by Mark Morris
“Okay, Elton. Where are the papers?” I sat up, looked around—and waited. But there was no sense of Swan’s presence at all.
“Elton,” continued Susan, her teeth gritting my name as if she were chewing ice cubes.
I looked around again.
Nothing.
“Where are they, Elton?” Each of Susan’s ice-pick words contained its own promise of instant violence.
“Swan?”
“What?” said Greg.
“Swan? Where are you?”
“What the fuck?” Greg’s exasperation was beginning to show. “What the fuck are you talking about swans for, Elton?” He liked to exaggerate the pronunciation of what he considered to be my very poncey name.
“You see?” said Susan, hands on hips as she turned back to Greg.“I told you—he’s pissed again. Look at the state of this room.” I laughed. More hysteria than humour. I just couldn’t help it.They both looked genuinely shocked when I did so.
“No bottles or cans,” I pointed out. “Look around. You won’t find any booze or empty bottles anywhere.”
“You little…” Greg loomed forward again, filling my vision entirely. He smelled sour; smelled of her. Just as effortlessly as before, he took me by the throat again, squeezing my windpipe shut. With no effort, he held me up in the air off the sofa as I beat at his arm. It felt like steel cable—perhaps made of the same stuff as the cables on the Tyne Bridge. In that moment, my reason for being on that bridge, making ready to make that swan dive, was instantly crystallised in my mind. Susan’s bitter vitriol, the constant cheating—now with this swine, the latest in a long line of men who could give her “what she wanted”. The constant betrayal and shame, the depression, despair and humiliation. Let that steel-cable-bridge-arm keep my windpipe closed. Let him take the life out of me, just as I’d been ready to give it up earlier that night. Susan had brought me to this point, even to the bizarre nervous breakdown that had led me somehow to believe that I had jumped from the bridge when I hadn’t; that had led me to create the horrifying figure of the thing that called itself Swan—something that existed only in what was now my shattered and irreparable mind.
I went limp in his grip, the weight of my body dragging his arm down. His eyes widened, taken by surprise but now angered at what somehow seemed to be a physical challenge to his muscle-bound bodybuilder’s physique. He gritted his teeth and had to bend his knees to keep me up in the air, when he could just as easily have let me drop to the sofa.
“Where are they?” demanded Susan.
I grinned at the ape that was holding me up. Now his eyes were bulging with effort and anger.
“Where are they?” he demanded.
I just kept on grinning.
“You scrawny little bastard…” Greg looked like he was being challenged in a one-armed contest to lift the world’s heaviest dumb-bell on an episode of World’s Strongest Man.
I was a dumb-bell, all right.
And I’d win this challenge when he killed me.
“Let him go!” Susan’s face leered in close. “Take your hand off his throat. How can he talk if you’re choking him?” It was the excuse that Greg needed.
He pitched me back on the sofa, face now beaded with sweat.
Susan was in my face now, slapping me as I retched.
“Where are they? Where are the papers?” I was done. I just wanted this harpy out of my face, out of my apartment, out of my life. I pointed to the bureau by the telephone. Susan gave me a good one across the cheek that helped me breathe again and then tottered to the bureau. I’d forgotten that there were papers all over the floor. Had it blown off…?
But what had blown it off, if it hadn’t been…?
Greg joined her, snatching and grabbing at papers on the bureau and the floor. I heard Susan muttering angrily as she hunted.
“Living like a pig… crap all over the place… this time of the morning…”
Then Greg said: “Here—here it is,” snatching a paper up from the floor.
After a brief pause while they looked at it, I knew what was coming next.
“You bastard!” Susan turned back to snarl at me. “You haven’t signed it!” Maybe if I smiled at her again, Greg really would kill me. It seemed like an option. I watched his face go red with anger. Could he really love her that much? Or was it just pure frustration with me?
Susan stormed back to me, holding the paper in front of her. Greg loomed behind her as she thrust it into my face.
“Sign it!”
“What with?” My voice sounded raw and strangled.
“Greg, find a pen.”
Now she was standing with her hands on her hips, foot tapping on the floor while Greg hunted for a pen.
“Bet he can’t even read or write.” I don’t know why I said it.The words just came out. So when Greg lunged back and punched me on the side of the head, it wasn’t unexpected. But it made everything tilt, with Susan and Greg swinging in and out of my vision.
“Try the bedroom,” said Susan. “He’s got some kind of desk in there.”
“Nice of you to remember.” The words just came out again.
Greg glared at me and stalked past.
“Does he know what a pen looks like?”
I heard Greg come to a halt and waited for him to return for another blow; saw Susan glare at him and then snap:“Just get a pen, Greg!” Greg made some kind of frustrated sound. Then I heard the bedroom door open.
And then I saw the expression on Susan’s face change. Her look of rage blurred and shifted. Her eyes grew wider, her jaw dropped—and what was becoming a frown of puzzlement began to morph into something else.
Something was happening behind me, but I was too dazed—too displaced inside my own head—to turn and see. I could only watch in fascination as the expression on Susan’s face continued to change. I realised now that I was expecting to hear Greg begin to scream; perhaps the same kind of screaming I had heard earlier that night in the diner. Because now I knew that what I had begun to think were just bizarre creations of a nervous breakdown had really happened after all. And that was why I should be hearing Greg screaming in a high falsetto quite unfitting to the masculine image he liked to project. That screaming should be accompanied by horrible ripping sounds and the hot pattering of blood on the living-room carpet. But no—all I could hear was a sound like… how do I explain… rapid breathing. Short staccato gasps that sounded almost like the sounds of lovemaking; rapid, hissing intakes of breath that could be of pain or pleasure. And all this was happening as a gigantic winged shadow began to rise up across Susan’s body, the figure backlit by the light in the bedroom doorway—a shadow that swelled and broadened and rose as those huge wings flexed. Her face fell completely into that shadow now as it rose. Susan’s mouth was wide open and she should have been screaming, her shadowed face contorted and her eyes glittering with terror. But no sound was coming out of that mouth at all.
God help me—as much as I had loved her enough to end my life when she left me for whatever was now left of Greg—I could feel a red-hot coal of hate deep inside me, which could not be denied at this last moment. And God help me again, I tried and failed to find some pity inside that might prevent what was to come.
“I can’t,” I said.
“I know,” said Swan in that horrible, familiar resonating voice that shook the living-room furnishings.
“I’m sorry, Susan.” They were such hollow words.
I screwed my eyes shut, bent over double just as I had done in the diner, and buried my face in my hands.
And when Susan was finally able to give vent to that shrill and piercing scream, I screamed too; trying and failing to drown out the other terrible liquid and rending sounds.
I was enfolded in darkness and snatched away as my scream broke down into hoarse sobs. Cold wind was buffeting me again and that terrible flap, flap, flap surrounded me once more as I was propelled into the night. Somehow, I could still hear the dying echoes of Susan’s screaming
even though I knew that I was no longer in my apartment and that Susan had received the terminal separation from me that she had so desired. But those echoes were becoming something else as I kept curled up like a foetus in Swan’s awful embrace with my eyes still firmly screwed shut.
They had, impossibly, become the strident ringing of a telephone.
And then I heard:“999.What is your emergency, please?”
“Police, ” said Susan’s voice over the sound of rushing wind. “I need the police.” How could that be Susan’s voice when I knew that Susan no longer existed?
“Your name, and the nature of the emergency, please?”
“My name is Susan Perdue,” said Swan in Susan’s stolen voice.“And I’ve just been assaulted by my husband, Elton Perdue.”
“Where are you now, Mrs Perdue? Can you give me…”
“You’ve got to stop him. He’s killed my boyfriend and some people at the Juniper Diner down by Gateshead Quayside—and he’s got a gun.”
“He’s got a gun?”
“He’s got a gun and he’s on the Tyne Bridge. I mean—he’s on the Tyne Bridge right now, and he’s…”
“Mrs Perdue, please calm down and tell me…”
“He’s just rung me. He’s on the Tyne Bridge and he’s got a gun and he says he’s going to start shooting at the cars going past and he’s going to get his own back before he jumps…”
“He’s there, on the Tyne Bridge, now?”
“He says he’s going to get his own back, do you hear me? Get his own back and then he’s going to jump off the bridge into the river and kill himself.”
“Mrs Perdue! Don’t…” And then the voices were cut off by the buzzing of a disconnected line—just as I fell on hard concrete, my hands and knees slapping painfully as I was dropped in a crouching position.The utter darkness that had enveloped me was swept away like a velvet, swirling cloak.
I didn’t need to look up to know that I was back in the same place on the Tyne Bridge where the horror had started.
It was night, and traffic was passing unheeding as usual. Keeping my head down, I scanned my immediate surroundings to locate Swan and make sure that I didn’t make the mistake of looking up directly to see him.
“So…” My throat was ragged and raw. I coughed and retched before continuing. “So you’ve tied it all up. Got me back to where it began.” When there was no answer, I hoped that he—that it—had gone. But really, I knew I couldn’t be so lucky.
“Are you there?”
“Yes,” came that hideous, sonorous voice somewhere off to my right. “I’m here.”
“Why don’t you just kill me?”
“How ungrateful that would be of me, Elton. After everything you’ve done for me.”
“You’ve fed well, then?”
“Oh yes. So many wolves. Such tender meat.”
“And now everyone thinks that it will have been me who did the killing.The diner.The apartment.”
“Of those that can be found, yes.And don’t forget the man in the car down below on the bank.”
“I’ve had a busy night.”
“Indeed.”
“You need me. People like me.To feed you.”
“Yes, Elton. Without you and your kind, I wouldn’t exist.” There was a flurry of movement from Swan and I cowered, covering my face. He was lying. He did intend to kill me after all.
But no, as the wind flapped around me, I knew that Swan had jumped up onto the parapet; to the exact spot from where I had made my swan dive, and given my terrible saviour his—its—name.
“So that’s it, then? This is when it ends?”
“That’s up to you.You have choices, Elton.You still have choices.”
“What the hell are you?”
“Not a wolf, not a lamb.”
He was silent then, and for a moment I really thought that I was going to get a proper answer.
But then the distant wailing of police sirens swirled in the air.
Swan laughed. Or at least made a low and shuddering sound that could have been a laugh.
“Goodbye, Elton.” And then Swan was gone, over the edge of the parapet and into the night.
I lurched to my feet and ran staggering to the parapet, hoping—I think—in that moment of desperation that I might have even a momentary glance of the face of whatever it was that had caused such horrifying mayhem. Maybe the shock of seeing Swan properly would do more than send me mad. Perhaps—mercifully—it would kill me.
But as I lunged to look over the edge, all I saw was a massive shadow like a giant black seabird, suddenly folding black bat-like wings tight behind its back as it plummeted into the water.There was no explosive splash—just a thin plume of foaming black water that spurted high and dissolved into spray. For a brief moment, I saw a swift underwater flash of something like glittering scales as Swan sped deep and away into the River Tyne. When I leaned back, I could see lights and a police cordoned area below on Bottle Bank where Swan had killed the driver and destroyed his car.
The sound of police sirens was very loud now as I turned from the parapet. Bracing both hands behind me on the cold stone, I saw the flashing lights of not one but two police cars—one speeding towards me from the Newcastle side of the bridge, the other from the Gateshead side. Behind them, in both directions, I could see that the police had also cordoned off the roads and stopped the traffic.
I turned and clambered back up onto the parapet as the first of the police cars slewed up onto the pavement, mere yards from me. All doors opened simultaneously as the four officers erupted from the car. They were wearing black flak jackets, clearly armed. As the second car stopped, they spread out—and one of them had his gun aimed directly at me. Couldn’t they see that I was unarmed, despite what Swan/Susan had told them? The officers in the second car appeared to be unarmed as they too began to form a half circle, hemming me in on the parapet.
“Armed police!” said the officer with the gun.“Get down from the edge!”
“No, wait!”
One of the unarmed officers was holding up his hand to the armed policeman. “Mr Perdue. Why don’t you come down and we can talk?” So some of them wanted to blow me off the bridge; others wanted to be my friend.
“You still have choices,” Swan had said.
I looked out across the river—to the Newcastle and the Gateshead sides. Cities full of wolves and lambs, and sometimes things that shouldn’t exist but do—like Swan.
Now one man wanted to shoot me, the other wanted to save me.
Should I do something to make the first kill me, or climb down to the other and be taken away; tried and sentenced to life for the murders that had occurred that night?
Or should I just finish what I’d originally started, and take a second swan dive from the bridge? I knew for a fact that this time Swan wouldn’t be there to catch me.
I looked at the gun.
I looked at the outstretched hand.
And then I looked down over the parapet to the dark water below.
Like Swan had said—I still had choices. But which way to dive?
Which way, indeed?
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
Alison Littlewood’s latest novel, The Hidden People, is about the murder of a young woman suspected of being a fairy changeling. Her other books include A Cold Season, a Richard and Judy Book Club selection, Path of Needles and The Unquiet House. Her short stories have been picked for several “Year’s Best” anthologies and won a Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction. They have been collected in Quieter Paths and Five Feathered Tales. Alison lives in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls in Yorkshire, England. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.
Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee, winner of British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards for his short fiction, Stephen Gallagher is a novelist and also a creator of primetime miniseries and episodic television. In the US he was lead writer on NBC’s Crusoe and creator of CBS Television’s Eleventh Hour. Among fifteen
novels are Chimera, Oktober and Valley of Lights. He’s the creator of Sebastian Becker, Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy, in a series of novels that includes The Kingdom of Bones, The Bedlam Detective and The Authentic William James.
Angela Slatter’s debut novel, Vigil, was released by Jo Fletcher Books in 2016, and the sequels Corpselight and Restoration will follow in 2017 and 2018 respectively. She is the author of eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels, Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. Her work has been adapted for the screen, and translated into Japanese, Russian, and Bulgarian. Angela has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, one Ditmar Award, and five Aurealis Awards.
Brady Golden’s short fiction has appeared in Mythic Delirium, DarkFuse 2, and on the podcast Pseudopod. He lives in Oakland, California, with his family.
Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year #6, The Year’s Best Science Fiction #33, and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Her novella Spin, a science-fictional reimagining of the Arachne myth, won the BSFA Award in 2014, and her story-cycle The Silver Wind was awarded the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in the same year. Her debut novel The Race was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel The Rift was published in 2017. Nina lives and works on the Isle of Bute in western Scotland. Find her blog, The Spider’s House, at www.ninaallan.co.uk
Brian Keene is the author of over fifty books, mostly in the horror, crime and dark fantasy genres. His novel, The Rising, is credited with inspiring pop culture’s current interest in zombies. In addition to his own original work, Keene has written for media properties such as Doctor Who, The X-Files, Hellboy, Masters of the Universe and Superman. Several of Keene’s novels have been developed for film. He has won numerous awards and honours, including the 2014World Horror Grandmaster Award,2001 Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction, 2003 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, 2004 Shocker Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and Honours from United States Army International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan and Whiteman A.F.B. (home of the B-2 Stealth Bomber) 509th Logistics Fuels Flight.