The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Exceeding Bitter ^{Kaaron Warren}

The first that Mrs. Jacobs knew of the Gray Ladies were the ashen footprints she found on the front step. She blamed the chimney sweep, furious that he had come to her front door dirty like that, or at all. She sent her husband to the Chimney Master, wanting a name, wanting that child to come and clean up his own mess, but her husband returned to say no sweep had come knocking and if he had, two shillings sixpence were owed.

“Awful man,” her husband said, and she got him settled by the fire before he bored her with the usual talk. “Should have been drowned at birth, most of them, and I mean that kindly.”

“Of course you do, dear,” Mrs. Jacobs murmured, but in her mind’s eye she pictured the baby rats he’d drowned in a bucket last week. Dropped them in then forgot about them, and she was the one who had to scoop them out and bury them.

He was asleep within minutes and she could settle to her busy work.

In the morning she swept the ashen footprints away.

She had just put the broom away when she saw the chimney sweep through the front window. A tiny, filthy boy and she lifted her broom to shoo him away.

He’d left more footprints, she saw that, but when she raised her broom and saw him shrink away, her heart melted.

“Boy!” she said, “What are you doing here?” Her cheeks were pink from exertion and she had her mum’s old patchwork apron on.

“It looks so warm inside. The ladies showed me.”

“What ladies, dear? Your aunties?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got none of those, nor a mother, neither. It was the gray ladies showed me.” He tucked his shoulders down, cold in himself. He stared inside. “You’re nicer than them, though.”

Her husband was at the office and the street was quiet so she took him inside.

“Bath first,” she said, but his stomach rumbled loudly and he seemed weak, so instead she sat him in the laundry and fed him porridge.

There was a knock on the door.

“The gray ladies!” he said. He seemed frightened.

“I thought you liked them.”

“Only they look at me as if I’m real,” he said. “But I don’t like them.”

Mrs. Jacobs opened the laundry door, wondering as she did so how the door was reached being, as it was, behind their high brick surrounding walls.

“Yes?” Mrs. Jacobs said, then drew a sharp breath.

Three gray ladies stood on her step. She could see the agapanthus through them, and they floated above the ground. They were tall and skeletally thin. Their skin was gray, flaccid, hanging off their cheeks in folds. They didn’t look at her, only at the boy.

One lifted her hand and Mrs. Jacobs recoiled at the sight of long, sharp fingernails. They were silent as they turned, glided to the back wall and disappeared through it.

Mrs. Jacobs stood staring, knowing she couldn’t tell her husband what she’d seen (Imagination is the indication of an unsteady mind, he liked to say). The boy shook.

“You better be off. My husband will be home soon for his lunch. Come back in two hours when he returns to work and I’ll make you a plate.” She put the hob on to make bubble and squeak and took out the bread knife ready to cut a slab to go with it.

He didn’t want to move so she physically picked him up. He weighed as little as one of Mr. Butcher’s chickens, no more. The morning had passed too quickly, though, because there was Mr. Jacobs at the front door, staring at her as if she was a beggar on the streets.

“Why are you carrying vermin?”

“Oh, Alfred. He’s a poor motherless boy, that’s all. Let me just bathe him. He can spend one night here, when he’s clean, then he’ll go after breakfast. We can’t send him out in the night.”

“It isn’t even close to night, woman.”

Mr. Jacobs had no patience for children. Never had done. If they’d been blessed, perhaps he would have changed his mind.

“Just the bath then and I’ll send him away.” She had the boy help her heat the water in the cellar and carry it to the laundry sink. The boy stared at the water as if mesmerized. The afternoon was gray and they needed what light they could but still Mrs. Jacobs pulled down the shutter. It was surely only shadow, but out there she thought she saw the three gray ladies, watching.

“You have a good scrub. I’m going down to clear up the lunch,” she told the boy. He stared at her. His eyes were ash gray and his skin had a gray pallor she hadn’t noticed before. His lips were drained of color and she saw streaks of ash in his hair.

“You take your time. Get yourself nice and clean. Go on.”

She tugged at his shirt, trying to help, but he shied away, so she called her, asking him to convince the boy he needed to remove his clothes for the bath and she left them to it.

Mr. Jacobs came back down and settled by the fire a few minutes later.

“How is he?” she called out.

“You mean the vermin? He’s as he should be.”

“He’s not vermin, he’s unfortunate,” but something in her husband’s tone made her run down the hall and throw open the laundry door. He spoke like that when he’d bested an opponent and was pleased with himself.

At first she thought the boy must have climbed out, the water was so gray and murky. Then one hand floated to the surface and she plunged both hands in to pull him out.

What she thought was ash was not at all but his own gray color.

She lifted him easily (was he lighter now? It seemed so) and she cradled him in her arms, holding him as if she could bring life back to him. She began dry him tenderly.

She heard a rustle, a hiss behind her and turned, still holding the boy, to see the three gray ladies standing there.

One bent forward and reached out as if to stroke the boy, but instead she worked her fingers between his ribs as if trying to pry something loose. One did stroke his hair gently, but the last knelt down and began lapping at him, as if drinking something spilled.

Mrs. Jacobs held the boy closer, trying to keep their fingers from him, but they reached through her, chilling her to the bone, and all she saw was gray.

“How did you know?” she whispered. “How did you know my husband would be capable of that?”

She rocked back and forth. Their eyes followed her while they kept still, then she saw their faces change as they aped her sorrow. They rubbed their hands together as if cleaning them, then went back to work on the boy, separating soul from body with long, sharp fingernails.

Did they gain color? Glow?

She wasn’t sure.

It would be weeks before Mrs. Jacobs could see color again.

The gray ladies were once Julia, Amara, and Magdalena. Pretty names for pretty girls, long since forgotten. How did you know? the woman asked, and they watched her, not answering her question. Truthfully, they did not know the answer and besides, they no longer spoke at all. Did they miss not talking to each other? Or had they no recollection of hours spent chattering?

They never knew where they’d knock. It was not their choice. Something moved them. It was death foretold by them, not delivered.

They knew they were doing good. A wise man (Wise. Cruel. Murderous.) told them often that one of the greatest gifts in life is to know when death is coming. It was a chance to say goodbye. To prepare.

If only people would listen. If they were stubborn, like the woman and her chimney sweep, no good was done to anyone.

She was colorful, that grieving woman, her cheeks pink, her eyes red. They were colorful once, these three.

Before.

They’d had a brighter life than many others like them, because their mother, Eliza, loved to travel, gathering friends like other people gathered pebbles or mementos. She’d been to Finishing School in Paris, where she met all manner of girls from all manner of places she’d never heard of before, like Lucia from Romania and Dao from the Principality of Phuan. And she learnt that each of them had a different idea of how things should be. This benefitted her daughters, giving them more freedom of expression and behavior than many others. Julia in particular thrived in this way, and as a girl loved to climb trees and sit in the branches, when the neighbors weren’t looking.

There was less travel once Eliza married Phillip and the girls came along, but she had trunks of treasures to enjoy, and to share with her three daughters. “This one is for you, Julia,” she said, lifting out a delicate blue scarf. “To match your eyes. For Amara, this green, and for Magdalena, this golden.” The tiny girls were swamped in the lush material and they danced around the room with their mother spinning in the center.

“What is this?” their father said. He pretended gruffness, but he wouldn’t have married her if he didn’t love her ways.

They had a good life until the Romanian came.

Eliza had written letters to her dear school friends, especially Lucia, for ten years, fifteen. They kept in touch, and then there were no more letters. “I miss you!” Eliza wrote. “I wish we could visit with each other monthly and talk about foolish things.”

It was not Lucia who visited. It was her brother, Mihai.

The girls would not remember his first visit, although their lives changed because of it. Their mother said he arrived in a large coach, with servants following behind. His voice louder than the most raucous of men in the village and his skin bright, glowing. He arrived on their doorstep with no announcement. He said, “I am the brother of the magnificent girl Lucia.”

He was not as handsome as Eliza had imagined (the girls had told stories under the covers when they were at school, squealing at the inventions) but he was charming and vulnerable.

“I bring sad news. My dear wife died in childbirth, and the baby as well. In my sorrow I am traveling the world until now, when I reach my sister’s dear friend and this beautiful land.”

He looked out, lifting and shaping his hands as if measuring the place.

“Here I will build a castle, with the help of a great man.”

Their father Phillip managed the project over the next fifteen years. This was his sole job, to build a mansion for the mysterious Romanian Mihai Adascalitei.

This brought success and financial security to the family, and each night Phillip insisted on raising a glass to Mihai, “Our benefactor.”

“Our slave master,” Eliza said, because Phillip worked twelve hours a day with little time for family.

Then it was done. Word came that Mihai would arrive to inspect, that he was traveling with a large retinue and that he was anticipating great pleasure on seeing his new home.

“He doesn’t mention Lucia but surely she will come,” Eliza said. “Perhaps she and I will go to London. She always said she’d love to go.”

“They can’t come,” Phillip said. He couldn’t sit down but paced in agitation. “He can’t see his home. Can you imagine what he will say? He will be disappointed, to say the least.”

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Eliza asked. He looked at her. He didn’t say anything.

“And what if he wants to visit here? Look at our house!” He was not a wealthy man. “He’s going to think us very poor specimens,”

They all looked at their house. The fittings were shabby but solid and clean, well made. “You are the architect. The clever one. Let his financiers show him wealth. We show solid family love.”

Mihai was tall, broadly built, his clothes cut well to hide how large he’d grown. His cheeks were red and round, his teeth spaced out and yellowed, his breath like cheddar or, Julia whispered like the Thames in summer. He had long hair brushing his shoulders (Phillip tried to hide his distaste at this), and he topped it with a small gray hat that was almost formless. He had blue lips, like a lizard’s and his eyelids hung low, making him look sleepy.

“Aah, your lovely ladies. So tall! So delicate in the limbs and colorful! All three like princesses of an exotic place. You must all come to dinner at my home now it is complete. I’ll have them serve beef broth and black pudding. That will get some meat on your bones.”

Amara blushed, which made him laugh.

“You know I last saw these two older girls when they were tiny. Just born! All blue in the face and furious,” he said. “How well I remember!”

The three girls barely contained themselves. They chattered all at once, drowning him out, until he burst into laughter and bade them hush.

They all heard his stomach rumble, like a crack of thunder, and Amara giggled. “Oh, you must be ravenous,” Eliza said, “ Let’s get you something to eat.”

“He’s not about to waste away, Mildred,” Phillip said.

“Alfred! So rude!” Eliza asked the cook to fix salmon en croute, because she knew they had leftover salmon from her order with the fishmonger. Some of them do it on purpose in the hope of taking the extra home but Eliza wasn’t having that.

The girls raced to their rooms, returning screaming with laughter. They wore salmon pink scarves, all three, to match their food. Even in their rush they exuded grace, their fingers long and delicate, their step light.

“Like angels,” Mihai said.

At dinner, Eliza couldn’t contain herself any longer. “And my dear friend Lucia? It has been so long since we communicated.”

Mihai shook his head. “I bring sad news. My dear sister died in childbirth. She did feel envy of your beautiful three, when she could have none. I’m sorry she no longer wrote to you. Perhaps hearing about your girls and their accomplishments became harder and harder as her years passed fruitlessly.”

“And yet you said she was with child. What joy that must have brought.”

“Ah,” he said.

“So sad that she should pass in the same manner as your wife,” Phillip said.

“Ah,” Mihai said, and Julia wondered at his eyes, how they shifted about, not wanting to focus, and how he smiled nervously, and how his hands shook.

“Your father is a clever man. My house is something to see,” he said, as the pudding was served, as if they hadn’t seen it five dozen times. As if every meal hadn’t been dominated by talk of this house.

“You’ve certainly changed the way things look,” Eliza said.

“My philosophy; take something to its basics and rebuild it. Hair will grow back differently on a shaved head.” Eliza thought he was dashing when he first visited, his hair a golden yellow, his shoulders broad.

“But hair grows back easily enough. By its very nature it is meant to fall.”

“Your house is certainly sturdy, if not very beautiful,” Phillip said. He had made many suggestions of design, all rebuffed.

“You know of the tulip?” Mihai said. “It grows weaker the more beautiful. There is little to be said for beauty, much for strength,” Mihai said. “You are the strongest, Amara. That is clear.”

Eliza well remembered the two-hundred-year-old house he’d had torn down to build his home.

He had bade her stand there in the rubble. She was flattered, a young wife with babies; you’d think she’d lost all of her allure. But no, Mihai, the brother of her dear friend (and, if she would only admit it, she had made up stories about him at school, when her friend spoke of him and his dashing ways) asking her to grace his home or the foundation of his home. “Stand there,” he said, and bade his man mark where her shadow fell. That was where the foundation stone was laid.

“And now you must prepare,” he had told her.

“For what, Mihai?”

“For your passing forty days from now.”

She had known of this curse but had forgotten. He seemed gleeful about the death.

“It’s a blessing to you. Knowing when you’ll die gives you every chance to make amends, say goodbye, indulge your desires.”

“I have no desires,” but she did, of course. Small, sustaining dreams.

“And yet you are not dead,” Mihai said in the present as she relayed this story and he roared with laughter. “My blessing failed.”

“But look at my daughters. They are the true blessing. Magdala wouldn’t be here, and who knows what sort of young women Julia and Amara would have been, raised by their father and hired women.”

“What do you know of hired women?” Mihai said, and he gave Phillip such a look. He led him to the drawing room but the girls weren’t going to miss out. Julia crept into the room next door, the little-used storage space and heard such things as made her sick to the stomach.

“There is a house of whores,” Mihai said, “Whose skin is dyed blue. Glorious. Like the naked bodies taken out of plague houses, a sight I’ve seen and never anything so beautiful.”

Julia wondered, How old is this man? Unless there was a plague more recently in Romania?

“These whores hold the same tinge and even more, as the blue fades it begins to look like bruising. Also beautiful.”

Julia noticed her mother kept them all close and allowed them no time alone. She was ever so protective, but not it seemed as if she offered a barrier between the girls and this charismatic man, as she saw him. The girls were not so inclined.

“You could do worse than that man,” Phillip said afterwards, but what his four ladies said in return burned his ears and made him shrink into his collar.

“Are we going to have to poison you to stop you marrying our girls off to awful men?” Eliza said.

The maid listened in. She always listened.

“He’s not so bad,” Amara said.

“But look at him! Like a monster!”

It was soon after this they traveled for dinner at Mihai’s mansion.

Outside was solid gray brick, with very few windows. “You see how I save money on the window tax? Your father chose his materials well,” Mihai had said, though Phillip had little choice in the matter. Inside, all was gray, muted.

He said, “It will be named for you, Phillip. Your name in brass, over the door.”

Phillip was embarrassed by this. An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work was all he asked for, and a good life for his girls and for his wife to be happy, because her happiness brought joy to his own life.

“No need for that,” he said.

“One of your daughters, then. Julia, Amara, Magdalena. Which one?” and he rubbed his great beard, eyeing them off. Only Julia understood he was teasing.

“More wine,” Mihai said. “More food.” The girls and their mother fell asleep as the two men finished bottle after bottle.

It was after midnight when Mihai arranged a carriage to take them home. Their father groaned and whimpered all the way, filling them all with irritation. Silly drunk man. He wasn’t amusing at all, just dull and odorous.

It was the last carriage ride the family would take together.

The next morning Phillip did not rise. He was never a lazy man, always up with the dawn, even on the nights he was up well past midnight. But after the amount he drank it wasn’t surprising that he was still not risen by noon.

“Silly fidget,” their mother said. “He’s poisoned himself with wine.”

“Mother!” Julia said. The maid stifled a smile; she was always far too free with ears and eyes, Julia thought and true; it was she who whispered so loud that Mihai came to visit.

“What’s this I hear? A house of women left unattended?” he roared.

“He is wine-ill, nothing else,” Eliza said. “He deserves a small amount of suffering for the noise he made last night.”

The maid heard this as well.

“Real men don’t suffer from the drink, and this is a man who can build a magnificent house. Leave me with him.”

Not knowing why, they did leave, even the maid.

In there, Mihai roused Phillip. He gave him a draught and when the man bent over double in pain he said, “I think that woman’s poisoned you. That wife of yours.”

The maid gave evidence at Eliza’s trial for attempted murder. “Oh yes,” she said, “I heard them talking about poisoning him.”

With their father weak and ill, their mother incarcerated, the girls had no one to watch over them.

Mihai made an arrangement with Phillip. If the three girls went into servitude for him, he would ask for mercy for Eliza using his influence. His wealth. He would ask the authorities not to put her to death. “I won’t work your girls hard,” he said. “Think of it as finishing school.”

The father had never physically recovered, nor mentally. He agreed.

It was not what they imagined. Even in their worst nightmares they couldn’t imagine what Mihai had in store for them.

Mihai’s closest companion was a cruel, weak man called Cyril. He was the mayor of a town far away who never seemed to be at home for his duties.

Cyril and Mihai drank great goblets of wine, but the girls were given crystal glasses of blue water.

“Isn’t it a beautiful hue? Indigo water. A rare thing, rare indeed but fitting for these beautiful tulip flowers I have before me.”

Later, in the lavatory, Amara would scream in terror and the older girls laugh to see how their water had turned blue.

“Look at your lovely ladies,” Cyril said, his eyes glinting. “You’d think they were dolls they are so lovely. Or puppets, perhaps. Dance for us, lovely puppets.”

“Go on,” Mihai said, “Do as he says.”

So the girls drew out their scarves and danced. They brought the only color to the place; there was scant art, much of it dull, and the food served on plain plates. Only the wine goblets shone golden, and the enormous candles brought a warmth and a glow.

“Have them dance on my grave when I’m dead,” Cyril said, and the two men laughed until they fell off their chairs.

Looking back, the girls would see that as the best night of their captivity. The last color they saw. As the sun rose, Mihai said, “And now.”

As he imprisoned down below, in solid dark rooms, his eyelids lifted so his eyes stared dark and hard and Julia understood that he would not listen to reason.

Each girl had a cell to herself. The cells were bare; no bed, no chair, no window, no light. It took them a while to understand they were there to die. They wondered; did their father build these rooms? Didn’t he wonder what they were for? Or did he imagine coal, or wood, or wheat?

Day by day Mihai told them how long they had to live.

“How good I am to you,” he said. “What a gift I give to you. To know the truth.” He said this every day.

He allowed them water. He passed tall thin jars to them through small cracks and while they saw nothing in the pitch dark, they knew this water was blue. He told them so, he said, “Your insides will be such a lovely color.”

Julia thought, this is because of the whores. He wants us blue like them. He couldn’t see them in the dark; it was their corpses he wanted to see.

They couldn’t hear each other. They could barely hear themselves; the walls were dense, almost absorbent, drawing in all sound and most of the air.

So hungry. So very, very hungry. No moss or mold on the walls, no rodents, so day by day they weakened. Amara was the bitterest; she alone had believed he would marry her and she would live a life of adventure. She felt such fury at what he stole from her. Not just her own moments of joy, love, success, but those of all her future generations. He stole her name, her family’s future, he ended her line, and this made her exceeding bitter.

Mihai fattened. Larger and larger so quickly his servants thought he was a devil and ran for their lives. He grew so large he could no longer walk down the stairs, and so he did not know that those three girls died together, within an hour of each other.

They oozed through the gray brick walls, waiting till they are all three dead and spirit.

They found him, fat, repulsive, sunk deep into his bed. He wept. “Oh, glory. O great glory of god, they are beautiful. Ah, great day.”

Julia said, “Is this how your wife died? And your sister?”

“Great glory of god they were beautiful too,” he said. And they watched, feeling victorious, as he rose and stumbled to the stairs, as he tripped and fell down, as he bled out, alone and foul.

Many years hence, Eliza was old and dead in the tongue from keeping silent. She had not hated living amongst the women and had enjoyed her work as nurse during the war, but she despised the filth, the jailors, the cruelty. She was not expected to see freedom, but during a transfer to a new gaol, where a woman of her years could see out her time, there was an accident.

The horses reared up. The driver called out “Get off the road you stupid girls,” but nothing was there. The horses reared sharper, the wagon tipped over into the river, and only Eliza, of the five being transported, the guards, and the driver, survived.

Free at last, wearing prison-made clothing, carrying one small bag of belongings, she had nowhere to go but to her daughters in captivity. Her husband was long since dead of the drink; she’d always known that’s where he was headed.

She found herself walking in the shadows of the shallows of the river, her feet so cold she thought perhaps they’d been severed, like the poor soldiers at the hospital who woke to find their feet removed by a surgeon’s blade.

But no, her feet were there, she didn’t walk on stumps at all.

No one had aided her find her daughters. No one listened.

She saw a gray washerwoman holding up what looked like cloth but, Eliza thought, was the tattered souls of the girls. It filled her mortal despair. It was too late; they were lost. Still she walked on, to pray over their graves at least.

There were times she imagined she was elsewhere, to help the forward steps. At school, when they did walk long miles for punishment (maybe not) or she’d imagine herself doing laps of a beautiful boat, the girls at play, her husband still alive and in love with her

At last she found the mansion. Long abandoned, uglier than ever. No name over the door, so Mihai had not even kept that promise.

She walked around and around, not sure how to get in. There were no windows and the door seemed locked tight.

She thought she heard moans and cries. Her daughters crying. She was suddenly sure they were alive and waiting for her, and she pressed her fingers against the gray brick, seeking entrance. One small door where the servants had entered was ajar, and there she entered, and then she found her girls.

They were bone.

They were long dead and she was old in the bone but she loved them.

She was cold, though, so cold, and she had been since the river, chilled to the bone and when she found an old rug by the hearth, and at the top of the house one small window where the sun crept in, there she lay down and allowed herself to sleep.

As sad as she was, and drained gray by grief, she achieved death at last and her soul passed on to another place. Her daughters, the gray ladies, would never find that peace.

They did feel something. From where they were, a world away, the three stopped as one. For a moment, a wash of red passed through them, the color of love, perhaps, and for a moment they clustered, almost remembering, but then they were drawn away, drawn towards, and they found the next door and they knocked on it, bringing their gift of knowledge to the person within.

(Author Note: The title “Exceeding Bitter” is inspired by Requiem, Op. 48, by Gabriel Faure: “…ah, that great day, and exceeding bitter, when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.”)