Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

The first that Mrs. Jacobs knew of the Gray Ladies were the ashen footprints she found on the front step. She blamed the chimney sweep, furious that he had come to her front door dirty like that, or at all. She sent her husband to the Chimney Master, wanting a name, wanting that child to come and clean up his own mess, but her husband returned to say no sweep had come knocking and if he had, two shillings sixpence were owed.

“Awful man,” her husband said, and she got him settled by the fire before he bored her with the usual talk. “Should have been drowned at birth, most of them, and I mean that kindly.”

“Of course you do, dear,” Mrs. Jacobs murmured, but in her mind’s eye she pictured the baby rats he’d drowned in a bucket last week. Dropped them in then forgot about them, and she was the one who had to scoop them out and bury them.

He was asleep within minutes and she could settle to her busy work.

In the morning she swept the ashen footprints away.

She had just put the broom away when she saw the chimney sweep through the front window. A tiny, filthy boy and she lifted her broom to shoo him away.

He’d left more footprints, she saw that, but when she raised her broom and saw him shrink away, her heart melted.

“Boy!” she said, “What are you doing here?” Her cheeks were pink from exertion and she had her mum’s old patchwork apron on.

“It looks so warm inside. The ladies showed me.”

“What ladies, dear? Your aunties?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got none of those, nor a mother, neither. It was the gray ladies showed me.” He tucked his shoulders down, cold in himself. He stared inside. “You’re nicer than them, though.”

Her husband was at the office and the street was quiet so she took him inside.

“Bath first,” she said, but his stomach rumbled loudly and he seemed weak, so instead she sat him in the laundry and fed him porridge.

There was a knock on the door.

“The gray ladies!” he said. He seemed frightened.

“I thought you liked them.”

“Only they look at me as if I’m real,” he said. “But I don’t like them.”

Mrs. Jacobs opened the laundry door, wondering as she did so how the door was reached being, as it was, behind their high brick surrounding walls.

“Yes?” Mrs. Jacobs said, then drew a sharp breath.

Three gray ladies stood on her step. She could see the agapanthus through them, and they floated above the ground. They were tall and skeletally thin. Their skin was gray, flaccid, hanging off their cheeks in folds. They didn’t look at her, only at the boy.

One lifted her hand and Mrs. Jacobs recoiled at the sight of long, sharp fingernails. They were silent as they turned, glided to the back wall and disappeared through it.

Mrs. Jacobs stood staring, knowing she couldn’t tell her husband what she’d seen ( Imagination is the indication of an unsteady mind , he liked to say). The boy shook.

“You better be off. My husband will be home soon for his lunch. Come back in two hours when he returns to work and I’ll make you a plate.” She put the hob on to make bubble and squeak and took out the bread knife ready to cut a slab to go with it.

He didn’t want to move so she physically picked him up. He weighed as little as one of Mr. Butcher’s chickens, no more. The morning had passed too quickly, though, because there was Mr. Jacobs at the front door, staring at her as if she was a beggar on the streets.

“Why are you carrying vermin?”

“Oh, Alfred. He’s a poor motherless boy, that’s all. Let me just bathe him. He can spend one night here, when he’s clean, then he’ll go after breakfast. We can’t send him out in the night.”

“It isn’t even close to night, woman.”

Mr. Jacobs had no patience for children. Never had done. If they’d been blessed, perhaps he would have changed his mind.

“Just the bath then and I’ll send him away.” She had the boy help her heat the water in the cellar and carry it to the laundry sink. The boy stared at the water as if mesmerized. The afternoon was gray and they needed what light they could but still Mrs. Jacobs pulled down the shutter. It was surely only shadow, but out there she thought she saw the three gray ladies, watching.

“You have a good scrub. I’m going down to clear up the lunch,” she told the boy. He stared at her. His eyes were ash gray and his skin had a gray pallor she hadn’t noticed before. His lips were drained of color and she saw streaks of ash in his hair.

“You take your time. Get yourself nice and clean. Go on.”

She tugged at his shirt, trying to help, but he shied away, so she called her, asking him to convince the boy he needed to remove his clothes for the bath and she left them to it.

Mr. Jacobs came back down and settled by the fire a few minutes later.

“How is he?” she called out.

“You mean the vermin? He’s as he should be.”

“He’s not vermin, he’s unfortunate,” but something in her husband’s tone made her run down the hall and throw open the laundry door. He spoke like that when he’d bested an opponent and was pleased with himself.

At first she thought the boy must have climbed out, the water was so gray and murky. Then one hand floated to the surface and she plunged both hands in to pull him out.

What she thought was ash was not at all but his own gray color.

She lifted him easily (was he lighter now? It seemed so) and she cradled him in her arms, holding him as if she could bring life back to him. She began dry him tenderly.

She heard a rustle, a hiss behind her and turned, still holding the boy, to see the three gray ladies standing there.

One bent forward and reached out as if to stroke the boy, but instead she worked her fingers between his ribs as if trying to pry something loose. One did stroke his hair gently, but the last knelt down and began lapping at him, as if drinking something spilled.

Mrs. Jacobs held the boy closer, trying to keep their fingers from him, but they reached through her, chilling her to the bone, and all she saw was gray.

“How did you know?” she whispered. “How did you know my husband would be capable of that?”

She rocked back and forth. Their eyes followed her while they kept still, then she saw their faces change as they aped her sorrow. They rubbed their hands together as if cleaning them, then went back to work on the boy, separating soul from body with long, sharp fingernails.

Did they gain color? Glow?

She wasn’t sure.

It would be weeks before Mrs. Jacobs could see color again.

The gray ladies were once Julia, Amara, and Magdalena. Pretty names for pretty girls, long since forgotten. How did you know? the woman asked, and they watched her, not answering her question. Truthfully, they did not know the answer and besides, they no longer spoke at all. Did they miss not talking to each other? Or had they no recollection of hours spent chattering?

They never knew where they’d knock. It was not their choice. Something moved them. It was death foretold by them, not delivered.

They knew they were doing good. A wise man (Wise. Cruel. Murderous.) told them often that one of the greatest gifts in life is to know when death is coming. It was a chance to say goodbye. To prepare.

If only people would listen. If they were stubborn, like the woman and her chimney sweep, no good was done to anyone.

She was colorful, that grieving woman, her cheeks pink, her eyes red. They were colorful once, these three.

Before.

They’d had a brighter life than many others like them, because their mother, Eliza, loved to travel, gathering friends like other people gathered pebbles or mementos. She’d been to Finishing School in Paris, where she met all manner of girls from all manner of places she’d never heard of before, like Lucia from Romania and Dao from the Principality of Phuan. And she learnt that each of them had a different idea of how things should be. This benefitted her daughters, giving them more freedom of expression and behavior than many others. Julia in particular thrived in this way, and as a girl loved to climb trees and sit in the branches, when the neighbors weren’t looking.