Songs of Love & Death

by George R. R. Martin; Gardner Dozois

  And then she was gone, and the party people were buzzing, and inspecting the ink-fouled painting and looking at me, and the Telegraph man was asking if I would like to comment and how I felt about seeing a three-hundred-thousand-pound painting destroyed, and I mumbled about how I was proud to be a painter, and said something about the transient nature of art, and he said that he supposed that tonight’s event was an artistic happening in its own right, and we agreed that, artistic happening or not, the woman was not quite right in the head.

  Barry reappeared, moving from group to group, explaining that Paul was dealing with the young lady, and that her eventual disposition would be up to me. The guests were still buzzing excitedly as he was ushering people out of the door, apologising as he did so, agreeing that we lived in exciting times, explaining that he would be open at the regular time tomorrow.

  “That went well,” he said, when we were alone in the gallery.

  “Well? That was a disaster!”

  “Mm. ‘Stuart Innes, the one who had the three-hundred-thousand-pound painting destroyed.’ I think you need to be forgiving, don’t you? She was a fellow artist, even one with different goals. Sometimes you need a little something to kick you up to the next level.”

  We went into the back room.

  I said, “Whose idea was this?”

  “Ours,” said Paul. He was drinking white wine in the back room with the red-haired woman. “Well, Barry’s mostly. But it needed a good little actress to pull it off, and I found her.” She grinned modestly: managed to look both abashed and pleased with herself.

  “If this doesn’t get you the attention you deserve, beautiful boy,” said Barry, smiling at me, “nothing will. Now you’re important enough to be attacked.”

  “The Windemere painting’s ruined,” I pointed out.

  Barry glanced at Paul, and they giggled. “It’s already sold, ink splatters and all, for seventy-five thousand pounds,” he said. “It’s like I always say, people think they are buying the art, but really, they’re buying the story.”

  Paul filled our glasses: “And we owe it all to you,” he said to the woman. “Stuart, Barry, I’d like to propose a toast. To Cassandra.”

  “Cassandra,” we repeated, and we drank. This time I did not nurse my drink. I needed it.

  Then, as the name was still sinking in, Paul said, “Cassandra, this ridiculously attractive and talented young man is, as I am sure you know, Stuart Innes.”

  “I know,” she said. “Actually, we’re very old friends.”

  “Do tell,” said Barry.

  “Well,” said Cassandra, “twenty years ago, Stuart wrote my name on his maths exercise notebook.”

  She looked like the girl in my drawing, yes. Or like the girl in the photographs, all grown up. Sharp-faced. Intelligent. Assured.

  I had never seen her before in my life.

  “Hello, Cassandra,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  WE WERE IN the wine bar beneath my flat. They serve food there, too. It’s more than just a wine bar.

  I found myself talking to her as if she was someone I had known since childhood. And, I reminded myself, she wasn’t. I had only met her that evening. She still had ink stains on her hands.

  We had glanced at the menu, ordered the same thing—the vegetarian meze—and when it had arrived, both started with the dolmades, then moved on to the hummus.

  “I made you up,” I told her.

  It was not the first thing I had said: First we had talked about her community theatre, how she had become friends with Paul, his offer to her—a thousand pounds for this evening’s show—and how she had needed the money, but mostly said yes because it sounded like a fun adventure. Anyway, she said, she couldn’t say no when she heard my name mentioned. She thought it was fate.

  That was when I said it. I was scared she would think I was mad, but I said it. “I made you up.”

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t. I mean, obviously you didn’t. I’m really here.” Then she said, “Would you like to touch me?”

  I looked at her. At her face, and her posture, at her eyes. She was everything I had ever dreamed of in a woman. Everything I had been missing in other women. “Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

  “Let’s eat our dinner first,” she said. Then she said, “How long has it been since you were with a woman?”

  “I’m not gay,” I protested. “I have girlfriends.”

  “I know,” she said. “When was the last one?”

  I tried to remember. Was it Brigitte? Or the stylist the ad agency had sent me to Iceland with? I was not certain. “Two years,” I said. “Perhaps three. I just haven’t met the right person yet.”

  “You did once,” she said. She opened her handbag then, a big floppy purple thing, pulled out a cardboard folder, opened it, removed a piece of paper, tape browned at the corners. “See?”

  I remembered it. How could I not? It had hung above my bed for years. She was looking around, as if talking to someone beyond the curtain. “Cassandra,” it said, “February 19, 1985.” And it was signed, “Stuart Innes.” There is something at the same time both embarrassing and heartwarming about seeing your handwriting from when you were fifteen.

  “I came back from Canada in eighty-nine,” she said. “My parents’ marriage fell apart, and Mum wanted to come home. I wondered about you, what you were doing, so I went to your old address. The house was empty. Windows were broken. It was obvious nobody lived there anymore. They’d knocked down the riding stables already—that made me so sad. I’d loved horses as a girl, obviously, but I walked through the house until I found your bedroom. It was obviously your bedroom, although all the furniture was gone. It still smelled like you. And this was still pinned to the wall. I didn’t think anyone would miss it.”

  She smiled.

  “Who are you?”

  “Cassandra Carlisle. Aged thirty-four. Former actress. Failed playwright. Now running a community theatre in Norwood. Drama therapy. Hall for rent. Four plays a year, plus workshops, and a local panto. Who are you, Stuart?”

  “You know who I am.” Then, “You know I’ve never met you before, don’t you?”

  She nodded. She said, “Poor Stuart. You live just above here, don’t you?”

  “Yes. It’s a bit loud sometimes. But it’s handy for the tube. And the rent isn’t painful.”

  “Let’s pay, and go upstairs.”

  I reached out to touch the back of her hand. “Not yet,” she said, moving her hand away before I could touch her. “We should talk first.”

  So we went upstairs.

  “I like your flat,” she said. “It looks exactly like the kind of place I imagine you being.”

  “It’s probably time to start thinking about getting something a bit bigger,” I told her. “But it does me fine. There’s good light out the back for my studio—you can’t get the effect now, at night. But it’s great for painting.”

  It’s strange, bringing someone home. It makes you see the place you live as if you’ve not been there before. There are two oil paintings of me in the lounge, from my short-lived career as an artists’ model (I did not have the patience to stand and wait), blown-up advertising photos of me in the little kitchen and the loo, book covers with me on—romance covers, mostly, over the stairs.

  I showed her the studio, and then the bedroom. She examined the Edwardian barber’s chair I had rescued from an ancient barbers’ that closed down in Shoreditch. She sat down on the chair, pulled off her shoes.

  “Who was the first grown-up you liked?” she asked.

  “Odd question. My mother, I suspect. Don’t know. Why?”

  “I was three, perhaps four. He was a postman called Mr. Postie. He’d come in his little post van and bring me lovely things. Not every day. Just sometimes. Brown paper packages with my name on, and inside would be toys or sweets or something. He had a funny, friendly face with a knobby nose.”

  “And he was real? He sounds like somebody a kid wou
ld make up.”

  “He drove a post van inside the house. It wasn’t very big.”

  She began to unbutton her blouse. It was cream-coloured, still flecked with splatters of ink. “What’s the first thing you actually remember? Not something you were told you did. That you really remember?”

  “Going to the seaside when I was three, with my mum and my dad.”

  “Do you remember it? Or do you remember being told about it?”

  “I don’t see what the point of this is… ?”

  She stood up, wiggled, stepped out of her skirt. She wore a white bra, dark green panties, frayed. Very human: not something you would wear to impress a new lover. I wondered what her breasts would look like, when the bra came off. I wanted to stroke them, to touch them to my lips.

  She walked from the chair to the bed, where I was sitting.

  “Lie down, now. On that side of the bed. I’ll be next to you. Don’t touch me.”

  I lay down, my hands at my sides. She said, “You’re so beautiful. I’m not honestly sure whether you’re my type. You would have been when I was fifteen, though. Nice and sweet and unthreatening. Artistic. Ponies. A riding stable. And I bet you never make a move on a girl unless you’re sure she’s ready, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t suppose that I do.”

  She lay down beside me.

  “You can touch me now,” said Cassandra.

  I HAD STARTED thinking about Stuart again late last year. Stress, I think. Work was going well, up to a point, but I’d broken up with Pavel, who may or may not have been an actual bad hat although he certainly had his finger in many dodgy East European pies, and I was thinking about Internet dating. I had spent a stupid week joining the kind of Web sites that link you to old friends, and from there it was no distance to Jeremy “Scallie” Porter, and to Stuart Innes.

  I don’t think I could do it anymore. I lack the single-mindedness. The attention to detail. Something else you lose when you get older.

  Mr. Postie used to come in his van when my parents had no time for me. He would smile his big gnomey smile, wink an eye at me, hand me a brown-paper parcel with “Cassandra” written on in big block letters, and inside would be a chocolate, or a doll, or a book. His final present was a pink plastic microphone, and I would walk around the house singing or pretending to be on TV. It was the best present I had ever been given.

  My parents did not ask about the gifts. I did not wonder who was actually sending them. They came with Mr. Postie, who drove his little van down the hall and up to my bedroom door, and who always knocked three times. I was a demonstrative girl, and the next time I saw him, after the plastic microphone, I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs.

  It’s hard to describe what happened then. He fell like snow, or like ash. For a moment I had been holding someone, then there was just powdery white stuff, and nothing.

  I used to wish that Mr. Postie would come back after that, but he never did. He was over. After a while, he became embarrassing to remember: I had fallen for that.

  So strange, this room.

  I wonder why I could ever have thought that somebody who made me happy when I was fifteen would make me happy now. But Stuart was perfect: the riding stables (with ponies), and the painting (which showed me he was sensitive), and the inexperience with girls (so I could be his first) and how very, very tall, dark, and handsome he would be. I liked the name, too: it was vaguely Scottish and (to my mind) like the hero of a novel.

  I wrote Stuart’s name on my exercise books.

  I did not tell my friends the most important thing about Stuart: that I had made him up.

  And now I’m getting up off the bed and looking down at the outline of a man, a silhouette in flour or ash or dust on the black satin bedspread, and I am getting into my clothes.

  The photographs on the wall are fading too. I didn’t expect that. I wonder what will be left of his world in a few hours, wonder if I should have left well enough alone, a masturbatory fantasy, something reassuring and comforting. He would have gone through his life without ever really touching anyone, just a picture and a painting and a half memory for a handful of people who barely ever thought of him anymore.

  I leave the flat. There are still people at the wine bar downstairs. They are sitting at the table, in the corner, where Stuart and I had been sitting. The candle has burned way down, but I imagine that it could almost be us. A man and a woman, in conversation. And soon enough, they will get up from their table and walk away, and the candle will be snuffed and the lights turned off, and that will be that for another night.

  I hail a taxi. Climb in. For a moment—for, I hope, the last time—I find myself missing Stuart Innes.

  Then I sit back in the seat of the taxi, and I let him go. I hope I can afford the taxi fare, and find myself wondering whether there will be a cheque in my bag in the morning, or just another blank sheet of paper. Then, more satisfied than not, I close my eyes, and I wait to be home.

  Marjorie M. Liu

  New York Times bestseller Marjorie M. Liu is an attorney who has worked and traveled all over Asia. She’s best known for the Dirk & Steele series, detailing the otherworldly cases of the Dirk & Steele detective agency, which include Tiger Eye, Shadow Touch, The Last Twilight, and The Wild Road. She also writes the successful Hunter Kiss series, which includes The Iron Hunt and Darkness Calls. Her latest books are In the Dark of Dreams, the tenth Dirk & Steele novel, and A Wild Light, the third in the Hunter Kiss series. She lives in Indiana.

  In the taut and suspenseful story that follows, she takes us to a postapocalyptic future, one of people just managing to scrape out a meager living from the soil, where every shadow has teeth and very real and deadly Things That Go Bump in the Night lurk in the darkness, kept at bay only by the strangest of alliances—and by the power of the blood.

  After the Blood

  Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig

  and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips…

  —PABLO NERUDA

  I didn’t have time to grab my coat. Only shoes and the shotgun. I had gone to sleep with the fanny pack belted to my waist, so the shells were on hand and jangled as I ran. I had forgotten they would make noise. Not that it mattered.

  No moon. Slick gravel and cold rain on my face. Neighbor’s dogs were barking and I wished they would shut up, but they didn’t, and I kept expecting one of them to make that strangled yip sound like Pete-Pete had, out in the woods where I couldn’t ever find his body. I missed him bad, nights like these. So did the cats.

  The cowbell was still ringing when I reached the gate, and I heard a loud thud: a hoof striking wood. Chains rattled. I raised the shotgun, ready.

  “They’re coming,” whispered a strained voice, murmuring something else in German that I couldn’t understand. “Amanda?”

  “Here,” I muttered. “Hurry.”

  Hinges creaked, followed by the soft tread of hooves and wheels rolling over gravel. Slow, too slow. I dug in my heels, hearing something else in the darkness: a hacking cough, wet and raw.

  “Steven,” I warned.

  “We’re through,” he said.

  I pulled the trigger, gritting my teeth against the recoil. The muzzle flash generated a brief light—enough to glimpse a hateful set of eyes. And then, almost in the same instant, I heard a muffled scream. I fired again, just for good measure.

  Steven slammed into the gate. I ran to help him set the lock—one-handed, shotgun braced against my hip. I heard more coughs—deeper, masculine—and got bathed in the scent of rotten meat and shit. All those unclean mouths, breathing on me from the other side of the fence. A rock whistled past my ear. I threw one back with all my strength. Steven dragged me away.

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered, breathless—and gave the boy a hard look; his body faintly visible, even in the darkness. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Steven let go. I couldn’t see his face, but I heard him stumble back to the horses. I almos
t stopped him, needing an answer almost as much as I feared one—but I smelled something else in that moment.

  Charred meat.

  I stood on my toes and reached inside the wagon. Felt a blanket, and beneath, a leg.

  When? I wanted to ask, but my voice wouldn’t work. I clung to the edge of the wagon, needing something to lean on, but that lasted only until Steven began leading the horses up the driveway. I followed, uneasy—trying to ignore the sounds of rocks hitting the fence and those raw hacking coughs that quieted into whines. Sounded like dogs crawling on their stomachs, begging not to be beaten. Made me think of Pete-Pete again. My palms were sweaty around the shotgun.

  Steven remained silent until we reached the house. Lamplight flickered through the windows, which were crowded with feline faces pressed against the glass. It felt good to see again. Steven dropped the reins and walked to the back of the wagon. He was a couple inches taller than me, and slender in the shoulders. Just a teen, clean-shaven, wearing a dark wide-brimmed hat. His suspenders were loose and his pants ended well above his ankles. A pair of old tennis shoes clung precariously to his feet.

  “They hurt him bad,” said the boy, unlatching the backboard. “Even though he saved their lives.”

  “He didn’t fight back?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

  Steven gave me a bitter look. “They called him a devil.”

  Called him other things, too, I guessed. But that couldn’t be helped. We had all expected this, one way or another. Only so long a man could keep secrets while living under his family’s roof.

  I tried to hand my gun to the boy. He stared at the weapon as though it were a live snake, and put his hands behind his back.

  “Steven,” I said sharply, but he ducked his head and edged around me toward the back of the wagon. No words, no argument. He did the job I was going to do, taking hold of those blanketed ankles and pulling hard. The body slid out slowly, but the cooked smell of human flesh curdled through my nostrils, and I had to turn away with my hand over my mouth.