Twenty-One Beginnings for the Same Short Story

1.

The west window of the old Thompson House was bright with the pale pressed faces of children peering down into the parking lot at the mailman, who, unable to hear their cries for help, was walking back to the street.

2.

Maybe it was the odor of rotting peaches in the wicker bowl on the kitchen countertop, or the pyramid of unread newspapers heaped in the driveway, or maybe the starved body of the little terrier lying under the scratch-marked legs of a table bearing a full bag of dog food. Whatever it was, something made Investigator Wainwright-Perkins wonder if maybe it had been a mistake to put off checking on the old widow until now.

3.

A bicycle stood by some dandelions. Tiny purple bulbs blew past in the wind. Groundwater leaked between the flowers. Anne Thompson, the youngest widow in New York, took off her shoes and began to walk toward the sea. The sun climbed up in front of her, a pale disc behind mist rising from the surface of the water.

4.

“Aging will be a thing of the past!” cried the Doctor. “I have found the elixir. I have made the stone. I’ve cut straight to the quick of life. I’ve distilled ambrosia. I’ve boiled myself a bit of immortality.

“And the crux of it is, Mrs. Thompson: I’m willing to share. But, I must have your answer now: my boat leaves early morning.”

5.

Meg wondered if the mailmen budded their newspapers, and wandered the Earth looking for suitable places to deposit them. Either way, they must have been driven by some blind force of instinct, caring for nothing else, for not a single one of the many mailmen and mailwomen that had serviced them over the recent years had ever acknowledged the cries for help Meg was certain could be heard from the front door—and for which she paid so dearly.

6.

Many years later, when asked why her wrists were so thin around, Meg would answer that she hadn’t been good at finding food during her feral years.

7.

“Oh no,” said Danica Thompson, watching the bathwater trickle down the steps into a pool at the bottom landing. “Mom’s finally decoded the text.”

8.

The Doctor had left nothing but a receipt written on a napkin, and a large sheet of paper bearing a vaguely Latin-looking cypher with a crude, unhelpful diagram of a bathtub on the reverse side. Mrs. Thompson had promptly taken the cypher into the library, and the only sunlight she got over the next few months were the weak rays that reached the space between the library windows and the red brick of the closely adjacent brewery.

The brewery, regretfully, is no longer in use. The only scents are the lime between the crumbling bricks and salt from the sea. It permeates everything, the salt. Pulls your skin tight, reddens your eyes, coats the ground, more salt than the end of Carthage.

9.

Danica’s departure from the house was simultaneous with the arrival of Samson, the handyman, and the scorn with which Mrs. Thompson had lately regarded her daughter seemed to have be converted equally and oppositely into affection for the newcomer. And as misplaced as her disappointment with Danica was, similarly undeserved was Samson’s high favor with the old widow.

Neighbors mark this exchange as the moment when old Mrs. Thompson became a true recluse. She was never seen outside again—only her silhouette could be observed, if one stood at a particular point in rafters of the disused brewery at a particular time of night. The shadow of a bent figure could be seen to slowly creep from yellow window to yellow window, back and forth, and it was the mark of manhood among the young boys of the village to witness this awful sight and to have returned home without fainting from fear.

10.

Investigator Wainwright-Perkins looked up from his desk to see an unfamiliar face. This was a rare experience for him, having been the arm of the law—more or less, from shoulder to fingertip—in this tiny village, for quite a few years.

“My name is Samson,” said the supplicant, twisting his hat in his hands in front of him, either of nerves or of feigned nerves.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Samson?”

“I’m from Mrs. Thompson.”

Investigator Wainwright-Perkins sat up, alert. So this was the handyman everyone had taken to disliking when he’d arrived, now several years ago.

“My duties,” he continued, “necessitate my visiting Cornwall. I’ll be gone for two months at least. I need someone to check in on Mrs Thompson once a week until I get back. It’s a very simple task: only see that she’s remembered to feed the dog, and knock on her bedroom door until you hear her voice. Last door at the end of the second floor hallway. Will you do it?”

Investigator Wainwright-Perkins wondered. The only time he admitted his own forgetfulness to himself was when it presented an actual obstacle to the completion of a task.

11.

How long had it been? Two months? Three? Something made Investigator Wainwright-Perkins suspect that the handyman had gone for good. Or maybe he’d fallen down some Cornish well and drowned. Either way, the Investigator had never seen a bedroom door he had wanted to enter less.

12.

Through a crack in the locked door Meg, the strongest of the children and therefore the only one with crack-viewing privileges, had been watching Danica (known to all of them then only as The Daughter) bustle around the upper floors all morning, stuffing various suitcases with clothing and valuables. From the Old Woman’s closed bedroom door at the opposite end of the hallway, Meg could hear screeches and curses and smashed porcelain. Before she left for good, Danica had approached the their door, bent down, and whispered into the crack.

“I wish there was something I could do for you.”

Years later, Meg had spent a lot of time wondering why she hadn’t unlocked the door, or told the police.

Then Samson had come, and the real horror had begun.

13.

Anne Thompson sat where the dandelions stopped in a foot-high cliff of soil and exposed roots, and dipped her feet in the shallow seawater up to the ankles. She watched the sun rise in the mist until it became too bright to behold.

She reached up a finger and touched the skin just under her eyes, and fancied she could feel wrinkles. She laughed. Leaning forward slowly, she dipped her face in the water. She took the smallest sip. Then another...

14.

They were all girls except for one boy, the smallest and youngest of all of them, the only one who still spoke of his parents and friends. Every time Samson unlocked the door and came into the room, the girls would have to hold him back, kicking and crying.

He was the only one still angry.

15.

Investigator Wainwright-Perkins shut the bedroom door behind him, and ran a hand over his whiskers. His cheeks felt cold. He tried each door along the hallway, passing a series of vacant and unkempt bedrooms until one bigger oak door opened on a library. He went to a table in the middle of the library, where found a yellow sheet of paper with curious markings on it, weighted down by a glass jar filled with a crusted brown liquid. Investigator Wainwright-Perkins shuddered.

He went back out into the hallway and tried the other doors. He took his gun out. When he got to the end of the hallway he found the door locked. And to his horror, after turning to go back to the bedroom to cover the body, he heard a sound behind him: a quiet whisper.

“Please help us.”

16.

They were naked and pale. All of them had pinpricks over their arms. The Investigator didn’t know what they’d eaten in the week he estimated them to have been locked in the room since they’d last been given food, but they were all still alive. Some of them had been in the room so long they couldn’t remember where they’d come from, but their homes were found and they were all returned.

Only one was deemed old enough and fit enough to make any kind of statement in court. This one’s name was Meg, and she’d described, showing the courtroom her wasted forearms and the many needle-holes dotting them, her unwilling complicity in a scheme too odd and terrible to be believed. It was a sensation for a while and brought the village unwanted celebrity.

“I am not angry,” she said, asked by a journalist from a bigger city. “I always told myself and the others: ‘no matter how afraid you are, remember: she is more afraid.’”

17.

When Meg made love with Jeremy for the first time, he had afterward remarked on the scars on her forearms, and the thinness of her wrists. She was ready to give her customary response, when she stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “It’s a story from when I was a girl. Let’s make love again. I need all the fucking encouragement I can get.”

18.

John Wainwright-Perkins sat at his desk, watching the ocean through the window with his pen in his hand, wondering how to begin.

“Dear Mrs. Singleton,” he finally wrote, “it has been many years since we were associated, and I bear you no grudge if you don’t remember me; in fact, I rather hope it is the case.”

He sighed, looking at the little black letters on the page. The dreams were back, and if he wanted to have any hope of ridding himself of them he would have to write the letter. In his dreams he could not get the door open in time: he would pull and pull and wrench the handle, and the little voice would get weaker and weaker, until it went out. The door would then burst open easily as if it had never been locked, and where there were whispers there would only be hundreds of little jars on the floor each filled with ugly red liquid leaking over the sides.

“I would very much like to hear your voice,” he wrote.

19.

By the ocean, in front of a little stone bearing the terse inscription, “Anne Thompson,” and nothing else, stood Danica.

Wind moved through the dandelions.

Over her shoulder she could see the big yellow machines going to work on the Manor, tearing out the library wall.

She smiled.

20.

A boat pitched and tossed on the ocean. Everyone was below deck except for two men, struggling by the railing.

One of them called out, “Damn you!” and, falling over the side, pulled the other over with him; and where there were two struggling men, there was now nothing but rain, a heap of ropes and pulleys, and a pitching deck.

21.

“I used to come here when I was a little kid,” he said, kicking an old stone with his toe.

“Really?”

“There used to be a huge house here. Me and my friends would sometimes go up into the brewery and watch the windows at night; you were supposed to be able to see the old witch who lived there. But I never saw a witch. The only thing I ever saw was one girl, and it wasn’t even in the window where you were supposed to see stuff. It was during the daytime, in the west window by the driveway.”

He sat down on a large broken piece of concrete, and pulled a dandelion out of a crack in the ground, twisting it in his hands as if he were nervous. She sat down next to him.

“A girl my age. Her face was in the window. She knew that I could see her.”

He put his face in his hands.