Tabinda was at the first step, snorting, pawing at the bricks. She was on all fours. Her face was completely static now, her forehead smooth. Not a fold, not a single crease, as if she were made from polished glass. Drool dangled in corkscrew threads from her chin.
As Noor watched, Tabinda lowered her head, sniffed the bricks stained with Noor’s menstrual blood, and began to lap at them.
Noor turned and scuttled up the rest of the stairs. Pain chewed her ribs and back and hips, but she leapt blindly, not caring if she broke every bone in her body. Tabinda’s smell behind her was acrid and meaty. It rushed at Noor. Noor vaulted across the last step and sprang toward the iron door.
Outside, the fog was a solid wall. Noor slammed through it, running—blind and barefoot—using the brooding stupa as her only directional marker. Chips of glass and sharp pebbles stung her soles. Branches and what felt like bird bones crunched. Something bellowed behind her. A loud animal grunt, then a pause. Noor clapped a hand over her mouth and kept running. She was wet and cold and trembling. Where was the fucking chopper? The night sky was silent. Her shalwar was soaked. She expected to crash face first into a wall any moment now. Instead, the sounds of the creature faded behind her. Was it licking her blood trail at every step?
Noor fled, weeping. The sharp bites of the alley became hard ground. The fog thinned, showing her the school bus sprawled in the lot like a dead animal. She bounded toward it before remembering she didn’t have the keys.
Noor wanted to scream, to slap her breasts, and fall down, crying. She fought the impulse. Behind her the city was wailing. An earsplitting surreal ululation that bounced from wall to wall, door to door, and razored through her head. Lights bobbed in the corner of her eye. She sped past the vehicle, heading toward the road winding out of the ruins, spraying up dirt behind her.
The fog thickened again. Icy air knifed in and out of her lungs. When the sounds of the ruins died, she slowed to a trot. She was shaking all over and crying. Hot tears on frosted cheeks. Her feet were slippery with blood and stung in a hundred places. She had no idea where she was and the moon was dead somewhere. She was plodding through squelching mud now. Another step and her foot sank ankle deep. The wind whistled and picked up. Something rattled. She flinched from the sound. Pattering of feet or clomping of hooves? Terror washed over her. She yanked her foot out, lunged, and landed in gelid water. Something slithered over her foot. A shower of water plumed over her when she struggled upright, tripped, and nearly fell again.
A misshapen root wide as her arm. She was at the riverbank. Had she once thought its smell rotten? It was mossy and sweet. The Sind River gurgled and babbled. Malformed cypress knees poking out of the fog like tombstones. Ghost acacia and lilacs swayed above her, their cocooned branches rustling. Glinting eyes speckled the webs. They undulated and disappeared as she splashed through the tree line. The fog curtain was so dense now she could wrap it around herself and disappear forever.
A figure bobbed ahead in the trees. A flash of light that ignited the mist briefly and was gone. Noor’s eyes widened. Her heart lurched and began to thunder in her temples. Part of her wanted to turn and bolt, but what if it was the army come to find them? With utmost care she lifted the cuffs of her shalwar and tiptoed through the water. Curls of dark moss like a woman’s hair floated between her legs which gleamed with congealed blood. The cypress knees were more numerous here. They protruded in various geometric shapes.
One was almost like a little stool.
Her sight rippled, but not before she saw the figure crouching in the foliage. It was very tall and angular and seemed to perch on or by a poplar trunk. It wore something around its head, which could have been a headdress or a shawl.
Hamid! The bus driver. It had to be him. Dear God, let it be him. Noor choked back a sob and sloshed through mist and river water toward the silent figure riding the trees.
DAISY JOHNSON
A Heavy Devotion
There is nothing much to eat but there is tea if you would like some.
Near the beginning people came all the time. There was a journalist who sat where you are sitting now. It was winter. He said his car had broken down outside town though we both knew that was a lie. I thought you looked a little like him out the window but I see now I was wrong. Are you one of the followers? They come sometimes too.
There are times I hear about my son. You have to know what you are looking for and I’ve been looking long enough to know. Someone in the North drawing crowds, saying they can hold their breath for hours; someone along the coast hunting hospitals, breaking into rooms.
Do you want to see the photos of him? There are some from when he was older; ones he sent to me. Do you want to see the room he slept in? People normally want to see that. No? I can tell you about him anyway. It’s been a while since anyone visited.
He came big; came with a slick of dark hair almost to his shoulders and a set of fine white teeth that bit onto my finger. It was the summer the fields flooded and stayed that way so long all the trees rotted to pulp. I took him to meet my friends and they all held him and bounced him on their knees. He was a quiet baby. He made little fuss. We passed him round the table in the pub. I almost forgot, then—watching him move from hand to hand—what he was.
The first time it happened he was still small. A little twisted shape of skin and bone, narrow wrists balancing big, heavy hands. He was useless, wrenching from side to side on his back, legs pedalling like a beetle. I was not afraid of him then. He was sickly, caught colds, had a cough all the time. I kept the house warm and we stayed mostly here, in the kitchen. I filled the sink with warm water, held him. He liked it there.
To begin with I didn’t understand. There was an ache. Here. Across my belly. I don’t remember what the first thing to go was. Only that it was a single word, a city I’d been thinking of perhaps, or my mother’s maiden name. He made a sound. A gurgle, I thought. Though it was a word. He was excited by it, thrashing in my hands. I tried to say the word back to him but there was nothing there. An absence.
That first week I lost things fast. Single words, whole memories, sentences I’d once said to someone. He took what I said or was thinking. At the start I wrote lists of all the words I wanted to keep, tested myself on questions when he was asleep. What is the name of the town you live in? How old are you? Those are the ones he took first. The ones I needed most.
I left him in the bedroom with the sides of the cot locked. It did not make any difference what room he was in. Doors and walls and locks had no power.
I thought of treating him the way they would hundreds of years ago. Leaving him out where the cold or the foxes would get him. But that was not a thing possible to do.
He grew fast with his takings. Faster than I could have imagined. His hair was longer than mine. I plaited it, tied it in a tight knot on top of his head. When he slept he tore it loose and lay beneath it. His toenails were claws. I cut them warily, watching his face while he watched me do it. He looked like me. More and more. The colour of his eyes, the shape of his face, his shoulders.
He was barely a year old though after the first few stealings he’d crawled and soon after that I caught him walking, stumbling from one piece of furniture to the next, clinging on. Turning his big smile towards me.
Do you remember—he would say after that. I would shake my head. He talked about days I was certain had been mine, people I thought I must have known. In the shop he would run ahead, stalking around the aisles. Look, he would say, pointing at someone I did not remember. Look. And people would stare.
Do you want something to eat or drink? You don’t look comfortable. It is cold, I know. I have not been to the shop but there might be tea or something in the cupboards. You’re free to look. You can stay until it gets dark. You don’t talk much.
*
Some people came to the house once. They wore stiff green coats and woollen hats though it was a hot summer. I knew I made them nervous because I looked like him; I walked and
talked the way he did. I did not want to let them in but beneath their coats they were bunched with muscle, thick at the neck and shoulder. Their bodies were heavy devotion. They wanted only caffeine-free—I did not have it—they would not drink the beer I gave them. They sat on the edge of the sofa, tipped forwards onto the shined toes of their shoes. When I moved my hands or face I could see them wince; I looked like a mistake who’d stolen his shape. I wanted to tell them that was not the way it was.
What can you tell us about him?
I got out the photos I keep in the drawer. He did not like them to be taken, most were of the back of his head or the flat of his hand raised in protest. There were scabs on his knees, his nose broken from when he fell off his bike. They were not interested in that; did not want to see him that way.
Tell us about the things he did, they said and I knew what they wanted me to say. One got out a notebook and balanced it on the huge bridge of his knee, held the pen in his fist.
What did he do to the heating? They tilted further forward.
He didn’t do anything to the heating.
What about when you had meat, one said. He stood, legs splayed.
Nothing happened when we had meat, I said.
Maybe, the one with the notebook said, you didn’t notice when the meat was better than you first thought, more free range.
An easy mistake, said the other.
I would give them nothing. They got desperate. They asked if he ever saved roadkill.
Maybe he fixed your washing machine or television when it broke.
They didn’t break, I said.
People came over the years, though they quickly learnt I was no good for it. Some mornings there were threats: soft, stinking packages pushed through the letter box, broken windows. They wrote things on the Internet I will not repeat. They came less and less. I was no good as a mythmaker. Never have been.
*
Yes, you can come closer if you want. Sit here, by the lamp. Are you someone who knew him? Maybe you could tell me about him. I would like to hear about the way he was when he was older, whether he was a good person.
*
One day he came home from school talking about William Jeff’s father who was a pilot and had a good car.
Who is my dad? he asked.
It was the one thing I had managed to keep from him, the one memory I kept sufficiently locked up he could not take it.
I moved my hands, miming anything I could think of. Distracted him with photos of astronauts and doctors.
But his question had sent me back to that night in the cornfield. A smell or the sound of husks breaking under-foot; the soft pop of pomegranate seeds between fingers; an arm thrust forward, the skin puckered, the nub of something breaking through: a feather. Then it was gone, the memory. I loved him more then. When I did not remember his conception.
It was too late, though I tried another story on him—a fiction, but no more one than anything else. I spent a month building the story, making it a memory. When I woke in the mornings I would lie in bed and think about it until I believed in it.
When I was younger, I told him, I met a boy. We messed around in the back of his father’s car; took our clothes off out by the estuary where we thought no one could see. We had some plans. They were small and simple to carry out. We bought a house in the town we grew up in. He gave me that jug over there as a gift. It was often filled with flowers. The year we knew that you were growing in me, we found there was something, also, that grew in him. I remember the funeral very well.
You don’t seem to like that story. Well, what would you have told him when he asked about his father?
It was no good. He understood now where he’d come from. He’d taken the memory of it from me. He changed after that. At night I listened to him foraging through the house. He was taller than me. All body. He had long hands. He looked as if he were made—I always thought this—of scaffolding, rafters. He drew on all the walls and floor. Mostly it was drawings of what he could see. He drew the fridge with the door open and then closed, drew light bulbs hanging from the ceilings of rooms and growing from floors; plug sockets and extension cords. He drew them as if they were creatures in a forest. He drew them more than he ever drew me. I came only as an afterthought: a tiny, out-of-proportion figure in the corners of rooms or emerging from piles of cables.
The stealings carried on. Often he tried so hard not to take anything; curled at the back of the wardrobe, hands pressed over his ears.
But soon I did not remember my name or the names of food or the sense of things. I have memories now I didn’t have for ten years. The sight of someone running, I think it is my sister, over a wet field; my father shovelling knuckles of coal into a fire. I had a boyfriend once. I only remembered that the other day.
Towards the end I would hear him crying in the night. He couldn’t, he would say, turn bricks into skin, skin into bricks. He did bring home roadkill. Left them sitting for days at a time. As if thinking it was only patience he needed to bring them alive again. When it rained he would stand out in front of the house with his hands held up. Like this. Standing there until it stopped. I was never certain whether he thought he was the one to do that.
I forgot ever giving birth to him; thought maybe I had found him. I forgot the way he was when he was a baby, seeming almost human. I forgot the speed with which he grew, burning through skins. I forgot the way I would sometimes wake and he’d be watching me sleep. The way, the more I forgot to eat, he fed me. He knew how to make the things I liked.
And then, one day, there was a man in my house and I did not know who he was. I was afraid of him. You would have been afraid of him too. I got a knife from the kitchen and I think maybe, if I could, I would have killed him. He looked at me and understood he had taken everything he could and then he left.
*
I listen to the radio. I know about him working the hospitals, opening incubators and lifting out the babies too small to breathe on their own. I get all the local newspapers and each hospital is closer. Some days I check the locks on the doors three or four times. No, I do not know why he is coming back. Only that he is.
It is getting dark out. Do you see? Perhaps you have been here longer than you meant. Maybe you should go.
*
He sent postcards. In the beginning he sent one a week. In the postcards he used the language he thought he was supposed to. He spoke often about the End of Days. He stopped giving dates when the dates came and went. Near the start he stuck to some of the cults and communes. Those countryside tribes of deep believers living off what scrawny potatoes they could grow; great broods of children. His handwriting was bad and, besides, I was having to learn language anew, picking up stray words. But later, when I’d regained enough to understand, he wrote that it was nice to find someone who believed in him and I knew he was saying that I’d failed in that regard.
I don’t think he stayed with any of them long.
After a while he must have got far enough away that I could have all my words again. I began looking at objects and then knowing what they were, replacing the gaps with knowledge. Plant pot, fridge, door. I moved around the house; I went to the shop, picked things up and named them: tin of tomatoes, bottle of milk.
The memories were slower to come. Some of them never came back. But that is to be expected—we all lose memories over time, no? None of us remembers everything. But some of my memories did return, and some of them he gave back to me. Wrote them on postcards: Do you remember and I’d realise that, again, I did. He gave me the things he thought were important. He left out anything he was embarrassed about. He was always, as a child, filled with huge bouts of embarrassment, shocking his face full of blood—I remembered that. But I wanted to ask him what happened when I first kissed someone, who it was and how it had gone. This was a thing he would never tell me and I would never ask.
That’s when he started sending the photos. In each one he looks like a different person. As if no single body is
strong enough to hold him. He wears his hair the way he thinks he is supposed to: long and loose. In the last photo there was a stripe of white, almost a burn, in his fringe.
I wonder often how he would have been if his father were a man. If I am being truthful I do not think of much else. Maybe he would be here now, would have got a job working at the pub or in a shop somewhere. There would be a woman or a man he loved; he would come round and cook me beef stew and dumplings the way I like it and I would enjoy his visits. He would not think he could bring back the dead.
*
I know who you are though in a moment I will not. It is getting. I do not remember the word. Soon it will be. How easily they go again. There is no loyalty in language. There is no.
OCTAVIA CADE
The Signal Birds
Shift change was always marked by the same roster call. “Sugar-plum, feather-plum, come get your coats on! Fall in, ducklings all!”
There were minor variations. We weren’t always ducklings. It was “goslings” when the raids were high, with night-time Spitfires over the Channel, and “little magpie twits” when room inspections had seen too many rinsed out panties hanging in the dormitory bathrooms.
I don’t know what else she expected. The south coast in winter was not a place we could hang out our washing and reliably expect it to dry. It was knickers strung round the bath like bunting or nothing.
“I’d rather nothing than damp,” said Polly. We’d both taken shifts in front of the radar with underwear that hadn’t fully dried before, and it had been an unpleasant, squirming experience.
“Not what I imagined when I got my wings,” she said. “Somehow I thought there’d be more glamour with it.”
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Page 18