Dangerous Women

It was after midnight when one of the local ne’er-do-wells made his way to the encampment and told Gray that, for a not insignificant fee, he was prepared to remove the casket containing the bones from its resting place and bring it to him. He was a man of his word. Within the hour he returned, and he brought with him an ornate, and clearly very ancient, casket, which he said contained the remains of Lilith. The box was about three feet long, two feet wide, and a foot high, and securely locked. The thief told Gray that the key remained always in the possession of the local imam, but the Englishman was unconcerned. The tale of Lilith was a myth, merely a creation of fearful men, but Gray believed he might be able to sell the beautiful casket as a curiosity when he returned home. He packed it away with his other acquisitions, and thought little more about it until he was back in England and reunited with his young wife, Jane, at Norton Hall.

Gray first began to notice a change in his wife’s behavior shortly after the bones arrived in their home. She grew strangely thin, almost emaciated, and began to evince an unhealthy interest in the boxed remains. Then, one evening when he had thought her to be in bed asleep, Gray found her prying at the lock with a chisel. When he tried to take the tool away from her, she slashed at him wildly before making a final strike at the lock, shattering it so that it dropped to the floor in two pieces. Before he could stop her, she had wrenched open the lid and revealed its contents: old brown bones curled in on themselves, with patches of tattered skin still adhering, and a skull almost like that of a reptile or a bird, narrow and elongated while still retaining traces of a half-developed humanity.

And then, according to Gray, the bones moved. It was only the slightest thing at first, a rustling that might simply have been the bones settling after their sudden disturbance, but it quickly became pronounced. The fingers stretched, as if powered by unseen muscles and tendons, then the bones in the toes tapped softly against the sides of the casket. Finally, the skull swung on its exposed vertebrae and those beaklike jaws opened and closed with a faint click.

The dust in the casket began to rise and the remains were quickly surrounded by a reddish vapor. But the vapor came, not from the casket, but from Gray’s own wife, emerging from her mouth in a torrent, as though her blood had somehow dried to powder and was now being wrenched from its veins. As he watched, she grew thi

Gray recovered himself and dived at the casket, sending the lid shooting down hard on the creature’s head. He could feel the foul being hammering and thrashing from within as he look the chisel and jammed it through the loop of the lock, locking and sealing the casket. The red vapor instantly disappeared, the thing’s struggles eased and, as he watched, his beloved wife crumpled to the floor and breathed her last.

There was only one page remaining in the narrative, and it detailed the origins of the folly: the digging of its deep foundations, the placing of the casket at the very bottom, and the construction of the folly itself above it in an effort to restrain Lilith forever. It was a ridiculous tale, of course. It had to be. It was a fantasy, Gray’s attempt to scare the servants or to earn himself a mention in some pe

Yet when I lay beside Eleanor that night, I did not sleep and I sensed a wakefulness to her that made me uneasy.

The days that followed did little to calm my feelings of unhappiness, or to improve relations between my wife and me. I found myself returning again and again to Gray’s tale, nonsense though it had initially seemed. I dreamed of unseen things tapping at our bedroom window and when, in my dream, I approached the pane to ascertain the cause of the noise, an elongated head would emerge from the darkness, its dark, predatory eyes gleaming hungrily as it broke through the glass and tried to devour me. As I fought it, I could feel the shape of its sagging breasts against me, and its legs wrapped around me in a mockery of a lover’s ardor. Then I would awake to find a small smile on Eleanor’s face, as though she knew of my dream and were secretly pleased at its effect upon me.

As we grew increasingly alienated from each other, I took to spending more time in the garden, or walking along the boundaries of my land, half hoping to catch some sight of the anonymous visitor who bore such a marked resemblance to the unfortunate J. F. Gray. It was on one such occasion that I spied a figure on a bicycle making laborious progress up the hill that led to the gates of Norton Hall. Constable Morris hove into view-quite literally, for he was a large man and his considerable girth, combined with the blurring effect of the day’s heat, gave him the appearance of a great, black ship appearing slowly upon the horizon. Eventually he seemed to realize the futility of his continued effort to master the hill on two wheels when gravity appeared determined to frustrate him, and he duly dismounted and walked his bicycle along the remaining stretch until he came at last to the gates.

Constable Morris was one of two policemen assigned to the little station at Ebbingdon, the town nearest to Norton Hall. He and the local sergeant, Ludlow, had responsibility for maintaining order not only in Ebbingdon but in the nearby villages of Langton, Bracefield, and Harbiston, as well as their surrounding areas, a task that they accomplished using a combination of a single dilapidated police car, a pair of bicycles, and the vigilance of the local populace. I had spoken to Ludlow only on a handful of occasions, and had found him to be a rather taciturn man, but Morris was a regular sight on the road by our property and was more inclined to spend a spare moment talking (and catching his breath) than was his superior.

“Hot day,” I remarked.

Constable Morris, red-faced from his exertions, wiped his shirtsleeve across his brow and concurred that, yes, it was indeed a devil of a day. I offered him a glass of homemade lemonade, should he choose to accompany me back to the house, and he readily agreed. We talked of local matters on the short walk from the gate, and I left him by the folly while I went into the kitchen to pour the lemonade. Eleanor was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear her moving about in the attic of the house, making a dreadful racket as she tossed aside boxes and scattered crates. I chose not to disturb her with news of Morris’s arrival.

Outside, the policeman was walking idly around the folly, his hands clasped behind his back. I handed him his lemonade as I joined him, the ice cracking loudly in the glass, and watched as he took a deep draught. There were great sweat stains beneath his arms and upon his back, a deeper blue against the lighter shade of his shirt, like a relief map of the oceans.

“What do you think of it?” I asked him.