The Landlord. Kristin Hunter

plucked a molasses bottle from it, and slammed it down in front of Elgar. He wondered what he was supposed to do with it: put it on the eggs? the sausages? He also wondered if Marge might be that mythical creature Borden was always describing, the Loving Person. Maybe she just had an angry style of loving.

      “Ummm, thank you,” he said noncommittally, and let his eyes wander back to the shelf, hoping to avoid both issues, molasses and men, since he could not win at either.

      The curiously assorted contents of the shelf did not make him feel any better. It held a long, black, very dead-looking hairpiece, a human skull and several teeth (her next-to-last old man?), standard bottles of corn oil, vinegar and mustard, and, next to them, some distinctly evil-looking bottles labeled Compelling Oil and Dispelling Oil.

      She caught the direction of his gaze and said, “See what men have done to me? For fourteen years I only practiced white arts, mister. Now I practice black arts too.”

      Plucking one of the nastier bottles from the shelf, she emptied it into a teacup and began to stir.

      “What’s that?” he asked in alarm.

      “Clarifying oil,” Marge said somberly. “I read the morning wrong. First time in three years.”

      “Don’t worry,” he said, patting her hand gently. “I’m sure it’ll clear up soon.”

      This time she let his hand remain. “I read evil visitors on my doorstep today,” she said glumly, and continued stirring. “But you’re too pitiful to be evil. I must have made a mistake. —Ah! Now I see.”

      Elgar tried to see something in the murky liquid too, but it was as blank to him as his future appeared right now.

      “I’m supposed to protect you from evil,” Marge said. “That’s it. You came my way so’s I could keep you from harm.”

      She pushed her chair back from the table, angrily accepting God’s will or Belial’s or whoever’s. “All right. Though I know you’ll repay me with suffering.”

      “Oh, don’t say that,” Elgar pleaded. “How can you be sure?”

      “Men,” she repeated with tragic emphasis, her fingers curling toward the gun once more.

      “One way you might help me,” he suggested feebly. “Since you’re supposed to anyway, I mean. You might, if it doesn’t inconvenience you awfully, put that gun away. Just a suggestion, of course.”

      “You the first fool this thing ever fooled,” she said. “It’s old and rusty as me. Never even been loaded. See?”

      Aiming just to the left of his ear, she pulled the trigger.

      After the explosion, Elgar turned, shuddering, and observed a black smoking hole in Betty Grable’s left knee. Though nothing could tarnish that immortal pin-up smile.

      Marge rose sheepishly and put the gun in a drawer.

      “Tell me about the other tenants,” he said after a long, long exhale. “What’s this DuBois guy like?”

      Marge elevated her nose and sniffed haughtily. “Oh, Professor DuBois don’t bother with the rest of us. He’s a college president.”

      “Really?”

      “Sure. The college is across town somewhere, he says. —Course I never heard tell before of no college selling degrees for fifty dollars. But it’s supposed to be legal and proper. I guess I’m too ignorant to understand these things.”

      Elgar caught himself wondering if the man would sell him a degree. After eight expulsions, the complete Ivy League circuit in four years, even Mothaw had given up. But then, he had given up trying to please her. Didn’t he tell Borden so every day? The hell with college.

      “What about the Cumbersons?” he asked. “The couple upstairs.”

      “Don’t ask,” Marge said ominously, beginning to stir her cup of oil again.

      “Why not?”

      “’Cause they been here twenty-five years and nobody’s ever seen them, that’s why.”

      “That’s impossible,” he said.

      “It would be if they was alive,” she said.

      There was silence in the room except for the dainty tinkle of Marge’s spoon in the cup and the rippling of hundreds of tiny, ghostly rodents, dancing behind her varicolored wallpapers and up and down Elgar’s spine.

      “Mr. Cumberson was already retired from the railroad when they moved here,” she said. “That was twenty-five years ago. They were both over seventy then.”

      “And nobody’s seen them since?”

      “Nobody.”

      “Well, who pays their rent?” he wanted to know.

      “Every Thursday a pension check comes for Mr. Cumberson. I never seen nobody take it out of the mailbox. But every Friday, it’s gone.”

      Elgar was indignant. “You’ve been here fourteen years yourself!” he exclaimed. “You must at least have heard noises. In all those years, didn’t you ever get curious, just once, and go up there?”

      “I sleep sound,” Marge said, “’cause I got nothin’ on my conscious, and I don’t look into what don’t concern me. Landlord, if you want to go up there, go ahead. All I can say to you is, I got the powers, and I don’t go. ’Cause my powers tell me, ‘Let well enough alone.’ ”

      “What kind of powers?” he asked fearfully.

      “Oh, nothin’ special. Nothin’ worth botherin’ about. Except, see, any time you got a little something troubling you, tell Miss Marge, and maybe she can fix it. A person robbing you, or crossing you, or spoiling your luck, or some little thing like that.”

      “I’ll remember,” he promised. That was motherly kindness glowing at him from behind the rimless glasses. At least he hoped so.

      “What are the first-floor tenants like?” he asked. “Copee, isn’t that their name?”

      “Oh, Fanny’s a good girl. Just a little ambitious, that’s all. She’s a good mother to those two boys.”

      “What about her husband?”

      “I don’t believe in speaking evil, Landlord. Besides, I’m concentrating now. If you want, you can go downstairs and meet him yourself.”

      She had lit a black candle, and smoke seemed to be curling upward from the cup while she mumbled unintelligible phrases. As the atmosphere was getting distinctly creepy, Elgar decided to follow her suggestion.

      But felt not at all the dashing lover as he knocked at fabulous Fanny’s door. Stuffed with sausages and badly shaken. Not the most romantic of conditions.

      Worse, he hardly recognized his wild non-Irish rose when she bloomed wanly in the doorway. Face scrubbed, hair skinned back severely, lashes batting more with fear, now, than coquetry. Until now he’d repressed the whole business about husband and children, little-mother role not suiting her, somehow. But from the glorious dragons rampant on scarlet fields she had changed to a mournful, motherly Muu Muu of limp, gray seersucker.

      The first-floor apartment was a Dragon Lady’s lair, though: red walls, lowering reddish lamps, gaudy Chinese-type furniture crouched to spring everywhere.

      Finger to her lips, Fanny let him in and said, “Shhh. Charlie’s studying his history.”

      From the deepest armchair a curl of smoke rose. Pipe, not incense.

      “Who goes there, wife?” came a voice from that vicinity. “Friend or foe?”

      “Ofay,” she answered, giving Elgar the key to the pig Latin the Enemy was not supposed to understand.

      “Then let him wait hat in hand,”