I turned my gaze from her to the tunnel, back again and sighed. The return bus to Salisbury was already gone, and another wouldn’t be along for well over an hour. Still, I told myself sternly, you’re here and you might as well make the best of it, don’t you think? So I walked up to the verge and looked over the other side.
They were there, lying, tilting, standing, a worn path in a great arc around them, a rope-fence to keep the souvenir hunters from taking their chips and gouges.
I felt it again—age, and melancholy, and the wind that danced continuously over the Plain, rounding the ringstones’ edges and flattening the low grass, putting voices in my ears that I could not understand.
I imagine I made a rather forlorn picture, because a few minutes later a stout puffing man in a smart dark uniform and round cap came up beside me. He was much shorter than I, his face red and creased, and without a word he handed me a fat silver flask.
“Pity,” he said, instinctively knowing my position. “It’s best to come here alone, too. You come in a group, there’s all chattering and questions and you can’t get a true feel for what you see, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded.
We introduced ourselves then, after another round of something that had no relation to brandy, but had the fire just the same. His name was Peter Jones, and he was a guide for the helpless who didn’t know what they were looking at.
We talked, and we sipped, and we stared at the circle until, as the sky darkened and a fleet of black clouds massed on the horizon, he took my arm. I frowned. He winked and said that we can’t have reporters all the way from America losing out on this last chance, now can we? I grinned, then, and followed him, down the incline, past the ticket booth and through the tunnel. No one stopped us, though someone who might have been his boss gave him a dark, disgusted look.
By the time we climbed up the other side, we were alone.
“Do you want the lecture, John Dalton?” he asked.
I shook my head. He had spoken in a reverential whisper, and I knew why—this place, far larger, far more grand than the space it occupied, was more like a cathedral than any cathedral I’d ever been to. If I were so inclined, I would have said that the forces which had created it, and sustained it, were still hard at work in preservation, and perhaps preparation.
I shivered.
Peter nodded and passed me the flask.
We made the circuit, all the way around to the ragged, aslant Heel Stone, and I was trying to imagine what the circle must have been like with all its pieces intact and standing, when I saw her.
The woman from Salisbury station.
She was in the middle of the monument, wearing the same clothes, sitting on one of the fallen blocks.
I grabbed Peter’s arm and pointed. He looked, lifted his shoulders against the wind, and pulled me back off the path before handing me the flask. By this time I was more warm inside than out, and my mind had a tendency to wander into places where I knew I didn’t belong. But I did see her. I wasn’t so drunk that I was imagining it. I knew she was there.
Especially when Peter said, “She’s dead, you know.”
“Is she?” I asked calmly, and didn’t object when he pulled me down onto the ground, where we sat cross-legged, watching that beautiful woman watching us. She was framed now between two of the larger, linteled pieces, and there was nothing behind her but the circle and the sky. We heard no cars, no buses, no planes passed overhead. “Is she really?”
“Indeed.” He looked at me sideways. “You’re not afraid?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“Good man. There are those I know who tend to feel a little threatened when they see her. Mind, she’s never done anyone, but it is a bit unsettling, you’ve got to give it that.”
I was.
And what was worse—I felt a dim part of me shrieking with laughter because here I was, sitting on dead grass with a dead-drunk guide, staring at a dead woman and believing every word.
“A shame,” I said.
“It is that.”
“What killed her?”
“Oh, the stones.”
“What happened? One of them fall?”
We passed the flask.
“No, nothing like that, John, nothing at all. She came here one day in winter ... oh, a few years back it was. All alone. Sat right where she’s sitting now and froze to death.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Surely someone would have seen her. You, maybe, or one of the others.”
Jones shook his head. “No one. Not until the next morning. It was snowing, you see, and with the fences, the road closed, no one saw her until dawn. A motorist. He called the constables in Amesbury and they came out to fetch her. Too late, of course. Frozen stiff, and make no mistake about it.”
She was beautiful. I still couldn’t see her features clearly for the wind blowing in my eyes, but she was beautiful.
“Suicide,” I guessed.
“No. The stones.”
“You said that already.”
“So I did. Well, I’ll say it a third time—it was the stones that did it.”
“She tried to take a piece of them?”
He scoffed, and we shared the last of the drink before he pointed to someone’s name spray-painted on one of the monoliths’ faces. “What are you thinking, man, the stones were protecting themselves? Then why didn’t they take care of the little bugger what did that?”
I didn’t know.
I belched.
“Cute little darling, isn’t she,” he said.
“I think I’m in love.”
“Oh, yes, you might be. You might be at that.”
“You think so?”
He nudged me with an elbow, gave me a wink. “Why don’t you introduce yourself?” And he giggled.
“We’ve already met. Sort of.”
“Really, now. You don’t say. Where?”
“At the station. The train station in Salisbury. I saw her on the platform, and she smiled at me.”
Peter sighed with delight. “Ah, so she’s getting around at last. It’s nice. I’d hate to think of her being stuck out here all the time.”
A sudden gust nearly shoved me over, and my head cleared for an instant. “Jesus,” I said, “we’re talking about a damned ghost!”
“Penny Daye,” he replied.
“What?”
“Penny Daye. That’s her name. You should at least know her name if you’re going to make remarks.”
I scrambled unsteadily to my feet and stood over him.
“Peter, sober up, for god’s sake.” I passed a hand over my eyes, took a deep breath, and looked again.
She was still there.
Smiling at me.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
Peter hiccoughed.
I wanted to clout him over the head then, kick at him, force him to admit that he was playing a marvelous, and certainly well-executed joke on me. But he only burst into cackling laughter and rolled onto his back, his cap spinning away in the wind, the flask bouncing free on the grass.
I waved at him disgustedly and started for the circle, watching the woman as her smile broadened and she adjusted her coat primly over her knees. When I reached the restraining rope, I stepped over it, barely thinking that I might be laying myself open for a hell of a big fine, and ignored Peter’s sudden shout of warning.
For which of us, I didn’t know.
She winked, and one hand lifted to rest against her cheek, an invitation to dance if I ever saw one.
Peter yelled again as I passed under the lintel.
I turned and grinned at him, swayed when the wind touched me, swayed again when it stopped.
And when I turned back, she was gone.
I nearly fell in my haste to get to where she’d been sitting, and did fall once I reached it, by snaring my foot in a depression hidden in tangled grass. My hands flew out to catch me, and I still came up against the stone hard with my chest, momentarily knoc
king the air from my lungs. My eyes teared, my ribs protested, and it was several gasping minutes before I was able to straighten up and look around.
She was gone.
So was Peter.
And suddenly I was too tired to chase after either one of them.
Too many drinks, too many years, too many disappointments of which this had to be the last straw.
At that moment there was a rage I didn’t think I had in me, and I didn’t care if anyone saw what I was doing; I hoisted myself up and sat there, ankles crossed, hands in my lap, looking out over the Plain and listening to the wind, watching the light vanish, watching the shadows grow out of the stones.
And hearing the aged voices that cling to the air, filled with angry tears and angry questions I have seen myself shed and heard myself ask whenever I turn on my light and there’s no one home but me.
I think there’s a hint of snow in the air.
Voices in false melancholy, telling me now as they have told Penny Daye and all the others before her that if I could do to the world what I believed the world had done to me, I will not have to stay long.
All I need is one person. One woman. Perhaps finding her on the bus, or at the station, or on a corner. One woman to smile at, one woman who knows what it’s like to be alone.
He’s dead, you know, Peter will say.
A woman to love me fleetingly, to cherish me briefly, dream of me just once in a large empty bed.
Froze to death, right where he’s sitting.
To lure to my side because that’s all there is left.
The stones did it.
It made me smile, as it had made her smile before she brought me to the place where the stones held me fast.
The stones.
It brought a color to my cheeks I haven’t had since I was a child, a color I would take with me, as she had, to find me.
It’s the color of the weak and the meek and those who suffer for romance, because romance has no heart.
It’s Penny Daye’s color.
It’s the color of revenge.
DWINDLING by David B. Silva
David B. Silva is editor/publisher of The Horror Show, a quarterly magazine and one of the most promising small-press publications of recent years. Often when a small-press editor also has ambitions as a writer, the temptation to publish his own work is irresistible and the results almost certainly unfortunate. Not so for Silva, who has avoided this trap and chosen instead to publish his stories elsewhere—and with considerable success—in a number of small-press magazines (“Dwindling” is from Spectrum Stories) and in anthologies such as Masques, Cold Sweats, and Damnations. Born July 11, 1950 in Carmel, California, Silva now lives in Oak Run, California—dividing his time about 75-25 between The Horror Show and his own fiction. Silva has been writing for about five years now, and he has a novel due out shortly from Leisure Books.
In the summer, just after school let out, the pastures were still green and there was a freshness in the air that wouldn’t die until the raw August temperatures broiled it from memory. The wind was tender and breezy then. During the day, the sky was a faint blue. But near sundown it would open its throat and the blue would turn purple, thick and rich and friendly. It had always been a special time of year for Derrick.
As he scooted off the last bus, making its last stop of the school year, and gazed across the forever fields to the farmhouse, a vague and chilling premonition marched in gooseflesh up his arms. The sensation was too obscure to trouble him. But as he kicked stones at his younger brothers and slowly made his way home, he made note of the bitter feeling and how similar it tasted to the bitterness he had experienced the day before Grandma Sanders had died. Then Georgie hit him in the back with a dirt clod and the feeling was put aside.
Six-year-old Tammy folded her hands in front of her, bowed her head, and took a deep breath. “Thank you, Lord, for this food upon our table. Amen.”
“Amen,” said in chorus, then hands, small-medium-large, reached for corn on the cob and broth of chicken and fresh green salad made of lettuce and tomato, bell pepper and carrot, celery and onion. There was hot homemade bread and cold unpasteurized milk. Everything and everyone that was important in Derrick’s life was all right there. Except for ...
“Where’s Sarah?” he asked as he buttered a slice of bread that warmed the palm of his hand. And when no one answered, he asked again, “Where’s Sarah?” this time looking directly at his mother. Her eyes seemed tired, as if she were gone somewhere faraway in a daydream. A swirl of black hair, singed with lean flames of gray, fell across her forehead. She brushed it back, seeming never to have left the daydream. “Mom?”
“Hmm?” she said, only half-there.
“I asked where Sarah was?”
“Who?”
“Sarah.”
For a moment, there was an eerie pause in the meal. Forks stalled in mid-air. Mouths were closed, ears were opened, and a dozen questioning eyes turned to stare at him. Who’s Sarah?
Then Tammy grinned, and with her mouth full of a thick, cheesy casserole, she said, “Betcha Derr’s got a girlfriend.”
Derrick felt himself blushing then, even though he had nothing at all to blush about. He was just curious about Sarah, that’s all. No big deal. He was sure she was all right, someone would have told him if she weren’t. So he smiled uncomfortably and turned back to his plate of vegetables, doing his best to divert the attention away from him.
His thoughts about Sarah would just have to wait.
Derrick didn’t breathe another word of her until he was in bed that night. Brian was already asleep in the corner, one of his arms hanging off the edge of the bed, his hand brushing against the floor. Georgie was tossing in the bottom bunk, rocking himself back and forth as he did every night until he eventually fell asleep. From the upper bunk, Derrick whispered, “Georgie?”
“What?” The light sway of the bunk beds stopped.
“Where’s Sarah?”
The rocking started up again.
“Georgie?”
“I don’t know.”
Derrick leaned over the edge of his bed. “If you don’t stop that blessed rocking, I’m gonna slug you.”
“I don’t even know who she is,” his brother whispered.
And for a moment, Derrick couldn’t believe his ears. “She’s your sister,” he said. “Your sister! The one that tried to eat the tail right off your kite yesterday.”
“That was Tammy.” His brother quietly said before he rolled over, face to the wall, back to Derrick where he could see a luminescent iron-on patch of the Incredible Hulk glowing green in the dark. “Ain’t one pesky sister bad enough for you?”
Derrick could have argued. He could have pointed out a handful of recent incidents when little Sarah had pestered both of them. Little sisters did things like that. And eventually he could have made Georgie admit that Sarah was missing. But he didn’t. Somewhere inside, gnawing at his gut, Derrick knew that there had never been a Sarah, that her four years of giggling and gurgling and crying—sometimes all night long—had been little more than an imaginative spasm, a bizarre tic on the face of his reality. And that’s why they had all stared at him with eyes that asked, Who’s Sarah? Because there was no Sarah. His imagination had been playing games in his head, as it must do with everyone, as it did when Tammy played tea party with playmates that weren’t really there.
An imaginative spasm.
That’s what it was.
The summer’s first one-hundred-degree temperature arrived less than a week later, pushing the mercury above the red zone on the rusting Orange Crush thermometer that had been tacked to the big oak as long as Derrick could remember.
Pa had allowed them the day down at Miner’s Pond. Clad in cut-offs made from an old pair of jeans he’d worn out during the winter, Derrick was busy cleaning the spring weeds out of the little patch of sand which covered the ground between the water and the cliff of rock they used as a diving platform. The others were already
in the water, squirming and churning enough to make the pond look like a pot of boiling watercress soup.
Tammy let out a squeal just before Brian dunked her.
Sometimes, like now, when her hair was damp and it closely embraced her thin, almost-hollow cheeks, he would see Sarah looking out from Tammy’s laughing eyes. Even though he realized that there had never been a Sarah. And when he remembered those special things she would do, those special things his imagination had made so real for him—like the time she tried to cut her own hair and Ma nearly had to shave her head to make it all even again—after times like those, he wished she had been more than just a daydream.
But she hadn’t. He knew that now. She was gone, her dolls were gone, her clothes were gone. There had never been a real Sarah.
Derrick collapsed into the soft sand and sifted his strange emptiness from hand to hand in the form of a thousand gritty particles.
“Come on, Derr,” one of the others called.
He smiled and shook his head, all of a sudden feeling too old to be splashing carelessly in Miner’s Pond. And he felt a little sad just then, as if at age twelve he had suddenly realized the time was nearing when he would have to give up some of those cherished things that stood between being a boy and being a man. Perhaps the joy of Miner’s Pond. Perhaps some other never-to-be-forgotten place or time or person.
That’s what his parents had done. Over the years, they had somehow given up their happiness for something else, something he wasn’t sure he understood. And maybe that was what growing up was all about. Giving away those things you liked most about yourself.
If so, it didn’t seem fair.
“Derr, come on!”
It didn’t seem fair at all.
Derrick wiped the sand from the butt of his cut-offs, and with a laughter he wasn’t yet ready to give up, he did a painful belly flop into the circle of his brothers and sister.
It felt great.
They played away the afternoon, exploring creek rocks for crawdads, building a miniature dam to house minnows, diving off the cliff, playing tag up and down the creek’s banks until their feet were sore and their bodies were bright pink from too much sun.
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