“Where?”
“In here.”
I found her, finally, in the master bedroom. She was in bed, under the covers; she wore a scarf and a stocking cap on her head, mittens on the hands that pulled the covers up to her chin.
Around her neck I could see the collar of the white fur jacket. Her teeth were chattering, and her skin was so pale that it was almost green. I stood in the doorway and stared. The shaft of light through the blinded window looked wintry. “Kelly, what’s wrong? Are you sick?” It was a question I could have asked months before; now it seemed impossible to avoid.
“I’m cold,” she said weakly. “I – don’t seem to have any energy.”
“Should I call somebody?”
“No, it’s all right. Usually if I stay in bed all day I’m all right by the time the boys get home from school.”
“How often does this happen?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Every other day or so now, I guess.”
I had advanced into the room, stood by the side of the bed. I was reluctant to touch her. I now know that the contagion had nothing to do with physical contact with Kelly, that I was safer alone in that house with her than I’ve been at any time since. But that morning all I knew was cold fear, and alarm for my friend, and an intense, exhilarating curiosity. “Where’s Ron?” I demanded. “Is he still out of town? Does he know about this?”
“He came home late last night,” she told me, and I had no way of appreciating the significance of what she’d said.
“What shall I do? Should I call him at work? Or call a doctor?”
“No.” With a great sigh and much tremulous effort, she lifted her feet over the side of the bed and sat up. I could feel her dizziness; I put my hand flat against the wall and lowered my head to let it clear. Kelly stood up. “Take me out somewhere,” she said. “I’m hungry. Let’s go to lunch.”
Without my help, she made it out of the house, down the walk, and into the car. The sun had been shining in the passenger window, so it would be warm for her there. There was definitely a fall chill in the air, I decided, as I found myself shivering a little. “Where do you want to go?” I asked her.
“Someplace fast.”
In Denver I have always been delighted, personally and professionally, by contrasts, one of which is the proximity of quiet residential neighborhoods like Kelly’s to bustling commercial strips. We were five minutes from half a dozen fast-food places. Kelly said she didn’t care which one, so I drove somewhat randomly and found the one with the least-crowded parking lot. She wanted to go inside.
The place was bright, warm, cacophonous. I saw Kelly wrap herself more tightly in the fur jacket, saw people glance at her and then glance away. She went to find a seat, as far away from the windows and the doors as she could, and I ordered for both of us, not knowing what she wanted, taking a chance. There was a very long line. When I finally got to her, she was staring with a stricken look on her face at the middle-aged woman in the ridiculous uniform who was clearing the tables and sweeping the floor. “I talked to her,” Kelly whispered as I set the laden tray down. “She has a master’s degree.”
“In what?” I asked, making conversation. It seemed important to keep her engaged, though I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Here’s your shake. I hope chocolate’s all right. They were out of strawberry.”
When she didn’t answer right away I looked at her more closely. The expression of horror on her face made my stomach turn. Her eyes were bloodshot and bulging. She was breathing heavily through her mouth. Her gloved hands on the tabletop were clawed, as if trying to find in the formica something to cling to. “That could be me a few years from now, “she said hoarsely. “Working in a fast-food place, for a little extra money and something to do. Alone. That could be me.”
“Don’t be silly,” I snapped. “You have a lot more going for you than that woman does.”
Suddenly she was shrieking at me. “How do you know that? How can you know? I’ve let everybody down! Everybody! All my teachers and professors who said I had so much potential! My father! Everybody! You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Then, to my own horror, she struggled to her feet and hobbled out the door. For a moment, I really thought she’d disappeared, vanished somehow into the air that wasn’t much thinner than she was. I told myself that was crazy and followed her.
The lunchtime crowd had filled in behind Kelly and was all of a piece again. I pushed through it and through the door, which framed the busy street scene as though it were a poor photograph, flat and without meaning to me until I entered it. I looked around. Kelly had collapsed on the hot sidewalk against the building. Her knees were drawn up, her head was down so that the stringy dark hair fell over her face, the collar of the jacket stood up around her ears. Two women in shorts and halter tops crouched beside her. I hurried, as though to save her from them, although, of course, by then Kelly wasn’t the one who needed protecting.
I met Ron at the hospital. From the ambulance stretcher, in a flat high voice that almost seemed part of the siren, Kelly had told me how to reach him. I hadn’t wanted to; I hadn’t wanted him with us. By the time I made it through all the layers and synapses of the bureaucracy he worked in and heard his official voice on the other end of the line, I was furious. But I hadn’t missed anything; Kelly was still waiting in the emergency room, slumped in a chair. Ron did not sound especially alarmed; I told myself it was his training. He said he’d be there in fifteen minutes, and he was.
They had just taken Kelly to be examined when he got there. I was standing at the counter looking after her, feeling bereft; they wouldn’t let me go back behind the curtain with her, and she was too weak to ask for me. When the tall blond uniformed man strode by me, I didn’t try to speak to him, and no one else did either. I doubt that Kelly asked for him, or gave permission, or even recognized him when he came. None of that was necessary. He was her husband. She was part of him. He had the right.
My father and I had been bound like that, too. If I’d asserted the right to be part of him, welcomed and treasured it, I could have been. Instead, I’d thought it was necessary for me to grow up, to separate. And so I’d lost him. Lost us both, I thought then, for without him I had no idea who I was.
I felt Ron’s presence approaching me before I opened my eyes and saw him. “She’s unconscious,” he said. “They don’t know yet what’s wrong. You don’t look very good yourself. Come and sit down.”
I didn’t let him touch me then, but I preceded him to a pair of orange plastic bucket chairs attached to a metal bar against the wall. We were then sitting squarely side-by-side, and the chairs didn’t move; I didn’t make the effort to face him. He was friendly and solemn, as befitted the occasion. He took my hand in both of his, swallowing it. “Brenda,” he said; he made my name sound far more significant than I’d ever thought it was, and – despite myself, despite the circumstances, despite what I’d have mistakenly called my better judgment – something inside me stirred gratefully. “It’s nice to see you again after all these years. I’m sorry our reunion turned out to be like this. Kelly has talked a great deal about you over the past few months.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say.
“What happened?” Ron asked. He let go of my hand and it was cold. I put both hands in my pockets.
“She – collapsed,” I told him. The more I told him, the angrier I became, and the closer to the kind of emptying, wracking sobs I’d been so afraid of. Now I know there’s nothing to fear in being emptied; Kelly simply hadn’t taken it far enough. To the end, some part of her fought it. I don’t fight at all anymore.
“What do you mean? Tell me what happened. The details.” He was moving in, assuming command. It crossed my mind to resist him, but from the instant he’d walked into the room I’d felt exhausted.
“I dropped by to see her. I was in the neighbourhood. When I got there she was sick. She asked me to take her out to lunch. So we—”
“Out?” His b
lond eyebrows rose and then furrowed disapprovingly. “Out of the house? With you?”
I mustered a little indignation. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s – unusual, that’s all. Go on.”
I told him the rest of what I knew. It seemed to take an enormous amount of time to say it all, though I wouldn’t have thought I had that much to say. I stumbled over words. There were long silences. Ron listened attentively. At one point he rested his hand on my shoulder in a comradely way, and I was too tired and disoriented to pull free. When I finished, he nodded, and then someone came for him from behind the curtains and lights, and I was left alone again, knowing I hadn’t said enough.
Kelly never came home from the hospital. She died without regaining consciousness. Many times since then I’ve wondered what she would have said to me if she’d awakened, what advice she would have given, what warning, how she would have passed the torch.
I wasn’t there when she died. Ron was. He called me early the next morning to tell me. He sounded drained; his voice was flat and thin. “Oh, Ron,” I said, foolishly, and then waited for him to tell me what to do.
“I’d like you to come over,” he said. “The boys are having a hard time.”
I haven’t left since. I haven’t been back to my apartment even to pick up my things; none of my former possessions seems worth retrieval. I had no animals to feed, no plants to water, no books or clothes or furniture or photographs that mean anything to me now.
Kelly kept her house orderly. From the first day, I could find things. The boys’ schedules were predictable, although very busy; names and phone numbers of their friends’ parents, Scout leaders, piano teachers were on a laminated list on the kitchen bulletin board. In her half of the master bedroom closet, I found clothes of various sizes, and the larger ones, from before she lost so much weight, fit fine.
The first week I took personal leave from work. Since then I’ve been calling in sick, when I think of it; most recently I haven’t called in at all and, of course, they don’t know where I am.
Ron is away a good deal. The work he does is important and mysterious; I don’t know exactly what it is, but I’m proud to be able to help him do it.
But he was home that first week, and we got used to each other. “You’re very different from the man I knew in college,” I told him. We were sitting in the darkened living room. We’d been talking about Kelly. We’d both been crying.
He was sitting beside me on the couch. I saw him nod and slightly smile. “Kelly used to say I’d developed my potential beyond her wildest dreams,” he admitted, “and she’d lost hers.”
I felt a flash of anger against her. She was dead. “She had a choice,” I pointed out. “Nobody forced her to do anything. She could have done other things with her life.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” he said, sharply. His tone surprised and hurt me. I glanced at him through the shadows, saw him lean forward to set his drink on the coffee table. He took my empty glass from my hands and put it down, too, then swiftly lowered his face to my neck.
There was a small pain and, afterwards, a small stinging wound. When he was finished he stood up, wiped his mouth with his breast pocket handkerchief, and went upstairs to bed. I sat up for a long time, amazed, touched, frightened. No longer lonely. No longer having decisions to be made or protection to construct. That first night, that first time, I did not feel tired or cold; the sickness has since begun, but the exhilaration has heightened, too.
Ron says he loves me. He says he and the boys need me, couldn’t get along without me. I like to hear that. I know what he means.
JOHN BURKE
The Devil’s Tritone
JOHN BURKE HAS WRITTEN around 150 books in all genres. Born in Rye, Sussex, he grew up in Liverpool, where his father became a Chief Inspector of Police.
During the 1930s Burke and Charles Eric Maine started The Satellite, one of the first science fiction fan magazines in Britain. He won an Atlantic Award in Literature for his first novel, Swift Summer (1949), and worked in publishing and the oil business before joining 20th Century-Fox Productions in 1963 as European story editor.
During the early 1950s he wrote several short science fiction novels and contributed many stories to such British SF magazines as New Worlds, Science Fantasy and Nebula.
Burke has also written novelizations of numerous TV and film titles, including A Hard Day’s Night, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, The Hammer Horror Omnibus, The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus, Privilege and Moon Zero Two. Two tie-ins to the UFO television series were published under the pseudonym “Robert Miall”.
Burke also edited the anthology series Tales of Unease, More Tales of Unease and New Tales of Unease, while We’ve Been Waiting for You is a collection from Ash-Tree Press of his best weird fiction, edited by Nicholas Royle. The author’s latest book is the mystery Wrong Turnings, featuring “The Laird of the Law” characters from earlier novels.
“I have always been convinced that music can work more directly and hypnotically on one’s feelings than any other art form,” reveals Burke, “and at one stage wrote a screenplay called The Devil’s Discord which was bought but never produced.
“In it, as quoted in Benjamin Halligan’s 2003 study of British film-maker Michael Reeves’s films, I aimed at showing that’ . . . a lot of the hysteria produced by so-called magic spells could be due to the musical content of the incantations . . . What cast the spell was the musical rhythm and melody and the cadences of the often non-sensical words.’
“It struck me that there could be a vampiric element in resonant echoes from the past restored to or maintained in evil life by, as it were, a contemporary tuned circuit.”
An unusual variation on the theme, the following story was written especially for this volume.
THE ORKNEY WIND HAD caused the postponement of one concert during the St Magnus Festival because a small circular window had been sucked out of the cathedral by the force of the gale. A less exposed recital given by the Drysdale Trio on Shapinsay started late because of the ferry’s slow struggle across the short but turbulent stretch between Kirkwall and the island. But the recital had been a success. People who had taken that much trouble to get there in such weather conditions were determined to enjoy the music, even when one banshee wail of a more ferocious gust howled in quite the wrong key.
This came in the middle of Variations on a Theme by Calum of the Clachan, which Robert Drysdale had composed for the three of them – himself on violin, his wife Deirdre on the clarsach, and their daughter Fiona on flute. Somehow, although it produced such a grinding discord, the cry of the wind seemed an integral part of the work, producing a shiver for which the strange convolutions of the melody had been preparing the listener.
The day after the final concert, the ferry to the mainland ran four hours late because of the fury of the wind along the Pentland Firth. The Drysdales had never been seasick, but by the time Robert drove off the ramp on to solid ground he was still dizzy from bracing himself against the lurching and plunging of the vessel. Half a mile clear of the ferry terminal, he drew in to the side of the road.
“We’ll have to find somewhere else to spend the night. It’s too late to make Pitlochry by this evening.”
They were due to play another recital in Hexham in Northumber-land two days from now. He had planned to break the journey a good way down central Scotland, and then have plenty of time next day for a leisurely drive south of the Border.
Deirdre reached for the map and opened it across her lap. “Dornoch?” she suggested.
“Or a bit further inland. We could make Bonar Bridge, or . . . just a minute.” Robert’s finger jabbed at a name. “Kirkshiel. Only a few miles off the direct route. And couldn’t be more appropriate.”
“Why’s that?”
“Calum of the Clachan, that’s why. That’s where he came from, and where he went back to in the end.”
“I didn’t think there ever was a place with a real
name,” said Fiona from the back seat. “Didn’t he call himself ‘of the Clachan’ because his home village was abandoned during the Clearances and never had a real name of its own?”
As the wind buffeted the side of the Volvo, Robert thought of the wind of cruelty that had swept across the Highlands when rapacious landlords and their factors drove men off the land to make room for sheep. Some emigrated, others were resettled into jobs on the bleak coast which was utterly alien to them. Others, like Calum of the Clachan, wandered – an itinerant fiddler, literally scraping a living as he travelled.
Robert glanced at his wife. “You ought to feel in tune with the man. Your own ancestors did enough stravaiging in their time.”
Deirdre laughed gently, as if dissociating herself from those wandering clarsairs from Eriskay who had carried their harps and their music from one glen to another, one misty hill to another, across land and water, one island to another.
“And he did find his way home in the end,” Robert added.
There must have been a few gradual resettlements when the railway came reasonably close on its way up through Lairg. Kirkshiel was one of them: still pretty small, but at least there was an inn marked on the map. It was worth a try.
Robert drove beside the twists and turns of a winding river. Passing places were marked with triangular signs. During the first hour, they met only one caravan bumping along the road towards some hidden caravan park or perhaps simply seeking a patch in the trees beside the road.
Fiona began humming to herself. Robert, usually relaxed when he was driving and rarely distracted by irritating sounds, human or mechanical, paid no attention at first. Then the sound became a nagging nuisance, plucking at his mind with thorny insistence.
“What on earth’s that you’re droning away at?”
“I don’t know. It just came into my head.”
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 48