The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  Judy still had contacts in the neighborhood. One of them was Chambliss. He brought the word on Sunday morning, murmured to them while they waited to cross Second Avenue. “Woman says she’ll meet you right after dark in Tompkins Square Park on the Avenue B side. Don’t bring nobody. She’ll take you where you can talk.” The folded twenties disappeared into his pocket.

  It was so obviously a trap that Judy and Ray laughed and made plans. At some point BD was called in. That night right on schedule Ray crossed Avenue A and walked into the park.

  Marlene began to growl before he sensed Rainier’s presence. He saw her under a streetlamp, a woman in her thirties wearing a long black dress and shawl. She kept her distance but looked at him wide-eyed and gestured for him to follow her through the almost empty park.

  Over the years he wondered if his visions were self-fulfilling prophecies. But he missed them acutely when they dried up. To find what else this woman could show him he was willing to do to her things as bad as had ever been done to him.

  She stayed about fifty feet ahead, walking rapidly and glancing back. As she reached the gates on Avenue B, he called to her to slow down. She turned toward him and so didn’t see the van with its headlights off as it rolled up behind her and braked.

  The rear door of the van opened as Ray released Marlene, who sprang forward snarling. Judy jumped out of the driver’s seat and BD came out of the back to make a perfect snatch.

  The Goosle

  Margo Lanagan

  Margo Lanagan lives in Sydney, Australia, and works as a contract technical writer. She has published three collections of speculative short stories: White Time, Black Juice, and Red Spikes. Her stories have won two World Fantasy Awards, two Ditmar Awards, four Aurealis Awards, and a Michael L. Printz Honor, and have been shortlisted for many other awards, including a Nebula, a Hugo, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Lanagan taught at Clarion South in 2005 and in 2007. She has also published poetry, and fiction for junior readers and teenagers. She maintains a blog at www.amongamidwhile.blogspot.com.

  Lanagan often twists Australian myth and children’s tales into something new, making them uniquely her own—as she does in this vicious follow-up to a well-known fairy tale.

  There,” said Grinnan as we cleared the trees. “Now, you keep your counsel, Hanny-boy.”

  Why, that is the mudwife’s house, I thought. Dread thudded in me. Since two days ago among the older trees when I knew we were in my father’s forest, I’d feared this.

  The house looked just as it did in my memory: the crumbling, glittery yellow walls, the dreadful roof sealed with drippy white mud. My tongue rubbed the roof of my mouth just looking. It is crisp as wafer biscuit on the outside, that mud. You bite through to a sweetish sand inside. You are frightened it will choke you, but you cannot stop eating.

  The mudwife might be dead, I thought hopefully. So many are dead, after all, of the black.

  But then came a convulsion in the house. A face passed the window hole, and there she was at the door. Same squat body with a big face snarling above. Same clothing, even, after all these years, the dress trying for bluishness and the pinafore for brown through all the dirt. She looked just as strong. However much bigger I’d grown, it took all my strength to hold my bowels together.

  “Don’t come a step nearer.” She held a red fire-banger in her hand, but it was so dusty—if I’d not known her I’d have laughed.

  “Madam, I pray you,” said Grinnan. “We are clean as clean—there’s not a speck on us, not a blister. Humble travellers in need only of a pig hut or a chicken shed to shelter the night.”

  “Touch my stock and I’ll have you,” she says to all his smoothness. “I’ll roast your head in a pot.”

  I tugged Grinnan’s sleeve. It was all too sudden—one moment walking wondering, the next on the doorstep with the witch right there, talking heads in pots.

  “We have pretties to trade,” said Grinnan.

  “You can put your pretties up your poink-hole where they belong.”

  “We have all the news of long travel. Are you not at all curious about the world and its woes?”

  “Why would I live here, tuffet-head?” And she went inside and slammed her door and banged the shutter across her window.

  “She is softening,” said Grinnan. “She is curious. She can’t help herself.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You watch me. Get us a fire going, boy. There on that bit of bare ground.”

  “She will come and throw her bunger in it. She’ll blind us, and then—”

  “Just make and shut. I tell you, this one is as good as married to me. I have her heart in my hand like a rabbit-kitten.”

  I was sure he was mistaken, but I went too, because fire meant food and just the sight of the house had made me hungry. While I fed the fire its kindling I dug up a little stone from the flattened ground and sucked the dirt off it.

  Grinnan had me make a smelly soup. Salt fish, it had in it, and sea celery and the yellow spice.

  When the smell was strong, the door whumped open and there she was again. Ooh, she was so like in my dreams, with her suddenness and her ugly intentions that you can’t guess. But it was me and Grinnan this time, not me and Kirtle. Grinnan was big and smart, and he had his own purposes. And I knew there was no magic in the world, just trickery on the innocent. Grinnan would never let anyone else trick me; he wanted that privilege all for himself.

  “Take your smelly smells from my garden this instant!” the mudwife shouted.

  Grinnan bowed as if she’d greeted him most civilly. “Madam, if you’d join us? There is plenty of this lovely bull-a-bess for you as well.”

  “I’d not touch my lips to such mess. What kind of foreign muck—”

  Even I could hear the longing in her voice that she was trying to shout down.

  There before her he ladled out a bowlful—yellow, splashy, full of delicious lumps. Very humbly—he does humbleness well when he needs to, for such a big man—he took it to her. When she recoiled he placed it on the little table by the door, the one that I ran against in my clumsiness when escaping, so hard I still sometimes feel the bruise in my rib. I remember, I knocked it skittering out the door, and I flung it back meaning to trip up the mudwife. But instead I tripped up Kirtle, and the wife came out and plucked her up and bellowed after me and kicked the table onto the path, and ran out herself with Kirtle like a tortoise swimming from her fist and kicked the table aside again—

  Bang! went the cottage door.

  Grinnan came laughing quietly back to me.

  “She is ours. Once they’ve et your food, Hanny, you’re free to eat theirs. Fish-and-onion pie tonight, I’d say.”

  “Eugh.”

  “Jealous, are we? Don’t like old Grinnan supping at other pots, hnh?”

  “It’s not that!” I glared at his laughing face. “She’s so ugly, that’s all. So old. I don’t know how you can even think of—”

  “Well, I am no primrose myself, golden boy,” he says. “And I’m grateful for any flower that lets me pluck her.”

  I was not old and desperate enough to laugh at that joke. I pushed his soup bowl at him.

  “Ah, bull-a-bess,” he said into the steam. “Food of gods and seducers.”

  When the mudwife let us in, I looked straight to the corner, and the cage was still there! It had been repaired in places with fresh-plaited withes, but it was still of the same pattern. Now there was an animal in it, but the cottage was so dim…a very thin cat, maybe, or a ferret. It rippled slowly around its borders, and flashed little eyes at us, and smelled as if its own piss were combed through its fur for pomade. I never smelled that bad when I lived in that cage. I ate well, I remember; I fattened. She took away my leavings in a little cup, on a little dish, but there was still plenty of me left.

  So that when Kirtle freed me I lumbered away. As soon as I was out of sight of the mud house I stopped in the forest and just stood there blowing from the effort of propelling m
yself, after all those weeks of sloth.

  So that Grinnan when he first saw me said, Here’s a jubbly one. Here’s a cheesecake. Wherever did you get the makings of those round cheeks? And he fell on me like a starving man on a roasted mutton leg. Before too long he had used me thin again, and thin I stayed thereafter.

  He was busy at work on the mudwife now.

  “Oh my, what an array of herbs! You must be a very knowledgeable woman. And hasn’t she a lot of pots, Hansel! A pot for every occasion, I think.”

  Oh yes, I nearly said, including head boiling, remember?

  “Well, you are very comfortably set up here, indeed, madam.” He looked about him as if he’d found himself inside some kind of enchanted palace, instead of in a stinking hovel with a witch in the middle of it. “Now, I’m sure you told me your name—”

  “I did not. My name’s not for such as you to know.” Her mouth was all pruny and she strutted around and banged things and shot him sharp looks, but I’d seen it. We were in here, weren’t we? We’d made it this far.

  “Ah, a guessing game!” says Grinnan delightedly. “Now, you’d have a good strong name, I’m sure. Bridda, maybe, or Gert. Or else something fiery and passionate, such as Rossavita, eh?”

  He can afford to play her awhile. If the worse comes to the worst, he has the liquor, after all. The liquor has worked on me when nothing else would, when I’ve been ready to run, to some town’s wilds where I could hide—to such as that farm wife with the worried face who beat off Grinnan with a broom. The liquor had softened me and made me sleepy, made me give in to the old bugger’s blandishments; next day it had stopped me thinking with its head pain, further than to obey Grinnan’s grunts and gestures.

  How does yours like it? said Gadfly’s red-haired boy viciously. I’ve heard him call you “honey,” like a girl-wife; does he do you like a girl, face-to-face and lots of kissing? Like your boy-bits, which they is so small, ain’t even there, so squashed and ground in?

  He calls me Hanny, because Hanny is my name. Hansel.

  Honey is your name, eh? said the black boy—a boy of black skin from naturalness, not illness. After your honey hair?

  Which they commenced patting and pulling and then held me down and chopped all away with Gadfly’s good knife. When Grinnan saw me he went pale, but I’m pretty sure he was trying to cut some kind of deal with Gadfly to swap me for the red-hair (with the skin like milk, like freckled milk, he said), so the only thing it changed, he did not come after me for several nights until the hair had settled and I did not give off such an air of humiliation.

  Then he whispered, You were quite handsome under that thatch, weren’t you? All along. And things were bad as ever, and the next day he tidied off the stragglier strands, as I sat on a stump with my poink-hole thumping and the other boys idled this way and that, watching, warping their faces at each other and snorting.

  The first time Grinnan did me, I could imagine that it didn’t happen. I thought, I had that big dump full of so much nervous earth and stones and some of them must have had sharp corners and cut me as I passed them, and the throbbing of the cuts gave me the dream, that the old man had done that to me. Because I was so fearful, you know, frightened of everything coming straight from the mudwife, and I put fear and pain together and made it up in my sleep. The first time I could trick myself, because it was so terrible and mortifying a thing, it could not be real. It could not.

  I have watched Grinnan a long time now, in success and failure, in private and on show. At first I thought he was too smart for me, that I was trapped by his cleverness. And this is true. But I have seen others laugh at him, or walk away from his efforts easily, shaking their heads. Others are cleverer.

  What he does to me, he waits till I am weak. Half asleep, he waits till. I never have much fight in me, but dozing off I have even less.

  Then what he does—it’s so simple I’m ashamed. He bares the flesh of my back. He strokes my back as if that is all he is going to do. He goes straight to the very oldest memory I have—which, me never having told him, how does he know it?—of being sickly, of my first mother bringing me through the night, singing and stroking my back, the oldest and safest piece of my mind, and he puts me there, so that I am sodden with sweetness and longing and nearly-being-back-to-a-baby.

  And then he proceeds. It often hurts—it mostly hurts. I often weep. But there is a kind of bargain goes on between us, you see. I pay for the first part with the second. The price of the journey to that safe, sweet-sodden place is being spiked in the arse and dragged kicking and biting my blanket back to the real and dangerous one.

  Show me your boy-thing, the mudwife would say. Put it through the bars.

  I won’t.

  Why not?

  You will bite it off. You will cut it off with one of your knives. You will chop it with your ax.

  Put it out. I will do no such thing. I only want to wash it.

  Wash it when Kirtle is awake, if you so want me clean.

  It will be nice, I promise you. I will give you a nice feeling, so warm, so wet. You’ll feel good.

  But when I put it out, she exclaimed, What am I supposed to do with that?

  Wash it, like you said.

  There’s not enough of it even to wash! How would one get that little peepette dirty?

  I put it away, little shred, little scrap I was ashamed of.

  And she flung around the room awhile, and then she sat, her face all red crags in the last little light of the banked-up fire. I am going to have to keep you forever! she said. For years before you are any use to me. And you are expensive! You eat like a pig! I should just cook you up now and enjoy you while you are tender.

  I was all wounded pride and stupid. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I can do anything my sister can do, if you just let me out of this cage. And I’m a better woodchopper.

  Woodchopper! she said disgustedly. As if I needed a woodchopper! And she went to the door and took the ax off the wall there, and tested the edge with one of her horny fingertips, and looked at me in a very thoughtful way that I did not much like.

  Sometimes he speaks as he strokes. My Hanny, he says, very gentle and loving like my mother, my goosle, my gosling, sweet as apple, salt as sea. And it feels as if we are united in yearning for my mother and her touch and voice.

  She cannot have gone forever, can she, if I can remember this feeling so clearly? But, ah, to get back to her, so much would have to be undone! So much would have to un-happen: all of Grinnan’s and my wanderings, all the witch-time, all the time of our second mother. That last night of our first mother, our real mother, and her awful writhing and the noises and our father begging, and Kirtle weeping and needing to be taken away—that would have to become a nightmare, from which my father would shake me awake with the news that the baby came out just as Kirtle and I did, just as easily. And our mother would rise from her bed with the baby; we would all rise into the baby’s first morning, and begin.

  It is very deep in the night. I have done my best to be invisible, to make no noise, but now the mudwife pants, He’s not asleep.

  Of course he’s asleep. Listen to his breathing.

  I do the asleep-breathing.

  Come, says Grinnan. I’ve done with these, bounteous as they are. I want to go below. He has his ardent voice on now. He makes you think he is barely in control of himself, and somehow that makes you, somehow that flatters you enough to let him do what he wants.

  After some uffing and puffing, No, she says, very firm, and there’s a slap. I want that boy out of here.

  What, wake him so he can go and listen at the window?

  Get him out, she says. Send him beyond the pigs and tell him to stay.

  You’re a nuisance, he says. You’re a sexy nuisance. Look at this! I’m all misshapen and you want me herding children.

  You do it, she says, rearranging her clothing, or you’ll stay that shape.

  So he comes to me and I affect to be woken up and to resist being
hauled out the door, but really it’s a relief of course. I don’t want to hear or see or know. None of that stuff I understand, why people want to sweat and pant and poke bits of themselves into each other, why anyone would want to do more than hold each other for comfort and stroke each other’s back.

  Moonlight. Pigs like slabs of moon, like long, fat fruit fallen off a moon-vine. The trees tall and brainy all around and above—they never sweat and pork; the most they do is sway in a breeze, or crash to the ground to make useful wood. The damp smell of night forest. My friends in the firmament, telling me where I am: two and a half days north of the ford with the knotty rope; four and a half days north and a bit west of “Devilstown,” which Grinnan called it because someone made off in the night with all the spoils we’d made off with the night before.

  I’d thought we were the only ones not back in their beds! he’d stormed on the road.

  They must have come very quiet, I said. They must have been accomplished thieves.

  They must have been sprites or devils, he spat, that I didn’t hear them, with my ears.

  We were seven and a half days north and very very west of Gadfly’s camp, where we had, as Grinnan put it, tried the cooperative life for a while. But those boys, they were a gang of no-goods, Grinnan says now. Whatever deal he had tried to make for Freckled-Milk, they laughed him off, and Grinnan could not stand it there having been laughed at. He took me away before dawn one morning, and when we stopped by a stream in the first light he showed me the brass candlesticks that Gadfly had kept in a sack and been so proud of.

  And what’ll you use those for? I said foolishly, for we had managed up until then with moon and stars and our own wee fire.

  I did not take them to use them, Hanny-pot, he said with glee. I took them because he loved and polished them so. And he flung them into the stream, and I gasped—and Grinnan laughed to hear me gasp—at the sight of them cutting through the foam and then gone into the dark cold irretrievable.