She Walks in Shadows by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paula R. Stiles

hours, as we had not brought light with us and the moonlight was treacherous. Finally, we stopped, and he withdrew from his satchel the ugly carving I had seen him remove all those years before. He put it back in place and looked at it for a long time. I gasped as the ground moved and made a noise, like a lion’s roar but under our feet. ‘May this end; may this end,’ he said to the wall. ‘Give me my freedom, though it is not deserved.’
    “He did not recover, though he stayed for a long time. When he left, he called together my family to ask if I could come with him. ‘If it is her wish,’ said my father. ‘She has a heart, for which we do not speak.’ I had never been so excited in my life, Mr. Greene. I agreed at once; we married in Italy a short while later.”
    “So, he died from his affliction?” I said, astonished. “We knew him as the heartiest, the most robust of men. What was it? Malaria? Yellow Fever?”
    “It did not seem that way,” she said, looking up at the map. “He wrote to Miskatonic University and they sent professors to talk to him; he was on the telephone at all hours. He even made a trip up there, carrying his notes from Africa. When he returned, he had copied out great reams from one of their old books — a medical book, I took it to be, not knowing any better — and stayed up late for weeks, reciting from it. I could barely sleep, hearing his voice all night, imagining the house was shaking. But then he did recover. He began to do his exercises again. He began to eat and write letters again. He slept soundly. He even began to speak of the adventures we would have again — all the places we would go together. I felt hunted; I dismissed it. His doom was with us, though. I did not realize what he was doing until it was too late. I did not believe he would do such a thing. I learned the word penance. A word we had no concept of in my language.”
    “Mrs. Penhallick,” I said, when she gave no signs of speaking again, though I dreaded to ask, “... how did he die?”
    She looked down at me, her great doe eyes suddenly hard and wary. “You’ll think me mad.”
    “No!”
    “The old gods who could not speak,” she said. “He had struck a devil’s deal with them and the cost was his life. They sent a shoggoth for him in the night. To collect payment.”
    I stared at her. Yes, quite mad, I thought. Her head had been filled with these stories. The old man had made it worse, for a young girl from a land far away whose mind eventually snapped from living here, alone in the great house …. After a moment, I said, weakly, “I see.”
    “Don’t put that in your article, Mr. Greene.”
    I was beginning to wonder if I had an article at all now, but shrugged and said, “As you wish.”
    As she was showing me out, I said, unthinkingly, “What a great pity that the man died without issue; my deepest sympathies for that, in addition to your great loss.”
    “Why, I believe I said nothing of the sort,” she said softly, taking my hat and coat from the stand. “If you must know, part of the deal for my freedom was poor Henley’s life ... but I was well-compensated with a child.”
    “But ….”
    She stepped aside just as the thing came racing down the stairs, all unseen save for the brass pins torn loose in its wake.





HAIRWORK
    Gemma Files
    NO PLANT CAN thrive without putting down roots, as nothing comes from nothing; what you feed your garden with matters, always, be it the mulched remains of other plants, or bone, or blood. The seed falls wherever it’s dropped and grows, impossible to track, let alone control. There’s no help for it.
    These are all simple truths, one would think, and yet, they appear to bear infinite repetition. But then, history is re-written in the recording of it, always.

    “ Ici, c’est elle, ” you tell Tully Ferris, the guide you’ve engaged, putting down a pale sepia photograph printed on pasteboard, its corners foxed with age. “Marceline