Fearsome Magics

by Jonathan Strahan

  That seems cruel for someone who has a place he can return to. “I can’t keep hold of a camera,” she says. “I don’t like it to be finished. I just can’t bring anything back home.”

  “You’d be wasted at home, too.” He smooths his hands over his chest pockets. Empty.

  “I found the place I really wanted. I know I’ll never get back there, don’t worry, that’s all gone. But I’ve been looking.”

  “That sounds exhausting.”

  She thinks that’s a little rich, coming from him. She doesn’t say anything.

  “So have you picked the lucky grave?”

  She says, “I know what I’m waiting for.”

  To feel anything, she thinks. As soon as I open my eyes and feel anything at all, I’m going to bury this rock in the ground and live out my days and die. Any magic has to fade if you bury it in the ground; it leaches out through the water and the air, it becomes a village of people who live a long time but can never stay put, it becomes a herd of deer who cross a continent.

  Then there will be time enough to find a high place, if she wants one. There will be a hill with a lake like oil at the bottom, and a sheer drop that no one climbs out of.

  “Don’t do something stupid just so I’ll miss you,” he says.

  She turns to him. “Promise me you’ll find me and tell me if it works.”

  I want you to know where I am, she doesn’t say. She doesn’t say, I want you to look at my grave just once.

  “If it doesn’t work, I won’t have to find you. You’ll open your eyes and a locomotive will run you over and you’ll know, and when you open them again you’ll know, without any help from me.”

  “Promise me you’ll find me,” she says.

  Her eyes sting, looking at him. Maybe that’s the first sign of something changing.

  He meets her eye; her heart is a thousand stairs with nothing waiting at the top.

  TO REMEMBER, SOMEONE had told her as they touched her hair, before she ever learned about a camera and what it could do for anyone who wasn’t her. To make you appreciate home, someone had told her as they pressed the stone into her hand—she’d been all night wandering, and it must have been an offense. They must have been afraid of her; she hopes she was frightening.

  Don’t do this to her, he’d said.

  She’s forgotten if he was always there or if he found the moment and tried to intervene; she only remembers his breath between her and the shadows the trees were casting. It was the last thing she ever heard, standing in that place.

  She suspects it was meant to be a place she’d come back to, that her heart and the stone in her hand would draw her back there when the traveling was over, but the first time she opened her eyes all that was gone.

  She doesn’t remember where or when, or anyone she left. The ground that could never be filled had taken them all in its mouth, and if she went back in time enough to meet them, she wouldn’t know their faces; she wouldn’t know where to stand to call it homecoming.

  Maybe she’s stood there already, and all she saw was the little circle of the box camera, a field inverted, a picture that was going to be devoured any second.

  When she closes her eyes and tries to conjure it back, she sees a drowned pier, and his face in a wreath of smoke, and a vulture’s eye, and a camera lens that was grasping to hold on.

  IT TAKES SIXTEEN moves before there’s a worthy place. (One of them had seemed beautiful, but she was only there an hour before the stone got warm and she grit her teeth and felt the sick-stomach lurch that reminded her she had a body. It had been an hour of red dust so bright the sky looked purple next to it; chromatic aberration.)

  But this is a quiet town, big enough that she can steal a camera, near enough to a river that she can follow it into the meadows, and be alone just past the bend. There’s no high ground here, but the world is wide.

  At the top of a sloping hill that’s as close as she can find, there’s a tree that reminds her of the place where they watched the beginning of the plague, and she presses her lips into a thin line, counts backwards carefully from ten as she gets closer. He never makes much noise. If she didn’t always expect him, she’d never know when he’d appeared.

  She stands beside the tree for a long time as the sun crawls over everything. The branches look like a man smoking, they look like someone reaching out for her, they look like a map of Venice. Below her is the little town and the river, and she looks as far as she can for a ship that could be carrying him.

  At sunset the branches look like the veins on the leaf she looked through once as the things that would become mammals skittered across her feet. In the dark the branches make cracks in the sky as she looks up at the moon, asks it nothing, counts to a hundred thousand thousand.

  It’s dawn when the stone begins to get warm around the edges. Panic clenches her tight for a moment, and she thinks about plagues and cities and deserts and no, it has to be here, she has to risk it, she’ll grow old waiting but she’ll wait, when he finds her he might laugh but she can’t stand the idea of ever again moving, she’s breathing like her chest will burst, she’s staying here.

  She drags a few inches of earth off from the ground beneath the tree, shoves the stone into it, scrapes in her tears and breathes against it and spits for good measure, buries it in a single two-handed shove of dirt like a door slamming shut.

  She closes her eyes, feels nothing, opens them. The bank of the river is shrinking; tide’s coming in.

  This is the ground then, she thinks. Whenever he finds me, he’ll know where I’m buried.

  It’s sunrise when the light hits low enough that she sees the place where the ground is risen, a little burial mound grown over with a hundred years of moss and little blue flowers she’s forgotten the name of.

  It’s a small grave. It’s barely big enough for a small, flat rock she could roll between her fingers like a coin.

  YOU’LL SEE HER when you go someplace trying to be alone—dramatically, romantically, the sheer hill that hangs over the bay, the kind of place where poets go. Somewhere you can look down on everything.

  She’ll be standing near the edge of wherever it is, not close enough that you’d feel right about crying out, but close enough that you keep glancing out of the corner of your eye as you sit down, try to let the moment wash over you. She seems like she’s waiting for someone, though she’s not moving, her arms crossed tight over her chest, everything about her looking pinched in, stretched out.

  You never quite catch her face, however long you look at her; when you try to get her attention you just remember some dark unblinking eye and then something going fuzzy at the edges like a bad photograph. When you look out at the bay you always forget she’s there until you move.

  You’ll begin to think that poetry’s a bit much after all. It’s not like you went through anything so bad, and it’s awfully windy to be in a place so high. It’s too windy to be as close to the edge as she is.

  You’ll stand up to reach her, start to move and then freeze, some prey instinct that holds you where you are.

  “Be careful,” you’ll say.

  She’ll say, “Don’t look.”

  ICE IN THE BEDROOM

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  1

  SIMON PAINTER HAD at last found a way of getting through the nights. Balancing his head on two pillows, the sheets pulled up to his neck, he would take a third pillow in his arms and hug it against his body tight. One arm over and one arm under, he would spoon with the pillow all night long—and if he got too hot, or too uncomfortable, or if he just had the urge to stare sleeplessly at a different patch of dark, he would turn over and he would take the pillow with him, lifting it in his arms, then somersaulting it over his body, allez-oop! Like it was a dance. One arm over, one arm under—and the arm under would never get numb as it had when he’d cuddled Cathy, so really, cuddling the pillow was better, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? And he never pretended that the pillow was Cathy, that would have been daft, and be
sides, she may have been short but not as short as all that!—he had called her sometimes his ‘little lady’, and she had laughed at him, and only occasionally found it annoying—he never believed the pillow was Cathy (it wasn’t belief, at any rate), but he would sometimes stroke it, he would run a finger down the very centre of it as if it were a human spine, and he might sometimes kiss it, he might wish it good night.

  So, Simon coped with the nights, even if he hadn’t yet worked out how to fall asleep, but that would come, give it time, he couldn’t expect miracles.

  The doctor asked him if he had been thinking about suicide. He told her he had been. It seemed a little blunt of her, he was only after some sleeping pills, but he was by nature a polite man and was willing to oblige her queries.

  “That is a concern,” said the doctor. The doctor was a short, pretty woman, who nonetheless in no way resembled Cathy.

  Was it really a concern, Simon asked her. He had thought it better to confront these thoughts head on, that’s what his friends had told him, that’s what they’d said on that video he’d rented from the library. He told her not to be concerned, please, not on his account, and he gave her his very best reassuring smile. But she remained stubbornly concerned, and wasn’t that just typical.

  Of course he’d been thinking about suicide. He’d been puzzling at which way would be the most painless. He’d read somewhere that drowning was quite a nice way to go, that it even gave you a sense of euphoria (but then again, how would they know?). Falling from a great height wasn’t too bad—and he’d heard that the body fell so fast that there wasn’t time for the brain to process it, in effect you’d be dead before you knew, in effect you’d die in ignorance. But the thought of the impact. With all your internal organs smashing into one another. With your heart bursting pop against your ribcage. That was, on reflection, less appealing. And when it came to it, at the very precipice, just seconds away from oblivion, could he really swing himself over the edge? Could he ever be that brave? He thought not.

  He’d always assumed pills would be the best way to go. In a funny way, when he’d found Cathy’s body, still warm, but still so dead, he’d felt a tiny flutter of relief. Along with the panic, the way that his insides were turning over, the way he’d gone so very cold—relief, wasn’t there, a little bit? The relief making things better. At least she’d opted for an easy method. At least she’d done it in a way there wasn’t any blood. But then—oh, he’d made the mistake of reading up on the subject—in the days after Cathy’s death there had been so much to do but so little incentive to do it—and he read of the horrible things a drug overdose would do to your insides, there was nothing clean and tidy about it. Really, the descriptions alone made Simon gag. And he remembered the way he’d found her, on the floor, twisted, and not in her favourite armchair, not with a composed smile upon her face. He supposed it hadn’t been such a peaceful way to die after all.

  He probably shouldn’t have told the doctor any of that, it did nothing for the concerned expression on her face. And he didn’t get to go home with any sleeping pills. So.

  There hadn’t been a suicide note. Simon didn’t know why Cathy had done it. He supposed she’d been unhappy. Shouldn’t he have known she was unhappy? Shouldn’t she have told him she was? He felt like an idiot. He didn’t know what to say to anyone when they gave him their condolences. He didn’t want to admit she’d seemed perfectly okay to him. He had to lie about it, give her death some extra depth. There’d been a trauma they’d been battling together for a while. And he’d failed her. He’d failed.

  He wasn’t going to kill himself. He would never kill himself. But if he ever did. If he ever decided to bite the bullet, as it were. He promised himself he’d leave a suicide note.

  He’d hug the pillow close to him, and he thought he could smell Cathy’s hair on it. Even though that was unlikely, he’d washed the sheets after he’d found the body, he’d given the whole flat a good spring clean, he’d wiped away every trace of her and he could kick himself for that now. He sniffed at the pillow. He smelled fabric conditioner, and pretended it was the scent of Cathy’s shampoo.

  And he’d stare out into the blackness of his bedroom, and minute-by-minute, and hour-by-hour, but eventually, at least eventually, he’d get through the night.

  2

  THOUGH HE MUST have slept, because the cold woke him.

  He didn’t want to open his eyes. He refused to open them. He grabbed for the sheets, the sheets must have fallen off. The sheets hadn’t fallen off, he was already tugging them as close to his body as he could, he’d cocooned himself within them, and still he was shivering.

  And he smelled the fresh outdoor air.

  He opened his eyes, and stared up at the moon.

  He goggled at the moon for a moment. In turn, the moon stared down at him, and maybe it was just as surprised. Who knew?

  At first he thought that the roof of the house had blown off. Maybe there’d been a storm? Some violent storm, but one of those quiet storms, so he hadn’t noticed. And it wasn’t just the roof that had gone, it was the house around him, it was the entire bloody world.

  And the moon, not so distant as he would have liked. It hung in the air above his head, it was bearing down on him. It filled the sky. It glowed. He shielded his eyes from that glow. When he looked again, the moon seemed even larger, he could make out the craters on it, could see how rough and pitted was its surface. He thought that if he stood up on the bed he might even be able to reach it. He knew he couldn’t really. He was fairly sure that was impossible. He didn’t try.

  He hoped that whatever was fixing the moon into place wouldn’t give way, because then the moon would fall down and squash him flat, and then he’d die.

  The glow above him. And beneath him, another glow reflecting back. He looked over the side of the bed, and saw that it was sitting upon a lake of ice. More than a lake, the ice was everywhere—and it was clear, so smooth, no one had set foot upon the ice, its surface was in such contrast to the jagged coarseness of the moon, it was perfect. And yet that smoothness, it scared Simon all the more. Not a single mark upon this ice world, untouched, unspoilt, what would it feel when it woke up? Because Simon suddenly knew that it would wake up, he was so dazed and so tired and he knew nothing, but he knew this, it was a single primal truth he had been given: the ice would wake, and find him there, him and his bed sitting ridiculously on its too smooth skin, and it would open up and swallow them whole. With nothing but the pockmarked moon as a witness.

  He looked about him, and it was ice as far as he could see. Nothing else in any direction. An entire ocean of it, no relief from the cold hard grey.

  “I’m asleep,” he said out loud. Of course he did. But it didn’t feel more real for the saying, and his breath came out as steam.

  Neither the glow of the moon nor the glow of the ice were enough to burn away the night. The night ran its way between them, a thin ribbon of the densest black. Simon’s head was in the black, he thought it might choke him.

  He forced his eyes closed, but they wouldn’t stay shut.

  And he thought that if he could confront the fantasy of it, that he might still be all right. If his body could come into contact with the world, and see that it made no sense. He looked over the side of the bed once more. The ice seemed grim and so so cold—but it couldn’t be there, could it? He climbed out from the sheets. They weren’t doing much good anyway. He sat up cross-legged on the bed, he took a deep breath. He swung one bare foot over the side, he slowly lowered it down onto the ice.

  He suddenly remembered doing this as a child. The way he’d dread having to get up in the night, setting his feet down onto the carpet. Hoping he wouldn’t disturb the monsters he knew were sleeping under his bed.

  His toe touched the ice. And he felt nothing, there was nothing. Encouraged, he pressed the whole ball of his foot down hard. And there it was, at once, the cold burned, and it was all Simon could do not to scream, he pulled his leg up to safety with bot
h his hands and did it so clumsily that he nearly unbalanced himself, he nearly fell off the bed, he nearly fell on to the ice that looked so cool but burned like fire.

  He rubbed at the foot. Tried to rub away the pain. He looked back over the side. “No, no,” he said. Because where his toe had touched the ice there were now cracks. “No!” he said, because he could hear those cracks splitting, as the ice broke underneath the weight he’d put on it, thin jagged lines snaking their way from the pressure point across the ocean in all directions like a spider web.

  Thank God, the cracking stopped. Thank God, the ice held. It took Simon a while to get his breath back, and he couldn’t tell whether that was the cold or the panic. Gently he peered back over the side. The legs of the bed stood firm upon the ice surface. He leaned over a little further to work it out, why such a heavy object as the double bed they had got in the sales only a couple of years ago, with the big brass headboard that Cathy had thought looked like it belonged in a palace—“It’ll be like we’re royalty,” she said, “as we sleep, or watch TV, or anything else we might get up to,” and even then she’d blushed, she looked every inch the little lady right then—how could this bed, so heavy that he never thought they’d even get it up the stairs, how could this bed balance so exactly upon the ice? And as he leaned the crack in the ice began to splinter again—as if his looking alone had caused it to break, or his even questioning the situation. “I’m sorry,” he said, “sorry!”—and quickly he sat back up. He tried to find the exact centre of the bed, huddled in it, tried to make himself small and light and hoped that was enough to keep him safe.

  He made himself shut his eyes again. His eyes were wet. He realised he was crying.

  Friends said he hadn’t cried since Cathy had gone, and that wasn’t true, he had cried a lot. He just hadn’t cried whilst they were watching, so how were they to know? He admitted he’d forced the tears out somewhat—he’d stared at the bathroom mirror and told himself he was going to have a really good cry, and he’d set his face nice and taut in preparation—and he’d thought of Cathy, hard, and he’d frowned, even harder. The effort gave him a headache. Sometimes water came out. Sometimes it didn’t. He’d tried to cry at Cathy’s funeral, but he just hadn’t been able to get the concentration right. He thought he’d let her down.