Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 18 Read online

  On the evening that Charlotte died, a fierce summer storm was only helping to ravage my heart as she took her final labored breaths. I had been reading to her from a child's book of verse, something she loved very much near the end. The simple rhythms and images were a balm to her, the mix of fevers and medication making it hard for her to concentrate on anything too complex. There was not much else I could do except sit by her bed and keep her company, and by extension, keep myself as far away from the unbearable loneliness I knew was imminent. After she had given me what was to be her final lesson on my character in what was left of her voice, then a raspy gurgle, I got up and went to the window. I watched the trees whip around the dark and purple night as I thought of what she said. When I turned back to give my defense, she was unconscious, her body rising and falling, each breath as though it was being driven by the storm. I stood there watching and listening. It was all I could do. And for a moment, in between the terrible inhalations, I thought I could hear something calling to her, calling her name, as if to prepare her place in the beyond, to properly situate her in the invisible order of things and away from me forever.

  When it was over, I made all the necessary preparations. There was a small funeral which I expressly asked be done quickly and without much fuss. I managed as well as I could. The sadness was something I could easily name; but I could not pin it down, could not dissect its inner qualities and set it in the proper compartment of my heart. Rather, it fluttered wildly, like a butterfly in the killing jar.

  I soon found myself back in my study, examining my specimens, marking them, giving form to their genus, their species—their final and perfect name. But I found myself distracted by a feeling of unease. That sound of Charlotte's name from the aether rang in my head like a small bell.

  Then, one night in September as I was eating my dinner, I felt the ominous quiet of the house. I had just finished dessert when my spoon inadvertently tapped against the tea cup with a quiet ting. The sound reverberated in the room. A word flashed in my mind, nonsense at the time, but with perfect clarity. “Zingel.” I said it out loud, quietly, and then even quieter still, until it became a murmured chant. I felt as though I was falling into a sort of hypnosis and a slight panic rose in my chest. I quickly got up from the table and fled the room.

  I went outside on the landing and I breathed deep the cool pre-autumn air. The sun was fading at the top of the hill and the reddish light seemed to be bouncing down the street like a child's ball. I felt my panic subside, but the strange word remained lodged in a tiny recess in my mind. I sensed it as though it was alive.

  I began to spend more and more time alone with my work. I had a deadline for the museum—a perfect excuse. However, the truth was I dared not stop to mourn. I could not let go, and so believed the less I thought of Charlotte, the less real her death would be. But the ache of it pulsed inside of everything and I could not leave the house, afraid that the very wind would carry her name. Certain things began to remind me of her, things that were inconsequential: the familiar rustling of paper, the flint of a match being struck, the clink of a glass. And I would think for a moment I heard something else in these minute details of the house.

  Another night, over dinner, I was again alone at the long table, the quiet of the house started to form into a dense reality all its own. Eventually, unable to stand it any longer and having barely touched my food, I left the room. As I walked down the hall to my study, I became aware of my footsteps on the floor and in my mind, strange words called out, “Crathen. Cruthen. Creethen."

  Each day these incidences grew in frequency. One Sunday afternoon I was in the living room reading the newspaper, trying to take a break from my work. My foot was pressed up against a small, round, padded ottoman. It slipped under my foot and moved a few inches across the wood floor with a slight squeak. Involuntarily I yelled out, “Phwist!” That same evening while washing my hands, the sounds of the water, something I'd rarely taken notice of before, boomed in my head, “Shister! Slaster! Floost! Floust!"

  * * * *

  About a month from the evening of my first outburst, I was in my study looking at some plant specimens that Charlotte had pressed for me. She had often helped me as she had a peculiar gift for preserving the plants so that they appeared still imbued with life. It was impossible to look at them and not think of her. I felt a terrible anxiety. I was always neat and organized, but the room appeared as if someone had been looking for something in haste. Papers were strewn about, books open on chairs and the floor. As I looked at the ephemera of my work, I realized I hadn't seen any of my colleagues in some time. There used to be many visitors, even in the final days of Charlotte's life. My work was always consuming, yet I considered myself a genial man. But now I felt the weight of my isolation and what seemed a private voluntary exile from my known world.

  An intense déjà vu came over me and I felt again the immense and living quiet of the house. A chill ran through me and I began to think of all the strange words that were haunting me. I began to jot down some of the words in a notebook. No longer merely echoes in my head, I saw them as real things that could be noted, made record of. Looking at them in this way, they almost seemed to tremble on the page, as if filled with some animate force. They reminded me of something so familiar that I needed some distance to recall what it was.

  Each of these words I had written down was a designation for something unseen, some invisible property that I normally would never have noticed. Why would I notice them now, unless Charlotte's passing has opened some kind of window to the aether. And then it came to me: the words were names. Names of a type of thing belonging to another class, another kingdom. They were the names of all species of the spirit world, every kind of poltergeist, soul, daemon, angel. There was no known taxonomy for them. They were the invisible specimens of the supernal, and I would make it my new task to classify them.

  * * * *

  Every moment became a search for these names and I discovered them everywhere. They were in the crackling of a fire or the snap in a flickering of a candle. Creaks within the hinges of doors, and the steam of a boiling tea kettle. Sometimes, on a very cold morning, when the heat from within the house was just so, they groaned out their names in the crystals that formed on the windows. They were in the swirl of fallen leaves during a windy day and in the dial tone of the telephone. It was then I realized that since the moment Charlotte passed away, I had never been alone. A doorway had opened and the rush of the spirit world was falling in and I alone could hear them, and, more importantly, I could hear their names.

  * * * *

  I wondered where in this hierarchy of names Charlotte's own existed. So I concentrated even harder, trying to hear my wife's name in the press of a floorboard—Skark, the clanging of a radiator pipe—Toong, or even the ticking of the great clock in the hall—Ceekock.

  I spent my days wandering the house, listening for sounds I had never been aware of before. When I turned on a light, I noticed the chain of the pull-switch rattled ever so lightly against the base of the lamp, calling out “Dededil.” My pencil sharpener made a small squeak when I turned its blades, saying “Eanther.” The house became a living conduit. Every small and insignificant detail alerted me to the spirits that resided here. I believed that if I could locate Charlotte, hear her name in the din of the mundane, I could locate her in the organization of spirit world and she would never be lost to me. Then I would be free and I could return to my life and the work that I loved. But I became fearful of every sound, afraid of the spirit hiding within and my own powerlessness to scrutinize them. As I formed the proper name of the phantom in my mind, another would soon reveal itself and I would have to keep listening. I did not understand their relationship to each other, to their place in the great taxonomy of the spirit world. But I kept listening, probing, dissecting every noise.

  * * * *

  December descended upon the house with its damp and its chill. The wind outside was an amplifier of the names of the
spirits. One day I dared to enter the emptiness of Charlotte's sick room. There was a window that made a delicate whistle when the wind blew just so—Slewee. I listened again for my beloved, the sound of her name a possibility and a dread. I sat on the bed, her bed, and I closed my eyes and concentrated. I could feel the presence of the inexplicable forms that had invaded my home, but of her I could detect nothing. I began to feel foolish, wondering how much this was in my mind alone. I decided to seal the room up and never return. I had to let her go, and this would be the place to start.

  I was getting up to leave when I heard a kind of hissing. I wasn't sure where it was coming from so I listened deeper until I could track its source. It was coming from Charlotte's radio. The radio had been on all this time, all these months; an ambient noise in the crevices of the silence. I was about to turn it off but instead I turned the volume up. A piano concerto, a lovely piece, with a swell of violins in the background, was being broadcast. It was difficult to hear, though, as the radio still did a poor job of receiving a signal. The music faded in and out with a chorus of static as an accompaniment. I decided I would take the radio with me.

  I took the radio into my study. Even though I spent much time here, the room was becoming unkempt; dusty, gloomy, and cold.

  The wind bumped against the large windows as if to say it didn't need a secret name to make itself known. I plugged in the radio, and, turning it on, found the station came in perfectly. A great wave of relief swept over me and I felt I had awakened from some terrible dream. The music became a barrier between me and all the other sounds of the house. I let it fill me, a perfect thing needing no taxonomy, no name, no classification.

  As I listened, I opened a notebook sitting on the desk. I gazed at it and then, as I began to read, I felt dizzy. I was astounded by what I saw. I remembered writing them down, but I had not gone back and looked at the whole of my work. I felt as though I was looking at myself from a distance, seeing an obsessed and lonely man who had gone quite mad. There in the notebook was page after page filled with those terrible names; “Arabal, Astonel, Azmodum ... Berium, Bolion, Burdrial ... Caraton, Cealdon, Crotholon ... Drafton, Duurel, Darshon...” Name after name after name, written in my precise script, each letter like a seal, a banishment. My head was spinning, the music from the radio filling my ears as nonsense, my own illness now a clear fact in my mind.

  Charlotte was dead and gone and this had been my dreadful mourning. I was just about to begin tearing the notebook apart, when the radio tuned out, and, for a brief moment, there, in the deepest part of the static, in the place between what is perceived and what is discarded by the mind as mere noise, I heard them. I heard the names and I comprehended them. And then I wept.

  For I knew now there was no order to be made. The names were infinite, stretching forever into the endless space between frequencies, between worlds. I knew it was not Charlotte who had let them into our home, but me. I had been desperate to hear the name of my beloved, to finally convince her that I knew her true place in the order of my heart, and had discovered instead that in the ordinary details of our waking, every sound is a tension coiled around a secret name, belonging to no class, no order, no genus, except that of the dead.

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  Son of a Bitch

  Tsultrim Dorjee

  When we sleep together

  I hear—voices in the windows boots marching on scrap metal or a lit match in a hand—ful of pills. And the damn phone ringing. There's really nothing left to this town.

  And it's every old bench. Where are my pencils? I want to draw you a picture of the back of your head, as you sleep in the arms of another man. Help me lift this box of letters, I'm walking out of these walls and holl—owed clouds into a sound;

  that hasn't ended.

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  The Fabricant of Marvels

  Sarah Micklem

  From Anticlimactic Folk Tales of the Isle of Abigomas, collected by Dr. Marcel Auerle

  He was renowned in his day, was Zil, the fabricant of marvels. Children would disappear on their way to school in Lynka only to reappear days later in Lyslee hanging by their dirty collars from the fists of truant collectors, all because they wanted to peek at Zil's aviary of mechanical birds through the high barred window of his workshop. One boy came back to school with muddy trousers, claiming that he'd seen Zil sitting on the floor of his workshop crying, with his automata hopping about him just like real birds and pecking and twittering and cocking their heads to look at him through obsidian eyes. Each of his birds was animated by a special chirp. They did not live as long as real birds, for once they wound down, they could not be wound up again, but if you could have afforded to buy one and hold it in your hand you would have felt the beating of a mechanical heart—so rapid it was more of a whirring than a beating—and the little bird would have panted and sung its one song. Zil made birds of silver and of gold, but the costliest automata of all had the bright iridescent plumage of real birds, sold to Zil by hunters from the distant Keenwood, where songbirds could still occasionally be found in those days.

  Zil dissected the songbirds with his blunt-tipped fingers and sharp-tipped instruments, but he never could find where their flight was hiding and his birds could not fly. Which may be why the boy saw him crying, but if you'd asked Zil, he could not have told you why he cried, for he'd forgotten. His brow was by then as furrowed as a walnut from peering through and over his spectacles. It seems he'd mislaid his memory—this man who had never mislaid anything, for his workshop was a marvel in itself, every tool of diminishing size from small to exceedingly small in its place of equal size, no larger and no smaller than required, so he could put his hand to anything he needed at once.

  First he forgot to eat when he was working, and his wife would have to come into his workshop with fragrant soup to recall him to this necessity. Then he forgot that his wife was his wife, mistaking her for some sort of assistant. She found it irksome that she had to remind him so frequently that they had been married long enough for a white hair to grow all the way down to her waist. Next he began to forget proper names, even the name of his richest patron, who had purchased orchestras of birds for various festivities, with which to adorn cornucopias, carriages, and caryatids (and it was said the birds spied on the rich man's mistresses from perches atop their towering wigs).

  Zil went to the slave market to buy a nomenclator to keep by his side at all times, whose duty it was to whisper the names of those Zil met in his left ear—or was it his wife who served as nomenclator? He quite forgot, and soon he had misplaced his nouns as well, so that he could not complete a sentence without assistance, but such assistance was not always at hand, for his wife left him when he failed to remember her name, which may be why the boy saw him sitting on the floor and crying.

  Truth be told, Zil's memory was not mislaid, but stolen by a cunning thief. This thief ran off with his wife as well, it was rumored, and as the thief was Time (you will not be surprised to learn), I do believe it.

  Although Zil the fabricant is gone, and his marvelous birds are gone, and his workshop was looted by boys and creditors before his last breath had left the room, if you looked for the street in Lyslee that used to be called Jewel Street and is now called Third Street, where all the buildings jut out over the sidewalks face to face like pugnacious brawlers, if you passed the greengrocer with the most perfect pyramids of lemons on a green barrow outside the window and went through the door with one broken hinge and climbed the stairs (none of which are the same height, so watch your feet!), and if you were then to sift the soft grit from the four corners of a dusty room, you might find an exceedingly tiny wrench, a golden gear smaller than the head of a pin, an iridescent blue feather, or an obsidian eye.

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  The Juniper Tree

  Angela Slatter

  It begins with the tree.

  Branches reach toward the sky; the tree is quite straight. Its roots
, conversely, go deep into the soil and spread out, consolidating their hold on the earth, making their foundation unassailable.

  It is the tree that watches over all. It was here before the people and the house, frosted brown and white like a cake; it will remain after they are dust and ashes. It watches and winds its way through their lives in much the same way as its roots wind their way into the soil; it is indelible.

  The tree holds many stories, they lie in its trunk like age rings. Its memory is a long thing. Some years it sleeps, some years it wakes and watches and listens. Some years it remembers the lives it has given and tasted and taken...

  * * * *

  There was a woman, once, young and pale and very lovely. Her husband had thought a young bride ideal for the getting of heirs. A more robust girl would have been better, he knew, but her green eyes and dark hair caught him. There was nothing else for it but to make her his wife and pray there would be children.

  * * * *

  He loved her dearly; she was frail but this did not stop his efforts to plant his seed. The man spent as much time riding his wife as he did his horse and to far less effect—at least on the horse he travelled, conducting business and growing his fortune. His wife, however, seemed to be a barren field, a bad investment.

  The juniper tree stood in the back garden. The wife loved its spreading branches and the whispers it made when breezes sang through its limbs and leaves. Of the many gifts her husband made her, her favourite was the simplest. A swing was hung from the strongest branch and on summer evenings the wife would sit and swing, dangling her delicate feet as she hung suspended above the ground, dress catching the air and fluttering behind her. The tree spoke to her and it was words of love she heard, before her husband collected her and took her once again to bed.