth threw the door open and took a quick step forward into the door frame, firing a shot that cracked through the air, causing Mr. Culler to stumble back with a hand to his ear. It came away with blood on the fingertips of his riding gloves.

  “Is that more to your liking, Mr. Culler?”

  Called out, he smiled and started to lower his hands. Elsbeth cocked the second barrel with a quick swipe. “You lower those hands any farther, young man, and I’m going to blow a hole in your britches so big you’ll need a ladle to take a piss.” She lowered the barrel, training it on the area in question.

  Mr. Culler’s arms shot up. “Please, call me”—he flinched as she nudged his privates—“careful!”

  “Son,”she said, prodding him a second time.“I’m more likely to call you a mortician, if you don’t do as I say.” She looked over his shoulder. “I hear you come as a team. Where’s your lackey?”

  Mr. Culler stole a quick glance to his left. As Elsbeth followed his gaze, a hand snaked out from the right and grabbed her gun by the barrel.

  She let out a scream, and there was an explosion of sound as the shotgun missed its target, shredding a hole in the eave of the porch above the door. Mr. Culler ripped the weapon from her hands, shoving her into the cabin so hard she fell against a wall— her spectacles tumbling from their perch and onto the floor. He wandered across the threshold with Danyer, as always, shadowing his steps, while checking the barrel of the gun to make sure the shells were spent.

  He tossed the gun onto the table, along with his riding gloves and jacket, and turned to study Elsbeth as she fumbled about for her glasses. Kicking them out of reach, he slid down with his back against the wall until he was sitting next to her. He draped his forearms over his knees, letting his eyes wander across the room. “Charming.” He slapped her leg affectionately. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

  Bounder, growling the minute Elsbeth hit the floor, chose that moment to let out an ear-shattering bark, and Mr. Culler reached for his holster.

  “Down, girl,” said Elsbeth as she struggled to get up.

  Bounder let out a shrill whine and settled into the crate.

  “Where are my manners?” Mr. Culler stood and dusted off his pants. Reaching under her armpits, he lifted Elsbeth and deposited her roughly into the rocker. “You will behave now, won’t you.” He wagged his finger. “No, don’t respond. That wasn’t a question.”

  He fished a letter from his pocket and dropped it onto her lap. “It’s from your granddaughter,” he said. “She sends her love, by the way.” Grabbing the armrests of the rocker, he leaned in so close that Elsbeth caught an overpowering whiff of tobacco mixed with stale cologne. “What a tangled little mess we have here. You, Miss Aster—or should I say, Miss Abbott, a dead man, and a door.” Cupping her chin between his thumb and forefinger, Mr. Culler lifted Elsbeth’s face until their eyes met. “Miss Aster has run me a merry chase. You should be proud.”

  He gave her chin a little shove and walked halfway around the rocker while running his hand along its rim. “The last few days have been most illuminating, though I still haven’t figured out one thing. It’s my hope you will be able to shed some light on the subject.” He crossed his arms on the back of the rocker, towering over her. “How did she learn to operate the time-travel conduit without instructions?” he asked.

  Elsbeth motioned for him to lower his head and said, “I have some carbolic toothpaste in the back and an extra brush. It may not move the conversation along any more quickly, but it’ll certainly make it more pleasant.”

  A current ran across Mr. Culler’s face and down his arm—not that Elsbeth could see it. He shook his hands loosely. “I see,” he said. “I was hoping that you would be more…pliable.” He gave the rocking chair a nudge and began to search the cabin.

  “What exactly are you looking for, Mr. Culler?” asked Elsbeth.

  Peering in a cupboard above the stove, he said, “It’s obvious that you and your granddaughter have communicated. It’s also obvious she knows how to operate the door. That suggests to me that either you or she has my late business partner’s diary.” He looked over his shoulder. “Perhaps you can save me the trouble?”

  “Were you dropped on your head as a child?”

  Ignoring the taunt, he said, “Letters then?” Seeing that he’d scored a hit, Mr. Culler added, “Oh, come now. I showed you mine. Now show me yours.”

  When Elsbeth remained intractable, he sucked air between his teeth. “You disappoint me, Mrs. Grundy.” He wandered to the back door and glanced outside before motioning to Danyer. “Will you be so kind as to see if there are some chairs in the barn,” he said under his breath. “I think that we will be spending a bit more time with Mrs. Grundy than anticipated.”

  He watched Danyer make his way across the yard, then stalked over to stand in front of Elsbeth.

  She closed her eyes as he leaned in, his tobacco breath steaming her cheeks. “Don’t toy with me.”

  At close range, she couldn’t miss the shift and boil of his features. Quickly as that, his face settled back into a blank mask. But in that moment, Elsbeth knew what she was dealing with. She whispered, “Lord have mercy,” following his gaze as it settled back on the crate.

  He tapped it a few times with the toe of his boot and looked at Elsbeth, his mouth curving in a wicked smile. “Let’s leave him out of it, shall we?” He reached in, picked up one of the kittens, and walked over to the stove, setting it on a burner. The kitten lowered to a crouch, mewling, as Mr. Culler checked the contents of the oven belly. Finding it empty, he grabbed a couple logs from a basket in the corner, looking up in time to see Danyer walk in empty-handed, his face turning dark.

  Anticipating a scene—Danyer had an inexplicable soft spot for kittens—Mr. Culler scampered to the door with his hands held out placatingly. He guided Danyer onto the back porch, where he found himself pressed against the wall, flinching against the expected aggression. When none was immediately forthcoming, he opened an eye to find Danyer staring at him—his face, as usual, a blank canvas.

  Sighing in exasperation, Mr. Culler adjusted his collar, then leaned over to speak quietly in Danyer’s ear. “Just a little persuasion, Mr. Danyer. That’s all. Don’t embarrass me in front of Mrs. Grundy.” He glanced through the door at Elsbeth, who was listening to the muffled exchange with obvious distaste. “I wasn’t going to harm it, honestly,” he said, turning back to his associate.

  Whatever else Mr. Culler was going to say was immediately forgotten when Danyer pointed across the wheat f
ield. Striding past the watering well, Mr. Culler spied a purple Victorian house on the horizon. Even at a distance, he could make out an unmistakably red door blazing in the Kansas sun.Taken aback, he looked at Danyer, who nodded in agreement, then wandered over to the well to collect a coil of rope before stepping inside the cabin.

  Elsbeth didn’t move a muscle as Mr. Culler dropped the kitten in the crate and sauntered behind the rocker to whisper in her ear. “It seems you have a reprieve.” He began securing her arm to the rocker, looking up occasionally to roll his eyes at Danyer who sat on the ground at the edge of the crate with a kitten in his lap.

  Mr. Culler repeated the exercise with Elsbeth’s other arm and both legs until she was effectively trussed, then motioned for Danyer to put the kitten down and follow him outside.They stood on the porch, taking in the peculiar sight, then walked through the wheat field to pause at a picket fence surrounding a rose garden. The door—their prize—sat at the end of the pathway. There was no mistaking the unique hue and perplexing carvings. This was the door that Abbott used in his magic show.

  Even so, they hesitated. Both were uneasy. For neither Mr. Culler nor Danyer was a particularly courageous man. They were resourceful. They were mean. But their fortitude was based upon the certainty of an outcome for which they had stacked the cards in their favor. Walking through that door would be as uncertain a prospect as they had ever encountered. In the end—spurred by greed—Messrs. Culler and Danyer swung the gate open to walk up the gravel pathway to Annie’s home.

  Unaware of her guests a few paces and a century away from her home, Annie sat at the rolltop desk writing a letter to El. While she had written to her several times since returning from her misadventure two days ago, the letters had been primarily of the “Let me know you’re okay” variety. It was time, she decided, to ask her grandmother’s opinion regarding a certain gentleman. She heard a faint sigh, like air released from a balloon, coming from the back of the house and laid down her pen, looking nervously in the direction of the kitchen. Acutely aware of every wheeze and mumble put off by the house since she’d returned home, Annie strained to hear other telltale sounds, but there was nothing more.

  She picked up the pen and twiddled it in her fingers as Mr. Culler and Danyer crept through the back door and into what Mr. Culler decided could have only been dreamed up in an opiuminduced fantasy from Alice’s Wonderland. There was a switch on the wall, and like Alice with the bottle, Mr. Culler couldn’t help himself. He flipped it, flinching when recesses in the ceiling cast the entire room into brilliant illumination. There were strange metallic objects riddling every surface that took his likeness, morphing and melting it into ugly caricatures, before throwing it back at him.

  He looked away, not being a fan of reflections, and headed for a doorway, slapping Danyer’s hand as he reached for something. It was a conical gewgaw that appeared to be filled with coffee beans. But again, temptation overcame Mr. Culler. He opened the lid and smelled them. Replacing the lid was not easy, and he used a little more force than intended. Quite unexpectedly, the beans bounced in a noisy frenzy, and he knocked the object over, watching stupidly as half-ground beans spilled over the counter and to the floor.

  In the other room, Annie leaped from her chair, her heart thumping. She threw open the desk’s center drawer and grabbed a letter opener—a frightful thing she’d purchased at a garage sale, only to later learn that it was a British no. 4 spike bayonet from the early 1940s. She clutched it to her chest as her eyes darted around the room. Stealing across the floor, she plucked her cell phone and house keys off the table in the foyer, dropped them into her purse, and hurried to the front door. She’d released the bolt and was easing the door partially open when she heard a very unwelcome voice.

  “You should have sold the door to me when you had the opportunity, I’m afraid.”

  Annie caught a glimmer of sunlight coming from outside as the door slowly swung shut, barring her escape. A hand reached over her shoulder and threw the bolt closed, leaving Annie with only two options. Not being a quitter, she chose the second. Chancing a glance at the arm blocking her escape, and before indecision rendered her immobile, Annie pivoted recklessly and buried the letter opener in the soft meat of Culler’s shoulder, screeching hysterically. Startled by her own audacity, she met his eyes and, lacking other avenues of escape, dashed up the stairs just out of Danyer’s reach, knocking over a decorative table holding a large vase.

  Mr. Culler gurgled in outrage before the pain registered, at which point he let out a bellow. As Danyer gave chase, Mr. Culler clenched the letter opener in his fist and tugged at the handle—his hand vibrating with fury. There was initial resistance, as if his flesh didn’t want to give up the blade, but then it began to ooze outward. As the tip slid from his shoulder, the skin closed over the wound like Jell-O. Three counts later, it began to discharge a stream of blood. He tossed the letter opener aside and, alerted by a deep, resonant thumping noise, looked up the stairwell to witness Danyer, a table, and a vase tumbling over one another down its length.

  Leaping out of the way, he watched in morbid fascination as Danyer landed in a heap on the hardwood floor at his feet, the vase careening down the stairs to land on his gut. It knocked his breath out before rolling quietly onto a carpet runner at the base of the stairs where it spun lazily to a stop.

  A phone plummeted over the railing, the receiver bouncing up and down on the coiled cord.

  Wheezing, Danyer picked himself up and leaned against the wall by the stairs.

  Mr. Culler gritted his teeth as he pressed a kerchief against the shoulder laceration. “Are you well?” he asked.

  Danyer coughed, running a hand across his mouth as he nodded.

  “Good, because I’d like you to check on Mrs. Grundy,” Mr. Culler said. Certain that Danyer would object, he added, “I know it’s your place to deal with unpleasantness, but I’m feeling uncommonly motivated.”

  Danyer expressed disapproval with an animal-like grunt, but lacking a rebuttal that didn’t include his love affair with brutality, he made himself scarce, even as Annie threw open the utility room door, frantically scanning for something with which to defend herself. Her eyes locked onto a fire extinguisher. Ripping it from the wall, she rushed out of the room and stole down the hall to her bedroom, where she peered out the window. With the garage occupying the first floor, she was essentially thirty feet up.

  She looked over her shoulder at the stairwell before backing into her bedroom closet and closing the door, then set the fire extinguisher aside to put her eye to the keyhole. A repetitive thud tickled at the edge of her hearing, and Annie spun about wildly before realizing it was the throb of her own heart. She whined in fear and frustration and pressed her fist over her mouth to dampen the noise while bracing her other hand against her thigh.

  A single, lucid thought broke through her panic, and Annie wrestled the cell phone from her purse, attempting to punch in a number.

  “Shit. Shit,” she whispered, as it began to slip from her sweatslick hands. She squeezed, causing it to emit an electronic squeal. Roughly pushing her hair out of the way, Annie flipped the lid shut to disconnect the line, reopened it, and tried to punch in the correct code using her thumbs, saying the numbers out loud in quick gasps. “Eight, six, seven—”

  The ringtone of an incoming call startled her, and the phone tumbled from her hands to rebound off the wall and land inside one of a pair of stiletto heels. She wasted precious seconds frozen in disbelief before grabbing the shoe to shake her phone loose. Jamming the shoe in a pocket, she punched in the numbers. “Please answer. Please,” she hissed.

  The line connected and she cupped her hand over the receiver to whisper in short, hoarse bursts. “Christian, he’s here!” she said. “In the house. Culler—”

  “… come to the phone right now. Please leave your name and number. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Have a good day. Oh, and wait for the tone.”

  She threw the phone against th
e wall with a shriek and slapped her thigh over and over in frustration. Unbelievably, she heard a beep. Snatching it off the floor, she whispered, “Christian, I’m in big trouble. Come—”

  Her words ended with a scream as the closet door flew open. Reacting with fear-drenched speed, she grabbed the extinguisher, pulled the pin, and showered Culler from head to foot in white, foamy fire retardant.

  He stepped back, thrashing his arms wildly about. She darted for the bedroom door, but he recovered quickly, diving for her legs. As he grabbed hold of an ankle, Annie stumbled and fell, banging her head on the floor as the stiletto tumbled from her pocket.

  She rolled onto her back—pain lancing through the ankle in Mr. Culler’s grip—and tried to yank free while kicking at his face and arms with the other foot. He released his hold, bellowing as the heel of her loafer grazed the side of his head above the ear, raking out a slice of skin.

  Both shoes flew from her feet, bouncing against the wall.

  Howling murderously as blood ran from the gash down the side of his head, Culler scrambled on top of Annie, clamping her legs together between his thighs. He reared up and slapped her hard across the face as she fought to turn over, then grabbed both of her flailing arms, pinning them to the floor above her head. As she struggled for breath, he smirked, slowly sliding his legs back to press the full weight of his torso against hers, a shudder of pleasure rippling down his body as he let out his breath with a very Danyer-like grunt.

  He hunched over Annie—his shoulders knotted, his chest heaving—aroused by her helplessness. He grunted once more while slowly lowering himself to run his chin roughly across her cheek before locking his mouth onto hers. He kissed her savagely, breathing so heavily he almost whined.

  Revulsion triggered another wave of adrenaline, and Annie bucked so violently that he almost lost his purchase atop her. Feeling his grip ease, she ripped a hand loose, seized the stiletto that had settled by her ear, and thrust her arm forward with a dreadful whimper to bury its heel into the wound in Culler’s shoulder. She ground it back and forth, her face frozen in a rictus of hatred, until he howled and fell to the side.