Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [59]
And once she had poured the beads into his hands, their weight and coldness compelled him; he understood himself to have made some kind of pledge in accepting them. There was no handing the necklace back, however much it pained him to hold it, the weight like a load of polished river stones. They chilled his hands, and the dragging of the overspilt ones made his whole arms shake. She had pushed them out of her time into his, and by taking them he had taken them on, somehow; he had become responsible for them. That’s right—you have it! she now exulted, and she had an eye again, a jagged gleam on the darkness as she nodded. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
He might say Yes. He might creak out the truth: It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. He might gather the spills of beads or leave them depending from the fat gold locket for which the whole embarrassment of ivory, amber, and jet had been assembled. No matter what he chose to do—if choice, indeed, played any part in it—she would nod and gleam in the same way; the same impression of her tight smile would hang there in the night before him. Put it on, she now said; they were only partway through whatever bewitchment she was working. Her voice issued not from her tensed lips but from the fearful air all around; it rose at Smoll from inside him, from the marrow of his own small bones.
Always he put the necklace on, although it was cold, and painfully heavy. The sooner he put it on, the sooner this trial would end.
You see? The woman melted into relief. Her head tilted more. Her smile flickered, then became more distinct; for an appalling moment it was too large for her face, the next instant it shrank too small, then the mouth was extinguished altogether. It suits you, she said unctuously, mouthlessly. Then she leaned forward and hissed, Hide it under your clothes, before Mistress comes and sees.
He did as she bid him, covering the noose of beads and locket with his nightshirt. Each time they made him gasp, the cold striking through his breastbone, the sudden weight straining at his neck.
Yes, that’s right, the lady would say—she was not a lady, of course; she was a servant like himself. She leaned at him; she had eyes and teeth. Her words caught up with her mouth, and some nights he would feel not only the ice-burden of the beads but also feathers of her historical breath against his face and front. By now he was fixed and imprisoned, by the beads and by his fear, by her face tilted forward, her forehead white and broad, the eyes wide and drinking up the sight of the hidden necklace.
Then she would be gone. But the necklace would stay, coldly burning. And the horror of her presence stayed too, the boxed-in attic air crawling with it as a street-dog’s coat crawls with vermin. All Smoll’s skin crawled too, and his ears still heard her hisses, and his spine still jolted with the ghost noises behind her, the ghost steps climbing the nonexistent stairs.
When the steps ceased, and the fear loosened its hold on him sufficiently, he lay back down, crushed to his little bed by the beads and locket, collared and chained down. To breathe, to lift the locket weight on his chest and let in air underneath, he must summon some force and determination. He lay entirely imprisoned, hauling himself from breath to breath, and whether he failed in that effort for want of air, or the task of breathing exhausted him, eventually he would sleep.
“WHY, LOOK HERE! A letter has come for a Master Smollett Standforth.”
Smoll looked up from his porridge. Mr. Pinkney placed the note before him. “Posture, boy!” Smoll straightened, and the raw skin of the sores crinkled and burned beneath his shirt.
“That’s a nice hand,” said Cook, passing behind him with her own bowl.
“The priest will have written it,” he said, “for my ma.”
Cook sat all