by Unknown
“Come on, then,” I yell to the madness. “She’s dead. I’m as good as. Come on and do it clean, cleaner than those bastards back in the real world.”
I’m tired of scientist-things and mages using me for their god-damned war and not even having the decency to ask me my bloody name first.
“I’m Attery St John, you fuckers.” I bow to the shapes in the darkness. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
More silver lines come for me, wrapping my gunship up like a silkworm.
A panel of dark glass cracks, and one of the fishing line things is inside, nosing about, blind as can be. I can’t close my eyes. Not since I changed, and all I can do is float here, and let the old beast eat me.
It prods at my face, and the touch of it is a trigger. The thing the mage stuck in my head breaks open and the hatch fills with magic. The tendril pulls back, puffing a cloud of spore. The spore and magic meet, and I can feel them both tearing through my brain, mixing up.
They’re talking.
They’re honest to Queens fucking talking.
They talk for longer than years, and just seconds, and then the tendrils turn to me and hold my face, gentle. They’re tapping at me, all playful, and the air is full of spore and I’m choking on it but it’s sweet and good and I can see the past
and present and future and everything.
~stay?~ they say inside my head. ~pretty here. safe~
And I think, well, why the fuck not. And the hatch opens and I’m in the Space Between, but I’m all right-like, and the silver fishing lines have me, and then I’m inside-
Oh, inside the old beasts and there is Louise, bright and shiny black, her beak open in a bird smile.
She’s real as real, and I wasn’t expecting the feeling that runs through me now, a human thing - relief. All around us, the Nar touch and talk, explain the world in new dimensions, taking away our deaths and giving us a new kind of sanity, one that even Queen Vicky with her court mages wouldn’t understand.
I drift up to Louise, my wings spreading, growing bigger and bluer and that’s okay because right here right now, that’s as it should be.
There’s nothing strange about being a boy who is also a butterfly, or being a starling who is also a girl.
~yes~ say the old beasts in the tones of parents who have been trying to explain simple things to small children.
“I could have pressed the trigger,” I say to Louise.
“He didn’t think you would.”
Never trust a mage. Not even the ones on your side. I smile. I wonder if the scientist-things know what it was he did right under their noses. If the Queen knows what her debt really bought her. How many more of the changelings will he send through before Queen Vicky cottons on and hangs him as a traitor, I wonder.
It doesn’t matter.
There are others already here. We were not the first.
We won’t be the last.
We are in the beasts now, and we are them and they are us and one day there will be a new world, and we will go back, and New Londinium will be the jungles and the Space Between and Bedlam and Babylon and we will all have changed.
And perhaps, like gods, we will raise the dead.
LIGHTHOUSE
BY GENEVIEVE ROSE TAYLOR
Isee her in the darkness, walking these sea-misted streets in this nowhere town. She walks by night, in the fog-drenched shadows, weeping in the rain. From the safety and warmth of my little garret room, I watch her stagger by, clutching her belly with one hand, searching for something she will never find. Even though I’ve never seen a ghost before, I know this isn’t a living woman stumbling along the cobblestones. She’s long past needing the help of shelter and a warm fire.
Ghosts in horror movies have always instilled in me that fear of the unnatural, the innate wrongness we feel when faced with the undead. I expect her to look up at me, with the preternatural kenning of evil, or to flicker like static in an old movie. I want to believe – selfishly – that she’s here because of me, as punishment for my sins, but the universe doesn’t work that way. God has better things to do than send ghostly justice my way, better things to do than to reach out and touch me – or her – with a miracle. She passes by without seeing me, without knowing that I’m watching from the other side of the veil.
When she’s gone, I realize that I’ve put my hand on my belly, like she did. I wonder if her secret is the same as mine, or if hers was worse. I still can’t sleep, and why bother trying? Sleep steals away the only hours I have left, so I make myself another cup of coffee, and return to the window.
In the morning, I make more coffee, this time with bacon and eggs to share with Barbara. She clucks at me for being up so early and waiting on her.
“And in your condition, too!” she scolds, assuming the obvious. My stomach is expanding, and I have a habit of resting my hand over the bulge, feeling the growth within. She didn’t need me to tell her the truth: she’s come to her own conclusion.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, though it’s a lie. Another sleepless night. I’ll collapse later, retreating to my room in time to lock the door and cower in the bathroom, retching blood. For now, I drink coffee and wear a smile, walking with Barbara to the shop. She owns a little gift shop in town, for the summer tourists. It stays open in winter, for the occasional foolhardy road-trippers, but she lives off the money from the summer season.
Last month I wandered into her shop, cold and wet from the drizzling snow, and asked her if there was any work to be found. I’d been from town to town already, my rusted car stuttering in the snow, and each place had said no. Maybe in summer, but not now, with the town in winter hibernation. Barbara said yes. She saw a young woman, helpless and alone, and she told me that she needed an assistant in her shop. It wouldn’t pay much, but she had a spare bedroom in her house she wasn’t using.
“Stay as long as you like,” she said, and didn’t ask questions.
I carried my one suitcase up the stairs to the garret room where I will spend the rest of my life. I tried not to think about all the things I had left behind.
On the walk to the shop, my hands in my pockets to keep them warm, I ask her about the woman I saw in the rain.
“Does Northshore have any ghost stories?” I say, starting off casual.
“Ghost stories? Every town has ghost stories, especially in New England.”
“Tell me one.”
Barbara’s a talker, but she’s not usually a storyteller. She looks off across the streets, thinking it over. “Northshore used to be bigger, I guess you know that. Never big enough to be a city, nothing like that, but three hundred years ago it was an important port town. The harbor’s deep, and it’s easy to defend, as long as you’re only dealing with boats and the occasional small ship. But as they started building ships bigger and bigger, our port became useless. It was too small, and the world was growing.
“Anyway, that’s when the ghosts come from, seems like. All the oldest stories, all the best ghosts, they’re the ones that were ancient history even when I was a child. The old Cassidy place is supposed to be haunted. Popular version of the story is that a young woman was forced to marry a man her father chose for her, though her heart belonged to someone else. On the night before the wedding, her fiance caught her with her lover, while she was saying goodbye. The two of them fought, and both men were mortally wounded in the scuffle. The girl, sick with guilt for causing the deaths of two men, took her lover’s gun and killed herself. She’s supposed to haunt the manor, searching for something: her lover, or maybe just forgiveness.”
“Do you think she’ll ever find it?” I ask.
“Three hundred years, and she hasn’t yet. By now, she’s probably forgotten what she was looking for. Maybe she’s even forgotten why. It’s a long time to remember something.”
Barbara unlocks the door to the shop, and I follow her inside, flipping the sign on the door to ’open’.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I want to ask her about the woman in the r
ain. Maybe no one knows what happened to her. Just another once-missing person, lost to history.
“Me?” Barbara tsks. “Dreary day to be talking about ghosts, though I suppose that’s the best kind. Do I believe in ghosts? Yes. I suppose I do. What about you?”
“I think I saw one.” Slowly, I take off my scarf and hat, hanging them on the hooks in the back.
“Saw one!” Barbara exclaims. “Is that why you’re asking? Tell me, then. What did you see?”
In winter, Barbara keeps an electric kettle in the shop, to make tea and hot chocolate, which she offers to any customers who might actually appear. The season’s late, almost turned to spring, but it’s still months too early for tourists. I fill the kettle, and turn it on. I wonder how to tell the story of the ghost woman without telling any secrets of my own.
“Last night, late, when I was looking out the window, I saw a woman in the street. She was weeping, hand on her swollen belly.” My fingers brush over the fabric of my shirt, feeling the growth beneath. Barbara doesn’t know yet, that it’s lopsided. With an effort, I take my hand away and put it on the counter, pretending that I don’t identify with the weeping ghost. “She was looking for something.”
“Looking for something?” Barbara repeats. “I don’t know. That’s not a story I’ve ever heard, from the streets of Northshore. How was she dressed?”
“In gray and black, a style I don’t recognize. Her hair was covered by a type of bonnet.”
“Well, I suppose you could research it, if you wanted.”
Too impatient to wait for the kettle to whistle, I lift it off the burner and pour us each a cup of tea. It’s still too hot to drink, even if it hadn’t reached boiling. “I’d be scared of what I’d find. Right now, I know what I saw, but I can still tell myself it was only a dream. If I found her, in an old book, it would make it all too horribly real.”
“But you’re interested,” Barbara points out.
My show of casual curiosity must not be working. She no doubt assumes that I identify with the ghost because one of the first things I told her about the woman I saw is one of the first things Barbara learned about me. I don’t use – or even think – the p-word, and I don’t let myself dwell on what she thinks.
“I’ve never seen a ghost before,” I say, deflecting the issue. “Have you?”
She goes quiet all of a sudden, drawing into herself. I watch her, surprised at how quickly the tables have turned to her secrets, instead of mine. “No,” she says, at last. “I don’t think so.”
I wait, rubbing my hands over my cup – one hand at a time, so I don’t get burned. The cup’s too hot to hold for more than a couple of seconds. Almost a minute passes before she collects her words and plows forward.
“My family owned a house, when I was a child. Not the one where I live now. It was a few counties south of here, and further inland.” While she talks, her eyes are far away, and I realize for the first time, that Barbara was younger than I, once. She’s old enough to live in that perpetual state past middle age that seems to last for decades, and she might be any age at all. I’ve never asked about her past. I’ve never imagined that she was anyone but Barbara the gift shop owner, who makes tea and hot chocolate for the tourists. It’s a comforting lie, to think of her as a constant in the world, as though she’s been here all along, keeping the door open for the next homeless young woman to show up on her doorstep.
“It was an imposing old house, peculiar and creaky enough to put ideas in your head, even if it wasn’t haunted. I never liked it. I grew up there, and I don’t remember living anywhere before that, but it wasn’t home. You know that feeling? I distrusted my own house. How foolish is that! It was only a house.”
“But?” I prompt her. There’s more to this story.
“I always felt like I was being watched.” She whispers it, like a secret. It is a secret. I wonder if she’s ever told anyone else this not-quite ghost story. “It’s silly, and I told myself that all the time. ‘Barbara, you’re being silly. There’s no one there.’”
She pauses again, lost in the memory. I’ve been in a house like that before – the kind that stays cold and dark, no matter how warm and bright it is in the sunlight outside.
“But then we moved away, years later, and the feeling went away. I forgot about it. Easy to pass something like that off as an overactive imagination.”
I don’t say anything, at first. I pick up my cup and take a sip, and she does the same, a moment later. “Have you ever gone back?” I ask, at last. “To see if anything’s changed?”
She looks at me, startled. “No,” she says, but she looks off to the south, in the direction that the house must be. “I never have.”
“Would you consider it?” I can’t resist the idea, now that it’s in my head. I feel like there are no strings on my life anymore, to stop me from doing the things I would otherwise avoid. Why hold back? Why be afraid of ghosts? I am still afraid. I’m terrified. But if I’m going to be a ghost myself, I want to know what it’s like.
“Maybe,” she says.
The bell on the door jingles before I can ask her anything else. I set down my mug, and go to the front to meet our customer.
I stay up late, that night, sitting in the window and watching for the woman in the rain. When I wake up, my cheek is cold from resting against the glass, and it’s near dawn. I don’t remember when I fell asleep, or if I saw any glimpse of my ghost. Moving to the bed, I sleep for two hours, and get up early to go for a walk.
Tuesdays are my day off, and it’s raining again, wet and dreary, clinging to the windows in half-frozen droplets. I put on my heaviest hooded coat and go out into the rain. Barbara’s already left for the shop, so she’s not around to scold me about the risk of catching a cold. I don’t care. I can’t be bothered with worry.
I walk along the shore, heading north. After an hour, I stop, and look back towards town. I should be taking it easy, taking better care of myself. I’ve barely slept, and haven’t eaten.
There’s an old lighthouse, a few miles out of town, off the main road. From here, I can just see it, a smudge on the horizon. I’ve been wanting to visit it, since I first spotted it on one of my walks, but it’s so far. I put my eyes on the ground, and keep walking. One step, then another. When I look up, the lighthouse is closer. That wasn’t so bad. I keep walking.
The sky is mottled by the time I get there, sun breaking between patchwork clouds. It’s warmer now, and the wet ground steams at the touch of sunlight. From afar, the lighthouse looks timeless, pristine, but up close I can see that it’s rusted and rotten. I stand at the foot of it, looking up at the gleam of sunlight on the silver metal, turned to rust at the edges. Copper-colored rust stains leak down the walls like blood, and at one spot I can see clear through two gaps in the metal to the blue sky above.
Metal creaks under my feet as I climb the three steps to the lighthouse door. I test each step before trusting my weight to it. I didn’t tell anyone my destination, so the last thing I need is to fall on an uneven step and end up with a jagged chunk of metal through my leg. The door itself is barely touched with rust, reinforcing metal rivets studding the edge. I try the handle. It twists in my hand, but neither pushing nor pulling garners any results. Locked. I wonder how many years ago the last occupant of the lighthouse turned the key in the lock and walked away. I bang on the door and listen to the hollow echo of metal, like I’m expecting someone to bang back from the other side, or to call out “Coming, coming, be patient!” to scold me for my presumption.
No one answers, though I wait. After a few minutes I realize that I’m waiting, so I stop. The lighthouse has a metal walkway around the base, and I sit down on the far side, my legs dangling over the edge and the abyss. The waves crash against the rocks, misting my hair and cheeks with spray.
My belly aches, slow and persistent throbbing, punishing me for walking so far. Scooting back from the edge, I press my spine against the cool metal wall of the lighthouse, and rest.
<
br /> It’s raining again when I wake up. I don’t have a watch, but it’s still light enough to suggest that it’s late afternoon. I’ve missed breakfast and lunch now. I feel light-headed as I stand up. I’ll be lucky if I get back before dark.
I don’t care so much for my own sake, but I don’t want Barbara to worry. She does worry about me, especially with my reckless behavior towards my own health. She holds her tongue, respectful enough to not cluck and scold me – “but what about the baby?” – but I can see it in her eyes, what she’s thinking.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.” Barbara presses buttons on the microwave instead of looking at me, the cheery metallic beeps punctuating her words. I look up and watch her. She made a casserole for dinner, but it was cold by the time I got home. I wait, and after a minute, she starts talking again, sitting down at the table while the glass plate in the microwave rotates my food. “About the house.”
“You want to go back?” I ask, hoping I’m picking up this conversation from the right angle.
“Maybe.”
“Is it even still standing?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “It’s low-season and the shop’s dead. How do you feel about a road trip?”
My finger has been tapping a slow-motion morse code against the table, subconscious messages to no one. This stops, and I look at her, my head cocked to the side. “A road trip?” I say, and then I have to swallow to clear my throat. “How old were you when you lived there? Do you even know the way?”
She goes to a drawer, and takes out a dusty envelope. It’s Barbara’s utility drawer, where she keeps scissors and tape. I’ve been in that drawer a hundred times, but I’ve never seen this envelope. She puts it on the table, address towards me. “I have the address.”
“Prospect? That’s not far.”
“Far enough.”
I don’t ask far enough for what. “Okay.”
The microwave beeps at us, and Barbara turns around, grabbing the plate and putting it in front of me. “Thank you,” I say, picking up my fork and eating. Barbara’s a good cook, but I have no appetite. I force myself to chew and swallow.