Read Online The Peculiar by Stefan Bachmann - Free Book Online Page A

checkerboard of pillowcases and withered grass.
    Bartholomew inched closer to the windowpane. A breeze was picking up. Wisps of the white curtain were blowing across the faery mother’s face, into her antlers and eyes. She didn’t move from her chair.
    The breeze gathered in strength. Sheets and bedclothes began to shift, skittering gently across the weeds in the yard. A shadow passed overhead. Bartholomew glanced up and saw that the summer sky had become low and angry, darkening with sudden weather. The sheets began to curl over themselves, piling up into heaps.
    The sour-looking woman worked on, flicking out more sheets, even as the other ones twisted across the yard. At the end of Old Crow Alley, the two men were still deep in conversation. The dog had found a scattering of slop and was scratching through it lazily. All seemed oblivious to the flooding darkness.
    The breeze was a wind now, churning the bedclothes, picking them up and hurling them into the air. Curtains slashed and flew across the window where the faery mother sat, now obscuring her, now revealing her stark against their whiteness.
    Suddenly there was a vicious shriek, like metal grinding against metal. The faery mother’s face exploded inches from his own, flat against the other side of his window. Her eyes were huge, dead-black, and sunken. Tears flowed from them, too many tears, streaming over her cheeks. Her mouth gaped open.
    Bartholomew screamed. He tried to jerk back from the glass, but he couldn’t move. His body had gone cold, stiff as the water pump in winter. The faery mother’s mouth opened even wider, and a horrid keening wail snaked from within.
    â€œYou won’t hear it come!” she screamed, and her eyes began to roll back in her head.
    Bartholomew was crying, trembling, terror strangling the air from his lungs.
    â€œYou won’t hear a thing. The cloven hooves on the floorboards. The voice in the dark. It’ll come for you, and you won’t hear a thing.”
    Bartholomew clamped his hands across the window, trying desperately to block out the face.
    But she only laughed a hopeless, anguished laugh, and sang:
    â€œYou won’t hear it calling. You won’t know until it’s too late, too late, TOO LATE!”
    With a start, Bartholomew fell back and struck his head hard upon the floor.
    Â 
    The next morning, while Bartholomew was still in bed, his mother came in with a smelly, boiled poultice, and a wet rag for his head. She didn’t ask where he had been. When he thought of it—the little faery house in the attic, the round window, and the face—it made him feel a million times worse.
    â€œMother?” he said quietly. “Mother, did you hear anything about the Buddelbinsters?”
    â€œThe Buddelbinsters?” Her voice was almost as hoarse as his own. “Don’t bother about them. There’s enough of bad luck in this house. We don’t need anyone else’s.”
    â€œBad luck?” Bartholomew sat up a little. “About their son?”
    â€œShush now, Barthy. Lie still. Not the son. The mother. Driven mad with grief, Mary Cloud says, but that’s just talk. Likely she died of the cholera. It’s all a-raging in London now.”
    His mother finished patting down the poultice and left. The flat door banged shut, then the door to the alley. He heard Hettie pattering in the kitchen, and the clink of a bowl. A few minutes later she came into the tiny room. Her arms were bare. She had pressed the juice from the red bird-berries Mother used to brighten the colors in the washing and had painted her arms in sloppy, twining lines.
    â€œHallo, Barthy,” she said. She smiled at him.
    Bartholomew stared back. He almost shouted at her. What a silly thing to do. What a silly, know-nothing little person you are!
    Hettie kept smiling.
    â€œWhere’d Mother go?” he asked after a while.
    She stopped smiling and climbed up beside him on the bed.