Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3 Page 3
She waits for them all to leave. From her awkward brothers to her overattentive coworkers, she nods as they go, each one in turn, moving on to the luncheon, then later shiva, and finally to a peaceful sleep she herself could never bear. She is an onen, in a state of mourning beyond reach. “I’ll be along, I’ll be along,” she says, “I just need some time to myself.” A deception. She wants no time alone, not ever. What she wants is her husband back.
Her husband’s daughter, born of his previous marriage, is the hardest goodbye. “Why did he have to die?” the girl sobs, her wet face pressed against the widow’s breast; the girl’s mother keeps a safe distance, frozen beneath a denuded elm far from the plot. “Everyone dies, my love,” the widow replies, and strokes the ten-year-old’s strawberry hair, her wedding ring snagging in the girl’s tangled mess of curls. “Only some go sooner than later.”
She waits until the sun sinks behind the horizon of distant buildings before she admits to herself that she’s too cold to remain here forever, that eventually the attendants will return to usher her from the premises, tell her she can return in the morning, some widows do, day after day after day. Darkening sky and she moves from the gravesite at last, shuffles through the snow until she’s back at the road that snakes through the cemetery in one long and intricate seam.
She steps onto the path, and movement catches her attention: a dark shadow in the distance, hunched and shuffling along a mausoleum-dotted hillock overlooking the snow-caked grounds. The figure progresses slowly across the landscape, shreds of gauzy black cloth flapping like clerical vestments in the wind as it reaches with sickled arms to touch upon each tombstone as if blind and feeling the way forward. The stranger stops and cocks an ear to the side, nose threading the air, a bloodhound seeking a scent.
The widow is chilled by a bitter wind. She lifts the neck of her coat against it, the furred collar tugged up to her eyes as the figure turns toward her and lifts a hand in acknowledgment, the scraps of what seems to be a shawl shifting in the breeze. An elderly woman by the looks of it, hunched in a manner that suggests a kyphotic spine bent by defect or age.
The stranger turns and lowers her head once more before soldiering on, trudging through the scattered stones and disappearing around the side of a large rotunded mausoleum. The widow waits. But when the stranger fails to appear she makes her way up the hill, drawn to the crypt as if toward an answer to an unspoken but persistent question. Her shoes brown with mud as she slides against the wet earth, the still-falling snow. She rights herself, and she climbs, until she reaches the twin doors that announce the entrance to the crypt.
The braided door handles have been wiped clean of frost, and she takes hold of their cold iron and pulls. Softly at first, but then she puts her weight into it, leaning back as she yanks until the doors groan open, just wide enough to pass. Within the slash of muted light an interior wall is visible—much deeper inside than she’d expected, given the vault’s outward dimensions—and it’s only upon entering the antechamber and daring to ease the doors shut in her wake that she makes out the dim illuminations of candle flame flickering farther inside the crypt. That, and the pleasing smell of cedar smoke, as well as the vague susurrations of voices, just as they fall silent.
She takes care not to trip upon the raised step leading into the main rotunda of the tomb, and she treads forward, broaching the arched entryway as she comes to a halt beneath the rose marble lintel.
Seated in an approximation of a semicircle are two women, one quite old and another young, along with an elderly man. Lit only by votive candles burning upon the crypt’s every ledge, the three are dressed in funereal black and huddled about a raised granite slab. Upon the stone surface are a further arrangement of votives, pale wax dripping and pooling into gray swirls along the floor of the rounded tomb.
“Hello, dear,” the old woman says from her place between the others, eyes bright in the candle flame as she draws her shawl with a wrinkled hand, brown fingers sparkling with gold and azure rings. “Would you like to join us? We’re just having a spot of dinner before it gets too late.” The hunched woman casts a hand across the stone block: inside the circle of candles a pile of smoked fowl is laid out, picked at with tiny bones jutting from charred skin upon a bed of unidentifiable berries and roots. The widow knows she should be repulsed but her stomach lurches for a moment like a dog jerked on a chain, and she’s shocked by her sudden hunger.
“Who are you?” she asks. “What are you doing in here?”
“What are you doing in here?” the old man says, his voice a scratched-vinyl rasp. “We’re in this together, aren’t we?” He gestures for her to sit. She stares down at her feet and the puddle of melted snow they’ve left upon the flagstone, and she regrets not stamping the ice off them before entering.
“Come,” the old woman says, “don’t be shy,” and so the widow lowers herself onto the near side of the slab. “Excellent, excellent. Happy to see you’re joining us here today. We’re always looking for a decent fourth.”
“Bridge numbers,” the old man says. “I tried teaching them rummy, but there’s really no convincing these two.”
The old woman laughs, then covers her mouth. “Sorry. Bad joke, I’m afraid. We’re not really much for bridge.”
“What are you, then?” the widow asks, and turns to face the young woman, who remains quiet and still.
“Ah,” the old woman says. “Well. I suppose we’re many things, of course, no person being just one thing. But mostly, we’re the ones left behind.”
“Left behind by who?”
Even as the widow asks the question, however, she knows. For what is she now, but left behind herself? The young woman’s light blue eyes swell with such alarming compassion that it makes her want to weep in recognition.
“How long have you been here?” the widow asks.
“Some time, now,” the old woman replies. “After a while, you lose count of the days. You just … Stay.” Her expectant face shines, incandescent in the flickering candlelight reflected upon the granite slab. “You’ll stay, won’t you?”
“I … don’t think so.” The widow makes no move to leave, however. Shadows dance about the curved walls as dusk’s last light evaporates beyond the surprising warmth of the stone shelter. “I have to go.”
“There’s nothing for you out there,” the old woman says. “Not anymore.”
“I have a stepdaughter,” the widow says. “I have friends.”
“We’ll be your friends now. We’ll be your family too.”
“I should go.”
“We’re the only ones who can care for you.”
“I should go.”
“We’re the only ones that can know you.”
“Let her go already!” the old man barks, spittle flung from the corner of his mouth as he waves her away. “Let her see for herself what it’s like out there, now.”
They fall silent. The widow begins to back away from them and toward the doors, but makes it no farther than the step leading to the anteroom when she stills, all the while her eyes on theirs. She has a stepdaughter; she has friends; she drinks two cups of coffee in the morning as she does the crossword with a ballpoint pen. But she had a husband, then. So none of that could now be so.
“Perhaps I will stay,” the widow says. “For a little while.”
The old woman smiles. “Good,” she says, and nods in eager approval. “Good.”
___
So she stays. For a few minutes, and then for an hour, for the evening and then overnight, sleeping beside them beneath an oilskin tarpaulin on the cold and damp flagstones that pave the floor of the crypt. They wake her at dawn and lead her to the evergreen hedges abutting the high flat stone of the cemetery walls to collect chokeberries, which grow there in red clotted bunches, a gift of winter. They show her how they use barbed wire as snares to catch sparrows and pigeons, starlings and other birds too stupid or slow to fly south for the winter. She keeps expecting someone to come looking for
her—her family, her friends, the police—but no one ever does.
She spends the day with them, and then another night, another morning and a new day, spent occupied with the daily business of acquiring food, of learning from the others the customs and rules of their strange and insular world. They melt frost in marble cisterns and drink from ornamental urns, the accoutrements of the dead refashioned for the needs of the living. But isn’t it all for the living? The widow casts her eyes across the snow-blanketed graves. The coffins and tombstones, the ritual pyres and monumental obelisks … What do the dead care, anymore?
Most wonderful of all, there’s no need for the widow to speak of her husband, for any of them to speak of their husbands, or the old man of his wife. It’s enough for them to be together in their grief. Their simple companionship abates the pain of her loss more than she would have ever thought possible.
Early on the morning of the third day, they finish stealing candles from the small chapel near the gates when they come upon a pair of parka-clad workers digging a fresh grave on the south side of the cemetery. The widow, exposed to them in the bright light of day, scuttles behind the obscuring limbs of a weeping willow, but the others continue undaunted along the path toward the mausoleum that is their home. The gravediggers fail to acknowledge them, and after some time she realizes that the workers take no notice of them whatsoever.
“Why don’t they see us?” she asks the others once she’s caught up with them.
The old woman shrugs. “They don’t want to see us, I suppose. It’s too … difficult for them.”
“They don’t have any skin in the game,” the old man says, and hocks a dark yellow loogie into the thick paste of snow. “They might as well work at a bank.”
“Once the funeral is over, they move on. Everyone does. But not us.” The old woman smiles her bright warm smile, but this time there’s something sorrowful in it, which feels just right.
By the seventh day, the end of shiva, the widow rarely thinks of the life that awaits her at her former home, doesn’t even remember more than a vague outline of what she ever did with her time. Where did I work? she wonders. Was it at an office building? Or was it some kind of school? By the ninth day it’s like walking through a waking dream: she no longer recalls her stepdaughter’s age, or the color of her hair, and soon the girl’s name is lost to her altogether, along with the general features of her face. All she remembers now is her husband, and she clings to his memory like a talisman, a lantern in the dark of night. It’s all she has left to hold.
She knows it’s because of her new friends. They understand her, in a way others are unable, and she knows this to be true because she understands them the same way. The widow knows that by staying with them—by haunting the hallowed grounds of the cemetery and living off what grows here, and alights here, and is fed by the flesh and marrow of the departed—that she needn’t move on, not ever. Because some people never do.
By the tenth day in the cemetery, however, the pain of her husband’s absence returns unabated. It surges like a cresting wave and crashes over her, bringing her back to that awful phone call, that moment that ushered her unwillingly into the midnight realm of unmitigated despair. I can’t breathe, she thinks, I’ll never breathe again, and she runs the familiar distance from the crypt down the hill to the family plot, where her husband’s grave, as with the rest, is buried in white. Her chapped pink hands dig at the wet ground, her tears pocking the snow. It’s only once she’s made her way to the hard dirt below that she stops to wonder whether she’s trying to dig her husband out of his resting place or make a grave for herself to crawl into, where she can lie down and pull the earth around her like a shroud. Even the accusation of her stepdaughter’s face begins to return, the dark almond eyes the girl shared with her father, the single dimple in her right cheek. She has abandoned her husband’s daughter, as she herself has been abandoned. She wants to die.
And what truth this is! As true as the aim of the steering column that had impaled her husband in his twisted metal cage, the one they needed the Jaws of Life to free him from, though there would be no life for him, not anymore. Twelve days gone since the phone call from the police, the race to the hospital to bear witness to his mangled body, her knuckles white against the steering wheel of her own car as she tried to wish it undone the way she had wished Tinkerbell back to life as a little girl, one among many at a crowded matinee clapping her hands at the screen so hard she was sure her numbed fingers would bleed.
Has it been only twelve days? Impossible. Surely it has been months. Twelve days? No. She couldn’t do this. No. She could not. Never.
“You can,” the old woman says at her side, all three of them here now, her friends. “You will.”
“How?” The widow wipes away tears and peers down at the pathetic little pit she’s carved. “How can I keep from wanting it to be over, every second of every hour?”
The old woman looks to the man, who slowly nods, just once, his head drooping so that his pallid chin touches the immaculate Windsor knot in his tweed necktie. He looks to the young woman, who nods once herself, the air crisping with electric tension.
“We have a trick that helps.” The old woman steps closer, her stale breath carried on the wind. “Would you like us to show you?”
___
That night after their rounds they trail back inside the crypt, back to the central round chamber, the widow entering last of all. The young woman lights the arrangement of ledge candles, one after the next, as the temple-like room takes on the eerie half-flame of a winter hearth. The old man clears their last meal’s detritus from the granite slab to help the old woman as she lowers herself down upon the tomb.
The old man and the young woman gather on either side of her prone form, the pair tugging back the old woman’s tatty black shawl. They unbutton her blouse and lower it, unfasten her nude-colored brassiere and shimmy it out from beneath her, peeling off the rest of her mourning attire until she is naked upon the slab. The old woman crosses her arms over her breasts and closes her eyes, as if she herself is laid out in death’s final repose.
All along the woman’s body are painted intricate black circles. Of varying size and shape, the patterns run up and down her sides in erratic intervals, appearing to spot her the way a leopard’s coat is spotted, dark swirls patching her sagging and distended skin.
Mesmerized, the widow steps forward. Inches away now, and she can see at last that they aren’t inked-on designs, but are in fact suppurated wounds, the size of bite marks. Just as soon as she realizes this fact a festering smell hits her, and she staggers back gasping from the slab.
“What is this?” the widow asks, and covers her nose and mouth with a trembling hand.
“This,” the old man says, “is the trick.”
The widow stares at the young woman, who remains silent as ever, only nodding gravely as she lowers herself to her knees beside the older woman’s prostrate figure. Without taking her eyes off the widow, the young woman lifts the older woman’s arm, brings it to her mouth, and sinks her teeth into its spongy flesh, the aged brown parchment of skin bruising and blooding a deeper shade of red.
“My God,” the widow whispers. “Why?”
“This is our sacrament,” the old woman says from the slab, eyes still shut though her parted lips quiver as if jolted by an electric current. “This is the holy of holy, the flesh that binds us together.”
“Take of her,” the old man says, so close his rotted breath masks the scent of the old woman’s wounds. “Take of her flesh and blood, so that you may strengthen grief’s resolve. It’s the only way, now.”
“I … can’t. I can’t.” She wipes away tears and retreats for the doors, wedges her chaffed fingers into the narrow space between them and wrenches them open, ready to flee into the darkness. No one tries to stop her.
But looking out at pale tombstones that litter the dim night like scattered teeth, she hesitates. It’s because she knows she cannot face the outsi
de world, not anymore. She cannot face anyone who had ever known her before. She needs to be with her own kind, now.
The widow eases the doors shut, a whinnying grind of iron on stone as she turns back to face them. A thrill prickles her skin, an admixture of terror and fascination as she walks the length of the antechamber and back inside the domed sepulcher, where they wait for her in their strange tableau.
She lowers herself beside the slab. “Show me how it’s done.”
The young woman wipes her mouth and points with a blood-flecked finger at the old woman’s free arm. The widow lifts it, bringing the hand toward her. The smell of the old woman’s lesions is gone now, replaced by that of snuffed-out candles, as well as a holier scent, sandalwood, perhaps. The widow finds an unblemished section of skin along the inside of the old woman’s papery wrist, brings it to her lips, and sinks her teeth into the flesh.
The taste is revolting, and also extraordinary; it reminds her of her first taste of tomato, of being a young girl and plucking one from her grandmother’s garden vines, sliding its tough membrane across her lips before biting down. How surprising the spurting of its contents, the strong perfumy taste of lifeblood and liquefied meat, and she retches now as she did then.
But even as she raises her head from where she is sick beside the slab and stares up at them—the looming old man, the wide-eyed young woman, the mutilated older one whose death mask of a face remains still, save the tears spilling from her closed eyes—even as she wants to scream and run from them and die from anguish and sorrow and the guilt of abandoning her stepdaughter, she knows that she will not.