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

There was less travel once Eliza married Phillip and the girls came along, but she had trunks of treasures to enjoy, and to share with her three daughters. “This one is for you, Julia,” she said, lifting out a delicate blue scarf. “To match your eyes. For Amara, this green, and for Magdalena, this golden.” The tiny girls were swamped in the lush material and they danced around the room with their mother spinning in the center.

“What is this?” their father said. He pretended gruffness, but he wouldn’t have married her if he didn’t love her ways.

They had a good life until the Romanian came.

Eliza had written letters to her dear school friends, especially Lucia, for ten years, fifteen. They kept in touch, and then there were no more letters. “I miss you!” Eliza wrote. “I wish we could visit with each other monthly and talk about foolish things.”

It was not Lucia who visited. It was her brother, Mihai.

The girls would not remember his first visit, although their lives changed because of it. Their mother said he arrived in a large coach, with servants following behind. His voice louder than the most raucous of men in the village and his skin bright, glowing. He arrived on their doorstep with no announcement. He said, “I am the brother of the magnificent girl Lucia.”

He was not as handsome as Eliza had imagined (the girls had told stories under the covers when they were at school, squealing at the inventions) but he was charming and vulnerable.

“I bring sad news. My dear wife died in childbirth, and the baby as well. In my sorrow I am traveling the world until now, when I reach my sister’s dear friend and this beautiful land.”

He looked out, lifting and shaping his hands as if measuring the place.

“Here I will build a castle, with the help of a great man.”

Their father Phillip managed the project over the next fifteen years. This was his sole job, to build a mansion for the mysterious Romanian Mihai Adascalitei.

This brought success and financial security to the family, and each night Phillip insisted on raising a glass to Mihai, “Our benefactor.”

“Our slave master,” Eliza said, because Phillip worked twelve hours a day with little time for family.

Then it was done. Word came that Mihai would arrive to inspect, that he was traveling with a large retinue and that he was anticipating great pleasure on seeing his new home.

“He doesn’t mention Lucia but surely she will come,” Eliza said. “Perhaps she and I will go to London. She always said she’d love to go.”

“They can’t come,” Phillip said. He couldn’t sit down but paced in agitation. “He can’t see his home. Can you imagine what he will say? He will be disappointed, to say the least.”

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Eliza asked. He looked at her. He didn’t say anything.

“And what if he wants to visit here? Look at our house!” He was not a wealthy man. “He’s going to think us very poor specimens,”

They all looked at their house. The fittings were shabby but solid and clean, well made. “You are the architect. The clever one. Let his financiers show him wealth. We show solid family love.”

Mihai was tall, broadly built, his clothes cut well to hide how large he’d grown. His cheeks were red and round, his teeth spaced out and yellowed, his breath like cheddar or, Julia whispered like the Thames in summer. He had long hair brushing his shoulders (Phillip tried to hide his distaste at this), and he topped it with a small gray hat that was almost formless. He had blue lips, like a lizard’s and his eyelids hung low, making him look sleepy.

“Aah, your lovely ladies. So tall! So delicate in the limbs and colorful! All three like princesses of an exotic place. You must all come to dinner at my home now it is complete. I’ll have them serve beef broth and black pudding. That will get some meat on your bones.”

Amara blushed, which made him laugh.

“You know I last saw these two older girls when they were tiny. Just born! All blue in the face and furious,” he said. “How well I remember!”

The three girls barely contained themselves. They chattered all at once, drowning him out, until he burst into laughter and bade them hush.

They all heard his stomach rumble, like a crack of thunder, and Amara giggled. “Oh, you must be ravenous,” Eliza said, “ Let’s get you something to eat.”

“He’s not about to waste away, Mildred,” Phillip said.

“Alfred! So rude!” Eliza asked the cook to fix salmon en croute, because she knew they had leftover salmon from her order with the fishmonger. Some of them do it on purpose in the hope of taking the extra home but Eliza wasn’t having that.

The girls raced to their rooms, returning screaming with laughter. They wore salmon pink scarves, all three, to match their food. Even in their rush they exuded grace, their fingers long and delicate, their step light.

“Like angels,” Mihai said.

At dinner, Eliza couldn’t contain herself any longer. “And my dear friend Lucia? It has been so long since we communicated.”

Mihai shook his head. “I bring sad news. My dear sister died in childbirth. She did feel envy of your beautiful three, when she could have none. I’m sorry she no longer wrote to you. Perhaps hearing about your girls and their accomplishments became harder and harder as her years passed fruitlessly.”

“And yet you said she was with child. What joy that must have brought.”

“Ah,” he said.

“So sad that she should pass in the same manner as your wife,” Phillip said.

“Ah,” Mihai said, and Julia wondered at his eyes, how they shifted about, not wanting to focus, and how he smiled nervously, and how his hands shook.

“Your father is a clever man. My house is something to see,” he said, as the pudding was served, as if they hadn’t seen it five dozen times. As if every meal hadn’t been dominated by talk of this house.

“You’ve certainly changed the way things look,” Eliza said.

“My philosophy; take something to its basics and rebuild it. Hair will grow back differently on a shaved head.” Eliza thought he was dashing when he first visited, his hair a golden yellow, his shoulders broad.

“But hair grows back easily enough. By its very nature it is meant to fall.”

“Your house is certainly sturdy, if not very beautiful,” Phillip said. He had made many suggestions of design, all rebuffed.

“You know of the tulip?” Mihai said. “It grows weaker the more beautiful. There is little to be said for beauty, much for strength,” Mihai said. “You are the strongest, Amara. That is clear.”

Eliza well remembered the two-hundred-year-old house he’d had torn down to build his home.

He had bade her stand there in the rubble. She was flattered, a young wife with babies; you’d think she’d lost all of her allure. But no, Mihai, the brother of her dear friend (and, if she would only admit it, she had made up stories about him at school, when her friend spoke of him and his dashing ways) asking her to grace his home or the foundation of his home. “Stand there,” he said, and bade his man mark where her shadow fell. That was where the foundation stone was laid.

“And now you must prepare,” he had told her.

“For what, Mihai?”

“For your passing forty days from now.”

She had known of this curse but had forgotten. He seemed gleeful about the death.

“It’s a blessing to you. Knowing when you’ll die gives you every chance to make amends, say goodbye, indulge your desires.”

“I have no desires,” but she did, of course. Small, sustaining dreams.

“And yet you are not dead,” Mihai said in the present as she relayed this story and he roared with laughter. “My blessing failed.”