Arcane II (39 page)

It was too much. Dulcy was rolling now, not truly laughing, not out of joy or amusement, it was like the manual break had come off of a steam train and now it was rolling and there was nothing there to stop her. She snorted. She went down on one side and she started to crawl away, a pain had started in the side of her head and another was reaching like a sharp branch down her side. But she couldn’t stop. Oh God, she could not stop. She snorted again.
That bitch,
she thought,
that funny bitch is killing me
.

Her vision was going white. She fell down and her face was against the floor.

Behind her she vaguely heard Ingrid say, “I’m so sorry.” And she felt her sister’s bony fingers wrap around her throat and squeeze. The white was taking all of her vision now. She wanted to fight but she could do nothing, only watch as the white turned slowly to black. Just before it did she got a twinkle of something metal. Something just by her head.

***

Ingrid sat looking at the motionless, thin frame of her sister lying on the floor. The same words kept repeating in her mind over and over, and behind it two different answers.
How could I?

She was sick.

How could I?

Because you’re damned.

How could I?

She was suffering.

She found that she watched the body for a long time. She was reluctant to look away.

Was she dead?

How could I?

***

Ingrid became concerned that it might not have worked. Was her sister dead? She looked dead, but Ingrid’s senses couldn’t always be trusted. She figured she had better make sure.

She went close to her sister’s face, which was mostly flat against the floor. There was nothing left. No breath, no movement. Still, Ingrid poked Dulcy’s sunken-in cheek with her finger. Nothing. Then, just to be sure, she stuck the tip of her finger into the empty eye socket. She worked her finger part of the way in. That would definitely raise her, she thought. But it didn’t.

The inside of the eye socket felt like warm mud and when she brought her finger back out the tip was covered with a brownish liquid. Ingrid shuddered; something she didn’t think she could do, but she did. She wiped the finger on her ragged shirt.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and there wasn’t a hint of the “sh” sound in her words. Dulcy was in a better place now. She knew that. Looking down at her dead sister she knew that, and she wished for a long moment that it was her down there. Released. That time was probably not too far off, though.

But I can eat
.

She would, if she could get the can opened. She wasn’t surprised to find that she still had an appetite after killing her sister, disappointed perhaps, but not surprised. The body has an imperative.

The can still sat upright in the center of the boxcar like a silent witness. It seemed like there was a spotlight shining down on it from above. She looked much faster now for the can opener. But she heard a sound from outside and it made her stop.

***

The noise sounded like it had come from a distance. A decayed tree finally giving up the ghost, thought Ingrid, but then there was another, similar but in a different place, still a bit far off. After a long time inside, everything out of the boxcar had seemed to stop existing so the noise got her attention briefly away from the can of beans.

Another sound, lighter, closely following the last. Ingrid waited. When she didn’t hear anything, she went to the door of the boxcar, slightly opened it and looked outside.

Through the door she saw nothing at first. Then she saw what looked like an oil drum being pushed to the side. The wind maybe? It tilted as if to fall over and then relaxed back into place. After it was righted a form showed above it. She thought she could make out a light...

“Looking for something?” a voice said.

She didn’t know where the voice had come from but it was clear. There was someone out there, someone with a light.

Then the voice came again.

“Behind you, bitch,” it said.

Ingrid spun around, her bony ass made a thumping noise against the floor of the car. Dulcy was standing up, her skeleton legs supporting the rest of her. She was looking down at Ingrid and there was something in her hand. Something with a wooden handle.

“God news, sister.” She was a ghost. The ghost was using a fake falsetto voice. “I found the fucking can opener,” it said. “Isn’t that just fucking corking news?”

Ingrid couldn’t believe her eyes. Dulcy was dead. She had made sure.

“Y-y-you’re dead now,” she said. Dulcy’s empty eye socket, dripping with that brown liquid, gaped vacuously next to the the other eye. That eye had a light of its own, a glaring hate, mixed with what looked like insane triumph.

“I’m not dead,” she said, “not yet.”

Ingrid remembered the light and the noise. This was crazy; there were people outside, actual people. She momentarily let herself forget that she had killed her sister. She was interrupted.

“While I was down there I thought up a few jokes of my own,” said Dulcy, “I’ll tell you one. Knock-knock.”

Ingrid’s eyes were large. “There are pe—”

“Knock-
knock
, I said.”

Ingrid said, “Who’s there?” and Dulcy jammed the sharp end of the can opener into her throat.

Ingrid grabbed onto her wrist. She sputtered and gurgled, grabbing at the wiry hands. Dulcy yanked the opener out of her throat and then stabbed it into Ingrid’s stomach. Ingrid fell to the floor, her face turning gray, blood running from her mouth and her nose. Dulcy stabbed her two more times but Ingrid was already dead.

The adrenaline fading quickly, she dropped the bloody can opener to the floor and laid down. She had woken up more herself than she had been for some time, but that might not last. She started thinking about the memory. The birthday party The big mechanical train with its clown conductor, the one who knew magic.

Such magic did that clown know. So many weird things she had seen on this mechanical train. She must still be there, she could always stay here, riding on this magic train. Until her impossible sister ruined the cake. That huge, glorious cake that was for her, for her birthday.

Everyone was dressed like princesses for the party, so pretty. Then awful Ingrid got mad because she couldn’t take two pony rides. She had thrown a fit and pulled on the table cloth, knocking the cake over and it collapsed on the floor, a wreckage of blue and white and pink frosting. Uncle Hal had slipped in the icing on the floor.

She came away from the memory when she heard a sound. It was a rusty squealing noise and it filed the air inside the boxcar. Dulcy opened her eyes and looked towards the sound. It was the clown conductor from her dream. He had opened the steel sliding door, the rusty one. The clown wore his clown conductor suit and a gas mask.

A gas mask?

It wasn’t the clown. What it was, was a man, or possibly a woman. The figure peered through the protective glass eye shields of the mask. The eyes saw the dead body of Ingrid on the floor.

Dulcy began to crawl towards the opening, and the figure. She couldn’t speak. She crawled across the floor clutching the can opener, trailing her sister’s blood across the floor, towards the person, the one that she was one hundred percent sure was not a clown.

The figure looked at her, and at the bloody can opener in her hand, then at the dead woman on the floor, then at the can of beans. It reached a gloved hand out and plucked the can of beans up and stuffed it into a rucksack it was carrying. Then the figure slung the sack over its shoulder, turned, and was gone, taking the beans with it.

Dulcy screamed. It wasn’t a loud thing, she was so weak. She threw the can opener, not in any particular direction; it just flew up and disappeared into the dark at the top of the boxcar.

When it went up there, the can opener hit something, something hard, then it fell to the floor next to her. What it had hit made a rolling noise a bit like a large ball bearing, or a marble. The rolling sound made a tumbling sound and then a series of clicks and bangs rung out through the car. Dulcy, who had stopped screaming, looked up and saw a heavy can fall from the ceiling. It hit her in the forehead with a crack. A second later another equally large can fell and hit her in the head as well. It was probably the second can that killed her.

The first can had been green beans. The second was another can of Burtie’s Baked Beans—
Secret Family Recipe. Guaranteed Fresh.

Contributors

Miranda Ciccone
’s (“
Orpheus and Eurydice
”) stories have appeared online in
The Harrow
,
The Three-Lobed Burning Eye
,
The Cynic Online
and
Kalkion
.

Collaboratively,
Libby Cudmore and Matthew Quinn Martin
(“
Convention of Ekphrasis
”) have been published in
The Writer Magazine
,
Big Pulp
and
Mixitini Matrix
. Libby Cudmore’s stories and essays have been published in
Pank
,
The Citron Review
,
Umbrella Factory
,
Connotation Press
, the
Yalobusha Review
and
Something Awful
. Her website is
www.geekgirlgoesglam.com
. Matthew Quinn Martin’s original screenplay
Slingshot
was made into a feature film by Bold Films and is distributed on DVD by The Weinstein Co. His prose fiction has been published in
The Beat To A Pulp
anthology,
Transition Magazine
,
Thuglit
,
The Oddville Press
,
Aphelion Magazine
and elsewhere. His website is
www.matthewquinnmartin.com
.

Eric Dimbleby
(“
The House That Wept Puddin’
”) has sold stories to more than 18 anthologies since 2010. His debut novel,
Please Don’t Go
, was published by Pill Hill Press last year, and won the Best Speculative Fiction award from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. His website is
www.ericdimbleby.com
.

Michael R. Fletcher
(“
Fire and Flesh
”) lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter and a host of delusions he hopes to make manifest in the new year. His science fiction novel,
88
, is due to be released by Five Rivers Publishing in the summer of 2013, and he has two more novels (including a dark fantasy novel that sprung from this story) currently in editing. His short stories have appeared in
Daily Science Fiction
,
Interzone
,
On Spec
, and
Heroic Fantasy Quarterly
. Sporadic updates on what he has been up to can be found at
www.michaelrfletcher.com
.

Milo James Fowler
(“
Beneath the Surface
”) is an English teacher by day and a speculative fictioneer by night. His work has appeared in
AE Science Fiction
,
Cosmos
, and
Shimmer
, and many of his short stories are now available on Amazon for Kindle readers. Find him on Twitter (@mfowler76), Facebook, and his blog where he posts weekly updates on his journey through the Published Land:
www.milo-inmediasres.com
. His story “El Diablo De Paseo Grande” appeared in the first
ARCANE
anthology.

Gef Fox
(“
Tree Hugger
”) is a self-described rabid reader and wrabid writer. He spent his childhood daydreaming of monsters, ghosts, and robots. Now he writes about them. His stories can be found in
Fading Light (An Anthology of the Monstrous)
,
Stupefying Stories
and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia, Canada. Visit his blog at
waggingthefox.blogspot.com
.

Adele Gardner
(“
Triptych
”) is an active member of SFWA with stories published in
Daily Science Fiction
, the Green Knight Press anthologies
Legends of the Pendragon
and
The Doom of Camelot
,
Challenging Destiny
, and
Penumbra
. She has also had poetry published in
Strange Horizons
,
Mythic Delirium
, and
The Magazine of Speculative Poetry
, among others; her first poetry collection,
Dreaming of Days in Astophel
, is available from Sam’s Dot Publishing. Two stories and a poem earned honorable mention in
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. “Triptych” first appeared in
Horror Garage
#4, 2001, under the byline “Lyn C.A. Gardner,” and earned honorable mention in
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 15th Ed.
, 2002.

Jean Graham
(“
Nightcrawlers
”) has sold fiction to the DAW Books anthology
The Time of the Vampires
(1996, reprinted 2005), to the Oct.-Dec. 2000 issue of the online magazine
wouldthatitwere.com
, and to the print anthologies
Fantastical Visions I & II
and the 2009 anthology
Under the Rose
(Norilana Books). She has also sold short stories to the e-zines
Coyote Wild
,
Firefox News
, and
Mundania/Fictionwise.com
, and to the print magazine
Renard’s Menagerie
. Her work has also been published in the small press magazines
The Horror Show
,
Quest
,
Outlands
,
Chosen Haunts
,
Melange
,
Gambit
and
Dark Graffiti
, among others.