“A lot happened. I got married.” He looked suddenly uncertain, and she laughed. “Don’t worry, it finished long ago. All I have left of him are a few photographs, some of his clothes and an old wedding certificate.” Suddenly she felt tears at the corners of her eyes. They were so sharp they stung her and she shook her head in disbelief. “I still can’t believe it’s you.”
“Oh, it’s me all right. No doubt about it. Flesh and blood.” He extended his hands and she grasped them, feeling the skin and the bones. She moved her fingers round until she could feel the slow pulse in his wrists.
She couldn’t hold back the tears. They slid down her face. “You knew that if you ever wanted me I’d be here.”
He nodded slowly, as if preoccupied.
She sniffed (she thought it sounded horrible) and said firmly “Bath.”
“All right. Whatever you say. If I can stay ...”
“Of course you’re staying. For as long as you want. Now come on. You look as if you haven’t been warm for days and your hair’s in bad need of a wash.”
For that moment his eyes looked uncomprehending.
“I’m not giving you a choice, John.”
“Okay.”
She ran the bath until the room was full of steam and dappled glass. He stood and let her undress him, making no protest, as silent as a patient. In the bath his feet stuck out of the water and she placed them on either side of the chrome taps. She washed his hair several times, relathering it, feeling it become cleaner beneath her fingers. She left him soaking while she washed his clothes. They had expensive labels but felt as if he’d been sleeping rough in them. She left the bathroom door open in case, in a trance with the heat, he slipped beneath the water.
When she dried him he felt warmer, healthier, more human. The water that dripped from his hair was warm. He even began to smile. He stood there, still pale but a little more pink, while she rubbed him dry with a thick white towel. She felt the rib, the muscle wall, the relaxed skin of his genitals, the slow thump of the heart. It was then that she asked him about the marks. They were distinct pinkish circles, almost like immature nipples.
What are these?” she asked, trying not to sound as nervous as she felt.
He looked down.
“You must know,” he said.
“Are they where the bullets hit?”
He nodded.
She tried to be calm, as calm as she could “John,” she asked, “are you dead?”
He laughed. He pushed his hair back with one hand. “Of course I’m dead,” he said, “can’t you tell? Don’t you believe what you read in the papers?”
Later John sat in her husband’s dressing gown in front of the fire. He stared into its flames, watching the black coal burning. He seemed content.
When he slept his hair fell across his eyes in a fine swath, making him look almost boyish. She pushed it gently back from his eyelids with her fingertips. He drew the blankets tightly about him like a child.
That night while he slept Dorothy filled his room with mementos of his life—posters, records, fan magazines, old photographs, a couple of books, a guitar with his name scrawled across it. Then she lay in bed, with a warm tide of fulfillment and trust flowing through her. She stayed awake like a guardian, and thought of him waking like a child at Christmas, lost in wonder at the Aladdin’s cave of his own past.
He was already awake when she looked in. He sat by the bed in her husband’s broadly striped pajamas. He picked through the collection, never dwelling for long on anything, but sometimes smiling and sometimes looking puzzled at this accumulation of evidence. Later she brought out the photograph album and together they looked at the pictures.
“You must have been our first fan,” John said.
“I never claimed that.”
“Didn’t you? But you were always there. I remember we all liked to see you. You gave us a sense of security.”
“I remember I felt quite possessive about you. When you started to make it big I thought you were being stolen by others. Firstly girls from Liverpool, then Hamburg, London—”
“Tomorrow the world,” he said, and the cutting edge was in his voice. “Where was this taken?”
“Didn’t you recognize Matthew Street?”
“Christ. Yes.”
“Do you know everyone on it?”
“That’s me. And you, and that girl who used to sometimes come with you. With Pete Best, George. That’s Ringo when he was with Rory Storm. That’s Rory’s girlfriend. This must have been just after Stu died.”
“Not long. We were all terribly upset about that.”
He put his hand up to his face and spread his fingers in an unexpectedly feminine motion.
“We wanted Paul on the photo but it all got a bit chaotic,” she laughed. “He came back to line up the camera with me and I took this by mistake. I just pressed the shutter too soon. And it was the end of the film.”
He tilted his head back and laughed. She could see hollows at the base of his neck. “Look,” he said, “I can remember a lot about those days. All of a sudden.”
They reminisced about the old days. About old songs, places, friends. Endless loves that had lasted a few days, wild ambitions that were never airborne; a time when all the future had lain before them. John was relaxed and amusing, telling tall stories, most of them true, with all his old flair for pithiness and zest.
“Come on,” she said finally, “it’s time you ate.” He shook his head.
“It must be twelve hours since you arrived,” she said, “and you haven’t eaten or drunk a thing. You must try.”
“No,” he said, “leave it.”
She left it a moment and then said “It’ll do you good to have a meal.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” he said.
So she ate on her own.
Later she dressed him in a pair of jeans and a black sweater. They were both slightly too big for him. “His shoes will be a size too large, as well,” she mused. “Maybe we could find some really thick socks so they won’t be too uncomfortable.”
“You know I’ll have to revisit the old places.”
She nodded. “I knew they could never kill you,” she said. “I knew you’d come back.”
He thought about this for a long time. “I always knew it was possible,” he said at last. “We thought about it a lot.”
“What happened? What really happened?”
“He got me all right. You go through life tensed up for the unexpected, and when it happens ...”
He gripped her arm. She felt her limb go numb the grip was so tight.
“You mustn’t tell anyone.” he said. There was urgency and a slight bitterness in his voice.
She shook her head, mute.
“I mean it,” he said, and all the old menace and unpredictability were there. “No one must ever know.”
“I swear it.”
“No one.”
“My arm hurts.”
He let go of her. “Sorry,” he said.
Within a few days he was leaving her for several hours, slipping out of the house at dusk with a turned-up coat collar and a pulled-down hat. Sometimes when he returned he would tell her where he had been—to where his mother lived, or Aunt Mimi’s old house, or Penny Lane, or Matthew Street, or Strawberry Fields. Sometimes he said nothing, but stared into the fire, red light edging his face. She would pretend to watch the television but all the time keep her eyes on him. He still had not eaten, and she was becoming increasing concerned. She once suggested calling a doctor and he was mercilessly sarcastic to her, asking did she not know that a doctor could do nothing for the dead—only angels and undertakers were of any use to the dead.
So she had rich, hot, heavy-smelling meals prepared for herself, hoping that they would somehow trigger hunger in him. But he remained indifferent, and all the time got thinner.
And although at times he was his old charming self, he often drifted away into silence and introspection, gazing for long periods at
nothing. In this relaxed, almost exhausted posture he looked like a man recuperating, lost between ordeals, resting between battles. It was then that he became a stranger, a foreigner in his own land, unwilling or unable to grasp the everyday event. He had no trouble in refusing to answer her.
Over the next few days he offered her four versions of the afterlife. She only asked him about it once but he could not let the matter rest. When he described them there was an edge to his voice. He was like a man betrayed, cheated out of his inheritance.
In the first of these he told her of an afterlife like a children’s heaven. There he would meet again all those he had loved, including the famous Julia, his mother. “She’s there all right,” he said, eyes glittering, “it’s just the way you think it should be. All your friends, all your relations. It’s like one big, endless, happy childhood. Like soft, neverending protection. The lion lies down with the lamb.”
The second was a rock’n’roll heaven. “They’re all up there,” he said, moving his hand in a slow arc and looking up at the ceiling. He was like a parody preacher. “Presley, Hendrix, Holly. They make music too great for mortal ears. And the girls are always beautiful and always available.” He stared directly at her, daring her to take him seriously.
A third version, the Eastern version, spoke of cycles of incarnation, of moments of insight between death and birth during which one saw with a clarity that Earth could never match. Life was an ascent or descent through stages of self-knowledge. One plunged down the spiral toward the senseless and inanimate or crawled up it toward the angels.
“And you?” Dorothy asked.
He sneered. “Why,” he said, “I’ve always known where I was going. To the toppermost of the poppermost.” It was the half-dismissive, half-serious phrase he’d used to cajole and encourage the others when they’d been struggling in Hamburg and Liverpool.
But John also offered the possibility of a fourth kind of afterlife. This was a spiritual existence, the survival of the mind without the body in a nexus of consciousness. Identities were individual and yet inseparable from the connections which passed through them. They were pulses in the eternal mind.
“And you’ve been part of this?”
Suddenly, without warning, he looked stricken and fearful. “I don’t know,” he whispered. She put her arms round him and he buried his head in her bosom. After a few minutes he had recovered.
Of course, she speculated about a fifth version. The dead returned to their old homes, haunting them, were restless and unsatisfied spirits until something finally laid them to rest. But he always felt so real in her arms.
“Come on.” she said to him, “you’re all right, John. You’re here with me. You’re safe.”
“Do you think so?”
“Of course, I know so.”
“None of it’s true, Dorothy.”
“What? What isn’t?”
His eyes were startling and honest, his cheeks thin. His hands looked large on the end of stick-like arms. “It’s oblivion, you know,” he said, matter-of-fact, “everything just sputters to an end, the body systems close down, consciousness just folds in on itself. There’s no light, no dark, nothing. It’s oblivion. Nothing. Forever.”
“A dying man’s life comes to him in the few moments before the end,” he said bitterly. “And that’s it. You go into death fooling yourself. Our only talent is self-deception.”
That night Dorothy sat and watched television. John was already asleep; his periods of rest were getting longer and longer. Now it was common for him to sleep the clock round. Sometimes when the winter sun set she would ask him if he was going out; he’d shake his head and say he was tired.
She sat with a coffee and watched a soap opera, the news, and a documentary about medicine. In the documentary a doctor discussed the nature of the self. One’s feelings were located in the self, he said, and that was paradoxical, for the self was unlocatable. Nobody knew where it was. As an illustration he showed amputees who still experienced sensations in limbs that were no longer there. When something vital is removed, the doctor said, the self creates an alternative—and it is too simple to say that this creation is fictitious. To the self, it is real.
“You’ve hardly changed at all,” he said to her the next day.
“Haven’t I?” She was flattered but surprised.
“You’re just like you were all those years ago.” He seemed bemused by this.
She laughed. “It’s nice of you to say so, but it’s not really true.”
“It is. You even have the same figure. Girlish—that’s the word. People change over the years. Look at me. But you, you’re no different. You look twenty-five years younger than me. Why, you even wear the same kind of clothes as you did then.”
“I don’t.”
He nodded. It was slow. “You’d think you were still there, Dorothy. All around me it still belongs to the early sixties. There’s only me that’s different.”
He shuddered. It was a spasm that ran through him, and he hugged his arms to himself to control it.
“I’m outside the time capsule,” he said.
Dorothy stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. Afternoon light made her face white. She bent close to the glass. There were broadening strands of gray in her hair, webbings of lines at her eyes and mouth, and she knew if she pulled down the collar of her blouse she would find the beginnings of a scrawniness at the base of her neck.
John’s fingers traced his chest until they found, beneath his clothes, the site of one of the bullets. He spread his hands over the area, pushed the flesh together. He was like a young girl discovering the beginnings of a breast.
“Dorothy.”
“Yes?”
“I’m dying. I know it.”
“You’re not, you’re not.”
“I know it. I’ve been thinking stupid things, thinking that I’d survived it. I thought that somehow this was all true, that it was real, that I’d been given some kind of guarantee.” He tilted his head downward. His hair fell forward. When he spoke again his voice was strained and unstable. “Because I can reach out and touch things, because I can touch you, I thought that was proof.” He put his hands up to his face.
“John?”
When he looked up again the lower rims of his glasses had caught tears. They spilled out of the sides as he lifted his head. His voice shook. “It scares me,” he said, “I’m terrified.”
Once more she had to comfort him. She could feel his bones beneath the skin. There was so little flesh on him now she felt as if she were comforting a hunger victim.
“I’m tired,” he whispered.
Even though it was only mid-afternoon she decided to put him to bed. He looked drained and ill, and she had to steady him as he walked to the bedroom. She helped him undress. He insisted that he did not have the strength to get into any pajamas so she humored him and let him get into bed naked.
He lay and cried while she sat beside him and held his hand and dried his eyes. Eventually the grief seemed to exhaust him, and he quietened and then slipped into unconsciousness. She sat with him for a while. He still sniffed and trembled a little in his sleep, but gradually, as he slept more deeply, the distress left him.
Dorothy went back to the mirror, took off her clothes and stood in front of it. She studied herself for several minutes. The light was cruel to her. There was no mistaking her age.
As she watched herself a feeling of unreality swept through her, loosening her understanding, releasing her grip. She felt floating, unresolved, half-imagined. It was a sickeningly dreamlike sensation, as if she belonged to something or someone else.
Weakened, she went back into the bedroom.
John lay beneath the sheets. He was quiet, still; his head was tilted back and his arms were down by his sides. His eyes were closed.
She lifted the sheets and slipped into bed beside him. He was cold. She wrapped herself around him, hoping that the heat of her body would warm him. He hardly moved. She could fee
l the slow pulse of his heart, the shallow peace of his light breathing.
Her fingers searched him until they touched the small round mark of a bullet. She ran her fingertips around it, touching it lightly, gently. After a while, like a newborn animal returning to its mother’s teat, found the wound with her mouth, and fastened her lips around it.
She lay there quietly, waiting for the night.
IN LATE DECEMBER, BEFORE THE STORM by Paul M. Sammon
Born December 22, 1949 in Philadelphia, Paul M. Sammon has been a world traveler since childhood. Sammon saw much of the Far East—and not the side reserved for tourists—with his father, who worked in military intelligence. Later, Sammon’s work as a journalist/filmmaker/publicist sent him on excursions throughout the world. Just now he resides in Los Angeles, where he has formed his own small film/video production company, Awesome Productions.
Readers who have attended major science fiction conventions may remember Paul M. Sammon for his slide show presentations as studio publicist for such films as Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, and Dune. Most recently Sammon has written, produced and directed the science fiction comedy, P.P.—The Planetary Pal. While Sammon has published over 150 articles, interviews, and critical studies in such places as Cinefantastique, Cinefex, American Cinematographer, Omni, and the Los Angeles Times, this is his first published piece of fiction. “In Late December, Before the Storm,” according to Sammon, is based on a dream and is about an old girlfriend. He calls the story “a parable of conscience.”
Yesterday morning the nervousness started. It always starts that way. With nerves. I lay staring upward on the sweat-soaked sheets for nearly half an hour, not fully awake, not wanting to go back to sleep. Not thinking, either. Just feeling. Feeling the sour edge pulsing in my throat, feeling my tingling fingers, feeling a tiny blade of fear nicking at my gut with every indrawn breath. The dirty gray ceiling above the mattress blotted out my thoughts like the end of all hope.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 14 Page 23