Chance (27 page)

“She named me. Christabella.”

“Good lord, what a name.”

Deb ignored that. “Christabella,” she repeated. “Christabella Infusino. She gave me a name.”

I stared at her blankly.

“So she couldn't have hated me all that much!” Deb blurted at me. “She had a name picked out for me. She must have wanted me at least a little bit, maybe before I was born.”

I excused myself, went into the bathroom and sat there until I felt calm again, cradling my pregnant belly in my hands.

Sometime within the next few days I noticed that Deb had started taking walks all the way down to 11th Street. Down to the tacky side of town, down the heaved-up sidewalks past the potholes. The first raw weeks of March she walked down there almost every day—walked, by damn, and this is the periwinkle boot girl, the white Corvette cat, walking down 11th Street in the rain with her slicker hood up and a pair of squelching tennis shoes on her feet.

She didn't ask me, but I started to walk with her. Sort of happened out when she went by. We didn't talk much, thank God. I could stand her better when she didn't talk. Actually I found that I no longer entirely disliked her, those days. And I guess she didn't mind having me along for the walk. She would slow up and wait for me as I waddled along beside her, seven months great with child.

“That's where I was born,” she told me. “Right in the house.”

It was that particular house that she walked to, of course. A rotting wooden hulk patched with tarpaper, moss growing on the roof, porch falling off. No one lived there any more—the place was condemned. A couple of Italian guys, brothers-in-law, unemployed, were going to tear it down for the lumber. Mid March, they started.

The weather hadn't warmed up much. Just the same, Deb and I would stand a few minutes and watch them work. We got to know them a little, enough to say hi, complain about the weather, joke that their wives would be jealous if they saw us hanging around. They were gutting the interior first, sheltering from the cold wind. Day by day we watched as they brought forth fixtures out of a dark, gaping doorway.

“The warm, dark womb,” Deb remarked once, maybe the first time she had come close to mentioning the “circle of healers.”

“A promiscuous womb,” I quipped. I cannot seem to help being flippant. “Wide open to all comers.”

Deb actually smiled. “That explains the variety of the offspring.”

The men brought out wooden cupboards, metal sinks and a porcelain one, oak doors, hardware, a chamber pot and some lengths of lead pipe. They took the window sashes out. The house stared blindly. Chunks of plaster and bits of lath started to drop down. They were ripping out the walls to get at the studding.

“Jesus shit!”

White face at the ravaged window above us. Husky Italian staggered beyond words, gesturing for help. Somewhere inside, the more articulate brother-in-law kept up bursts of startled profanity.

“Screw me silly, what is it!”

Deb reached the stairs while I, very pregnant, was still lumbering through the door. The commotion came from the second floor—

When I saw what it was about, I stood as stunned as any of them.

No insulation in the walls of that old place. And in the space between plaster and lath and the outer sheathing lay something that just fit there, snugly, as if in a coffin.

A—homunculus, a human something, a tiny, shriveled brown mummy curled up there in the wall, its head the largest part of it, feet bent under and hands up against the twisted, brittle mouth, disintegrating hands—but the face, intact. Eyes shut, squeezed tight in pain or rage. Mouth wide open to wail. And the leather thong still furrowing the puny neck. Someone had strangled a baby.

A gasping breath, then the cry. For an awful instant I thought it was coming from the dead thing in the wall. It seemed to be everywhere. It seemed to fill the world.

It was Deb. Not a scream, what she was doing, not a shriek of fear that would pass or hatred that would vent. Not a weeping. But a cry, a terrible, dry-eyed, utterly abandoned infant's cry, the throat-tearing cry of total dependence. For a moment I stared at her, couldn't think or act, I was so shaken by that cry. Her face, contorted, teeth bared to the gums, eyes buried in pain, skin the color of a bruise, straps of muscle standing out on her neck—and her hands rose to meet her gaping mouth—

“Mother of God,” one of the Italians moaned.

I jerked myself loose from that place, got hold of her by the wrists and took her out. Her noise eased up once we reached the street. I hustled her toward home, and the police cars went screaming down Eleventh Street beside us. That walk home seemed to take millennia. All through the streets of Hoadley, out of the walls of the sparrow-brown houses row on row I imagined I heard crying, primal cries. Want me. Mother me. Love me.

The local paper ran a photo of the mummified baby the next day. It could have been as much as a hundred years old, the coroner said. Probably had nothing to do with Debora's natural family at all. But Deb had that awful look on her face again.

I didn't see her much after that. For all I know she is still living at home. They might have hired a private nurse for her by this time. I don't know. I don't care. Within three days I had talked Brad into breaking the lease, and I had found us an apartment in Steel City. I did not want my baby to be born in Hoadley.

About the Author

Nancy Springer has passed the fifty-book milestone with novels for adults, young adults, and children, in genres including mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magic realism, horror, and mystery—although she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Springer moved with her family to Gettysburg, of Civil War fame, when she was thirteen. She spent the next forty-six years in Pennsylvania, raising two children (Jonathan and Nora), writing, horseback riding, fishing, and bird-watching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida Panhandle where the bird-watching is spectacular, and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The following originally appeared and are copyright as follows: “The Boy Who Plaited Manes,”
The Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction,
© 1986 by Mercury Press Inc.; “The Wolf Girl Speaks,”
Star*Line,
© 1982 by Nancy Springer; “Bright-Eyed Black Pony,”
Moonsinger's Friends,
© 1985 by Nancy Springer; “Come In,”
Night Voyages Poetry Review,
© 1982 by James R. Page; “The Prince Out of the Past,”
Magic in Ithkar,
© 1985 by Nancy Springer; “Amends,”
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
© 1983 by Mercury Press Inc.; “The Dog-King of Vaire,”
Fantasy Book,
© 1982 by Nancy Springer.

Copyright © 1987 by Nancy Springer

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

ISBN: 978-1-4532-9406-2

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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