Giants and Ogres Page 8

  “Yuh not Danny. Yuh mean.”

  “I’m Cresser, and you’d better watch it. Unless you eat kids, of course.” He laughed, and glanced around. He saw the glint of a picture frame. That could be silver, worth a bit.

  The ogre stood up.

  Cresser’s torch, focussed on the creature’s head, had missed the sheer size of what was in the flat. It had been sitting or kneeling on the floor. Cresser blinked, and now his sense of humour had gone. The ogre towered over him, its back bent but its head still scraping paint from the ceiling like huge flakes of grey dandruff.

  “Hey, no, get back!” said Cresser, lifting up his rusty weapon.

  The ogre reached out with one gangling arm and yanked the railing from the boy’s hand. He put one rusty end into his mouth. Cresser watched, paralysed, as the thing in front of him bit through an inch of wrought iron, then spat it out. The two halves of the railing clanged on the floor.

  “Eat … kidss?”

  The ogre came closer, a figure whose monstrosity had finally penetrated even Cresser’s brain.

  “S’pose … find out,” it said.

  Gnarled hands, each the size of a man’s head, took hold of Cresser by both shoulders, drew him close. Spittle sprayed the boy’s face. He saw broken yellow teeth with shreds of gristle between them, grey gums ….

  “Very hungery.”

  Huge jaws closed.

  Crunch.

  Mrs. Jacobs arrived at six in the morning, whistling softly as she went to the fallen front door of Number Seven and reached underneath it. As usual, she found money in the broken flowerpot, but the note next to it puzzled her. Malcolm had never left her a note before. And there was far more money than she needed to get his shopping. She had promised Malcolm’s late mother that she would always keep an eye on him, and she had. Whatever he had become in the last few years meant nothing to her. Promises were made to be kept.

  She opened out the crumpled note, a large square of dirty wallpaper: Kno wut to eat now. Not hungery no more. Thanck yu.

  The writing was clumsy and in what appeared to be dark red ink.

  Why he had gone, or where, puzzled her. Nothing had changed as far as she knew. She blew out her cheeks, looked around. She always came at this time of day, to avoid nosy parkers and the neighbourhood kids, who used to shout names and throw stones at the flat. Ogre, they called him, that was the word. Stupid thing to say. Malcolm would never hurt anyone.

  She went into the flat for once, to check he wasn’t still there. Mrs. Jacobs had lost her sense of smell years ago, and her sight wasn’t as good as it used to be. Her sister had booked her in for cataract operations, but she didn’t fancy them much. So the flat was a mess. Single men never did put the effort in.

  He had definitely gone. She was about to leave when she noticed the trainers on the floor. They couldn’t have been Malcolm’s. He had always had big feet, even as a child. She picked one up, but it was stained and sticky, no use to her. That, on the other hand …

  Mrs. Jacobs reached down and took hold of a large, fresh bone. There was a bit of meat left on it, despite the tooth-marks where it had been gnawed at one end.

  “Do nicely for the dog, that will.”

  She popped it in her shopping bag, along with Malcolm’s cheap bacon joint, the note, and the money.

  And Mrs. Jacobs walked away from the ogre’s lair, carrying the last of Ricky Cresser to a better place.

  John Linwood Grant lives in Yorkshire with a pack of lurchers and a beard. He may also have a family. When he’s not chronicling the adventures of Mr. Bubbles, the slightly psychotic pony, he writes serious supernatural crime and fantasy tales. You can find him every week on his weird site, greydogtales.com, often with his dogs.

  Bread and Bones

  Laura Keating

  When I was young I would walk the fields behind my house. Often alone, I observed my father’s warnings about coyotes—although the only coyote I knew was a cunning inventor, bumbling but not a villain, and had no plans for solitary children. That was the wolf’s job. There were cows in the field, and I would watch the herd quietly, their slow moving swagger, their placid glances. I would name any one of them that came within arm’s reach Buttercup. I would listen to their rumbling, throaty basses as the dusk choir of predators beyond the trees provided melody. I was not afraid, but I always went home before dark.

  Walking with my father the fields became bigger, safer. Iron skies felt protective and only brightened the blooming daisies, yellow cowslips, and pink apple blossoms yet undiscovered by the plodding cattle. I would pluck the stems or snap the blooming twigs from gnarled trees and tuck the flowers decoratively behind an ear, imagining that the tantalizing burst of gold proudly displayed in my long dark hair would lure a Buttercup close enough to tame. It was patience, dad would say, and gentleness that would bring them close. My mother had taught me to be patient, and I could be gentle if I wanted. They are all gone now, but when I remember back I remember the cows first. I would try to feed the large brown beasts some of the green bean pods dad always kept in his pockets as he told me again the story of how his great, great grandfather had started the herd after selling his last cow for a pittance and then setting off to find his fortune.

  I learned not to ask what happened after the happy ending.

  Winter was always harder. Years before I was born, my mother had immigrated to Canada from a country closer to the sun (so she’d say) before finding dad. She never accepted the winter’s cold. The chill that crept under the crack of our front door whined like a neglected dog, slinking meekly across the floor to lick at our ankles. Dad would roll towels into twisted green stalks to jam the cracks to stop it, and tell my mother he wasn’t made of money, drowning the furnace if she had lit it again. She would thump and rub her arms under her woolen sweater, forever too small around her huge, hunched shoulders, her head swiveling, glances retreating to the floor. She would mutter for me to help her in the kitchen.

  “Add water slowly,” she would instruct as she piled her wiry blonde hair into a reasonable tangle on the top of her head, and I would push my hands into the warm dough. I always looked for faces in the sticky mass of flour, water, and oil when it was still a formless, fleshy tone—like something weak and young. But it wasn’t until my mother took the bowl from me, dumped the heap to the floured counter with a deft, practiced sweep, and pressed in her knuckles that any real life was massaged into the twisted little monster I had made. She would grind flax and oats with her large mortar and pestle and season the soft dough with the coarse grains.

  “Fie, foe.” She muttered constantly as she pulled and pushed, making something right in the confusion of dough. She rolled her words into it and filled the crust with them. When it was time to leave it alone, the bread would rise, full and round and as smooth as a satisfied belly. While it baked, I was allowed to select and crack the cold, golden eggs from the refrigerator and paint their sticky insides across the crust until it glistened.

  “Mr. Jackson has the towering temper,” my mother would say of my father as she put me to bed. This only happened on the nights they had been fighting loud enough for me to hear. She would always smile conspiratorially then, minute lines crimping the edges of her tiny eyes, her broad plain face made momentarily pretty. “But he is small man. We are giants, and we overcome.”

  She would sing me a song in words she wouldn’t teach me, her large hands raised slightly before her, one in front of the other, as she picked at an instrument that was not there, playing me music I could not hear. She would tell me old stories filled with castles, monsters, and a twisting green tree that scratched the sky. She told me how she used to climb this tree high enough to kick the clouds. I found her stories hard to believe, and she would laugh from the belly when I politely called her a liar. I would snack on a piece of the bread we had made, warmed and spread with cinnamon and butter, as I listened. When I slept, I would dream about the sky.

  She would say nothing the nights he came home
late, slamming doors, reeking and shouting. She would lock my door and crawl into my bed, stroking my hair as she stared up at the ceiling.

  My mother was the tallest woman I ever knew, and I dreaded the thought of ever looking (ugly) like her although I suspected one day I would. Her hands were not like those of the other mothers’ who dropped their children off at school on those muddy mornings in spring—pretty, slim, painted. The hand that held mine was larger than most men’s, with calloused fingers, and thick wrists. Her face was flat, her hair was the yellow of mown grass left to wither on a lawn, and her cheeks were ruddy red, as if forever burned in a strong wind. Her feet were gigantic, and she seemed to shake the ground as she walked me down the cracked sidewalk. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. I noticed (her shoes like tires), the other children noticed (the way she never kissed me goodbye), and their mother’s did too (the way they smiled at me and flicked their eyes at her). But she did not notice; her thoughts were always somewhere else. Her dreaming gave her a vacant look, her dull eyes becoming even more bovine and slow. I would have to pull her hand to make her stop.

  “Huh?”

  “We’re passing my school.” I’d drop her hand as soon as she’d loosen her unknowingly iron grip.

  “Sorry,” she’d say. “Head was in clouds.” She’d smile her monstrous smile, showing her pebble-string of teeth, like we were sharing secrets.

  Sometimes I hated her.

  I never learned where my parents met or when they married. I suspected at one time they must have been happy, never suspecting how it would end. I wanted to think it wasn’t just madness that brought them together—although some days, listening to my mother’s mutterings (fiefoefum) and my father’s sullen, sodden rants, I wondered if that was what pulled them apart.

  She was always careful when she searched around our home, always with backward glances, like she did not have a right to be in her own house. When she caught me watching her, a thin, almost canine smile would split across her moon face like a dull mask of innocence. I would look away, strangely ashamed. She was unable to be quiet, so she would wait until the house was empty before pulling drawers, tapping walls, or digging in the backyard.

  “I will find; they are mine. They are mine,” she would softly chant, her nails full of earth, her hair sticking to her narrow forehead.

  By the time he got home for supper, not a speck of dust would be out of place. If it was, I would walk into the field until I was surrounded by the herd, and I couldn’t hear anything but the lowing of the cattle.

  I would wait, and he would come to find me.

  “That woman lives in her own world.” He would give me an Oreo. “See what she made me do, kiddo?”

  I would watch the herd and eat my cookie.

  Dense clusters of trees bordered the fields. They were thick and wild, wasted fingerlike branches tangling on the floor. In their shadows, bleached patches of snow could survive well into the spring, perhaps into the summer. In a grove of thin maples, I climbed as high as I could one day and swinging from a branch remembered my mother’s stories. I felt a surge of guilt for bringing them out here without her. I hurried to climb down.

  It was below that I found the cow bones. They had been shot by my father’s father, the cows too sick or old to be of any use. I began to carefully arrange the bones of one, so it appeared as if it had simply lain down on its side one afternoon, as a skeleton, and failed to rise ever again. Dad found me soon. He told me the names of the bones as I piled the spares into stacks. I never thought to question his knowledge—we were in the fields, the home of all his stories.

  He picked up a rib, his shaking hands brushing away the loose moss.

  “This is a bone orchard,” he mused. I imagined rattling branches of ribs on tall trunks of vertebrae where daisies and yellow flowers bloomed at the skeletal roots. He took his large silver flask from his pocket, fumbled the cap off, tremors in his fingers, and finished it as I proudly recited the names back. I smiled when I thought he was smiling at me.

  I told my mother about the place later.

  “Oh,” she told the laundry she folded. “That is nice.” She then continued muttering like I had not said a word. I wished I had not.

  Dad and I took a skull from the orchard as a memento one day, pairing two random jaws that seemed to fit enough to complete the grin. I shielded it from the black, watery eyes of the cattle; I did not feel like a thief, but I thought it was better that they did not know.

  Back home dad told me to put the skull in his shed; he’d find something to mount it on later. I stared at him for a moment and then carried it in both hands, my thumbs looped into the musty eye sockets, and delivered it to the work shed. I unlatched the door and bummed my way inside. A bag of old lime fertilizer stooped in the corner, spilling, and old gardening tools rusted on bent nails on the walls. On the small splintering table rich with the skunky hum of old oil was a birdhouse I had made (broken, waiting almost two years to be mended) and his dusty axe. I put the skull on the table and moved the axe to the floor. That was the last time I saw my birdhouse, the skull, or the axe.

  The herd got smaller every month after that. Dad was away more often, and the fighting grew more frequent. I couldn’t hide in the herd like I used to, so I would stay in my room and play my music loud.

  He would call her a troll and Blunderbore. She would shout things I couldn’t understand. He would say he was leaving, but he never did. There were cold nights (the nights he was home), and warm nights (the nights he didn’t come back until the morning) when she would stoke the furnace. He stopped going back to the fields or checking on the cattle, but I no longer would have wanted to join him if he had. I didn’t stop hating her the night he broke her nose, but I thought I loved her more because of the way she walked to the bathroom and calmly reset it with a cracked pop. When he left, she came out with a bandage between her eyes, and we made bread. She didn’t instruct me anymore, and we worked together in silence—except for her muttering. She ground the grains, and punched the loaves. Fie. Foe.

  How much time went by before it happened? I do not remember. I did not know that there was something to wait for back then. I remember that the day that Chris Hemford kissed me was the day she came home from the hospital. I remember it that way, not the other way around: that Chris Hemford in his tight black jeans kissed me as we walked home, near the gas station where the street ended. That I stood on my toes, and at home she was in the kitchen like an afterthought.

  “Who drove you home?” I asked. I got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water from the tap before I took my backpack off. I had driven her there.

  “Who is the boy?” she asked, not looking up from the dish she was washing. Both of her eyes looked like they had been blotted with purple bingo dabbers. I looked out the window and could still see Chris’s back shrinking down the street. “He is good boy?”

  My head turned sharply. “Don’t tell dad.”

  The dishcloth stopped squeaking around the plate, and at last she looked at me. “He saw. He is gone now.” She wrapped her huge, wet hand around my fingers, smiled, and for an instant I thought I would cry. But then she let go and went back to work.

  “Do not fear small men,” she said.

  It was that night, I think, that she came to my room to tell me a story. She looked too happy for me to tell her I was too old to be tucked in, and I was still too consumed by what would happen when dad came home to ask her to leave. She told me one of her Old Country stories again, a story about the sky.

  “Once there was great king,” she said. Her accent was always soft but somehow severe; like snow pushing through pine boughs. “Who was murdered by thief. The king had been very happy. His kingdom, happy. His queen, happy. There was plenty food. The queen had a golden eagle. Every morning it would lay a golden egg, and this egg would crack every evening, releasing not just egg but great feast. And the people were content.

  “There was endless gold from purse king wore. Every morning he would
throw gold, and every day city sparkled when great sun reached over clouds and touched shining streets. And people were happy.

  “There was such music. King’s music box, made of silver starlight, played as moon rose and every night, dancing. And people were merry.” She paused a long time. “But thief took these all, one by one, laughing as he ran. The king pursued, and he fell.

  “With no eagle there was hunger. As kingdom starved, the queen’s heart broke, and she lost her mind. With gold vanished, sun no longer shone through streets, and there was darkness. Only music now was crying of city. Like wolves, they mourned.”

  She held my chin then, softly in the cradle of her hand. “But the king’s daughter said, ‘I do not fear dark. I will make it right.’”

  She smiled then and produced a plastic shopping bag. From the bag she withdrew an old metal box. At one time it would have been silver, but it had long ago tarnished a mottled green-grey. It flaked with dirt as she ran her thumb along the carvings and creaked when she pushed open the clasp. As she eased open the lid, a small dancer holding a harp tilted upright.

  She smiled as she wound the key in the back and placed it on my dresser. The small dancer began to turn, and arthritically the box plucked out a melody that was at first sore but soon turned sweet.

  I lay back and listened, slept and dreamed of a twisting, green tree that scratched heaven. The branches boomed like a slammed door against the sky. The wind howled around the branches, screamed and fought. The fighting wind ended sharply, decisively. I thought that I woke once, from noises from the furnace room; heavy, wet, chopping. But it was the giant tree and a laughing man with an axe.

  It was uncommonly warm in my room, and I woke early to the dim grey light of dawn. Later, I could not tell if I had seen her from my window, walking into the fields, covered in dust.