Bull Running For Girlsl Read online

  BULL RUNNING FOR GIRLS

  By

  ALLYSON BIRD

  SECOND PAPERBACK EDITION – 2013

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION – 2008

  Screaming Dreams

  13 Warn’s Terrace, Abertysswg, Rhymney Gwent, NP22 5AG, South Wales, UK

  Copyright © Allyson Bird 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  JournalStone

  www.journalstone.com

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  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  Original Cover illustration Copyright © Vincent Chong 2008

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-14-3 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-15-0 (ebook)

  JournalStone rev. date: December 13, 2013

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013952622

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Design: Denise Daniel

  Cover Art: Vincent Chong

  Edited by: Joel Kirkpatrick

  To the memory of my mother Laura Shakespeare. And my sister Sylvia Insley. I miss you.

  “To live is to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind; To write is to hold Judgement Day over the self.” Henrik Ibsen.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank Steve Upham for first publishing Bull Running for Girls and for his encouragement and enthusiasm. Thank you to Vincent Chong for the wonderful original cover and support from the beginning.

  To the other editors who have all introduced my prose to the world, Sarah Dobbs and Lee Harris—amongst others. Thank you to Andrew Hook in the discussion of The Silk Road.

  Almost all the stories in the collection are original except for: “Blood in Madness Ran” published in Hunger 2006. “Wings of Night” first appeared in Hub 2007. “Shadow upon Shadow” appeared in Black Petals 2008. “Dissolution” was published in The Third BHF Book of Horror Stories 2008. “The Silk Road” appeared in The British Fantasy Society publication—New Horizons 2008.

  Contents

  The Caul Bearer

  Bull Running

  In the Hall of the Mountain King

  Hunter’s Moon

  Shadow upon Shadow

  The Bone Grinder

  The Conical Witch

  In the Wake of the Dead

  The Sly Boy Bar and Eatery

  The Celestial Dragon

  The Critic

  Wings of Night

  Medium Strange

  The Silk Road

  In a Pig’s Ear

  A Poison Tree

  Blood in Madness Ran

  Dissolution

  Silence is Golden

  Pompeii

  Deathside

  The Caul Bearer

  “They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward towards the town: and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.” The Shadow over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft.

  Like the webfoot cockle women trudging out of a Dylan Thomas black, bandaged night, the flither girls made their way across Robin Hood’s bay (or Baytown as the locals called it) to find limpets to use for bait on long lines. This wasn’t a fishing village in Wales but it could have been, with the small fisher houses and the narrow, cobbled lanes in between. There were nets to be mended, lying strewn around the cottage entrances as if to capture land animals as they entered and left. Nets, stretched like cauls over the windows and on the front of the walls. A strong odour hung in the air from the fish that had been left to dry. Part of the wild village had already fallen into the sea, demolished by the northeasterly winter storms. Brid’s mother had told her of the houses on King Street that had leaned over the cliff and tumbled into the sea a few decades ago.

  Bridgette Moorsom was a caul bearer. She had been born with a caul over her face and the midwife had pressed a piece of paper over the membrane so that the caul stuck to it, and then it had been given to Brid’s mother as an heirloom. The possession of a caul was said to protect the bearer from death by drowning. Brid now had it in a small box on her dressing table; she had never given it away. Why should she? A few sailors had offered a fortune for its protection but she had never parted with it. She had meant to give it to her fiancée on their wedding day. Oh, why hadn’t she given it to him before?

  A marriage had been arranged and then put to one side, like the wedding dress that hung in her mother’s closet. Brid had no need of it anymore. She had promised to marry Benjamin Eskell but he had been lost to the sea a few months earlier. Brid’s mother had been muttering on that Brid should have married Tom—Ben’s brother—except that Tom was unhelpfully married already.

  A cold, grey mist crept in from the sea towards the huddled houses of the small village and then wound its way up each street; first to the right along the one terrace, then after the length of it to the left and along again. Turning at each bend, like a sea dragon searching for a lair, or a lost soul reaching for a forgotten memory. Brid followed its trail to top of the hill, to the little cottage she shared with her mother. All the way along she was thinking about her lost lover and how she longed to be reunited with him again. Even death held no fear for her; she only wanted reunion. What could be wrong with that?

  Once inside the cottage she nodded to her mother, who sat by the fire knitting a jumper. Each jumper served a twofold purpose: the first was obviously for warmth, the second in that each village had a unique pattern—it was how they identified and claimed their dead from the sea. Wives even put mistakes in the garment so that it was particular to their family. When they found Brid’s fiancée, his face had been bitten away by fish and the pattern had proven that he was of their village of Bay Town. Brid could not look at that jumper.

  “I’m off to bed.”

  “That’s all you seem to want to do these days, Brid. You go to your room and you never talk to me.”

  “There’s nothing much to talk about, Mother.”

  “You’re young. There will be plenty for you to do in the future. Sit down here with me, Brid. I’ve hardly talked to anyone all day.”

  “I need to change out of these wet clothes.”

  “I suppose,” responded her mother. “They look dry enough to me already—where have you been?”

  “To the Bay Hotel.”

  Helen gave her an honest stare that was full of reproach. “We can’t afford to squander our money, Brid.”

  Brid felt so wound up, so wanting to let go of her anger.

  “Afford? We can’t afford anything, Mother. I’m sick of the work, sick of the poverty. I couldn’t afford to lose a man—but I did—and I know you want me to find another one to replace him, so we can afford things.”

  “It’s not my fault that
the men in this family either go away or die in the sea.”

  “No, it’s not your fault at all—but if you hadn’t driven father to work harder all the time and moaned at him whenever he gave you any kindness perhaps he wouldn’t have left.”

  “He might come back!”

  “We both know that will never happen, just as my Ben won’t be coming back either!”

  Brid’s mother was knitting furiously at this point, as if every stab of the needle would make a hole in her worries. “There’s some fried fish on the table,” she muttered in a begrudging tone.

  Brid gave her mother a disdainful look, took one of the candles from the shelf next to the fireplace, lit it from the main candle near her mother and left the room. She was tired of fighting; fighting her mother, the cold winter, and her grief.

  Her room smelt of the sea; Brid had found some old bits of fishing nets and hung them from the beams. Faded ribbons and cradled mementos, love notes and tokens from the previous year, all hung in mid air as if waiting on the unseen hand of her lover to present them once more. That would never happen again…Brid knew. She wondered if she would ever find anything interesting to hang in the nets again.

  She noticed dark pools of water over in the centre of the wooden boards and the curtain billowed unexpectedly despite the window being closed.

  The cold had gotten into her bones and she started to shiver. Under the window was a small chest of drawers. Brid rummaged around in the bottom of one and pulled out a half-empty bottle of gin. She took out the stopper with some difficulty. She always felt guilty when she drank, and when she had enough she always drove the stopper home with the intention of making it more difficult to get at the next time. It never was that difficult, for she always managed in the end.

  Brid slept badly that night. It wasn’t a sweet repose, more a dream with the dead.

  The wind was howling around the outer buildings, screeching around the rooftops and chimneys like a scavenging, northern wraith. Even the fishermen and their families slept fitfully in their cots. Brid fumbled at her bedclothes and cried out in her sleep. In her dreams she floated beneath the viridian sea, fighting off the levellers of the deep and losing.

  She was unaware of the green phosphorescence in her room that clung to the floor, wove its way along the boards and then stretched its tendril fingers towards the crumpled sheets—then beneath.

  In the morning there was blood on her nightgown. She made excuses that it was badly soiled because it was a heavy month and her mother let it be when Brid helped with the washing.

  Each hour of her existence was an agony of delusion and nightmare. The future was something Brid rarely thought about now—only working and sleeping, and barely being bothered to eat. She could simply walk into the sea and never come out. What was the point of living if it was this hard?

  Families helped one another out in Baytown. The Moorsoms and the Eskells (originally an old Scandinavian family) had married each other for generations and Brid’s marriage was one more, intended to strengthen the bond between them. She gathered bait and helped with the fish, and the Eskells helped Brid and her mother in little ways. Tom would have been her brother–in–law and he still felt an obligation. He lived three doors along with his pregnant wife.

  The cold, wintry morning called for as many layers of clothing as Brid could find, to wrap around her and still work in without being too restricted. And then it was down to the shoreline, and across to Boggle Hole and beyond, to get the limpets at low tide. As she made her way past Eskell cottage she caught sight of Jenna, Tom’s wife, through the small dark window. There was no mistaking that it was Jenna due to the size of her swollen stomach—she was due to give birth any day now. Brid bit down hard on her bottom lip, trying to push aside her jealousy; she might have had been with child now if the sea hadn’t taken her Benjamin.

  Unlike the rest of the flither girls, Brid preferred to gather the bait on her own and on that particular day she lingered around Boggle Hole rather than follow the rest of the girls over the hills. They travelled away from the sea-beaten cottages and down to the other bays. Also, she was tired of their incessant gossip. Her heart wasn’t in anything—she could only think of Ben. She caught glimpses of his scowling face, framed by the brown seaweed, in the rock pools, and imagined she felt the light touch of a hand on the back of hers as she prised the limpets off the rock.

  Brid stabbed at the limpets, venting all her anger on them, until she caught her left hand with one lunge and her blood splashed the dark shells. Ignoring the pain, she stood up, threw a handful of the limpets into a basket, arched her aching back and looked out at the black sea.

  The sea was almost as dark as night and the sky was only a shade lighter—just enough to work by. Out there was where the fishermen came to grief, near landmarks called Farside’s Out and Ower Robin a Trum, and she wondered if it were possible for dead fishermen and sailors to return from the sea.

  The wind whipped up and the ocean began to get rougher, flinging spray in her face as the tide came in. She imagined herself cut off by the tide—part of her wished it would—freeing her of her drudgery. The rain pelted her arms and legs and she pushed her black hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Salt had dried her lips and made them bleed. Just as she was turning to go back along the shoreline, just to her left a little of the soft, clay cliff face fell away. Brid looked up to see if more would follow but nothing else looked as if it was going to slip. There was just a small channel of mud and water sluicing down.

  Something solid caught her eye. Most of it was sticking out of the cliff face and, at first, she just thought it was one of the rocks. Taking care not to slip on the sea-worn boulders, she went to investigate. The rain fell harder and the cold sting of it on her face made her curse under her breath. She reached up on tiptoe for the small, wooden casket and gave it a pull. It didn’t budge with the first tug and she almost slipped. However, with the second pull the soft wet clay came away, and she caught the box as it fell. It was less than her arm’s-length long but quite light, so she placed it in her large flither basket and made her way back across the foreshore before the tide cut her off from the Wayfoot, just below the Bay Hotel.

  When the tide was out you could walk all the way across Stoupe Beck Sands to Ravenscar; she’d done that often enough, but not today. Many a wreck lay off the Ravenscar headland, hundreds of years of them. Sailors and fishermen had been washed up on that shore; their bodies harvested by the scavengers of the deep. Men in their pale mottled skin with slivers of flesh hanging from them. They were so rotten you could peel out the spine of the fishermen as easily as with fish.

  The flither basket with its tiny cargo began to feel heavy. Brid slipped on the stones as she hurried to beat the tide, but she managed it well enough across the water’s edge and up the cobble causeway to the Bay Hotel. The sea had more than once pounded the hotel in the terrible winter storms and hurled the tiny coble boats against the windows of the inn. But not today, although the sea was getting rougher. It was at the hotel that Brid sought shelter. Once through the door, which banged loudly behind her, she moved silently over to the fire and sat down beside it. She took off her wet shawl and her black jacket, and placed them over the basket to hide the contents.

  The Bay Hotel was empty; there was no one behind the old, oak wood bar. For a time she sat alone. Either the bad weather had kept the rest of the flither girls down the coast or they had made their sodden way back to their homes. None of the locals were around. None had come down to the Wayfoot to see that their boats were still tied up. It was a while before the landlord came into the bar.

  “Well Brid, there’s not many out today. Do you want a drink to warm you up?”

  “I haven’t got any money, nothing for now.”

  Josh Brannislaw, a man of extraordinary height for a local and a widower of two winters, laid out two glasses and poured himself and Brid some brandy from a jug. She knew that it was from the fine cask, from one of the ones
the excise men never found. The excise never found anything in Bay Town—there being too many secret hiding places. Brid made to get up from the fire.

  “Stay there, Brid. I’ll bring the drink over. I’ve got some bread and cheese in the back too?” he enquired with a raised eyebrow.

  “Thank you. That’s most kind of you.”

  He was not long out of the bar and seemed in a hurry to bring back the food for her. As he placed the bread and cheese down on the table his hand moved as if to touch her arm—but he seemed to think twice of it. She looked at him with watery, grey eyes and then past him to another table—where Benjamin sat looking out to sea with a caul over his white face. If only I had given him the caul, she thought.

  Ben, with his old navy jumper, shabby through years of use. Ben, with his hair washed back by the sea and the caul stretched thin over his face—not the tiny dried thing that lay in the small box, but this made of a harsher material—its edges now twisted into hooks that seemed to dig into his skin, piercing it but with no show of blood. Brid had seen him in this state twice now, as if mocking her because she hadn’t given him the caul. She glanced at Josh to see if he had seen Ben. He had not.

  Brid ate the bread and cheese slowly and sipped at the brandy.

  Josh methodically carried out his work behind the bar, spoke little and just raised his head from time to time as if expecting a customer to burst through the door at any minute.