Tales From the Crossroad Volume 1 Read online

  "For Christ's sake," Jeaves exploded, "you're not young! You're fifty-three, you daft barrel of dog droppings! Now shut your yap and let me tell this!"

  "Proceed, Jeaves. I'm all ears."

  "The razor cut him, and with it he killed his wife, his three children, and, when there was no one left, himself. Thus it always was, and will ever be." That smile was back and I stared at it entranced. It was such a novelty to see Jeaves's teeth. "And thus it was with you, Worster," he said. "Your aristocratic aunt and uncle, your indolent and slothful friends are dead, and though I grieve for the servants whose lives you ended, it was a sacrifice worth making. Bernard Worster is a mass murderer…and a suicide."

  "Yes, Jeaves. I was contemplating with extreme solemnity that very route when you walked in. But one thing rankles, Jeaves. A fellow as clever and far-sighted as you have proven to be in the past must surely have realized that I would not do away with myself, while there was still another living, breathing, skin-wrapped bag of blood and meat in the immediate vicinity, i.e., you. So why then do you show up here practically begging for it? Oh, I've read enough shilling shockers to grasp the revenge motif, if that's the word – "

  "It is, sir," said Jeaves, skillfully falling back into our old repartee.

  "Thank you, Jeaves," I replied, also revisiting our old Smith and Dale routines. "I can understand the melodramatic joy of saying the equivalent of nyah hah hah, I've got you at last and all that, but is having your throat cut to the point of beheadedness really worth the candle?”

  "A cut throat is a far quicker and easier way to die than cancer."

  "Cancer, you say, Jeaves?"

  "Cancer, sir."

  "Very sorry to hear it, Jeaves."

  "Thank you, sir."

  I couldn't tell if Jeaves was doing the Mr. Interlocutor/Mr. Bones gag with me a.) for old time's sake, b.) as an subconscious throwback, or c.) for the purposes of that irony stuff I was talking about, but it seemed rather comforting to both of us. Motive and means both having been explained, I felt that no further clarification on Jeaves's part was necessary, so I cut his throat with the razor, a bit more forcefully than before, I confess. Truth to tell, I was rather peeved with Jeaves.

  Perhaps I jammed my foot into the top of his head more roughly than I might have as well, but Jeaves's roomy brainpan allowed much more foot room than had Hortense's, and it was with a great deal of comfort that I walked to the writing room to relate the events of the past two days before doing what Jeaves had hoped I would do.

  No regrets, as the code of the Worsters really doesn't allow it. Que sarah sarah, whoever she was. This massive missive will serve as my admission of guilt, so that no wandering knight of the road should be blamed for these mishaps. No doubt all this spirit-in-the-razor mumbo jumbo will be written off as the nutty-as-a-fruitcakiness of your humble narrator, and perhaps it's best so.

  There remains only my last will and testament, so tally-ho and on with it then:

  Being of sound mind (under the circumstances), parents being deceased, and being siblingless, I leave everything I possess to my biological son whom I now for the first time admit to fathering by my Aunt Amanda's chambermaid, who was let go a year and a half ago for being in the family way sans required family. Her name escapes me – Rosie or Rosalyn, something along those lines – but I trust the authorities will find out. The last name might have been Lichter or Lechter or something sim. Might as well give the little chap the razor too, if it doesn't get put on display in S. Yard's Black Museum. Who knows, he might find it useful someday.

  And that, as they say, is that. So let me turn to Shakespeare for my parting words. As I sit here and ponder, however, the only complete line I can come up with (which has always stuck in my head for some reason or other) seems to be: "Exit hurriedly, pursued by a bear," so that'll have to do.

  Really, it is Shakespeare. I've won bar bets with it. Look it up if you wish – I believe it's from a play.

  “And So Will I Remember You…”

  by Chet Williamson

  This story first appeared in the Ash Tree Press anthology At Ease With the Dead

  I don’t recall when I bought the book. It must have been on my shelf for years before I read it and found the inscriptions.

  How I ever came to have a copy of The Peep of Day; or, a Series of the Earliest Religious Instruction the Infant Mind is Capable of Receiving, I’ll never know. I had to have picked it up from Kerry Baker, the book dealer, since it had his code in it: “$1-“ with “xx” below it, showing that he’d paid nothing for it, probably having gotten it in a box lot at an auction. I suppose I bought it on a whim, due to its cheapness and age.

  It sat unnoticed in the lawyer’s bookcases in my bedroom for twenty years, until the evening I lay in bed reading Todd Pruzan’s piece in The New Yorker about Mrs. Favel Lee Mortimer, the author. Perhaps I should say authoress, since that stuffy, tight-laced woman would no doubt have referred thus to herself. She was among the most Victorian of British Victorian writers, was the redoubtable Mrs. Mortimer, slinging moralistic platitudes and nationalistic chauvinism about like some precursor to the Evangelical one-minders who’ve cast a similar blight on the current cultural landscape.

  The simultaneously amusing and nasty thing about Mrs. Mortimer was that she wrote for children. Her withered literary soul found fertile ground among her parental collaborators who foisted upon their hapless offspring such titles as The Countries of Europe Described, Reading without Tears, and the aforementioned The Peep of Day. When I read her various descriptions of those unfortunate enough to live outside of England – “…it would almost make you sick to go to church in Iceland” is one of her kinder judgments – I knew I had found a true monster of popular literature, and was assured of it when I unearthed my own copy of The Peep of Day.

  I have a memory for books, if for nothing else, and although Mrs. Mortimer’s name meant nothing to me, the book’s title did. I set down the magazine on the nightstand, muttered a brief explanation to my wife Linda, and starting rummaging through the bookcase on the other side of the bedroom. After several minutes I came up with the sad little volume. Its cover was worn, the cheap pseudo-cloth covering the heavy paper boards was chipped, and the dark threads and white binding cloth of the spine lay exposed like muscle and nerves under skin.

  I climbed back into bed and found that the edition was published by The American Tract Society, always a promising sign, and gave no author’s name. “Anna B. Huber’s book 1860” was written on the front flyleaf in an ink that time had browned. I turned to the text, hoping for outrage, and was not disappointed.

  The first chapter, entitled “The Body,” describes the same in simple and non-technical terms:

  God has covered your bones with flesh. Your flesh is soft and warm…I hope that your body will not get hurt…

  If it were to fall into a fire, it would be burned up. If hot water were to fall upon it, it would be scalded. If it were to fall into deep water, and not be taken out very soon, it would be drowned. If a great knife were run though your body, the blood would come out. If a great box were to fall on your head, your head would be crushed. If you were to fall out the window, your neck would be broken. If you were to not eat any food for a few days, your little body would be very sick, your breath would stop, and you would grow cold, and you would soon be dead.

  You see that you have a very weak little body.

  Thank you for all your many kindnesses, Mrs. Mortimer. Her eventual point was that the child should pray to God to keep its little body safe from harm. I suppose it’s merely a more explicit version of the old bedtime prayer, “If I should die before I wake,” but I wondered about the effect such a list of horrors would have on an impressionable child of “five or six,” Mrs. Mortimer’s target audience, as revealed in her preface.

  I couldn’t help but share Mrs. Mortimer’s deathless prose with Linda, though she’s never been as fond as I of such literary cruelty. Being an elementary school principal makes
her even more sensitive toward the feelings of children, and she was properly horrified and disgusted to the point where she gave a theatrical shudder, closed her own book, and turned off the light on her side, a cue that I should do the same, and one to which I responded as desired.

  Nothing alarms me at night. When I close my eyes in the darkness I’m able to close them on the concerns of the day, even my current inability to create a solid outline for a new novel, which drove me mad whenever my eyes were open. Nor am I affected by any filmic or literary horror I might have ingested before bedtime. In short, I sleep well and heavily, and am awakened only by the twin orbs of the morning sun and my bladder when full. That bladder alarm usually wakes me around four in the morning, as it did on this particular night, so I got up quietly, traversed the darkened bedroom with the assurance of one who knows every toe-stubbing bedpost and nightstand by heart, and made my way to the bathroom.

  When I stepped into the hall on my return, however, I felt suddenly ill at ease, as though if I turned and looked through the doorway into the living room, I might see a dark shape sitting in one of the chairs. It was surprising. Usually I’m as at home in the dark as a cat.

  So I confronted my fear, and turned and looked directly into the room, lit only by the pale glow the street lights cast through the thick curtains. There was nothing there, of course, but I thought that I heard just the wisp of a sigh, high and feminine. I took a few steps to the doorway, reached in and turned on the light.

  The room was empty. The sigh had probably been my own sinusitis-induced nose-whistle. I snorted at my own imagination, and went back to bed. Sleep, however, didn’t come as readily as it usually did.

  The next day I was too busy to think about Mrs. Mortimer and her less than salubrious effect on children. My writer’s block, spongy at first, had thickened to the consistency of cement, and I struggled unsuccessfully through another eight-hour day, trying to extricate myself from a muddle of forced motivations and blatant coincidences. When I’d finished, I had another paragraph of my outline done, and knew that I would delete most of it the next day. My anxiety deepened daily, despite Linda’s assurances that I would work my way out of my problems. Hives frequently appeared, and the small x-shaped birthmark on my shoulder itched madly, as it always did when I grew upset.

  That evening, lying next to Linda, I tried to distract myself by once again paging through The Peep of Day. Nothing equaled the awfulness of the first chapter, though that on “The Wicked Angels” came close, with the deathless verses:

  Satan is glad

  When I am bad,

  And hopes that I

  With him shall lie

  In fire and chains,

  And dreadful pains.

  All liars dwell

  With him in hell,

  And many more

  Who cursed and swore,

  And all who did

  What God forbid.

  I wondered if the Anna B. Huber who owned the book had been as enthralled by her bedtime tales as I’d been by mine, and in curiosity I turned to the endpapers to see her name again, then flipped to the back. There was a note handwritten in pencil. Though faded, it read:

  The owner to this book is A. B. Huber. My Father gave it to me for a Present. This is a nice reading book for us if we only try and do as it says in this book and read it through and through. 1862

  ~ * ~

  I was unexpectedly moved by this touch of humanity in such a harshly written volume, and could nearly see the events of a century and a half before, the father giving the book with pride and affection to his daughter, and, two years later, Anna trying out her new penmanship skills on the endpapers. I looked through the other pages at the rear and front of the book, and found on a fore-title page a main course to which the other inscription had been a mere appetizer:

  This evening I write my name here and that is Anna B. Huber. In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty three and here youns can see my name when I am dead and gone.

  The rose is red the vines are green

  The days are Past which I have seen

  Remember me by the dawn of day

  Remember me when far away

  Remember me and so will I

  Remember you till I die.

  Anna B. Huber’s Book 1863

  God, I thought with a smile, how these simple words define a life long past. A little girl wants to be remembered after death, so she puts her name in a book, perhaps the only object of permanence she owns, creating her own time capsule to be opened years later by a middle-aged man who hears her voice and does as she wishes – he remembers her, long after she is dust.

  Remarkable, I thought at first, that she should be so fixated on death. But when I considered what mortality rates were like in 1863, not even taking the Civil War into account, I thought it likely that Anna B. Huber had experienced the deaths of family and friends. It was even possible that her father had died at Gettysburg or Shiloh or Antietam or in some other less famous but no less lethal battle.

  And there was always Anna’s prized volume, in which Mrs. Mortimer constantly reminded her of mortality and of the many and varied ways in which life might end. No wonder the poor wee thing had death on her mind. Don’t worry, little girl, I thought. I’ll remember you.

  I read a chapter from another book, having had quite enough of the ill-tempered Mrs. Mortimer, and went to sleep with one arm around Linda, but thinking of Anna Huber, wondering what she had looked like, how long she had lived, and whether she had had children of her own to abuse with Mrs. M’s writings.

  It wasn’t the bladder alarm that roused me that night. It was Anna B. Huber, or, I thought at first, my simulacrum of her. And before I realized what I was seeing, I was grateful for the awakening.

  I’d been having a dreadful nightmare, quite a novelty for me. I had been closely watching a little girl in a long dark-colored dress, and, as so often occurs in dreams, was also experiencing what was happening to her. In literary terms, I was both first and third person at once. This collective We were moving through a series of incidents that would have made Lemony Snicket quail.

  At first I was drowning. Not knowing which way was up, I thrashed about in thick, swampy water, and saw long brown hair twist like snakes on either side of my head, drifting in front of my eyes and blocking my vision. Every time I breathed, I took in a noseful of lumpy viscosity that choked me so that dark flames surged before my eyes.

  Then those flames heated the water until I seemed a piece of meat boiling in a pot. My hands reddened and great blisters started to form, bubbles rising beneath the young flesh as though live things were pressing to get out. The blisters burst, and tattered shreds of skin roiled in the bubbling water like strands of seaweed. The pain increased as something pierced my stomach, and when I looked down a silver beam of light a foot wide had impaled me, and a great stream of blood was pouring from my body as though from a fireman’s hose, and I remember thinking that it looked like the scene at the end of Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, when the blood gushes like a fountain from the dying samurai.

  As the blood roared out of me, I felt myself growing even weaker than before. The heat receded, and the blood slowed its river and stopped altogether, though the sense of being in thick water remained, and I began to fall. Twisting I fell through that thick miasma of dream until I saw a stony plain far below coming up to meet me. I tried to turn away, to slow or even cease my fall, but I could not, and the ground grew closer and I saw myself as a diver, head first, arms at my side, until the stones filled all my view and I struck them. My neck twisted and snapped like a dry branch broken for kindling, and I entered blackness.

  The darkness turned to white, and I was lying on a flat hard plane, but I could see myself, and my face, the little girl’s thin face, was growing thinner. The eyes protruded, the cheeks fell in as if made of pastry dough, and the bones pressed against the wasted skin. I – she – was dying. My breath came slow and shallow, and my body grew colder until the wor
ld was full of stillness.

  Suddenly a pinpoint of motion entered that world, and my dead eyes became fixed on a speck high above my reclining form, a speck that was slowly getting larger. At last its shape took on the definition of a square, and as it drew nearer it seemed as though I lay at the bottom of an elevator shaft, with the car above rushling down at me. Though I struggled to move, I could not. My dead eyes could only watch helplessly, as further doom approached.

  In one final instant the dark square drove all the white world away, and pain crushed me, shattering skull, smashing brain, hurling my dream entity into an abyss from which there would be no rebirth.

  So naturally there was no choice but to wake up.

  When my eyes opened in the darkness, I hitched in a breath of relief. I was lying on my left side, facing Linda, and I put my arm around her, careful not to wake her. I closed my eyes again, but opened them immediately, fearful that I would fall back into the nightmare. Better to remain awake and get my thoughts off Anna Huber and Mrs. Mortimer, for I had no doubt that they were the source of my dire dreams.

  I turned slowly, still not wanting to rouse Linda, onto my back and then my right side, closing my eyes with the superstitious conceit that my movement was thus more stealthy, and opening them again when I was in the proper position.

  Before me I saw the face of a little girl. Her eyes were open wide, staring at me fearfully. Or maybe her fear was a reflection of my own.

  What made the apparition more frightening was that she wasn’t standing next to my bed, but rather parallel to my own recumbent body, as if floating sideways in the air. Her hair was covered by a white kerchief tied under her chin, but the strands of hair which had escaped it were hanging down on either side of her face, rather than dangling toward the floor. That detail was the most uncanny of all, and made me think that I was still dreaming, because even ghosts had to obey the laws of gravity, didn’t they?