by John Pelan
And she kept on falling.
And Brynn would never know when or where she struck bottom because, as her lungs expelled their last, the image and the pain faded away to nothing.
His senses crawled back like whipped dogs seeking succor. He gasped at the air, moaned, tried to scream but puked again instead. This time, he was able to turn on his side so that he did not have to swallow it.
The caravan door was swinging in the morning breeze. The place stank, and he was rolling in his own filth. He must have been out all night.
After much struggling he stood and peeled off his clothes. His arms, legs, back, and buttocks were tender and bruised; his head throbbed as if his skull had been shrunk to compress his brain; he had bitten his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. Yet he took solace in the pain each breath gave him.
He found some clean clothes, dressed, made a pot of tea over the primus stove.
The cold hit him all at once, retrieving memories of last night like hypnotic suggestions. He suddenly needed to leave the caravan. The smell of vomit and shit hung heavy in its stale atmosphere, and he could make out dents and scrapes where he had been flipping about during his fits. To stay there would be to tempt fate. And though fate was about as believable as malignant demons, given a choice Brynn would tempt neither.
So he left the caravan and headed to the cliffs, and on the way he saw trails in the dew-laden grass, slick sweeps of disturbed moisture where something had passed by not too long ago.
Soon he found himself at the head of the path leading down to the beach. Daylight, fresh air, the eternal hush of the sea onto the rocks below, all helped to clear his mind of what had happened, both the fear of the fits and what he had seen while he was incapacitated. The pain felt good, because it was good to be alive.
The thing was even darker than before, almost black, and its tentacles were once again stretched out in dead abandon. Some were buried, others snaked along the sand as though seeking a comfortable resting place. From this high vantage point, the dead creature looked like a huge drift of oil on the beach.
On the way down, Brynn wondered yet again at how he had navigated this path in the semi-darkness. It was so narrow at times that his shoulder brushed against the cliff face as he passed, and showers of stones and sand snickered down onto the rocks below. And still the sea mocked his fears with its incessant song.
He had not brought his camera with him, nor his notebooks. He had left his jacket in the caravan, and now he shook and shivered as he waited for the sun to purge the shadows he was descending through. The path was slick with dew.
On the beach, a line of seaweed indicated high tide. Brynn thought it was further up the beach than he had yet seen it. He knew about tides and surges and seasonal highs—the sea had been his obsession since Helen had been lost to it—and he knew that there was nothing extraordinary about last night.
Really, he thought. Nothing at all? What about that fit and those dreams? What about the trails in the grass?
The sea was rough today, whipped into a frenzy by westerly winds, and where it struck the rocks near the base of the path it threw sheets of spray into the air. The wind carried it to Brynn, cooled his face, spotted his clothes. He opened his mouth and closed his eyes, wondering if some of Helen were splashing across him now, bits of the stuff that had made her spread across the oceans after so long.
He would touch the thing today. It must have been here for several days and decomposition was splitting it and venting its gases and melting its insides, but he would run his hands across those tentacles, feel its hide. Feel the truth of it.
He walked through the surf so that he did not leave a trail in the sand. It seemed the right thing to do. Because there were other prints there already, strange snakelike patterns winding across the beach. And as he neared the thing, he saw that it had begun to change. It was flattening, settling down into the sand, spreading a dark stain and becoming a new bridgehead between land and sea, between known and unknown. The tentacles stretched further than ever, but even they were breaking down and giving themselves to the beach.
Brynn fell to his knees and scooped up a handful of the darkened sand. It was sticky and heavy, warm and sweet smelling. He stopped himself from tasting it… though he yearned to know its true scent.
He fell on his back next to the corpse and stared up at the new day. He could almost hear the thing rotting, a series of rips and tears over and above the constant hypnotic surge of the sea. He closed his eyes.
His muscles clenched, then shook in the grip of a sudden, violent fit. His eyes turned up in his head. Senses drifted away like breaths in a storm. A gust caressed his skin and then he was gone, a berserker in the dawn, flopping and flipping in the sand like a thing of the sea.
Black grit entered his mouth and eyes and ears, worked its way beneath his clothes, trying to make him a part of the beach just like the dead thing. He saw darkness, felt unbearable pressure and the icy cold of unknown depths. Helen was in his head —or he in hers—and he finally knew what she was thinking at the moment life left her body to its doom. He knew but it did not comfort him, not as it should have. It scared him. Even in the depths of his strange fit, he wondered how her final wish would come to be fulfilled.
She never wanted to leave him. Someday she would be with him again.
Her last thought had been of him.
Brynn opened his eyes, blinked rapidly, and rolled onto his side. His bones felt brittle and liable to break at the slightest impact.
The thing had all but gone; it was now little more than a hump in the sand. It had spread as it came apart, and as he stood, Brynn saw that most of the beach had taken on a dark tint. He walked across and tried the path to the clifftops, but he could not climb. He willed his limbs to take him up but they rebelled, showing him instead the trails in the sand that led down to the edge of the sea, and further. He doggedly sought other routes to the ground above, shambling along at the base of the cliffs, looking for handholds and cracks. But all paths were lost to him now.
The gale increased, driving the sea into angry white breakers, going from nowhere to nowhere with ferocious intent. He was sure the wind started on the beach and ended on the beach … he could see a horizon, but it seemed false, a trick done with mirrors.
The top of the cliffs looked a million miles away. He felt like crying but the tears would not come.
It was only as he finally followed the trails to the water—felt the sea close around his thighs, tasted brine on his tongue, sensed new depths opening up to him as he moved further and further out—that he felt truly in control once more.
SOUR PLACES
Mark Chadbourn
Ten years under foreign skies should be time enough to leave the past behind. Yet when I returned to Sheffield it was still there, staring out from the dusty, broken windows, watching from the side streets where yellowing newspapers and smashed syringes were thrown about by the merciless wind. For a city built on the backs of men toiling away in hellish steel foundaries, Sheffield had known good times and bad, but like all British cities—maybe all cities worldwide—there was one area that remained resolutely bad. And that was the place where I grew up.
Why those areas remain unredeemed in the face of the hardest efforts of councillors, charities, and do-gooding businessmen has never been clear to me. But whatever's there gets under the skin of the residents like ringworm. You never lose it.
I tried harder than most, but however many miles and years I had put between my home patch and me, I still felt sick in the pit of my stomach when I saw the crumbling, weather-stained tower blocks rising up like jagged teeth against the grey sky. Despite the time of day, the concrete shopping centre seemed deserted. Too many stores had been boarded up or plastered with posters, and that familiar unpleasant smell of urine still hung in the air.
I hadn't summonec the nerve to go back to the house, so I sought out the tiny cafe that had been a home from home for a few of us in the dismal days of our teen
s. The glass front was opaque through steam, but at least the place was still open. Amid the oppressive atmosphere of fried food, one man sat with a cold cup of tea at a Formica table scarred with the names of a generation of young lovers. He didn't give me a second glance.
When the door closed with a bang, Molly came out from the kitchen at the back, cheeks hollower, face lined, but unmistakably Molly. It took a second or two for the pinched expression laid on her by life in that part of town to be replaced by a smile of recognition.
“Bobby, is that you?” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “What are you doing back here?' It was an accusation of failure, filled with the disappointment of someone who had vicariously enjoyed the idea of someone escaping forever. The real reason dawned on her a few seconds later and she looked unconscionably relieved. “It's your dad, isn't it?” Not a failure at all. I had escaped; there was hope for all of them.
I nodded. “I haven't seen him yet.”
She leaned over the counter and took my hand. “Oh Bobby, you poor thing. He's in a bad way.”
“I heard. I don't know the details.” I spread out the crumpled telegram next to the sugar bowl. “They just said he'd had some kind of breakdown. Couldn't look after himself anymore. Do you know what happened?”
She winced, looked away. “The old place has gone downhill since you were last here, Bobby dear,” she said, as if that explained it all. Her words almost made me burst out laughing. Gone downhill. As if it: ould. “But look at you!” she continued. “You look wonderful. Where was it? France?”
“For a while. Then Rome, and Milan.”
“Oh, you lucky bugger!” She gave my cheek a pinch. “It's nice to hear a success story, you know—” she motioned around the room “—with what we normally get in here.” She brushed down her overalls, suddenly aware of my local celebrity status. “Listen to me rabbiting on. Let me get you a cup of char while you tell me what it's like working for all those glossy magazines.” She winked. “Photographing all those beautiful women.”
As she bustled around in the steam, a melancholy air seemed to come over her, and when the cup of milky tea was in front of me she said, “You know, I never thought you'd get out of this hole. I'd watch you with all those mates of yours on a Saturday morning, sitting at that table by the window.” She nodded toward our place. “Nice lads, the lot of them, but no prospects, if you know what I mean. You were different. I could see it in you even then. You'd make us all proud, given the chance.”
There was the key phrase. No one in this place ever got any chances. Unless they made their own.
“Then when that girl — Marie, was it?”
“Mary.”
“Pretty girl. Lovely, really. For round here.” She gave a weak smile. “She was even quite clever, wasn't she?”
“She was.” For round here.
“But it was easy to see what she wanted. To get married, have kids quick, like her mum, and her mum before. And then—”
“And then I would have been stuck here forever, in some hopeless job, fat and old by thirty.”
She nodded slowly. “I know your dad—and your mum, God rest her—they must have put a lot of pressure on you.” She searched my face, the extent of the understatement known but unspoken. “They didn't really want much out of life, did they?”
“Not really.”
“It would have been a shame if they'd stopped you getting what you wanted, all lhat potential gone to waste. All the girls here, we thought you d be announcing the engagement once you'd finished school. And then one Saturday you didn't come in, and the other boys said you'd just upped and gone.” She gave a relieved smile. “Good for you, I say!”
I sipped on the insipid tea; I'd forgotten how awful it tasted.
“That Marie—”
“Mary.”
“She must have taken it hard.”
I winced, the memory still raw, like all the memories of this place. “Yes. She did. And I didn't speak to my mum and dad for months after. Mum …” I took another sip; horsehair for the mouth. “She was three weeks buried before I knew she was dead.”
She rested a comforting hand on my forearm.
I finished the tea and made to pay, but she waved me away. “Give my love to your dad.” And then as an afterthought: “When you see him, try not to take it too hard.”
It was midaffernoon before I found the courage to wander up the drive of the horrendous Victorian dump they euphemistically called “the home.” When I was a kid it had the kind of reputation you saw in old films about gothic insane asylums; everyone hoped it would go with the NHS cuts, but with the new caring policy it had earned an undeserved lease of life. That was ironic. In a particularly bitter way.
The past was still watching me from the trees so I hurried into the smell of antiseptic and stale tobacco. Incongruously, the nurses all wore crisp white and tried to smile most of the time. That got quite unnerving after a while in that oppressive place. They led me down labyrinthine corridors to my dad's room, which looked out over the grounds; it would have been a pleasant view if it wasn't so dismal out.
When I entered he was in a chair with his back to me, so I was spared the full shock of what had happened to him. As I skirted the room the revelation came to me in tiny fragments so I was prepared for the full-on view. He was sixty and looked about a hundred, his face sagging in the cheeks and hollow around the eyes. His hair, which had been steely grey the last time I saw it, had almost entirely fallen out, and what did remain was the colour of snow. But it was the awful haunted expression continually gripping his face that affected me the most; he looked as if he'd had a vista onto hell.
“Dad?”
He didn't look at me. I don't know if he could even hear me. His rheumy eyes shifted constantly across the rolling lawns and shadowed trees, as if he was constantly searching for something just beyond his field of vision.
“Dad? It's Bobby.” I dragged up a chair and sat just off to one side, where he could look at me if he wanted. I can't say that we were ever close, but even if we'd been the worst of enemies it would have broken me to see him that way. It was five minutes before I could bring myself to talk to him again, but however much I tried I couldn't get any response from him. I slumped back in my chair, covered my eyes, tried to comprehend what could possibly have done that to him. When I looked up, he was staring directly at me. And what I saw in his eyes made me so sick I knocked over my chair in my hurry to get out of the room.
“What happened to him?” I tried to mask the break in my voice, but I guess the doctor had heard more than a few overly emotional relatives. Even so, his expression seemed unduly troubled.
“Have you spoken to the police?” He was in his forties with the kind of studious, sensitive face that marked him as an outsider.
“Why the hell should I talk to the police?”
He looked uncomfortable discussing the matter without any preparation. “You could — “
“No. Tell me now.”
“There was an incident in the street where your father lived. Several bodies were found in one of the houses. By all accounts, even by the standards of such a thing, it was not a very pleasant sight.” His choice of words almost made me laugh; it must have been the strain. “There had been a degree of mutilation. Whoever was responsible hasn't been caught—”
“And Dad?”
“When the police were going from house to house questioning the few people who were left in the street, they found him, well, as you saw him. He refuses to talk, barely eats. There has been some suggestion his condition is a response to stumbling across the atrocity, perhaps even witnessing it. The police were understandably very eager to talk to him, but so far he hasn't found the desire to communicate.”
“Shock, then. So given time he could come out of it?”
“He could.” His eyes gave the lie to his words.
Keeping one step ahead of the past is a difficult thing and I'd spent the last ten years doing it. Sometimes I'd failed and those were
the worst times, unbearable, and the simple act of attempting it had taken the sheen off my new life. Nothing had worked out quite like I'd hoped.
Going back to the old house was almost more than I could bear, but I had to go back; it was a fishhook stuck in my life. Despite the memory hanging in my mind like a lowering cloud, I almost had trouble locating the street. Molly had been right; the place had changed and not for the better. It was now surrounded by a vast swathe of wasteland like some medieval battlefield, where the old redbrick back-to-backs had been bulldozed. All the familiar landmarks were gone. No great loss. I picked my way among the rusting washing machines, oil drums, and twisted wire with the smell of some industrial pollutant hanging in my nose. The wind rustled the scrubby yellow grass so it constantly seemed things were moving just below eye-level all around. Twilight was coming in hard; I didn't want to hang around there any longer than I needed.
The old street looked incongruous in the new landscape, just two long rows of houses facing each other in the middle of nowhere. I suppose there were still a few residents hanging on to their familiar misery to prevent any further demolition; I know my dad would have died before he moved. The redevelopment wasn't so surprising. Nobody could get any price for the houses in that area anyway. There were rumours of them changing hands for just £150 in the local pub, any amount so the occupant could get away and start over. If they were anything like me it wouldn't have done much good; our sort carry our misery with us.
The lights in the city beyond were winking on as I crossed the last stretch of muddy ground. Before me the backs of the terraces were all in darkness; it didn't look like there was anyone left.
As I came up to the graffiti-scarred brick walls that bounded what passed as rear gardens, the doctor's brief description of the atrocity in one of the nearby houses came back in force. Bad things always happened round here, but nothing like that. Had it been some junkhead freaked out on dust? A gang killing? A part of me perversely wondered if it was just one of the locals who had finally had enough of living round here, snapped, gone wild with his former neighbours, and then stalked off to oblivion. It was disturbing to think that actually made sense.