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  GIFTS FOR THE ONE

  WHO COMES AFTER

  BY HELEN MARSHALL

  INTRODUCTION BY ANN VANDERMEER

  ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRIS ROBERTS

  ChiZine Publications

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  GIFTS FOR THE ONE

  WHO COMES AFTER

  “Helen Marshall is a writer who creates real people in real situations, then uses the fantastic to pry her way inside her readers’ ribcages and break us wide open.”

  —Neil Gaiman, international bestselling author of The Ocean at the End of the Lane

  “Helen Marshall whispers in your ear when she fits the noose around your neck, filling you with wonder and dread, urging you into a startling, beautiful darkness. These stories—which sometimes feel more like spells—are the very best kind of unsettling.”

  —Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon, The Wilding, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk

  “Helen Marshall is one of my favorite living writers. Her elegant, grotesque stories are best encountered like this, gathered together in a book and in conversation with each other; only then can you appreciate the staggering variety of her imagination. What unifies them, and what elevates them from being merely great fantasy to being literature, is the ache of human experience that informs them all: the yearning; the heartbreak; the desperate, misinformed love. This is life, in all its beauty and sorrow.”

  —Nathan Ballingrud, award-winning author of North American Lake Monsters

  “Helen Marshall’s Gifts for the One Who Comes After is in turns chilling, heart-wrenching and uplifting. Marshall has a way with words that makes even the most peculiar seem possible, and the stories here are each so layered with character and meaning, they are like perfect, condensed novels.”

  —Kaaron Warren, award-winning author of Through Splintered Walls

  PRAISE FOR

  HAIR SIDE, FLESH SIDE

  “Sometimes a book comes along that is so original, so vibrantly alive, so beautifully imagined and so much a law unto itself that the only comment or advice a reviewer can offer is to say: go read it.”

  —Nina Allan, Strange Horizons

  “Stories subtle and unsettling: Helen Marshall clothes the uncanny in new flesh and then makes it bleed.”

  —Kelly Link, author of Pretty Monsters and Stranger Things Happen

  “Sometimes you hear people talking about the new face of horror. Well huddle closer, children . . . Hair Side, Flesh Side is it. . . . Marshall’s stories are frightening, touching, quirky, sexy and deeply lyrical.”

  —“Best F/SF Books of 2012,” January Magazine

  “Hair Side, Flesh Side is a strong first collection of speculative fiction borne out of faded manuscripts, old libraries and the memories of the past. However, it’s how Marshall sees us reconcile these ghosts with the world of the living that give her stories the weight of immediacy. She is a talent to be discovered.”

  —The National Post

  “Helen Marshall’s debut collection reads like a fanciful walk through her dark imagination. . . . Strangely touching, disturbing and weird as hell, Marshall proves herself a potent new talent.”

  —Rue Morgue Magazine

  “A tour de force of imagination, this remarkable debut collection uses the conventions of dark fantasy and horror as the framework for some of speculative fiction’s most unusual stories. VERDICT Fans of experimental fiction and exceptional writing should find a wealth of enjoyment here.

  —Library Journal, starred review

  DEDICATION

  To Laura:

  My gift to you.

  I owe you much more.

  But you already knew that.)

  EPIGRAPH

  We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march.

  — Sir Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Advance Praise for Gifts for the One Who Comes After

  Praise for Hair Side, Flesh Side

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  The Hanging Game

  Secondhand Magic

  I’m the Lady of Good Times, She Said

  Lessons in the Raising of Household Objects

  All My Love, a Fishhook

  In the Year of Omens

  The Santa Claus Parade

  The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass

  Death and the Girl from Pi Delta Zeta

  Crossroads and Gateways

  Ship House

  A Brief History of Science Fiction

  Supply Limited, Act Now

  We Ruin the Sky

  In the Moonlight, the Skin of You

  The Gallery of the Eliminated

  The Slipway Grey

  Acknowledgements

  Previously Published

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  Copyrightt

  Also Available from ChiZine Publications

  INTRODUCTION:

  STORIES THAT HURT SO GOOD

  BY ANN VANDERMEER

  Helen Marshall has an uncanny way of getting under the readers’ skin with her stories. We are itching and uncomfortable and yet . . . we are attracted to the scratch. Gifts for the One Who Comes After is Helen Marshall’s second short story collection. Her first, Hair Side, Flesh Side, was embraced by readers all over and met with critical success. It dealt mostly with themes concerning the individual. Those stories were focused on the internal conversations we have with ourselves as we try to make sense of the world around us. Some of those stories explored how we fit into the universe.

  In contrast, this collection deals with the connections we strive to make with others—those close to us and those that are merely in our way. Within these stories we have to deal with the legacies of the past—the histories of our ancestors, families and neighbourhoods. How do we maintain those traditions and yet still move confidently into the future? Will maintaining those traditions hold us back? And if we do abandon them will we lose something ultimately priceless in the process?

  The collection opens with “The Hanging Game,” which centres on what looks like a harmless children’s game. Yet this game is deeply ingrained in the history of this small town community. So it’s much more than just a children’s game; it’s the town’s heritage as well.

  If we are not deeply connected to others, if we push them away when they come close, what are we left with . . . an empty life? Perhaps as empty as Leah in “In the Year of Omens,” who is waiting for the right signal. She wills it to come as it came to all the others. “There had always been signs in the world.” But Leah is still looking for hers. She does not want to be left behind.

  There are things better left unsaid—left undone—things that will cut you down in your prime if you give voice to them. Things that hang there on the periphery of your vision—you want to look but as soon as you turn your head, they disappear. As Melanie says in “Supply Limited, Act Now,” “Why ya always gotta go doing that? Why ya always gotta go making things small just so that you can grow up? It doesn’t have to be like that, you know? Why do ya wanna go on being the kids that just wreck everything because ya don’t know better?”

  The characters in Marshall’s stories would do well to heed the advice of those that went before. They should think twice before leaving their long-held beliefs and tra
ditions behind, because if they do discard these precious values, what will they be left with? In “Crossroads and Gateways” we hear from Dajan, “If only it were so easy to change the past.” He struggles to make sense of what is expected of him. Yet he takes the next step. It is the only thing he can do.

  So, let’s talk about the legacy of the family. “Ship House” is full of family obligations and expectations, however, “It was home, it was home, but it didn’t feel like home any longer.” Eileen reluctantly returns to Ship House only to be surprised at the affection she feels, instead of feeling repelled. “Now Ship House felt strange on the inside to Eileen: too small and too large at the same time.” But still, she can’t turn away.

  These tales demonstrate how families are the most complicated of relationships. Marshall’s characters go through so many stages of connection to reach out to each other. In “The Gallery of the Eliminated” we are introduced to a different kind of natural history exhibit that makes you question your place in the wider world. You think about the inheritance you will leave once you are gone, “It’s bewildering, you know. To realize that you are next. Link by link, generation by generation, the chain of your people are yanked into death. And you are next—the link before you? Gone. Your last protection. But losing a child is different. It’s like seeing the end of the chain. Watching it dangle over the abyss.” And yet in “The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass” we meet Danny who is only trying to figure out what went wrong in his parents’ past so he can fix it and make everything right again. So, you see . . . it goes in both directions.

  Then there are the stories where the familiar is strange and the strange becomes familiar, the memories are locked inside finding their way out when visuals stimulate the memory. Whether you are dating Death or trying to know and understand who your parents were before you were born; whether you are finally giving away the secrets of who you are or disappearing through someone else’s magic, it’s all about the connections with others. Families, neighbours, friends, lovers and exes. You can’t imagine your life without them even as they seem to want to change you or to destroy who you really are. Or maybe they know you better than you do and you’ve only been fooling yourself. Even when you try to escape your destiny, it comes back with a vengeance and claims you. That’s what these stories will do. They will claim you . . . and you will want them to do this. They will itch inside and out, but oh the feeling! Just as the song says, it will hurt so good when you can finally scratch that itch.

  “I give you to Hangjaw, the Spearman, the Gallows’ Burden.

  I give you to the Father of Bears.”

  THE HANGING GAME

  There was a game we used to play when we were kids—the hanging game, we called it. I don’t know where it started, but I talked to a girl down in Lawford once, and she remembered playing it with jump ropes when she was about eleven, so I guess we weren’t the only ones. Maybe Travers learned it from Dad, and from father to father, forever on up. I don’t know. We couldn’t use jump ropes, though, not those of us whose fathers worked the logging camps, climbing hundred-foot cedar spars and hooking in with the high-rigging rope just so to see that bright flash of urine as they pissed on the men below.

  For us the hanging game was a sacred thing, the most sacred thing we knew save for one other, which I’ll have to tell you about too, and that was the bears.

  What you need to know was that north of Lawford where we lived—Travers and I, Momma, Dad sometimes, when he wasn’t at the camps—that was a country of blue mountains and spruce and cedar so tall they seemed to hold up the sky, what the old men called Hangjaw’s country. They said the bears were his, and the hanging game was his. We all had to play, cheating death, cheating Hangjaw but paying him off at the same time in whatever way we could. Living that close to death made you kind of crazy. Take Dad, for instance. Dad’s kind of crazy was the bears.

  I remember one summer he killed nine of them, which was still two short of old Sullivan, the skidder man, but enough of a show of guts, of tweaking Hangjaw’s beard, to keep him drinking through the winter following. He’d caught the first one the traditional way, see, but he didn’t clean it how he was supposed to. He just left it out on the hill and when the next one came he shot it clean through the eye with his Remington Model Seven. He took another seven throughout the week, just sitting there on the porch with a case of beer, just waiting for when the next one came sniffing along, then down it went until the whole place smelled thick with blood and bear piss, and Dad decided it was enough.

  But we were kids and we couldn’t shoot bears, so for us it was the hanging game. That was the kind of crazy we got into. Bears and hanging.

  The first time I played it I was just a skinny kid of twelve with her summer freckles coming in. I remember I was worried about having my first period. Momma had started dropping hints, trying to lay out some of the biology of how it all worked, but the words were so mysterious I couldn’t tell what she was saying was going to happen to me. It scared the bejesus out of me, truth to tell.

  That was when Travers took me to play the hanging game.

  He was fifteen, copper-headed like me, just getting his proper grown-up legs under him. He brought a spool of high-rigging rope he’d scavenged from the shed, and we went down to the hollow, my hand in his, a stretch of rope with thirteen coils hanging like a live thing in his other hand. It had to be high-rigging rope, he told me, not jump rope like I guess they used in Lawford. High-rigging rope for the logger kids for whom the strength of rope was the difference between life and death.

  Travers stood me up on the three-legged stool that was kept for that very purpose. I remember the wind tugging around at the edges of my skirt, me worried he might see something I didn’t want him to see, so I kept my fist tight around the hemline, tugging it down. But Travers, he was my brother and he wasn’t looking. He tossed the end of the rope over the lowest hanging branch, easy, and then he fitted the cord around my neck.

  “Close your eyes, Skye,” he said. “That’s a good girl.”

  There were rules for the hanging game. This is what they were. It had to be high-rigging rope, like I said, and you had to steal it. Also it had to be an ash tree. Also you had to do it willingly. No one could force you to play the hanging game. It couldn’t be a dare or a bluff or a tease, or else it wouldn’t work.

  I remember the rope rubbing rough against my neck. It was a sort of chafing feeling, odd, like wearing a badly knit scarf, but it didn’t hurt, not at first. I let go of my dress, but by then the breeze had stilled anyway. My eyes were closed tight, because that was how you played the hanging game, we all knew that. We all knew the rules. No one had to teach them to us.

  “Take my hand now, okay, Skye?”

  Then Travers’s hand was in mine, and it was as rough and callused as the rope was. It felt good to hold his hand, but different than on the way over. Then he had been my brother. Now he was Priest.

  “I’ve got you, Skye, I’ve got you. Now you know what to do, right?”

  I nodded, tried to, but the rope pulled taut against my throat. Suddenly I was frightened, I didn’t want to be there. I tried to speak, but the words got stuck. I remember trying to cough, not being able to, the desperation of trying to do something as basic as coughing and failing.

  “Shh,” murmured Travers. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t be afraid. You can’t be afraid now, understand? Be a brave girl with me, Skye, a brave girl.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Calmed myself. Let a breath go whistling out through my lips.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Now lean to me.”

  This was the tricky part.

  The stool tilted and moved under my feet. It was an old thing, and I could tell the joints were loose just by the feel of it. That movement was sickening to me, but I did like Travers said, I leaned toward him, his fingers warm against palms going cold with fear. I leaned until the rope was tight against my throat, drawing a straig
ht line, no slack, to where it hung around the tree branch, my body taut at an angle, my toes pointed to the ground. The edge of the stool pressed into the soft space on my foot between the ball and the heel.

  “Good girl,” Travers told me. “Good.”

  God, it hurt. The rope cut into my throat, and I knew there would be bruises there tomorrow I’d have to cover up. But this was how we played.

  I knew the words that were coming next but even so, they sounded like someone else was saying them, not Travers. “Skye Thornton,” he said, “I give you to Hangjaw, the Spearman, the Gallows’ Burden. I give you to the Father of Bears.” And he touched my left side with the hazel wand he had brought for that purpose. “Now tell me what you see.”

  And so I did.

  I don’t remember what I told Travers.

  None of us ever knew what it was we saw, and no one was ever allowed to talk about it after the fact. Those were the rules. I remember some of the stories though.

  When Signy played the hanging game she told us about how her husband in ten years’ time would die high-climbing a tall spruce spar while he was throwing the rope and getting the steel spurs in. Ninety feet from the earth it’d get hit by lightning, crazy, just like that, and he’d be fried, still strapped to the top of the thing. But the problem was she never said who that husband was gonna be, and so no one would ever go with her, no one ever took her out to the Lawford Drive-In Theatre where the rest of us went when the time came, in case she wound up pregnant by accident and the poor boy sonuva had to hitch himself to that bit of unluckiness.

  That first time I wasn’t afraid so much of playing the hanging game, I was afraid of what I was going to see in Travers’s eyes after. I was afraid of what he might know about me that I didn’t know about myself.

  When he took the noose off after and he had massaged the skin on my neck, made sure I was breathing right, I remember opening my eyes, thinking I was going to see it then. But Travers looked the same as ever, same Travers, same smile, same brother of mine. And I thought, well, I guess it’s not so bad, then, whatever piece of luck it is that’s coming my way.