“Yes,” she said. She swallowed and found the appropriate words. “I’m so sorry about what happened—about all of it.”
It was simple after that. They talked, she managed a couple of facsimiles of smiles, and he agreed to meet her for a drink the following Friday. She could already see him picturing in his head how the evening might progress, and where it might lead. She saw a flicker of disgust pass over his face. She wanted to believe that it was disgust at himself, but she knew better.
He made a show of paying for her coffee, and then, as they left the café, he gave her a peck on the cheek. That was the point at which she almost lost it, but she retained enough self-control simply to turn away so he wouldn’t see how much she hated him. She used a wet wipe to clean her cheek once he was out of sight and was so distracted that she bumped into someone as she turned the corner. She looked up to see Miss Bronston. The tall woman said nothing, but simply raised an eyebrow in inquiry.
“Friday,” said Carolyn. Miss Bronston reached out a hand, and Carolyn dropped the copied keys in her palm before continuing on her way.
• • •
Carolyn and Reese arrived almost simultaneously at the Asian-themed bar, far away from their own regular haunts. They ordered finger food, and he tried to ply her with booze, but she carefully nursed a single glass of wine. When he asked her why she wasn’t drinking more, she told him that she wanted to keep a clear head. She reached out and touched his hand.
“I want to enjoy it,” she said. “You know, later. I don’t want to miss any of it.”
He took her hand in his and lazily inscribed circles on her palm with the tip of his index finger. He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. His tongue probed at her lips, and she opened them wide enough to allow it to enter, just enough not to raise his suspicions, just enough to make sure that he was hooked.
They took a cab back to her apartment, his hand working to part her legs. She slapped it away a little more forcefully than he might have liked, then threw him a smile to soften the blow. He grew more insistent once they got inside and took off their coats. She gave in to his kisses, and allowed his hands to wander for a while before pushing him away.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said. She took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom. She undid his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and kissed him on the chest.
“You do the rest,” she said. “I’ll be out in a moment.”
As she walked away, she reached behind her and let him see her start to unzip her skirt. Then, as she had been instructed to do, she went into the bathroom and locked the door. She sat on the toilet seat and waited.
• • •
Reese stripped down to his underwear. He’d hold off on that until she came back from the bathroom, then let her witness the grand unveiling. He knew what he wanted to do to her. He was going to screw her six ways to Sunday, then spit in her face for what she’d put him through. If she came near him again, he’d report her to the police as a stalker.
He sat on the bed and glanced at himself in the mirror of her dressing table. He sucked in his gut then released it. He didn’t care how he looked to her. He wasn’t trying to impress her. If anything, he wanted her to feel degraded by him. It was the only time in his life that he wished himself fatter and uglier than he was. He willed her to hurry up. At least her bed was big. That was good. He noticed that there was a protective plastic layer between the mattress and the bedsheet. Odd, he thought: he hoped that she didn’t have some kind of bladder problem.
A sound came from behind him. He hadn’t heard the bathroom door open, but he’d been lost in thoughts of what he would soon be doing to her. He looked over his shoulder, but the door was still closed. There was that sound again. It was coming from the floor. Did she have a cat? He hated cats. And what was that smell?
He had shifted position to check, climbing on all fours so that he could lean across the mattress, when a woman’s face appeared from the other side of the bed. Her hair was dark, her face mostly pale, and her mouth almost lipless. Christ, thought Reese, she must have been hiding under the bed. A flatmate? Was this some kind of kinky sex thing? He didn’t mind, but it would have been nice to be asked.
The woman’s hands grasped the mattress and she pulled herself onto the bed. Her upper body was naked. Her breasts were small, and dry skin flaked from them.
“Who the f—”
Reese glimpsed the swell of her buttocks, and then whatever else he might have wanted to say died in his mouth.
The woman had no legs. Instead her skin darkened and mutated from white skin to reddish-black scales at the small of her back, and her thighs were fused below the cleft of her buttocks to form a single hard, jointed limb that tapered to the thickness of a man’s arm. It resembled a scorpion’s tail, right down to the dark, curved stinger at its tip.
The woman moved closer to him, dragging herself across the mattress. Reese wanted to get away, but his body wouldn’t respond. The woman’s eyes fixed him in place as surely as if he were pinned like a dead insect to a board. That dark tail arched over her back, and a drop of clear liquid dripped from the end.
“Please,” he said, and he wasn’t sure what he was asking her to do, beyond letting him live. “Please.”
The stinger struck, catching him on the top of the chest, in the same spot on which Carolyn had kissed him only minutes before. Instantly, he felt the venom spreading through his system, like a fire burning inside. His body shuddered, and his mouth opened so wide that he both heard and felt his jaw dislocate. He looked up at the stinger and saw it bifurcate, the bony carapace splitting to reveal a sharp pink organ covered in small, glistening hairs.
The woman gripped him hard by the torso, and he smelled her breath on him. She forced him onto his back, and her body arched at an impossible angle so that the stinger was poised above his mouth. She made a sound that might have been pain or pleasure, and Reese heard her vertebrae crack as the spike shot into his mouth and slowly began to force itself down his throat.
• • •
Carolyn heard Reese’s final words, followed by a thrashing on the bed. She wanted to look. She wanted to see. She’d been told not to, but after what he had done to her, she wanted to know.
She opened the door and stared at the composite creature on her bed. Amelia was crouched over Reese’s body, most of her lower half lost between his jaws. There was blood on his face where his mouth had torn as the metasomal segments of her tail had pushed themselves inside. Her eyes locked on Carolyn’s, and her upper half shuddered as she strived to force herself deeper still into the expiring man.
Before Carolyn could react, a figure appeared from the right. Miss Bronston pressed a pad against Carolyn’s mouth, and the image of the monstrosity faded from Carolyn’s mind just as the life died in Reese’s eyes.
• • •
Carolyn woke in her own bed. Reese’s body was gone. So, too, were Amelia and Miss Bronston. She might almost have dreamed it all were it not for the faint reptilian smell that hung in the room, and the fact that the sheets on the bed had been changed.
She pulled the covers over her head and tried to sleep.
• • •
Months went by before Carolyn returned to number sixty-five. She half expected to find the house unoccupied, but the same Miss Bronston answered the door, and the same Amelia sat in her wheelchair in her uncomfortably warm room, her lower body covered by a blanket.
“I came to thank you,” Carolyn told Amelia.
“No regrets?”
“None.”
“Good. But I was wondering . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . . if there was anything I might do for you in return?”
Amelia looked past her to where Miss Bronston stood, listening to their exchange.
“Not now,” said Amelia, “but later, perhaps, I may have a proposal for you.”
• • •
Ameli
a gave a final snip of the scissors and handed the article to the waiting Carolyn.
It was winter. Miss Bronston had been dead for three months. Carolyn had been with her when she passed away. By then, Miss Bronston had told her all that she needed to know.
“This one,” said Amelia.
Carolyn read the article before taking a small notebook from her pocket. She knew the case. She flicked through the pages until she found the name and address she was looking for, then sat at the old desk in the corner and removed an expensive blank card and matching envelope from the drawer. In clear, careful script, she wrote:
I can help you.
THE HOLLOW KING
Once upon a time, in a distant island realm, there lived a king and queen of great renown, admired as much for the devotion of the one to the other as for the wisdom and mercy of their rule. The king was handsome, the queen beautiful, and only the absence of children shadowed the perfection of their life together. Instead they lost themselves in their love, and it consumed them, body and mind.
After many years of peace, rumors reached them of a threat from the north: a great mist had spread itself over the land, engulfing farms, villages, entire towns. Nothing that it touched survived, and nothing that entered it ever emerged again. The people fled before it, and the stream of refugees became a torrent, all seeking safety in the stronghold by the sea, only to reach it and find that there was nowhere left to run, and they must turn at last and face the entity that was pursuing them. Those who came told the king of strange beasts glimpsed in the mist—creatures with jaws in their bellies, women with the bodies of serpents, and men with two heads who rode upon the backs of flightless dragons.
The king listened, and he was afraid. He sent scouts to the northern edges of his realm, the better to warn him of the mist’s approach, but none returned, and in time, from the battlements of his castle by the sea, he saw the first gray tendrils invade the distant forests, and within hours his kingdom was lost from sight. Some took to boats in an effort to reach other lands, but the mist was on the sea, and none escaped it, and all died unseen.
But the murk did not descend upon the castle, and the plain between the walls and the forest remained open and clear. Yet the halt brought no comfort, for the white fog was alive with alien screeches and roars, and the cries of those who had been unable to flee in time to the safety of the castle walls. The king listened as they called out to him for help, and the pitch of their screams rose in accordance with their suffering, until, one by one, they were silenced by the mercy of death.
The king could stand by no longer. He summoned his knights and his infantry, armed all those within his walls who could fight, and set out to do battle. His queen did not try to stop him, and would have gone with him had he allowed it, but he told her to take care of those left behind, and rule in his absence. She kissed him once, and said: “I shall not rest until you return, and I shall not weep until you do, for I will shed no tears of sorrow for you.”
The queen watched from the highest battlement as the king led his army into the mist, and it swallowed the thousands entire.
In the days that followed there came the sounds of distant combat, of trumpets calling and weapons clashing, and then all was silence that continued for a month and a day, until at last the mist began to recede. A single horseman emerged from the woods now revealed once more, and the queen watched as her king approached. The gates were opened for him, and he was welcomed and hailed, although his face was haggard, and his skin pale. He was but a shadow of the man he once had been, seated on an emaciated horse with its flesh scorched and torn, its eyes rolling in madness and terror. As soon as the king was helped from his saddle, the poor beast fell dead upon the ground.
The queen led the king to his chambers and removed the remnants of his bloodied armor. She bathed the wounds on his body, and as he stood naked and vulnerable before her, she shed a single tear. The king kissed it from her cheek and drank it down, and something of the old light appeared in his eyes. From that moment on he grew stronger and became more like his former self, but he did not speak, as though the silence that descended after the battle had somehow infected him, rendering him mute. He ruled as he once had, but now through signs and writing, and he lay each night with the queen in her bed.
But the mist had not vanished: it had merely retreated to the very edges of the kingdom, and the queen felt it as a coldness in her bones and glimpsed it as a dimness in the corner of her vision.
One year after his return, the king appeared in his courtyard, mounted on his finest charger and clad in his armor. When the queen inquired where he was going, he pointed north, and she knew that he was returning to the mist. But when she asked him why, he simply shook his head, and she told him for the second time: “I shall not rest until you return, and I shall not weep until you do, for I will shed no tears of sorrow for you.”
This time, the king returned after a single night, once more thin and enshadowed, and riding a horse driven mad by what it had endured. And the queen shed one tear, and the king kissed it away and was made whole again.
And so this continued for nine years: each year a journey, each year a return, each year a tear. The kingdom grew prosperous again, and traders journeyed from the lands beyond the mist, skirting the great forest in which it had made its stand, and from which no sounds came. Neither did birds fly through it, nor deer emerge from its reaches, and anyone foolish enough to risk an exploration was never seen again.
But on the tenth year the queen could contain her curiosity no longer, and she sent one of her most trusted and courageous courtiers to follow the king and brave the mist, if he would. To protect the courtier, she gave him the most powerful talisman that she possessed: a vial of blood from the only child she had brought to term, a girl born dead from the womb.
So the courtier pursued the king, who did not look back, and in time they came to the forest. The courtier’s heart grew cold at the sight of the mist that enveloped it, but he loved his queen and could not have lived with his shame were he forced to return and tell her that he had failed at the first obstacle. The wall of mist parted for the king and came together in his stead.
The courtier opened the vial of the dead child’s blood and smeared a little on his forehead and on the brow of his horse, as the queen had instructed him to do, and instantly they were rendered invisible. With blood trickling from skin and hide, man and beast advanced into the mist.
All of the trees in the forest were dead, their branches bare, their trunks gray, so that they appeared almost as insubstantial as the mist itself. The courtier could see only a few feet ahead of him, but he was able to follow the path cut by the king. He came across bones of men scattered so thickly upon the ground that they resembled drifts of snow. He passed the remains of a two-headed giant, impaled by a spear against the split trunk of a great oak, and the withered husk of a creature with the torso of a woman and the legs of a spider, an ax buried in its back.
Worst of all, he descried the features of men on the tree trunks and believed them to be the play of shadow upon bark until he drew closer and saw that they were the shriveled faces of those whom he had known in life—knights, squires, soldiers—torn from their corpses and nailed to the wood.
But he neither saw nor heard one sign of life.
• • •
At last he came to the edge of a clearing, and in the heart of it stood the king. The mist was less dense here, but the courtier thought that he caught sight of figures forming and vanishing in the clouds, and there came a whispering from all around.
“All hail the Hollow King.”
The king dismounted and walked toward the body of a man that hung from the thick branch of a sycamore tree. It was entirely skinless, its exposed flesh in a state of slow decay, its ribs visible through the holes in its chest. Only the ornate helm on its head gave any clue to its identity, for it bore the royal insignia.
As the courtier watched, the king on the ground shed
his boots, and then his clothing, and finally his skin and the flesh beneath, the two halves falling away like the membrane of a snake. Standing in the clearing was no longer the king but a being with a wretched, twisted body, a deformed skull, and a nose that was more like the beak of a carrion bird than the organ of a man.
And though the courtier had never before laid eyes on this creature, still he knew his name, for every land had heard tales of the Crooked Man. Some claimed that he was the union of an old, violent god and a human woman, and had torn his way out of his mother’s womb at the time of his birth, killing her in the process. Others said that he had no such origin, but had come into existence with the dark stuff of the universe. He had always been, they whispered, and would always be. In the end, all that was certain about the Crooked Man was the harm he meant to living things, and the joy he took in their torment.
Beside him, his horse began to shy, and whinny in panic, terrified by the transformation, for all creatures fear predators, and the Crooked Man was the greatest predator of all. The horse was tied to a tree and could not escape, and so its terror increased. The Crooked Man paid it no heed, but its cries served to hide the distress of the courtier’s own mount. The Crooked Man’s black eyes gleamed with all of the wickedness in this world as he bowed low before the dangling man.
“Your Majesty,” he said. “Why, you look almost good enough to eat!”
And with that he tore a strip from the decaying body and jammed it into his mouth.
“Ah,” he added, chewing on the carcass, “if only you tasted as good as you look. And if only your queen would shed more than a single tear . . .”
And as he ate, he spoke:
One tear for a year,
One bite for a coat,
Flesh for a wall,
And blood for a moat,
All to possess a pretty queen,
All to restore a Hollow King.
He swallowed the last of the meat, and a new body began to take shape over his own: blood and bone, muscle and fat, and finally a layer of skin, until at last he once again resembled the old king. Then, exhausted by his efforts, the Crooked Man collapsed to the ground and fell into a deep sleep.