Jeffers and I both turned sharply, in time to see that the second young lady of the party, ashen in colour, was being supported by her friends. As they fussed and produced a smelling-bottle, and called loudly for spirits, Polleto darted to his feet and went gliding quickly from the terrace.
‘Now I fancy,’ said Jeffers, ‘you’ve witnessed something of this sort before. And I too, in a way, since you told me of it.’
‘You mean Daffodil King, who fainted at the church tea?’
‘Just so.’
‘You imagine that she, and the lady over there, swooned for a similar reason — that they had seen Mr Polleto?’
‘Don’t you imagine it?’ asked Jeffers laconically.
I thought, and answered honestly, ‘Yes. But why?’
‘I wonder,’ said Jeffers, infuriatingly. Then he added, ‘No, I’m not being fair to you. You see, I’ve read of the case, and viewed a rather poor photograph once, in a police museum, in circumstances I shan’t bore you with. When you first pointed him out, I had a half-suspicion. But in the light of both ladies fainting at the sight of the man. Recollect, Austria is only over the border here. I believe you told me that the charming Daffodil had been in Austria once, and said she had seen something there so awful that it had taken her six years to recover from it?’
‘Yes, or so her sister informed me.’
‘What she saw then was that same man, Polleto, in the street probably, on the day that the people of a well-known Austrian spa almost lynched him. I have no doubts the other lady, to our right, saw him in a similar style. Unless she had the singular misfortune to have met him.’
‘Then he’s notorious?’
‘No. Of course, his real nameisn’t Polleto. 1 was never told what his real name was. The documents referred to him only as the Criminal. And the crime too was hushed up in the end, and rich acquaintances got him away to avoid a most resounding scandal, which would, I believe, have brought down the Austrian government of the hour.’
‘In God’s name — what had he done?’
Jeffers shrugged. ‘That’s the thing, Frederick, what had he done? No one would say. Not even the file on him, which I was shown, would say anything as to the nature of his crime. Not even the policemen I spoke with. It was something so vile, so disgusting, so inhuman, that no scrap of it has ever been revealed by anyone who knows. They won’t — can’t — speak of it. They try to push it from their minds. And if they see him, like that lady across the terrace, some part of them withers. There now, she’s looking a little better. All the better, no doubt, since what made her ill has left the vicinity.’
I sat staring at him.
Presently I said, ‘Are you then saying to me what I suppose you must be?’
Jeffers stretched himself in his chair, and smiled at me. ‘Even you,’ said he, ‘asked yourself whether or not something of great perceived virtue, like a church bell, could halt Amber Maria, should she set her sights on it. But it wasn’t virtue she avoided, was it? She loved the earth and all the people in it. I, too, Frederick, have heard of the Lilyite sect, and of course she must have been a member of it. No doubt Josebaar Hawkins let her have her meetings in his house, and protected her afterwards by lying. But maybe, in later years, he feared that in her too, that she was one of the Lilyites and put the teachings of Jesus before all other things. “What did she do but love others and want to help them with her precious gift of seeing, from which she herself had never tried to profit? She saw good and beauty in all men and all things, and loved them like — loved them better than — herself. And where have you heard such philosophy before, save from the lips of Christ?’
I was shocked a little, to have missed this clue. Humbly I waited for him to go on. He did so.
‘Amber Maria looked with her eating eyes through her window, and after the blocked-up bricks and pins, she had the glass, and then, as you said, the trees, the air and the Lane. And next she ate up Steepleford with her eyes. And it would have gone on like this, like rings spreading from a pebble thrown into a pool, and God knows where it could have ended. But ended it must have done, at last. For in this world, along with all those who, despite their colossal failings, carry in them the seeds of goodness and beauty, there are a few, only a few, I trust, who have nothing like that inside them. Who are composed only of the grossest and most foul of atoms, who are, though human, like things of the Pit. In them there is not, I dare say, one hint of light. Perhaps there is no soul. And meeting one of these persons, Amber Maria, who fed on goodness and beauty and drained it to dust, fed instead upon the worst poison, that which would scald away the psychic core of any such vampire. It was Polleto, you see, Polleto, that little ghastly human demon, whose crime is so unspeakable that it is never spoken of, Polleto who had come to live in the town, placating it by helping it buy a bell, Polleto that at last her devouring eyes reached. Like everything else then, she tried to eat him up. And then she must have tried to spew him out. But it was too late. She had touched and tasted in a manner only vampires know. She who had once loved God and once loved others as herself, until they let her die in that atrocious manner. And after that she who hated and would have eaten the world, save in due course she came to Polleto and ate at Polleto. Polleto! And it killed her, Frederick, in each and every way. It killed her, sending her to a death more deep than any grave, more cold than any stone.’
Glen Hirshberg
Struwwelpeter
The following story originally appeared on SciFi.Com, and has been selected for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection as well as this volume of The Mammoth Books of Best New Horror.
Glen Hirshberg’s novelette, ‘Mr Dark’s Carnival’, which received its first printing in the Ash-Tree Press anthology Shadows and Silence and later appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection, was nominated for both the International Horror Guild Award and the World Fantasy Award. He also has stories in Dark Terrors 6 and The Dark. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, is published in the United States by Carroll & Graf. Currently, he is putting the final touches on a collection of ghost stories and working on a new novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.
About ‘Struwwelpeter’ the author notes: ‘Ballard is an actual section of Seattle, but the neighborhood portrayed here bares little resemblance to it except for the rain and the duplexes and the lutefisk smell. This story is dedicated to Phil Bednarz, wherever he is, for taking me bell-ringing.’
‘The dead are not altogether powerless.’
This was before we knew about Peter, or at least before we understood what we knew, and my mother says it’s impossible to know a thing like that anyway. She’s wrong, though, and she doesn’t need me to tell her she is, either.
Back then, we still gathered, afterschool afternoons, at the Andersz house, because it was close to the locks. If it wasn’t raining, we’d drop our books and grab ho-hos out of the tin Mr Andersz always left on the table for us and head immediately toward the water. Gulls spun in the sunlight overhead, their cries urgent, taunting, telling us, you’re missing it, you’re missing it. We’d sprint between the rows of low stone duplexes, the sad little gardens with their flowers battered by the rain until the petals looked bent and forgotten like discarded training wheels, the splintery, sagging blue walls of the Black Anchor restaurant where Mr Paars used to hunker alone and murmuring over his plates of reeking lutefisk when he wasn’t stalking 15th Street, knocking pigeons and homeless people out of the way with his dog-head cane. Finally, we’d burst into the park, pour down the avenue of fir trees like a mudslide, scattering people, bugs, and birds before us until we hit the water.