Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 24 Read online

  I had the sense that the brown room had always been here inside my head, the program always running. I simply hadn't noticed before. Now the door to it was wedged open.

  I found I couldn't look away from the screen while all this was happening, but what did that matter when the program was so good? In the background, though, beyond my field of vision, I could hear the unmistakable sound of someone rattling the front door. Rattling and scraping. The dream went on and on, vivid, uplifting, but inexorable.

  Later, noises on the street outside roused me again. It sounded like Morgan had come to pay a visit—an unwelcome one. Oddly, though, I couldn't open my eyes. The dream kept playing.

  "No!” my mother yelled. “I won't let you in this time, you monster!"

  "You'd better leave,” said my dad.

  "Or what?” said Morgan with a laugh. “What are you going to do, Derek, call the police?"

  I heard something like a struggle. Then Morgan started chanting.

  "Wall socket! Rusty hinge! Wall socket! Rusty hinge!"

  My mother burst into tears.

  Minutes later, I heard the sound of my room door banging open. Awful silence stretched while the dream played silently against my leaden eyelids. I watched myself winning some kind of award and speaking to a crowd. My body refused to move.

  Morgan's gravelly voice came again, from close up this time.

  "I'm very disappointed with you, kid,” he said. “I thought you'd last a lot longer. I was going to string the bastards out for weeks this time. But then, I never guessed you'd make such a fucking mess of things either."

  His feet creaked on the floorboards.

  "Hah! Is this the check? Well fuck me, kid, you actually got it!” Paper rustled. “I can't bank it sadly. It's illegible. Looks like I'm going to have to find some other way to settle accounts. Particularly given the damages you incurred.” He paused. “Luckily, I came prepared."

  I heard something being unscrewed.

  "How'd you like a nice cup of tea?"

  I felt a plastic cup touch my lip and Morgan's thick fingers on my chin.

  Panic leant me strength. I managed to reach up and struggle weakly with one hand against Morgan's chest while the liquid reached my mouth.

  In the dream, the lock on the front door broke with an audible crack. Roger let himself in, a large print of the burned out toaster under one arm. He crouched next to the TV and started taping the picture over the beautiful images on the screen. The sight of it sucked the strength from me, just as it had when I'd seen it in Roger's album. It burned in my mind like black fire—like despair.

  At the same time, my other outstretched hand reached the heavy shock-watch on my bedside table. I grabbed it and pushed every gram of strength I had into swinging it up to clout Morgan on the side of the head.

  "Oww!” Morgan shouted, dropping the cup. “Fucking bastard!” I spat the liquid out of my mouth at where I dearly hoped his face was.

  With a supreme burst of effort, I managed to prize my eyes open. The world was grey fuzz. Meanwhile the dream kept playing, superimposed on my sight.

  Roger tssked to himself. His picture kept sliding off the screen.

  The massive blur that was Morgan wiped its face and strode back toward the bed. He grabbed my jaw again, much harder this time.

  "Drink up,” he growled.

  At that moment, my mother lunged into the room, her face gaunt and ashen, a frying pan clutched in white-knuckled hands. She brought it crashing down against Morgan's head. He groaned and reeled.

  "Get up!” she gasped.

  She dragged me out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind us. I staggered across the landing, supported solely by her arm. At the same time, my father marched up the stairs in the other direction, a garden rake in his hand, his face a death mask. He stomped past us, headed for the bedroom.

  "Hurry,” he urged.

  "Stupid bitch!” Morgan roared.

  He hurled the bedroom door open and confronted Dad coming the other way.

  "You stupid fucking assholes!” he yelled. “Think what you're fucking doing. Think what the penalty will be."

  We kept moving.

  Behind us, my father made a weak swipe with the rake that Morgan fended off with a single blunt arm.

  "What choice has he got?” said Morgan. “Did you think about that? Where's he supposed to go?"

  I could still taste the tea on my lips. In my head, Roger fiddled with the tape. He had one side of the terrible image fixed in place again.

  My mother and I reached the hall at the bottom of the stairs. We made our way down it, but at the doorway to the brown room, I couldn't help but look to see if Roger was really there.

  He wasn't. Instead, the Joggly Horse was on. It looked straight at me, capering. Dream and reality synchronized into a single chilling image. The ghostly Roger fixed his picture in place over the screen at last. Simultaneously, the Joggly Horse got brighter. The burned out toaster didn't hurt quite so much while I was looking at the horse, I realized. I could just keep watching. The pain might go away. Something calm and heavy started settling inside me.

  I heard a giggle and realized then that like me, my mother had stopped in the doorway to watch. Her head hung on one side like something broken. A stupid smile played on her lips even as tears welled in her eyes.

  "Go,” she whispered.

  In the background, Morgan fought my father back without even touching him. He simply repeated two words over and over.

  "Rusty hinge! Rusty hinge!"

  My father wilted under the onslaught like school lettuce.

  "Please,” mother begged, almost silently.

  I tore my eyes away from the horse and with feeble steps made for the door. I pushed it open to where Morgan's fancy car was parked outside. I stumbled across and leant against it while I fought for control of my body. In my head, Roger's picture slid off a second time. He turned and looked straight at me.

  I saw that hunger in his face again that I'd noticed at the house, but brazen this time, not disguised by any pretense of humanity. Meeting his eyes was like staring down the hole at the center of a tenement stairwell.

  "You're making this hard for all of us, you know,” he said.

  That was enough to get me moving. I zigzagged down the street like a drunk, dressed in my pajamas.

  Where was I supposed to go? I had no clothes and no money. I'd find something, I told myself. The Watch Boys knew all the best places in town to hide.

  I careened down the street away from Factory Row, pushing off the terrace walls to stay upright and ducked into a neighbor's garden alley just in time as Morgan stormed out of the house.

  He stared furiously up and down the street but failed to spot me in the shadows. He climbed into his car and started cruising slowly down the street in my direction.

  I squeezed against the alley wall as Morgan slid by, craning his head from side to side. I sagged as soon as he was past, exhausted, but too scared to stop for long, or even to shut my eyes. Inside my head, Roger was still hard at work, yanking more black tape off his reel with ever increasing violence.

  I needed somewhere to hide and instantly thought of the old bike shelter at the bottom of the Smiths’ garden. The Smiths were in their seventies and had let their property go to seed a long time ago. They never used the shelter any more. I knew—it was where I'd used to go to smoke.

  I made it to the shelter without incident but spent the afternoon that followed in torment. Chill autumn winds cut through my meager garments and numbed my feet. I struggled to comprehend the monstrous things I'd seen and heard, while shutting the eager photographer out of my head at the same time. Fear of Morgan kept me lucid.

  However, with the night, the temperature fell even further and I couldn't stand it any more. Worse even than the cold was the uncertainty about my parents. Had they escaped? What were the terrible penalties Uncle Morgan had referred to? Drawn like a moth to a flame, I snuck back to the house to find out if they wer
e okay.

  I climbed over the wall from the neighbor's garden and peered in through the window to the brown room. Morgan sat there between my parents like a stone, arms folded, a thunderous scowl on his face. My parents, thin grey things that they were, sagged in their chairs and chuckled listlessly at the antics on television as if nothing had happened—their eyes lost and glassy.

  I regarded that cuckoo in my family's home, his ogre's face lit by the sickly blue glow of the screen and understood their relationship properly for the first time. He'd never come to visit my parents, or at least not since they'd been young themselves. He'd come to keep an eye on me. To farm me. How many other young people in town was he uncle to, I wondered. How many Watch Boys?

  I contemplated murder then. I would like to say that the constant threat of that desolate picture in my head drove me to it, but it would not be true. At that moment, I simply wanted Morgan dead.

  I slid back into the dark and headed across to our garden shed. There would be weapons there—better ones than the rake my father had chosen. I pictured the long pruning shears, and how satisfying they'd look sticking out of my so-called uncle's barrel chest.

  I scraped back the flimsy wooden door as quietly as I could and scanned the gloomy interior. The shears hung on the back wall.

  As I stepped inside to grab them, my foot hit something large and soft. I crouched and found a bag sitting there. I shifted it to a shaft of moonlight. It was my sports bag from school.

  Inside lay folded clothes and a small roll of money. A very short note sat on top, scrawled in my mother's ragged, but still recognizable hand.

  Just GO

  It was signed Mum and Dad with an X underneath.

  Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. They'd guessed I'd come back. They'd guessed what I'd try. Perhaps they'd even tried it once themselves. The rage seeped out of me as fast as it had come, replaced by a knot of resolve. I hefted the bag and slipped back out of the garden. I had no idea of where I was going, but wherever it was, it had to be better than here.

  I changed in the shadows, crept out to the street, and made my way down Factory Row feeling like an un-tethered balloon, my life receding beneath me. If I walked quickly, I could still catch the midnight bus. In the dark soil of my fear and sadness, a bud of excitement bloomed. The future wasn't set. My TV show might still pan out any number of ways.

  In my head, the picture of the toaster slid off the screen for the last time and settled gently to the floor.

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  Dusking by Liz Williams

  You don't go dusking when the moon is dark, everyone knows that. Too many things waiting in the shadows, coming to cling to your little light, coming to bite and snap. But when the moon is full or new, that's the time to go dusking, and that's when you find all the young couples out in the parks and on the downs, dressed in their Sunday best, carrying candles in a globe of glass, chasing spirits under the oaks.

  We didn't have such practices in Greenwich. It was too close to the river, but when my parents died and I was sent to live with my aunt in Blackheath, it was all the rage. One could buy trapping globes in the local market, in a variety of pleasing colours. I remember that in the year of my arrival at my aunt's, blue was very popular, but then, it was during the summer and as the winter months drew on, the blue globes were put away and red ones took their place.

  I was too young to go dusking, my aunt said. I begged and pleaded, but she refused, and took to locking me into my bedchamber early in the evening, with a supply of improving literature. My aunt was devout, fervently so, and she disapproved of dusking; it encouraged the Others, she said, and that would never do. Perhaps if I had been a boy, she might have relented.

  Of course, the more she disapproved, the wilder I was to do it. I used to lean out of my bedchamber window with a jam jar with a candle in it, but I never attracted anything larger than moths. Only on one evening, close to the autumn equinox, did something else come close to the flame. I saw it briefly, because it veered away into the eaves as soon as it saw my face reflected in the light: it was a small, pinched thing, the colour of dead leaves, with little sharp hands. I often wonder what would have happened if I had caught it. You're supposed to let them go before sun up, but plenty of people forget and find a leaf in the bottom of the globe in the morning, or a bundle of twigs.

  This was not the only restriction placed upon me by my aunt. Education was frowned upon for girls, particularly any interest in the developing sciences. I was not to go to school, although she instructed me in Bible study at home. I was to learn needlework, and the basics of the culinary arts, and household management. I grew increasingly frustrated and resentful as the years went by. I remembered what I had learned in my mother's house, but I could do nothing with it: I had no books here, nor access to them.

  We only spoke of it once. I'd burned a saucepan, again. My aunt had not been pleased.

  "If you would just apply yourself to the rudiments, Emily..."

  I drew myself up. She was a short woman, and I was no taller, but I pretended. “I,” I said, “have Skills."

  My aunt looked me straight in the eye. “I,” she replied, “am well aware of that."

  Clearly, they were yet another thing of which she Disapproved.

  And so I began to plan. I despised the necessity; I found it tedious. But until I had reached my majority, this sort of thing had to be done.

  Then, when I was sixteen and some way along with the planning, a young man asked me to go dusking. Chaperoned, of course, by a friend of my aunt's—the young man's mother, in fact. Tristan was eminently suitable, my aunt considered, and I think she was hoping that he might offer for my hand and thus relieve her of the responsibility of myself. I was young, true, but better marry me off as soon as possible and find a more appropriate channel for those skills I'd mentioned.... There was a belief in those days that marriage, and all that it involved, could tame all those wild and latent powers that occasionally afflict young ladies.

  It wasn't a view to which I subscribed. But I thought I should like to go dusking, all the same.

  Green globes were very fashionable that year. When Tristan asked me to go dusking with him, autumn was sliding into winter; it was the end of October, and London had been touched by the edge of the great storms that had swept so much of the north and west. Wild nights, with the trees lashing against the windowpane, a thundering rain whipping even the sluggish Thames into a froth. I loved this weather, but it was clear that Tristan was deeply concerned about my health, that I might catch a chill.

  "You are so pale, Emily. Perhaps it's just that your hair is so very fair. But I worry that this weather will be too much for you."

  I could have told him not to fuss. I'd never had a day's sickness in my life—not a genuine one, anyway. Instead I lowered my eyelashes and murmured that it was so kind of him to worry. I could feel my aunt watching me as I did so; it's sad not to be trusted by your closest relatives. My plans took a little hop forward.

  "But I have a thick velvet cloak, Tristan, proof against even the harshest winter chill. And I think I—I should like to venture out. If you're quite sure it's safe, of course."

  Thoughts of the woods, of bone and blood and the wet black earth, the wind ripping through the trees ... I didn't know where these thoughts came from, but they were occupying more and more of my attention. I felt my aunt's gaze sharpen like an icicle, as though she could see into those thoughts. I lowered my head still further and gave a little I-must-be-brave sigh. Tristan put out a hand, as if to reassure me, but the icicle stare drove it back.

  "I shall be quite sure to protect you, Emily. I—I'd do anything.” He must have realised that he'd said enough after that, because he grew pink and flustered. I gazed at him admiringly, all the same, and the pinkness increased.

  "I should be pleased to see you settled, Emily,” my aunt said, stiffly, after Tristan had made a blushing farewell. I'd learned by now not to argue: it was pointless. Instea
d, I nodded.

  "I should like a home of my own, aunty.” It was quite true; I didn't have to say what sort of a home, after all.

  "Perhaps I have misjudged you,” my aunt said, but not as if she believed it. “I suppose you can't help your ancestry, after all. Your poor mother—"

  I dabbed my eyes with a lace handkerchief and I think that helped, too.

  Upstairs, in my own chamber, I looked out at the weather hissing across the heath, the gaslights blurring the city beyond.

  Her mother disappeared, you know.

  It broke her father's heart. He didn't live long after that.

  I'd heard the whole story by now, delivered in whispers behind the parlour door. My aunt had never liked my mother, I think, but I didn't know why. To my knowledge, Mama had never actually done anything; she was always so meek and mild, at least until she'd vanished. Run off with another man, my aunt had said, still whispering. But I didn't think that was true. And she'd looked so much like me: the same fair hair, almost white, the green eyes that in some lights took on an odd chestnut tinge, nearly red ... My mother had been considered a beauty.

  It is my opinion that my aunt thought that I had not shown enough proper mourning at my father's death. Children are frequently stupid; I should have made a better job of it.

  * * * *

  It rained solidly for a week, which meant that there could be no dusking anyway. The Others won't come out when it pours, although I've seen them at the edges of storms, flashing in the darkness like snatches of lightning. On the Friday night, however, the sky cleared over and a thin new moon rose over the heath. Tristan, still flustered, presented himself and his mother on the doorstep at six thirty in the evening. I waited modestly on the stairs, clutching my new globe, a stout jade-green affair with a night-light smouldering in it.

  "Emily? I thought, if you wish—ah, I see you are ready. It is quite chilly, we must make sure you wrap up warmly."