Bloody Mary, page 3
And the memories he holds closest are those of Bloody Mary. He does not understand why. In some ways, she has treated him no better than the shadowy things that ran the world to ground. By that token, she may be little better than a monster herself. But Bloody Mary is also the one who has kept him alive. He knows that much is true. She taught him; she trained him. And they are together, and have been, and will be. That is true, too.
Maybe that is why he guards his memories (jealously), even as he guards her. He holds them close and keeps them safe, and he shares them not at all. Her smile, the curve of her scar, her piercing eyes behind the half-a-princess mask. The ride of her muscles beneath her skin, and the sound of the first breath she takes after she falls asleep. The way she talks to the cat when she thinks he isn’t listening. The easy glide of her walk, and her hand on his shoulder when she wakes him, and the sound of her brush as she rakes it through her red hair (much longer now than that first day on Maple Street).
Other memories are tangible… almost touchstones. The scrimshaw cyclops tusk, buried deep in a canvas bag that holds the young man’s belongings. Or the black gloves he wears each day. Or the revolver that turned five cackling goblins into carcasses on a storm-swept night, which he wears low-slung in a holster on his hip.
These are the things he values most — the tangible and intangible. He cannot think of them as possessions, for he does not own them, any more than he owns Bloody Mary. Still, there is nothing he holds dearer. There is nothing he thinks of more often. And that is a mystery to him. For all he knows, bundled and wrapped and knotted ’round a dozen roses all of it might be nothing more to Bloody Mary than a fistful of memory’s grist, but to him it means so much more.
To him, it is everything.
And so is she.
* * *
“You should move,” Bloody Mary says. “It’s stupid to sleep under an apple tree — those things are going to thud on you all night.”
The young man doesn’t say a word. They are in an old orchard. He has been foraging (alone) all day in a nearby town while Bloody Mary swam in a river and baked herself on a rocky ledge in the sun… with the sawed-off Remington in easy reach, of course. Now they are camped beneath apple trees, branches untrimmed for years, ripe fruit there for the taking. Earlier, the young man convinced Bloody Mary that it was not a good idea to have a fire, because (if anywhere) this valley of oak and low fog and two-lane country road was true pumpkin country. It was always best to be wary in such places, where Jacks seem to thrive, but now he thinks better of it. Though the day was like summer, the crisp night air has turned chill. It’s cold enough (and windy enough) that apples have begun to fall. He wishes he’d built a fire.
The cold doesn’t seem to bother Bloody Mary. She lays beneath the stars on a patch of earth still open to the sky, cocooned in a down sleeping bag. Zipped up tight, the cat curled at her feet. She calls the bag a “mummy bag,” and the young man always says that it is well-named. He figures it’s a deathtrap. Something grabs you in the night while you’re wrapped up in such a thing, it could drag you all the way to hell before you had a chance to get free. That’s why he sleeps under loose blankets. “Like a hobo,” Bloody Mary says.
And, of course, that’s why he is cold tonight.
“You’re still awake?” Bloody Mary asks.
“Yes,” he says, happy to put his thoughts away.
“Me, too,” she says, sitting up.
Her pill bottle rattles, and then her canteen sloshes. There go fifty milligrams. The young man knows she won’t be awake for long.
“You should watch that stuff,” he says.
“That’s why I’ve got you. To protect me when I put my brain in neutral.”
“I knew there was a reason.”
“That’s one of them, anyway.”
That stirs him. The young man waits for Bloody Mary to say something else, wondering if she will. And after a long while she does, but it’s nothing he expected.
It’s a question. The only question, really… the one they never talk about.
She’s staring up at the stars when she asks it.
“What do you think happened? I mean, really?”
The young man considers his answer. He’s weighed multiple theories, some of which made the rounds before the world took its final tumble into darkness. All of them make some kind of sense, in one way or another. A rift between dimensions, the collapse of barriers between worlds. A curse related to forgotten rites of pagan western cultures (see: Celts, see also: Druids). A reality born from a collective unconsciousness grown too dark. The rise of the devil, the fall of god… and every hypothesis that fit (not so neatly) in between. But the young man likes the simple answers best, and he knows the words he speaks are true.
“The monsters came,” he says. “That’s what happened.”
“And now they’re everywhere,” Bloody Mary adds.
“Yes… and everyone.”
Bloody Mary says nothing to that, and the young man says no more.
A moment later, her first sleeping breath is caught by the rising wind.
* * *
She’s under now… Fifty milligrams deep. Dreaming her dreams, and they’re of him, as they have been lately. She doesn’t even know his name, and maybe she shouldn’t find out, because those things never worked out very well for her pre-10/31. But maybe this time—
And then there’s a sound. It drops through her dream and finds her. A thud… or a couple of them. Harder thuds than apples would make falling on a sleeping man—
Bloody Mary tries to stir, but she’s so far under. Next comes a groan, and then another. Louder this time — a guts-kicked-in kind of sound. And then another sound, an undeniably brutal one, like an axe handle slamming unprotected flesh.
Suddenly, Bloody Mary’s eyes flash open. She’s not fifty milligrams under anymore. There’s a full moon, and by its glow she sees the monster standing there, looming over the nest of hobo blankets. The blankets are a twisted tangle, and she hates to think of the man (whose name she doesn’t even know) wrapped in them, because that would mean that he is dead, and—
Just then, the monster drops a broken branch on the ground, as if he doesn’t need it anymore. Nothing stirs in the blankets. Nothing else moves, anywhere. And then the creature whirls as if catching her scent on the night air, and it sees her.
The cat stirs at her feet. One glance at the monster, and it hisses and bolts. Bloody Mary struggles with the mummy bag, but the creature is too fast. And strong. The stitched things charged with lightning and dark magic are all like that, and this one is no different. She can see its sloping head in the moonlight, the scarred nightmare of a face, the bolts in its neck and the black black clothes. In a moment the thing is on top of her, and it snatches the mummy bag by the neck and drags Bloody Mary across the open patch of orchard.
She’s thrashing now, but there’s no way to gain enough leverage to escape, and the thing swings her to the side for even trying. The ground is like cement, and a breath blasts out of her as she hits it. She’s on her back, and the monster straddles her, staring down, the moon riding low behind one squared-off shoulder. Bloody Mary squints into the cold brightness, trying to focus. They’re beneath a gnarled fruit tree. The branches are like some terrible web, and from the web dangles a chain, and on the end of the chain is a meat-hook.
It seems the creature is grinning now… a crosshatched mess of a grin. It snatches up the mummy bag. Bloody Mary kicks, but there’s no way out. And before she draws another breath the meat-hook is right there, inches from her face. Just as she’s ready to taste it, the monster threads the spike through a canvas loop on the neck of the bag and lets the woman hang.
The branch creaks. The monster’s face comes nearer — sunken eyes piercing… burning.
It speaks.
“Lesson One,” it says. “Never trust anyone… except me.”
Bloody Mary blinks. She recognizes this voice… knows it as she knows her own.
And then it comes again. “You asked me my name once,” he says from behind the mask. “I didn’t have one that mattered before, but now I do. I’ll tell it to you.”
“No,” she says, staring at the stitched-horror mask, the green skin, the black clothes that aren’t a costume. “Everyone knows your name… everyone.”
“I think you’re right,” he says. “The same way they know yours. The same way they’ll know both our names… together.”
His black-gloved hands reach out and slip the mask from Bloody Mary’s face. One finger traces the scar on her cheek, then five comb through her hair. He peels the glove off his other hand, brushing her lips with a finger.
She pulls off his mask.
He pulls her closer.
“Happy Halloween,” he says.
Norman Partridge
Publishers Weekly called Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest “contemporary American writing at its finest” and chose the novel as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006. His fiction includes horror, suspense, crime, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story” says his friend writer Joe R. Lansdale. Author of five short story collections, Partridge’s novels include the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. Partridge’s compact, thrill-a-minute style has been praised by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and his work has received multiple Bram Stoker awards.
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Norman Partridge, Bloody Mary
