Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [58]
She carried her faceless head with an intent tilt, and it was in this tiltedness that Smoll’s fear formed, for she was intent on him; she tilted her head at him. He would scramble upright in the bed, his back pressed to the wall, the back of his head hard against the frame of the little uncurtained window, which, admitting as it might the fullest moonlight or the strongest effusions of a clear night’s stars, never showed him what he needed to see of the woman, never illuminated her brightly enough to convince him that he had seen all the evil there was to see of her, that he now knew what she was, that he could begin to bring some measure of rationality to his encounters with her. Instead he only underwent yet again this deep abjection, this wholesale shrinking of body and being from whatever she was, whatever she wanted.
For she did want something; she made the same demand of him night after night. She rattled the beads in her hands and pushed them at Smoll, pushed them into him sometimes. Did her touch itself, her thrusting at his middle, produce those pond ripples of horror up and down him, or was only the idea of her touch, in his appalled mind, sufficient to generate them?
The beads themselves were grotesque, bulbous; her handfuls of them reminded him of Arthur Cleal at Hobson’s farm, gathering up innards after the butchering, the slippery tubes and organs overflowing the bowl of his hands.
Take it, she hissed, and shook the thing and pushed it at him again. Take it; I don’t want it. Her voice was muddied—from having crossed time to reach him, perhaps, or from the invisibility of her mouth. She was hurried and guilty; she crouched at him. ’Tis not as if I can ever wear it. Take it!
He might say No. He might say I don’t want it either. He might ask her who she was and why she plagued him. Whatever he said, fear crawled and shook in his voice. And she always answered the same, angrily: Take it!, bobbing at him, bobbing into him a little, bobbing back. There might be the flash of an eye, fixing on him with horrible inexactitude, as if she were blind; there might be something of a mouth, a ghost of teeth, momentarily, against the hollow attic room behind her, which resounded with the muddied sounds of ghost steps. What would I do with it, for heaven’s sake? Take it! Take it, before Mistress comes!
AT FIRST HE felt only faint pains, here and there about his neck, a slight heat in the skin of his chest where the locket lay. Sometimes these were itches and no more, and if he lifted the neck of his shirt to search for signs of them, he saw no mark—the first few times, the pains themselves eased utterly, he was so reassured by the sight of his clear skin.
Then a redness began to grow and to glow in the flesh there, visible in the light of a bright day outdoors but not by candlelight or lamp. The reddened skin was sensitive to the touch of a finger or the rubbing of shirt cloth; if he scratched it absentmindedly it would sting and burn, and the pain of that would linger.
There rose blisters, then, pepperings of them where each bead had lain in the night, and a flowering on his breast from the locket’s weight. They burst and itched and wept, and the skin stayed raw; sometimes by nightfall it had healed dry, but the dream-lady’s visit would inflame it again, when she forced the unnatural burden of the ghost beads on him.
The wounds never quite bled; at worst they leaked a watery fluid that stained Smoll’s shirt and nightshirt yellow. “What have you spilt on yourself?” Cook might scold him, but it was less a question than a lament at the general carelessness of boys, and she did not pursue him for an explanation.
THE DREAM-LADY WOULD thrust the beads one last nervous time at Smoll, her shining, rattling handfuls of them. His own hands would turn palm up to take them. He was an obedient boy, and before he had left to live here his mother had kissed him and instructed him to do exactly