Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017 Page 6

  She laps at her upper lip, trailing blood like warpaint. “Because if I do not do it, no one in this forsaken court of bastards will.”

  Three facts:

  One: The system is unjust.

  Two: The system is rigged.

  Three: The system is broken, but you are not.

  Hurt is a pale, dark language, full of new words for fear. But it is also a communion, a dialect of knowledge, a thousand ways of saying I understand and hold on.

  They gave her no temple, no priest. But she does not care. Hers is, was always meant to be, a religion passed from tongue to tongue, whispered over bruises and shouted over the crash of fist–on–flesh. Bright with fury, yes, but also bright with hope, with faith in tomorrow and faith that it gets better.

  “Who are you?” The girl is small and matchstick–thin, hair snarled over a sweat–slick face, knees pushed against her chest.

  They are all the same , the goddess thinks. Young, old, pale, dark. Not broken, never broken, but worn and whetted, stronger than they’d ever imagined.

  “A friend,” she whispers before she calls the light.

  © 2017 by Cassandra Khaw

  * * *

  Cassandra Khaw writes horror, press releases, video games, articles about video games, and tabletop RPGs. These are not necessarily unrelated items. Her work can be found in professional short story magazines such as Clarkesworld , Fireside Fiction , Uncanny , and Shimmer . Cassandra’s first original novella, Hammers on Bone, came out in October 2016 from Tor.com . To her mild surprise, people seem to enjoy it. She occasionally spends time in a Muay Thai gym punching people and pads.

  * * *

  The Thule Stowaway

  Maria Dahvana Headley | 11412 words

  I have reached these lands but newly

  From an ultimate dim Thule —

  From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime

  Out of SPACE— out of TIME.

  Edgar Allan Poe, “Dream–Land”

  The Poet’s Tale

  The dreamer, born bleak, invents an existence elsewhere. He tosses in his sleep, his hair tangled. His hands grasp at nothing, and his nightclothes oppress him. He roams a land of chill seas and stony cliffs, and when at last he arrives at a kingdom, he passes through its gate cautiously, seeking a fire, but finding only silvery surfaces surrounded by cliffs. It is a frozen place, no metal, no wood. It is a place where even the knives are made of ice.

  There is a tower before him. The dreamer enters the tower and climbs the staircase.

  In the tower there is a creature, and in the creature there is a heart made of lost love. The heart takes flight from the creature’s breast, and a raven rises against the frozen gray sky, over a coastline bordered in coffins, a world of women with bound hands and blindfolded eyes.

  As the heart departs, the dreamer wakes a poet.

  He stumbles to his desk and opens a pot of ink. He dips the raven’s feather in it and begins to write, sleep still half upon him, his mind full of creatures that fade as he commits them to paper, caging them line by line, his pen drawing their prison.

  He wrings the night into dawn. He covers pages with calligraphed serpents, a poem twisting into a story filled with another story, a novel pushing against the edges of the paper. As he writes, his kingdom comes into being, and he breathes life into it, his fingers leaving prints on the pages, his companion beginning to take shape, an appetite made of points of light, a creature made of the hours of an insomniac.

  If a man makes a monster, he wonders, is he responsible for it? If one is the master of the monster, what happens when the monster is left alone? Does it wander in wrath? Does it rage? The poet does not consider his monster’s future. He makes it and sets it free in his kingdom.

  The poet is a young man when he begins to build the kingdom called Thule, and he builds for years.

  He dreams alongside his dreamers, and in the waking world, he wanders, writing roads alongside his own, sometimes crossing them. A dream within a dream, he thinks. Thule and its king with his dark heart and longing for love, Thule and its ruler, its forests, its floods of ghosts. Dream–land, he thinks, embroidering the edges of a realm stitched in silver.

  Into the drawer of the desk the poet puts his Thule, locked and keyed, while he goes into his own life, a marriage, a misery, years of scrimping and sickness, a beach, a bride, a breaking.

  Thule continues about its business without its god, and when the poet returns to it and publishes a map of its boundaries, the companion he invented as a young man has been roaming the earth for years.

  There has been a dead wife washed up on the shores of Thule, her name Annabel or Lenore, or…

  Call this body Virginia. Call this, that was a girl, a ghost with violet eyes and black hair, dead at the age of twenty–four, consumed.

  The poet opens his drawer, and finds his kingdom of grim comforts. He looks into the distance, seeking the raven–shaped heart, the starry skin, the sharp teeth, but the creature is nowhere to be found.

  The poet remembers a ship left sailing into the line of the horizon, but he can’t recall the direction, not with a compass, not with the sun. Dim, the land he made as a boy, and darkness abutting the edges. But out of that land, in the brightness of the world, there is something he made, and he must capture it.

  He writes a trap for the monster, a story filled with dreamers. A woman, a demon, a journey, a town by the water and something floating out in the harbor. He writes a tale for himself to inhabit, a dream within a dream.

  This tale.

  The Thule Tale

  There are certain stories, any reader knows, that recur in towns boundaried by water. A captain’s wife stares into a gale, and suddenly her husband’s face appears in that green–gray miasma, a vision of his wrack and ruin. Ghostly sailors struggle from the waves, only to fall back again. Ships are found adrift, crews missing. Messages in bottles are discovered ten years after their sender’s drowning, inscribed with predictions of futures unlived.

  I need not remind the reader, gentle or no, that these tales are fictions made of desire, that the act of missing a beloved may conjure miracles. For myself, I never held with such. I held with hope, and so I came to Providence for a worldly version of Salvation, in the year eighteen hundred and forty–eight, carrying an umbrella and wearing a long dress, my hem draggling in the mud.

  No one turned head to look at me when I emerged from my carriage. I was no longer a girl, but a woman of nearly thirty–five. I’d had money, and then I had none, or at least none in hand. A cutpurse I never saw, and that was gone, though in the hem of my skirt I’d sewn enough to carry me. I was no innocent. By all accounts I was a lost cause and a fallen woman.

  The mistress of the inn was slender, with bones that ridged through her skin in distinct knobs.

  “I am Mrs. MacFarlane,” I informed her, with as much dignity as I could. “My husband is delayed on the road.”

  She looked into my eyes and offered a tight smile. I felt certain that my ruse had not been accepted.

  “And every husband is delayed on the road,” she said. “And every road leads to hell.”

  It was not as though I had better options. The accommodations were homely but the linens were of a fine hand. The food was good and plain.

  I’d come to Providence to make a portrait, a particular rendition of my own visage, and the man I meant to meet had no notion I was coming. It was a wild afternoon in November, and my arrival was veiled by weather. I had no wish to be recognized, and so the rain bothered me not at all, though when I ascended to my room, I hung my dress to dry and returned to the dining room in another gown, this one charcoal hatched with violet stripes, a changeable taffeta petticoat in rose and canary.

  In the daguerreotype I planned, I’d look like a woman dressed in dark, but in truth, I was as a nightbird’s wing, flashing my colors. There was a whimsy in that, and though I had suffered, I still had enough humor to see the wit of a woman garbed in silk peacockery, appe
aring, when drained of color, to be a widow in mourning. I wanted levity in the daguerreotype, if indeed I would be carrying it with me for the rest of my life.

  I sat at a small table with a plate of boiled meat, and the innkeeper kept my tea hot. There were curtains hanging all about me, toile printed with scenes of exploration in some unknown country, a legacy of a former life. They were of French manufacture, I believed, though this town was on the eastern coast of America. I ate quietly, contemplating my mission, considering the streets with their cobblestones, the daguerreotypist’s parlor, the items in my valise upstairs.

  Eventually the innkeeper emerged again. She’d taken down her hair and drawn a muted paisley shawl about her shoulders. Her hair was an unlikely platinum, near enough to white that I’d thought her older than she was, and it was loose now, in waves down from her pins. It was beautiful, though she was not. It seemed to me that this mattered, though I’d known beautiful women dead in the same circumstances as those whose faces had less grace. Beauty, it seemed to me, was a lie told to girls, a fairytale of prospects and princes, and as my own face had aged, I’d come to wonder whether anything of it was truth at all. Whatever beauty I possessed had only brought me trouble.

  “A sip for a storm,” the innkeeper said. I looked at her, feeling weary, though the fire blazed up, and it was warm enough in the room. I’d left New York scarcely recovered from the last fever, and from the ghastliness thereafter. This portrait and photographer were my only hope.

  She sat opposite me. I could smell her perfume, a mixture of salts and camphor.

  She poured sherry, her hand steady, and I could see her smile, though her head was bowed. It was a smile that said she knew my history. Some jilting, some man turned marauder, or perhaps wed to another lovelier than I. Perhaps she thought I’d promised myself to a sailor, and now waited in vain for his bones to walk out from the bay.

  I saw her glance at my waistline, but there was nothing there to betray me. No, what inhabited me hid more efficiently than that.

  Beneath my dress, I wore a strand of beads made of amber, the better to absorb the energy of the thing I carried. Sometimes at night I woke, chilled and sweating, gasping, unable to swallow, but I was here, was I not? I’d managed the journey. It had been a question, my body racked with spasms, curled against the hard leather seat.

  I’d twisted my wedding ring seven times around my finger, and then taken it off and put it on a chain about my neck for fear of losing it. My father was certain I’d acquired it of a tinker, roadside shine bought as an additive to my delusions of a paramour. He understood nothing.

  I’d reduced in weight during in the sixmonth I’d spent an invalid, plagued by visions and panics, surrounded by delicate pieces of dark. This in spite of the midnight meals I’d consumed—no, nothing to speak on, nothing to think on. They had not fed me.

  Now I was here. This was a cure, or so a medium in New York had told me.

  “Go to this daguerreotypist,” said the woman met in a district otherwise filled with stables and snorting animals, passing me a card with an address. She was in the upper quarters, a gown of dark pink embroidery, a face like a crystallized fig, all folds and sugary creases, poisonously edible. “Hire him to take your portrait.”

  A photographer of ghosts. There was a fashion toward such things at that time, but this studio, that of Masury & Hartshorn, was particular. Both of the main photographers there were of unusual lineage, she told me. Messr. Hartshorn was a stag turned man by a jealous god two thousand years before, and Messr. Masury was the son of a ghoul, but, by all accounts, tremendously polite. They ran a specialist studio. There was a photographer there, this medium swore, who might use the camera to save my soul, if anything remained of it. His name was whispered in these circles, though it was not one the studio advertised.

  That was why I had come here, at considerable peril, and this was my aim. A session that would save me. A portrait that would free me from the burden I carried.

  The man I was to meet was called Edwin Manchester, an apprentice who had come to photography from the spiritual movement. He was well–known in the circles I’d come to rely upon, and had, according to the medium, purged one Miss Valpareille of a demon that had taken up residence inside the chambers of her heart. His method of photography extracted whatever creature had nestled within the person being photographed.

  If there was a stowaway inside my body, this portrait would snatch it out. The portrait, then, would depart with me, and though it was necessary I keep it under lock and key, the stowaway would be trapped inside it for as long as the portrait existed. So I hoped and so I prayed. I could not spend my nights the way I’d spent them of late.

  The mistress leaned back in her chair. I noticed a woven bracelet around her wrist, the same platinum as her own tresses, twisted into a complicated pattern, a mourning bracelet, but for the large gemstone at the center, wreathed in hair. A star sapphire. The star gleamed in the same way her eyes did. It was not from here. A sailor for her too, it seemed, someone who’d raided a faraway treasure, or traded with a woman for her jewels.

  “Best to close the curtains,” the innkeeper said, calmly as though she were telling me she’d prepared hot milk to better my sleep. “Men may come out from the water at night, and you would rather they not see you, though if you desire you may look out from behind the drape.”

  “Men?” I asked. “What men? The men from the town? From a ship?”

  She spoke as though what she said was nothing strange, nothing the least unusual, and in truth, my recent history had convinced me there was nothing impossible in the world, that anything might happen, and to anyone.

  “There is a ship anchored in the bay. Out of it come explorers, drenched and walking inland toward the light of the town. They carry lanterns, and come bearing maps, but the maps do not depict any place the barmen have heard tell of, nor do they reveal any mark in their topographical lines to remind one of anything near here. Drear, the men are, dressed in creamy silk waistcoats, and long black tails. With the dawn they walk back into the water.”

  “I had not realized I was to hear of ghosts,” I commented, mildly enough, but the story, I worried at like a knot. I’d heard stories before, and some of them were true. I lived in the center of a narrative that no reasonable person would perceive as plausible. This one, that of a ship of the dead, chilled me. I had known other stories about ships.

  I peered out into the street and saw all sorts of men with all sorts of countenances, all in their dark and drear, all with their eager eyes and long mustaches, but none of them came out of the bay.

  “One always hears of ghosts at this time of the year,” she said, and shrugged. “The season is turning dark and the storms are upon us. The living walk beside things that would be stricken by sunlight. Now it is time for your tale, Mrs. MacFarlane, for it is clear you have one.”

  I flinched, my sherry sloshing in my glass. The bones of my corset oppressed me and I felt as though I’d been caged inside a skeleton not mine own. Perhaps it was that of a whale, and I was a Jonah, adrift and punished by God. I put the glass to my lips and drank the balance.

  “Tell me why you’ve come here, to this town on the water. The wind is cold, and the streets full of trouble, and no one comes without a reason. Will you sell your soul as a stowaway? Will you go to Thule?”

  “Thule?” I asked, my heart racing with that word. “What do you know of Thule?”

  She tilted her head, appraising me with the attention of a jeweler looking through a loupe.

  “Tell me your tale, and I shall tell you.”

  I had never spoken of Thule, nor had I heard tell of it from anyone but the notorious one who haunted me, the minder of my misery.

  The innkeeper tilted the decanter, and sherry filled my glass again. I looked at her slender figure, her strangely ageless countenance, and though I had kept mine own counsel for twenty years, her mention of Thule persuaded me. I found myself confessing my sorrow to her.

/>   “I will not sell my soul, no, for it is not mine to sell at present. To Thule, though, I may be bound.”

  I had never told this tale to anyone, or no one beside the medium, and she only in the utmost desperation, my skin heaving and quivering, my burden boiling my blood. I would begin.

  The Lady’s Tale, First Part

  “This is my soul, then, and this the history of my trouble, the history of the Thule I know too well. My second cousin was twenty–five years my senior, and his announcement at my birth that I was to be his wife, and that he would devote himself to the welfare of the family, stirred my parents. On my fourteenth birthday, a carriage arrived at our house, and my mother stood on the roof of our building looking down as my cousin’s manservant settled me into the cushions, my small trousseau, my books and belongings.

  I went to my bedchamber in his house uptown, dined with him twice, and then he was gone to his business, traveling by ship to the far North for the next year.”

  Thus far, my story was nothing strange to the innkeeper, a trouble known to women, perhaps not terribly different from her own.

  “He was lost at sea?” she prompted.

  “Not in the usual fashion. My husband returned to me a hard shadow of his former self, mustache white, though it had been black when he left New York. He came into the house, and I came down the front stairs to meet him. I was there when he opened his trunk. Something unfolded out of it, stood in the center of our foyer, and looked at me with burning eyes.

  “I am dreadfully sorry, dear Cousin Annabel,” said my husband to me, and there was no emotion in his voice. “But on my voyage, I have made the acquaintance of a new master.”

  I looked at my husband, and at the thing standing beside him. It was tall and slender, with an excess of fingers, dressed in a long black coat, which I remembered as having belonged to my husband. There was the pale blue monogram I had embroidered, on the collar. Beneath the hem of the coat I could see hooves, and a lashing tail, somewhat feline, somewhat… else.