Candle in the Attic Window(45)

Out into the storm, where that dismal voice hailed from. All through the blowing snow, the sculpted drifts, I stumbled half-blind, reaching frozen hands out to push brambles and branches back. I slipped on ice and staggered when the cold seeped into me; I could not feel my feet, but kept moving, not away from the house, but toward that voice.

“Who are you?” I screamed the question, expecting no reply, but one came.

The skeletal arms closed around me, nearly warm the way they had been in the windmill. Dream or awake? Awake, I told myself, over and over, as I turned in those arms and looked up at his face. And yes ….

He had lips as would any human man, lips that tasted of wintergreen oil when they crossed mine, but his eyes were far gone and so, too, his nose. Yet, this did not bother me. It simply was. His hands were no longer those of a man but skeletal. Long, time-worn bones stroked over my cheek, my hair and curled around my throat. I thought I should scream, yet the touch was warm, rousing, and I leaned into it. Even when he bade me not to, even when he told me only I could stop him.

“What do you want?” I whispered. Though my breath turned to frost between us, I still watched as it melted the snowflakes upon his rotting cheeks.

He could not speak – I saw that now. As other parts of him had rotted, so, too, was his throat gone. There were no muscles that might make such sounds. He had never spoken my name, had never told me anything. Then who?

Though his eyes were clouded over – perhaps they had once been blue – I saw some frantic horror still within them. He needed me to understand, but he could not speak. He needed me to know. He was wretched and terribly lonely. And Aunt had never married ….

I shoved a hand into my pocket, barely feeling the scrape of cold denim over frozen skin, and pulled out the ring box. With shaking hands, I lifted the ring from its box and held it up, showing him how, even in the storm, it managed to gleam. That diamond was small but lovely, almost like my aunt.

There was a recognition in his eyes and maybe, just maybe, he had offered this ring dozens of years ago, so long ago that none could remember – but Aunt had remembered. Had shut the box away in a secret place that only another dreamer might find.

I saw them then. He would take Aunt by the hand – his own not gloved, fingers twining warm and firm about hers – and lead her through the fog, up the hillock with its dew-wet grasses (faded to amber with the coming of autumn), and into the meadow beyond. The gate would unlatch, the sheep unseen, and they would make their slow and steady way toward the windmill, which rose in dark relief within the clouded air. The bare oak and apple trees made a fringe behind the old mill, only half there in the gloom; he pulled her through thorn bushes, which caught at her skirts and tried to hold her back.

Aunt said no and forever regretted it. Forever.

I held the ring between us, like a shared secret, and his milky eyes blinked. Did he gasp? Did he – Ah, Reader. The dead do smile.






E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado – strange how that works out. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Sci Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. For more, visit http://www.ecatherine.com.





In His Arms in the Attic





By Alexis Brooks de Vita





The first surprise was that the two hundred-year-old townhouse was still intact in the heart of the French Quarter, even after Hurricanes Katrina and Ike, and the rebuilding of New Orleans into an adult fantasy of itself.

Ave Marie de la Croix pulled her antique 914 black Porsche over to the curb that dipped between the narrow-bricked sidewalk and the cobblestoned street. She shoved open the driver’s rusted door and unfolded long, lean, jean-clad legs to slide out and confront her childhood holiday playground.

Then Ave had her second surprise.

She thought she heard a voice, hushed and urgent, call her name: “Ah-vay!” She jerked her head up toward the townhouse’s second floor. And something slipped like a razor-edged knife between the wrought-iron balcony and the glass panes of the French doors.

A bird as it flew overhead? A squatter scuttling back into hiding?



Ave waited. Watched, barely breathing.

But no bulky darkness shifted behind the dusty glass. No hesitant hand pushed aside tattered lace to peer down at her upturned face. Nothing moved again.

Ave muttered, “Jumping at shadows.”

She threw a cautious look back over her shoulder. No frustrated residents were out running errands, and no lost revelers wandered in search of bars or breast-baring college girls. Even with Mardi Gras night fast descending, this little side street remained empty and still.

Her neighbours had probably all fled the seasonal festivities for suburban relatives’ homes. Ave would be alone in the townhouse tonight.

She squared her shoulders. Tossed back her head and yanked out the hair-tie that held together a lopsided bun at the nape of her neck. Braids and dreadlocks cascaded down to her narrow waist.

She had not driven all this way from San Francisco just to play the scared, little, big-eyed girl again. She was all grown up now.

And ready to believe in ghosts. On the theory that, once you believed, there was nothing left to fear.

Ave kicked shut the sports car’s door and strode across the cobbles and bricks. She jangled through the ring of rusted keys she’d retrieved from a Bay Area safe deposit box until she found one with curled masking tape, faintly labeled: “Front Door.”