Dead Ends

by JT Ellison

  There was a loud clatter, and Molly shouted from the butler’s entrance to the dining room: “Miss Lilith!”

  The spell was broken and the sunlight returned. Theresa’s skin was no longer gray, and she sank back into her chair, sobbing.

  “My cake! Look at my cake!” Lilith ran to where Molly stood over the shattered platter and clumps of chocolate cake.

  When Lilith raised one hand, I was certain she was about to strike Molly, but a dreadful glint flashed in Molly’s eyes. Lilith must have seen it, too, because her hand dropped to her side and her whole body wilted.

  I realized that since I’d arrived I’d seen her as something more than a little girl, because she was so well-spoken and confident. Imperious. A second spell was broken now, and I saw that she was just a young child.

  What kind of child can make the sun turn cold and the air stand still? What kind of demon or witch torments another child so, causing her such pain?

  We have to leave here.

  “I don’t think I want to have any more birthday today,” Lilith said.

  I wish I had listened to that part of myself that told me we should leave that moment, and not even take our things, but just run out the front door. But I didn’t listen. The strange occurrence frightened me, but what had I really seen? Both girls had been overwrought, and Lilith was freakishly intimidating for a little girl. Theresa was exhausted, but uninjured.

  I could almost hear Allan laughing. Demons don’t exist, my darling. You have such imagination.

  Theresa and I would avoid Lilith, pack our things properly, and leave the next morning. I was owed a week’s wages, and though Mary Trewlove had obviously been too ill to come downstairs for the party, paying me would only take a few moments, and wouldn’t be much of a strain. The next day wasn’t so far off. If Jerome refused to drive us to the station, we would drag our trunks to the end of the long drive, walk the three miles into Carystown, and hire a car to pick up the luggage.

  Having some semblance of a plan calmed me. I prepared a lunch tray for both Theresa and myself, and took it up to my bedroom. I had no concerns about Lilith’s comfort. Molly would have to take care of her.

  Theresa lay blanketed in sunlight on the long couch beneath the window overlooking the drive. “I shouldn’t have made her angry. I’m so sorry, Mama.” Tears gathered in her eyes. She looked so much like Allan. Sometimes I wished she didn’t, because it hurt too much.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” I lied. I didn’t really believe everything was going to be fine, but I didn’t want her to be more worried than she already was. “We’ll leave here tomorrow morning. I promise.”

  She nodded and gave me a faint smile through her tears.

  “Now. Let me see your hands.”

  There was no sign that they had been any different for even a moment.

  “They don’t hurt anymore.”

  “I’m glad.” I took her hands in mine, and was much more gentle than Mary Trewlove had been with me.

  After lunch, I read to Theresa from Understood Betsy as she snuggled against me. It was the last time we would ever truly be together.

  When she fell asleep, I lay down and tried to nap as well, but I was too restless. What about the lost woman in the woods? Theresa and I could leave, but I was convinced that she must also somehow be a victim of the strange Trewloves. How could I go, knowing she might be out there, injured or dying?

  There was no answer when I knocked on Mary Trewlove’s door, and when I peeked inside, I saw her bed was empty and her cane was missing. If she hadn’t been well enough to come down to lunch, what was she doing out of her room?

  Downstairs, Molly was nowhere to be found.

  With Theresa still deeply asleep, and Mary Trewlove gone—where?—I decided I had time to take a quick look in the woods for the woman. I was still dressed for the party, and so put on a pair of overshoes I found in the kitchen breezeway. The kitchen itself was filled with the scent of vanilla and cocoa, and I followed the scent to a table where three layers of another chocolate cake were cooling. I resisted the urge to upend them all onto the floor. Lilith needed to be punished, but taking my frustrations out on the cake would simply be childish.

  Outside, the sunshine waned, disappearing behind thick, Spanish gray clouds that threatened rain. At the head of the rough path into the woods, I picked up a large stick, broken from a tree limb, and carried it into the woods with me.

  The weeds and wildflowers in the woods were twice as thick as they had been on our arrival. Spring was alarmingly fecund here, as though its greenery wanted to swallow and stifle everything in its path. I imagined the madwoman trapped by the young poison ivy vines, or buried by burdock or the ferns growing along the path.

  I searched for more than twenty minutes, staying within view of the path, and didn’t find the lost woman. But on the way back to the house, I followed a smaller, almost hidden path, and discovered another entrance to the walled garden: a battered, sagging door mounted with rusted ironwork. The long grass and weeds around it were bent and broken. Someone else had recently come in or out this way.

  I went inside.

  “Hello?” A web of lilac branches blocked my view, but I sensed that someone was nearby. Pushing the branches aside, I gasped at the scene before me. This was no overgrown, forgotten place. There were the ragged, spindly trees, but everything else looked healthy and neatly trimmed: apple and, I thought, peach trees; white peonies in long bushy banks along the wall; neat plots of roses in pink and red; a circular bed of zinnias surrounding a concrete fountain that was topped by the figure of a young girl in medieval dress. The child’s unseeing eyes were downcast, fixed on the constantly spilling stream of water coming from her ewer.

  The fountain girl was not alone. There were a dozen other stone figures scattered around the garden—all young girls, in every manner of dress popular over perhaps the last hundred years. It felt like a Victorian scene, something that might be set up in an old folly. Or in a graveyard. I wandered from one statue to another, marveling at the details of their clothing and their faces. I had the strangest feeling that if I were to touch one, it might come alive.

  I recalled the sense of loneliness I’d felt when I first saw the girl in the gardens in front of Trewlove Hall. There were so many others here, together, but they each looked lonely. Lost.

  Near one end of the garden stood a figure of a plump little girl with round cheeks. She was charming, with her textured basket and enormous bow, but something else drew me toward her: the dirty, yellow mound lying at her feet.

  “She’s dead. We can’t help her now.” I turned my head at the familiar voice to see Mary Trewlove leaning on her cane beneath a tall, drooping lilac bush.

  “How do you know?” I asked. She’d startled me at first, but she looked somehow right there in the garden.

  “You’re welcome to look for yourself.”

  From the shape of the mound, I could discern the outline of a human figure beneath the filthy cloak. I lifted up the cloak’s edge.

  Sure enough, the woman I’d seen near the yews was curled beneath it, her matted hair loose, her hands layered beneath her head as though she had lain down to sleep. Though I was afraid, I gripped her shoulder to shake her awake. But there was no warmth in her rigid body.

  “We’ll have to notify the police. What about her family?” I stood slowly.

  “She has no family. Jerome will bury her.”

  I was shocked. “We can’t just bury her. The authorities… we don’t even know who she is. What about her daughter?”

  Mary Trewlove, as weak as she was, gave a sharp bark of a laugh. “Her name is Alma, and there is no daughter to find.”

  At that moment I knew Theresa and I had to leave immediately. I would go to the police to tell them what I’d seen, and that Mary Trewlove knew who the dead woman was. I told her what I planned, and that I wouldn’t let her keep us there. She was old and fragile. What could she do?

  When I finished speak
ing, her shoulders sagged, and I thought she might collapse. As wicked as I thought her, I didn’t want her to die here in this strange garden, so near the dead woman at my feet.

  “Susannah, you promised,” she whispered.

  “I can’t raise Theresa here. That you would even suggest that we bury this poor woman in unhallowed ground without notifying someone sickens me. And I’m sorry to tell you that Lilith is a spoiled, unpleasant child. Theresa needs to get away from her. We can’t stay.”

  Mary Trewlove grabbed my arm. “Don’t let her hear you say that. Not ever. If you want your daughter to live, you must stay. And never, ever mention to Lilith that you are thinking of leaving.” Her filmy eyes were wide with alarm. “Don’t you understand?”

  I almost laughed, but she was too serious. Had her illness driven her mad?

  “Let go of me.”

  “Do you think I’m joking? Look at Alma.”

  Now I did laugh, but nervously. “What does this have to do with her? Let go!” I jerked away.

  “If you won’t look at Alma, look at me, Susannah. Look at my daughter!” She pointed to a nearby statue of a little girl who looked six or seven years old. She was bent over slightly at the waist, one hand extended, as though to pick a flower. The skirt of her drop-waist dress fanned out around in the style of dresses I’d worn as a child, and her hair was done in two plaits neatly caught with a bow at the back. I touched my own hair, thinking of how similar it had looked when I was young.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” I was genuinely confused. Was this really a statue of Mary Trewlove’s daughter?

  “Look at her! Look at my Annabelle! Six years old, and cast forever in stone. I don’t even know if she can hear or feel. She has no heartbeat. Stone. My daughter is stone.”

  The poor woman was surely as mad as the dead woman had been. “You’re not well. I’ll go into town and get help.” I started for the main garden door. Its entry was—unsurprisingly—not crumbling at all.

  “Stop, Susannah. Please. I’m telling you the truth. I came here fifteen years ago, with Annabelle, because I needed work, just like you. The last Mary Trewlove hired me to be Lilith’s governess. But when I realized the horror of this place, and of—that child…” Her voice shook. “I tried to get us out of here, but I was too late. Lilith caught us. To punish me, she made my Annabelle into that thing.”

  “Lilith is only eight years old today. What are you saying? You’re Mary Trewlove. How could you have had a six-year-old daughter fifteen years ago?” I knew it was cruel, but I said, “Look at you! That’s impossible.”

  Her hands shaking, Mary Trewlove felt her way to the marble bench beneath the lilac and collapsed onto it.

  “Tell me the real truth! Stop trying to frighten me,” I said. The presence of the strange stone children and Alma’s body filled me with dread.

  Trewlove Hall will be the last house I’ll ever see.

  “I’m forty-two years old, and my name was Margaret Troyer.” She looked up at me. “That is the real truth. It’s living with Lilith that has taken my life. She feeds on love. A mother’s love. She’s an abomination.”

  My knees felt weak. “That’s not possible.”

  “Alma and her daughter were unsuitable. The daughter attacked Lilith. I thought I’d calmed Lilith down, but she tricked the girl into coming out here the next morning. Alma went mad when she saw the statue. Jerome was supposed to make Alma disappear, but he does things in his own time. She must have just died here near her daughter.”

  I remembered Alma’s words: “I know Satan’s work!”

  Dear God, there really are demons, Allan.

  “There have been many Mary Trewloves at Trewlove Hall, but only one Lilith,” she said quietly. “I believe Lilith came from a family of devils that abandoned her, and left that creature, Molly, to guard her. Now Lilith can’t bear for anyone to leave her. She never grows older. She never sleeps. The only one who has any control over her is Molly. They’re just alike. They never change. Evil never changes.”

  “This can’t be happening. I won’t let it happen.” I ran for the garden door.

  “I’m dying,” she called after me. “I’ll be dead before morning. If you try to leave with Theresa, Theresa will die, too. Just like all the other little girls.”

  I ran.

  It can’t be too late. God, don’t let it be too late!

  In the kitchen, Molly stood working at one of the enormous sinks, but she didn’t even turn around as I hurried through. Neither did she call after me.

  Molly and Lilith never sleep. I hadn’t listened to Theresa. I hadn’t paid attention. She’d tried to tell me they weren’t normal. Abominations.

  Molly and I understand each other, now, but we will never be friends.

  I kept the image of Theresa lying asleep on the blue velvet lounge in my room in the front of my mind. That was where I’d left her an hour before, and there was no reason she should have gone anywhere else.

  As I ran up the stairs and through the halls, I gasped for breath, my head pounding with sudden pain. The air had turned noxiously thick and oppressive—just as it had in the dining room at lunchtime—and the wan daylight was replaced with chilling moonlight.

  It can’t be too late!

  I tried to scream Theresa’s name, but the only sound that came out of my mouth was a pathetic mewling. It didn’t matter, because Theresa was no longer in my bedroom: The velvet lounge was empty.

  As thick as the air was, I kept moving, clawing my way along the wall and grabbing portrait frames to steady myself. There seemed to be hundreds of portraits now, all bearing the same name on their identical brass plaques: Mary Trewlove.

  When I reached the hallway leading to Theresa’s and Lilith’s rooms, the pressure grew to a crescendo that caused me to cover my ears. I was sure my head would shatter from pain.

  And then the pain was gone.

  No, it can’t be. Please, no!

  I opened the door to Theresa’s room. Lilith stood beside the bed, her back to me, one hand resting on the edge of Theresa’s open trunk, which was half-filled with clothes. Only when Lilith turned around did I see Theresa, standing forever still and silent behind her. I couldn’t bear to look at my daughter’s precious face, only her rough, gray hands, her gray traveling boots, and the stiff, stone folds of her dress.

  A sob broke from me, and I covered my mouth.

  Lilith’s dark eyes were wet and full of sadness. “Theresa told me you were going to take her away, and leave me all alone,” she said. “You won’t leave me, will you, Mary?”

  The Body Electric

  Bryon Quertermous

  Brindy Dye needed to go get her baby. The rain was coming down in thick sheets and NeNe was out there in the swampy weeds, exposed and alone.

  Brindy’d never gotten used to drinking in this weather. Give her a blizzard and a fifth of something brown and she was a happy girl. This humidity was bullshit, and whiskey did weird stuff to her head during hurricane season. Not as weird as the shit Dusty did to her head when he hit her, but weird enough to make her wonder if she was even awake.

  The window in her bedroom looked out over the back of the trailer park to the field where her baby liked to play.

  Where NeNe liked to play.

  She still had a name. She’d never grow old or get married or have babies, but she had her name: Navayah Nelody Dye-Accord. Dusty and his jap car last name made her baby sound like a foreign peace law, but he’d given her a few clean needles and some good pills to make her add the name, him being a proud dad and all.

  Goddamn this weather.

  Her hip was tricky from Dusty throwing her down the steps of their first trailer outside of Detroit, and her knee was blown out from when he hit her with the car her last day of work at the nursing home before moving to New Orleans to take care of Pop. She rolled the fingers on her left hand into a gimpy fist and tried to push herself up from her bed. Two lite beer cans and a bottle of pills fell to the floor when she
moved, but she didn’t notice the needle still in her arm until she tried to scratch the back of her head.

  The rain poured from the sky and blew against her window like God was trying to sink the trailer. That might be a nice way to go. She’d heard good things about drowning in her suicide support group. Supposed to make you feel heavy and tired and light, and then you woke up in heaven or hell or just passed on to whatever was next. She wanted to pass on, but not without her baby. If Brindy could get to her before the water took her away, they could pass on together. Maybe get another shot in a better place.

  Her reflection in the window’s rainy splatter made it hard to see what was going on outside, but it sure looked like someone else was sneaking around where her baby was. One of the perverts who lived in the park, probably. She didn’t have a problem with perverts so much, God knows she was no good girl, and they’d been kind to her and NeNe, but nobody needed to be passing a baby on to heaven but her momma.

  Pulling out the needle made her bleed and made her head spin. She remembered for a second having the same feeling before and that’s why she’d left it in. Needles were bullshit, like the weather and the sugary booze in the summer, but they were easier to come by than pills. The TV was getting louder, or maybe she was just remembering it was there, but she liked her odds with the TV in her head. TV’d been good to her and NeNe, and would never steer them wrong. She made a final push out of bed toward the sound. There were more cans on the floor and another needle she almost stepped on in the bathroom, but she made it to the TV and the Wheel of Fortune.

  “Panama Canal,” was the last thing she said before she passed out again.

  The pervert from across the way woke her up the next morning. His name was really Matthew or something white and Biblical like that, but everybody in the whole goddamn park had names that sounded the same, so she got used to thinking of them as the pervert from across the way, the pervert with the nice van, the pervert with the head scab, the pervert with the good grill. Despite his name, the pervert from across the way was a black guy with a lumpy head and slimy hair, but she was too Christian to think of him as the black pervert, and he really was across the way. Always across the way, watching her and NeNe, but never saying anything or making them feel creepy or whatever. Just watching.