When I stand up, so does Jango. “We going, then,” he says, “so I can sell you one?"
"No."
The first spots of rain appear on the stone ground of the square. They are heavy and fat, like watery coins. The sky is stirring darknesses of grey. The wise pigeons are seeking cover. “I'm going home,” I tell Jango and stalk off, hunching my shoulders as the downpour begins. Before I shove my hands into my pockets I toss the screwed-up paper bag into a litter bin. The magician has surrendered alchemy to the gods and is cursing as he gathers together his connivances of thaumaturgy. The rain falls.
* * * *
Fisher has learned to count to twenty, and she does so now to gain my admiration, which she already has through her simple demonstration of cells weaving together to make a composite of bone and flesh, blood and mind. Genetic inheritance inhibits the opportunity not to love and respect. Though she does not know it, she has rescued me simply by being. I think she has taken me to a place beyond violence; I swear that I shall not return to the confines I was bound in before her birth. She spreads her fingers on one hand and runs over them with a finger of the other as she begins.
"One, two, three four five..."
"Now I've caught Fisher alive."
"No!” She giggles. “That's not it.” She slaps my arm in admonishment, nearly losing her balance. And then she begins again, anticipating my interruption and running into “Six seven eight” before the five has completely left her lips.
We are in a second-floor restaurant. From the picture windows we can see the gothic cathedral. It sails like an impossible liner of dream-like architecture over the higgledy-piggledy tile rooftops of the old town. Fisher has a plate of jelly diced with artificial colours and I have a Cornish pasty. The table wobbles when I lean my elbows on it. My half read John Updike novel is beside my drink and in danger of any overspill, but I only glance at it while I pick at the pasty.
Like all lunchtime restaurants in the city, this one is crowded. Every table is taken, and those vacated are quickly filled; the waitresses clean them as new customers sit there on Robin Day chairs warmed by the heat of the previous diners. In a corner, seated by herself, I see a young woman reading a Robert Heinlein science fiction novel over a foaming cappuccino and I smile, feeling the solidarity of the book reader in public.
I am feeling good because the dates have been confirmed for my radio appearances and only two poems need their verses worried to a finish. Publication will follow, first in various pamphlets, and then, with luck, in a small press perfect-bound edition. Mainstream publishing is done with me—notoriety wears thin as a selling point. Instead there will be a scattering of reviews by people I know and whose work I have reviewed. There will be very little attention paid to my writing beyond the radio interviews. I will not make my fortune from the poems, but publication will allow me to continue teaching would-be romantics in night schools on fey and waning evenings when the nights draw swiftly close.
"Daddy, look!” Fisher shows me all her fingers and flashes them twice, like twinkling stars. “Twenty!"
"Very good,” I say. And my love is unabated even by the appearance of a tall and slim, scruffily dressed man passing tables to get to us. I do not rise with anger; I am the master of the maelstrom churning inside me. This I have learned: I am in control. Calm waters are mine for the sailing. Telling Fisher to be good and wait where she is, Daddy will be back in a moment and will not leave off watching her, I move to intercept him before he can seat himself with us. The busy tables that are like a narrow channel hem us in, and I anticipate his words as we coast toward collision.
"Jango. You remember? I've got some more."
"No,” I say. “And definitely not here.” My stare is the cold of the sea around the poles and yet still I think that for a moment he is going to challenge me.
There is the possibility of a scene in the restaurant, and I'm prepared for such a thing because I have had enough and now I feel my daughter is threatened by this strange and persistent man's presence. But he must see something in my eyes he does not like and he leaves.
Fisher says, when I come back to the table, “That was Jango, Daddy."
* * * *
One night, when I am thinking about the stars and the flood beneath and how waters rise and churn, showing caps of white in even the darkest hours, I hear a sound outside. It comes from the street below. I leave my bed and transport myself barefoot to the window. I peer through the curtains and see a shadow, thin and wasted, skipping exaggeratedly from view, back turned to me.
From my daughter's bedroom I hear a giggle. But when I enter her room Fisher says only, “He's funny. Can we let him in next time?"
* * * *
Days pass, the river flows. And then, as I sit on the grass on the steep conical mound that Clifford's Tower sprouts from like a medieval stone mushroom, he appears. His shadow first, and then his voice.
"It's me,” he says. “Jango. Remember?"
"I remember."
"I've got more, if you want to buy another."
I sigh and look up from my notebook, whose pages shine brightly in the sun. I'm tired from vigilant nights spent watching the street. I have wondered how and if this will ever end. Like the city at the prospect of the deluge, the river rising, I feel overwhelmed. Chaos has taken the form of this slim man with whiskers and black hair. The flood does not wash away sin, I remember, but creates it. I ask myself, what does it create in me that I must finish this? I have known tides so black that I have despaired of ever seeing the light again. I have thought that all of that is behind me since Fisher, since my life has been rescued from a drowning. But this man, his presence, the unrelenting contamination of his presence. . . . What does he stir in me; what deep and all but buried currents are channelled through his persistence?
I think of my daughter, the way he smiles at her and makes expressions with his hands that she copies, how she says he dances on the street for her, and I do not like that memory. I say, “How much?"
He tells me as I put away my pen. Says, “The best I can do, and only because you're a regular. We can go get one now."
I relent. I rise. I accept that I am a sinner and that what floods as a result of my act is not water and will turn the stomach of whoever has to clean it up, who has to wash it away. I tell myself that rivers flow only in one direction, and that however hard we fight against the drift, we are tugged back, relentlessly, by the undertow, back to the place we all come from, to the darkness we have known before, and which we have never truly left, however much we tell ourselves that we are different and capable of change. This is my confession, my truth. It is my deluge.
Copyright © 2010 Mark Patrick Lynch
[Back to Table of Contents]
Fiction: AS THE SCREW TURNS by Shelley Costa
* * * *
Art by Robyn Hyzy
* * * *
He found me in the office at Ectopolis Enquiries, where I was browsing through the cold case files. These were always a particular sore point for me because until suspicious Terra deaths are solved, those people are caught in the permabrane—that boundary between Terra Simplex, what residents there call Life, and our own Eutopia. Someone caught in the permabrane is at least unaware. Unlike murderers, who are trapped, conscious, in the permabrane forever. One eye glimpses the Eutopia they can never experience, the other faces the Terra Simplex they disrespected.
"Miss Jessel?"
I looked up to see Peter Quint, the valet at Bly, where I was working up until the time I had that unfortunate fatal carriage accident a year ago. I had always liked Quint. He had short-cropped red hair and an unerring eye for dress. “Quint!” I set aside the file on someone named Armbruster, who had been caught in the permabrane since 1867, ten years ago.
Peter Quint owned a costume shop. After his fall on an icy path one night near Bly when he was coming home late from the local pub, he tumbled through the permabrane and found himself in possession of a costume shop, since it reflected
his truest self and he had been a decent man. In Terra Simplex, the closest he could get to beautiful clothing was to hire himself out as valet to Edward Delavan, the Harley Street gentleman who owned Bly, a vast country estate, and who had been my employer as well.
"It's Master Miles,” he said. Miles Delavan was nine when I had the fatal accident, leaving him and his little sister Flora without a governess. “He's been articulating me lately."
"Has he?” Articulations—"ghost sightings"—occur when a Terran is in some sort of need. They're eerie and diaphanous, and utterly useless, of course, unless the Eutopian responds. Then we achieve all the crude materiality of old Terra Simplex."I've felt it getting stronger, Miss, more frequent, so I've been turning up at Bly. I saw you there.” His eyes widened. “Twice."
I thought. “So Flora has been articulating me."
"Haven't you felt it?"
"No.” I looked down at my fingernails that were finally the right length and shape, forever. “I've been preoccupied with cold cases.” It sounded so feeble. What could it possibly matter if Armbruster spends another decade caught in the permabrane, when my lovely little Flora Delavan is articulating me? Was I nothing more than a researcher of the equivocally dead?
"Then just now, Miss, I was outside on the terrace, at the French windows, like—” Peter Quint smacked my desk with his cap. “That pie-eyed chinless governess Mr. Delavan went and hired—” He turned, glowering, addressing the walls. “—was bedevilling Master Miles something terrible."
"How so?"
"Was he bad, was he telling his mates dirty stories, was he palling around with that devil Peter Quint—"
"You?” I was astounded. He had worn one of Mr. Delavan's waistcoats once without asking, but that was as bad as Peter Quint got. He was a friend to all, made excellent wassail, played lawn bowls with Master Miles and dolly orphanage with Miss Flora, and he still had his eye on Giles the stable boy, although they were for the time being separated by the permabrane. I watched him scuff a thin film of old mud from his shoe, which he studied. There was something more. “What else, Quint? What else was she—what's her name?—"
"Eloise Dalrymple."
"What else was Miss Dalrymple saying?"
"Well, more like suggesting, Miss—"
"Go on."
"That you and I—” One of his hands made a couple of quick circles in the air, then he stared at me meaningfully. When he said nothing and only fixed me with a look, I finally understood. As I stood up, my chair fell over.
"She said these things to Master Miles?” I hadn't felt so black brained and crushed—and very nearly magnificent—since the night of the carriage accident.
"And Master Miles, he just—fell down."
"Fell down?” At that, five other enquiry agents turned to look at us. I rounded my desk and set my trembling hands on Peter Quint's fine satin waistcoat. “Dead, Quint?"
"No, Miss, at least I don't think so because I did a quick check of the permabrane, and he's nowhere to be found. His eyes were open, but he looked something terrible, and the Dalrymple woman was shrieking. That's when I came to find you."
"We're going to Bly, Quint.” I called across to Edgar, the legendary director of Ectopolis Enquiries, who had just come in from the street. I could feel the intelligence in his keen grey eyes from all the way across the room. He always cut a fine figure in his black greatcoat, lightly holding his malacca cane. Without taking his eyes from my face, he drew off his white kid gloves. “Edgar,” I said, grabbing Peter Quint's arm. “I'm off to Terra Simplex."
"Crime in progress, Charlotte?"
"I won't know until I get there."
"Be mindful of things hidden in plain sight."
My coworkers watched impassively as Peter Quint and I, Miss Jessel, raised our arms in two graceful curves straight out in front of us, sending us headlong back through the permabrane.
* * * *
Peter Quint and I exploded through the permabrane on the grounds at the back of the house. Bly, the country home of Edward Delavan, was a grand sloping estate, where nothing else living achieved the same scale as the property itself. The lake was larger than you would expect, the gardens more artful and sprawling than you would care to tend, the woods disappearing into a horizon too far to attempt. Despite the size, it was always curiously devoid of life. Birdsong seemed inconsequential, perhaps even mistaken. Animals were small and secretive, nothing anyone would care to stalk and bring to the table. Voices were extinguished in the complacent green vastness that was Edward Delavan's Bly.
We made it up to the locked French doors of the drawing room. Inside two women were shrieking, hurtling into each other, stepping on each other's hems. I recognized the hysterical maid Noreen. The other woman was the menace that Quint called Eloise Dalrymple. I knew the type. Eyes the size of chestnuts, all pleading and romantic, a lower lip she sucked back in a way someone had once told her was charming or girlish or some other such rot.
What could Edward Delavan, the guardian of his niece and nephew Miles and Flora, have been thinking hiring this swooning product of some country vicarage? These two women were aflutter, nearly swooning with some dangerous combination of horror and thrill. I watched their trampled skirts disappear through the drawing room door, which one of them drew shut with a slam.
Then Peter Quint pointed.
Miles lay on his back on the Turkish rug. In a second we had permeated the glass and kneeled at the boy's side. His hair was damp with sweat, his eyes staring, his body totally inert.
"You must have missed him in the permabrane,” I whispered, glancing quickly at Quint. “It had to be his heart. She frightened him to death.” I wanted to howl and break something, something as broken as the teacup near Miles, something as broken as the mechanical toy that had landed near a table leg.
Then I noticed the pulse at the boy's throat, small and fluttering like everything else at Bly. He was alive, barely. I moved closer to him. “Miles.” I touched him. He didn't flinch. He didn't whimper. But when I moved into his line of vision, he looked me in the eyes. “Miles,” I said again. For a moment, he knew me. “Don't be afraid.” Of me, of what lay ahead, be afraid of nothing, but I had no time to explain anything.
I wiped the sweat from his face with my skirt, remembering the baths when he was just five, my soft swipes across his beautiful face with a warm cloth, telling the little boy I was painting him all the crimsons and ochres of handsome savages. But now, nothing. Just something in his eyes that would have hurled him into my arms, if he could. And in the next second that flicker of life settled like nightfall over water, then nothing.
"He was just ten,” I said, finally.
Beside me, Peter Quint shook his head, and we grabbed each other's hands, just for a grieving second, then let go.
"Best hurry, Miss,” he murmured, shaking out a game bag he always carried for his “finds."
I gently turned Miles this way and that, noting the sweat, the awkwardness of his poor body. I turned his chin. There in the hair at his temple was a light smear of blood. It began at his cheekbone and disappeared into the brown hair. I brushed down to the skin. No break, anywhere. Then what accounted for the bloody smear?
"Miss, I hear them coming back."
I looked up. He held his bulging game bag clenched against his chest. “One minute, Quint.” I turned back to the body of Miles Delavan. His left hand had a pale smear as well. I pressed back the curled fingers of his right hand and removed the crumpled, monogrammed handkerchief I had given him for his birthday a year ago.
"Hurry, Miss."
In the palm of his lifeless hand was the source of the injury: a small puncture wound. Around it, a thin trail of blood.
"Miss!"
The voices were just outside the closed door. Two women, one shrill, soothed by a deep, plodding sort of male voice. I stood up, stepping away from the boy I couldn't help any longer this side of the permabrane. Peter Quint grabbed my hand and together we permeated the nearest wall
and plunged into the garden, where yew hedges hid us from view of the householders at Bly, who could never understand.
* * * *
The bells above the door of Quint's Costumerie sounded as I shut the door behind me. It was a shop that came as close to magic as anything I ever knew. Bustles, bonnets, boots. Cravats and cutaways. Pantaloons and pyjamas, breastplates and motley, headdresses and chausables. Dominic, the pink and white cockatoo hopping along the swaying rope that hung overhead, eyed me in the warmth of the lamplight. From somewhere in the back room, I heard the whirr of Quint's sewing machine.
I found the row of men's work trousers, selected a slender pair—the tag said, Sebastian, Act II Scene i, Twelfth Night—and stepped into them, pulling them up through the tedious yards of my skirts. I stepped in front of the cheval mirror, lifting my skirts to my waist. I could say the effect was electric, but there was no one to feel it, except me. My hands jabbed around inside actual pockets. A button fly. A pleated waist. I could climb, evade, haul, outrun. Clip my hair and I was invincible.
"Miss?"
I whirled. “Yes, Peter Quint?” He had a measuring tape over his shoulder and a pin cushion he wore as a wristband. His eyes narrowed at my costume. Very slowly one eyebrow edged upward. He was looking very Irish, indeed, and I felt suddenly grateful for his fidelity to Giles the stable boy. Trousers, despite what you hear, do not make the man.
"I'm going to the funeral, Quint. As a gravedigger."
"Turn,” he jerked his head.
I did.
He pinned a dart. “We'll add a leather jerkin and you'll be the grave-digger from Hamlet—"
"Thank you, Quint."
He sat back on his haunches. “I was coming to see you after closing."
"What is it?"
"Master Miles hasn't made it through the permabrane."
* * * *
A suspicious death.
No other explanation for it.
What was left of my auburn hair after I took Quint's shears to it was stuffed under a cap. I leaned reflectively on my spade, just behind the gathered mourners, as the vicar spread pieties about Miles Delavan being taken from us like a tender rosebud blown by cruel winds from its stem, but now he's in a better place. This was most certainly true, but not in the way Terrans believe it, who inhabit what is just a proto-world. Overhead the clouds were thin and high, separating into a blue beyond. Aside from the coffin being lowered awkwardly into the ground by undertakers’ men in ill-fitting top hats and black gabardine, a perfect day.
AHMM, April 2010 Page 10