#SpookyShowcase: Sing Sweet by Tiffany Sanerd

Welcome to the 9th annual #SpookyShowcase, a Halloween artist and author showcase. A full schedule of submissions can be found here so you don’t miss a single entry for THESE DEADLY CURSES. Now, on to today’s submission!

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Sing Sweet by Tiffany Sanerd

“Sing sweet,” Ma would say, and I’d stand from my stool in the corner and sing ethereal through the gaps in my teeth. Ma would look for the man that would cry, sit on his lap, and dry his tears with her bosom. “Sentimental gents is generous gents,” she’d tell me afterward, blowing smoke out a broken windowpane.

The gaps in my teeth filled in, and other things too, but my voice remained high and sweet. Some of the gents started looking at me sidewise, but the barkeep kept me close when Ma was gone, in exchange for getting close to Ma when she was in.

Gents might mess with a girl’s girl, but they wouldn’t mess with the barkeep’s. On long nights he’d hand me a cracked scrimshaw horn. I’d turn it this way and that, feel the knife cuts under my thumb, press it to my nose and wonder if what I smelled was bone, lampblack, the sea, or just the boozy sweat of the barkeep.

Then Ma got sick – too sick to pay her debts – and off to the charity school I went. That was the barkeep’s doing too. The madam would’ve kept me – treated me like her own, she said – but the barkeep put his meaty heel down, and that was that.

School girls ain’t so different from a covey. Gather a bunch in a big room, and it takes you a long second to see ‘em any different. But then you do see. One’s got a snub nose and one’s proud of her even smile, and one’s got a bosom doesn’t want to behave and one’s got a leg that’s too short and makes her hop like a bird chasing bugs. Some’s selling themselves and some’s over the selling and just taking up space.

You weren’t going to see the different in me right away though, plain as I was, so I tried to earn favor by singing sweet like Ma taught me. But the nuns said I was being too showy.  In church services, they didn’t like me to sing, not even in the choir.

The dour, pious organ notes were the only thing that pierced their dry hearts. And that’s why they favored Sarah. Sarah whose fingers were too long for her small hands and had stretched the skin so thin you could see the white of her bones right through it. Sarah who was bleached and bony everywhere else too, save for the shining fall of her hair.

The organ was a whale that took up a whole wall, its ivory and ebony keys the same shades as the barkeep’s scrimshaw. The first time I noticed Sarah, she was cowering on its bench. Her hands working the keys looked to me like ten translucent shrimp fighting off the baleen plates of the big brass pipes. I didn’t care for the church songs but thinking the behemoth might swallow her if she stopped – suck her fingers between the keys if she even slowed – set my pulse to hammering.

She was kind to me as no one – not the barkeep or even Ma on holidays – had ever been before. She told me, “If you get scared at night, you can come to my bed. The shadows at the edges have arms.” I hated the kindness, the invitation, and her. But she was right about the shadows.

Our beds were assigned, with the newest girls nearest the door. I was lucky in my timing, because the dark didn’t reveal its arms until two more girls had come after me. They were men’s arms. I saw that soon enough. But still, men can be monsters in the wrong places.

So with hate in my heart, I took Sarah’s invitation. Finding her in the long row of beds was easy. Her eyes were wide open and her face – as long and narrow as her fingers – glowed like a lighthouse against the dark.

“I’m not your ma,” I told her as I unbraided the nighttime tangle of our hair in the morning.

“Of course not,” she said. “I’m older than you.”

It was news to me. News the nuns were keen on keeping. They’d written a patron; told him our pauper school had a prodigy. It wouldn’t do for sweet little Sarah to be nearly a woman. So she hid me from the reaching shadows, and I ate all the food that would’ve grown her too big to get out. At mealtimes, my bread reappeared the moment I ate it. Only Sarah’s eyes seemed to eat.

Then a Saturday came where I left her bed and she didn’t follow. Or did and was snatched away. Though I was as close with my affection as she was generous with her meals, I felt her absence more keenly in every passing moment. I named my grief hunger. I’d grown accustomed to double portions. There was no explaining my loss of appetite at supper.

Every word of our guided bedtime prayer felt foreboding that night. I climbed into my bed exhausted from worrying and fell into a fitful sleep. I dreamed I was swimming after a mermaid. And something was swimming after me. It smelled like the scrimshaw; like soot and salt and rum. Just as I reached to touch golden hair, a manacle circled my wrist.

I opened my mouth to scream and cold flesh rushed in, like water. Not much flesh. More bone. I opened my eyes to Sarah, hovering like a ghost.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

Before I could find the words for Ma’s illness, her pianist fingers played from my mouth back to my wrist. “Come on,” she said, pulling me from my bed and deeper into the room, to hers. The moonlight moved through her hair in waves. I reached to touch it then shuddered, remembering my dream.

“Get in,” she said. When she lifted her sheet, the space inside was impossibly large. As we cowered together in the secret cavern, she whispered about her long day at the organ. The patron was coming for Sunday services. She told me the songs she would play.

“When I start,” she said, “You come forward. The nuns won’t dare correct you in front of him. Stand beside me and sing sweet.”

The next day, it was easy to spot the patron. I’d never seen such a well-dressed gent so close. An equally well-dressed woman folded her kid leather hand around his tailored right elbow. A less well-dressed man strode along at his left. They took the pew nearest the organ.

I stared at them with an orphan’s longing, though I’d never considered myself as such. I stared at them with such intensity, I didn’t hear a single word of the sermon and thus was shocked by the flutter of Sarah’s hands as she flexed them over the organ. A foreign gesture. An improvised cue, I realized. I stood and moved toward her without feeling my legs. I was surprised to meet the second man behind the bench.

Sarah began to play. In such proximity, I could feel the powerful gravity of the pipes. I couldn’t fight it off with my hands as Sarah did, so I fed it my voice. The man beside me winced. When the recital ended and I caught my breath, I noted that he smelled like the dark edges of our sleeping room.

The patron and his wife stood and applauded politely. The second man stared at Sarah’s hair. The Directress came then and stood in front of me.

“Quite good,” the patron said.

“Thank you,” the Directress said.

“Is she a prodigy though, really?” asked the patron’s wife.

The Directress stiffened and inhaled, then hesitated. She could not correct this woman in the same sharp way she corrected us.

“Perhaps,” said the second man. And then he touched Sarah’s hair. I can’t say what a man can glean of a girl’s talent by touching her hair, but in that moment Sarah looked much younger than I knew her to truly be.

The gesture raised the same protective instinct in the patron. He stepped astride the second man, clapping him on the shoulder and simultaneously knocking his hand from Sarah’s hair. “If Mr. Powell sees talent in the girl, that’s good enough for me.”

The wife gave a one-shouldered shrug, leveled her posture, then tilted her head upward. Admiring the architecture that I knew from my own studies to be unexceptional.

“I can’t declare her a prodigy with so little evidence,” the second man said, conceding the lady’s point. “But she has talent,” he continued, conceding the patron’s point, too.

“Then it’s settled!” The patron beamed at everyone and no one. “We would be delighted to sponsor her tuition at Mr. Powell’s school.”

“How generous,” said the Directress.

I was overcome with emotions. It doesn’t matter which. What matters is that I stumbled sideways, causing the well-dressed man to laugh.

“And the little bird, too!” he said.

“What?” said his wife and the Directress.

“Why not?” said the patron. “I’ve not Mr. Powell’s experience, I’ll grant you, but she sounded sweet enough to my ears.”

I don’t think anyone but Sarah agreed with him, but no one dared tell him no. Ma was right. Sentimental gents is generous. I wish I could say his generosity saved me. Or Sarah, for that matter. It merely moved us from one sleeping room to another. And then, when she got her own room, it moved us apart.

She no longer cowered before an organ, but all the pianos in the school had their own gaping mouths. As for my mouth, Mr. Powell preferred it shut. My lessons were choral or cursory. He allowed me to accompany some of his lesser students when he wasn’t present, but I only accompanied Sarah when the patron came.

During these recitals, our teacher continued to wince at the sound of my voice. As soon as the patron was gone, he would excuse me. From the doorway, I would watch as he made Sarah perform all her compositions again. Often, he would stroke her hair, as he had that first Sunday. If she was playing well, his touch was as gentle and fond as any good father’s. But if she faltered, his hand was firm, as if he might push her into the piano’s mouth.

Though the very smell of him sickened me – and the very sound of me sickened him – I was jealous of Mr. Powell’s attentions. Of his fondness as much as his disappointment. Of his expectations for Sarah. His belief that she was special.

The music school was not the same as the charity school. Our tuition included a small allowance, and when our instruction allowed it, we were able to come and go as we pleased. My limited instruction gave me far more freedom than Sarah had.

That’s how, after many months of jealously watching Mr. Powell stroke Sarah’s hair from doorways, I one day found myself walking toward the disorderly side of the city. I don’t know what I expected. Though I suppose I do. The school had never informed me of Ma’s death. So at my loneliest, being still quite young and naïve, it only seemed right that I should return home and find Ma waiting.

As it was daytime, I found only the madam. She didn’t remember me and claimed not to remember Ma. “The barkeep with the scrimshaw,” she repeated with a smirk, “ain’t been here in near a year.”

I considered asking if he’d left the carving, at least. “Can I see our old room?”

“Which is that?”

“One that faces the harbor. Far end of the hall. 

“Don’t see why not. ’s empty,” said the madam. And then, “You’re very sentimental for a girl’s girl,” she said from the door as I bent to blow through the broken windowpane.

“I ain’t– I’m no such thing,” I said. “I’m a student at Mr. Powell’s music school.”

“That so?”

“A soprano,” I said proudly. “I used to sing here, sometimes.”

“I think I’m starting to remember,” she said. “Why don’t you sing for me? See if that helps.”

So I did. Because I was always waiting to sing, but so few people asked. The whole while I sang – not something from the school, but something Ma used to like – she took my measure. And by that, I mean hips, waist, bust. At the end of the song, she reached up and ran a lock of my hair between her fingers.

“Want to come back and sing again?” she asked.

Don’t feel sorry for me. And don’t judge me, neither. I can look down all the paths behind me and see I was always going to end up at that brothel. And somebody did save me there, but it wasn’t a nun or a sentimental gent. Her name was Jenny Lind.

She had plain brown hair and didn’t like wearing corsets. Best of all, she was a soprano like me. Or rather, I was a soprano like her. After the whole world went crazy for her, half the city clamored to get tickets to her concert. And many a gent left with a very specific case of Lind mania.

By then, I was as good a girl as Ma ever was. And though I was grown, I could still make a gent or two cry by singing sweet. I had a reputation, not entirely bad. There wasn’t a girl in the city better suited to play Jenny Lind in the bedroom. Maybe not even Jenny Lind, since rumor has it she’s not the sensual sort.

In my comfortable costume, I could perform in a standing room, take my pick of the highest bidders, and be done for the rest of the week. Near every day, a courier came to the brothel with gifts, with poems, with letters pledging love and proposing marriage. It was good to be Jenny Lind.

I followed Sarah for a while after I left the school. Bought a cheap ticket to one of her concerts, though I couldn’t find the nerve to go in.  But eventually Mr. Powell got himself a real prodigy, and Sarah couldn’t starve herself small enough to compete with that.

You can imagine my shock then when she walked into my room. The same one I’d had with Ma, except the window was fixed, the walls were papered, the rugs were Oriental, and the sheets were real silk. I was considering another marriage proposal when I heard the polite knock.

“Jenny?” said the madam, because my gents paid enough for us to keep up appearances.

“Yes?” I sang sweetly.

“You’ve a visitor. A lady visitor. Says you were school friends.”

The madam said lady like she didn’t quite mean it, but I’d only ever had one school friend. “Let her in!” I said, my hands shaking so badly I dropped the letter. Then I nearly toppled my pretty chair standing up to smooth my skirts and hair.

I needn’t have bothered. The woman that entered was twice as tall and twice as thin as Sarah had been the last time I saw her. Her skin was silver over the bones and purple under them. The only thing that made her recognizable was the rippling curtain of her hair.

“Jenny,” she said, smiling, testing the name.

I found I couldn’t say hers. I turned to straighten my letters instead. “How have you been?” I asked, ridiculously.

“Not well,” she admitted. She took a single step toward me, so I could see the proof of it.

“Oh?”

“Consumption,” she said.

My hands were shaking again. I resisted the urge to cover my mouth. “Why are you here?” I admit, I was half-hysterical with fear that she had come to pass the disease to me.

“There’s a doctor that says he can cure me. I don’t have any family or friends. Just you.”

“You want money?” Other girls in the brothel had warned me of this. Of lost family and friends materializing to make demands on my income.

“I would pay you back –“

“How?”

“I could play the piano for your act…”

“No,” I shook my plain brown hair. It wasn’t because I doubted her ability. I’d gotten it into my head that she was death. I couldn’t allow her to stay, not a moment more.

“Please,” she said.

I could feel her reaching. Not with her dirty hands, at least. I remembered all the times I’d watched Mr. Powell reach to touch her hair. All the times I’d dreamed of touching it myself. How absurd that she still had it.

“For your hair,” I said. “I will give you the money for your hair.”

Her cheeks colored briefly, as if she’d been pinched. I thought she would touch her hair, then. Stroke it fondly, as everyone else seemed wont to do. “It’s always been a curse,” she said. “I wouldn’t wish it on you.”

“Let me help you with that burden, at least,” I said, and the velvety smugness of my voice sickened me. Or maybe it was her sickness, I thought, already taking hold. “Make the deal or be gone,” I went on, shrill as only a soprano could be.

Her dull eyes crawled over my elegant vanity. Jealous? But no, in a moment her long fingers were around my silver shears, and then her golden hair was all around her shoddy shoes. I crossed the room and turned my back to her so she couldn’t see how much I had in my hidden purse. As if she was the thief.

When I wouldn’t meet her eyes, she looked to the bed. And I knew then that if I made the invitation she’d made to me – if I gave her a place to hide from the shadows – she would die in my arms, that very night.

I turned my palm into the mouth of the purse, let all the coins slip back inside, then pulled it tight.

“Here,” I said, the bag dangling heavily from its strings.

She held out both hands to take it. “Thank you,” she said.

“Maybe when you’re feeling better…” When I looked at her again, shorn and pale, with the veins in her hands bulging under the weight of our exchange, bile rose in my throat.

“Of course,” she said. “I’m glad to see you’re doing well. I will pay you back, I promise.”

I nodded. Again and again. Like a cheap bisque doll. I couldn’t seem to still my head. In the end, it was her that gave the final mercy, slipping out the door.

Eventually, I gathered up the hair. (Is there any amount of days that would have made the deal decent?) I took it to a wigmaker recommended by the madam. It took them almost two months to do the job. I thought of Sarah every day. Every time someone played the piano in the bar. When I couldn’t sleep at night.

I made inquiries. What doctor could she have meant? Had anyone seen a lady fitting her description? I was not insincere when I called her lady. As the days went on and I became desperate for news, lady became friend.

“You’ll recognize my friend if you see her, because her hair is exactly this color,” I told the wigmaker when the job was done. “She might come here for a wig, when she’s feeling better,” I said.

I brought the wig home and set it gently on my bed. I was not Jenny Lind that day. I paced the room, wanting to get away from the wig but not wanting to leave it alone. Finally, on a peculiar whim, I put on a black dress and fit the wig to my head.

When I came down the stairs, the madam looked twice.

“That’s a lovely color,” she said of my hair. “But I’m not sure it’s yours.”

“I’d like to play the piano,” I said. I didn’t wait for a reply. I’d made her a rich woman. And bought the new piano in the bar, besides.

I learned a little piano at the school. Nothing to enchant or enliven the gents at the bar. None of them saw me for who I was. Or for Jenny Lind, either. It was for the better. I wanted to be alone. Or so I thought.

As I watched my fingers stagger through a half-remembered composition, I smelled sweat. My own? No. There was something else there. An exhale moved my hair. Rum. But it wasn’t my hair, was it? I’d only begun the thought when a trembling hand cupped the back of my head.

My fingers died on the keys. Though it was a light, new, oak piano, for a moment I remembered Sarah’s whale of an organ and worried I would be eaten. I turned my head and met Mr. Powell’s watery eyes. The sentimental curve of his lower lip tightened into a line.

“You,” he said. And there too was the familiar wince. His hand began working on the back of my wig, as if Sarah might be just under the surface.

“You work here?” 

Every word turned my stomach, but I found myself leaning into the pressure of his hand. “Yes.”

“Don’t speak again,” he said. Then, “Show me your room,” pointing his body away from me, his gaze seeking out the stairs. I stood, and his grip tightened, as if I might run.

The madam raised her brows into twin arches, but I ignored her. I let him push me up the stairs and down the hall, only resisting when we were at the end, outside my room. “This –”

“Don’t speak!” he repeated, pulling my real hair under the wig. “And don’t light any lights.”

I’d always known he hated my voice. Hated me. But I’d seen the way he loved Sarah, and there was hate in that too. There had to be a reason he was there, in my home. That he’d appeared that night, to me, when I was most and least myself. Though my eyes were burning, I was determined to see it through.

When I shut the door behind us, the darkness was near total. I knew this game, I reminded myself. I was good at it. “Would you like to unlace me?” I whispered.

“Goddamn it!” he shouted, shoving me forward with one hand and pulling me back with the other still in Sarah’s hair. “I said be quiet. Do it yourself and then lie on the bed.”

He held me at a distance; his palm firm but his fingertips moist and tentacular as they slithered through the wig. I struggled to unlace myself, biting my lip to keep from crying out in frustration and fear. If I did, would the madam send help? As if in answer, someone started playing the piano downstairs.

I pulled my clothes down my body until I was bare, grateful for once for the darkness. Full of shame as I had not been in many years. I crawled onto my bed. Mr. Powell grunted as his thigh nudged the corner post. He half-fell onto me, then just as quickly pushed me away.

A moment later, his free hand was back again, pressing along my spine, looking for bones. It was careful to skirt the soft spots. He found my ribs, curled a hand around them, drew me closer. The arms of darkness, I thought. The hand in my hair was opening and closing. The mouth of the whale. I couldn’t fight it. I wasn’t like Sarah. 

I closed my eyes and waited for the monster to consume me. A large section of Sarah’s beautiful hair fell across my face. I remembered the time she had come to find me, to save me from the darkness. She had covered my mouth to keep me from screaming.

Now she was gone, and I’d invited the darkness in. Mr. Powell was thrashing and gasping beside me, abusing himself I assumed. I tried to pretend the hair over my mouth was Sarah’s hand. I could almost believe it. Could almost feel the hair separating into five long, cold fingers.

Mr. Powell’s fingers at the back of my head clenched, loosened, fell away. Was that it? I opened my eyes to stare into the darkness and tears spilled out. I held my breath and waited. Silence. Not the silence of a spent man slipping into unconsciousness. The silence of no one breathing.

Ever so carefully, I turned. The wig shifted, and I screamed into the hair. He would punish me for that, surely. But no. Mr. Powell would never punish a girl again. A silky blonde hand released its grip on his throat.

Curse indeed. Just enough of a shiny thing to make a plain, poor girl foolish. To make her think she could survive in a world full of monsters. I had been cursed, too. “Help me with this burden,” I whispered into Sarah’s other hand. I had taken her hair. It was only right she take my voice.

The hand slipped from my mouth. Five finger-shaped locks brushed over my cheeks and under my eyes, wiping away my tears. I caught them with my own fingers, brought them to my lips, and kissed them.

Then I drew up my feet and pushed Mr. Powell off the bed. The new glass rattled in the window. Let the madam and her connections deal with the body in the morning. I pulled the sheet over my head. Our head.

I dreamed of a mermaid. This time, she was me. Me and Sarah. Our golden hair cut through the darkness. We sang sweet, and monstrous shapes turned and moved toward the harbor, unsuspecting.

About the Author

Tiffany Sanerd’s mother went into labor on Halloween. For most of her childhood, Tiffany liked to pretend that people were wearing costumes and passing out candy to celebrate her birthday. As an adult, she’s embraced her ability to celebrate the strange and spooky year-round. To the delight of her conservative neighbors, sometimes that means putting out skeletons in August. And to the mortification of her family, sometimes that means writing stories like this one.

Twitter: @AtypicalTiff