SPINDLESHANKS

(NEW ORLEANS, 1956)

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of the novels Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She also wrote the movie novelization of Beowulf and, more recently, she has published the Siobhan Quinn series of urban fantasies (Blood Oranges, Red Delicious, and Cherry Bomb) under the pseudonym “Kathleen Tierney.”

Her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in a number of volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores, To Charles Fort with Love, Alabaster, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, The Ape’s Wife and Other Tales, Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume Two), and Dear Sweet Filthy World.

Kiernan is a multiple recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award, as well as a winner of the Nebula Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Mythopoeic Award.

As the author explains: “‘Spindleshanks’ is the only story I’ve ever written that I thought was so good that it would absolutely, definitely, find a place in an annual ‘Year’s Best’ anthology. Previously, I’d almost felt that confident about ‘Rats Live on No Evil Star.’ Naturally, neither of these stories were chosen for such compilations. As is so often the case, my own reaction to my work was not in line with the opinions of readers and editors, and so ‘Spindleshanks’ has languished in a somewhat obscure collection.

“In ‘Spindleshanks,’ I somehow managed to achieve an economy of language I’d not enjoyed before (or since, for that matter). Stylistically, I think it stands apart from the greater body of what I’ve written. That wasn’t intentional, though, just something that happened. When I started work on the piece, I had in mind a story about a ghoul cult living in a necropolis beneath Lafayette Cemetery, with dashes of lycanthropy thrown in, and ‘Spindleshanks’ is what came out instead. Rather, not instead, but it is a story where I kept the horrific and supernatural elements so low-key that, most of the time, they work more as subtext than overt theme.

“Looking back at the story, I realize that it’s actually about the difficulties I was having finishing my second novel, Threshold (née Trilobite), with Reese Callicott’s The Ecstatic River standing in for my own unfinished manuscript. I see in it many of the qualities that I so admire in the work of Shirley Jackson, who, as Stephen King so aptly pointed out years ago, ‘never needed to raise her voice.’”

THE END OF July, indolent, dog-day swelter inside the big white house on Prytania Street; Greek Revival columns painted as cool and white as a vanilla ice cream cone, and from the second-floor veranda Reese can see right over the wall into Lafayette Cemetery, if she wants to—Lafayette No. 1, and the black iron letters above the black iron gate to remind anyone who forgets. She doesn’t dislike the house, not the way that she began to dislike her apartment in Boston before she finally left, but it’s much too big, even with Emma, and she hasn’t bothered to take the sheets off most of the furniture downstairs. This one bedroom almost more than she needs, anyway, her typewriter and the electric fan from Woolworths on the table by the wide French doors to the veranda, so she can sit there all day, sip her gin and tonic and stare out at the whitewashed brick walls and the crypts, whenever the words aren’t coming.

And these days the words are hardly ever coming, hardly ever there when she goes looking for them, and her editor wanted the novel finished two months ago. Running from that woman and her shiny black patent pumps, her fashionable hats, as surely as she ran from Boston, the people there she was tired of listening to, and so Reese Callicott leased this big white house for the summer and didn’t tell anyone where she was going or why. But she might have looked for a house in Vermont or Connecticut, instead, if she’d stopped to take the heat seriously, but the whole summer paid for in advance, all the way through September, and there’s no turning back now. Nothing now but cracked ice and Gibley’s and her view of the cemetery; her mornings and afternoons sitting at the typewriter and the mocking white paper, sweat and the candy smell of magnolias all day long, then jasmine at night.

Emma’s noisy little parties at night, too, all night sometimes, the motley handful of people she drags in like lost puppies and scatters throughout the big house on Prytania Street; this man a philosophy or religion student at Tulane and that woman a poet from somewhere lamentable in Mississippi, that fellow a friend of a friend of Faulkner or Capote. Their accents and pretenses and the last of them hanging around until almost dawn unless Reese finds the energy to run them off sooner. But energy in shorter supply than the words these days, and mostly she just leaves them alone, lets them play their jazz and Fats Domino records too loud and have the run of the place because it makes Emma happy. No point in denying that she feels guilty for dragging poor Emma all the way to New Orleans, making her suffer the heat and mosquitoes because Chapter Eight of The Ecstatic River might as well be a cinder-block wall.

Reese lights a cigarette and blows the smoke toward the veranda, toward the cemetery, and a hot breeze catches it and quickly drags her smoke ghost to pieces.

“There’s a party in the Quarter tonight,” Emma says. She’s lying on the bed, four o’clock Friday afternoon and she’s still wearing her butter-yellow house coat with one of her odd books and a glass of bourbon and lemonade.

“Isn’t there always a party in the Quarter?” Reese asks and now she’s watching two old women in the cemetery, one with a bouquet of white flowers. She thinks they’re chrysanthemums, but the women are too far away for her to be sure.

“Well, yes. Of course. But this one’s going to be something different. I think a real voodoo woman will be there.” A pause and she adds, “You should come.”

“You know I have too much work.”

Reese doesn’t have to turn around in her chair to know the pout on Emma’s face, the familiar, exaggerated disappointment, and she suspects that it doesn’t actually matter to Emma whether or not she comes to the party. But this ritual is something that has to be observed, the way old women have to bring flowers to the graves of relatives who died a hundred years ago, the way she has to spend her days staring at blank pages.

“It might help, with your writing, I mean, if you got out once in a while. Really, sometimes I think you’ve forgotten how to talk to people.”

“I talk to people, Emma. I talked to that Mr …” and she has to stop, searching for his name and there it is, “That Mr. Leonard, just the other night. You know, the fat one with the antique shop.”

“He’s almost sixty years old,” Emma says; Reese takes another drag off her cigarette, exhales, and “Well, it’s not like you want me out looking for a husband,” she says.

“Have it your way,” Emma says, the way she always says “Have it your way,” and she goes back to her book and Reese goes back to staring at the obstinate typewriter and watching the dutiful old women on the other side of the high cemetery wall.

Reese awakens from a nightmare a couple of hours before dawn, sweating and breathless, chilled by a breeze through the open veranda doors. Emma’s fast asleep beside her, lying naked on top of the sheets, though Reese didn’t hear her come in. If she cried out or made any other noises in her sleep at least it doesn’t seem to have disturbed Emma. Reese stares at the veranda a moment, the night beyond, and then she sits up, both feet on the floor, and she reaches for the lamp cord, but that might wake Emma and it was only a nightmare after all, a bad dream, and in a minute or two it will all seem at least as absurd as her last novel.

Instead she lights a cigarette and sits smoking in the dark, listening to the restless sounds the big house makes when everyone is still and quiet and it’s left to its own devices, its random creaks and thumps, solitary house thoughts and memories filtered through plaster and lathe and burnished oak. The mumbling house and the exotic, piping song of a night bird somewhere outside, mundane birdsong made exotic because she hasn’t spent her whole life hearing it, some bird that doesn’t fly as far north as Boston. Reese listens to the bird and the settling house, Emma’s soft snores, while she smokes the cigarette almost down to the filter, and then she gets up, walks across the wide room to the veranda doors, only meaning to close them. Only meaning to shut out a little of the night and then maybe she can get back to sleep.

But she pauses halfway, distracted by the book on Emma’s nightstand, a very old book, by the look of it, something else borrowed from one or another of her Royal Street acquaintances, no doubt. More bayou superstition, Negro tales of voodoo and swamp magic, zombies and grave-robbing, the bogeyman passed off as folklore, and Reese squints to read the cover, fine leather worn by ages of fingers and the title stamped in flaking crimson—Cultes des Goules by Comte d’Erlette. The whole volume in French and the few grim illustrations do nothing for Reese’s nerves, so she sets it back down on the table, makes a mental note to ask Emma what she sees in such morbid things, and, by the way, why hasn’t she ever mentioned that she can read French?

The veranda doors half-shut and she pauses, looks out at the little city of the dead across the street, the marble and cement roofs dull white by the light of the setting half-moon, and a small shred of the dream comes back to her then. Emma, the day they met, a snowy December afternoon in Harvard Square, Reese walking fast past the Old Burying Ground and First Church, waiting in the cold for her train, and Emma standing off in the distance. Dark silhouette against the drifts and the white flakes swirling around her, and Reese tries to think what could possibly have been so frightening about any of that. Some minute detail already fading when she opened her eyes, something about the sound of the wind in the trees, maybe, or a line of footprints in the snow between her and Emma. Reese Callicott stares at Lafayette for a few more minutes and then she closes the veranda doors, locks them, and goes back to bed.

“Oh, that’s horrible,” Emma says and frowns as she pours a shot of whiskey into her glass of lemonade. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe they found her right down there on the sidewalk and we slept straight through the whole thing.”

“Well, there might not have been that much noise,” Carlton says helpfully and sips at his own drink, bourbon on the rocks, and he takes off his hat and sets it on the imported wicker table in the center of the veranda. Carlton the only person in New Orleans that Reese would think to call her friend, dapper, middle-aged man with a graying mustache and his Big Easy accent. Someone that she met at a writer’s conference in Providence years ago, before Harper finally bought The Light Beyond Center and her short stories started selling to The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Carlton the reason she’s spending the summer in exile in the house on Prytania Street, because it belongs to a painter friend of his who’s away in Spain or Portugal, some place like that.

“They say her throat, her larynx, was torn out. So she might not have made much of a racket at all.”

Reese sets her own drink down on the white veranda rail in front of her, nothing much left of it but melting ice and faintly gin-flavored water, but she didn’t bring the bottle of Gibley’s out with her and the morning heat’s made her too lazy to go inside and fix another. She stares down at the wet spot at the corner of Prytania and Sixth Street, the wet cement very near the cemetery wall drying quickly in the scalding ten o’clock sun.

“Still,” Emma says, “I think we would have heard something, don’t you Reese?”

“Emmie, I think you sleep like the dead,” Reese says, the grisly pun unintended but now it’s out and no one’s seemed to notice anyway.

“Well, the Picayune’s claiming it was a rabid stray—” and then Carlton clears his throat, interrupts Emma, and “I have a good friend on the force,” he says. “He doesn’t think it was an animal, at all. He thinks it’s more likely someone was trying to make it look like the killer was an animal.”

“Who was she?” Reese asks, and now there are two young boys, nine or ten years old, standing near the cemetery wall, pointing at the wet spot and whispering excitedly to one another.

“A colored woman. Mrs. Duquette’s new cook,” Carlton says. “I don’t remember her name offhand. Does it matter?”

The two boys have stooped down to get a better look, maybe hoping for a splotch of blood that the police missed when they hosed off the sidewalk a few hours earlier.

“What was she doing out at that hour anyway?” Emma asks, finishes stirring her drink with an index finger and tests it with the tip of her tongue.

Carlton sighs and leans back in his wicker chair. “No one seems to know, precisely.”

“Well, I think I’ve had about enough of this gruesome business for one day,” Reese says. “Just look at those boys down there,” and she stands up and shouts at them, hey, you boys, get away from there this very minute, and they stand up and stare at her like she’s a crazy woman.

“I said get away from there. Go home!”

“They’re only boys, Reese,” Carlton says, and just then one of them flips Reese his middle finger and they both laugh before squatting back down on the sidewalk to resume their examination of the murder scene.

“They’re horrid little monsters,” Reese says and she sits slowly back down again.

“They’re all monsters, dear,” and Emma smiles and reaches across the table to massage the place between Reese’s shoulder blades that’s always knotted, always tense.

Carlton rubs at his mustache and “I assume all is not well with the book,” he says and Reese scowls, still staring down at the two boys on the sidewalk.

“You know better than to ask a question like that.”

“Yes, well, I had hoped the change of climate would be good for you.”

“I don’t think this climate is good for anything but heat rash and mildew,” Reese grumbles and swirls the ice in her glass. “I need another drink. And then I need to get back to work.”

“Maybe you’re trying too hard,” Carlton says and stops fumbling with his mustache. “Maybe you need to get away from this house for just a little while.”

“That’s what I keep telling her,” Emma says, “But you know she won’t listen to anyone.”

The pout’s in her voice again and it’s more than Reese can take, those horrible boys and the murder, Carlton’s good intentions and now Emma’s pout, and she gets up and leaves them, goes inside, trading the bright sunshine for the gentler bedroom shadows, and leaves her lover and her friend alone on the veranda.

Saturday and Emma’s usual sort of ragtag entourage, but tonight she’s spending most of her time with a dark-skinned woman named Danielle Thibodaux, someone she met the night before at the party on Esplanade, the party with the fabled voodoo priestess. Reese is getting quietly, sullenly drunk in one corner of the immense dining room, the dining room instead of the bedroom because Emma insisted. “It’s such a shame we’re letting this place go to waste,” she said and Reese was in the middle of a paragraph and didn’t have time to argue. Not worth losing her train of thought over, and so here they all are, smoking and drinking around the long mahogany table, candlelight twinkling like starfire in the crystal chandelier, and Reese alone in a Chippendale in the corner. As apart from the others as she can get without offending Emma, and she’s pretending that she isn’t jealous of the dark-skinned woman with the faint Jamaican accent.

There’s a Ouija board in the center of the table, empty and unopened wine bottles, brandy and bourbon, Waterford crystal and sterling silver candlesticks, and the cheap, dime store Ouija board there in the middle. One of the entourage brought it along, because he heard there was a ghost in the big white house on Prytania Street, a girl who hung herself from the top of the stairs when she got the news her young fiancé had died at Appomattox, or some such worn-out Civil War tragedy, and for an hour they’ve been drinking and trying to summon the ghost of the suicide or anyone else who might have nothing better to do in the afterlife than talk to a bunch of drunks.

“I’m bored,” Emma says finally and she pushes the Ouija board away, sends the tin planchette skittering toward a bottle of pear brandy. “No one wants to talk to us.” The petulance in her voice does nothing at all to improve Reese’s mood and she thinks about taking her gin and going upstairs.

And then someone brings up the murdered woman, not even dead a whole day yet and here’s some asshole who wants to try and drag her spirit back to Earth. Reese rolls her eyes, thinks that even the typewriter would be less torture than these inane parlor games, and then she notices the uneasy look on the dark woman’s face. The woman whispers something to Emma, just a whisper but intimate enough that it draws a fresh pang of jealousy from Reese. Emma looks at her, a long moment of silence exchanged between them, and then she laughs and shakes her head, as if perhaps the woman’s just made the most ridiculous sort of suggestion imaginable.

“I hear it was a wild dog,” someone at the table says.

“There’s always a lot of rabies this time a year,” someone else says and Emma leans forward, eyes narrowed and a look of drunken confidence on her face, her I-know-something-you-don’t smirk, and they all listen as she tells about Carlton’s policeman friend and what he said that morning about the murdered woman’s throat being cut, about her larynx being severed so she couldn’t scream for help. That the cops are looking for a killer who wants everyone to think it was only an animal.

“Then let’s ask her,” the man who brought the Ouija board says to Emma and the blonde woman sitting next to him sniggers, an ugly, shameless sort of a laugh that makes Reese think of the two boys outside the walls of Lafayette, searching the sidewalk for traces of the dead woman’s blood.

There’s another disapproving glance from Danielle Thibodaux, then, but Emma only shrugs and reaches for the discarded planchette.

“Hell, why not,” she says, her words beginning to slur together just a little. “Maybe she’s still lurking about,” but the dark-skinned woman pushes her chair away from the table and stands a few feet behind Emma, watches nervously as seven or eight of the entourage place their fingers on the edges of the planchette.

“We need to talk to the woman who was murdered outside the cemetery this morning,” Emma says, affecting a low, spooky whisper, phoney creepshow awe, and fixing her eyes at the dead center of the planchette. “Mrs. Duplett’s dead cook,” Emma whispers and someone corrects her, “No, honey. It’s Duquette. Mrs. Duquette,” and several people laugh.

“Yeah, right. Mrs. Duquette.”

“Jesus,” Reese whispers and the dark-skinned woman stares across the room at her, her brown eyes that seem to say Can’t you see things are bad enough already? The woman frowns and Reese sighs and pours herself another drink.

“We want to talk to Mrs. Duquette’s murdered cook,” Emma says again. “Are you there?”

A sudden titter of feigned surprise or fright when the tin planchette finally begins to move, circling the wooden board aimlessly for a moment before it swings suddenly to no and is still again.

“Then who are we talking to?” Emma says impatiently, and the planchette starts to move again. Wanders the board for a moment and members of the entourage begin to call out letters as the heart-shaped thing drifts from character to character.

“S … P … I … N,” and then the dark-skinned woman takes a step forward and rests her almond hands on Emma’s shoulders. Reese thinks that the woman actually looks scared now and sits up straight in her chair so that she has a better view of the board.

“D … L,” someone says, and “Stop this now, Emma,” the dark woman asks. She sounds afraid and maybe there’s a hint of anger, too, but Emma only shakes her head and doesn’t take her eyes off the restless planchette.

“It’s okay, Danielle. We’re just having a little fun, that’s all.”

“F … no, E …” and someone whispers the word, “Spindle, it said its name is Spindle,” but the planchette is still moving and “Please,” the dark woman says to Emma.

“S … H,” and now the woman has taken her hands off Emma’s shoulder, has stepped back into the shadows at the edge of the candlelight again. Emma calls out the letters with the others, voices joined in drunken expectation, and Reese has to restrain an urge to join them herself.

“A … N … K … S,” and then the planchette is still and everyone’s looking at Emma like she knows what they should do next. “Spindleshanks,” she says, and Reese catches the breathless hitch in her voice, as if she’s been running or has climbed the stairs too quickly. Fat beads of sweat stand out on her forehead, glimmer wetly in the flickering, orange-white glow of the candles.

“Spindleshanks,” she says again, and then, “That’s not your name,” she whispers.

“Ask it something else,” one of the women says eagerly. “Ask Spindleshanks something else, Emmie,” but Emma shakes her head, frowns, and takes her hands from the planchette, breaking the mystic circle of fingers pressed against the tin. When the others follow suit, she pushes the Ouija board away from her again.

“I’m tired of this,” she says, and Reese can tell that this time the petulance is there to hide something else, something she isn’t used to hearing in Emma’s voice. “Somebody turn on the lights.”

Reese stands up and presses the switch on the dining room wall next to a gaudy, gold-framed reproduction of John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit—the pale, secretive faces of five girls and the solid darkness framed between two urns—and in the flood of electric light, the first thing that Reese notices is that the almond-skinned woman has gone, that she no longer stands there behind Emma’s chair. And she doesn’t see the second thing until one of the women cries out and points frantically at the wall above the window, the white plaster above the drapes. Emma sees it, too, but neither of them says a word, both sit still and silent for a minute, two minutes, while the tall letters written in blood above the brocade valance begin to dry and turn from crimson to a dingy, reddish brown.

When everyone has left, and Emma has taken a couple of sleeping pills and gone upstairs, Reese sits at one end of the table and stares at the writing on the dining room wall. Spindleshanks in sloppy letters that began to drip and run before they began to dry, and she sips at her gin and wonders if they were already there before the reckless séance even started. Wonders, too, if Danielle Thibodaux has some hand in this, playing a clever, nasty trick on Emma’s urbane boozers, if maybe they offended her or someone else at the Friday night party and this was their comeuppance, tit for tat, and next time perhaps they’ll stick to their own gaudy thrills and leave the natives alone.

The writing is at least twelve feet off the floor and Reese can’t imagine how the woman might have pulled it off, unless perhaps Emma was in on the prank as well. Maybe some collusion between the two of them to keep people talking about Emma Goldfarb’s parties long after the lease is up and they’ve gone back to Boston. “Remember the night Emma called up Spindleshanks?” they’ll say, or “Remember that dreadful stuff on the dining room wall? It was blood, wasn’t it?” And yes, Reese thinks, it’s a sensible explanation for Emma’s insistence that they use the downstairs for the party that night, and that there be no light burning but the candles.

It almost makes Reese smile, the thought that Emma might be half so resourceful, and then she wonders how they’re ever going to get the wall clean again. She’s seen a ladder in the gardener’s shed behind the house and Carlton will probably know someone who’ll take care of it, paint over the mess if it can’t be washed away.

In the morning, Emma will probably admit her part in the ghostly deceit and then she’ll lie in bed laughing at her gullible friends. She’ll probably even laugh at Reese and “I got you, too, didn’t I?” she’ll smirk. “Oh no, don’t you try to lie to me, Miss Callicott. I saw the look on your face.” And in a minute Reese blows out the candles, turns off the lights, and follows Emma upstairs to bed.

A few hours later, almost a quarter of four by the black hands of the alarm clock ticking loud on her bedside table, and Reese awakens from the nightmare of Harvard Square again. The snow storm become a blizzard and this time she didn’t even make it past the church, no farther than the little graveyard huddled in the lee of the steeple, and the storm was like icicle daggers. She walked against the wind and kept her eyes directly in front of her, because there was something on the other side of the wrought-iron fence, something past the sharp pickets that wanted her to turn and see it. Something that mumbled and the sound of its feet in the snow was so soft, like footsteps in powdered sugar.

And then Reese was awake and sweating, shivering because the veranda doors were standing open again. The heat and humidity so bad at night, worse at night than in the day, she suspects, and they can’t get to sleep without the cranky electric fan and the doors left open. But now even this stingy breeze is making her shiver and she gets up, moving cat-slow and cat-silent so she doesn’t wake Emma, and walks across the room to close the doors and switch off the fan.

Reaching for the brass door handles when Emma stirs behind her, her voice groggy from the Valium and alcohol, groggy and confused, and “Reese? Is something wrong?” she asks. “Has something happened?”

“No, dear,” Reese answers her, “I had a bad dream, that’s all. Go back to sleep,” and she’s already pulling the tall French doors shut when something down on the sidewalk catches her attention. Some quick movement there in the darkness gathered beneath the ancient magnolias and oaks along Sixth Street; hardly any moon for shadows tonight, but what shadows there are enough to cast a deeper gloom below those shaggy boughs. And Reese stands very still and keeps her eyes on the street, waiting, though she couldn’t say for what.

Emma shifts in bed and the mattress creaks and then there’s only the noise from the old fan and Reese’s heart, the night birds that she doesn’t know the names for calling to one another from the trees. Reese squints into the blacker shades of night along the leafy edge of Sixth, directly across from the place where the police found the body of the murdered cook, searches for any hint of the movement she might or might not have seen only a moment before. But there’s only the faint moonlight winking dull off the chrome fender of someone’s Chrysler, the whole thing nothing more than a trick of her sleep-clouded eyes, the lingering nightmare, and Reese closes the veranda doors and goes back to bed, and Emma.