The Bootlegger's Dance by Rosemary Jones

Author:Rosemary Jones [Jones, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Media Tie-In, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Mystery & Detective, Historical, General
ISBN: 9781839082528
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2023-11-07T11:03:59+00:00

Interlude

So the story is told, and here it begins. So the story is told, and here it ends.

Except I can find no endings and the beginnings grow worse. Every time I step out of this place, I lose more of myself. I am no Shadow, adept at fighting evil. I’m not even a cook determined to be brave.

Courage. I tell myself to have courage, but I don’t even know what the word truly means anymore. Around me the trees weep blood and all I can remember is the old story of Bluebeard’s bride stepping out of the little locked closet. Her shoes are covered in blood. Her heart is cold with terror. The key in her hand cannot come clean but drips blood whenever she picks it up. Courage, her sister tells her, courage for our brothers are coming to save us.

“Down she went, down she went, until she reached the little closet and turned the key,” I recite to myself; this story is the only memory that I can keep in my head as the blood pours across the ground and rises around me. “She walked into the little closet and her shoes grew sticky with blood.”

No sooner than I thought of the closet full of blood than I stood in the hallway of a house. Light filtered through a dirty window to show a floor gray with dust. I did not know the place, although I had lived in so many houses like this. A remembered smell made me sneeze, a fog of cabbage soups and despairing lives crammed under one roof. I was certain that I stood in the upper hallway of a boarding house. Yet I was equally certain that I was alone, trapped in my nightmare forever.

As I walked down the hallway, I saw my footprints behind me were the only prints on the dusty carpet. All the doors swung into empty rooms, stripped of furniture. A broken window in one room let in the cold wind. An icicle dangled on the windowsill and the walls were blotched with a dark fungus.

Then I heard the bang of a door. I looked back behind me before I realized that the sound came from below me. At the top of the stairs, I found myself overlooking an entryway.

Leaning over the railing, I spotted a woman and a man. All I could see was the top of their heads, and the woman wore the large hat of another era. Their voices sounded neither young nor old. Still, there was an undercurrent of affection and exasperation in their tones that spoke of a couple long used to each other.

“Agatha Crane,” said the man. “I don’t want to spend our Christmas Eve in a deserted house, not even one with ghosts.”

“Wilbur,” replied the woman, “there are no ghosts, at least as far as the accounts of this house go. Just a room where the ceiling drips blood, to be precise.” She sounded like a woman who always wanted to be precise.

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