Страница 79 из 102
It went out of the town and down to the shore, and over the rocks and into the sea, and with its head above water, it rode the waves out, still playing its tune, and the people and animals from the town went in after, and it took hours for them to enter the ocean and go under and drown, but still the head of the thing from the sea bobbed above the waves and the strange music wailed, and soon all that had come from the town were drowned. They washed up on the beach and on the rocks, water swollen, or rock cut, and lay there in the same way that the garbage from the sea had lain.
And finally the thing from the sea was way out now and there was just the faint sound of the music it played, and in the houses the infants who had been left could hear it, and they didn't cry as the music played, and even those who could not move, and those in comas, heard or felt the music and were stirred internally. Only the deaf were immune. And then the music ceased.
The thing from the sea had come apart from the blast of the waves and had been spread throughout the great, deep waters, and some of the thing would wash up on the beach, and some of it would be carried far out to sea, and the harmonica sunk toward the bottom and was swallowed by a large fish thinking it was prey.
And in the town the infants died of starvation, and so did the sick ones who could not move, and the deaf, confused, ran away, and the lights of the town blared on through day and night and in some stores ca
The Thirteenth Hell by Mike Allen
for Laird Barron
The Goosle by Margo Lanagan
"There," said Gri
Why, that is the mudwife's house, I thought. Dread thudded in me. Since two days ago among the older trees when I knew we were in my father's forest, I'd feared this.
The house looked just as it did in my memory: the crumbling, glittery yellow walls, the dreadful roof sealed with drippy white mud. My tongue rubbed the roof of my mouth just looking. It is crisp as wafer-biscuit on the outside, that mud. You bite through to a sweetish sand inside. You are frightened it will choke you, but you ca
The mudwife might be dead, I thought hopefully. So many are dead, after all, of the black.
But then came a convulsion in the house. A face passed the window-hole, and there she was at the door. Same squat body with a big face snarling above. Same clothing, even, after all these years, the dress trying for bluishness and the pinafore for brown through all the dirt. She looked just as strong. However much bigger
I'd grown, it took all my strength to hold my bowels together.
"Don't come a step nearer." She held a red fire-banger in her hand, but it was so dusty-if I'd not known her I'd have laughed.
"Madam, I pray you," said Gri
"Touch my stock and I'll have you," she says to all his smoothness. "I'll roast your head in a pot."
I tugged Gri
"We have pretties to trade," said Gri
"You can put your pretties up your poink-hole where they belong."
"We have all the news of long travel. Are you not at all curious about the world and its woes?"
"Why would I live here, tuffet-head?" And she went inside and slammed her door and banged the shutter across her window.
"She is softening," said Gri
"I don't think so."
"You watch me. Get us a fire going, boy. There on that bit of bare ground."
"She will come and throw her bunger in it. She'll blind us, and then-"
"Just make and shut. I tell you, this one is as good as married to me. I have her heart in my hand like a rabbit-kitten."
I was sure he was mistaken, but I went to, because fire meant food and just the sight of the house had made me hungry. While I fed the fire its kindling I dug up a little stone from the flattened ground and sucked the dirt off it.
Gri
When the smell was strong, the door whumped open and there she was again. Ooh, she was so like in my dreams, with her sudde
"Take your smelly smells from my garden this instant!" the mudwife shouted.
Gri
"I'd not touch my lips to such mess. What kind of foreign muck-"
Even I could hear the longing in her voice, that she was trying to shout down.
There before her he ladled out a bowlful-yellow, splashy, full of delicious lumps. Very humbly-he does humbleness well when he needs to, for such a big man-he took it to her. When she recoiled he placed it on the little table by the door, the one that I ran against in my clumsiness when escaping, so hard I still sometimes feel the bruise in my rib. I remember, I knocked it skittering out the door, and I flung it back meaning to trip up the mudwife. But instead I tripped up Kirtle, and the wife came out and plucked her up and bellowed after me and kicked the table onto the path, and ran out herself with Kirtle like a tortoise swimming from her fist and kicked the table aside again-
Bang! went the cottage door.
Gri
"She is ours. Once they've et your food, Ha
"Eugh."
"Jealous, are we? Don't like old Gri