He walked further into the midst of the sea-strewn carcasses and the birds scattered, screeching and cawing out their anger.
A cool breeze invaded his unzipped jacket, making cold flesh even colder. But it felt good, it felt right. Taking longer strides, he increased his pace until he was almost jogging across the sands. He remained parallel with the beach and continued away from the Installation until it was obscured beyond a point of land. The region had remained remote and he expected to see nothing but bare beach and ragged sea. Slowing his pace, Vandemeer, finally came to rest.
The vault of the sky bled toward the coming dawn. Perhaps an hour away. Surely no more. He wondered if he would be much affected by the coming light, and decided he would not push things just yet. He’d proven the vaccine worked, but there was still more testing to be done. Let them do it. Turning, he headed back the way he’d come, back toward the Installation. As he walked and approached the cove, he felt invigorated, renewed. The beach was so desolate, so peaceful, a palliative for his tortured psyche. He relished the isolation, the removal from the hard-edged realities of the world. He even smiled as he basked in the dark glow of his solitude.
And so he was surprised when he saw the human.
A woman. Long hair, straightened by the wind; baggy clothes which failed to conceal her lithe, almost thin frame. She walked down the beach, away from him and towards the cove, with an athletic stride, a dancer’s grace. As he watched her, a thought touched him: They move differently than us.
He slowed and kept pace with her—just far enough behind to keep her barely in view. She did not sense his presence and her night-vision could not be sharp enough to actually see him.
A space of time expired as he matched her gait. His following her had been an instinctive reaction, done without conscious assent. He had no idea how long he followed her like that, but it suddenly struck him that he felt no hunger. The intimate thirst was simply…not there.
The realization stunned him for an instant, like a slap unexpected. Perhaps it was the intravenous treatments, his weakened condition, any one of a hundred factors intruding. Whatever, it unsettled him to not be regarding the human female as something akin to cattle.
Watching the woman, he saw her approach the cove, bend down and pick up one of the creatures on the drying sand. Slowly, she stood, her silhouette dark against the coming amethyst dawn, and tossed the object out to sea. She repeated this maneuver several times as he began walking again closing the distance between them.
As he drew closer, he could see she was most likely in her late twenties or early thirties. Although no classic beauty she was certainly not unattractive. Moonlight clarified her angular features, accented the blonde strands of her hair. There was something sensual about her, but in an aesthetic, rather than erotic way. He must have been moving very quietly, because she didn’t notice his presence until he was almost close enough to touch her.
And still, within him, there was no thirst…Turning, a little too quickly to not reveal the sudden fear in her, she regarded him with animal wariness.
“It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?” he asked, his voice almost cracking.
“Yes, it is,” she said almost whispering the words. “But it’s almost dawn.”
He nodded, knowing what she meant.
“Who are you?” she asked, looking out to sea. “No one ever comes out here.”
“I’m on a journey,” he said, trying not to lie.
“And you’re not one of them? You’re not afraid of them?”
Vandemeer cleared his throat. “I won’t harm you. Believe me. If I was one of them, you’d be dead by now. You know that.”
She exhaled as though with great effort. Some of the fear slipped away then and she looked into his eyes as though searching for that spark of true life all humans possess. Then, abruptly, the suggestion of a smile began to appear at the corners of her mouth. Turning, she began walking down the beach.
He followed at a respectful distance, watching her crouch down to examine the body of a starfish quivering on the sand. She took the sea-thing into her hands.
“Do you…collect them?” he asked.
“In a way, I guess. But only the living.”
He didn’t understand what she meant, but remained silent as she stood and waited for a new wave to break on the beach. Drawing back her arm, she hurled the starfish into the deep water. It disappeared behind the breakers.
“Maybe it’ll live now,” she said, wiping her hands on her pant legs.
“Do you walk here very often?” He didn’t really care, but he wanted to hear the music of her voice again. “Oh yes,” she said. “Whenever I can. Every night if I could. But not always here. There are so many coves along this coast. So many nights…”
He nodded as though he understood and followed in silence until she came upon another beached creature, which still glistened with the faint glow of life. Most would be repulsed by its shape—a blistered crab-thing with long, sagging antennae.
She picked it up in delicate, pianist’s fingers and again threw it far into the dark waters. It made a brief splash in the moonlight and was gone.
She said nothing, didn’t even look at him, and continued to walk along the water’s edge. He thought about how silly, how futile her actions were. No matter how many she saved from oblivion each night, it could not matter. Death raced across the beaches at a greater pace than hers.
“Do you live nearby?” he tried to sound as non-threatening as possible.
“Sometimes. Not always.”
She looked into his eyes again, as though searching again. He could smell the apprehension on her, but it never coalesced into fear. He found that he was attracted to her—not physically but emotionally. There was a vital force in her, which touched him in ways he’d believed long-dead. He was suddenly rocked by a sensation of being utterly alone and he wanted her to know this.
But he couldn’t find the words.
She smiled a small smile this time, turned, and resumed her patrol. He followed her, watched her rescue another air-choked thing.
“The sun returns,” she said, looking up at the orange and purple smears to the east.
He nodded, trying to conceal the shock which braced him.
There came a roaring in his ears, and it grew until it was a scream that echoed down the corridors of space and time. The moon fell and the stars bled across the sky, filling his mouth with the sting of their salt.
Faltering, he staggered away from her.
“Are you all right?” She looked at him with renewed fear.
He turned away for a moment. “No. It’s okay. I’ll be all right.”
Memories and sensations raged though him like acid in his veins. He didn’t want her to see him like this. The sun had crested the eastern horizon and its warmth played across his flesh. But it did not burn him.
She watched him stand with his hands at his temples, but there was relief in her gaze. The sun had brought her that.
“I’ve…I’ve got to go…” he said, spinning off into the blaze of the dawn as though under a spell. If she replied, he didn’t hear, didn’t remember. He was walking toward the slabs of stone on the faraway cliffside. He was lost, yet he was not. He feared something, but had no way to articulate that fear. But it tasted bitter like arsenic, and spoke of death. He inhaled deeply of the sea-choked air. The salty breath of the ocean, which once had carried the earliest seeds of life, rushed into him like an invading virus. The whitening sky spun and sparkled across his vision and he remembered nothing more.
Until he awoke to a montage of white and green. Staff moved about him in his hospital bed. More tests: wires, screens, charts, tubes, broken pieces of sentences. The vaccine was valid, they told him. New tests with Hastur would begin tomorrow, and truly a new age would dawn among his kind.
Late into the next evening, Vandemeer left the Installation, letting the indigo arms of night embrace him once again. Without pausing to consider why, he knew he was
being drawn back to the beach and its receding tides. He walked with a long stride to the cove beyond the point. The wine-dark sea was smooth tonight, but the retreating tide had already speckled the sand with new dead and the dying. But tonight, Vandemeer knew he was seeing things differently. As his footprints marked the sand, he searched for traces of hers.
The moon grew high and small as clouds raced to clutch it far above his head. The wind grew stronger, cooler. He stood in the center of the cove, feeling lost, disconnected, abandoned.
There was no sign of her and he began to wonder if she really existed. So many beaches. So many nights. Who was she, anyway? Maybe all was simple madness…No. There was something magic about this place. He couldn’t give up so easily. Where he now walked had been a solitary human being who nightly paused to battle death. And now he was learning that even for his own kind, perhaps there were different kinds of death.
Looking up, he saw movement on a jutting point of land. Someone approached the cove with an easy, distant grace, and he knew it was her. He wanted to break into a run, to race to her side, but something held him back. Once, as she grew closer, she paused to pick up something from the wet sand and return it to the sea. Again, she paused when she saw him standing amidst the shadows of the shoreline. He stood waiting as a wave broke and the ebb tide fell away from him.
Looking down, into the swirling muck and sand that slid past his boots, he saw something shining. In the swirling foam, there was a small and slimy thing. Its pores glutted with sand, it slowly suffocated in the night breeze. Vandemeer stooped down and picked it up, feeling tiny spicules tickle his palm. The creature beat feebly with the rhythm of the living, and he resonated to the sensation.
She drew closer and he took steps toward her. She looked at him and almost smiled. Her gaze dropped to the thing he held in his hands.
“I’m sorry…about last night,” he said. “I really don’t remember—”
She silenced him with a simple gesture—an outward glance of her eyes and a slight tilt of her head.
“I’m sorry if I scared you. I’m sorry,” he continued. Then, after a pause: “I’ve come to…to join you.”
This time she did smile, moonlight burning in the amber of her irises. Vandemeer looked at her, feeling a smile forming on his own lips—the first in a long, long time. “Please do…” she said and looked out to the star-filled sea.
Pulling back his arm, Vandemeer flung the creature out into the night. Time seemed to slow as he watched the thing’s path describe a graceful arc across the sky. Masked by the whisper of the surf, it penetrated the surface.
He felt an atavistic surge within himself, like a starburst in his thoughts. He felt strangely renewed and paused to wonder what was happening to him.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she whispered.
He kept looking out to sea as he nodded in response. The urge to touch her hand, to share the moment more deeply, broke in him.
“Your name,” he said as he turned to face her. “What is it?”
But she was gone.
Stunned, Vandemeer whirled about, but there was no one with him. The echo of her words still drifted across the surface of his mind. Trying to reject the shock, the utter impossibility of her disappearance, Vandemeer sought for answers when he knew none would be found.
He felt a momentary disorientation as he ordered his thoughts. Starlight skittered across the ocean’s surface; thoughts of the sea and its secrets entered and retreated like the tides. He had no idea how long he stood on the edge of the water-world, as the coming dawn stretched out before him. It didn’t matter now.
Turning away from the wet sand, he leaned into the wind, in the direction of the Installation. It was a long, slow, and lonely walk. Interrupted several times when he found something which needed him on the sand, his trek gave him the time he needed to absorb what he’d learned, to re-dedicate himself. Ahead, in the distance, the monolith of the Installation soared above the cliffs. He thought of its corridors, almost deserted during the diurnal cycle, and how he could move unimpeded into his lab. Where he would access his records and his vaccine. He had worked so hard and so long.
But there was one last thing to do.
Okay, this story was written for another of the HWA anthologies, the aforementioned Freak Show edited by F. Paul Wilson. But to say that Paul merely “edited” the book does him a great disservice because he went beyond that duty to create an intricate overlay, a back-story, which not only connected1 all the stories in the anthology, but allowed each tale to move a larger story along to a satisfying conclusion. Paul wrote short pieces that wove everything together and the result was a literary gestalt that was not short of brilliant—in which the final resolution was far greater than the mere sum of its parts.
As far as my story goes, I think it stands on its own as a fine study in character and emotion, but when you see the reference to a “piece” for Oz’s device, you will understand why it is there. I very much loved the challenge of helping Paulie create Freak Show, and I stand by my claim that it is a truly wonderful piece of work. If you don’t have the book, try to find it in either its unbelievably cheesy paperback edition from Pocket Books, or the lavishly beautiful Borderlands Press limited edition with illustrations by Phil Parks.
1 The shtick used to connect the stories is a quest, which all the main characters of all the tales must eventually join. The man who runs the Freak Show, Ozymandias, is building a machine called “the Device,” and he has asked all his companion-freaks to help find the parts for this machine, which had been scattered and/or hidden all across the country during one of the traveling show’s previous circuits. This story was originally titled “Oyster Bay, New York,” which was the town where Oz’s Freak Show had stopped for a run.
“I had the dream again,” said Carmella Cerami.
She looked across the breakfast table at George Swenson. “About the guy in the hat?”
She nodded, pushed a strand of long dark hair from her cheek. “It’s more than a dream, George. I know it is.”
He sipped from his coffee mug, his gaze alternating between her dark eyes and the red-and-white checks of the tablecloth. “One of your ‘visions,’ huh?”
“For what they’re worth,” she said, half-grinning. “Sometimes they mean something, and sometimes, you know, nothing…But this one—this one’s so real! He’s so handsome and well-dressed, but I can’t see his face because of the hat being kind of slanted down. And he comes to see me, but not when I’m in the sideshow, and he doesn’t see me as a Freak. But…”
“But what?” asked George.
“But there’s something different about him, something almost…dangerous.”
“Does he try to hurt you?”
Carmella smiled wistfully. “Oh no, nothing like that. He’s kind of mysterious—like those men in the old black and white movies, like Garfield or Bogart.”
“I don’t get to see many movies…” George rippled a tentacle, fidgeted with his coffee mug. He seemed to have something on his mind.
“The old movies are the best,” said Carmella, feeling her mood begin to brighten. It was always like that—the more she distanced herself from her dreams and her sometimes prescient visions, the happier she would feel.
She drew a breath slowly; autumn was in the air. A woodsy sachet which always comforted her. It was her favorite time of year—the end of the hot, dusty weather of summer and the change of season’s colors. Time to switch from iced lemonade to hot cider and a cinnamon stick; time to end the roadshow for another year. They were on the home run now. No more gawking faces, no more—
“Hey, Carmella, you okay?”
She looked up at her friend as though he were a stranger. What had he been saying?
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I was just thinking…and drifting away…‘woolgathering,’ my mother used to call it.”
George nodded, tried to smile, doing an awkward job of it. She knew he wasn’t trying to court her
; he had a girl—a Straight. Just like Carmella wanted. She’d always had a wish-fantasy that someday she would leave the Show and end up with a normal man—a Straight of her own. Despite her reputation as a flirt with a great body, she liked to think of herself as a dreamer. Blowing the show was a fantasy she’d sheltered and protected like a baby bird with a broken wing.
More importantly, it was one of the things she’d promised her mother when she died two season’s back—
Like a cruel hand, a black memory slapped her. Blinking her eyes against the vision, she fought against re-seeing the grim tableau: the dark interior of their trailer near the end-days. Dying oh-so-slowly, her mother had curled herself into the depths of her bed where the light could not reveal her sagging flesh. As the cancer continued to feed, speech became almost impossible, but Carmella’s mother had forced the words to come. It had been a time of last things—last words and last chances—and both mother and daughter knew the importance of such things. Her mother had been re-hashing a familiar wish—that she find a man who would be good to her, who would stay with her, “…and not run off like your father did you.”
The words had become like a well-known litany, but this time her mother added something new.
“Carmella, listen to me…”
“Not now, Momma. Rest.”
Her mother had smiled weakly. “Plenty of time for that. Listen.”
Carmella nodded.
“I want you to blow the show.”
The words had shocked her so. “What? Momma, why?”
“’Mellow, this is no life for a young woman. You deserve better, you deserve a life.”
“The Show’s the only life I’ve ever known…It’s okay.”
Her mother winced. “That’s my fault,” she said. “I should’ve given you a better chance…”
“Momma, don’t talk like that. You’ve been good to me.”
Her mother looked directly into her eyes, her gaze dark, piercing. “Just promise me, Carmella.”
“All right, I promise.”
“There’s one other thing—” A cough savaged her sagging chest before she could continue. “You won’t be able to leave until you…you do something for Oz.”
Fearful Symmetries Page 20