In fact the apnoea is caused by the thousands of microscopic mushroomlike growths that have colonized the lining of Moolie’s lungs. Most of the time these growths remain inactive and appear to do no harm, but periodically they flare up or inflate or expand or whatever—hence the apnoea.
“It’s definitely not cancer,” the medics insist. There’s a real sense of triumph in their voices as they say this, as if the growths’ non-cancerous nature is something they’ve seen to personally. But when I ask them what it is if it’s not cancer they never seem to give me a direct answer and I don’t think they have one. I don’t think anyone really knows what it is, to be honest. It’s a whole new disease.
Whatever it is, it seems to have the advantage of being slow-growing. Moolie might die of old age before the growths clutter up her bronchial tubes, or fill her lungs with spores, or find some other, quicker way of preventing her from breathing entirely. In the meantime, the doctors stave off the attacks by giving Moolie a shot of adrenaline and then supplementing her oxygen for an hour or so. The enriched oxygen seems to kill the mushroom things off, or make the growths subside, or something. Whatever it does it works, and surprisingly quickly. By the time I come on to the ward, Moolie is sitting up in bed with a cup of tea.
“What are you doing here?” she says to me.
“I might ask you the same question.” I can’t tell yet if she’s being sarcastic or if she’s genuinely confused. Sometimes when she comes round after an attack she’s delusional, or delirious, whatever you want to call it when the brain gets starved of oxygen for any length of time.
Moolie seems okay, though—this time, anyway. She’s sipping her tea as if she’s actually enjoying it. There’s a biscuit in the saucer, too, with a bite taken out of it—Moolie eating something without being reminded is always a good sign.
I notice that one of the nurses has brushed her hair. She looks—very nearly—the way she does in that old photograph, her and me and Grandma Clarah out by the reservoir.
“I’m fine, Emily,” she says, neatly sidestepping my actual question, which is so typical of her that I am tempted to believe her. “There was no need for you to leave work early. I know Benny needs you more than I do at the moment.” She takes another sip of tea. “You could have come in afterwards, if you wanted to. They say I can probably go home tomorrow, in any case.”
She’s peeping at me over the rim of her teacup, grinning like a naughty schoolgirl—See what I did. Trying to boss me about like any normal mother. She can be like this after the treatments—it’s as if the rarefied oxygen cleans out her brain, or something. I know it won’t last, but it makes me feel like crying, nonetheless.
Just to have her back again.
Sometimes I forget how much I miss her.
I sit down on the plastic chair at the side of the bed. “I’m here now,” I say. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.” I reach for her free hand across the bedcovers and she lets me take it. After a couple of minutes one of the ward staff brings me a cup of tea of my own. It’s good just to sit, to not feel responsibility or the need for action. The mechanics of this place are unknown to me, and therefore the urge to do, to change, to control is entirely absent.
Moolie begins telling me about the TV programme she was watching before she had her turn. Yet another documentary about the Mars mission— no surprises there. I’d rather she told me what it was that made her go outside by herself, but she waves my question away like an importunate fly.
“That girl,” she says instead. “That girl, Zhanna. She’s twenty-six tomorrow, did you know that? She says she doesn’t want children, that her work is enough for her. She’ll be dead before she’s forty, more than likely. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“You were younger than she is when you had me, Mum,” I say. “Did you know what you were doing?”
Moolie shakes her head slowly and deliberately from side to side. “No, I didn’t,” she says. “I didn’t have a clue.”
Then she says something strange.
“I won’t always get better, Emily. The day will come when I don’t come home. You should have a talk with Benny, before that day comes. There’s no point in us pretending. Not anymore.”
The mug of tea is still warm between my hands but in spite of this I suddenly feel cold all over. When I ask Moolie what she’s talking about she refuses to answer.
BY THE TIME I leave the hospital my shift has been over for ages. I decide to go back to the hotel anyway, just in case anything cropped up after I left. I check in with housekeeping and when I’ve satisfied myself that no major disasters have occurred in my absence I go in search of Benny. I find him in his office. There’s a semicircle of empty chairs in front of his desk, the ghost of a meeting. Benny is alone, sitting very still in his chair, reading something—a book?—by the light of his desk lamp. He seems miles away, absent in a manner that is most unlike him.
When he realises I’m there he jerks upright, and there’s an expression on his face—panic, almost—as if I’ve caught him out in a secret. He slams the book shut, making a slapping sound.
It’s pointless him trying to hide it, though. I’d know the book anywhere, because it belongs to us, to Moolie and me. It’s The Art of Space Travel.
“Emily,” Benny says. He’s watching my face for signs of disaster and at the same time he still looks guilty. It’s a weird combination, almost funny. “I wasn’t expecting you back. How’s your mother?”
“Moolie’s fine,” I say. “They’re letting her out tomorrow. What are you doing with that?”
I am talking about the book, of course, which I can’t stop staring at, the way Benny is holding it to him, like a shield. All of a sudden there’s this noise in my ears, a kind of roaring sound, and I’m thinking of Moolie and Moolie telling me that I should talk to Benny.
I’m thinking of the way Benny is always asking after Moolie, and what Moolie said before, such a long time ago, about Benny arriving in this country with a cardboard suitcase and fake Levis, and a gold watch that he had to sell to get the money to rent a room.
“Emily,” Benny says again, and the way he says my name—like he’s apologising for something—makes me feel even weirder. He unfolds the book again across his lap, opening it to the centre, where I know there’s a doublepage colour spread of the Milky Way, with its billions of stars, all buzzing and fusing together, cloudy and luminous, like the mist as it rises from the surface of the George VI Reservoir.
Benny runs his fingers gently across the paper. It makes a faint squeaking sound. I know exactly how that paper feels: soft to the touch, slightly furry with impacted dust, old.
Benny is touching the book as if it is his.
My stomach does a lurch, as if the world is travelling too fast suddenly, spinning out of control across the blackly infinite backdrop of the whole of space.
“One of my schoolteachers gave me this book,” Benny says. “His name was Otto Okora. His parents brought him here to London when he was six years old. They never returned to Africa, but Otto did. He came back to teach high school in Freetown and that’s where he stayed. He said that England was too cold and too crowded, and that the sky here was never black enough to see the stars. He had this thing about Africa being closer to outer space than any other continent. ‘We never lost our sense of life’s mysteries,’ was what he used to say. Otto was crazy about outer space. He would sit us down in the long hot afternoons and tell us stories about the first moon landings and the first space stations, the first attempts to map the surface of Mars. It was like poetry to me, Emily, and I could never get enough of it. I learned the names of the constellations and how to see them. I knew by heart the mass and volume and composition of each of the planets in our solar system. I even learned to draw my own star maps—impossible journeys to distant planets that no one in a thousand of our lifetimes will ever see. I saw them, though. I saw them at night, when I couldn’t sleep. Instead of counting chickens I would count stars, pic
king them out from my memory one by one, like diamonds from a black silk handkerchief.”
Like diamonds from a black silk handkerchief.
I want to hug him. Even in the midst of my confusion I want to hug him and tell him that I feel the same, that I have always felt the same, that we are alike.
That we are alike, of course we are.
The truth has been here in front of me, all the time. How stupid am I?
There’s a kind of book called a grimoire, which is a book of spells. I’ve never seen one—I don’t know if such a thing really exists, even—but The Art of Space Travel has always felt to me like it had magic trapped in it. Like you could open its pages and accidentally end up somewhere else. All those dazzling ropes of stars, all those thousands of possible futures, and futures’ futures.
All those enchanted luminous pathways, blinking up at us through the darkness, like the lights of a runway.
I clear my throat with a little cough. I haven’t a single clue what I ought to say.
“Your mother did her nut when you first got a job here,” Benny says quietly. “She called me on the phone, tore me off a strip. She said I wasn’t to breathe a word, under pain of death. That was the first time we’d spoken to one another in ten years.”
“I WAS SUPPOSED to study medicine,” Benny says to me later. “My heart was never in it, though. I didn’t know what I wanted, only that I wanted to find a bigger world than the world I came from. I remember it as if it was yesterday, standing there on the tarmac and looking up at this hotel and just liking the name of it. I gazed up at the big lit-up star logo and it was as if I could hear Otto Okora saying, You go for it, Benny boy, that’s a good omen. I liked the people and I liked the bustle and I liked the lights at night. All the taking off and landing, the enigma of arrival. There’s a book with that name—your mother gave me a copy right back at the beginning, when she still believed in me and things were good between us. I never got round to reading it, but I loved that title. I loved it that I’d finally discovered something I was good at. “Would she mind very much, do you think?” Benny says. “If I went to see her?”
“It’s your funeral,” I say, and shrug. I try and picture it as it might happen on TV, Benny pressing Moolie’s skinny hand to his lips while she smiles weakly up from the pillows and whispers his name. You see how funny that is, right?
“Only don’t go blaming me if she bites your head off.”
ZHANNA SOROKINA IS shorter than she appears on television. She has short mouse-brown hair, and piercing blue eyes. She looks like a school kid.
When I ask her if she’ll sign The Art of Space Travel she looks confused. “But I did not write this,” she says.
“I know that,” I say. “But it’s a book about space. My dad gave it to me. It would mean a lot to me if you would sign it. As a souvenir.”
She uses the pen I give her, a blue Bic, to sign the title page. She writes her name twice, first in the sweeping Cyrillic script she would have learned at school and then again underneath in spiky Latin capitals.
“Is this okay?” she asks.
“Very,” I reply. “Thank you.”
Sorokina smiles, very briefly, and then I see her awareness of me leak from her eyes as she moves away towards the lift that will take her up to the tenth-floor news suite and the waiting cameras, the media frenzy that will surround her for the remainder of her time here on Earth. Her bodyguard moves in to shield her.
It’s the last and only time I will see her close to.
In leaving this world, she makes me feel more properly a part of it.
I WISH I had a child I could one day tell about this moment. I’ve never felt like this before, but suddenly I do.
BENNY WOULD KILL me if he knew I was down here. I’m supposed to be upstairs, in the news suite, making sure they’re up and running with the drinks trolleys. That there are three different kinds of bottled beer, instead of the two that would be usual for these kinds of occasions.
WHISPER ROAD (MURDER BALLAD NO. 9)
Caitlín R. Kiernan
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN (www.caitlinrkiernan) is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and the New York Times has declared her ‘one of our essential writers of dark fiction.’ Her recent novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and, to date, her short stories have been collected in thirteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, and the World Fantasy Award winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently she’s editing her fourteenth and fifteenth collections – Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales and Dear Sweet Filthy World. She has recently concluded Alabaster, her award-winning, three-volume graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics. She is currently working on her next novel, Interstate Love Song, based on the story that appeared in last year’s volume. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
IT MAKES ME think of skipping stones, the way the pale red light skips along above the tree tops. It makes me think of finding a cobble on the beach, slate or granite or schist, no more than half the size of my palm, smoothed by ages of weather and not ground quite entirely flat. I put my thumb here, and I put my middle finger here, the weight of the stone cradled by my index finger. The stone hits the water, though the pale red light does not quite seem to touch the tops of the trees growing out beyond the edges of the cornfields. There is no moon tonight, no clouds, but no moon, either, and the light is very bright, silhouetted against the southern July sky. I ask Easter if she sees it, too. It’s always good to be sure I’m not the only one. All too often I have found that I am the only one. Easter is messing around with the radio, looking for a station that isn’t country music or preaching or hip hop, and she asks, “What? Do I see what?” I say, “If you’d look, you’d know what.” Or she wouldn’t, but, whichever way, I’d still have my answer. It skips like a grey slate cobble, that light, not moving smoothly along in its course, but buffeted from below, and I think how striking air and striking water are not necessarily so very different. Easter raises her head, and by the dashboard lights her bottle-blue eyes almost glow. It was her eyes that got me first; not her ass or her tits or the promise of what’s between her legs, but those startling blue eyes. I take my right hand off the steering wheel and point out the open driver’s side window. “Real low,” I tell her. “Right above the treetops. If you see it, you’ll know. If you see it, just tell me, so I know it isn’t only me.” And I know right away from her expression that she does, indeed, see the pale red light skimming along almost like a skipping stone on the waters of West Cove or Mackerel Cove or Hull Cove. But I still want to hear her say it out loud. She left the radio tuned to a blur of static, and I almost reach over and switch it off, but then she says, “Yeah, I see it. Don’t you think it’s probably an airplane? Or maybe a helicopter?” No, I reply, because it looks a lot more like a stone bouncing across water than it looks like either a helicopter or a plane, and, honestly, it doesn’t look anything at all like a skipping stone. The comparison only comes to mind because of the way it’s moving. Behavior, I think, is not appearance. “Then what is it?” Easter wants to know, as if I have the answer. And I catch a dull sliver of anxiety dug into her voice. That’s hardly surprising, since the thing above the trees can’t be too much more than half a mile away from us, half a mile from the edge of Tuckertown Road to that black wall of maples and oaks and pines. It can’t be much more than a hundred feet above the treetops; maybe not even that. So, I don’t fault her for sounding just a little bit nervous. Here it is past midnight, and we’re the only car in sight. After that ugly piece of business back at the farm, we’re both certainly worse for the wear, and now there’s this thing that I’m pretty sure isn’t a helicopter or an airplane, and she says, “I can’t hear it. That close, don’t you think we ought to be able to hear it, whatever it is?” I tell her I need a cigarette, please, and so she lights one and sets it between my lips. I breathe in smoke, willing the nicotine to clear my head, t
rying to concentrate on the road, because we just passed a yellow, diamond-shaped sign with the stark black outline of a buck printed on it. Wouldn’t that be hilarious, a fucking deer dashes out in front of us, and we’re both staring at a light in the sky. Next thing you know, bam, we’re dead in the proverbial ditch, so there’s our comeuppance. If you subscribe to notions of karma and fair play and the witches’ threefold law, well, that would be our ironic just reward. “How fast are we going?” asks Easter, and I say, “You’ve got eyes, don’t you?” But I glance at the speedometer, anyway, and the needle is sitting right at seventy. “Maybe you ought to slow down,” she tells me. Maybe I should, I tell myself, because getting stopped for speeding would be almost as funny as hitting a deer. I ease my foot off the gas pedal, and the speedometer needle promptly retreats to sixty-five, sixty, fifty-five. “Hey, Chaz,” says Easter, “it’s slowing down, too,” and when I look I see that she’s right. Out there across the field, the pale red light hasn’t moved on ahead of us, like it should have. We aren’t trailing along behind, as we should now be doing. “What the fuck,” she says. “What the fuck would do that?” Like I should know. Like I do know, but I’ve decided at this late date to start keeping secrets from her. “Can you please find a station?” I ask. “The static’s getting on my nerves. I hate that sound. I’ve always hated that sound. It’s like hearing ants.” Easter switches off the radio, and I say fine, yeah, that works, too. We pass a turnoff for some or another nameless dirt road and a couple of big trees very briefly block our view of the thing in the sky. “Maybe we should stop,” she says, and I ask her what good she thinks that would do. “It might keep going, Chaz. It might pass us by, if we were to stop now. You could pull over there,” and she points through the windshield towards a place up ahead where the shoulder is a little wider and paved with gravel. “You could just pull over, and we could see if it keeps going.” She sounds a lot more afraid than she did only a minute before, that strained brittleness that comes before panic starts to creep into her voice. And I realize that I find this more disconcerting than the sight of the thing in the sky, because Easter is the one who never loses her shit. Not really. I couldn’t count all the times she’s talked me down. I wouldn’t care to try. Back at the farm, when the dogs started barking and I reached for my gun, she was there to say, “No, no, Chaz. It’s okay. They’re just dogs. People will think it was a coyote set them off. Or just a skunk. Or a raccoon. There are lots of things out here to make dogs bark at night. No one even notices. No one gives it hardly more than a passing thought.” But barking dogs are one thing, and that pale red light skimming along above the trees, well, that’s another altogether. I don’t pull over, and we rush past the gravelly place at the side of the road. Easter makes a small, uneasy noise, and she takes the cigarette from my mouth and sits smoking and watching the strange light out beyond the cornfield. “Just a little farther,” I tell her. “That Jehovah’s Witness church, that’s not too far from here. I can pull over there, if you’d like.” The tip of the cigarette flares in the dark, and she exhales a grey cloud; the wind through the open windows pulls it apart. “They don’t believe in blood transfusions. Jehovah’s Witnesses, I mean. Did you know that?” she asks me, and I say no, I didn’t. “Well, it’s true. They don’t. They believe that blood is sacred, so it’s some sort of blasphemy or something, some kind of unholy desecration, to get a blood transfusion. So, they’ll just let their people bleed to death and shit. No, I don’t think we should stop there. We should find somewhere else to stop.” And fine, I tell her. We won’t stop at the church. We’ll keep going. “They won’t allow organ transplants, either,” she says. “Because, when you get someone else’s heart, or their liver, or their kidneys, you’re inevitably gonna get some of their blood in the bargain. It can’t be helped, and so they’re also against organ transplants. They’d rather let people die.” I take my eyes off the road long enough to see that the red light is still out there, pacing us. Skipping. Skimming. And then the landscape on my left abruptly changes, and the fields are replaced by a merciful tangle of trees growing too closely together, grape vines, greenbriers, bracken, and I actually breathe a sigh of relief. Now it can’t see us, I think. Now it’ll get bored and go away, find some other car to follow. For a moment, neither I nor Easter says a word. I don’t look at her, but I can feel her blue, blue eyes staring past me at the open driver’s side window, staring towards the welcome, concealing sanctuary of the woods outside the window. “You okay?” I finally ask her, more to break the silence than anything else. She laughs a not entirely convincing sort of laugh and says, “Jesus in Heaven, what the fuck is wrong with us? Sure, that was weird. That was really fucking weird, but what the fuck is wrong with us, freaking out like that over a goddamn airplane or a helicopter.” And I tell her it’s just we’re both still keyed up after the scene back at the farm. That it’s probably nothing but the adrenaline making us jump at shadows. “Well, we gotta calm down,” she says. “We’re not ever gonna to get to Hartford, or anywhere else, if we don’t we don’t get a grip and our shit together.” I tell her we’ll be fine, everything’s gonna be right as rain, and now she’s opening the glove compartment, digging around for the bottle of Percocet she keeps stashed in there. Back at the farm on Whisper Road, she was the one dolling out calm and reassurances, and the comforting words sound funny coming from me, as unconvincing as that laugh of hers. She finds the bottle and dry swallows two of the pastel yellow pills; she offers me one, but I say no. Not when I’m driving. When I’m driving I don’t drink and I don’t smoke weed and I don’t take pills, and Easter says, “Suit yourself. “ And then she says, “There’s a place you can pull over at Worden’s Pond. It’s not much farther, a little parking lot with a dock for fishermen and kayaks and stuff. We can stop there, just long enough to catch our breath.” That sounds good, I reply. That sounds perfect. So, we’ll stop at Worden’s Pond. Easter puts the prescription bottle back into the glove compartment and slams it shut, because the latch is busted and if you don’t slam it, the door doesn’t stay closed. She flicks the cigarette butt out the window. In the rearview, I see it hit the road and die in a bouncing flurry of orange sparks. “Maybe it was a drone,” she says. “I’ve never seen one at night, so maybe that’s what it was. I don’t know what they’d look like in the dark, but they might look like that. I was reading a magazine article about using drones to catch illegal deer hunters. You know, poachers. And to spot forest fires and check on power lines—all sorts of other everyday things you might not know about drones getting used for. I bet that’s what it was. I bet it was just a drone.” Maybe so, I tell her. Maybe that’s exactly what it was. And I’m also thinking, I expect the police use them, too, but I keep that to myself. The police aren’t looking for us. No one’s looking for us. Not yet. No one saw us, and, besides, it’ll be at least another day or two before anyone goes poking around the farm and calls the cops. It might have been longer, if she’d let me kill the dogs. Those dogs get hungry, they’ll attract attention, no matter what Easter says about no one out here paying any mind to barking dogs. But when I told her I was going to kill them, the beagle and the German Shepherd, she said she’d leave me if I did. She helped me tie up the man and the woman, and she watched me cut their throats, but then when I say I need to put down a couple of mutts to save our hides, to buy us time, and she tells me she’ll walk if I do. I don’t know if she really meant it, but I didn’t kill the fucking dogs. “Isn’t it crueler to leave them here to starve?” I asked her, and she replied, “They won’t starve. Someone will find them.” And then someone will be looking for us, only I didn’t say that. “We used to swim in Worden’s Pond,” says Easter, “when we were kids, my brothers and me. My brothers used to catch turtles and water snakes there.” We pass the church—the Kingdom Hall, according the sign hanging out front—and the woods on our left give way to open fields again. I taste foil, and for a few seconds my heart is a long-distance runner thudding in my chest. “Don’t look,” Eas
ter tells me, as if I have some choice in the matter. Of course I look, but there isn’t anything out there to see. No pale red phantom skipping along. Nothing but dry-stone walls and alfalfa and more rows of tall corn, then a black line of trees to mark the boundary of someone’s toil, marking off the southern edge of the fields. I think about how those cornstalks would rustle out there in the dark, whenever the wind stirs, and it gives me a shiver. “It’s gone,” I say, not feeling even half as relieved as I should. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now. Relax. Find something on the radio.” Easter turns her head to see for herself, cause maybe after the way things went back on Whisper Road, my word isn’t good enough for her anymore. I said no one was gonna get hurt, and then they did, and so I can’t exactly blame her for losing faith. But I want to, whether blaming her is right or wrong. It’ll be a long, long time before I’m over losing her trust. “It’s gone,” she says, like an echo, and I say, “Like I told you, huh?” She turns away from me then, turning head and shoulders to stare at the summer night from the vantage point of her own window. “We should stop anyway,” she says. “Just to clear our heads.” I nod and tell her, “Fine, sure, we’ll stop anyway,” even though I only want to keep driving. The tires are making music, the steady lullaby hum of rubber against asphalt, and what matters now is putting as many miles behind us as quickly as possible – get out of Rhode Island, get up to Hartford, ditch this car, get some fucking sleep, then figure out what comes next. Easter has friends in Hartford, people she says will be sympathetic to our situation – for the right price. She switches the radio on again, and this time it only takes her a moment to find the college station out of Kingston. They’re playing the Rolling Stones, “Start Me Up,” a song I know from my father’s old records. “Leave it there,” I say to her. “That’s good. You sure we need to stop now? Can’t be more than twenty, twenty-five miles from here to the state line. We could stop then, stop and piss and top off the tank. Get some coffee.” But she stubbornly shakes her head, no, “No, I need to stop before that, I need to get some air.” As if all the air in South County isn’t blowing in through her open window, whipping at her long hair, roaring in our ears. I can smell the ocean on that air, the ocean and cooling tar and fresh-cut hay. And then she adds, “I need to wash my hands.” Easter looks down at her open palms. She washed her hands back at the farm after I killed those two, washed her hands twice in the kitchen sink with scalding hot water and liquid dishwashing soap, Palmolive or Dawn or Joy or something like that. I finally had to tell her to stop it, that she was gonna scrub all the skin off if she didn’t, and we needed to get the fuck out of there. I couldn’t have her going all Lady Macbeth on me, especially when she wasn’t the one who held the knife and there wasn’t a drop of blood on her anywhere. I check the speedometer, the gas gauge, the odometer, the clock. I almost tell her she can wait to wash her hands again, that it won’t kill her to wait, but then I lose my nerve. I’m a goddamn coward when it comes to Easter. “It wasn’t necessary,” she says, “what you did.” And I tell her, “Well, it seemed pretty necessary at the time. But now it’s done, and there’s no point being sorry for something that can’t be undone. That’s just what happened. That’s just the way it went.” She rubs her palms together, wrings her hands, then glances past me at the place where the pale red light isn’t skipping along beneath the sky and above the trees. “They got kids,” she says. “I saw photographs. Kids and grandkids, and all I’m saying is it wasn’t necessary, and you promised no one would get hurt. I’ve never done anything like that before, that’s all. I’d never seen anything like that done.” I say, “You’ve seen it in the movies, lots of times. You’ve seen it on TV.” And she says, “That isn’t the same. That isn’t the same at all.” She’s absolutely fucking right, of course, but I don’t tell her so, and I don’t apologize, either. Instead, I say “Don’t pretend you didn’t know what I am.” She takes another cigarette from the half-empty pack on the dash, lights it, and at first I think she’s staring at me, but really she’s only staring at the place where the pale red light isn’t. In the darkness, her face is like a painting on black velvet. “Don’t you even feel anything?” she asks. “Anything at all?” Before I can reply, she says, “There’s a little cemetery off over there, on the far side of that pasture. There’s a dozen or so marble headstones, but the dates are mostly worn away. Acid rain, you know, it ruins the marble. Acid rain from pollution, makes the stone soft. Makes it rot.” She pauses, takes a drag, holds in the smoke a moment, exhales. “I haven’t ever killed anything, much less anyone.” We pass a few houses lined up neatly on either side of Tuckertown Road, and the night is briefly interrupted by streetlights and porch lights and lamps still burning in windows, unsuspecting people asleep and dreaming in their beds or up late or maybe even already awake again and getting ready for tomorrow. Tidy rows of mailboxes. Tidy yards and tidy fences. “You knew,” I say, and “Yeah, Chaz, I knew,” she replies. “But knowing isn’t the same thing as seeing, and it certainly isn’t the same thing as being a party to it.” And now the houses are behind us, along with whatever comfort might be found in the cold white electric glow of all those lights, whatever dim sanctuary. The night takes us back. The night is a jealous bitch, but she’s also forgiving. I’m driving too fast again, my foot too heavy on the accelerator, and I’m trying to decide if the speed is worth the risk of cops and hitting deer when I smell sulfur. Before I can ask Easter if she smells it, she says. “Jesus, did you hear that?” and I see she’s got both her hands clapped over her ears. “No,” I tell her. “I didn’t hear anything.” And she asks, “Is that the car? Jesus, is it the car making that noise?” The stink of sulfur is suddenly overwhelming, and my stomach rolls like I’m getting seasick, like I’m stuck on the ferry from Galilee to Block Island. “Is it Morse code?” she wants to know. I’m going to puke, I think. I’m seasick without even being near the sea, and I’m going to fucking puke right here on the steering wheel and in my lap if I don’t get off the road right now. I put my foot on the brake, slowing down and looking for some safe place to pull over. But there are steep shoulders on the left and on the right of us, steep shoulders and deep, weed-filled ditches. Then I finally hear whatever it is Easter’s hearing, only it isn’t loud at all, and certainly it’s nothing that would ever make you want to cover your ears. In fact, it seems very far away, a muted, indistinct beep-beep-beeping. Maybe it does sound like Morse code. Maybe that’s exactly what it sounds like, but I wouldn’t know. I can tie forty different knots, every single one in the Boy Scout handbook, but I don’t know shit about Morse code. “There’s something wrong,” Easter says, hands still over her ears, and if she sounded scared before, now she sounds terrified. “There’s something wrong with the sky. Don’t slow down. Don’t stop. Please, don’t stop.” And back at the farm on Whisper Road, hardly even an hour and a half ago, she’s watching me tie up the man and his wife with lengths of strong jute rope I bought that afternoon down in Wakefield. Easter asked me if duct tape wouldn’t be easier and faster, and I told her easier and faster is sloppy, and sloppy is how people get caught. Sloppy is what the sheriffs and police detectives are always counting on. “Like this,” I say, standing at an angle so she can see my hands. “Over and under and around.” The man and woman are silent. I haven’t gagged them, and I keep expecting him to make threats. I keep expecting her to beg or start crying. But they don’t do either. I wish they would; it would be so much easier if they would, if I were angry. Anger takes the edge off everything. Anger is better than whisky or cocaine when I need to steady my nerves. “Can’t you talk, old lady?” I ask the woman, looping the rope about her skinny ankles, cinching it tightly. “Cat got your tongue?” Easter tells me to leave her alone. “We got what we came for, didn’t we? There’s no point being cruel.” And I see then that the old woman is watching her, not me. So is the man, and I know they’re both thinking how Easter’s the weak one in this equation, how whatever slim hope they might have of seeing daylight and getting out o
f this alive resides there in her startling blue eyes. Hell, from where they’re sitting right now, Easter probably looks as sweet as the Divine Baby Jesus wrapped up safe in Mother Mary’s arms. It’s her eyes. Her eyes have mercy in them. When we first met, I told her I’d never seen eyes that shade of blue, and that’s when she told me it was called cornflower blue. “It’s just a weed that grows wild in cornfields,” she said. “Cornflowers, I mean. They bloom in June and flower all summer long.” So, that’s what I’m thinking, there in the farmhouse, in that that old couple’s bedroom, looping rope round and round, that these two see God in my lover’s cornflower eyes. “Did you hear that?” Easter wants to know, and when I ask, “Did I hear what?” she shakes her pretty head and turns away. “Just hurry,” she tells me. “Finish tying them up and let’s get out of here.” I reply, “Hurrying is just as bad as being sloppy. Hurrying makes you sloppy.” Easter, she glances at the alarm clock ticking away the night on the little table beside the bed. The clock’s face is washed with soft green light, like dashboard light, like the light on Easter’s face when she reaches for a cigarette or opens the glove compartment or wanders the radio dial looking for a station that suits her fancy. “Sunrise is at 5:16,” she says, “and we’re expected in Hartford before noon. I’m not saying be sloppy, but we can’t hang around here all night.” And right here I feel the spark of anger I was hoping for, right fucking here, and I say, “Okay, fine. My bad. Let’s get this the fuck over with and get back on the road.” I reach down and pull the butterfly knife out of my right boot, flip it open, and Easter just stands there watching me while I cut their throats. I open their carotids and the arterial spray paints the floor and walls. Neither of them makes a sound. They don’t beg. They don’t whimper. They don’t cry out in fear or pain. And I think that’s fucking creepy, that’s goddamn fucking eerie, and I can’t help but wonder if this whole thing’s gone south on us. I let go of the old woman’s body, and it pitches forward, landing face down in its own blood. Her own blood. “You didn’t have to do that,” says Easter, just barely loud enough for me to hear. “You promised me no one was going to get hurt.” Then she looks down at her hands, then back to the bodies, then back at her hands again. That’s when she goes downstairs to the kitchen sink. I stand there in the bedroom a few minutes longer, staring at the dead woman and her husband, not really giving a shit that they’re dead, but pissed off that Easter made me kill them. Pissed off that she’s pissed at me, when it was her fault, when she’s the one that threw that bright copper spark that set me on fire. I wipe the knife clean on the nubby white chenille bedspread, fold the blade closed, and stick it back into my boot. I go downstairs and find her at the sink. “I didn’t mean to do that,” I tell her. “I didn’t come in here meaning to kill anyone.” She doesn’t look up, just squirts more soap from the green plastic bottle into her hands and says, “I never said you did. But they’re still dead, regardless.” I tell her that we need to go, and Easter says go on ahead, she’s coming, she’ll be right behind me, she just has to wash her hands first. And this is when the dogs in the pen out back start barking. I reach for the pistol tucked into the waistband of my jeans, but she stops me. “Why is it they call you Easter, anyway?” I asked her, the first night we met, and she told me, “When I was a little girl, I used to raise rabbits. My daddy, he started calling me Easter when I was a kid, and it just sorta stuck.” And I said, “Rabbits? For what? For the skins? For the meat?” And she made a face and said no, just for pets. She never let anyone kill one of her rabbits. No one ever tried. And there in the farmhouse on Whisper Road she puts her hands on mine, her hands all wet and soapy, hands that have never been stained with the blood of rabbits or human beings. She tells me how I’m not going to shoot those dogs, because there’s no need, because people out here are used to hearing dogs barking at night, and they’ll just think it’s because there’s a skunk or a coyote or a raccoon poking about the garbage cans, getting them stirred up. “No more killing,” she says, “not tonight. Not if you want me to stay.” And then she looks back over her shoulder at the steam rising from the sink because she left the tap on, steam fogging the windowpane above the sink, and she says, “Chaz, did you hear that?” I ask her did I hear what, because all I heard is the damn dogs, and she says, “I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. Was it Morse code?” And she must have shut off the water before we left the house, but, if so, I can’t remember her doing it. I can’t remember walking back up the dirt road to where I’d left the car parked in the shade of two huge oak trees, either. And there must be a word for this, when you suddenly realize that you can’t remember something you should, something that’s just fucking happened. “Is that the car making that noise?” she wants to know. We were standing in the kitchen, and the dogs were barking, and everything smelled like dishwashing liquid and blood, and then we’re driving down Tuckertown Road, and when I turn my head I see that pale red light skipping along above the treetops. “No,” Easter insists, “there was something else, something in between there, after the kitchen, but before you asked me to look and tell you what I saw.” And I say, “I don’t think I’d know Morse code if I heard it.” I can’t remember getting back into the car or turning the key in the ignition. I can’t remember stowing the box from the old couple’s basement in the trunk of the car, but I know that’s exactly where I put it. “Dots and dashes,” says Easter. She’s standing alone at the far end of the dock jutting out into Worden’s Pond. I’m looking north, and on my right the sky’s beginning to brighten. On my left, the night is as dark as night can be. There’s a mist rising up off the water and from the tall grass and cattails growing all along the shore. There’s a canoe tied up at the end of the dock, and Easter says, “A lot of people think the first time anyone used S.O.S. to call for help was when the Titanic sank, but that’s a myth.” I’m sitting on the hood of the car, watching her, trying to remember what happened after I smelled sulfur and she heard Morse Code, how we got from there to the pond. That must be half a mile or more I’ve forgotten, and now the sun is coming up, even though the last time I checked the clock on the dash it was only a little past two thirty. I’ve forgotten half a mile and more than two and a half hours. “How’s that even possible?” I ask her, and that’s when I see the light, way out over the water, hovering just a few feet above the steaming surface of the pond. “Three dots,” says Easter, “three dashes, then three more dots. Three short, three long, three short. Some people think it stands for something, like ‘save our ship’ or ‘save our souls,’ but the truth is it doesn’t stand for anything at all.” She’s holding my pistol in her right hand, holding it down at her side, staring out across the water at the light that isn’t skipping or skimming, but just hanging there like a fat butchered hog. “You should come back,” I say. “You shouldn’t get so close to that thing. We don’t know what it wants.” And I think then how the hood of the car is cold, how the engine block isn’t popping and pinging the way it does when it’s cooling off, and I tell Easter again that she should come back. “We don’t even know what it is,” I say. I’m amazed at how perfectly, utterly calm I sound. “Come back over here, and tell me more about the Titanic and Morse code. I don’t know where you learn all this stuff.” She shakes her head, and when she does I imagine that the pale red light sort of bobs along in unison. It isn’t making any sound whatsoever. “No, Chaz,” she says. “I think I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. You promised me no one would get hurt tonight. You promised me, and then you killed them, anyway. You didn’t need to do that.” And it occurs to me that someone’s standing there beside her, someone or only the shadow of someone. Get up, I think. Get the fuck up off your ass and go get her. But I don’t move. I’m not even sure I can move, my arms and legs feel so heavy, like lead weights, like marble headstones etched by years and years of acid rain. Out on the pond, the pale red light waits impatiently, and there on the dock, Easter raises the pistol and presses the barrel beneath her chin. Get up. Get the fuck up and d
o something. But then the shadow leans in close, and I imagine that it’s whispering to Easter secret words that only she’s supposed to hear, truths and revelations that I’ll never know. She squeezes the trigger, and thunder blooms and rumbles and rolls away like sunrise, dashing the night apart upon the hateful shingle of the coming day.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 47