Other terrors, p.28
Other Terrors, page 28
A waking dream. A misplaced nightmare. It had to be.
After that sleepless night: a numbing fog. A welcome change, sort of, after coming to class every day with a bundle of tension in her gut.
Lynn abandoned her old notebook, the one that had offended Paolo, and brought a fresh and blank new one with her to class.
She paid attention while Paolo lectured.
He spoke about a passage of Traccia and the hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden. The lamb roams the garden to drink from fountains of light, and so forth. The monks had built the image atop a more sensual garden space in the verses of the Usignoli. The Usignoli were fond of fruit trees; they described dipping needles in ink to write each other love notes on cherry leaves.
The overlapping narratives didn’t unnerve Lynn as they once had. In fact, something amused her about the shift from cherry trees to fountains of light. Like amorphous riverbed stuff turned into workable clay, that could become a jar, a brick, something useful to build upon, to build with, to contain.
While Lynn listened to Paolo and took notes, her left hand probed an itch near her breast. Damn the tiger mosquitoes of southern Italy.
Her other hand traced something new of its own accord on the page. A serpentine line of script wended its way across her notes.
A sharp shriek.
It took Lynn a moment to recognize it as her own.
Jenny leaned over, draped her hand across Lynn’s.
Good old Jenny.
“Would you shut it?” she hissed. Something was different about her voice. Like she had caught a cold, but not quite, ragged edges around her words, the ghost of someone else’s intonation. “You’re making a scene.”
Lynn’s chair screeched backwards across the flagstones.
She apologized for the upset, said she was unwell. Needed to go lie down.
Her notes. She had to get to her notes. She could find some secret that could help her fix . . . whatever this was, the weird madness bleeding through the Accademia.
Lynn loped down the hall, then froze.
Her door was already ajar.
Ice at the base of her spine, in spite of the oppressive summer heat.
She shoved the door open and stumbled into her cell.
At first she thought someone had torn open her pillow and filled her room with down. Then she recognized shreds of paper fluttering through the air, stirred by her passage.
And in the middle of the floor: her notebook. Or its corpse, rather. All wrong. Ragged. Someone had opened it up and eviscerated it, torn its pages to pieces.
Lynn nudged the damaged notebook with her toe. Revulsion shuddered through her and she kicked it toward the wall.
She sat down on her bed, her limbs heavy. A flurry of torn paper shifted around her. She swept it all away before collapsing against her pillow.
Lynn tried to remember. The lines she had exhumed. There was one that liked to linger:
There is a cure, made of stone and sound . . .
Those horrible lines on Simon’s face, Jenny’s changed voice.
A cure?
And there—she heard it again.
A thin song, vibrating through the room.
The sunken amphitheater looked different after dark. Its columns taller, lengthened, their shadows stretched out by the moon. Lynn shook in the cold while starlight simmered overhead. She stood in the quiet. Then, she opened her mouth, and let the one verse of Usignoli song drift out of her.
And there it was. A bit of music echoed around her, unconstrained by the monastery walls.
Lynn followed the voice’s lead, though she wasn’t sure at first how to follow an echo that filled so much of the space around her with a shimmering shadow of sound. She recognized one word, then two. “Sole.” “Cura.” They were words she had sung herself, carried on now by strange voices. And a vague, background hint of birdcalls.
And the amphitheater did not, in fact, appear to be quite so sunken anymore. Its fragments of pillars had become arches, like broken bones grown back into place.
Lynn rubbed her eyes, dizzied by the overlay of past and present.
She saw people, a procession filling into the space around her. Women in long brown gowns. They all wore masks, puckered around the nose: little beaks.
One woman paused, turned to face Lynn, tilting her head. She held out her hand.
Lynn hesitated a moment, then accepted the invitation.
The procession wound its way between columns, then formed a neat ring at the center of the amphitheater. Song reverberated through the circle; Lynn realized it had become a tune she did not know at all, and she shifted uneasily.
The woman who had invited her stayed by her, placed a hand on her shoulder.
Then, one by one, couples broke away, to dance in the middle of the circle. They moved lightly, barefoot, on the balls of their feet. Just like the pizzica, the taranta, the southern Italian dances meant to shake out tarantula venom.
Soon, Lynn understood they were teaching new verses to her. Words she hadn’t yet unearthed.
The woman who first invited her leaned in close, fingertips brushing against Lynn’s collarbone.
When Lynn glanced down at herself she flinched at the sight of her snakebite. On either side of it, lines of an unfamiliar text glimmered darkly just beneath her skin, like misshapen veins around her breast.
The woman’s hand lingered for a moment, as though she wanted to wipe away the line of unwanted text. Then she tugged Lynn toward the center of the ring.
“Oh—oh no,” said Lynn, digging her heels into the earth. “Can’t dance.”
She found herself confronted with a distinctly avian pout, though she couldn’t figure how the woman managed it around her mask. And how to say no to that? Instead, she let herself be led into the music by the ghost of a nightingale.
As they danced, the sun rose—brought into being by their song.
And when the procession filed out of the amphitheater, Lynn followed them. She would sing with them. Their words would resound through the walls.
There would be a cure.
She flew through the refectory, the old vestry, the chapterhouse, followed the nightingales’ voices as they tugged her along.
Paolo claimed that Lynn no longer cared to study Traccia, that she had decided to go home. Jenny and Simon weren’t too surprised, though Lynn could at least have said goodbye—whatever the tension between them recently.
But then, Jenny was the first to hear it—a faint murmuring, lost bit of sound. The cadence of it somehow like Lynn. They used to hear her sometimes, practicing in the chapel. Lynn had a lovely voice, a flutelike soprano. She’d shut up in an instant of course if anyone ever came in to listen to her, so they had to be sneaky and hang out outside the chapel if they wanted to hear her.
And now. Some remnant of that.
Day by day, it mounted. Soon, the others started to hear it, too.
Voices wrapped around trilling birdsong. Louder this time. Impossible to ignore. And drumming, tambourines, pipes.
Paolo lost their attention as his students glanced around the room, studied the walls and ceiling, searching for the source of the distant music.
And there it was. Lynn’s voice.
Paolo hissed, curled up on the floor as he covered his ears, but it grew, a flood of sound, filling the room.
The music of the Usignoli radiated outward from where it had lain frozen, petrified beneath the monastery’s walls. Paolo stopped struggling. A wild look frozen on his face, his eyes wide and bloodshot.
Later, the students would be hard pressed to describe the change in the air. A shimmer of feathers and birdsong, diaphanous as spider silk, fluid as smoke, everywhere, thrumming.
And somewhere in that song, Lynn’s high and pure voice, ringing and wavering, begging them to listen, to sing the poison out.
What Blood Hath Wrought
by S. A. Cosby
Keisha hated working nights at the Pancake Shack. She hated the dry, barren hours between eleven p.m. and three a.m. when the third shift crowd from the mill poured into the little diner like ants. She hated the flickering streetlamp at the corner of the parking lot that threw strange shadows onto the asphalt. She hated the creaky sign that advertised the Pancake Shack as a twenty-four-hour eating establishment. The sign hung from a rusting arm on a pole that rose ten feet into the air near the street. When the wind blew, the sign would let out a mournful squeal like a banshee.
She especially hated the lights that illuminated the mill three blocks away. Huge plumes of steam poured out of smokestacks that reached into the sky like towers on an ancient castle. The lights that ran along the steel fence and were positioned at various strategic locations across the plant’s campus gave off a ghostly green glow. The droplets of water in the steam could play tricks on your eyes when they hit those eldritch green lights. Then there were the truckers and mill workers that constantly hit on her as they shoveled down greasy hash browns and doughy pancakes. Some were a little more insistent than others. Their greedy eyes appraising her body the way a wolf stares at a deer unnerved her sometimes. One night she had gone out back to throw away a bag of trash and one of the truckers had been hiding behind the dumpster. He had walked out of the shadows with his dick in his hand. She had run back inside after hurling the contents of the trash bag at the man. She hadn’t told her manager, Vicky. There was nothing she could have done, and the guy was probably a hundred miles away by the time she got back inside the building.
Most nights the Pancake Shack was a spooky, stressful job, but she had to pay the bills. She was a single mom and in Pittsville. If you didn’t work at the Lowenfield Pulp and Paper mill, you took what you could get. Keisha was a waitress. Troy Green was a waiter/busboy. Shavon Mitchell was the cook, and Vicky Jones was the manager on duty. Sometimes Troy was a waiter/busboy/assistant cook and sometimes Keisha was a waitress and janitor. The employment structure at the Pancake Shack was as flexible as a contortionist.
Tonight was a perfect example of that malleable hierarchy. Vicky, who was supposed to be working the eleven p.m. to seven a.m. shift too, had given Keisha her keys. Vicky had then slipped out the door to go bang the married guy she had been seeing for the past four weeks while his wife worked the graveyard shift at the mill.
“I’ll be back before the till has to be counted, okay?” she had pleaded as she had thrown Keisha the keys on her way out the door. Troy had watched her go and just shook his head. Keisha was fairly sure that if Troy just glanced in Vicky’s direction she would rip off her pants and screw him in the bathroom. Vicky and Keisha had both applauded Ike Hathaway’s business acumen when he hired a luscious piece of eye candy like Troy. Ike owned the Pancake Shack with his wife, Hilda. Vicky was his niece.
Troy was built like a Greek statue dipped in chocolate. His megawatt smile could elicit flirtatious repartee from even the oldest churchgoing grandmother. Troy would hit her with that smile from time to time, but Keisha did her best to disregard it. Troy was a sophomore at Colson College on the other side of town. Guys like Troy graduated and never looked back. They settled down with a nice Becky or Madison and raised a gaggle of badass children. Eventually they forgot the pungent smell that the mill belched into the sky—the omnipresent stench of burning pulp and wet wood. Locals liked to say it was the smell of money, but Keisha thought it smelled like servitude and dreams deferred. That was why she was taking online courses in the mornings and working at the Shack at night. She was going to get the hell out of Pittsville or die trying.
“Tell me you got an order up, Keisha. I’m bored to death back here,” Shavon said through the sliding rectangular window that separated the kitchen from the dining area.
“You could dump the grease trap,” she responded without looking up from her crossword puzzle.
“I said I’m bored, not suicidal,” Shavon said with a laugh.
Keisha shook her head. Shavon was funny and quick-witted. He had a subtle charm that drew you in like you were warming your hands by a fire. He reminded her of her son’s father. That alone was enough reason to steer clear of him. Shavon had shoulder-length dreadlocks that he tied back with a red bandana and a set of deep dimples. He also had a record for possession with intent to distribute and assault and battery. He might have been fun for thirty minutes, but Keisha knew she and her son deserved better.
Shavon came to the window again.
“Why you so mean, Keisha? Can’t you at least let me see them pretty eyes when you diss me?” he said.
Keisha felt herself smiling in spite of herself. She put down her crossword puzzle and walked behind the counter to poke her head through the window.
“You could clean out the grease trap,” she said before batting her eyelashes. Shavon laughed.
“Forget you, girl!” he said. His words seemed harsh, but his tone was playful. Keisha saw Troy walk in the kitchen through the rear exit. He had an empty trash can in his hand.
“Troy, go through the side door! You can’t have that in the kitchen!” Keisha howled. Shavon laughed again.
“For a college boy, you mighty dense,” Shavon said.
Troy started to retreat. “Yeah, but in two more years this college boy will be an accountant, and you will still be flipping omelets. Guess we’ll see who is dense then, huh?” Troy said.
“Yeah, but you still gonna be dense. Probably be doing books for the Russian mob, thinking they just really successful caviar importers!” Shavon said.
“Whatever, Treasure Troll,” he said.
Keisha shook her head as Troy slipped out the back door. “Why do you pick at him? It just gets him all worked up,” she said to Shavon.
“That’s exactly why I do it. He always walk around here like his shit don’t stink.” Shavon pushed an errant lock of hair out of his eyes.
Keisha shook her head again and turned back to her crossword puzzle.
Shavon cleared his throat.
“Yeah?” Keisha said.
Shavon smiled, dropped his head and looked at his shoes for a moment before catching Keisha’s gaze. “So, I noticed we both off next Friday and, well, I mean, you know Kevin Hart is coming to the Scope, and I got some tickets, and I was just wondering if you wanted to go. I mean just as friends. Unless you wanna get buckwild, which in that case, I’m definitely down.”
“Shavon, you know I got my online classes and homework, and I’d have to get a sitter for Arian.” She crossed her arms.
Shavon put his chin on the bottom sill of the sliding window. “So that’s not a no,” he said as he gave her puppy-dog eyes.
Keisha rolled her own eyes and was about to say something else when the roaring of an engine drowned out her thoughts. Keisha turned and saw a big red rig ambling into the parking lot. It was just a rig with no trailer. Keisha watched as the trucker’s headlights illuminated the entire diner and chased away the shadows that seemed to congregate in the corners of the Shack. A tall, rangy white man got out of the rig and began a stiff-legged trot over to the Shack. Even though it was a cool autumn night, the trucker was clad in summer attire. A black T-shirt, a worn pair of blue jeans, and a greasy baseball cap completed his ensemble.
“Well, glad to see the redneck nation has sent their representative,” Shavon said just before the man entered the diner.
Keisha shot him a wicked glance but said nothing. The man sat at the counter and stretched his arms. She pulled out her pad and prepared to take his order.
“Hey there, how you doing, hon?” she said.
The man gave her the slightest of smiles. “All right, I guess. Can I get some scrambled eggs and hash browns and a cup of coffee?” His voice had a bit of a southern twang.
Keisha wrote down his order and turned to give it to Shavon. Troy entered the diner through the side door that led to the storeroom and began wiping down the tables that lined the walls.
Shavon took the order. “Hmm . . . the breakfast of champions,” he whispered.
The trucker yawned and extended his arms straight out behind him, lacing his fingers together as he stretched again.
“Huh. You mighty flexible there,” Keisha said.
The trucker smiled. “Twelve years of yoga will do that for you.”
Keisha raised her eyebrows.
“Yoga, huh?” she said with a smirk.
“Yeah, my ex got me started. Best thing she ever did besides leaving me,” the trucker said with a weary laugh.
The diner went quiet again save for the pop and sizzle of Shavon’s griddle. The Felix the Cat clock on the wall ticked away the minutes as the night chased the dawn. Keisha was trying to think of a four-letter word for physical discomfort when she felt goose bumps run up her neck. It was the unmistakable feeling of someone staring at you. She raised her head, fully expecting the trucker to be staring a hole through her. She instantly regretted making small talk with him. But when she did raise her head, the trucker was playing a game on his cell phone. She looked at the sliding window over the drink machine. Shavon was finishing up the trucker’s order. She looked to the right. Troy was concentrating on cleaning the last few tables in the back of the Shack.
Almost as an afterthought, she glanced toward the front windows of the Pancake Shack. What she saw made her jump.
There was a man staring at her through the window. He was wearing a long, weathered trench coat over a dingy white dress shirt, and loose-fitting black slacks. His face wasn’t pressed against the glass, and he wasn’t doing anything lascivious. He was just staring into the Shack. Staring at her. His sallow brown face was covered with a kinky black beard that looked like a map of England. His bald head was peppered with large, angry pimples. His eyes were bloodshot with watery gray pupils that seemed ready to float away.
The man noticed her noticing him staring and quickly dropped his gaze. He took his hands out of his pockets and entered the diner. He walked quickly but with a pronounced limp. He grimaced as he sat two seats down from the trucker and placed his palms on the counter. Keisha didn’t move immediately. There was an odor coming from the man that made her stomach quiver. Finally, she swallowed hard and went to take his order.
