STORY: The Farm
A short horror story. Elswyth has grown up in a large house with other young boys and girls. Finally, it is her turn to be chosen and get to leave the house to meet her bridegroom.
Creepy (hopefully), but no explicit sex or violence.
That morning Elswyth didn't need to be woken. Her eyelids went up, and just a moment later she could kick her way up with her legs, as if she'd known what day it was even in her dream. Usually she remembered what she'd dreamt, but not this time, though anticipation had already been there.
Sister Gertrudis was in the room. She ran a washcloth over the table and didn't turn around until she heard the bunk creaking. She was aged, not old, with strict grey hair on each side of a face as pale as white cloth. Even her lips were as white as her teeth when they opened in a smile. Her uniform looked like the one the girls wore, but black with a white apron. The cloth dangled from her hand.
“You awake already, honey? I hope you've been able to get some sleep tonight.”
She had, even though it was the big day.
“I'm going to get you your breakfast. You don't have to eat with the others in the canteen today... it's your day, after all.”
Elswyth heard the click of the lock.
She looked around the cell, because it might be the last time. Everything in it was cosy: the fibreglass walls and the blanket in almost the same shade of brown, the dressing mirror that made the room a little bigger. She didn't think she would miss it.
Gertrudis had put two bags in the space between the vanity and the wardrobe, a small rustling one and a large transparent plastic bag where she could see flat folds of black lace. She left them alone, because she would know soon enough.
Gertrudis came back with her tablets and a plate full of meat and sausages on a tray from the canteen. Elswyth had thought that the excitement would lace up her stomach, but the salty flavours were enough to get her appetite up.
“Look, now you're all greasy.” Gertrudis smiled in a way that might have been motherly, rubbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “You'll have to go and clean up, at least. Come with me.”
Gertrudis followed her to the deserted shower room and watched her, the way she hadn’t done in several years, to make sure she lathered herself properly. Elswyth rubbed her hair to a stiff frizz with the shampoo and let the water pull it into a heavy yellow mass in front of her face. The soap and shampoo were in two containers next to each other and had the same chemical smell. She hoped Gertrudis would give her perfume, so she could smell a bit prettier when she met him.
After the shower room they went to the doctor, Sister Lilim, for a blood sample, even though it was less than a week since last time. Elswyth looked away from the savage red in the glass tube, and while Sister Lilim studied it, she got a chill in her stomach because she might be ill and would have to wait several more months. It felt like illness, but it passed when Lilim smiled and shooed them out in the corridor.
When they returned to the cell, she took a few bounds to the wardrobe to take her uniform out, but Gertrudis grabbed her wrist. Her hand was soft and cool. Elswyth had thought that everyone's skin was as cold, and been surprised when the other boys and girls pushed her in the food queue and had warm arms.
“Surely you understand that you have to be dressed up today. I brought your dress.”
It rustled when she pulled it out of the bag. Elswyth threw off her nightgown and let Gertrudis pull it over her head. She'd only ever worn something that pretty a few times, at the Selections. The bodice had stiff curves that she almost filled, and it was the only thing that was real cloth, black and so shiny it reflected the fluorescent lights, because the puffy sleeves were lace and the skirt was scales of tulle to her ankles, with patterns of darker shapes where the threads were closer together. A pair of shiny ankle-high boots belonged to it. Gertrudis placed rings on her fingers, so her hands sounded like machines when she put them on the vanity, and hooked earrings in the holes in her earlobes. The make-up -kohl and a pink pearl lipstick that smelled like the sweets the Sisters had given her when she was little- made her beautiful.
Gertrudis took out curling irons and a little sheet of hair grips that she held so that Elswyth couldn't get to them. It took at least an hour, but then her hair was a pattern of different textures, tight braids at the top flowing into ringlets over the puffy sleeves.
“Is he going to think I'm beautiful?” she said.
Gertrudis laughed at that, and the reflection got a grin, so childish she pressed her lips together. She hadn't asked about him. The first days, it had been enough that she had been Chosen. Now it was so close, she didn't need to ask.
Gertrudis unlocked the door and adjusted her skirts before she got to follow her into the corridor. This time, they went in a direction where she'd never been.
They met two people on the way out: Rosial, a dark-haired boy who sat next to her in the canteen -they used to guess what was outside the house, and sometimes they came up with cheesy things to make each other laugh- who walked with Brother Valentin from the boys' corridor. Perhaps the boys' donation was in this side of the building, if they had a donation. In his normal uniform he was smaller than she in the dress.
“I've been Chosen”, Elswyth bragged, even though he must have seen it on her clothes.
Rosial soured. She would have continued saying that if he got Chosen, they could come and see each other, but Gertrudis gave a hiss and tugged at her arm until they were out of hearing. Elswyth flinched in case Gertrudis would slap her, but she didn't. Perhaps she was afraid of Elswyth's bridegroom.
Her legs were tired by the time she saw light through a glass door at the end of the corridor. It led outside, not to the court where they exercised, but to a yard so big it had to be outdoors. She had thought it was day, but the sky was black. The light came from tall lamps that shone across the whole front of the house. It smelled like perfume, and she had an idea how many trees and flowers there had to be out here, outside the lamp light where she couldn't see them. A car was standing by the door, graceful in its outlines and shiny like a pendant. All she knew about cars was that the Masters came in them for the Selections; she'd seen that in the films in the school hall. There was nobody in it, but Gertrudis opened a door for her and sat down in the front. It started with a heavy gasp and a buzzing in the walls. When they reached a door in a wall of metal wire, Gertrudis pushed a button that made it open. Elswyth twisted so she could see it close as well.
The journey could have almost made her forget that she was going to her ceremony. The car moved faster than you could run, and just the speed made her light-headed, like when they'd taken too much of her blood on the letting day. It was night, but she still saw more than she had during all these years. Heaps of stone and bent iron rods lay along the road. Some you could still see that they’d been houses, but little trees grew on them, and the windows were just holes. They drove between two walls of black trees that covered the stars. When they got out, she saw a house that was still whole and delicate, one of the mansions. Gertrudis didn't turn, so that wasn't where she was going. It wasn't the size of the house, but prettier with its angled roofs. It took a long time until she saw the next one. There weren't many of the Masters left, that was why they needed the Chosen.
*
She had never got to see him at the Selection. Each year, she believed, the girls who were old enough to stand had to line up in the hall, in dresses sewn so full of tulle they could have floated, while the boys did the same in the next hall in their suits. When she was a kid, she'd thought it was a game and wondered when they would get to run. When she got older, she had wondered if something was wrong because he didn't come there to study them like in the films, but Gertrudis had explained later that everything was done via cameras in the ceiling. The next morning, her best friend Mélie didn't come to the canteen.
A few days after the last time, Gertrudis told her that his gaze had stopped on her.
*
It was so far that Gertrudis had to take a shot with a red syringe -the Brothers and Sisters hardly ever did that while they watched- while Elswyth got two sausage sandwiches, but then it wasn't long until Gertrudis stopped. They were standing outside the gate of one of the mansions, perhaps the grandest. The garden took a while to walk through. When she stepped off the gravel path, the tulle of her skirt dragged in the wet grass, and everything was so heavy with night scents that it couldn't be air, if air was what she had breathed in the house. She saw winding bushes with flowers that had to be roses. They were white in the white light of the night sky. They weren't particularly beautiful, they looked like lumps of something stitched-up, but when she put her nose in one of them, it had the most beautiful scent she had felt. The petals felt beautiful, too; they had a thick veined gloss when she brushed her lips against them, as if they were what the Brothers' and Sisters' skin was made of.
“Elswyth...” Gertrudis said.
Elswyth straightened up, but when she turned around, Gertrudis smiled.
“Nah, there's no rush. You can stay here if you want.”
But she couldn't waste any more time, because she always saw the blacker outline of the mansion with one eye. There were no lit windows. She had heard that the Masters could see in the dark, but she didn't know how much about the Masters was made up. Rosial and Christabel couldn't know everything they had told, and the Brothers and Sisters hadn't told them that much. Of course they had said a lot, even showed them films and given them books, but nothing that was about the Masters as people, only about being Chosen.
She bounced ahead all the way to the carved door -only that was as long as the long side of the exercise yard- but she let Gertrudis press the doorbell.
It must have been he who opened. He didn't look any different from a Brother, but his face was young, like that of the oldest boys. His hair was dark in the monochrome light, and his face was white and so smooth, it didn't seem to have all those little holes that her skin had in the mirror. She didn't dare to look at him, and perhaps he would have been angry if she'd looked away, so she let her gaze slide down to his shirtfront. All his clothes were fine and stained, threadbare at the edges.
“Is this she?” he asked over her head.
His voice was tired -but they didn't sleep- or sad. She was certain she hadn't done anything wrong.
Gertrudis gave Elswyth a push towards him. Her footsteps scraped on the gravel when she walked back. Elswyth had been certain she would stay for the ceremony. Now she wanted to call for her, but perhaps it wasn't important.
She unbuttoned her shoes inside the door while he waited, and then he grabbed her lower arm and dragged her along. The hallway was so dark, it didn't make any difference if she closed her eyes, and he yanked at her arm when she stumbled. He was as strong as Sister Gertrudis: she couldn't have freed herself any more than she could have held back the car.
“Will I be able to see in the dark?” she asked.
Her voice sounded so light and childish. He must have heard, but he didn't reply. It smelled different in here. She guessed this was what wood smelled like, damp and old. Perhaps it was his body.
When they came to a set of stairs down, he took her in his arms and lifted her. It got colder, as if the stairway lay underwater. She tried to feel whether it was love she felt, but he just held her as if he was carrying a fragile object.
“Is this where it's going to be?”
She couldn't believe it when she had said it. She had thought it was at least going to be lit, with candles.
Here light came in from windows under the ceiling, the same light she’d seen in the garden, letting her see a table and some objects like in Sister Lilim's clinic, tubes and a sink. It smelled like the clinic. She looked up at the lattice of black leaves over the window, as if she could get that smell instead. The air was cold with moisture.
“Lie down”, he said, pointing with a fingernail like a moonstone.
She got up on the cold table, smoothed her skirt and lay down, but he smacked his lips as if he was in a hurry. Nobody had told her what was going to happen now.
The shadow obscured the windows in turn, and then she felt him tightening something over her left wrist, a strap. It was as hard as his grasp, and almost as cold. She heard the buckle click.
“Do you have to do this?”
He didn't reply, but she heard his shoes scrape against the concrete floor. He was walking around the table.
She screamed, because perhaps Gertrudis wasn't at the car yet. She couldn't get her left hand out, but she kept the right one away and waved it back and forth in the blackness so he wouldn't be able to grab it. She screamed all the time. If nothing else worked, perhaps he would get tired of the racket and let her go.
“Oh, cut it out.”
The dark hadn't shifted, but when he said that, she saw his eyes. They weren't different from anyone else's eyes in their colour or shine, but she could see the pupils, and then it felt like someone had hit her in the back of her head, only without pain.
*
When she could think again, she remembered that this was the ceremony. She couldn't remember what she had done, only enough that she didn't want to remember. Had it been that bad? If she'd made enough of a nuisance of herself, perhaps he would have to call Sister Gertrudis to drive her back to the house.
“I'm sorry”, she managed and lay down.
He tied down her other wrist and ankles, so he must have forgiven her.
She felt a prick in her lower arm, but she ought to be used to it now. When she looked, the tube had slipped in under her skin. The blood was black where it flowed up the spiral of tube into a transparent bag, starting to collect at the bottom. It would cover one of the windows when it was full. Another tube went into her, from a bag heavy with pale nutritional fluid.
When she looked away, she saw his profile against the next window. The light glinted in a glass, finer than the ones in the canteen, still transparent. He knocked it against a plastic tap on the bag, without looking at her.
THE END
Creepy (hopefully), but no explicit sex or violence.
That morning Elswyth didn't need to be woken. Her eyelids went up, and just a moment later she could kick her way up with her legs, as if she'd known what day it was even in her dream. Usually she remembered what she'd dreamt, but not this time, though anticipation had already been there.
Sister Gertrudis was in the room. She ran a washcloth over the table and didn't turn around until she heard the bunk creaking. She was aged, not old, with strict grey hair on each side of a face as pale as white cloth. Even her lips were as white as her teeth when they opened in a smile. Her uniform looked like the one the girls wore, but black with a white apron. The cloth dangled from her hand.
“You awake already, honey? I hope you've been able to get some sleep tonight.”
She had, even though it was the big day.
“I'm going to get you your breakfast. You don't have to eat with the others in the canteen today... it's your day, after all.”
Elswyth heard the click of the lock.
She looked around the cell, because it might be the last time. Everything in it was cosy: the fibreglass walls and the blanket in almost the same shade of brown, the dressing mirror that made the room a little bigger. She didn't think she would miss it.
Gertrudis had put two bags in the space between the vanity and the wardrobe, a small rustling one and a large transparent plastic bag where she could see flat folds of black lace. She left them alone, because she would know soon enough.
Gertrudis came back with her tablets and a plate full of meat and sausages on a tray from the canteen. Elswyth had thought that the excitement would lace up her stomach, but the salty flavours were enough to get her appetite up.
“Look, now you're all greasy.” Gertrudis smiled in a way that might have been motherly, rubbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “You'll have to go and clean up, at least. Come with me.”
Gertrudis followed her to the deserted shower room and watched her, the way she hadn’t done in several years, to make sure she lathered herself properly. Elswyth rubbed her hair to a stiff frizz with the shampoo and let the water pull it into a heavy yellow mass in front of her face. The soap and shampoo were in two containers next to each other and had the same chemical smell. She hoped Gertrudis would give her perfume, so she could smell a bit prettier when she met him.
After the shower room they went to the doctor, Sister Lilim, for a blood sample, even though it was less than a week since last time. Elswyth looked away from the savage red in the glass tube, and while Sister Lilim studied it, she got a chill in her stomach because she might be ill and would have to wait several more months. It felt like illness, but it passed when Lilim smiled and shooed them out in the corridor.
When they returned to the cell, she took a few bounds to the wardrobe to take her uniform out, but Gertrudis grabbed her wrist. Her hand was soft and cool. Elswyth had thought that everyone's skin was as cold, and been surprised when the other boys and girls pushed her in the food queue and had warm arms.
“Surely you understand that you have to be dressed up today. I brought your dress.”
It rustled when she pulled it out of the bag. Elswyth threw off her nightgown and let Gertrudis pull it over her head. She'd only ever worn something that pretty a few times, at the Selections. The bodice had stiff curves that she almost filled, and it was the only thing that was real cloth, black and so shiny it reflected the fluorescent lights, because the puffy sleeves were lace and the skirt was scales of tulle to her ankles, with patterns of darker shapes where the threads were closer together. A pair of shiny ankle-high boots belonged to it. Gertrudis placed rings on her fingers, so her hands sounded like machines when she put them on the vanity, and hooked earrings in the holes in her earlobes. The make-up -kohl and a pink pearl lipstick that smelled like the sweets the Sisters had given her when she was little- made her beautiful.
Gertrudis took out curling irons and a little sheet of hair grips that she held so that Elswyth couldn't get to them. It took at least an hour, but then her hair was a pattern of different textures, tight braids at the top flowing into ringlets over the puffy sleeves.
“Is he going to think I'm beautiful?” she said.
Gertrudis laughed at that, and the reflection got a grin, so childish she pressed her lips together. She hadn't asked about him. The first days, it had been enough that she had been Chosen. Now it was so close, she didn't need to ask.
Gertrudis unlocked the door and adjusted her skirts before she got to follow her into the corridor. This time, they went in a direction where she'd never been.
They met two people on the way out: Rosial, a dark-haired boy who sat next to her in the canteen -they used to guess what was outside the house, and sometimes they came up with cheesy things to make each other laugh- who walked with Brother Valentin from the boys' corridor. Perhaps the boys' donation was in this side of the building, if they had a donation. In his normal uniform he was smaller than she in the dress.
“I've been Chosen”, Elswyth bragged, even though he must have seen it on her clothes.
Rosial soured. She would have continued saying that if he got Chosen, they could come and see each other, but Gertrudis gave a hiss and tugged at her arm until they were out of hearing. Elswyth flinched in case Gertrudis would slap her, but she didn't. Perhaps she was afraid of Elswyth's bridegroom.
Her legs were tired by the time she saw light through a glass door at the end of the corridor. It led outside, not to the court where they exercised, but to a yard so big it had to be outdoors. She had thought it was day, but the sky was black. The light came from tall lamps that shone across the whole front of the house. It smelled like perfume, and she had an idea how many trees and flowers there had to be out here, outside the lamp light where she couldn't see them. A car was standing by the door, graceful in its outlines and shiny like a pendant. All she knew about cars was that the Masters came in them for the Selections; she'd seen that in the films in the school hall. There was nobody in it, but Gertrudis opened a door for her and sat down in the front. It started with a heavy gasp and a buzzing in the walls. When they reached a door in a wall of metal wire, Gertrudis pushed a button that made it open. Elswyth twisted so she could see it close as well.
The journey could have almost made her forget that she was going to her ceremony. The car moved faster than you could run, and just the speed made her light-headed, like when they'd taken too much of her blood on the letting day. It was night, but she still saw more than she had during all these years. Heaps of stone and bent iron rods lay along the road. Some you could still see that they’d been houses, but little trees grew on them, and the windows were just holes. They drove between two walls of black trees that covered the stars. When they got out, she saw a house that was still whole and delicate, one of the mansions. Gertrudis didn't turn, so that wasn't where she was going. It wasn't the size of the house, but prettier with its angled roofs. It took a long time until she saw the next one. There weren't many of the Masters left, that was why they needed the Chosen.
*
She had never got to see him at the Selection. Each year, she believed, the girls who were old enough to stand had to line up in the hall, in dresses sewn so full of tulle they could have floated, while the boys did the same in the next hall in their suits. When she was a kid, she'd thought it was a game and wondered when they would get to run. When she got older, she had wondered if something was wrong because he didn't come there to study them like in the films, but Gertrudis had explained later that everything was done via cameras in the ceiling. The next morning, her best friend Mélie didn't come to the canteen.
A few days after the last time, Gertrudis told her that his gaze had stopped on her.
*
It was so far that Gertrudis had to take a shot with a red syringe -the Brothers and Sisters hardly ever did that while they watched- while Elswyth got two sausage sandwiches, but then it wasn't long until Gertrudis stopped. They were standing outside the gate of one of the mansions, perhaps the grandest. The garden took a while to walk through. When she stepped off the gravel path, the tulle of her skirt dragged in the wet grass, and everything was so heavy with night scents that it couldn't be air, if air was what she had breathed in the house. She saw winding bushes with flowers that had to be roses. They were white in the white light of the night sky. They weren't particularly beautiful, they looked like lumps of something stitched-up, but when she put her nose in one of them, it had the most beautiful scent she had felt. The petals felt beautiful, too; they had a thick veined gloss when she brushed her lips against them, as if they were what the Brothers' and Sisters' skin was made of.
“Elswyth...” Gertrudis said.
Elswyth straightened up, but when she turned around, Gertrudis smiled.
“Nah, there's no rush. You can stay here if you want.”
But she couldn't waste any more time, because she always saw the blacker outline of the mansion with one eye. There were no lit windows. She had heard that the Masters could see in the dark, but she didn't know how much about the Masters was made up. Rosial and Christabel couldn't know everything they had told, and the Brothers and Sisters hadn't told them that much. Of course they had said a lot, even showed them films and given them books, but nothing that was about the Masters as people, only about being Chosen.
She bounced ahead all the way to the carved door -only that was as long as the long side of the exercise yard- but she let Gertrudis press the doorbell.
It must have been he who opened. He didn't look any different from a Brother, but his face was young, like that of the oldest boys. His hair was dark in the monochrome light, and his face was white and so smooth, it didn't seem to have all those little holes that her skin had in the mirror. She didn't dare to look at him, and perhaps he would have been angry if she'd looked away, so she let her gaze slide down to his shirtfront. All his clothes were fine and stained, threadbare at the edges.
“Is this she?” he asked over her head.
His voice was tired -but they didn't sleep- or sad. She was certain she hadn't done anything wrong.
Gertrudis gave Elswyth a push towards him. Her footsteps scraped on the gravel when she walked back. Elswyth had been certain she would stay for the ceremony. Now she wanted to call for her, but perhaps it wasn't important.
She unbuttoned her shoes inside the door while he waited, and then he grabbed her lower arm and dragged her along. The hallway was so dark, it didn't make any difference if she closed her eyes, and he yanked at her arm when she stumbled. He was as strong as Sister Gertrudis: she couldn't have freed herself any more than she could have held back the car.
“Will I be able to see in the dark?” she asked.
Her voice sounded so light and childish. He must have heard, but he didn't reply. It smelled different in here. She guessed this was what wood smelled like, damp and old. Perhaps it was his body.
When they came to a set of stairs down, he took her in his arms and lifted her. It got colder, as if the stairway lay underwater. She tried to feel whether it was love she felt, but he just held her as if he was carrying a fragile object.
“Is this where it's going to be?”
She couldn't believe it when she had said it. She had thought it was at least going to be lit, with candles.
Here light came in from windows under the ceiling, the same light she’d seen in the garden, letting her see a table and some objects like in Sister Lilim's clinic, tubes and a sink. It smelled like the clinic. She looked up at the lattice of black leaves over the window, as if she could get that smell instead. The air was cold with moisture.
“Lie down”, he said, pointing with a fingernail like a moonstone.
She got up on the cold table, smoothed her skirt and lay down, but he smacked his lips as if he was in a hurry. Nobody had told her what was going to happen now.
The shadow obscured the windows in turn, and then she felt him tightening something over her left wrist, a strap. It was as hard as his grasp, and almost as cold. She heard the buckle click.
“Do you have to do this?”
He didn't reply, but she heard his shoes scrape against the concrete floor. He was walking around the table.
She screamed, because perhaps Gertrudis wasn't at the car yet. She couldn't get her left hand out, but she kept the right one away and waved it back and forth in the blackness so he wouldn't be able to grab it. She screamed all the time. If nothing else worked, perhaps he would get tired of the racket and let her go.
“Oh, cut it out.”
The dark hadn't shifted, but when he said that, she saw his eyes. They weren't different from anyone else's eyes in their colour or shine, but she could see the pupils, and then it felt like someone had hit her in the back of her head, only without pain.
*
When she could think again, she remembered that this was the ceremony. She couldn't remember what she had done, only enough that she didn't want to remember. Had it been that bad? If she'd made enough of a nuisance of herself, perhaps he would have to call Sister Gertrudis to drive her back to the house.
“I'm sorry”, she managed and lay down.
He tied down her other wrist and ankles, so he must have forgiven her.
She felt a prick in her lower arm, but she ought to be used to it now. When she looked, the tube had slipped in under her skin. The blood was black where it flowed up the spiral of tube into a transparent bag, starting to collect at the bottom. It would cover one of the windows when it was full. Another tube went into her, from a bag heavy with pale nutritional fluid.
When she looked away, she saw his profile against the next window. The light glinted in a glass, finer than the ones in the canteen, still transparent. He knocked it against a plastic tap on the bag, without looking at her.
THE END