The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (42 page)

Lily climbed over a broken wall. The hall was before her, once elegant, now in decay. There was a lion on what was once the lawn. He came out of the long grass to inspect her with amber eyes. Prowling back and forth, tail twitching, lip licking. Tawny skin taut. Immense paws. Testicles and teeth.

Lily backed towards the hall’s doors. Her hand found the knocker. The bronze was cool in her clammy palm. She rapped slowly so as not to startle her stalker.

The door fell open. Lily fell in.

The servant was not the sort of man she’d ever encountered in service. That he was hare lipped made her pause. His livery was old and in disarray, buttons missing and ragged braid. There was an oak leaf, stained yellow by the season, caught in his hair. Lily was accustomed to servants who stood to attention. This one didn’t show her a jot of deference or respect. He didn’t even help her from the floor. That he was too busy saluting the lion annoyed her even more.

“What do you want?”

“To see your master.”

An inauspicious start. A well-trained servant would have taken a bloodied, muddied lady in his stride.

“It’s imperative that I see him.”

The haughty tilt of her head had no effect.

“Please. It’s important. I’ve come all the way from,” she was about to say Marshcombe but thought better of it, “Botheringstile.”

“So far?” he mocked.

He was handsome. Or, at least, Lily found him so. His auburn hair much darker than her own. Lively eyes. A smile that danced around his damaged mouth.

“What’s it about?”

Brazen, too.

“That’s for his ears alone.”

He didn’t show her to the parlor but left her standing in the hall. A grandfather clock was several hours astray in its estimation of the time. The stained glass, stained rugs and stained flags all needed a good scrub. The medieval tapestries were fantastical. A lion in armor skewering a man. A ring of wolves dancing around a fire and the coronation of a fox. This whimsical court was well beyond repair. Shabby relics of glories past.

The servant returned.

The library. Books languished on the shelves, pages crumbling between moldy covers. A dying fire smoldered in the grate. Lily went to the long windows. A spider’s web spanned an entire pane. It was a striking creature, plump body marked in paler shades. It picked at its web’s threads as a harpist plucks her strings. The flies quivered as they listened to her tune.

Lily gasped. Figures were reflected in the glass. Gods filled the library’s alcoves. Mallory was an idolater. His deities had trunks and tusks and fangs. They demanded the fiercest of devotions.

“Do you like them?”

“You startled me.”

Mallory had crept close despite his size, sniffing at her hair. Satisfied, he hobbled to the fire and sank into a chair.

“What’s your name?”

“Lily Hastings.”

“Are we acquainted?”

Lily had been prepared to be outrageous in her lies but now she saw he would spot a ruse.

“I come here in desperation. I come here to throw myself upon your mercy.” She flung herself at his feet and grasped his folded hands. The ebbing firelight caught her hair and set it alight. Burnished copper winked amid the red. It made the white flash of her throat seem more exposed.

“Sir, I implore you.”

Victor smirked.

“You mock me,” Lily cried, “you are cruel.”

“Hush now. What books you girls must read nowadays! Such lurid melodrama. It might work on the page and younger men but I’m neither.”

“You’re not so old.” Her wet eyes and sudden smile were a charming combination.

“Such a lovely little trickster.”

Victor was immune to womanly wiles. She would have to try a different way.

“You’re a magician.”

“A long time ago. I learnt my craft in Africa and China. I’ve performed for prime ministers and kings.”

He’d sunk into his reminisces. A vacant stare. Lily wondered if she was in error but his face was unmistakable despite the burden of age.

“The things I’ve seen. I’ve walked on the roof of the world and been where the canopy’s so dense that it’s perpetual night.”

“You’re The Theologist,” she prompted.

“The Theologist of Transformation,” he sounded surprised by his own stage name.

“I need your help to make me disappear.”

“I don’t do tricks upon request.”

“I’ve nowhere else to go. No benefactor sympathetic to my cause. I have a suitor . . . ”

“I should imagine you have many.”

“He’s a beast.”

“We’re all beasts, my dear.”

“Not just a beast. A brute.”

“Refuse him then.”

“I can’t. I rely on my aunt’s charity. She’ll turn me out.”

Victor picked up the bowl beside him. He raked his fingers through the jumble of gems. A discarded fortune, their luster dulled by dust. He pulled out a tiara and threw it on her lap. It was encrusted with diamonds and grime.

“Have that. The means to leave. Not enough? Have more.”

A rain of jewels. They lay where they fell, scattered on the floor.

“It’s not just the money,” Lily was unsure why she was dithering, “it’s something else.”

Now her tears were real.

“Don’t waste my time!” Victor roared.

Lily thrust her fists against her eyes. She was undone, lacking in the words. Now, when she had to explain to someone else, she realized that she didn’t understand herself.

“I saw you when I was a child. In India. After my mother died. My father said you’d help if I was ever in need.”

“Who was your father?”

“Captain Harry Hastings.”

“I don’t know him.”

“I saw you. At the palace. I sat on your knee during the performance. Afterwards my father was angry at me for being so bold.”

Victor’s face froze.

“So angry that he frightened me.”

“You don’t remember why?” Victor asked.

Lily shook her head.

“Later he said he was sorry that he’d lost his temper. I’d stopped speaking when my mother died. Everyone thought I’d lost my wits. He said it was because of you that I recovered them.”

“Where’s your father now?”

“He died. A hunting accident.”

“Who was hunting him?”

“I’m sorry?” Lily thought that she’d misheard.

The Theologist stared at her.

“No, I am,” he sounded weary, “unhappy is the one who doesn’t know themselves.”

“I came for magic,” Lily blurted out, hardly sure what she was asking for. Unsure if Lacey was far behind.

“There’s none left. It’s all spent. Now leave me be.”

“Please.”

“Robert, make her go away. Give her a room if she needs a place to stay.”

Robert, the hare-lipped servant, grasped her elbow and pulled her to her feet. She wondered how long he’d been standing there.

“He’s tired. He needs to sleep.”

She turned back but Victor’s chin was on his chest, eyelids moving as if already in a dream.

“Run, dear,” Victor muttered from his sudden slumber. “Run.”

The walls were lined with portraits, eyes flat and blank. They held no regard for Lily. She was just another girl. At the stair’s turn there was a line of brass urns, each brimming with gold coins. They lay there, uncoveted. The smell of the house was stronger here. Pungent, like a lair.

There was a rocking horse on the minstrel’s gallery. Someone had thought to groom it. The tail combed out and the wood polished until it shone, yet it had been attacked. Something had clawed at its wooden flanks. Three parallel lines bit deep.

I’m among lunatics, she thought.

Lily followed Robert to the upper floors. Here were Victor’s strange family, with all its inbreeding, its bastards, whelps and wards. Fathered at Grissleymire or found on travels abroad. They turned to see Lily trying to catch a glimpse. One man kicked the door shut with his heel. Through a gap she saw a man writing in a ledger, the boy at his feet batting a ball of yarn between his palms. In the next room a woman loosened her dress to suckle her young, one at each breast. Straw matted the floor. The room was rank with urine, milk, and regurgitated meat.

“Who’s this?” she barked at them. Her accent was Russian. “Put her out. She stinks of lies. Tell Victor I said so.”

“Tell him yourself, Vivien.”

Lily followed Robert to the end of the corridor. He shoved the door open and leant against the frame. Lily squeezed past him. He was unwashed. Musky and provocative.

“You can bed down here.”

“I need a fire. A bath.”

The room was filthy. Full of dander and dirt. The furniture and the mirror were coated with the stuff.

“The jug’s there. You’ll get water from the kitchen pump. Logs are by the back door.”

Stood so close, his smell was stronger. It made her nose twitch. It made her itch.

“Of course, there’s other ways of keeping warm,” he said, straight faced, “if you should want me, I’ll be just along the hall.”

Not the proper place for a servant at all.

Lily stepped from her clothes, layer by layer. Just garments, not the essence of herself. She used them to make a nest beneath the bed. This was how her father used to find her. In a den of her own design.

Lily hadn’t planned to sleep so long. She only meant to ease her aching legs. When she woke the sky had already darkened. A fire laid and lit. Hot water steamed from the ewer and the mirror had been polished. A plain twill dress was laid out on the bed, a shawl folded at its head.

She cleaned off the sweat and mud. The blood. Then went back along the corridor and down the stairs. From the higher windows she could see the maze, its geometry wracked and ruined. When she turned a corner she saw Robert was outside. She went to him.

“Thank you for the fire and the water. You’re not a footman at all, are you?”

“No.”

Robert had changed too. His shirt was darned but clean. They walked together in the equality of these new clothes.

“I’m Lily.”

They turned onto the avenue of oaks, once the fine approach to Grissleymire from the road. One of the giants had been felled in a lightning storm. Its charred corpse blocked their way. Something sluggish and sinuous slithered along the broken boughs.

“One of Victor’s,” Robert explained. “It was part of his performance.”

The dappled python was lost in the English undergrowth.

“Like the lion?”

Robert looked at her from the corner of his eye.

“He wasn’t in the show. Victor just wanted him to have a home.”

“My aunt says hunters and poachers are run off Grissleymire.”

“We don’t want strangers here. And killing for food is one thing but sport is quite another.”

Lily imagined a democracy of carnivores. The otters floated downstream. The badger lay quiet in his set. The fox and the lion went unmolested.

“So it’s safe here?”

“Safer. For now. For a certain sort.”

“What sort?”

“The hunted. The cursed. The damned.”

Hunted. Cursed. Where was Lacey now? Lily wished him to the very bottom of the bog. She’d already decided that she’d never be his wife. She’d rather take her own life.

Past the diseased limes and through the kissing gate, rusted on its broken hinge. They reached the devastated water gardens. The fountains, unrefreshed with spilling water, stagnated. There was only one pond that remained clean being fed by an overflowing stream. Robert knelt and trailed his fingers along the surface to draw the monstrous carp lurking in its depths. Ghostly creatures, flecked in blues and golds. They nibbled at his fingertips and then drifted into darkness, unsatisfied.

“What do you dream about?”

“My dreams?”

“Yes,” he coaxed.

“I dream of running.”

“Yes,” as if he understood, “but what’s your most vivid dream?”

“I can’t say.”

“You have to.” She writhed in his sudden grip. “This is why you’re here, isn’t it? You want to know about your dreams. You want to know what they mean.”

“No!” Lily tried to twist away. His smell was maddening. It enraged her in the most disturbing way.

“Tell me. Or do I have to tell you? You dream you’re dead . . . ”

“I dream I’m dead . . . ” Lily repeated. “No, I dream I’m playing dead. I’m lying on the ground. My eyes are shut. My tongue hangs out. Crows caw at me. I wait for them to come too close. I let them peck at me. I wait until one is far too close.”

“Then, snap! You have them!”

Feigning death. A foxy trick to lure scavengers. Lily would gorge on those who would devour her.

“And you steal from the coop,” Robert prompted.

It was too much. The poultry yard raids and eggs for burying carried in her jaws. Both she and Robert were scatter hoarders who hid their treasures in the ground.

“You’ve come too late for Victor’s help. He’s dying.”

So many years wasted, when he’d been here all along. Indignation rose like bile in her throat, her cry stalled by the sadness on Robert’s face.

“I’m sorry.”

“Victor found me at a circus.”

“You were an acrobat?” She tried to make him smile. “A clown?”

Robert shook his head.

“My father sold me when I was a boy. My face wasn’t always so.”

Not hare lipped then but scarred. In his eyes, Lily saw the whip, the chain, incarceration in a cage.

“Victor bought and freed me. He taught me what it meant to be myself.”

Lily touched his lip where it had been too damaged to reunite. A vulnerable flaw that she found seductive and of which Robert was ashamed. She put her mouth to it. To kiss it better. As if to fuse their flesh together and make it whole. She’d bargained for her virtue only hours ago. Now she wanted to throw it away. Once gone, Lord Lacey could hardly take it from her.

She shed her dress, the shift, the torn stockings made of silk. Robert undressed for her in turn. They stood before each other as their natures intended. Not nude but naked. Revealed as they were, not as others saw them.

They leapt at one another. Moonlight struck their backs. It made them dance with joy. A pair of foxes, rolling in the grass. The chill of the coming winter did not sting. They had pelts to keep them warm.

“Lily, stop!”

Harry Hastings was too late. His daughter had slipped away and run onstage. For months she’d been a silent, fading shade, refusing all but the most babyish of foods. She’d pined away, day by day. By night she refused to sleep anywhere but under his bed.