One morning, it became clear to him that the subject was studying the artist more closely than the artist was studying the subject and this was no small feat.

“Wash your face,” she said at last, her eyebrows scrunched as if he’d done something to make her very angry. But why should Corliss be angry, he wondered? “Use the bowl over there.”

Ridley scrubbed until his face was cleaner than it had been in months.

“Look at you,” Corliss said, her brow scrunched even more than before. “You’re perfectly pleasant under all the dirt, aren’t you?” And with that, Corliss Pracy burst into tears.

Ridley rolled a piece of chalk between his fingers and waited for her to transform again into the damselfly he’d come to know.

“Oh, what’s to be done?” her lips said. “I may as well accept it.”

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him with all her might.

Ridley wanted Corliss more than he had ever wanted anything, yet he held her from him and scrambled for his quill.

HE’LL HAVE YOUR HEAD ON A PIKE FOR THAT.

“That’s rather the point, I’m afraid.” Tears trickled from her eyes. “Does all of this feel right to you, Ridley? You’re a barber, not a court painter. Don’t you see? My picture will never be good enough until he’s gotten what he wants – a way out.”

Ridley’s brother had once tricked him into kissing a girl by leaving gifts that falsely hinted at adoration, but Ridley Tom had never run across a truly devious act in his life. He read Corliss Pracy’s lips, but he didn’t understand what she was saying.

“The man can scarcely break the arrangement he made with my brother, can he? He wants us to break it for him.”

Ridley knocked over a candle in his haste to answer. Across splashed wax, he wrote, I WILL REFUSE TO DRAW YOUR PICTURE.

Corliss laid her soft fingers over his, making him drop the pen. “Then we will die innocent and stupid.”

“Distressing news, nephew,” Uncle Ambrose said when Ridley came to work an hour after. “I’ve moved the boy to the Moribund Room.”

YOU PUT HIM WITH THE FINGERS?

Phinneas Grey had turned out to be a frightful botch. The boy’s body had returned to the living but his mind had not. It’d been necessary to report him dead to the family since the truth would mean the chopping block for Ambrose Pratt. A coffin of stones had been tearfully put to rest in the church yard one week before.

“I want you to see this for yourself,” Uncle Ambrose said.

Through an archway of red eyes and pink tails they traveled, hopping oily puddles and scrabbling up a crumbling staircase to emerge in a draft with their candles snuffed at a room reserved for hacked limbs. When Uncle Ambrose re-ignited the wicks, their eyes fell on the window in the door. A jagged row of nubs was all that remained of the iron bars that had been there hours before.

Keys were extracted and inserted and turned. The door was opened, just a crack, and they peered in, one face above the other.

Phinneas Grey, if he could still be called by that name, lunged from the darkness; his little fish teeth snapping.

Uncle Ambrose slammed the door, locked the lock, and they both backed away, panting. “Did you see it?” Uncle Ambrose said. “He’s eaten the fingers and toes.”

All night, they debated it until ink, along with words, ran out. At sunrise, Uncle Ambrose took an ax and returned to the Moribund Room. “From now on the dead stay dead,” he said.

His fingers were trembling too much to draw. “Poor, Ridley,” Corliss said. “This has you out of sorts.” She took the chalk from his quivering fingers. “I know just what you need.”

Down came Ridley’s trunk hose.

“You’re the only person who’s ever listened to me, Ridley,” she said, laughing at the irony of it all.

Off came Ridley’s nether stocks.

“You’re the only person who’s ever loved me.” She unhooked a strand of glass pearls and let them drop away. “You do you love me, don’t you, Mister Tom?”

He rubbed his cheek against hers, up and down, up and down, and they fell on the rushes that carpeted her floor, rolling until wild snippets of cowslips and daisies poked from their hair.

Most nights, Ridley curled up on gummed flagstones in the surgery and made do around the dross. Corliss slept in a room for a queen. She shook a petal from her hair, and Ridley watched it weave through the air like a golden magic carpet.

The portrait sat untouched on the easel for seven days yet Ridley’s life had never had more color.

“How far will you go for me?” Corliss asked.

Ridley wrote his answer with his finger tip on the inside of her wrist. AS FAR AS I HAVE TO.

Not long before this, Uncle Ambrose had stitched the finger of a corpse onto a living hand. With shiny eyes, they’d watched the new finger flop against the others as if it had no bone. The next day it turned black and the patient was more ill than before. The day after that, Uncle Ambrose did away with the entire hand. In the end, the patient died. Kissing Corliss felt a whole lot like putting a dead finger on an otherwise good hand. It was a fix that was bound to kill but Ridley couldn’t stop himself. Some things were more important than living.

Eventually, they were caught. “Run Ridley! Run!” Corliss cried, as the king’s men stormed her room.

Ridley was out the window before they could catch up.

Corliss was put in the Record Tower and word spread that the king’s intended had a secret lover.

Corliss insisted her virtue had been stolen at knifepoint by a stranger at her window but the king didn’t believe her. “If it was the deaf boy, he will die soon enough for my surgeons do not live long. But if, as you say, it was a stranger at your window, this is because you are a tart who smiles at every man she sees. Either way, you’ve made a fool of me.”

“Happy to be of service, my dear,” she said.

The execution was to take place on the day set aside for Corliss of Lenoncourt’s coronation.

In the Moribund Room, Ridley could feel the ghosts of a dozen abandoned fingers curling up from the carnage in an effort to trip him. He feared to turn his back on the bone piles, lest they might reassemble themselves, and come after him in revenge. How dare you leave us to be sucked clean by that little monster!

Even as Ridley steered clear of irate digits, he felt grateful to that little monster. In life and in death, Phinneas Grey had carried the girth of wealth. Ridley was thin as a starvling. Though Phinneas had found the strength to rip iron bars from wood, he didn’t have the trim size to make an escape. Ridley almost did.

The removal of the bars was the first thing Ridley was grateful for. The second was the ax. Uncle Ambrose must have left it behind as useless. The door planks were thick as a Cromwell Bible but they were also old and rotten. Ridley scraped at the opening, whittle by whittle, and the window grew bigger. When the size was right, he kicked off a dozen phantom fingers, squeezed out of the cell, and went off to rescue Corliss.

“I was worried I’d never see you again,” Corliss said when Ridley tossed a pebble at her prayer book. Ridley had already given the guard a good knock in the temple. He held up the saw.

Corliss went back to praying.

To do the job properly, the left arm would have to go and part of the shoulder too. “Better a limb than my head,” Corliss said, though it made her turn green saying it. She tied a rope around her waist, handed the tail to Ridley, and drank down the malmsey he’d pinched from his uncle.

Ridley tied his end of the rope around himself so that there was no slack between them. He stuffed a wool stocking in her mouth and had her step on an old leather jerkin. The rope was to hold Corliss upright, the sock to stifle the screams, and the jerkin to soak things up, but Ridley didn’t tell her that. He angled her arm on the window sill and put a finger to his lips.

Shhhh.

It took eight minutes to get it off and, if Corliss screamed, Ridley didn’t know it. He only knew that, when it was done, the jerkin could have been wrung out three times over. Using the rope, he pulled her up, praying she would fit.

She did.

Then it was into the death cart and off to the surgery where an empty coffin waited. Ridley’s intent was to put her in the box and drive her out, using the papers for a woman who had died that morning. It was a late hour for such business but it would work. It had to. By the time the king realized what had happened, they would be half-way to Buttermere.

Uncle Ambrose was not happy to see that Ridley had escaped, especially after all the trouble he’d gone to keep him safe. “Blast you, boy! Do you want to die? Think of your poor Mum!”

Uncle Ambrose being Uncle Ambrose, he was too deep in his cups by this point to do anything but help with Corliss and mutter like an old hen. “A man who will stick his fingers with equal carelessness into a hive of bees, a chest cavity, or the King of England’s bride is a danger to himself and others. If you had any brains at all, you’d have stayed back with the arm.” He put his ear to the girl’s chest and listened for a long time.

“She isn’t breathing, Ridley.”

Ridley shook Corliss again and again and again. He listened for breathing. He shook her some more. He scratched on the wall with a stub of chalk: BRING HER BACK

“You know I can’t do that.”

Ridley thumped on the words he’d written. Thump. Thump.

“No.”

It took a single punch in the nose to change the man’s mind. Uncle Ambrose brought out the bottle of celandine he’d hidden in his good fur hat and he rubbed the tincture on Corliss Pracy’s pale forehead.

They watched. They waited.

The girl’s eyes shot open.

DOES SHE SEE ME UNCLE?

“Lord God, I hope so.”

They were putting the coffin on the wagon when Ridley noticed that every window in the tower was lit. “They’re looking for her,” Uncle Ambrose said. They hurried the box back inside. “Take her to the Moribund Room, Ridley. No one will look for you there.”

She wasn’t next to him when he woke up and the lamp was broken on the floor. Ridley felt around, finding a wall, a pebble, a bone. He still had his candle and set about lighting it.

It caught on the first try and, in a flash; he came grimace to grimace with Corliss, a breath away from his nose. He dropped his light. The candle rolled into his knee along with something else. Was that a finger brushing along his forearm? Something wiggled near his ankle. Ridley scraped the lighting stone, fervently wishing he could hear or speak. He was so grateful to see that Corliss still lived, he could scarcely grip the slick candle in his hand. He felt a puff of air near his cheek. A breath. Then another. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. The stone sparked.

She was against the far wall, her dress soaked through with blood. When he held up the candle, he noticed something stuck to the back of his hand. An old ear. He dropped the candle again and Corliss disappeared just as she began to move toward him. He rubbed the flint faster. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. The last he could recall, he’d been counting her breaths.

At last, the wick caught and Ridley reminded himself to keep the thing lit this time, no matter what. He moved the light from one corner to the next, the flame a circle of gold in the Bubonic black. There! Corliss sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, blocking the glow with splayed fingers.

Ridley smiled.

Corliss leapt.

He reared back so fast, he almost lost his candle again, but she only wanted the arm lying against the far wall. With round eyes, she raised it to her mouth and bit.

It took time to understand what he was seeing and by then, she had picked the bone clean and was coming across the room at him. Ridley pulled the ax blade from his pocket and climbed to his feet.

At that same moment, he caught a familiar gleam in the dark pools of her eyes. How far will you go for me, R-ID-LEY?

When she chomped her teeth, he had no choice. Ridley raised the ax as if it weighed more than the sun. Heart thundering in his chest, he sank the blade in flesh and bone, stopping Corliss in her tracks.

For a full minute, she looked at him the way she’d looked at him before her mind went bad. That one minute was enough.

When her eyes clouded again and she barred her teeth, Ridley slumped down in the gristle and tossed his beloved his thumb.

Carole Lanham’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies over the last few years. Recently, she was fortunate to win two short story contests. Please look for her latest stories in the upcoming November Issue of Tales of Moreauvia and the December Issue of Fantasy Magazine. If interested, you can also find Carole bustling about next month on the web by looking for The Horror Housewife at horrorhousewife@live.com where she hopes to share some handy household tips on removing stubborn stains and a few delicious high ball recipes.