Skein and Bone, page 1
Skein and Bone
V. H. Leslie
Published by Undertow Publications at Smashwords
Copyright 2015 V. H. Leslie
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold
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Also by V.H. Leslie
Bodies of Water (Salt Publishing, 2015)
Skein and Bone, by V.H. Leslie
All stories copyright © V. H. Leslie
Interior illustrations copyright © 2015 V. H. Leslie
Cover artwork and design copyright © 2015 by Vince Haig
Interior design, layout, and typesetting copyright © 2015 by Courtney Kelly
“Namesake” first published in Black Static #36, ed. Andy Cox (Sept, 2013). Reprinted in Best British Horror 2013, ed. Johnny Mains (Salt Publishing).
“Skein and Bone” first published in Black Static #31, ed. Andy Cox (Nov. 2012).
“Ghost” is original to this collection.
“Making Room” first published at This is Horror (Aug. 2013).
“Family Tree” first published in Black Static #27, ed. Andy Cox (Feb. 2012).
“Time Keeping” first published in Black Static #23, ed. Andy Cox (Jan. 2011).
“Bleak Midwinter” is original to this collection.
“The Blue Room” published simultaneously in this collection and in The Hyde Hotel, ed. James Everington.
“Ulterior Design” first published in Black Static #21, ed. Andy Cox (Feb. 2011).
“The Cloud Cartographer” first published in Interzone #247, ed. Andy Cox (July 2013). Reprinted in Best British Fantasy 2013, ed. Steve Haynes (Salt Publishing).
“Preservation” first published in Strange Tales IV, ed. Rosalie Parker (Jan. 2014).
“Wordsmith” is original to this collection.
“The Quiet Room” first published in Shadows & Tall Trees #6, ed. Michael Kelly (Mar. 2014). Reprinted in Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, ed. Paula Guran (Prime Books).
“Senbazuru” first published in Shadows & Tall Trees #4, ed. Michael Kelly (Oct. 2012). Reprinted at Weird Fiction Review.
For my mother
“weaveth steadily”
Contents
Namesake
Skein and Bone
Ghost
Making Room
Family Tree
Time Keeping
Bleak Midwinter
The Blue Room
Ulterior Design
The Cloud Cartographer
Preservation
Wordsmith
The Quiet Room
Senbazuru
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Namesake
Her name was Burden. Cecelia J. Burden. Her parents had at least tried to compensate by giving her a pretty first name, hoping no doubt to disguise the surname behind flowery sibilance. Yet neither name was really quite right. The J stood for Joan or Jan or Jane, a legacy of some distant aunt. Whichever name, it had been forgotten and mislaid long ago with her birth certificate in a loft full of paper. J was happy just to have retained the initial, whatever it stood for. Jane, most probably, on account of how plain she was. Its mystery appealed to her, so that’s what she went by J.
J had liked her surname once. Before she really understood what the word meant. She liked the sound of it and would break it into syllables and imagine her name was a place where birds lived. Bird-den. Burden. She even decorated her textbooks with scribbles of robins and owls, and dotted her i’s with curved silhouettes of birds in flight. It would have been the perfect name for a life a crime, she often thought, or a serial killer. She read a lot about serial killers; they often had hard childhoods, unrealistic responsibilities forced upon them at a young age, a huge emotional chip on their shoulders weighing them down until they finally reacted with violence.
She’d thought about changing her name—she even had the forms at home, ready and signed—but she worried about how her parents would react. Did they like being Burdens? She’d never asked her mother how she felt about taking on her father’s name. A test of love, perhaps, a declaration of her devotion, taking on such a heavy toll. But her mother was attracted to suffering—she’d prolong a cold, or walk instead of taking the bus. She probably should have married a Martyr instead.
No, J was resigned to waiting it out. She looked forward to her wedding day for reasons different to most young women; it wasn’t the fairy-tale castle or the princess dress that she fantasized about, it was about finally being shot of her name.
But finding a husband was no easy feat. It wasn’t like you were going to run into Mr Rochester or Mr Darcy at your local greeting card shop, where J worked stacking shelves. To make matters worse, J wasn’t exactly brimming with self-confidence. The weight of her surname accompanied her through her adolescence and into her twenties and had lived up to its meaning, a constant pressure on her neck and shoulders that made her feel like she was hunched.
At least Internet dating allowed you to disguise your projected defects as well as your name. J's mother said only freaks and perverts used the Internet. J thought a hunchback like herself would fit right in. She described herself as busty and bubbly, avoiding the obvious B word on her mind, and issued herself instead a nice humdrum surname—Bentley. She avoided all the potential matches the computer spat at her. She had her own method of selection. When she saw the name, she knew he was the one.
Blithe.
*
The bar had changed. It hadn’t been much to look at back when J knew it, but there’d been something reassuring about the shabby décor, the sticky floor. It had character. You knew what to expect. It was called Frank’s or Ed's then, something suitably proprietary and ordinary. Now it was Bar None and J wondered how many drunken men had appealed to the bar’s signage as they were manhandled out the door by bouncers. Inside was modern, the tables high, surrounded by bar stools which gave you a strange feeling of vertigo when you managed to get up there. Red lights shone from behind the bar in regimented unison, the glow refracted in the chrome and glass surfaces like the beams of sniper rifles. Sitting by the bar felt like an ambush.
She sat near a large spiral staircase, an artistic showpiece of metal and wire that allowed the men gaping at the bottom to look up women’s skirts as they descended. With mock confidence the women negotiated the chrome stairs in their three-inch heels, gripping the banister desperately to prevent themselves falling into the pit of testosterone below.
J scanned the men lining the bar, trying to remember the picture of Andrew on his profile. She hadn’t really cared what he looked like, it was the name she was interested in. The bar’s clientele had changed as well, which made it harder to spot him. All the men wore suits as if they’d just come from work and the women were as groomed and as glossy as their surroundings, sipping expensive cocktails from martini glasses. Bar None seemed pretty apt; there was no individuality here, everyone looked the same. J felt adrift on her bar stool, she glanced at the cocktail menu: Adonis, Tom Collins, Harvey Wallbanger, Scarlett O’Hara. Good names. She ordered herself a Bloody Mary and waited.
“J?” a man in a red jumper asked.
“Yes. Hello.” She held out her hand and he shook it.
“Andrew,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m late. Parking was a nightmare.”
“You won’t be drinking then?” J regretted the two glasses she’d had at home and the cocktail in front of her.
“I might. I can leave my car here, pick it up in the morning if…” he trailed off, hoping not to have sounded presumptuous.
Andrew sat down on the barstool opposite. J had already learnt it wasn’t easy to do elegantly and a puff of air dispersed as he made contact with the upholstery. His face reddened.
“The stool…” he began.
J laughed. “Mine’s the same. But there is one cool thing about them.”
She pressed the lever on her chair and suddenly disappeared under the table. She reappeared with a hydraulic hiss.
“That does look cool.” Andrew found the lever and began to disappear from view.
Behind them the barman shook his head at the newcomers bobbing up and down like fish caught in a net.
*
The chrome spiral staircase must have been an architect’s joke or a test of sobriety. How many people had fallen down, J wondered, trying her best to concentrate on each step. It didn’t help that her vision was blurred.
Andrew was waiting at the bottom, holding her coat. She hoped he was gentlemanly enough not to glance up through the rails. She’d allowed herself to get ridiculously drunk on the first date; there would be no coming back from this, she thought. She’d be ruined in his eyes forever as wife material.
“I’ll walk you home,” Andrew said, helping her with her coat.
“I’m a Burden,” she spluttered in reply.
“It’s no hassle.”
“No, that’s my name. Burden. Not Bentley.”
Andrew looked at her for a moment, weighing up whether to make a joke or not, wondering whether she’d be able to make light of it.
“It’s not funny. You try being a Burden?”<
“It could be worse.”
“Could it?”
“I went to school with a girl called Paige Turner. Seriously.”
J smiled.
“Anything else I should know?” he asked. “What does the J stand for?”
Plain Jane. But buoyed up with alcohol, on Andrew’s arm, she didn’t feel plain at all. She felt blithe.
“Nothing at all,” she replied.
*
“What’s in a name anyway?” Andrew asked later as they lay in bed.
J shrugged, content and satisfied, sleep weighing heavier on her than her name ever had. Andrew’s flat was small and comfortable, surprisingly decorative for a bachelor. Not that she’d seen a great deal, led almost straight away to the bedroom. It was a small room but felt bigger because of the high ceiling, with mezzanine at the far end, which Andrew said led to the attic, though J couldn’t see a ladder. From where she lay, she could watch the shadows gathering up there, black shapes converging behind the rails. She blinked and the shadows dispersed.
“It’s a hard name to live up to,” Andrew continued, “Blithe. People expect you to be constantly happy.”
J hadn’t intended to be so easy on the first date, but he’d been so understanding about her name, her initial deceit. If he’d noticed the way she hunched over he hadn’t mentioned it, he made her feel beautiful and he was so much more attractive than she’d hoped. Naked in his arms, she thought of other names for herself, taunting herself with the insults her mother threw at the TV when celebrities wore too few clothes. Whore, Slut, Slag. She didn’t want to think about that right now, but the words repeated themselves over and over in her mind until they became a litany. Blithe's voice in her ear couldn’t compete.
“People don’t imagine that you’d have troubles and strife with a name like mine. J? J?”
But J was fast asleep, dreaming of any name but her own.
*
Burden and Blithe went well together. J hadn’t expected Andrew to call after such a drunken first date but he did, the very next day. And he’d surprised her further by asking to see her that night. Three weeks later, they’d spent every available minute in each other’s company. J had even acquired a drawer and a cabinet in the bathroom and her stuff was slowly creeping in, cluttering up Andrew’s small flat.
“Maybe I could store some stuff up there,” J asked one day, pointing at the mezzanine. “You don’t seem to use it.”
It was the only area in the flat that gave the impression of space. Andrew hadn’t said as much, but without a ladder it was clearly off limits.
He shook his head. “I’m in the process of decorating. I’ll clear out the cupboard in the hallway instead, how about that?”
J smiled, happy that he was making space for her in his life. She looked up at the mezzanine all the same and for a brief moment had the curious feeling of being watched.
*
To change the name but not the letter is to marry for worse and not for better. Such was her mother’s response to the news that they’d set a date. It was typical of her mother to kill her enthusiasm, to lace her mood with a little bit of the misery that she enjoyed so much. J didn’t care about old wives’ tales; changing her name was her priority and she wanted to be blithe more than anything.
Yet it wasn’t just her mother cautioning her whirlwind romance. J had moved in entirely now with Andrew, yet she was far from settled. Cold feet she told herself, though she knew that wasn’t true. The negativity wasn’t of an emotional kind, it was more tangible and it stemmed, she was certain, from the mezzanine.
“Maybe we could move,” J asked one night in bed. Andrew had always regaled her with his stories of foreign travel yet he looked uncomfortable at the suggestion.
“I can’t, J, I’m tied here.”
“Why?” she asked. He wasn’t particularly enthused about his job, though it allowed him to work from home. He’d never introduced her to friends or family, in fact he was frustratingly vague about all family ties. What was keeping him here?
“I’d never get out of this mortgage,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m up to the hilt in debt I’m afraid.”
Marry for worse and not for better sprang to mind, but she swept it away with for better or worse.
*
J woke in the middle of the night, conscious that someone was watching her. Andrew was asleep at her side, his snoring obscuring the sound of something above. She wanted to reach for the bedside lamp but she couldn’t move. She stared back in the blackness and listened hard.
She heard footsteps on the mezzanine.
She lay still, willing the noise to repeat itself, wondering if she had heard it at all. She waited, gripping Andrew in readiness.
A creeping movement this time. Unmistakable now. Something was up on the mezzanine. Her mind conjured the image of a person walking up there, sneaking about in the dark.
She shook Andrew awake.
“There’s someone up there,” she whispered, pointing in the darkness.
Andrew looked about, barely comprehending. He switched on the bedside lamp, flooding the room with light. “What?”
“I heard a noise,” she repeated, “up there.”
Andrew sighed. “Oh. That. Sometimes birds get into the attic. It’s happened before. They’re protected, would you believe. Allowed to nest up there.”
“It didn’t sound like birds,” J said.
“Listen, J, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“But Andrew—”
“I’ll check it out in the morning if you like.” And with that he turned off the light.
Burden.
Bird-den.
She imagined a room full of birds in flight. She watched them orbiting an attic space, circling it again and again and again, until she drifted back to sleep.
*
J was in the wedding aisle again, stacking the shelves with images of happy couples, garters, and wedding cakes. Since her engagement she spent longer in this part of the shop than any other, arranging the cellophane-wrapped cards in order of preference instead of price codes. The manager, Sharon, a girl barely out of college, was more interested in her mobile phone than what J did. She barely noticed that J had neglected the birthday and bereavement aisles, along with the balloons and silly string display.
J looked around the shop. It expressed every sentiment but the one she felt. She couldn’t stop thinking about the birds in the attic. Andrew’s conviction that there was nothing to worry about had been enough for her to go to sleep. But the birds had swooped into her dreams instead and flown around and around her mind like an inky whirlwind. It wasn’t just the birds; J hadn’t liked the way Andrew had cut her off, refusing to listen to her as if she hadn’t said anything at all. Was that what she was expected to do? To accept Andrew’s word on the subject despite her misgivings, to honour and obey him?
