“You didn’t come back for her,” I said.
“I did not.” He paused, and breathed in deep, like he never smelled coffee before and found it the finest thing in the world. “I could say that I was unable.” He glanced at me underneath a fan of handsome eyelashes, quick as a bird. “But you know that’s not true, you know that’s not how magic works, don’t you? I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay, and it didn’t matter. What Missus Felder did—your sister, yes, I know about that—what she did was cruel in its own way, sure, but not in the way you’d think—”
“No, boy,” I cut him off. He looked surprised at that, like he was not used to people cutting him off. I wondered who this new boy was, this boy that Cheryl and I had made. “We figured it out, of course, though it was too late for anything to be done. You were always a boy who was looking for magic, even then, even then you were, and we knew it, Cheryl and I both knew it, but we had hoped it might be a different sort of magic. A kinder sort.”
“But it wasn’t,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t. You found something in there, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“And you stayed for it.”
“I did.”
“And now?”
“Now I have taken what I need from it,” he said, and he flexed his fingers, long and graceful. They were not the fingers he had when he was a boy, those poor stubby things that couldn’t palm a quarter or pull off a faro shuffle. These were magician’s fingers.
“So I see you have, my boy. Has it done ill for you or aught?”
At this he paused. I could see he wanted to get into his patter now, and it was not the same kind of pause as when he was young, when he knew the word but still it tripped him up; this was a different beast.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I want you to tell me. That’s why I’m here, I suppose, Marianne.”
“No one can tell you that, Sayer.”
He took to studying his fingernails. Maybe he learned that trick from Cheryl, not looking at a person. “I think you can. I think you are afraid to tell me.”
A shiver ran down my spine like ice melting. I tried to shake the feeling though.
“No, boy.” He looked up at that word. “Your sense of timing was always characteristically awful. You never learned how to wait for a thing. Don’t you know that? When you try to cheat magic, it just gets worse and worse and worse. What you found in that hat—some sort of secondhand magic I’m reckoning, that piece of truth you were looking for all that time—it’s yours now. It ain’t your daddy’s magic. It ain’t Lillian’s either. Poor, sweet Lillian. You’ve suffered for it, and you’ve caused suffering for it, so it’s yours to own, yours to do with as you will.”
“There is a bad thing coming at the end of this,” Sayer told me. He reached out that long-fingered hand of his, and he touched me on the wrist.
“I know, boy,” I said. “We always know these things. Time’s always racing on for us; even if most other folk can’t see it properly, you can. But, God, the thing we never learned right, Cheryl and I, is that magic is about waiting, it’s about letting the bad things happen. It’s about letting the children pass on into adults, and the mothers grieve, and the fathers lose their way, or find it, and the sons come home again when they are ready to come home. That is the thing you will not have learned in that place you went to, because that is only a thing you can learn out here. What are you going to be, Sayer Sandifer? Why, whatever it is you choose to be. You saw what was coming that day when you invited her up on the stage with you. Boy, there were twenty people out in the audience who loved you, who would have waited with you, who would have helped you get there on your own, but you wanted what she had and so you took it.”
The words were hard stones in my own mouth, but I had chewed them over so long that I had made them round and smooth and true.
“Where is my sister?” I asked him.
“She’s gone now,” Sayer told me, and this time I could tell that he wasn’t lying. I didn’t know what kind of a thing he was, this man drinking his coffee in front of me, this man who had taken power into himself but not knowledge, not wisdom, not the patience of a boy who learns to speak for himself.
“Well,” I said, and the word hung between us.
I felt old. I felt the weight of every summer and winter hanging upon me.
I knew it would only happen if I let it. I knew it would only happen if I wanted it to happen. I knew this just as my sister knew it.
Then Sayer laid down his grey Trilby on the table, and, lo and behold, it was the thing I’d been looking for after all. The hat, the chimney-pot hat. That little piece of secondhand magic. He turned it over so that I could see that yawning chasm inside—the pure blackness of it, deep and terrifying. The place he disappeared to. The place he found his way out of.
“You could marry me,” he said. “You always loved me, and I can see there’s no man about now. Living like that can be awful lonely.”
The words pulled at something inside me. He was right. I was lonely. This life of mine felt old, misshapen, stretched out by the years. But I did not want him. I did not want that stranger. “No,” I said.
He sighed and shook his head like it was my tragedy. My funeral.
“I’m not cruel,” he said to me in that handsome, grown-up voice of his. And he looked at me with eyes wide as two silver dollars, but flat-edged and dull as if the shine had been worn off them by residence in too many dirty pockets. “I swear I’m not trying to be cruel. It’s the world that’s wild and woolly.”
And I knew that magic only worked if you let it. I knew that magic only worked on a thing that wanted it. But I was tired, and I was tired, and I had lost my husband, and I had lost my sister, and I had lost that little boy I loved.
Sayer pushed the hat toward me.
I took it up carefully, studied the dilapidated brim, fingered the soft black silk of it.
And Sayer smiled. Just once.
And then the bad thing happened.
Dale Bailey
THE CULVERT
DALE BAILEY recently published a new collection, The End of the End of Everything, followed by the novel, The Subterranean Season. He has published three previous novels—The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.)—and one earlier collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories.
His work has been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award. The author’s International Horror Guild Award-winning novelette ‘Death and Suffrage’ was adapted for the Showtime Network’s Masters of Horror TV series. He lives in North Carolina with his family.
“As is usually the case,” reveals Bailey, “I have no clear idea where the concept for this story came from. I only knew that I wanted to play with the theme of identity.
“I set myself a technical challenge: since I usually write ‘long’ (novelette or novella length), I wanted to compress the narrative as much as possible, while still maintaining emotional resonance—thus the brief telegraphic bursts which I hoped would communicate the speaker’s inability to face his own sense of grief and loss.
“I can only hope it worked.”
MY BROTHER NEVER had a grave. No funeral service. Not even a real obituary. Just a handful of articles I scissored from the front page of the city’s newspaper when I was thirteen years old. I have them still. I can fan them out like a hand of poker, yellow as old ivory, fragile as pressed flowers: LOCAL BOY GOES MISSING, STILL NO SIGN OF MISSING CHILD, PARENTS CLEARED IN MISSING CHILD CASE.