Sarah Canary (S.F. Masterworks) by Karen Joy Fowler

Author:Karen Joy Fowler [Joy Fowler, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780575131378
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2012-09-12T12:00:00+00:00

11

The Story of Carmilla

But never met this Fellow

Attended, or alone

Without a tighter breathing

And Zero at the Bone—

Emily Dickinson, 1865

Harold was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed frame. His face was drained of color and his eyes were those of a madman. He was looking right at Chin. ‘Demon from hell,’ he said. His voice croaked like a cricket’s. ‘Chinese devil.’ He spat. In one hand he held something; now his fingers uncurled so that it fell to the floor. ‘Pick it up,’ he told Chin. ‘Read it to me.’

Chin had heard of snakes in India that hypnotized their prey so they walk right into the snakes’ open mouths. He took three steps into the room, moving like a little mouse, like a dreaming rabbit, carried forward by his own sense of inevitability. Beside the bed, he squatted slowly, until his eyes were just opposite Harold’s. He picked up the item, which he didn’t look at, but that his fingers recognized as a chopstick. He rolled it to the flat side, felt for the characters like a blind man. He couldn’t take his eyes off Harold’s eyes. ‘It says good health,’ said Chin. ‘Good fortune. Long life.’ What did chopsticks say?

Harold laughed and it was a horrible whistling laugh, like a breath over the top of an empty bottle. ‘Long life. I just bet it does,’ he said. ‘John Chinaman.’

‘Chin,’ B.J. said from the window. Chin didn’t know if B.J. was speaking to him or correcting Harold. Neither responded. They continued to look at each other, Harold attacking with his insane stare, Chin defending, until his strength gave out. His soul began to leak from his eyes and he was forced to close them quickly.

Harold made a sound, breath and demon music. The air from his mouth was very foul. ‘Am I a dead man?’

‘No.’ Chin looked at the chopstick in his hand and saw that it was his own chopstick, his own good fortune, his own long life. ‘Did Sarah Canary give you this?’ he asked.

‘That’s what she did,’ said Harold. He coughed, holding both his hands over his stomach, and the cough was unproductive and apparently painful, but Harold repeated it anyway. He brought one hand up, wiping away the spit at the corners of his mouth. Chin saw that his nails were stained the color of bean sauce and there was a matching stain on his shirt where his hand had been. ‘I found it in my heart. Is it wooden?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course, it would be. She used to come at me in my dreams, standing over me in the moonlight and gloating and her dress all made of blood. I’d wake up in a sweat and have to drink to steady myself so that I could sleep again. I don’t have a gift for sleep. Too much like death, I suppose. And now, of course, we’ve gone beyond dreams. Now she’s tried to kill me. She doesn’t understand that I can’t be killed. You tell them, Jimmy.

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