Haunted Legends (9 page)

Ruth closes her eyes, but the television plays on behind her lids. The Spring Heel leaps in; his screen entrance could be Spider-Man camp, all comic book perspective and improbable acrobatic acts had Ruth not seen for herself his leaps and bounds.

Spring Heel’s face fills the screen on Ruth’s eyelids. His own eyes bulge, all spider veins and weeping, yellowed fluid. He tilts his head and there’s a rim of fire on his lips. When he speaks, his words are disjointed as if they fall into Ruth’s head from far away.

“I’ll be taking you with me, Ruth,” he says. “See if I don’t.”

Ruth falls forward from her chair. She’s unconscious before she hits the floor.

•  •  •

A twilight world, lost inside Ruth’s head. Shapes fade and loom; colours swirl. She’s in the park, but it’s hardly the same park she knows so intimately. The air smells of wood smoke, and gas lamps hiss and bathe the strolling gentry with a tallow glow. Between the lamps the stars burn fiercely in darker skies.

Ruth reaches down and smoothes her petticoats. These are fine garments, silken to the touch. No one has pulled out and ejaculated on these skirts. No one has wiped piss and snot and God knows what on these gowns. She feels a hand grasp her wrist from behind, and she’s lifted with ease from the ground. Ruth leaps, instinctively in step with her bearer’s giant strides, until they’re like two ice dancers soaring gracefully as one. Below her, the lamps swirl and fall away. Ruth feels the night air cool and damp on her brow.

“Is this what you want, Ruth?” says the Spring Heel.

Ruth shivers. She stares down at Victorian Liverpool bustling far, far below her feet. With each bound, the Spring Heel takes her higher, farther away from the pimps and pushers, away from the users and abusers; away from the Ruth she once was and farther toward the narrow thoroughfares and simpler times.

“Yes,” Ruth whispers. She grips the Spring Heel tighter. “It’s what I want.”

Ruth turns her head. The Spring Heel’s breath is a fire on his lips, but for an instant he could be Basil, or Lass, or even The Runt.

“You’d leave them all to be here?” says the Spring Heel.

“I could bring them with me.”

“You could if they’ll come.”

•  •  •

Ruth wakes, startled. The ward is hospital-warm, sickly stifling, and Ruth gasps for breath.

“She’s awake,” says The Runt. “About fuckin’ time. I hate hospitals, me; hospitals are bad for the health.”

Basil and Lass, entwined as ever, turn as one from the window.

“You gave us quite a turn, old thing,” says Basil. “I thought we’d damned well lost you.”

Lass smiles. “But not yet,” she says. “Not quite yet, eh?”

The smell of the park lingers. Ruth still tastes the fiery breath of the Spring Heel on her lips. The white line of his grip fades around her wrist.

“Where did he go?” says Ruth.

“Who?” says The Runt.

“The Spring Heel.”

A nurse enters the room. The Runt’s ripe, and Basil swigs the last dreg of his brandy, and the nurse makes no attempt to disguise her contempt. She waves her arms. “Everyone, out, the girl needs rest.”

Lass runs a hand over Ruth’s brow. She stares down into Ruth’s eyes. “I think he’ll come back for you later,” she says. “And when he does, then you should go fearlessly with him. It’s what we all do whenever the mood to go back takes us, and that’s more and more these days. There’s less and less here for us now.”

Ruth smiles and nods. She thinks she understands. Everyone secretly yearns for simpler times.

When the Spring Heel comes, he no longer looks the terrible demon to Ruth. Instead he’s a glowing light of salvation. He’s love, and Faith, and Hope, and all that Ruth needs. Together they stand paused at the opened hospital window. The evening is cool and the street below glistens with earlier rains.

Ruth can see the headline now:
Spring Heel Jack Lures Woman to Death Fall.

Even as they leap, Ruth blows a kiss across time and space to The Runt, to Basil, and most of all to Lass. Perhaps she’ll see them again one day, when they chance to journey back to better days. But for now Ruth strolls through the gas-lit park lanes with the gentry. She’s at home in simpler times, and here she knows enough to live life away from prostitution, away from itchy labia, away from madmen with knives.

When she reaches the park gates, Ruth does not pause. She walks away slowly, deliberately. She no longer needs giant leaps to know where she’s going. She glances skyward and sees the merest hint of the Spring Heel on his evening prowl.

“You’re much misunderstood, sir,” Ruth whispers to no one but the night and the devilish glow dancing amongst the chimney pots.

For an instant Ruth wonders if she’s really there. Is this her Heaven, and her body lies broken against some hospital wall?

Ruth shakes her head. It doesn’t matter. This is where she’s at peace.

“Long may you leap, Mr Spring Heel,” she says. “Your wonders to perform.”

Afterword

I’ve always been fascinated by the Spring Heel Jack legends. I love the way Jack was somehow able to show himself in great leaps and bounds even during daylight and yet still remain elusive and mysterious. I tried to mimic this in the story; to have the Spring Heel’s appearances seem fleeting, as if he’s almost incidental to Ruth’s tale, yet at the same time to reveal him as a catalyst to bring on Ruth’s (apparent) salvation. I added a little creative license to suggest that in Ruth’s ragtag friends perhaps the Spring Heel didn’t quite work alone. Living in Liverpool, where a great many of Jack’s appearances came, also makes the legend special to me.

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including the award-winning
Threshold
and, most recently,
Daughter of Hounds
and
The Red Tree.
Her short fiction has been collected in
Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster;
and
A Is for Alien.
Her erotica has been collected in three volumes:
Frog Toes and Tentacles, Tales from the Woeful Platypus,
and
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart.
She is currently beginning work on her eighth novel. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

“So, you believe in vampires?” she asks, then takes another sip of her coffee and looks out at the rain pelting Thames Street beyond the café window. It’s been pissing rain for almost an hour, a cold, stinging shower on an overcast afternoon near the end of March, a bitter Newport afternoon that would have been equally at home in January or February. But at least it’s not pissing snow.

I put my own cup down—tea, not coffee—and stare across the booth at her for a moment or two before answering. “No,” I tell Abby Gladding. “But, quite clearly, those people in Exeter who saw to it that Mercy Brown’s body was exhumed, the ones who cut out her heart and burned it, clearly
they
believed in vampires. And that’s what I’m studying, the psychology behind that hysteria, behind the superstitions.”

“It was so long ago,” she replies, and smiles. There’s no foreshadowing in that smile, not even in hindsight. It surely isn’t a predatory smile. There’s nothing malevolent, or hungry, or feral in the expression. She just watches the rain and smiles, as though something I’ve said amuses her.

“Not really,” I say, glancing down at my steaming cup. “Not so long ago as people might
like
to think. The Mercy Brown incident, that was in 1892, and the most recent case of purported vampirism in the Northeast I’ve been able to pin down dates from sometime in 1898, a mere hundred and eleven years ago.”

Her smile lingers, and she traces a circle in the condensation on the plate-glass window, then traces another circle inside it.

“We’re not so far removed from the villagers with their torches and pitchforks, from old Cotton Mather and his bunch. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Well, not exactly, but . . .” and when I trail off, she turns her head toward me, and her blue-grey eyes seem as cold as the low-slung sky above Newport. You could almost freeze to death in eyes like those, I think, and I take another sip of my lukewarm Earl Grey with lemon. Her eyes seem somehow brighter than they should in the dim light of the coffeehouse, so there’s your foreshadowing, I suppose, if you’re the sort who needs it.

“You’re pretty far from Exeter, Ms. Howard,” she says, and takes another sip of her coffee. And me, I’m sitting here wishing we were talking about almost anything but Rhode Island vampires and the hysteria of crowds, tuberculosis, and the master’s thesis I’d be defending at the end of May. It had been months since I’d had anything even resembling a date, and I didn’t want to squander the next half hour or so talking shop.

“I think I’ve turned up something interesting,” I tell her, because I can’t think of any subtle way to steer the conversation in another direction. “A case no one’s documented before, right here in Newport.”

She smiles that smile again, and yeah, maybe I’m talking about violated corpses and rituals to keep the dead in the ground, but my mind’s somewhere else. Even lesbian graduate students get horny now and then.

“I got a tip from a folklorist up at Brown,” I say. “Seems maybe there was an incident here in 1785 or thereabouts. If it checks out, I might be onto the oldest case of suspected vampirism resulting in an exhumation anywhere in New England. So, now I’m trying to verify the rumors. But there’s precious little to go on. Chasing vampires, it’s not like studying the Salem witch trials, where you have all those court records, the indictments and depositions and what have you. Instead, it’s necessary to spend a lot of time sifting and sorting fact from fiction, and, usually, there’s not much of either to work with.”

She nods, then glances back toward the big window and the rain. “Be a feather in your cap, though. If it’s not just a rumor, I mean.”

“Yes,” I reply. “Yes, it certainly would.”

And here, there’s an unsettling wave of not-quite déjà vu, something closer to dissociation, perhaps, and for a few dizzying seconds I feel as if I’m watching this conversation, a voyeur listening in, or I’m only remembering it, but in no way actually, presently, taking part in it. And, too, the
coffeehouse and our talk and the rain outside seem a lot less concrete—less
here and now
—than does the morning before. One day that might as well be the next, and it’s raining, either way.

I’m standing alone on Bowen’s Wharf, staring out past the masts crowded into the marina at sleek white sailboats skimming over the glittering water, and there’s the silhouette of Goat Island, half hidden in the fog. I’m about to turn and walk back up the hill to Washington Square and the library, about to leave the gaudy, Disney World concessions catering to the tastes of tourists and return to the comforting maze of ancient gabled houses lining winding, narrow streets. And that’s when I see her for the first time. She’s standing alone near the “seal safari” kiosk, staring at a faded sign, at black-and-white photographs of harbor seals with eyes like the puppies and little girls from those hideous Margaret Keane paintings. She’s wearing an old peacoat and shiny green galoshes that look new, but there’s nothing on her head, and she doesn’t have an umbrella. Her long black hair hangs wet and limp, and when she looks at me, it frames her pale face.

Then it passes, the blip or glitch in my psyche, and I’ve snapped back, into myself, into
this
present. I’m sitting across the booth from her once more, and the air smells almost oppressively of freshly roasted and freshly ground coffee beans.

“I’m sure it has a lot of secrets, this town,” she says, fixing me again with those blue-grey eyes and smiling that irreproachable smile of hers.

“Can’t swing a dead cat,” I say, and she laughs.

“Well, did it ever work?” Abby asks. “I mean, digging up the dead, desecrating their mortal remains to appease the living. Did it tend to do the trick?”

“No,” I reply. “Of course not. But that’s beside the point. People do strange things when they’re scared.”