Free Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Stephen Graham Jones, Robert Marasco

stared at the ceiling, the hum of their voices which had become low and soothing, hypnotic almost, brought out the exquisite patterns more clearly. She could see what the ceiling must have been like in its full glory, the room, the house, and everything in it.
    “It just kills us,” Miss Allardyce was saying, “going off without her like this. But would she have it any other way, Brother?”
    “ ’Course not,” Brother said. “And believe me, there’s no use arguing with her. Delicate as she is, there’s steel under it all.”
    Miss Allardyce laughed lightly. “Oh, we’ve learned that all right. Her word is law . Always was and always will be, as long as she’s with us. Which is always, please God.”
    “Always,” Brother repeated reflectively.
    For a moment the ceiling had become almost transparent to Marian, the pattern working on her like a trompe l’oeil. Brother went on, his voice growing softer, more inward, as though he were alone in the room.
    “In her room all the time,” he said, “way at the end of the house where you’ll never see her, never even know she’s there.”
    “All you’d have to do is leave a tray for her,” Miss Allardyce said, “three times a day. Just put it on the table in her sitting room – ”
    “Never the bedroom,” Brother cautioned Marian. “It’s kept locked all the time.”
    “Always,” Miss Allardyce said, “our poor, gentle darling.”
    Their voices were blending. Marian could barely hear the difference.
    “What could be simpler? A tray in the sitting room three times a day – which she might, and then again, might not, even touch.”
    “And for that simple – ‘catch,’ as you call it, Mr. Rolfe,” Brother said, “everything here’s yours, with no strings attached.” He repeated the word to Marian: “Yours.”
    “Her marvelous house,” Miss Allardyce said, letting her eyes roam around the room, “that’s been here for so many years; that she’s watched come alive and grow so many times . . . when we’ve despaired, Brother and me.”
    “She’s been a pillar of strength to us . . .”
    “A tower of hope . . . our darling.”
    Miss Allardyce’s hands were tight on Brother’s shoulders. She loosened them in the silence and let them fall to her sides with a long, weary sigh, keeping her eyes, soft and distant, on Marian and Ben who remained motionless. Brother reached for his tissue again, and the sound seemed to call Ben back. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. The voices had worked on him like a moving point of light – a coin or a candle flame. Was it just him; the mind suddenly going blank again, like another car incident? He looked at Marian whose eyes were wide and shining. She faced him slowly.
    “I wouldn’t mind, Ben,” she said. “Really I wouldn’t.” She was saying it as much to the Allardyces as to him.
    It took him a while to collect himself, to wrench the sound of their voices from his mind; he covered it by looking even more thoughtful. When he was sure it would come out normal and even, he said, “That’s something we hadn’t counted on.”
    “I suppose not,” Miss Allardyce agreed.
    Marian kept silent; obviously she had made up her mind.
    “And you’d just . . . leave her?” Ben asked them.
    “We’ve done it many times, Mr. Rolfe.” There was a note of resentment in her voice.
    “That’s what keeps her young,” Brother said. “Why, if she thought Roz and me would pass up our trip this summer, she’d become an old woman overnight. Believe me she would.”
    “She’s that independent, that self-sufficient.”
    “Like Aunt Elizabeth,” Marian said, thinking aloud. She looked at Ben and repeated it.
    Again, they were waiting for him to reply, all three of them. His impulse was to come right out and tell them – predictably, Marian would surely think – “Thanks, but no,” and assume that she would have sense enough eventually to see beyond the house and realize the absurdity of the whole