It was only when she was sealed into the darkness of the royal crypt she realised what terms like 'posthumous marriage' and 'eternal honeymoon' really meant.
A courtier seized the boy for whipping, after all, a punishment must be carried out, and it couldn't be the divine being.
'Well, the funny thing is...' the prehistoric surgeon replied, pulling out more of his trepanning equipment.
Upon seeing the farmer’s sign, the traveller brought his exhausted pony to a halt.
He did not like goat meat, an aversion stemming from childhood, when they’d held the ceremony.
The villagers whispered their misdeeds into a black goat’s ear, whereupon this ‘conduit of sin’ was driven into the desert.
Yet, once, upon a terrible occasion, the goat had returned, walking into the village on its hind legs, going door to door, naming sins that required complete blood atonement.
He had seen the Devil then, no question.
Now fifty years had passed, and he was in a farmer’s hovel to make the purchase.
‘You saw the sign?’ the farmer said.
Times had gone beyond merely lean. The farmer’s cheeks were hollowed into pits, and his wild, staring eyes sat large in their cadaverous sockets.
‘I did.’
The traveller had money, some, but what good was money in a land ravaged by famine?
‘I taught myself writing. I was on the…up… Sheep, cows, even a llama,’ the farmer continued.
The traveller made sure to face the window space so he could see his pony, not that it made for very handsome viewing, but without it, he was wholly doomed.
‘I was a…merchant,’ the farmer went on, ‘like a Venetian.’
‘I’ll need to see the animals first,’ the traveller continued.
‘Let me take down the sign in case anyone comes by...’
Through the window, he watched the farmer go.
A starving man’s foremost enemy is hunger, but not that far behind is gravity. He moved as if in molasses.
Returning inside, he beckoned the traveller to follow.
They entered the adjacent room and the traveller paused, froze, even his stertorous breath catching in his throat.
Tied up in a pen were two skeletal children: a boy and a girl, perhaps 4 years old.
‘But they’re… not goats,’ the traveller answered dumbly.
The farmer thrust the sign in the traveller’s face: Two kids for sale.
‘Yes,’ the farmer answered, ‘they are.’
And that was when the traveller became aware that his interlocutor was fingering the handle of an axe.
‘Now, let’s shake on it like gentlemen.’
The traveller nodded slowly and took out his coin purse.
…
The children were unstaked, and their hands and feet trussed up. They were near unconsciousness, moaning softly.
‘A pleasure doing business,’ the farmer said.
He reached out a bony hand.
Perhaps the farmer really did see two goats.
The traveller peered long and hard into his eyes. He was looking for Satan, the Satan that had appeared in the form of Baphomet all those years ago.
But he did not glimpse the Devil; he saw only madness and animal certainty.
The Devil has agency, and he shows up when there is a choice to make, when there is an inner tussle to be fought, and the traveller knew he had already succumbed because when he got over the next hillock, he would stop and eat.
The industrial revolution was in full swing, no world for magic, and that is how the last witch and wizard committed suicide.
At the time stammering was not understood so it was either this ‘lunatic’ defence or nothing at all
On the other side of the world, at Madame Tussaud’s London, a fire ripped through the gallery
The one thing they couldn’t be convicted of was false advertising because it did say right there on the menu: nan bread.
24 hours later the man’s wife was dead, and 2 other cruise ship passengers had also come down with symptoms.
The coroner must have had a sense of humour because he listed cause of death as: vowel/owl bowel movement
I want to tell you about something that happened to me as a kid. Something instructive because it ain’t like I learned much else at school.
Folks didn’t know much about different horses for different courses back then, so all ages and abilities were mixed together.
Rex O’Donnell could throw and catch and hit, and boy did he do some hitting. I called him T. rex on account of his tyrannising.
Then there were some fish in their own little worlds, kids like Theo Strangeways.
(Funny that. At some point, every family selects a name they want to go by, whether ‘Hope’ or ‘Joiner’, and the clan that would become ‘Strangeways’ picked that.
The odd thing was that Theo could recount whole books like The Odyssey. You’d say p62 line 14, and he’d tell you what it said in his monotone.
But above all else, he was fixated on pens.
He collected pens from all around the world. Ballpoints from Britain. Fountains from France. German gels. And he’d lay them all out on his desk and just look at them. That was the irony. He never took the lids off– they were like ceremonial daggers.
One day, we had a test, and T. rex went ahunting because he didn’t have anything to write with.
Strolling to the back of the classroom, he ran a hamhock over Theo’s desk and grabbed a Parker from his collection, saying, ‘This belongs to me.’
I don’t have to tell you the kid lost it, but not how you might expect.
He mumbled once, too low for anyone to hear, and then slightly louder, ‘Achilles.’
‘What the hell are you saying?’ Rex commanded.
‘Don’t forget your pen, Achilles! Don’t forget your pen, Achilles!’
It was a kind of incantation.
Rex slapped him upside the head, but that didn’t stop Theo. Now he was shouting, roaring.
‘And Thetis dipped her son into the River Styx, and his heel remained untouched!’ Again and again, like a mad minister. ‘Don’t forget your pen, Achilles!’
It took Mrs Simpson, Mr Collingwood, and the school janitor to wrestle him outside.
…
The crisis started about six months later, and it was because of San Saba,Texas.
Lonnie Hernandez’s folks had taken her there, and she came back with treats.
We were all tucking in when Rex reared up and clutched his throat, lips turning the blue-purple of bad sausage meat.
He went into his backpack, searching frantically and then upended the whole thing across the dusty floorboards before hitting the deck himself.
The thing about San Saba, Texas, is that it's the pecan capital of the world, and the thing about Rex that nobody knew was that he was allergic, deadly allergic to nuts.
Well, I say nobody but one person did.
Call it sharp observation, deduction, or… mind-reading, but Theo Strangeways knew.
‘Don’t forget your pen, Achilles,’ he said.
And right there, he dropped Rex O’Donnell’s ‘Survival Technology’ EpiPen at his twitching heel and crushed it.
As Moms went, they didn’t come much prouder than Sharon Murphy.
‘It’s so good to meet you, Siu-Ling… Please tell me if I got that wrong.’
‘No, Mrs Murphy, that’s perfect.’
Sharon, a tall, well-built blonde woman, pulled the small girl in close.
And then she saw her son, James, back from college (finally!) and took his handsome face in her hands.
‘My Little Prince!’
…
‘A winner,’ she continued, ‘a born winner.’
‘Come on, Mom,’ James replied, but there was no real protest in his voice.
‘No,’ Siu-Ling answered. ‘My parents are Chinese. They probably wouldn’t say they were proud of me until my “second” Nobel.’
‘James, have you told her about the hail mary at Beechwood– “the pass of the century”… If you won’t blow your own horn, I’ll blow it for you…’
Siu-Ling turned to see if he reacted. He was a little arrogant, but no more than your average 21-year-old frat guy. That deserved at least a mild cringe.
‘And the math olympiad,’ she continued, ‘What did they call your solution?’
‘Vieta jumping, Mom.’
‘Too complicated for us mere mortals.’ She squeezed Siu-Ling’s leg.
‘Uhm, yeah,’ Siu-Ling answered. ‘I don’t know trigonometry from optometry… That always got to my Dad.’
A dark look passed over Mrs Murphy’s face.
‘James’s so-called Dad, we don’t talk about him.’
Siu-Ling felt like she was stepping on all the grenades. A heads up on the way over woulda been nice.
‘Decision making,’ Sharon Murphy tapped the table, Pandora bracelet jangling, ‘that is what separates winners… And you know, sweetheart, I’ve met a lot of James’s girlfriends over the years, and you’re my favourite!’
…
After dinner, Mrs Murphy brought out an old photo album labelled 'The Little Prince'.
And then onto home movies made into a supercut soundtracked by Taylor Swift’s Never Grow Up.
In truth, Siu-Ling was feeling a little James’d out, and then Mrs Murphy shot up.
‘You’ve got to see his trophy collection.’
James shrugged his broad quarterback’s shoulders as if to moms gonna mom, but Siu-Ling couldn’t shake the feeling this was extra.
He treated the new pledges a little regally, but this? He was like Joffrey in Ralph Lauren.
Mrs Murphy almost scooped up Siu-Ling, moving deeper into the house and then pushing open a final door.
The first thing that caught her attention was a shrine– there was no other word for it. It was a black-and-white photo of James, lit with candles, and beneath, a sacrifice of sunflower petals.
‘It's…’ and then Siu-Ling paused because her attention was yanked away to a central cabinet where she expected to see all his winners’ medals, cups and ribbons.
Instead, she felt the cool press of Mrs Murphy’s hands on her shoulders. Then, a squeeze.
‘His trophy collection,’ she continued softly.
On the shelves, beautifully backlit were numerous locks of hair, assorted pieces of jewellery, and the driving licenses of several young girls Siu-Ling recognised from the news.
Cydney halted in front of the cabinet because, in place of medals and ribbons, were the driver's licenses of several girls in the area who'd gone missing.
Emma was a writer who decided not to study creative writing and instead get out in the real world like ‘the beats’.
She worked a day shift in a restaurant and a night shift in a bar– she kept an orders pad in her apron, scrawled with observations– gestures people had made while demanding a martini, and snippets of dialogue she would put into the mouths of her characters.
Her boss said she was a diligent employee, and she was, but she had learned to make it seem as if her feet were on the ground while her head was in the clouds.
She encountered him, walking home from her shift at 2 am.
Like Edward Hopper, she looked around the darkened city for nighthawks and was unlucky enough to find a bird of prey.
‘David Neville,’ he said, extending a hand as a distraction, before swinging the truncheon with the other.
…
She saw an eye staring at her through a peephole at the top of the cellar stairs, a cold eye, almost like a shark’s.
She had no pen or paper, but she did have a 1-gallon bucket of water, and in the water as she awaited the inevitable, she wrote.
…
As an expert in water management, David Neville knew he had an advantage when disposing of a corpse. After all, the body was 60% H2O.
The mistake Denis Nilsen made was allowing the small bones to collect in the drainage system, causing a backup. David was the water guy, and no such error would occur.
…
He worked the lead on the Emerald Reservoir Plant because investors seemed to warm to his glib, superficial charm.
It was a local scenic beauty spot, a place David often sneaked around at night, spying on young couples in cars.
Someone on the PR team had set out a bottle of champagne for the dignitaries to pose with.
‘You’re not having a glass,’ Councillor Henderson said.
‘Oh, I only drink water,’ David replied, holding up a bottle of Evian.
In the distance, the English country hills rolled away to the horizon. The sun was setting, casting the lake's surface in a red-orange glow.
‘Three cheers for David!’ Another dignitary said. ‘Our hydro-guru!’
Suddenly, they turned en masse to the lake. The water was rippling.
‘An earthquake?’ Councillor Henderson said.
‘Impossible.’
‘Perhaps Moses is going to part the waves,’ Henderson joked.
Nobody laughed.
The waves began to break and fold into one another, and then from the maelstrom, perfect coherence formed.
The sun had set even further, and now the water was blood red. Written the entire breadth of the lake, repeating millions and billions of times in the glassy surface, was a message– Emma’s masterpiece.
‘David Neville is a murderer.’