Dark Duets Part 54

Now she had a large family of squirrels that she tormented. Currently she was forcing them to produce a play. It was awful torture, as squirrels are not naturally given to dramatics.

"Please, O cruel and glorious mistress," said one squirrel, whom she had gifted with the power of human speech for her own dark purposes. "Might I know what my motivation is in this scene?"

Clytemnestra pointed to a tiny, squirrel-shaped Iron Maiden.

The squirrel bowed his little, furry head. "Understood."

Clytemnestra had not spoken much in the last hundred years, but she always managed to get her point across.

Scylla turned her single eye into the light, making the blue of its iris gleam. It was a part of the bargain with the Dark Lord that the sisters had but one eye between them, though that eye could see into the future and also shoot death rays from its slit pupil.

"One day my prince will come," she mumbled.

"Good," said Hibiscus. "I'm getting awfully tired of squirrel."

The thing about ruins is-as everyone knows-they are often excellent real estate opportunities. And lo, so it was that builders came to the ruins of the old town and began, slowly but surely, to construct a new town on top of it. First came men and women in suits who pointed at things and had servants running before them. Then came the trucks with supplies, the cement mixers and Dumpsters and Porta-Potties. And men, lots of men, who were healthy and loud and who appeared willing to take off their s.h.i.+rts at the slightest provocation.

"They are so very loud," said Hibiscus, playing idly with a vial of a poison so deadly that it not only killed whosoever drank it, but raised them from the dead just to kill them all over again. She sighed. "I miss the quiet. I suppose I will have to do something about that."

"Yes," agreed a squirrel. "The sound of the jackhammer compromises the integrity of our performances." Then, realizing he'd spoken out of turn, he ducked back into the knothole of a tree.

"No, please," said Scylla, who enjoyed sneaking to the edges of the forest and watching the workers. "Please let them be. I like to hear them. And soon we will have a whole town to toy with."

It seemed to Hibiscus, though, that Scylla was less interested in a whole town than one of the workers. He was slender and young, with a mop of corn-yellow hair and eyes the color of a fern and the annoying habit of singing under his breath while he worked. He also appeared to be the son of one of the suited men, although he worked as hard as anyone else. Scylla liked to take the eye all afternoon and peer down at him in the manner of someone who was about to take a captive and torture him until he couldn't remember his own name, but only that he loved her. Which did promise to be amusing.

"Very well," promised Hibiscus, "but I can't speak for Clytemnestra."

"I don't see why not, since she won't speak for herself," groused Scylla, crossing her arms over her chest.

Clytemnestra snorted, then went back to forcing a quartet of foxes to try their paws at acrobatics. It was going about as well as expected.

"Nothing ever changes," Scylla continued. "We never travel. I want to see the great cities and the oceans and the mountains. I want to wear big, sparkly dresses and go to the movies and eat popcorn until my fingers are greasy with b.u.t.ter. I want to be in love, real love, the kind where the boy is conscious."

That seemed ridiculous to Hibiscus, and she complained about it, as oldest sisters are wont to do, but Scylla was not listening. The next day she put on a dress made of silvery spiderwebs woven tightly together, and a sparkling eye patch over the hollow of her right eye, and climbed down from her throne to the forest floor.

When the blond young worker, whose name was Marcus, saw her approach, he thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She seemed to glide above the ground, and when she took his hand and led him away from the other workers, he was happy to go. She guided him to a copse in the forest where black flowers grew, and they sat in the gra.s.s and exchanged conversation. It had been years since Scylla had talked to anyone but her sisters, but fortunately Marcus was bedazzled by her golden hair and slender figure and seemed to think that her stories of squirrel torture and boiling oil were hilarious fables.

"I have never met anyone like you," he said, taking her hand. "The girls of the village are as dull in comparison as caterpillars to b.u.t.terflies."

They kissed, and Scylla found his mouth soft and sweet. She wondered if the rest of him would be sweet as well if she cooked him, perhaps in a pot with vegetables.

"Marry me," he breathed.

"I cannot," she said. "For I am bound in service to a dark G.o.d, along with my sisters, and I cannot leave them. Without me, they would be blind."

"I know what it is like to have an overly dependent family," Marcus said. "But surely you deserve freedom for yourself?"

She gazed into his green eyes, and her heart melted. "Where would we run to?"

Marcus seemed vague on that topic, but he was clear that they would be very happy there. He wove a wonderful tale of love, and flowers, and more love. Wherever they went, apparently, there would be an excess of beds. Scylla allowed herself to be convinced.

It was clear to her, however, that if she was to venture into pastures new, she would need the eye. Scylla told herself that her sisters would hardly miss it, that they would want her to be happy, that it would be quite funny to take it.

She told herself many things, and they all added up to her stealing away in the middle of the night, away from her sleeping sisters and into her lover's arms.

She did leave a note, but of course her sisters could not read it.

Nevertheless, they soon gathered what Scylla had done.

"I am going to boil that brat until she is nothing but bones and broth, and then I will drink the broth and crunch the bones!" Hibiscus exclaimed.

"What will come of my production?" Clytemnestra asked. "Without my guiding eye, who will see to the costumes? And who will beat the foxes when they miss a step? Everything will be ruined!"

"Not to worry, I rather fancy myself a director," said one of the squirrels, and Clytemnestra gave a low moan of distress.

She was clearly becoming hysterical. This meant Hibiscus had to pull herself together and think. Hibiscus had known her sisters a long time. She did not need to peer into a dark future to know how this latest escapade would end.

"Hush," she said and pa.s.sed Clytemnestra a live rattlesnake so she could suck on its head. "How does it usually end, when mortals are in our company?"

"Death, pain, madness," said Clytemnestra, her voice slightly m.u.f.fled around the snake. "More pain. That rash of beheadings. The rain of mad chickens. Oh, and plague, of course. I can't believe I almost forgot plague!"

"Exactly. Patience, my sister," said Hibiscus. "Patience, and then terrible b.l.o.o.d.y vengeance."

Meanwhile, Marcus and Scylla were walking hand in hand down the street of the next village over. They had not been able to travel far, because Scylla had turned the coachman into a beetle for insolence and stepped on him. Marcus had missed this, being in the privy at the time.

"What a shame the fellow ran off," said Marcus.

Scylla coughed. "Indeed."

Scylla told herself that the course of true love never did run smooth, but she was beginning to think that perhaps her oldest sister was right-as she so often and so irritatingly was-and that men who were conscious were more trouble than they were worth.

Just then, a small and charming tot raced down the street toward them.

"Do you like children?" Marcus asked, sighing a gusty, soppy sigh, like a wet bedsheet hanging in the wind.

"I do," said Scylla, brightening at this evidence of a common interest. "They're very handy for potions, of course, and very juicy and tender after a long day when all you want is a snack."

Marcus looked appalled.

"I also," Scylla offered, after some thought, "enjoy sucking out their youth and innocence and consigning them to eternity as imps in the service of my dark master."

This did not please Marcus any better, and Scylla's black heart sank down to her cruelly pointed shoes. How long can any love last, if the man involved will not accept your true self?

As it turned out, not long.

She could make him forget her misdeeds with a little magic, but she couldn't forget the way he looked at her each time she disappointed him, the fresh horror and the ridiculous shock-as though he'd never seen anyone pull wings off a b.u.t.terfly before! Or attach them to a mouse! As though it wasn't funny to watch the creature try to get off the ground! It was absurd, the way she had to act around him to make him happy.

And where were they supposed to live? Scylla could get them plenty of money, but Marcus seemed against all her suggestions regarding how she might go about doing that. And when she described her dream of a cottage with a nice little garden of mandrake, deadly nightshade, opium poppies, and a few other necessities, he got very distressed. In fact, Marcus, despite his great beauty, was becoming a bit of a bore.

But the final straw came when she caught him chatting up a shopgirl. She had been in the back, selecting a very fine length of black cloth that she thought would make an adequate wedding dress if she trimmed it out in bat fur, when she spotted Marcus holding a ladder for a blus.h.i.+ng girl in the process of shelving soap. The girl told him that her name was Honey. He told her that such a pretty name suited her, being so pretty herself. Scylla was furious-both that she hadn't previously noticed how criminally terrible he was at flirtation and also that he was directing those criminally terrible flirtations toward another girl.

She left with him, pretending that she didn't notice the longing look he shot back toward the shop.

That night, while he slept beside her in their hotel room bed, she plotted her revenge. Perhaps she should change him into a lizard and feed him to a cat. Or maybe she'd curse him to have a limb fall off every six months until he was just a talking head. Or enchant him so that each of his lovers died the moment he kissed her.

In the morning, Marcus was looking glum. "I do not think this thing between us is working out," he said.

"No, it isn't," she agreed. He looked very beautiful in the morning sunlight, very n.o.ble and square jawed, and she still admired his cheekbones. "I am so glad you agree."

And she turned him into a pale yellow rabbit. At first the rabbit ran around the courtyard of the hotel a bit, but he was soon calmed with carrots. She tucked him in the bodice of her dress, where his ears hung out a bit, and set off with all speed toward the forest.

When she arrived at her sisters' dwelling place, they were not nearly as agreeable as Marcus had been. They were quite angry, in fact. Furious, even. They explained that after she had gone away and taken their single eye, leaving them to crash blindly around the forest, they had not been able to find food and had been eating rocks and gra.s.s, rendering them very unwell. Clytemnestra's play had fallen into ruins-most of the rodent actors had run away, except for a few squirrels and a chipmunk. The chipmunk was directing, but since he did not understand basic plot elements such as foreshadowing and denouement, the play no longer made sense.

Clytemnestra was lying upon the ground.

"Ruined, ruined," she moaned. "It's all ruined. My vision is ruined! And why is it ruined? Because I can't see!"

"I don't see why you're complaining," said Hibiscus sadly. "You're not the one who bit into a rock and broke your last tooth."

"I have explained, over and over again," said Clytemnestra, "that actors should be suitable for their roles, that it can't all be about the tortoise action scene, and that removing the climax is a bad idea because stories should have endings!"

"I liked that tooth," muttered Hibiscus.

"Er," said Scylla. "Hi?"

The two sisters, as elder sisters will when faced with the youngest, forgot their differences and began to converge menacingly on the sound of Scylla's voice.

"Sisters," said Scylla. "I am truly sorry. I have learned the error of my ways and I grieve if my actions have caused you any inconvenience! But I have learned a life lesson: that I was dreaming my life away when what I truly wanted was what I had all along: not romance, but being true to myself, being with you, serving our evil master and delighting in the suffering of the innocent. Until now I did not know myself. So you see it was all for the best."

She hastily thrust Marcus into the hands of Clytemnestra. There was an uneasy moment while Clytemnestra looked as if she might be about to eat him, but then she petted his ears and set him among the squirrels, where the chipmunk began to order him to learn lines.

"The eye?" Hibiscus said, warningly.

"Oh, er, yes!" Scylla replied brightly and plucked it from her eye socket. She had never worn it for so long before and felt the darkness descend on her ominously as she stretched out her hand. "Here it is. And I am willing to give up my turn at it for-"

"Your turn? Your turn!" Clytemnestra roared, s.n.a.t.c.hing the eye. "You'll be lucky if you ever have a turn again!"

"That's not fair!" Scylla began. It wasn't like she hadn't brought it back!

"Eminently fair, eminently fair," muttered Hibiscus. "But your punishment must be even more fair than that. I thought about taking your voice, but I do like to hear you prattle on. And I thought about taking your hands, but you can be so useful with them. And I thought about taking your heart before I remembered you'd lost it to that rabbit, so you clearly wouldn't miss it much. But then, then I realized what we must take from you-your feet!"

"My feet?" Scylla shrunk back. "No. They're my feet. They're not for sharing." But she felt the sharp bright line of pain across one ankle. She winced. This was going to hurt. "Ow!"

"Without feet, you can't run away," said Hibiscus.

"Oh, don't whine, we'll let you have them back sometimes," Clytemnestra told her. "Or bird claws. Or hooves. That is, if you're very, very, very good."

The sisters placed Scylla gently in her accustomed seat of bones and roots. Scylla squawked and sulkily kicked Clytemnestra in the s.h.i.+n with her protruding ankle bone. But even as angry and unhappy as she was to be footless, she had to admit that she had been even more unhappy in town. And once Marcus the rabbit had been placed in her arms, she buried her face in his fur and found she preferred him this way too.

In the end, Scylla stopped missing her feet and learned a valuable lesson about what she truly wanted as compared to what she'd thought and dreamed she wanted, and Hibiscus and Clytemnestra learned how they valued their young sister, by missing her. Also family discipline was upheld through mutilation, which was harsh but fair. The town remained a ruin of ashes and bones brought down by evil, but it had been too late for the townsfolk before this story began.

Even Clytemnestra's play was a success. To the surprise of all, Marcus turned out to be a sensational leading rabbit and was much beloved by all the squirrels.

SINS LIKE SCARLET.

Mark Morris and Rio Youers.

It began its miserable purple existence nine and a half years ago, a growth in the inner layer of his colon, which-untreated-metastasized into his lymphatic system, internal chest wall, and liver. It was doubtless other places by now. His bones. Maybe his lungs. He'd skipped his last two rounds of chemo, because it was cruel, cold, and pointless: a shot of ugly that left him whimpering at h.e.l.l's door. The doctors hadn't been hopeful before his few treatments began and told him now that his life expectancy was down to months. He believed them. No reason not to. The blood in the toilet bowl, and in his saliva, delivered a similar prognosis. And his body-once firm and powerful-was now a rawboned rack of hurt. But what the doctors didn't know was that there was an older pain, a deeper pain, that he had suffered for many years. He'd lain in machines that had scanned his body, but as far as he knew there was nothing for the soul. Should such a machine exist, the doctors would find his malady: a shadow, worse than any cancer, and shaped like grief.

Allan Strand closed his eyes and fumbled for the hip flask in his pocket. Antique silver, dulled and dented with use, filled with liquid morphine. He unscrewed the cap with buckled fingers and raised the flask to his lips. A single swallow, raspy throat clenching like a fist. Allan groaned and his thin body trembled. He didn't feel relief so much as numbness-the physical pain encased in ice that would melt all too soon. And that deeper, emotional pain . . . still there, but the morphine had lifted hands for him to hide behind.

He smeared blood from his lips and screwed the cap back on the hip flask.

"Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow."

He opened his eyes. The boy was gone.

HE HADN'T SPOKEN to Holly for twenty-five years. Their marriage-once, like him, firm and powerful-had withered to nothing following the murder of their only son. There had been eleven subsequent months of togetherness, each as fragile as eggsh.e.l.ls. No lovemaking. No comfort or a.s.surances. They finally separated in the winter of 1987, whereupon Allan's wings had stretched far and wide. He flew his crippled coop to begin a new life in Canada. He'd hoped thirty-five hundred miles would nullify his woes and responsibilities. He was wrong. His pain had spread its wings, too. Some things refused to be left behind.

"h.e.l.lo."

Holly, it's Allan. . .

He breathed his sickness into the mouthpiece and rubbed a tear from his eye with the heel of his free hand. Her voice awoke memories, both dark and light. So easy to envision the girl he had fallen in love with. Nineteen years old. Green eyes and a line of freckles across her nose, as distinctive as the markings on a cat. The bow in her hair had come untied, and Allan had pulled it free and handed it to her before she lost it. That was how they'd met. She'd taken the ribbon from his hand and twelve years later they stood beside the too-small coffin of their one child with a valley of emptiness between them. Allan would never have believed that silence could be so deep.

"h.e.l.lo . . . ?"

Holly . . . I have something to tell you.

He opened his sandpaper mouth, not sure that he could speak at all. To utter a single word-even one as innocuous as h.e.l.lo-demanded vast courage. He gripped the phone tighter. His throat clicked. He considered hanging up, and in the end didn't have to; Holly beat him to it. The empty line was a different kind of morphine. Old pain slipped sweetly away-temporarily, at least.

There was a copy of yesterday's Daily Mirror on the table in front of him. He'd found a convenience store downtown that sold a few British tabloids. They were always a day or two late, but for Allan-who was unfamiliar with the Internet-it was the best way to keep up with the news back home. The paper was open on page seven, where a black-and-white picture and two-column story wavered like smoke, and which he'd inhaled, inducing waves of nausea and despair. It had prompted him to call Holly, even if he hadn't mustered the courage to talk to her. Now he inhaled the story again, the headline: MEADINGHAM MONSTER DIES IN BROADMOOR, and the picture of a thin man with close-set features and a small, dark mouth. The caption beneath read: Desmond Grayson-termed the "Meadingham Monster" after killing twelve children in the 1980s-suffered a fatal heart attack in his Broadmoor Hospital room on Thursday. He was sixty-two. The killer's eyes regarded Allan impa.s.sively, as if his sins were unformed, and the blood on his hands could so easily be washed away.

The image unsettled Allan. It always had, and he had seen it thousands of times. It had been splashed across the news throughout Grayson's trial, so synonymous with evil that it had attained cult status. Allan had even seen it printed on posters and T-s.h.i.+rts. Desmond Grayson may have been a diminutive, psychologically frail individual . . . but the media had made him famous.

His victims were aged between six and eleven. He lured them by asking for directions or pretending to look for something he'd dropped, and the moment the children lowered their guards, he grabbed them. He took them to his house, where he raped, tortured, and killed them. Then he dumped their bodies in secluded locations in and around Meadingham. It was a wave of terror that lasted six years, ending on a frosty night just after Christmas of 1989, when Grayson was pulled over for speeding. One of the two officers who spoke to him was sufficiently alerted by his odd behavior to ask him to open his trunk. The bloodstains they found on the upholstery prompted them to take Grayson in for questioning, and twenty-four hours later he had confessed to all twelve murders.

Allan remembered Holly's shock when she first saw Grayson. She had expected a person both imposing and demonic-the stuff of horror movies. But in reality he was well groomed and courteous, and he sat throughout the trial with his hands folded primly in his lap, his voice-on the occasions he spoke-soft and controlled. Holly regarded the child killer with as much disbelief in her heart as hate. How can someone so normal-looking commit such unG.o.dly crimes? she had asked. But it wasn't Grayson's appearance that unsettled Allan, so much as the emptiness in his eyes. Did he really feel nothing? Was he indifferent to all the blood he had spilled . . . to the small, broken bodies piled behind him?

Thomas-their son-was seven years old. His body was discovered in a dilapidated barn two miles outside Meadingham. Although he had not been raped, he had been stabbed thirty-eight times. His body had been covered in abrasions and bruises. His right arm and neck had been broken. The officer in charge of the murder inquiry, Detective Inspector Lomax, had informed them that it was the broken neck that had killed their son, and that the knife wounds had been inflicted postmortem. The thinking was that Thomas had died from falling down Grayson's bas.e.m.e.nt steps, thus denying the killer his s.a.d.i.s.tic pleasure. Lomax's tone had been one almost of satisfaction, as if the little boy had bravely and resourcefully outwitted his abductor, but for Allan and Holly, it was the end of everything.

Their togetherness fractured, along with their happiness. Holly's kind and loving heart shattered, and she strayed all too often into a vortex of depression and delirium. She once drove to London with the intention of attacking Grayson as he was ushered from the Old Bailey. Unable to get close, she hurled abuse and pushed ineffectually at the crowd, and in a frenzy she attacked the young PC who tried to restrain her, gouging his cleanly shaven cheek. In the end it took four policemen to wrestle her into a Black Maria, after which she was detained in a cell overnight and issued with a caution, despite the extenuating circ.u.mstances. Shortly afterward, she downed a c.o.c.ktail of lorazepam and vodka and spent the night in Meadingham General having her stomach pumped. Allan wanted to care, but he didn't . . . couldn't. The distance between them had grown too vast, and he had problems of his own-this new and terrible illness: a cancer of the soul that struck long before the disease touched his body.

Running a hand down his sunken face, Allan closed the newspaper. He reached for the phone again, dialed the first three numbers, then hung up. Pain rolled through his stomach. His right leg twitched. He coughed-sprayed blood against his bunched fist-and fumbled for his morphine. The hip flask's curves and dents were so familiar that he took comfort from simply holding it. Alas, not enough; he had a callus on his lower lip where he'd so often pressed the collar.