“She’s had a baby once before,” a pale, thin boy said, coming to stand by Jasper, his eyes pleading. “Go on. Ask her.”

  “Ask her what became of that child,” said the grim-eyed boy.

  Shaking, Wendy jerked right and left, trapped by all of the eyes that gazed upon her. Jasper frowned, staring at her, and she saw the doubt blooming in him, saw his lips beginning to form a question. Her father still glared angrily at the boys, but even he had a flicker of hesitation. In the front row, Mary Darling stepped from the pew and extended a hand toward her daughter.

  “Wendy?”

  Shaking her head, Wendy began to back away from those who loved her, retreating down the aisle. She tripped over her silken train and when she fell amongst the soft purity of its folds, she screamed.

  “Ask her!” one of the boys shouted. Or perhaps it had been all of them.

  Thrusting herself from the ground, whipping her train behind her, she ran. Her whole body felt flushed but she caught a glimpse of her left hand as she ran and it was pale as marble. Pale as death. At the back of the aisle, a few crimson rose petals had fallen, petals meant to be scattered in the path of husband and wife after the ceremony. To her they were blood from a wound.

  She burst from the church, an abyss of unspoken questions gaping behind her, and she fled down the steps in fear that if she did not run, that yawing silence would drag her back. Pain stabbed her belly and her heart slammed inside her chest. Her eyes burned and yet strangely there were no tears. She felt incapable of tears.

  At the foot of the steps, she tore off the train of her dress. When she glanced up, horses whinnied and chuffed. Her wedding carriage stood waiting. The driver looked at her with kind eyes and his kindness filled her with loathing.

  “Wendy!”

  Jasper’s voice. Behind her. She dared not turn to look at him.

  Racing across the street, she darted down a narrow road between a dressmaker’s and a baker’s shop. At a corner, she nearly collided with two more of the Lost Boys—names, you know their names—and she turned right to avoid them, racing downhill now. Another appeared from an alley to her left, but this boy was different from the others. He’d been badly burnt, skin and clothing charred, and unlike the others, he had no substance, flesh so translucent that she could see the stone face of the building behind him.

  She wailed, stumbling in anguish, and fell to the street. Her dress tore and her knee bled, so that when she staggered to her feet and ran screaming—grief carving out her insides—a vivid red stain soaked into the satin and spread, the petals of a crimson rose.

  “Mother,” the burnt boy said behind her.

  She did not look back, but glanced once at the windows of a pub as she bolted past. In the glass she saw their reflections, not only the burnt boy but the others as well, one with his head canted too far, neck broken, another beaten so badly his features were ruined.

  Moments before she emerged from between two buildings, she realized where she had been going all along. Had she chosen her path or had they driven her here? Did it matter?

  Wendy stared at the bank of the Thames, at the deep water rushing by, and all the strength went out of her. Numb and hollow, she shuffled to the riverbank.

  Somewhere nearby, a baby cried.

  Glancing to her left, she saw the bundle perhaps a dozen feet away, just at the edge of the water. The baby’s wailing grew louder and more urgent and she started toward it.

  She knew the pattern on its blanket. His blanket.

  Kneeling on the riverbank, her bloodstained dress soaking up the damp, she reached out to pull the blanket away from the infant’s face. His blue face, bloated and cold, eyes bloodshot and bulging and lifeless.

  The sob tore from her chest as she reached for the child, lifted it into her arms and cradled it to her chest. Still she could not weep, but she pressed her eyes tightly closed and prayed for tears.

  The bundle in her arms felt too light. Gasping for breath, she opened her eyes.

  “No, please,” she whispered as she unraveled the empty blanket. The empty, sodden blanket.

  “Mother,” a voice said, so close, and a hand touched her shoulder.

  Wendy froze, breath hitching in her chest. This was not the burnt boy or the grim-eyed child from the church. This was another boy entirely.

  Still on her knees, she turned back to see his face. Nine years old, now, his skin still blue, eyes still bloodshot and lifeless. Her boy.

  “Peter,” she whispered.

  He thrust his fingers into her hair and she screamed his name—a name she had never spoken aloud before today. Wendy beat at his arms and clawed at his face as he dragged her to the water and plunged her into the river. She stared up at him through the water and his visage blurred and changed, became the face of his father, James, the butcher’s boy. He’d earned his nickname with the bloodstained hook he used in handling the sides of meat in the shop down the street from the Darlings’ home.

  Her chest burned for air, the urgency of her need forcing her to strike harder at the face above her, which now became her own face, only nine years younger. The hands that held her beneath the water were her own, but she was no longer herself—instead she was a tiny infant, so newly born he still bore streaks of blood from his mother’s womb. An infant conceived by a mother and father who were only children themselves, carried and borne in secret—a secret safeguarded by her brothers in the privacy of the room they shared, a secret which destroyed her relationship with them forever. A secret made possible by a father’s neglect and a mother’s denial.

  Peter, she thought.

  Starved for air, thoughts and vision dulling, diminishing, slipping away, Wendy opened her mouth and inhaled the river.

  Blackness crept in at the corners of her eyes, shadows in her brain, and she realized she had stopping fighting him. Her arms slipped into the water and her hair pooled around her face. Bloodstained white satin floated in a cloud that enveloped and embraced her.

  The hands on her now were larger. A man’s hands. They dragged her from the river and for a moment she saw only darkness, a black veil for a cruel mother.

  “Wendy,” said an urgent voice.

  She saw him then. Not the little drowned boy, but Jasper, her intended. He knelt over her, desperate and pleading and calling her name.

  Gathered around him on the riverbank were the Lost Boys, those cast-aside children, each murdered by his mother. Those dead boys she had met once before on the night she had drowned her Peter in the Thames. They had been visible to the people in the church, dark dreams come to life, but now they were unseen once more. Jasper wept over her, unaware of their presence…

  Wendy could only watch him, standing a short distance away. Her dress felt dry now, but the bloodstain remained.

  “No,” she whispered, as the darkness retreated from her thoughts and she understood what she saw.

  Jasper knelt there, mourning her, grieving for the life they might have had. Wendy saw her own lifeless body from outside, her spirit as invisible to him as the Lost Boys. Others began to run toward the riverbank—her parents and her brother John, the vicar’s wife and Jasper’s brother, an aunt and uncle. They seemed like ghosts to her, these living people, their grief distant and dull.

  The Lost Boys circled around her, dead eyes now contented.

  “Mother,” Peter whispered, taking her right hand.

  Another boy took her left hand. She glanced down and saw the grim eyes that had so unsettled her in her dreams.

  “You promised to be a mother to us all, forever,” the grim-eyed boy said.

  Wendy blinked and turned toward the river. Somehow she could still see the swaddled infant floating on the water, sodden blankets dragging it down, just as it had on that night nine years ago.

  “Forever,” said Peter.

  They guided her gently into the river, where the dark current swept them all away.

  On…The Cruel Mother

  Child Ballad 20 (Roud #9), The Cruel Mother, is a ‘murder’ ballad. The heart of the ballad concerns a woman going into the forest and giving birth to two illegitimate children. She then murders them, either stabbing with a penknife or strangling them with a ribbon. She then buries them. In some versions she ties them together and buries them alive.

  Later she sees two pretty children and rhapsodizes on how she would treat them most tenderly if they were hers, dressing them in fine clothing and feeding them only the best food. They answer that when they were hers she treated them very differently - though they will be forgiven she will not. Hell is her fate. In some ballads she must serve seven-year penance in hell.

  In one significant variant a herdsman finds a child in the hollow of a tree. The child asks him to take it to the house where its mother is to be married that day. There the child announces that the bride is its mother. It then tells the assembled company that she has had three children. One she drowned, one she buried, and one she hid in the hollow of a tree. In what Child calls a ‘Wendish’ version (i.e. Sorbian), the bride/mother has had nine children.(1)

  Various musicians have recorded The Cruel Mother with singers such as Joan Baez.

  1) Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads Vol. 1. Mineola: Dover, 2003.

  SWEET WILLIAM’S GHOST

  By

  David Liss

  Maggie and I had been together for months, which is about as much as any relationship needs to drag on. Some guys, I know, are needy, and they’re all about looking for that right woman. I don’t have anything against that sensitivity of whatever, but let’s just say I’m a little skeptical. I don’t think there’s any man alive who is happy with just one woman. Maybe he can settle, or trick himself into thinking he doesn’t need anything else. More likely, I’m guessing, he’s happy as shit for a while, and by the time he snaps out of it, he’s got a mortgage and kids and responsibilities and all that bullshit. I saw that happen to my father, who looked at my mother like she was a piece of rotting meat. He didn’t think I saw, but I did, and I vowed not to let that happen to me.

  Even though I was on my guard, things went on with Maggie longer than I would have thought. It didn’t hurt that she was a nice-looking woman. Pretty face with pale skin, black hair and big-wattage blue eyes. I hardly ever notice a girl’s eye color, not even if I’ve been with her for weeks, but with Maggie, it was almost the first thing I saw. Almost, because she’s got a really nice body, and she works out in the gym where I’m a trainer. A lot of girls built like Maggie would strut around in micro shorts and sports bras, letting the world get an eye-full. She could pull it off, but she dressed like a fat chick when she exercised. That’s fine. I understand she wasn’t looking for attention, but I’m a trained professional. I know a woman in good shape when I see one.

  I’d been watching her for a while, trying to figure out my move. Guys tried to strike up conversations with her all the time, and she’d be polite, but she didn’t want any part of it. She listened to music while she worked out, which made it easier to cut the chatter short. She’d pull out one ear bud when someone tried to get a conversation going, but stare at it the whole time, like she was itching to get back to the music. It made guys anxious, and they struck out.

  I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. When I moved in, it was going to count. I just had to wait for the right moment. One day I saw her at the squat rack, and I knew that was my in.

  Not a lot of women bother with barbell squatting. It’s technical and it’s uncomfortable, and most people think it’s for serious bodybuilders “only”. Even so, there she was, at the rack, a pair of ten-pound plates on the bar, giving it a try. And doing it badly.

  Your average lightweight gym member can’t squat for shit, and as a trainer, I can tell you it’s not worth teaching them. If a guy insists on hitting the squat rack when I’m training him, he usually cranks out half or quarter squats, and I don’t tell him to do otherwise. Why bother? He doesn’t want to hear he’s doing it wrong. He doesn’t want to hear that to do it right he’s got to drop some weight and practice form. He wants to feel like he’s moving a shitload of iron around, and he pays me to make him feel like he’s the Hulk or something. That’s the service I provide. I’m in the people business.

  This woman wasn’t paying me, though. I knew she was a class act. I saw the clothes she wore on her way in or out—skirt suits and shit and silk blouses and like that. She was some kind of professional. A lawyer or accountant or something. She was smart. I could tell from her eyes, from her hair, the way she carried herself. Whatever it was women like that talked about in their spare time—cinema and politics and the latest novel by some Indian lady—I wasn’t equipped to handle. But squatting? That I could talk about.

  “Excuse me,” I said when she finished a set. “I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you’re form is wrong. You’ll hurt your knees.”

  She looked at me, like she wanted to hear what I had to say. Her eyes darted over my body in my shorts and polo shirt. She took out both ear buds, rested them in her palm. I’d passed the test, and with good reason. I am tall and I am fit. Women like to look at me, and I don’t see the point of pretending otherwise. Her gaze shot up to my face, which isn’t so bad either, and she tried to keep it there. She laughed self-consciously and shook her head.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “I read an article about squatting in a magazine, and I figured I’d give it a try, but it’s harder than it looked.”

  “Harder than it looks, but easier than you think,” I said. “You have to go all the way down. Thighs parallel to the ground. Can I show you?”

  She let me show her. Just like that. Hands on her shoulders, then my palm pressed flat against the small of her back. She might as well have gotten naked right there, because even if she didn’t know it, or pretended not to know it, I had just closed the deal.

  * * *

  A few minutes of my time there, a few conversations around the gym the next few times she comes in, and suddenly she hires me on for sessions twice a week.

  I’m not an idiot. A woman in that kind of shape doesn’t need a trainer. Unless you’re a movie star or an athlete, no one in good shapes needs a trainer. This woman sure as hell had no business paying someone to toss her a medicine ball while she stood on a balance board. She didn’t need for me to count off while she did some bullshit on the TRX. She hired me because she wanted to sleep with me.

  Maybe she never intended to go through with it. Most people don’t jump in the sack with every person they’ve got the hots for. I get that. Still, she was flirting—flirting with me and flirting with the idea. Maybe that’s all she wanted to do. Maybe at first she thought the thrill of having a guy who looked like me put his hands on her twice a week was enough to scratch her itch.

  And make no mistake, Maggie loved it when I put my hands on her. I felt her shiver and tense, I heard her let out her breath when I would adjust her form or correct her posture. Even so, she put up plenty of barriers. She mentioned her fiancé at least twice a session. William this, and William that—how kind, how smart, how sweet. It was as if to say she was spoken for, and she would not have any flirting. For all that, she asked me about my weekends. She fished for information about my social life. She touched my forearm with her fingertips during casual conversation. I know the drill.

  It turned out I was right the first time. Maggie was a lawyer, though not like the kind you see on TV, talking to juries and solving crimes and shit. She was a corporate lawyer and sat in her office reading contracts all day, which sounded dull to me, and she admitted it was not the most exciting thing in the world. I was also right when I guessed she was smart. She liked movies, the more foreign and colorless the better. She liked to read books. Her fiancé, William, was some kind of high-powered engineer, specializing in environmental cleanup. He was a big deal. She was proud of him. He mattered. She loved spending time with him. She was looking forward to a life with him and starting a family with him. His awesome importance made her absolutely untouchable. No matter how much she might be attracted to another guy, no sane woman would mess up the sort of future she had with a guy like her sweet William.

  Maggie and I were sleeping together within three weeks of her first session. Smart guys with smoking-hot girlfriends take note. I don’t care how compatible the two of you are. I don’t care how much your souls intertwine or whatever. If she’s better looking than you are, she’s going to step out with someone like me. Know that going in.

  * * *

  That’s how it went for two months. William worked long hours, and he traveled all the time, so Maggie and I didn’t have to work too hard to find opportunities to slip off to my apartment, which wasn’t far from the gym or from the house Maggie shared with her fiancé. I had to do a little cleaning up for Maggie, throwing away pizza boxes and shoving laundry in the hamper, but whatever. She was worth it. After a while, she canceled the training sessions. They were too much of a tease for both of us. All that distraction with heavy weights—that’s a recipe for an accident. In the interest of safety, we limited our interactions to me pounding the shit out of her whenever we could both slip away.

  It wasn’t like we were in love or anything. We were attracted. We liked to have sex with each other. That was it. She was out of my league, and I was out of hers, which made it hot. She felt like crap about what she was doing to William, while I didn’t care, and that was also hot. Once a week she would tell me that we should stop, that she really loved him. I’d tell her that I would hate to let her go, but I wanted her to be happy. When I said that, I’d see something darken in her lovely face—the knowledge that I could simply walk away and not look back. I think that’s what kept her around. Maggie wanted me to be desperate for her, and until I was, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Then, one day, lying in my bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, Maggie looked up at me. “William’s going to be out of town for three weeks,” she said. “He’s got an extended assignment in Glasgow. Some old factory has apparently been leaking who knows what into the soil for decades.”