Old Kingdom 04: Across the Wall (28 page)
Gretel relaxed for an instant as the dust obscured the beast, then screamed as the front part of Lazarus jumped out at her, teeth snapping. She kicked at it, but the cat was too swift, its great jaws meeting around her ankle. Gretel screamed again, and then Hansel was there, shaking the strange dust out of the broken body as if he were emptying a vacuum cleaner. In a few seconds there was nothing left of Lazarus but its head and an empty skin. Even then it wouldn’t let go, till Hansel forced its mouth open with a broomstick and pushed the snarling remnant across the floor and into one of the cages.
Gretel hopped across and watched it biting the bars, its green eyes still filled with magical life and hatred. ‘Hansel,’ she said, ‘your own eye is frozen with the witch. But I think I can remember the spell—and there is an eye for the taking here.’
So it was that when they entered the cold room later to take the key of bone from the frozen, twisted body of the witch, Hansel saw the world through one eye of blue and one of green.
Later, when they found their way home, it was the sight of that green eye that gave the Hagmom a heart attack and made her die. But their father was still a weak man, and within a year he thought to marry another woman who had no love for his children. Only this time the new Hagmom faced a Gretel who was more than half a witch, and a Hansel who had gained strange powers from his magic cat’s eye.
But that is all another story …
INTRODUCTION TO HOPE CHEST
I LOVE WESTERN FILMS . ALWAYS HAVE , and I daresay always will. Strangely, I don’t much care for Western fiction in print, with some notable exceptions, like Larry McMurtry’s
Lonesome
Dove
. But I love the films and regularly watch old favourites and try to catch up with the ones I’ve somehow missed along the way.
As I said in my original note that accompanied this story when it was first published in
Firebirds
(edited by Sharyn November), the origins of ‘Hope Chest’ lie in watching too many Westerns, and I quoted some favourites, such as
Winchester ’73
;
Red River
;
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
; and
They Call Me Trinity
. As I have a little more space here, to that list I would add
The Wild Bunch
,
The
Far Country
, and the miniseries
Lonesome Dove
.
Of course, I couldn’t write a straightforward Western. I find it very difficult to write a story of any kind without introducing elements of fantasy or science fiction. I seem to have a natural tendency to divert from the straight and narrow of realism. Even writing a Western, as here, I found myself setting it in a kind of alternate United States, with a supernatural Hitler analogue, inherited magical powers, and parallel worlds. In retrospect, the latter half of the story is more Peckinpah than Hawks or Ford, but I do admire the work of all three in Westerns (and elsewhere).
HOPE CHEST
O
NE DUSTY, SLOW MORNING IN THE
summer of 1922, a passenger was left crying on the platform when the milk train pulled out of Denilburg after its five-minute stop. No one noticed at first, what with the whistle from the train and the billowing steam and smoke and the labouring of the steel wheels upon the rails. The milk carter was busy with the cans, the stationmaster with the mail. No one else was about, not when the full dawn was still half a cup of coffee away.
When the train had rounded the corner, taking its noise with it, the crying could be clearly heard. Milk carter and stationmaster both looked up from their work and saw the source of the sound.
A baby, tightly swaddled in a pink blanket, was precariously balanced on a large steamer trunk at the very edge of the platform. With every cry and wriggle the baby was moving closer to the side of the trunk. If she fell, she’d fall not only from the trunk but from the platform, down to the rails four feet below.
The carter jumped over his cans, knocking two down, his heels splashing in the spilled milk. The stationmaster dropped his sack, letters and packets cascading out to meet the milk. They each got a hand under the baby at the very second it rolled off the trunk. Both men went over the edge of the platform, and they trod on each other’s feet as they landed, hard and painful—but upright. The baby was perfectly balanced between them.
That’s how Alice May Susan Hopkins came to Denilburg, and that’s how she got two unrelated uncles with the very same first name, Uncle Bill Carey, the stationmaster, and Uncle Bill Hoogener, the milk carter.
The first thing the two Bills noticed when they caught the baby was a note pinned to the pink blanket. It was on fine ivory paper, the words in blue-black ink that caught the sun and glinted when you held it just so. It said:
‘Alice May Susan, born on the Summer Solstice, 1921. Look after her and she’ll look after you.’
It didn’t take long for the news of Alice May Susan’s arrival to get around the town, and it wasn’t more than fifteen minutes later that fifty percent of the town’s grown women were all down at the station, the thirty-eight of them clustering around that poor baby enough to suffocate her. Fortunately it was only a few minutes more till Eulalie Falkirk took charge, as she always did, and established a roster for hugging and kissing and gawking and fussing and worrying and gossiping over the child.
Over the next few months that roster changed to include actually looking after little Alice May Susan. She was handed from one married woman to the next, changing her surname from month to month as she went from family to family. She was a dear little girl, everyone said, and Eulalie Falkirk was hard put to decide who should adopt the child. Her final decision came down to one simple thing. While all the womenfolk had been busy with the baby, most of the menfolk had been taking turns trying to open up that steamer trunk.
The trunk looked easy enough. It was about six feet long, three feet wide, and two feet high. It had two leather straps around it and an old brass lock, the kind with a keyhole big enough to put your whole finger in. Only no one did after Torrance Yib put his in and it came back with the tip missing, cut off clean as you please right at the joint.
The straps wouldn’t come undone either, and whatever they were, it wasn’t any leather anyone in Denilburg had ever seen. It wouldn’t cut and it wouldn’t tear, and those straps drove everyone who tried them mad with frustration.
There was some talk of devilment and foreign magic, till Bill Carey—who knew more about luggage than the rest of the town put together— pointed out the brass plate on the underside that read ‘Made in the U.S.A. Imp. Pat. Pend. Burglarproof trunk.’ Then everyone was proud and said it was scientific progress and what a pity it was that the name of the company had been scratched off, for it’d get some good business in Denilburg if only they knew where to send their orders.
The only man in the whole town who hadn’t tried to open the trunk was Jake Hopkins, the druggist, so when Stella Hopkins said they’d like to take baby Alice May Susan on, Eulalie Falkirk knew it wasn’t because they wanted whatever was in the trunk.
So Alice May Susan joined the Hopkins household and grew up with Jake and Stella’s born daughters, Janice, Jessie, and Jane, who at the time were ten, eight, and four. The steamer trunk was put in the attic, and Alice May Susan, to all intents and purposes, became another Hopkins girl. No one out of the ordinary, just a typical Denilburg girl, the events of her life pretty much interchangeable with the sisters who had gone before her.
Until the year she turned sixteen, in 1937.
Of her three sisters, only Jane was at home that birthday, enjoying a vacation. Janice and Jessie had married up and left, both of them now living more than twenty miles away. Jane was different. She’d won a scholarship that had taken her off to college back east, where she’d got all sorts of ideas. One of them involved criticising everything Alice May Susan did or said, and counting the days till she could get on the train out of town and back to what she called ‘civilisation’.
‘You’d better study harder so you have a chance to get away from this place,’ said Jane as they sat on the porch eating birthday cake and watching the world go by. None of it had gone by yet, unless you counted the Prowells’ cat.
‘I like it here,’ said Alice May. ‘Why would I want to leave?’
‘Because there’s nothing here!’ protested Jane. ‘Nothing! No life, no colour, no … events! Nothing ever happens. Everyone just gets married and has children, and it starts all over again. There’s no romance in anything or anyone!’
‘Not everyone gets married,’ replied Alice May after a short pause to swallow a too-large bite of cake.
‘Gwennifer Korben, you mean,’ said Jane. ‘She’s a schoolmistress. Everyone knows they’re always spinsters. You don’t want to be a schoolmistress.’
‘Maybe I do,’ answered Alice May. She spun her cake fork into a silver blur and snatched it handle first out of the air.
‘Do you really?’ asked Jane, momentarily shocked. ‘A schoolmistress!’
Alice May frowned and threw the cake fork into the wall. It stuck, quivering, next to the tiny holes in the wood that showed several years of practice in the gentle art of cake-fork throwing.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I do feel … I do feel that I want to be something. I just don’t know what it is.’
‘Study,’ said Jane firmly. ‘Work hard. Go to college. Education is the only way for a woman to have her own life.’
Alice May nodded, to avoid further discussion. It was her birthday, and she felt hot and bothered rather than happy. The cake was delicious, and they’d had a very pleasant lunch with her family and some friends from school. But her birthday somehow felt unfinished and incomplete. There was something that she had to do, but she didn’t know what it was. Something more immediate than deciding her future life.
It didn’t take more than two hours in the rocking chair on the porch to work out what it was she needed to do, and wait for the right moment to do it.
The steamer trunk. It had been a long time since she’d even looked at it. Over the years she’d tried it many times, alone and in company. There had been times when she’d gone up to the attic every day to test if by some chance it had come undone. There’d been times when she’d forgotten about it for months. But no matter what, she always found herself making an attempt to open it on her birthday.
Even when she forgot about opening it, the trunk’s brooding presence stayed with her. It was a reminder that she was not exactly like the other Hopkins girls. Sometimes that was pleasant, but more often not, particularly as she had got older.
Alice May sighed and decided to give it yet another try. It was evening by then, and somewhat cooler. She picked up her lantern, trimmed the wick down a little, and went inside.
‘Trunk?’ asked her foster father, Jake, as she went through the kitchen. He was preserving lemons, the careful practice of his drugstore carried over to the culinary arts. No one else in Denilburg preserved lemons, or would know what to do with them once they were preserved.
‘Trunk?’ asked Stella, who was sewing in the drawing room.
‘Trunk?’ asked Jane on the stairs, as Alice May passed her. ‘Trunk?’
‘Of course the trunk!’ snapped Alice May. She pulled down the attic ladder angrily and climbed up. It was a very clean attic, in a very clean house. There was only the trunk in it, up against the small window that was letting in the last of the hot summer sun. A red glow shone on the brass lock and the lustrous leather straps.
Alice May was still angry. She set the lantern down, grabbed a strap, and pulled. When it came loose, she fell over backward and hit her head on the floor. The sound it made echoed through the house. There was a noticeable pause, then three voices carried up in chorus.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes!’ shouted Alice May, angrier still. She wrenched at the other strap and it came loose too, though this time she was ready for it. At the same time, the brass lock went
click
. It wasn’t the sort of click that was so soft, you could think you might have imagined it. This was a slow, drawn-out click, as if mighty metal gears were slowly turning over.