Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Phillips does this and that. Between us the mulberry’s stomach grumbles and tinkles with the foreign food he’s kept down. Between leaf-rollings, I have another pull. “God, the smell of that!” says Phillips, and spares a hand from his preparations to wave it away from his face.

“It’s good,” I say. “It’s the best. It’s Nat Culloden’s.”

“How old are you anyway?” He cannot read it off me. Perhaps he deals only with other men — I know people like that, impatient of the young. Does he have children? I’d hate to be his son.

“Coming up fifteen,” I say.

He mutters something. I can’t hear, but I’m sure it is not flattering to me.

Now there’s some bustle about him. He pulls on a pair of very thin-stretching gloves, paler even than his skin; now his hands are even more loathsome. “Right,” he says. “You will hold him down when I tell you. That is your job.”

“He’s down.” Look at the spread cross of him; he couldn’t be any flatter.

“You will hold him still ,” says Phillips. “For the work. When I say.”

He pulls the brace gently; the skein comes forth as it should, but—“Hold him,” says Phillips, and I hook one leg over the mulberry’s thigh and spread a hand on his chest. He makes a kind of warning moan. Phillips pulls on, slowly and steadily like a mother. “ Hold him,” as the moaning rises, buzzes under my hand. “Christ above, if he makes this much of a fuss now .”

He pulls and pulls, but in a little while no more silk will come. He winds what he has on a spindle and clamps it, tests the skein once more. “No? Well. Now I will cut. Boy, I have nothing for his pain.” He looks at me as if I forgot to bring it. “And I need him utterly still, so as not to cut the silk or his innards. Here.” He hands me a smooth white stick, of some kind of bone. “Put that crosswise between his teeth, give him something to bite on.”

I do so; the teeth are all clagged with leaf-scraps, black in this light. Mulberries’ faces are the worst thing about them, little round old-children’s faces, neither man nor woman. And everything they are thinking shows clear as water, and this one is afraid; he doesn’t know what’s happening, what’s about to be done to him. Well, I’m no wiser. I turn back to Phillips.

“Now get a good weight on him, both ends.”

Gingerly I arrange myself. He may be neither man nor woman, but still the creature is naked, and clammy as a frog in the night air.

“Come on,” says Phillips. He’s holding his white hands up, as if the mulberry is too hot to touch. “You’re plenty big enough. Spread yourself out there, above and below. You will need to press here, too, with your hand.” He points, and points again. “And this foot will have some work to do on this far leg. Whatever is loose will fight against what I’m doing, understand?”

So he says, to a boy who’s wrestled tree-snakes so long that his father near fainted to see them, who has jumped a shot stag and ridden it and killed it riding. Those are different, though; those are wild, they have some dignity. What’s to be gained subduing a mulberry, that is gelded and a fool already? Where’s the challenge in that, and the pride upon having done it?

“Shouldn’t you be down there?” I nod legs-wards.

“Whatever for, boy?”

“This is to let the food out, no?”

“It is to let the food out, yes .” He cannot speak without making me lesser.

“Well, down there is where food comes out, yours and mine.”

“Pity sake, boy, I am not undoing all that . I will take it out through his silk-hole, is the plan.”

Now I am curled around the belly, with nowhere else to look but at Phillips’s doings. All his tools and preparations are beyond him, next to the fire; from over there he magics up a paper packet. He tears it open, pulls from it a small wet cloth or paper, and paints the belly with that; the smell nips at my nostrils. Then he brings out a bright, light-as-a-feather-looking knife, the blade glinting at the end of a long handle.

“Be ready,” he says.

He holds the silk aside, and sinks the blade into the flesh beside it. The mulberry-boy turns to rock underneath me; he spits out the stick, and howls to the very treetops.

Mulberry boys we call them. I don’t know why, for some begin as girls, and they are neither one nor the other once they come out of Phillips’s hut by the creek. They all look the same, as chickens look all the same, or goats. Nonsense, says Alia the goat woman, I know my girls each one, by name and nature and her pretty face. And I guess the mothers, who tend the mulberries, might know them apart. This one is John Barn, or once was called that; none of them truly have names once they’ve been taken.

Once a year I notice them, when Phillips comes to choose the new ones and to make them useful, from the boys among us who are not yet sprouted towards men, and the girls just beginning to change shape. The rest of the year, the mulberries live in their box, and the leaves go in, and the silk comes out on its spindles, and that is all there is to it.

They grow restless when he comes. Simple as they are, they recognise him. They can smell their balls in his pocket, says James Pombo, and we hush him, but something like that is true; they remember.

Some have struggled or wandered before, and these are tied to chairs in the box, but you have to watch the others. Though they have not much equipment for it, they have a lot of time to think, and because their life is much the same each day and month and year, they see the pattern and the holes in it through which they might wangle their way.

Why the John Barn one should take it into his head after all these years, I don’t know. He was always mulberry, ever since I knew to know, always just one of the milling amiables in that warm box.

Oh, I remember him, says Pa. Little straw-haired runabout like all them Barns. Always up a tree. Climbed the top of Great Grandpa when he couldn’t have been — what, more than three years, Ma? Because his sister Gale did it, and she told him he was too little. That’ll send a boy up a tree.

Last year when I was about to sprout, it was the first year Phillips came instead of his father. When he walked in among us we were most uneasy at the size of him, for he is delicately made, hardly taller than a mulberry himself, and similar shaped to them except in lacking a paunch. Apart from the shrinkage, though, you would think him the same man as his father. He wore the same fine clothes, as neat on him as if sewn to his body directly, and the fabrics so fine you can hardly see their weave. He had the same wavy hair, but brown instead of silver, and a beard, though not a proper one, trimmed almost back to his chin.

The mothers were all behind us and some of the fathers too, putting their children forward. He barely looked at me, I remember, but moved straight on to the Thaw children; there are lots of them and they are very much of the mulberry type already, without you sewing a stitch on them. I remember being insulted. The man had not bothered with me; how could he know I was not what he wanted, from that quick glance? But also I was ashamed to be so obviously useless, so wrong for his purposes — because whatever those purposes were, he was from the town, and he was powerfuller in his slenderness and his city clothes than was any bulky man among us, and everyone was afraid of him. I wanted a man like that to recognise me as of consequence, and he had not.

But then Ma put her arm over my shoulder and clamped me to her, my back against her front. We both watched Phillips among the Thaws, turning them about, dividing some of them off for closer inspection. The chosen ones — Hinny and Dull Toomy, it was, that time, those twins — stood well apart, Pa Toomy next to them arms folded and face closed. They looked from one of us to another, not quite sure whether to arrange their faces proudly, or to cry.