Flock of Shadows

by Houguez, Claire; Parfitt, Rebecca;

  I did not wish to ever leave that dream, but a hand was shaking me awake and there was Thomas, dressed in his own clothes again.

  The old woman had moved to an armchair by the fire where she slept, her mouth hanging open slightly, her chin sagging on her chest.

  Thomas led me to the door, tugging gently at my hand as I gazed at the old woman and hung back like a recalcitrant child. Then we were outside on the street once more and Thomas slammed the door behind us decisively.

  ‘You look ridiculous, you know,’ he said in a hiss. ‘Here are your things.’ He pushed a brown paper parcel into my arms. ‘It goes without saying that you have shocked me. How could you drink that dishwater she served us? I thought you’d have the good sense to pretend like I did. And as for that liquor! My god, you’re quite drunk, aren’t you?’

  He set off up the steep hill towards the entrance to the château again. He was carrying his cane tucked under one arm and striding ahead. I ran a few paces to catch up with him, but my head was reeling, and the shoes I wore might have done justice to walking, but running uphill half drunk in the blazing heat and light of mid-afternoon?

  A small truck came rattling round the bend and I saw the driver’s eye follow me, turning his head to pucker his lips as he let out a shrill whistle of approval.

  Thomas had rounded the bend and by the time I caught up he was entering the carved archway that led into the château. I followed and found myself at the foot of a broad spiral staircase. I paused a moment listening to distant echoing steps going up, further and further away from me. I must have gone up forty or so steps, when I stopped, opened the package, retrieved my walking shoes and slipped them on. My head was clearing; I felt energised and so I began to move faster. The dress brushed against my legs and the rubber soled shoes gave grace and accuracy to my fast moving feet. Up and up I went, stopping once to gaze out of a narrow window to the cobbled courtyard far below where other visitors milled about in pairs and groups. One man stood just below me, a camera aimed upwards, obscuring his face. Where was my camera? Thomas had dragged me away so suddenly I had not even thought of it. I threw myself at the stairs again, running, taking two, then three steps at a time. Surely he would have picked the camera up for me. It had been there on the table near his elbow. He knew what it meant to me!

  I reached the top of the stairs. They ended in a circular well in which there was only one door. A wooden door that was banded with black iron and scarred all over from bottom to top with carved signatures, many of which were dated. I saw the year 1668 swing away from my gaze as I pushed the door open. A clear fresh wind hit me, tossing my hair and rippling through my dress. Ahead of me was a narrow walkway that led from one tower to the next. On one side was a crenelated wall, on the other side nothing but a sheer drop. Thomas stood halfway, he had the camera in his hands and was leaning forward slightly from the waist aiming the lens at the courtyard. I watched him for a moment with relief, thankful that he had remembered the camera. Then I realised that any shots he took would ruin my pictures by producing double exposures!

  ‘Thomas!’ I called. ‘Don’t!’

  He turned sharply at the sound of my voice and his walking stick, which he had tucked under his arm, clattered onto the walkway, then half rolled, half bounced over the edge. He lunged sideways, his hand clawing helplessly for the cane, then his injured leg buckled and, both arms flailing, he pitched forward over the edge.

  There was nothing slow or magnificent about his descent, it was nothing like flying. When he landed there was a noise that I will never forget. A woman screamed, but it seemed very far away. I don’t think it was me.

  I stood there blinking for a moment, hardly believing what had happened. I could not take it in. I stared at the place where he had stood as if willing what I saw to develop fully just I watched images appear in the developing fluid in the darkroom. Then my eyes went to the ground where his feet had been. There was my camera, the case half open, the neck strap making a looped whorl. It had landed on its back, the delicate glass lens uppermost. Unbroken.

  Enter the Petal Throne

  Morgan Downie

  It was a place I wasn’t unaware of but had never visited, had no reason to. It was not a place I was recommended, nor had I been sent. The frontage was upholstered in what appeared to be red leather, studded with brass nails. It had an uneasy fleshy feel to it, like the blush of freshly beaten skin. The sign was simple, unobtrusive. It read ‘The Petal Throne.’

  My mother had warned me about such places. Not that she knew about them beyond what she had been told. Not that she could have imagined the places I had actually been. My mother with her blue door, rowan at the gate, all that fierce belief, withered.

  The traffic roared in my ears. An old city, brazen enough to forget its own memory. I was not so fortunate.

  I stepped over the threshold. Distant music, muffled, out of reach, the promise of lights, dancing but nothing to be seen other than the dim glow that illuminated row upon row of variously coloured liquids, clouded, viscous, odd shapes held within that could have been the slow drift of sediments or objects, misshapen, preserved.

  A man stepped forward from a hidden set of stairs, elaborately moustachioed, limbs creped in velvet. He smiled through the whitest of teeth and extended a hand.

  ‘Gilmartin’ he said, mellifluous and faintly haughty. ‘My name is Lachlan Gilmartin.

  How may I be of service?’

  ‘That depends on the service you provide,’ I said. His hand was damp to touch, cool but not weak. Any show of weakness was surely an affectation.

  His eyes glinted. ‘My dear man, we provide all of them.’

  ‘Then how will I know what I want?’

  ‘To know what we want,’ he said. ‘Is merely a matter of admitting it to oneself.’

  He turned my hand in his. ‘There are those charlatans, those mountebanks, who claim that in the pattern of your palm they can tell your future. The best they can provide is justification.’ His eyes were amber in the dim light. ‘Of course not all of us need such an excuse.’

  ‘I didn’t catch your name,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t give it.’

  He laughed. ‘Of course you didn’t. A nameless man. How charming. I once had a set of tarot cards that featured a nameless man. I forget what it meant. Something to do with loss or descent, it escapes me.’

  ‘I thought only charlatans claimed to tell the future.’

  ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘But the weak have their purpose don’t you think?’He held up a finger. ‘But none of this is of any use to you. Hieroglyphia,’ he called.

  ‘This gentleman requires assistance.’

  A figure approached, swathed in blue cloth. I could see only her eyes, a furious green.

  ‘Hieroglyphia?’ I asked.

  He smiled. ‘We have many names here. Only the fortunate may remain nameless for long.’

  The woman spoke, asked me to follow, raised her arm as if to beckon me.

  ‘I didn’t hear you,’ I said.

  ‘She cannot talk as you and I,’ said Gilmartin. ‘At least not in a form you will be able to understand.’

  She led me up a set of stairs. I felt his eyes on my back. greedy, voracious.

  A room full of diffuse light with a single chair and a stool in front of it. She motioned me to sit. She sat in front of me, face veiled, her head lowered so that I could no longer see her eyes. She took my hand. She spoke.

  I heard words. Some recognised, old words, strange dialects, others I had no knowledge of at all and mixed in amongst it the noises of creatures, clicks, chirps, a purr in her chest. And then where she touched me, embossed on my skin like the faintest of tattoos – a rising flock of aged birds, a book bound in wire, clasped shut. I tried to pull my hand away but could not, from the fast trap of her fingers a mouth arose shouting wordlessly.

  ‘You can’
t write?’ I asked.

  Spilled ink, a broken stylus, what appears to be cuneiform mixed in with an Arabic script, jumbled, senseless, blurring into a single blue line.

  I looked down at her. ‘What has this to do with me?’

  Up my arm waves appeared, a familiar sea, the nod of fishing boats in the bay, a boy standing at the sea’s edge, casting stones out against the surface.

  I covered the image with my hand. The sea washed against it. A nestle of houses appeared around the knuckles, smoke cast itself skywards above distant hills.

  I pulled my hand away.

  And on my arm fire, blue flames engulfing up past my elbow, houses, villages ablaze, people running, the silence of their screams mouths the gooseflesh of my skin, the spatter pattern of random gunfire. A deer runs through it all, mad, panicked, pursued by dogs which tear it down, choke themselves on its meat.

  She raised her green eyes. I said nothing.

  I saw her with a knife in her neck. No blood came.

  She released her grip.

  Lachlan Gilmartin smiled. His teeth glittered like undersea pearls. ‘What you saw was... troublesome?’

  I shrugged. ‘Bad dreams.’

  ‘If only,’ said Gilmartin. ‘Tell me, did you ever fear consequences?’

  ‘Consequences of what?’

  ‘I knew a woman,’ said Gilmartin. ‘Who found herself attracted to a certain type of man. And what men they were. Men without fear. Or so they said. Yet so full of fear they could only manifest it in others. Frightening men with names that coiled on her tongue. Butchers all. Imagine a beautiful warlord, hands blackened with the tales of what he has done. All she had was desire without thought of consequence. And there were consequences.’

  ‘Are you asking me some sort of question?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so bold.’

  Gilmartin turned to the shadows. ‘Quarantina,’ he called.

  ‘Another of your many names?’

  ‘Think of it as a joke,’ he said. ‘But with an element of mocking. Love is a sickness too, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t think.’

  ‘Indulge me,’ said Gilmartin. ‘The symptoms are the same, a certain physiological hyperactivity, a quickness in breathing, a racing pulse and then that sense that one is not quite oneself, a fever enters the personality, behaviour becomes irrational, overblown. Surely a man such as yourself must recognise the symptoms, that passion even if it is cause rather than effect?’

  ‘Do you think,’ I asked. ‘That somehow you know me?’

  ‘I know everyone,’ said Gilmartin. ‘Or at least I can recognise a little of myself in everyone.’

  From the darkness behind him a figure appeared, powdered, coiffured. For an instant she put me in mind of Madame de Stael. Her eyes were wide, her face flushed. I could hear the faint music of Chopin.

  ‘What is this talk of love?’ she said. ‘Surely the best in life is to love or to be loved.’

  ‘If that is true,’ I replied. ‘Then you must be among the most womanly of women.’

  Her eyebrows raised a little.

  Gilmartin laughed. ‘My dear fellow, you betray your education. Such delicacy in such a rough form. What are we to do with you?’

  Quarantina took my hand lightly in hers. Her fingers were dry as dust. She led me into a room occupied by a single baize covered table, tapping her way with a white cane.

  A bottle of green liquid stood upon it, an open smoking flame, a cube of sugar, a slotted spoon cut in the shape of crescents, cabbalistic symbols.

  ‘First, absinthe,’ said Quarantina, raising the filigreed spoon. I noticed the colour of her nails, scarlet with an undertone of corrupted umber, glistening like knives.

  ‘Absinthe?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Always.’

  ‘French or Bohemian?’

  I pointed to the flame. ‘I’d assumed Bohemian.’

  ‘You were correct,’ she said. ‘This is a place of fire.’

  I watched her in the light of the flame, her eyes luminous, blank. I became aware of her breathing, heavy, tubercular, the breathing of port vennels, the raw throats of fishwives, calloused with harbour talk. Her lungs creaked like overworked rope. The spoon tremored in her fingers.

  ‘This is old absinthe,’ she said. ‘Not that poor liquid that passes itself off under the same name these days.’

  ‘Then I have never tasted it,’ I said.

  She raised a glass. ‘It is wormwood. It is poison.’

  She spoke no more, put the glass to her lips, gestured that I should do the same. She poured again, repeated the same ritual, the sugar dissolving into a bubble of liquid, a gall of sweetness on the tongue, matching each other drink for drink.

  I was a green boat on a green sea, a state of paralysis in which I could neither speak nor move. Her hands curled around the oars, the blood red of her nails glowing dark as stigmata. She dipped a glass into the ocean, ice cold water into the green liquid, it turning milky, opaque, strange shapes rising like old ghosts.

  ‘The louche,’ she cried. ‘It is mother’s milk. Drink it down.’

  She forced it to my lips, the glass grinding against my teeth. I gagged, choking, retched into the bottom of the boat. She pulled me back up. My tongue lolled in my mouth.

  ‘Tell me about your mother.’

  She sat in a consulting room, a pen and notepad in her hand. Behind her, occupying the whole wall were Rothko prints, solid walls of maroon, glowering down upon me like corrupted flesh. ‘Tell me about your mother,’ she repeated.

  I tried to clear my head. There was nothing but fire, fire in the darkness as if it was a breathed presence and a roaring, a black roaring that filled my vision. Then a boy, a boy at the sea’s edge, banging on a drum. All around him gulls rose, a cloud of panicked wings, vortices of feather and beak until all that remained was the boy and the beach, his hand paused above the drum. The sky held its breath waiting for what he did next.

  And here I am. An alloyed landscape, a train yard, a single set of black rails to the horizon. Metal groaned around me, the mesh of giant cogs, forged iron, rust-red. It moved in a slop of grease dripping, forming ink pools on the ground. I struggled forward, barely able to move my legs. Steam vents purged foul smelling vapour, condensing in black streams upon my skin. There was a hammering, the glow and hiss of furnaces. I had no idea where I was and then just as suddenly a sound, the slide of a bolt, the familiarity of a chambered bullet. I remembered everything. I became a blade.

  I sucked the air back into my lungs, felt my face wet with tears. I jumped from my chair reaching for some form of defence, my arms flailing.

  She did not move. ‘A bad dream,’ she said and lit a cigarette.

  ‘And you,’ I asked. ‘What did you see?’

  She tapped a carmined nail against the rigid surface of her eye. ‘I see nothing at all.’

  I staggered towards the door. ‘I have to leave.’

  ‘If you do,’ she said. ‘Misfortune will surely follow.’

  I looked back to the green bottle on the table. ‘Then let it.’

  I walked back into the shop. Old tango music was playing softly, songs of broken hearts, stolen loves, crimes of passion. Lachlan Gilmartin was engaged in conversation with a man dressed in the manner of a gaucho, a pair of bolas swinging lazily at his hip. He could have doubled for Valentino.

  Gilmartin turned. ‘Ah, my friend, you have returned. We were just discussing the parallels in the lives of Carlos Gardel and Robert Johnson.’

  He gestured vaguely into the air. ‘That song you heard when you returned – Yo no se que me han hecho tus ojos. One of Gardel’s more famous.’ He continued. ‘Gardel had the nickname el mago, the magician, an implication at the very least of the supernatural, and Robert Johnson famously traded his soul for music.
Perhaps you have an opinion?’

  ‘None I’d care to think of at this moment.’

  Gilmartin looked concerned. ‘I trust your experience here wasn’t unfavourable.’

  ‘Unexpected.’ I said.

  ‘And you say it with such certainty,’ said Gilmartin.

  I look to the exit. ‘I have to leave now.’

  Gilmartin shrugged. ‘What makes you think there is anything out there for you?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said Gilmartin. ‘The appearance of choice is only the manner in which the inevitable goads the present.’

  ‘I have to go.’ I repeated.

  ‘Then we will expect to see you again soon.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  Lachlan Gilmartin smiled. ‘You think you have a choice?’

  I pushed through the exit and into the street. An astringent shriek of sunlight poured into my eyes. The air shivered and I gagged at the verdant tingle of my tongue. All around the flutter as of wings, pushing me downward, the fish bone choke of feathers in my throat. I felt myself begin to sink to my knees. The world was a whirlwind around me.

  I turned back. I re-entered and gently closed the door behind me.

  Singing a New Song

  Shirley Golden

  On the third night of Guy’s posting to ‘Wipers’, the bully beef makes him sick. Bile rises from his gut, leaches into the base of his throat. He swallows; he can feel her blood, barbed on his tongue. The Countess, the castle; his travels are a fairy-tale woven from enchanted cobwebs. It’s hard to imagine a time before this, and curious to contemplate beauty here, almost wicked.

  Sid trades his shaving mirror with Guy on agreement that he’ll surrender a pair of dry socks. Trench foot is much on the men’s minds.