Five Stories for the Dark Months

Five Stories for the Dark
Months

Katherine Traylor

Smashwords Edition

~}*{~

Copyright 2013 Katherine
Traylor

Cover image is
"
Window
,"
by Lucrecia Beatrice

"
Under
Glass
," "
Warmth
in Winter
," and "
Over
the River
" can also be read online at
the author's blog,
Among the Goblins
. "Sans Merci" and
"Boon" have never been published before in any
format.

Visit the author's Smashwords page!

License Notes

This ebook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be
re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share
this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy
for each recipient, or refer them to the free stories at
the author's homepage
. If you’re
reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased
for your use only, then please return to
Smashwords.com
and purchase your own
copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

~}*{~

Table of
Contents

1.
Under Glass
:
A girl discovers the danger of
being rude to a mirror.

2.
Warmth in
Winter
:
A
young border guard and a foreign spy must avoid pursuit while
traveling through a forest full of hungry ghosts.

3.
Sans Merci
:
During a stolen coffee break, a
young father meets a beautiful stranger who is much more than she
seems.

4.
Over the
River
:
A young
woman wanders to the riverbank on Halloween and is invited to a
strange party.

5.
Boon
:
A very dark Thumbelina retelling, inspired by
zombies and Norse mythology.

6.
About the
Author

~}*{~

Under
Glass

October 2011

Table of Contents

“But
you said
I could
go!”

“I said
you could go
if
you kept your grades up, young lady, and I
told
you what would
happen if you didn’t.”

“But Aunt Laurie—”

Adie’s mother
folded the report card and set it down on the pristine kitchen
counter. She clearly would rather have thrown it on the floor. “I
will call Aunt Laurie myself and tell her why you’re not coming,”
she said. “Or
you
can explain to her why shopping with your friends was so much
more important to you than your visit next
month.”

“That’s
not
—”

“Don’t
you raise your voice to me, young lady, or you’ll
regret it.” Her mother pointed out the door. “Now go upstairs and
do your homework. Dinner’s in an hour.”

Adie glared. “I’m not hungry.” Her
stomach rumbled as she spoke. The air was heavy with the aromas of
baking bread and homemade tomato sauce, and she hadn’t eaten
anything since lunch. But some things were more important than her
mother’s spaghetti, and New York was one of them.

Adie’s mother looked heavenward,
took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “All right. Then go
upstairs and go to bed. I don’t want to see you until morning.”
With that she turned back to the cutting board and began dicing
celery with harsh, uneven strokes. Adie knew that the conversation
was over.

She grabbed her
backpack and stormed from the kitchen, down the hallway and up the
towering stairs. She made sure to stomp hard on each beige-carpeted
step. All right, she
would
go to bed—and then she’d get up early tomorrow,
eat breakfast and leave the house before either of her parents woke
up. Right now she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see them ever
again.

The trip to New
York was a long-delayed birthday present from her Aunt Laurie, who
had been one of Adie’s dearest companions until she’d moved away
last fall. The thought of calling to tell her aunt that the trip
was off was enough to make her gut clench. Tears blurred her vision
as she opened her bedroom door. She threw her backpack on the
floor, then went back down the potpourri-scented hallway to the
bathroom to brush her teeth. She
would
go to bed. Right now she’d
rather be dead than face the knowledge that her own stupidity had
lost her New York.

In the bathroom, Adie squeezed a
healthy glob of toothpaste onto her toothbrush and shoved it into
her mouth. She winced as it rammed the backs of her gums and
bruised the inside of her cheek. As she brushed (tops... bottoms...
insides... outsides... twice all over...) she watched the
reflection of her face in the mirror.

The girl in the
mirror was an unfashionable sixteen. She had frizzy hair and an
awkward nose, and her shirt was stained from a spill at lunch.. Her
cheeks were wet with tears; her eyes were red and swollen. This was
the kind of face you had when you were hopeless. When you weren’t
going anywhere. When you would spend Christmas break alone with
your own stupid parents... and when, worst of all, you weren’t
going to New York because you had been
stupid.

She spat her toothpaste into the
sink, then spat again to clear the dregs from her mouth. Now the
girl in the mirror had little dribbles of toothpaste foam all over
her lips and chin. Her nose had begun to run,too. She looked
ridiculous.

Adie wrapped her
arms around herself and stared at the girl in abject misery.
So. Stupid
. Why had she
ever even thought that she would make it to New York? She was
probably doomed to stay here forever and rot, like an unharvested
pumpkin in the world’s worst field.

A little more toothpaste ran down
the chin of the girl in the mirror. Despite her foolish appearance,
there was a glint in her eyes that Adie didn’t much like. The girl
looked mocking. Mean, even. Adie could understand why people
wouldn’t want to be around a girl like that. She wouldn’t want to
be around herself, either. She just made everyone angry. It was
probably for the best that she wasn’t going—Aunt Laurie would
probably have regretted inviting her even if she had
gone.

She glared at the girl, and the
girl glared back. “Fuck you,” Adie whispered. She wiped the
toothpaste from her mouth with an angry fist.

The girl in the mirror watched
dumbly, as if she hadn’t understood what she’d said.

On a whim, Adie
licked her fingertip and wrote—in big, neat block letters—on the
surface of the mirror:
FUCK
YOU
.

Then, to make it even clearer, she
wrote it backwards.

When she looked
back down at her reflection, her stomach dropped:
The girl was not looking at
her.

She was looking, instead, at the
message Adie had written, and her lips were moving as she read the
words. When she finished, her eyes went wide. Slowly, she looked
back down at Adie.

It was not a nice look.

More than an hour later, as Adie
lay trembling in bed with the blankets over her head, someone came
into her room. She thought that it was probably her mother, because
she could smell her mother’s neat floral perfume over the faint
tang of her own unwashed laundry. Well-pressed chinos swished
efficiently to the center of the room, then stopped.

The person who was
probably her mother stood quietly for a very long time. Adie lay in
the warm darkness beneath her blankets and wished that she could
be
sure.

“Still mad?” her mother said
finally. The sound of her voice was blessedly familiar.

Adie shrugged. She hadn’t actually
thought that much about the argument since she’d seen what must
have been a hallucination in the bathroom mirror. She still
shuddered just thinking of the malice in her reflection’s
eyes.

“Do you want to talk about it?”
her mother continued in her calm, reasonable way.

Adie snorted. Tell
her mother she was hallucinating? Sure,
that
would smooth things
over.

Her mother sighed. It was a soft,
gusty sigh, quite restrained: the sigh of someone who has too many
troubles to welcome another one. It also had that extra little
trill of exasperation that had always been applied exclusively to
Adie. This, more than anything, convinced her that it was safe to
come out.

She pulled the covers from her face
and sat up. The air was a cool shock against her skin after more
than an hour between the blankets. Her mother, who had already
started to leave, stopped in midstride. She looked surprised, and
no wonder: Adie rarely left a sulk until at least a day after she’d
started it.

“I’m still mad,” she said quickly,
lest her mother wrongly assume that all was forgiven. “But... I’ll
come downstairs.”

“All right,” said her mother,
looking bemused. “Go wash your hands and come set the
table.”

Adie approached the bathroom as if
it were a dragon’s cave. Her heart was pounding. The bathroom light
was out, and since the room had no windows it was as dark as a real
cave would have been. She snaked her arm around the doorframe and
felt for the switch. For one harrowing second she was sure that
something was going to bite her hand off—but then she found the
switch, and light flooded the bathroom.

There was something wrong with the
mirror. At first she couldn’t make sense of what she saw. It was a
strange crosshatching over the surface of the glass, so thick in
places that it almost looked frosted. It covered the whole surface
of the mirror, from top to bottom and left to right.

After a moment, Adie realized that
the marks were scratches, gouged into the surface of the glass as
if with a screw or a nail. They grew larger and wilder the further
down they went, until at the bottom they became a nest of angry
gouges that took up half the mirror.

She reached out automatically to
touch the glass. The scratches were quite deep, almost rough to the
touch. It would have taken someone a lot of work—and a lot of
anger—to produce them so quickly. Gradually, her mind found
patterns in the chaos—and then it all clicked into place. From top
to bottom, side to side, the scratches spelled out the same two
words over and over again, until they culminated in a ragged scrawl
across the bottom:

FUCK YOU
FUCK YOU
FUCK YOU
FUCK YOU
FUCK
YOU

Something moved behind the glass,
drawing Adie’s eyes to her reflection. The girl behind the mirror
was almost hidden behind the destruction she had wrought, but it
was clear that she was pleased with herself. She smirked at Adie
and mouthed two words. Though Adie couldn’t hear them, she
understood them quite clearly.

“I just don’t see how you did it,”
her mother said the next Saturday. “You were only up there for an
hour—some of those scratches were a quarter of an inch deep!” She
was leaning against the kitchen counter, overseeing Adie’s
punishment breakfast of cold cereal and milk. For Adie’s parents
there were pancakes and coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The
smells in the kitchen were an exquisite torture to Adie, who
usually looked forward to Saturday breakfast all week.