The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (67 page)

She had told him her brief story. When she reached twenty-one, and came into an uncle’s legacy, she had packed her brush and comb and two books and a toothbrush (“All my other possessions, if they could be called mine, were too ugly to take.”), and, pausing only at a hairdressers’ to have her bun cut off (he had seen a photograph of her at nineteen, a quiet, dull-looking girl, weighed down by her mass of hair), she had set off for Egypt to visit her only friend, Mrs. Acres. She wrote to her mother from Cairo. She had had one letter in return.

“My dear Sarah, as you are now of age I cannot claim to have any further control over you, for you are, I trust, perfectly healthy in mind and body. I have confidence in the upbringing you received, which furnished you with principles to guide you through life’s vicissitudes. I know that in the end you will come back to me.”

“She seems to have taken your departure quite lightly,” Orford said, reading it over her shoulder.

“Oh, she never shows when she’s angry,” Sarah said. She studied the letter again. “Little does she know,” was her final comment, as she put it away. “Hey, I don’t want to think about her. Quick, let’s go out and see something—a pyramid or a cataract or a sphinx. Do you realize that I’ve seen absolutely nothing—nothing—nothing all my life? Now I’ve got to make up for lost time. I want to see Rome and Normandy and Illyria and London—I’ve never been there, except Heath Row—and Norwegian fjords and the Taj Mahal.”

Tomorrow, Orford thought, he would have to put on winter clothes. He remembered how the weather had become hotter and hotter on the voyage out. Winter to summer, summer to winter again.

London, when he reached it, was cold and foggy. He shrank into himself, sitting in the taxi which squeaked and rattled its way from station to station, like a moving tomb. At Charing Cross he ran into an acquaintance who exclaimed, “Why, Tom old man, I didn’t expect to see you for another month. Thought you were on your honeymoon or something?”

Orford slid away into the crowd.

“And can you tell me where Marl End is?” he was presently asking at a tiny, ill-lit station which felt as if it were in the middle of the steppes.

“Yes, sir,” said the man, after some thought. “You’d best phone for a taxi. It’s a fair way. Right through the village and on over the sheepdowns.”

An aged Ford, lurching through the early winter dusk, which was partly mist, brought him to a large red-brick house, set baldly in the middle of a field.

“Come back and call for me at seven,” he said, resolving to take no chances with the house, and the driver nodded, shifting his gears, and drove away into the fog as Orford knocked at the door.

The first thing that struck him was her expression of relentless, dogged intention. Such, he thought, might be the look on the face of a coral mite, setting out to build up an atoll from the depths of the Pacific.

He could not imagine her ever desisting from any task she had set her hand to.

Her grief seemed to be not for herself but for Sarah.

“Poor girl. Poor girl. She would have wanted to come home again before she died. Tired herself out, you say? It was to be expected. Ah well.”

Ah well, her tone said, it isn’t my fault. I did what I could. I could have prophesied what would happen; in fact I did; but she was out of my control, it was her fault, not mine.

“Come close to the fire,” she said. “You must be cold after that long journey.”

Her tone implied he had come that very night from Sarah’s cold un-Christian deathbed, battling through frozen seas, over Himalayas, across a dead world.

“No, I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll stay where I am. This is a very warm room.” The stifling, hothouse air pressed on his face, solid as sand. He wiped his forehead.

“My family, unfortunately, are all extremely delicate,” she said, eyeing him. “Poor things, they need a warm house. Sarah—my husband—my sister—I daresay Sarah told you about them?”

“I’ve never seen my father,” he remembered Sarah saying. “I don’t know what happened to him—whether he’s alive or dead. Mother always talks about him as if he were just outside in the garden.”

But there had been no mention of an aunt. He shook his head.

“Very delicate,” she said. She smoothed back her white hair, which curved over her head like a cap, into its neat bun at the back. “Deficient in thyroid—thyroxin, do they call it? She needs constant care.”

Her smile was like a swift light passing across a darkened room.

“My sister disliked poor Sarah—for some queer reason of her own—so all the care of her fell on me. Forty years.”

“Terrible for you,” he answered mechanically.

The smile passed over her face again.

“Oh, but it is really quite a happy life for her, you know. She draws, and plays with clay, and of course she is very fond of flowers and bright colors. And nowadays she very seldom loses her temper, though at one time I had a great deal of trouble with her.”

I manage all, her eyes said, I am the strong one, I keep the house warm, the floors polished, the garden dug, I have cared for the invalid and reared my child, the weight of the house has rested on my shoulders and in these hands.

He looked at her hands as they lay in her black silk lap, fat and white with dimpled knuckles.

“Would you care to see over the house?” she said.

He would not, but could think of no polite way to decline. The stairs were dark and hot, with a great shaft of light creeping round the corner at the top.

“Is anybody there?” a quavering voice called through a half-closed door. It was gentle, frail, and unspeakably old.

“Go to sleep, Miss Whiteoak, go to sleep,” she called back. “You should have swallowed your dose long ago.”

“My companion,” she said to Orford, “is very ill.”

He had not heard of any companion from Sarah.

“This is my husband’s study,” she told him, following him into a large, hot room.

Papers were stacked in orderly piles on the desk. The bottle of ink was half full. A half-written letter lay on the blotter. But who occupied this room? “Mother always talks as if he were just outside.”

On the wall hung several exquisite Japanese prints. Orford exclaimed in pleasure.

“My husband is fond of those prints,” she said, following his glance. “I can’t see anything in them myself. Why don’t they make objects the right size, instead of either too big or too small? I like something I can recognize, I tell him.”

Men are childish, her eyes said, and it is the part of women to see that they do nothing foolish, to look after them.

They moved along the corridor.

“This was Sarah’s room,” she said.

Stifling, stifling, the bed, chair, table, chest all covered in white sheets. Like an airless graveyard waiting for her, he thought.

“I can’t get to sleep,” Miss Whiteoak called through her door. “Can’t I come downstairs?”

“No, no, I shall tell you when you may come down,” the old lady called back. “You are not nearly well enough yet!”

Orford heard a sigh.

“Miss Whiteoak is wonderfully devoted,” she said as they slowly descended the stairs. “I have nursed her through so many illnesses. She would do anything for me. Only, of course, there isn’t anything that she can do now, poor thing.”

At the foot of the stairs an old, old woman in a white apron was lifting a decanter from a sideboard.

“That’s right, Drewett,” she said. “This gentleman will be staying to supper. You had better make some broth. I hope you are able to stay the night?” she said to Orford.

But when he explained that he could not even stay to supper, she took the news calmly.

“Never mind about the broth, then, Drewett. Just bring in the sherry.”

The old woman hobbled away, and they returned to the drawing room. He gave her the tissue-paper full of Sarah’s hair.

She received the bundle absently, then examined it with a sharp look. “Was this cut before or after she died?”

“Oh—before—before I married her.” He wondered what she was thinking.

She gave a long, strange sigh, and presently remarked, “That accounts for everything.”

Watching the clutch of her fat, tight little hands on the hair, he began to be aware of a very uneasy feeling, as if he had surrendered something that only now, when it was too late, he realized had been of desperate importance to Sarah. He remembered, oddly, a tale from childhood: “Where is my heart, dear wife? Here it is, dear husband: I am keeping it wrapped up in my hair.”

But Sarah had said, “She might as well have the lot, now I’ve cut it off.”

He almost put out his hand to take it back; wondered if, without her noticing, he could slip the packet back into his pocket.

Drewett brought in the sherry in the graceful decanter with a long, fine glass spout at one side. He commented on it.

“My husband bought it in Spain,” she said. “Twenty years ago. I have always taken great care of it.”

The look on her face gave him again that chilly feeling of uneasiness. “Another glass?” she asked him.

“No, I really have to go.” He looked at his watch and said with relief, “My taxi will be coming back for me in five minutes.”

There came a sudden curious mumbling sound from a dim corner of the room. It made him start so violently that he spilt some of his sherry. He had supposed the place empty, apart from themselves.

“Ah, feeling better, dear?” the old lady said.

She walked slowly over to the corner and held out a hand, saying, “Come and see poor Sarah’s husband. Just think—she had a husband—isn’t that a queer thing?”

Orford gazed aghast at the stumbling slobbering creature that came reluctantly forward, tugging away from the insistent white hand.

His repulsion was the greater because in its vacant, puffy-eyed stare he could detect a shadowy resemblance to Sarah.

“She’s just like a child, of course,” said the old lady indulgently. “Quite dependent on me, but wonderfully affectionate, in her way.” She gave the cretin a fond glance. “Here, Louisa, here’s something pretty for you! Look, dear—lovely hair.”

Dumbly, Orford wondered what other helpless, infirm pieces of humanity might be found in this house, all dependent on the silver-haired old lady who brooded over them, sucking them dry like a gentle spider. What might he trip over in the darkness of the hall? Who else had escaped?

The conscious part of his mind was fixed in horror as he watched Louisa rapaciously knotting and tearing and plucking at the silver-gold mass of hair.

“I think I hear your taxi,” the old lady said. “Say goodnight, Louisa!”

Louisa said goodnight in her fashion, the door shut behind him—and he was in the car, in the train, in a cold hotel bedroom, with nothing but the letter her mother had written her to remind him that Sarah had ever existed.

No one warned her about the dangers of swimming in the lake—especially without clothing. In retrospect, she was foolish. But how could she have known?

The Lake
Tananarive Due

The new English instructor at Graceville Prep was chosen with the greatest care, highly recommended by the Board of Directors at Blake Academy in Boston, where she had an exemplary career for twelve years. There was no history of irregular behavior to presage the summer’s unthinkable events.

—Excerpt from an internal memo,

Graceville Preparatory School Graceville, Florida

Abbie LaFleur was an outsider, a third-generation Bostonian, so no one warned her about summers in Graceville. She noticed a few significant glances, a hitched eyebrow or two, when she first mentioned to locals that she planned to relocate in June to work a summer term before the start of the school year, but she’d assumed it was because they thought no one in her right mind would move to Florida, even northern Florida, in the wet heat of summer.

In fairness, Abbie LaFleur would have scoffed at their stories as hysteria. Delusion. This was Graceville’s typical experience with newcomers and outsiders, so Graceville had learned to keep its stories to itself.

Abbie thought she had found her dream job in Graceville. A fresh start. Her glasses had fogged up with steam from the rain-drenched tarmac as soon as she stepped off the plane at Tallahassee Airport; her confirmation that she’d embarked on a true adventure, an exploration worthy of Ponce de León’s storied landing at St. Augustine.

Her parents and her best friend, Mary Kay, had warned her not to jump into a real estate purchase until she’d worked in Graceville for at least a year—The whole thing’s so hasty, what if the school’s not a good fit? Who wants to be stuck with a house in the sticks in a depressed market?—but Abbie fell in love with the white lakeside colonial she found listed at one-fifty, for sale by owner. She bought it after a hasty tour—too hasty, it turned out—but at nearly three-thousand square feet, this was the biggest house she had ever lived in, with more room than she had furniture for. A place with potential, despite its myriad flaws.

A place, she thought, very much like her.

The built-in bookshelves in the Florida room sagged. (She’d never known that a den could be called a Florida room, but so it was, and so she did.) The floorboards creaked and trembled on the back porch, sodden from summer rainfall. And she would need to lay down new tiles in the kitchen right away, because the brooding mud-brown flooring put her in a bad mood from the time she first fixed her morning coffee.

But there would be boys at the school, strong and tireless boys, who could help her mend whatever needed fixing. In her experience, there were always willing boys.

And then there was the lake! The house was her excuse to buy her piece of the lake and the thin strip of red-brown sand that was a beach in her mind, although it was nearly too narrow for the beach lounger she’d planted like a flag. The water looked murky where it met her little beach, the color of the soil, but in the distance she could see that its heart of rich green-blue, like the ocean. The surface bobbed with rings and bubbles from the hidden catfish and brim that occasionally leaped above the surface, damn near daring her to cast a line.