Aphelion

by Andy Frankham-Allen

  Blood splattered Iago’s face, and his bright teeth erupted through his lips in a smile.

  The war could now continue.

  The incubus glanced down at Caitlyn’s dead eyes as its children swarmed up its black, oily arm. The woman would never know the great service she had performed, like so many women before her.

  Still there was another who would know. The incubus rose to its clawed feet, and turned to where Hunter lay, still out cold. Death would be swift for the man, but the incubus did not wish to kill him. Although it knew that it would never be able to impregnate a man, something new stirred within, brought on by a remembrance of a kiss.

  “Different? New? Exciting?”

  Yes; all these things. One day the incubus would return, but in a new form, one Hunter did not know. It wished to explore further this new breed of man. The war would continue to wage without it for a while; its children, spreading out over its body as they were, would see to that. Yes, it would take a break from the war, and see what Hunter had to offer.

  *

  Three Months Later…

  Questions, accusations, statements, medical examinations, even psychiatric evaluations. No one was quite sure what to do with Hunter after the police had come to investigate the reports of screaming from the neighbors. At first it was assumed that Hunter, who was huddled in the corner of the kitchen, cradling Caitlyn’s body in his arms, blood all over his clothes, had killed her. But medical examinations proved that somehow something had ripped itself out of her, killing her painfully.

  Hunter wouldn’t talk of what had happened, not at first, but eventually he opened up. And that’s when they placed him in the psychiatric hospital, just for tests, of course. He’d been there for over two months since that one-off visit, and they were happy with him, although his counselor was worried for his safety.

  Hunter was worried, too, but he had kept his nose clean and eventually his day-out was approved.

  He knelt by the grave and placed the flowers gently on the ground. He thought it was going to be hard coming to see Caitlyn, but it was proving surprisingly easy. In his own mind he was still trying to sort out what had happened while he’d passed out, but it was as if there was some block preventing him from thinking too hard about it.

  Hunter knew it would remain a mystery. And of that he was glad.

  He smiled thinly. “See you soon, Cait, love,” he whispered, making sure his companion couldn’t hear him. He was pretty sure the orderlies at the hospitals had no idea what he was planning. It didn’t matter; soon he wouldn’t be a problem for them.

  He stood up and walked over to his companion. A new member of staff at the hospital. A stunning young man from Scotland, with bright blue eyes, light brown hair and a smile that had bedazzled Hunter the second they’d been introduced.

  “Ye ready to go back now, then, Hunter?” he asked.

  Hunter nodded. “Yeah, love. Thanks for coming with me.”

  The younger man held Hunter’s hand and together they walked off. “Ach, man, for ye, anything,” Iagan said, grinning.

  Off Flesh

  Travel, they say, broadens the mind. It’s a truism if ever there was one. What they fail to tell you is that it can scare the living crap out of you, too. I travel a lot, visit a lot of places, stay at a lot of hotels. I’ve been to some crappy hotels, some really luxurious ones, too. But never been to one like The Cliff’s Edge in Torquay. It was a business meeting about selling outboard motors, pretty tedious stuff, really.

  Things started going weird on the Saturday after we’d all arrived. The actual meetings weren’t to begin until Monday, which left us the whole weekend to pal around and get to know each other. You know, chill in the sauna the way half-naked men seem to like to do, play tennis in the convenient courts located beside the hotel, or just go for a stroll into the nearest little town.

  After finishing breakfast, scrambled eggs on lightly buttered toast and a couple of glasses of milk, I came out of the dining room just in time to catch Mr. Wyndham entering the lobby. He was dressed in his tennis whites, so no prize for guessing where he’d been. Something of a fitness fanatic, really, which came as a bit of mystery to me seeing as he didn’t eat breakfast. Something told me that Mr. Wyndham, who had a few years on me, would not be around on this little world of ours for longer than I. Still, he seemed a nice enough chap. Like me he had arrived a few days early, so we had the chance to get to know each other a little bit more than the others. I still think of him as Mr. Wyndham, even though by Saturday morning we were already on first name terms. Mark of respect, I suppose. It’s “a thing,” as my niece would have said.

  “Hey there, Sam,” I said to him.

  “Alright…” he said to me, with a wide smile, and after a failed attempt to juggle his tennis racket and bag gave up on the offering to shake my hand. I laughed and asked him if he fancied a meander into town later. We both shared an interest in antiques, and I’d noticed a little shop on the drive here. Mr. Wyndham said he’d be more than happy to accompany me once he’d had a shower. No problem, I could find something to occupy me while he was getting rid of all that manly sweat.

  I watched him walk away, my eyes lingering on his pert ass beneath the white shorts, and only turned away when he entered the lift. I glanced around the lobby, hoping no one had noticed where my eyes had looked. Not that I’m in the closet or anything, it’s just there was something about him that I couldn’t resist. And yes, it’s true; I’m a married man. So sue me.

  So, there I was, not much of anything to do except wait. Once I was certain no one was paying me any attention my eyes returned to the lift. Going up, of course. Mr. Wyndham was on the first floor, so I guessed he wouldn’t be too long. I turned away, intending to find something to occupy me, but before I could come up with anything even remotely interesting there was the ding of a bell and the sliding noise of metal on metal as the lift doors reopened. I turned around. Maybe Mr. Wyndham had left something in the courts.

  It wasn’t him. A couple emerged from the lift, so caught up in their own world they were totally unaware of this casually dressed thirty-something man watching them. I suspect they were having an affair…only people in the midst of a clandestine affair would be so wrapped up in each other.

  For a moment I was puzzled. Surely there had not been enough time for the lift to reach the first floor? I dismissed this. Not like I wasn’t in a world of my own for a while there. More time could certainly have passed than I realised.

  Once again I turned away from the lift.

  *

  Time passed, as it is want to do. At first I wasn’t sure how much, since I got caught up in conversation with another hotel guest. It was a bizarre conversation, one in which I spent most of the time nodding and making the occasional agreeable sound, since I barely had a chance to get a word in. This guest, a young lady called Elisa, rambled on about the patterns in life. To be honest I had no idea what she was getting at, since all these patterns she saw were way beyond me. I sometimes think it takes a special person to discover the secret patterns of life, other times I just think these people are barking. Elisa was, I would say politely, totally out there.

  Still, if nothing else, it helped me pass the time while I waited for Mr. Wyndham. Eventually, I managed to excuse myself, which I did by cunningly introducing her to the wonders of outboard motors. A topic guaranteed to bore the living crap out of anyone, except yours truly. There is only so much deep and meaningful conversation the mind can take before midday, and mine had a full quota already.

  So, off she trotted and I returned to the lobby and to the total lack of Mr. Wyndham. I checked my watch. A whole hour had passed with change. I looked around, hoping that Mr. Wyndham was elsewhere in the lobby, perhaps in conversation with someone a little more interesting than Elisa. He wasn’t, which puzzled me, ’cause I honestly couldn’t believe he’d have passed me outside without saying a word. We had, after all, spent several hours talking the night before and seemed to be kindred
spirits. What was I to do? First thing that came to mind was to see if he’d fallen asleep in his room. It made a certain sense; he could have been more tired from his tennis than he looked.

  I walked up to the lift and pressed the call button. And waited. Chewing my lips, trying not to appear anxious or impatient, I watched the indicator above the lift as the light told me it had moved from floor four to floor three. Should be with me in a minute. Or not. Up to fifth, and top, floor. I raised an eyebrow. It stayed at five for a fair while. Finally the light went out again, signalling the lift’s descent.

  I glanced around the lobby, hoping no one noticed that I was practically hopping from foot to foot like some schoolboy about to visit a friend he’d not seen in a long time. Or, perhaps, even visiting Santa.

  Looking back, I suppose I did kind of feel like that, too. It had been a long time since I’d found myself attracted to someone new; it was a feeling I’d not had in a long, long time. And never since.

  The light on the indicator never did come back on. I assumed the light had simply broken; either that or the lift had got stuck between floors. Either way, I couldn’t wait any more. The stairs were now my only option.

  Narrow corridors. Hate them, don’t you? Hotels have this thing about them. Never quite understood why. After all, looking at The Cliff’s Edge from outside it looks flipping huge, and yet inside there seems to be no space at all. Makes me wonder where it all goes, ’cause neither the rooms nor the corridors take up much space.

  Room 173 was before me. I raised a hand to knock, and for a few worrying moments it remained in midair, barely an inch from the door. A large part of me wanted to knock, like some previously unknown desire was driving me to see Mr. Wyndham in the privacy of his room regardless of what he was doing. But there was a more cautious part of my brain attempting to hold me back. It was telling me to leave him alone, that this guy was grabbing a few winks after a tiring workout on the tennis courts. And then there was that tiny part of me screaming, telling me, back off, to leave the man alone! Just what the hell did I think I was doing anyway? I had a husband at home!

  The cautious part lost, and so did that tiniest scream. My fist rapped on the door. Once, twice. Pause.

  There was no answer. I assumed Mr. Wyndham was a deep sleeper, so I knocked again, this time a little harder. Still nothing. A third attempt, I decided, then I would go and…well, I didn’t know what I would do, but a third attempt was going to be last. This time I added my voice to my efforts.

  “Hello, Sam, you okay in there?”

  My heart skipped a beat, certain I had heard something move inside the room. “Hello?” I called again. This time there was nothing.

  Head lowered, I turned and began the long walk back to the lift. It was only twenty feet away, but those twenty feet felt like the farthest distance I had ever walked. By the time I was three feet from the lift I heard the creak of metal on metal, and saw the doors slide open. I stopped, hoping to God that Mr. Wyndham was going to walk out of there.

  Nothing. No Mr. Wyndham, no no-one. I tenderly approached the lift and looked inside. There wasn’t anybody waiting in there. I stepped to enter, deciding I couldn’t be arsed to walk back down the stairs, or maybe I could retire to my own room, wait a while, then try Mr. Wyndham’s room again. But as my shoe landed on the minute gap between corridor and lift I stopped.

  My breath caught. For a startlingly long second I couldn’t breathe at all. It was as if the lift had started to close in around me, about to gobble me up like a Sunday roast. My hands rushed to my throat in a mad desire to open an emergency hole to let the air through, but as soon my fingers brushed the skin of my throat the air returned. I staggered back, and fell against the wall.

  The lift doors closed. My eyes climbed to the indicator above. No light, no sign that it had been on the first floor at all.

  People were lined up in a queue at the reception desk. Judging by the look of them they were all here for the forthcoming conference. You could always tell people who sold outboard motors. Grey people in grey suits. Much like me, really. As I stood there my life flashed before my eyes. It didn’t last long at all. A mediocre life as a child, with my father drumming into me the need to be a stable husband, my extremely exciting college business studies course, my marriage to Jake, and our subsequent stable but very dull life together. We never did anything interesting; when I wasn’t at work we’d sit at home, watch TV, eat, sleep, and then go back to work the next day. When was the last time we had a holiday? Four years ago, and that was our honeymoon.

  A grey man in a grey suit living a grey life.

  Mr. Wyndham was different. He hadn’t arrived at the hotel in a grey suit. He’d arrived in baggy jeans, a nice tight t-shirt and sunglasses. He didn’t carry a suitcase, either. His conference papers were in a trendy off the shoulder “man bag.” It wasn’t until I’d got talking to him the previous night that I realised he was one of us, and that he was actually older than me. He could easily have been mistaken for twenty-five.

  My eyes skittered to the lift, and my mind returned to the worrying absence of Mr. Wyndham. I needed to speak to the manager. Since leaving the first floor my mind had been over things several times, and I was now absolutely certain that I had heard a sound in Mr. Wyndham’s room. The sound of falling.

  I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, though. Thus I waited, watching as one by one my fellows signed in and picked up their room keys. An interesting insight into the tedium of being a receptionist at a hotel. I could see that the young woman behind the desk was forcing the smile more each time she turned to the next guest. It was good, in a way, to know that it wasn’t only my job that was tedious. I felt an affinity with the woman, and was sure we’d meet on common ground over the disappearance of Mr. Wyndham. Hopefully it would amount to nothing, a simple case of Mr. Wyndham falling asleep and then falling off his bed in surprise at the loudness of my knock. One way or another, for the woman it would be a change from the humdrum of manning the reception desk.

  Hang the manager. He probably had a hundred and one things to do anyway. The receptionist needed some spark.

  I approached the desk, barely registering the lift doors sliding open as I moved within four feet of them. Had I paid more attention I might have realised that there was no way they should have opened, since only seconds ago the last of the grey suits had entered the lift for his own floor.

  I smiled at the receptionist, whose name was Meg according to her badge, and asked, “Could you tell me if Mr. Wyndham has gone out? We were supposed to meet in the lobby but I think I might have missed him.”

  She asked me to wait one moment while she checked the keys hanging behind her. Hotel rules didn’t permit the taking of keys off the premises. As long as you remained on the grounds it was fine, but if you were going beyond you had to return the key to reception. A security measure, probably something to do with fire regulations.

  “His key isn’t here, which means he’s either in his room or on the grounds somewhere.” Meg smiled at me. Her practiced smile.

  “Ah.” I paused a moment, wondering if what I had to say next would come out right. “Well the thing is, I checked on his room a short while ago. You see, when I last saw him he had just returned from playing tennis.”

  The sign of recognition come to her face. “Oh yes, I remember. I saw the two of you talking. You watched him enter the lift, didn’t you?” She asked the question with a very innocent voice, but I could tell by the glint in her eyes that she was trying to imply something.

  I chose to ignore that. “Anyway, I checked his room and there was no answer.”

  “Did you take the lift?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The lift. Did you take the lift to first floor?”

  Again her voice was quite innocent, but her eyes narrowed. Somewhere in the back of my mind a small bell of alarm rang. Foolishly I ignored it. I needed this woman’s help to find out what had happened to Mr. Wyndham. “No, I took the stai
rs. The lift was…erm, busy.”

  Meg smiled knowingly. “Then maybe you missed him? He might have taken the lift down here while you took the stairs.”

  “He might have, yes. But two things make me think otherwise.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yes. One, if he had returned to the lobby at any time you would have noticed, since you clearly pay close attention to your guests’ movements when they’re down here. And two, I heard a sound when I knocked on his door.”

  “Oh.”

  This little revelation seemed to shut her up for a moment. I watched her reaction, and it occurred to me that I was never going to connect with Meg. Despite the equal tedium of our jobs we had nothing in common. She looked at me as though she was the keeper of a particular secret that I had no right to whatsoever.

  “Maybe we should check together?” Meg suggested.

  This time it was my turn to narrow the eyes. The offer of help came a little too quickly for my liking. But how could I turn down such help? I needed to know what had happened to Mr. Wyndham.

  “That would be…ideal,” I said, once I had decided on the most innocuous word I could think of.

  She reached under the desk to retrieve something. I couldn’t see what it was, since by the time she returned to an upright position she had deposited it into the back pocket of her skirt. She joined me on the other side of the desk and I motioned her to lead the way. Although she was a good foot shorter than me, and a much smaller build, I still didn’t like the idea of her walking behind me. Let alone beside me. I followed her towards the lift.

  “I’d rather we took the stairs, actually,” I said just as she pressed a thumb against the call button.

  “It’s only a lift,” Meg said with a small laugh. “Do you have claustrophobia?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s not that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  How could I explain to her? There was something very wrong about this lift. I had no idea what, but I instinctively knew something was up. Another of the conclusions I had drawn between the time I left the first floor and returned to the lobby. As I looked at Meg more closely I came to the realisation that she probably had a good idea anyway.