Read The End of the Sentence Online

Authors: Maria Dahvana Headley,Kat Howard

Tags: #mythology, #fantasy, #fairytale, #ghosts, #horror, #literary horror

The End of the Sentence (10 page)

BOOK: The End of the Sentence
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20.

 

I’d been expecting a monster. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof the murderer, Dusha Chuchonnyhoof the Ironhide, Dusha Chuchonnyhoof the goblin made of rust and hooves—but he’d always been a monster. 

“Malcolm,” he called again, his voice gentle, a parent reassuring a child of the safety of the darkness. I walked towards the car. 

When I saw his face through the smoke, he did not look like a monster. He didn’t look like a man. He looked broken.

I looked into the car, and saw the prison warden, looking not at me, nor at his passenger, but straight ahead. 

I could smell the iron and the corrosion, the rust that had turned his skin to red. It had crusted the beds of his fingernails, and lined his eyes, weighting the lids. He moved as if his bones were knives, carving his flesh from the inside, slowly, and too carefully. He picked up his feet as if the earth burned him. 

His shadow, rising in the firelight to twist in the night and the smoke, did not match the rest of him, and I heard the townspeople around me, all the people I didn’t know. Gasps and whispers. No one screamed. 

I looked down at his feet. Hooves, yes, at the bottoms of his pants, and the thinnest layer of metal beneath, broken in places, hands too old to carry their burden. The hooves were black and dusty, like old wrought iron, or feet belonging to an animal near dying, and I thought again of my grandmother, her hands fixing the goats, but there were always some goats that had started on their way to death. She’d let those go. ‘Too old a thing for fixing,’ she’d said. 

I could see centuries on Chuchonnyhoof’s skin, and on the cracked horns that curved from his forehead. From one angle, I saw them. From the next, gone. The shadow showed the truth, and had I seen him only in that form, I would have fled. Here, though, in front of me, was a ruin, a man made of rust. 

The only thing unruined was his eyes, nothing like anything else I’d seen in the world. It occurred to me that that was because they weren’t from it. Milk-blue opals, strange, bright and tender, lined in that rust. 

I nodded at him. “Welcome back, Mr. Chuchonnyhoof.”

He smiled at me, a slow, grinding stretch of his skin. “Thank you, for that. Will you give me your arm? I am not as well as once I was, and the way is difficult.”

He held out his hand.

I looked back. Ralph stood at the side of the house, near the door to the smithy, arms folded across his chest, hair silver in the light from the bonfires. Lischen stood next to him, mouth dark from the blackberries. In the light, the juice looked like blood. 

I looked at the things that had started to rise from the earth, white trails of nothing, people in long dresses and short coats, a feather headdress, a wide-brimmed hat, all made of light and mist, bending around the fires, bowing, kneeling, circling. 

The world of the quick had pressed itself hand to hand with that of the dead. 

I imagined their graves, between the town and my land. The people, the living, fed the fires with wood they’d hauled from elsewhere. Far out in the sky, above all this, I could see the stars, but it was as though I was seeing them through netting. I thought of costumes. I thought of sweatshirted goblins and chiffon dresses. I squinted into the mist, hoping, but Row wasn’t there. 

Veiled in smoke, the people of Ione danced with their dead, and spoke to them. 

There were dead I would give everything I had to speak to again.

Instead, I gave Chuchonnyhoof my arm, and staggered from the weight of him. Whatever he’d been before, he was iron now, almost entirely. We walked slowly, dragging through the grass, a bridal procession to the waiting priest, the watching bride. 

“I know some of what you have done for me, Malcolm. I know that you have tried to care for the place. I am grateful.” Chuchonnyhoof’s voice was sweet and gentle. No thickness, no grinding of rust.

His fingers, where he clutched my arm, left red streaks on my jacket. “The place is mine,” I said. “Better to fix what I can.”

Chuchonnyhoof stumbled, nearly going to his knees, and I felt the strain along my side as I heaved him back up. His hand was rough, and snagged at my palm.

I turned my head, hearing the sound of soft hooves, and saw a herd of ghostly horses rising from the property line, unfolding their limbs, white and silver, circling the land, weaving between the smoking stacks. At their head, a mare of bone, haltered in ribbons of red.

“The mare’s walk,” Chuchonnyhoof said, his voice catching. “The
Láir Bhán
. Guised to bring fortune. A hundred and seventeen years since I’ve seen one.”

I looked closer. Some of the horses weren’t horses, but women, the horse forms transparent around them. They moved as though they were a single thing, a many-bodied ghost marching between the fires, around the families.

Lischen looked out at the procession, her face lit with longing. She turned to descend the stairs to the smithy, Ralph behind her. 

Chuchonnyhoof’s and my progress was slower. Each step deliberate, each movement an entire tick of the clock. The heat grew greater as we descended, the forge waiting in readiness.

“Have you enjoyed living in Ione?” Chuchonnyhoof asked.

“Enjoyed it?” I asked. 

“Has it been a good place to live? Would you make your home here? Will you stay?” he said, and looked at me. “At the homestead?”

“Yes,” I said at last. It was mine. I felt a claim on it. 

“Good,” Dusha said, and nodded. There was a snap, and he stumbled, hand clutching at my sleeve, then fell. Thumping against the walls, the lights shuddering from the impact. I ran after him.

He pulled himself up, half-leaning, half-sitting. Blood, a thicker red than his rust-stained skin, trickled from his temple, and his left nostril. 

“My shoe,” he said.

His right hoof was still shod, though it seemed only hope held it on. The left hoof was bare, and ragged. 

The shoe, snapped in two, rested above us on the stairs, and Chuchonnyhoof’s left leg was no longer human. It was hide, bristles of coarse fur like wire, the leg of an animal, a tremendous one. A beast. The hoof was split to the quick, and I could see the pain of it, the blood there too. As I watched, the transformation progressed, moving up Chuchonnyhoof’s body, and I felt him getting heavier still. The stairs groaned beneath us. I stared at him, his skin darkening, his body larger than it had been. There was something indistinct about his edges, something that twisted up from his spine and then was gone, and his face shifted and then became his again. There was a raw sound, something ripping inside his body, and then he coughed blood, a hissing cough like a fox barking after prey.  

“Hurry,” he said.

“You get the shoe,” Lischen said. “I’ll get him.” 

She pulled him from the ground as if he were nothing, and carried him. They continued down the stairs.

The horseshoe was worn, in some places as thin as paper, and cold. The detail of the fingers near gone, it could have been anything woven together in that shape. On the inside, it was corroded with rust.

Red streaked the white of Lischen’s dress, and her eyes glowed as bright as the flames in the forge, her mouth black and bloody from the berries. I could still taste the tartness of the fruit on my breath. She carried him as though he was nothing. 

Ralph had gripped Chuchonnyhoof’s other leg, and was pulling the remaining shoe loose with pincers. Chuchonnyhoof’s shadow hulked behind them, huge and lurching, the darkness beginning to match the man. As I watched, the shadow drew a claw across Chuchonnyhoof’s jawline. 

“I need that one, too,” Ralph said.

I placed the pieces in his hands, and he tossed both shoes into the forge. The smoke rose, white and thick. 

“The bone fire is lit,” Chuchonnyhoof said. I couldn’t bear to look at him, his pain, and then I saw Lischen remove something from around her shoulder. 

The silver bridle. Chuchonnyhoof nodded at her, baring his teeth. 

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. That is necessary. Thank you.”

I saw her change for a moment, her hair too long, her body too large. She fit the bit between his teeth, and laced the silver around his head, and his shadow tossed and reared up, but she held tight to the reins. The bridle calmed his body. The shadow stilled, and Chuchonnyhoof stilled as well. 

Hew’s shoe thumped against my chest, against the little crown that was still there, over my heart. Once, twice. Then a third time. That was when I heard the footsteps reverberating down the stairs. Clanging and echoing in parade, louder than the ghosts outside, louder than the ghosts inside. 

All of the paired shoes from the closet upstairs. This time, not empty. This time, this night, was when the dead of Ione could return, though they wore their hands as horseshoes.

They came down the stairs, a woman with Lischen’s mother’s face. Her father. Millers and Marches, all the names from the contracts, the watercolor-portraited, the locks of hair twisted together, two slender women, and last of all, unshod, a woman with silver braids around her head, and an apron made of black leather. No, not leather. A blacksmith’s apron made of dark. I looked at her pale arms, her pale face, all of it shining with a light that came not from the sun or moon, but from under the earth. It was the phosphorescence of a cave, or of the things deep down in the ocean. 

I looked at what dangled from her own hand. A smith’s hammer. So Dusha had brought his dead here tonight too. 

I wondered about the other dead. About Olivia Weyland, who was a ghost of the house. Were they here as well? About my dead, my Row. He was mine, but he was not Ione’s, and this was not my place yet. 

I took Hew’s shoe from my pocket, and set it upon the anvil. There was no ghost for it, no one to wear it. It was alone, thumping. 

Lischen looked away from it. “The witnesses have arrived.”

“Do you both come here freely, and of your own volition, with the intent to bind yourself in this place?” Ralph asked.

“There is supposed to be love,” I said, remembering the instructions. “For the binding to work.”

Lischen knelt in front of the anvil, her white dress foaming around her. She laid her hand across it, and looked up at me. I thought of her weight in the bed behind me, thought of her smell. Thought of her teeth against my back, the feel of them not tearing at me, though she’d torn at Michael Miller. I thought of my own broken history. Who was to say which of us was worse? 

Lischen tossed her head, shaking her hair loose from the silver threads that I now saw bound it. “Am I not something you could love?” 

“Will you give her your hand,” Chuchonnyhoof said, his voice stretching around the silver in his mouth, “and place it in hers, knowing what will happen?”

Ralph held a hammer in his hand. A pein, I remembered. On the anvil, a chisel. I imagined the strike, the chisel against my skin, then through it, separating bone from bone. I looked at an empty shoe, and at a woman who had mourned her child, two lifetimes and a day. No one ever died from grief, but there were those who lived with it.

“I will.”

“Then that is love enough,” Chuchonnyhoof said, sagging against the wall, wincing. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth, the drops falling to the floor. Beneath his hooves, the ground clattered with iron nails. “Let the contracts be signed and let the remunerations be written.”

We signed our names and wrote our wishes on the papers. Ralph picked the brand out of the coals of the bone fire, and pressed it to the pages. C&W. The paper did not burn, but the smell of iron thickened.

I heard metal, scraping and grinding behind me. The forge, I thought. It would be hot. And it would be pain. Lischen, though, had survived it once before, and she was here again, a willing bride, offering her right hand this time. Her left had already been taken. 

“You go first,” Lischen said.

“No,” said Chuchonnyhoof. “Together. I am, as I said, reduced.” His voice was scarcely a voice now. A rasp. 

Shaking only a little, I knelt over the anvil across from Lischen, and took her hand in mine. I looked at the faces of the ghosts, standing witness. All of them looked at me, except one. 

That ghost rolled her sleeves from the wrist, pushing them up her arms. That ghost looked only at Dusha. Abigayl. For a moment, he looked back, and I saw his eyes close. When they did, the room flinched with him. I looked at the hooves and saw them splitting further, peeling back from his bones. 

“Speak your wishes,” Ralph said. He placed the chisel against my skin.

My hand clenched around Lischen’s. As I clasped it, I felt in her palm the lone shoe. I pressed it into mine as well, hard between our hands. It was comfort, even if neither of our ghosts walked here. I felt the air shift as Ralph swung the hammer back. We spoke together.

“My son.”

“He will return when I do,”
Chuchonnyhoof had written. The dead were here, and they were watching, and what was pain before that chance?

The pein fell, and I heard a howl, a roar, a churning like something ripping from the earth itself. 

I felt the press of a roomful of ghosts against me, felt them holding a hand that held onto nothing. Pain, white-hot, large enough to block out my vision, my nerves screaming up my arm, a thousand ants, needles and trees falling, screaming pin-toothed animals, stampede, box canyon, ropes and knives. Sacrifice. Smoke, and the scent of a bone fire. Shapes and the shadows and rust and iron. Burning and burning and burning. 

Then the cedar and silver scent of Lischen, and something cooler, too. Rain beneath the smoke, moss and darkness. Iron, and the dust-spice sweat of horses. 

I opened my eyes, and looked down at my hands. Around my left wrist, a thin band of silver. Clasped hands, holding onto each other, never to let go. Lischen’s back was to me, her head bent, and her thick black hair streaming over her shoulders. Ralph was kneeling at the unlit forge, searching for something in the ashes.

“Has something”—my voice cracked, rusty in my throat. “Is everything all right?”

“There are no new shoes,” Ralph said. He stood by the forge, coated to the elbow in ash. I could see Abigayl there too, standing in the forge itself. She had something in her hands. 

BOOK: The End of the Sentence
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