enough for other folks. It seemed as if that was what she lived on. I don’t think she was ever so scared by that poor little ghost, as much as she pitied it, and she was ’most heartbroken because she couldn’t do anything for it, as she could have done for a live child.
“‘It seems to me sometimes as if I should die if I can’t get that awful little white robe off that child and get her in some clothes and feed her and stop her looking for her mother,’ I heard her say once, and she was in earnest. She cried when she said it. That wasn’t long before she died.
“Now I am coming to the strangest part of it all. Mrs Bird died very sudden. One morning – it was Saturday, and there wasn’t any school – I went downstairs to breakfast, and Mrs Bird wasn’t there; there was nobody but Mrs Dennison. She was pouring out the coffee when I came in. ‘Why, where’s Mrs Bird?’ says I.
“‘Abby ain’t feeling very well this morning,’ says she; ‘there isn’t much the matter, I guess, but she didn’t sleep very well, and her head aches, and she’s sort of chilly, and I told her I thought she’d better stay in bed till the house gets warm.’ It was a very cold morning.
“‘Maybe she’s got cold,’ says I.
“‘Yes, I guess she has,’ says Mrs Dennison. ‘I guess she’s got cold. She’ll be up before long. Abby ain’t one to stay in bed a minute longer than she can help.’
“Well, we went on eating our breakfast, and all at once a shadow flickered across one wall of the room and over the ceiling the way a shadow will sometimes when somebody passes the window outside. Mrs Dennison and I both looked up, then out of the window; then Mrs Dennison she gives a scream.
“‘Why, Abby’s crazy!’ says she. ‘There she is out this bitter cold morning, and – and —’ She didn’t finish, but she meant the child. For we were both looking out, and we saw, as plain as we ever saw anything in our lives, Mrs Abby Bird walking off over the white snow-path with that child holding fast to her hand, nestling close to her as if she had found her own mother.
“‘She’s dead,’ says Mrs Dennison, clutching hold of me hard. ‘She’s dead; my sister is dead!’
“She was. We hurried upstairs as fast as we could go, and she was dead in her bed, and smiling as if she was dreaming, and one arm and hand was stretched out as if something had hold of it; and it couldn’t be straightened even at the last – it lay out over her casket at the funeral.”
“Was the child ever seen again?” asked Mrs Emerson in a shaking voice.
“No,” replied Mrs Meserve; “that child was never seen again after she went out of the yard with Mrs Bird.”
The Ninth Witch
Sarah Langan
This was back in the old days, when women weren’t worth anything. First came the wars, then the floods. Molluscs made homes out of rotted dolls. After that came the plague; moss worms riddled all the animal lungs. By the time things began to clear, and the sun burned out from its sulphurous pocket, everyone was hungry and cold. They’d forgotten what it meant to be human, and had no sympathy left to spare.
Like all witches, Jane was born the ninth daughter of a ninth daughter. This was rare, because back then, few women carried anything but stones to term. What Jane didn’t know, and what no one remembered, was that the line carried farther: she was the ninth daughter of a ninth daughter nine generations back. With each generation, the magic got stronger until the last ninth was born with a misshapen womb that could only expel animals, so that no tenth would compete with God.
Though ninth of nines, nine back, were prophesized to change the world, most squandered their birthrights. They were women, after all, and rarely met their potential. Some, rejected by their families, wandered the borders of Sudamorstralia like lunatics, shouting of visions. Others were murdered because of their third eyes. Some denied they were different. Jane was like these last. As soon as she was old enough, she clotted closed her third eye with beetle fat, and if she’d been sure it would not grow back, she’d have cut it out.
Because her mother’s power was nearly as strong as Jane’s, each of her eight siblings was also born with a special talent. These varied from music to words to grace. Strength and beauty were obvious; those less obvious didn’t tend to get expressed. Jane’s third eye was a blue freckle high up in the centre of her forehead. A black cowlick covered it, and it only opened, its skin parting to reveal a cornflower blue pupil, when she was sleeping. Her father might have sacrificed her to Ve for this strange affliction, but the kind spirits of her ancestors began combing the skeletons in the Perth fallout for offerings on her behalf. They left trinkets such as round, metal bands affixed with rocks so shiny they reflected rainbows, and hunks of gold shaped like teeth, which the family traded for food. Other, less kind spirits rocked the child too hard in her crib, and knocked her out. When that happened, Jane’s sixth sister, the healer, would pick her up and rock her, crooning a popular lullaby so softly that none of the other children could hear:
Because Jane’s mother died in childbirth, her father’s heart had dried and shrivelled inside his chest. He worried about his payments to King Herod IIXX, who raised taxes every year. He worried about the price of radishes and potatoes, which kept falling. He put the girls to work. They toiled during hours of light, bare-backed and slick with sweat like men. The eldest, who at night made music from jars filled with water, quickly died. The second and smartest ran away. The third, querulous and lazy, who could track the stars by fractions of millimetres and ought to have lived on a boat, he married off to a grey-haired priest, just to be rid of her. The fourth, a rare beauty, he sold, parading her on the town auction block with her dress lifted, so the men could admire her muscular thighs. The fifth, he kept by his side, because she was strong, never complained, and had the disposition of a horse. The sixth, and Jane’s favourite, made a career of medicine by studying the books she’d found in the bombed-out library. There was a room deep underground filled with untouched texts that she translated from Latin, then ate each page one by one, so that it would become part of her, and because she was hungry. She saved her father and three sisters when plague passed through the countryside, boiling down willow bark and feeding it to them as a stew, along with two-week-aged mould from bread. She stayed until Jane was old enough to speak, so that the youngest child might defend herself.
Taxes came due on the farm. The old man and his five remaining girls got down on their knees and begged for a reprieve, but the soldiers, dressed in rusted, cut metal sheets from dismantled old-world buildings, refused. They were thrown out, their house chopped down and used for Herod’s castle.
Because the farm had been in the man’s family since before the flood, and even before the continental drift, he went a little mad. He murdered the seventh child and peeled off her skin, then hung it from a blue spruce tree, like the legends told him. Then he made his wish, and prayed all night to Fulla that his prayers would be answered, and the child’s hanging husk would be filled by a living boy-child, who would save them from starvation. But by the next morning, something had stolen the child’s dangling husk. He considered lighting what remained, her flesh and bones, over a fire to quell his rumbling stomach, but by then his daughters had buried her, and would not tell him where. For this, he beat them. Each bore the whip silently. Six lashes apiece. The strong fifth child, having never complained, did not tell them that a child had quickened inside her. Their father was the father, though not even the fifth child knew this. They’d never seen animals or the sex act, except when perpetrated upon them, and did not know what it meant. At the sixth strike, something broke inside the stalwart daughter and she fell dead. The life ran out between her legs, a perfectly formed boy-child, unbreathing and too small.
The eighth and most courageous child stripped the whip from her father, and used it to lash him. He took it back, of course, and hit her until she fell beside her sister, barely breathing. To release her from this horror, if only
