“Gwen, are you all right? What is it, love? What’s happened? I knew you’d exhaust yourself!”
She tried to stand up, collapsed into his arms and shivered there; he cradled her where earlier they’d made love. And at last she could tell it.
“I . . . I stayed close to the shore,” she gasped, gradually getting her breath. “Or rather, close to the cliffs. I was looking . . . looking for a way up. I’d gone about a third of a mile, I think. Then there was a spot where the water was very deep and the cliffs sheer. Something touched my legs and it was like an electric shock—I mean, it was so unexpected there in that deep water. To feel something slimy touching my legs like that. Ugh!” She drew a deep breath.
“I thought: God, sharks! But then I remembered: there are no sharks in the Med. Still, I wanted to be sure. So . . . so I turned, made a shallow dive and looked to see what . . . what . . .” She broke down into sobbing again.
Geoff could do nothing but warm her, hug her tighter yet.
“Oh, but there are sharks in the Med, Geoff,” she finally went on. “One shark, anyway. His name is Spiros! A spider? No, he’s a shark! Under the sea there, I saw . . . a girl, naked, tethered to the bottom with a rope round her ankle. And down in the deeps, a stone holding her there.”
“My God!” Geoff breathed.
“Her thighs, belly, were covered in those little green swimming crabs. She was all bloated, puffy, floating upright on her own internal gasses. Fish nibbled at her. Her nipples were gone. . .”
“The fish!” Geoff gasped. But Gwen shook her head.
“Not the fish,” she rasped. “Her arms and breasts were black with bruises. Her nipples had been bitten through—right through! Oh, Geoff, Geoff!” She hugged him harder than ever, shivering hard enough to shake him. “I know what happened to her. It was him, Spiros.” She paused, tried to control her shivering, which wasn’t only the after-effect of the water.
And finally she continued: “After that I had no strength. But somehow I made it back.”
“Get dressed,” he told her then, his voice colder than she’d ever heard it. “Quickly! No, not your dress—my trousers, shirt. The slacks will be too long for you. Roll up the bottoms. But get dressed, get warm.”
She did as he said. The sun, sinking, was still hot. Soon she was warm again, and calmer. Then Geoff gave her the spear he’d made and told her what he was going to do. . .
There were two of them, as like as peas in a pod. Geoff saw them, and the pieces fell into place. Spiros and his brother. The island’s codes were tight. These two looked for loose women; loose in their narrow eyes, anyway. And from the passports of the honeymooners it had been plain that they weren’t married. Which had made Gwen a whore, in their eyes. Like the Swedish girl, who’d met a man and gone to bed with him. As easy as that. So Spiros had tried it on, the easy way at first. By making it plain that he was on offer. Now that that hadn’t worked, now it was time for the hard way.
Geoff saw them coming in the boat and stopped gouging at the rock. His fingernails were cracked and starting to bleed, but the job was as complete as he could wish. He ducked back out of sight, hugged the sentinel rock and thought only of Gwen. He had one chance and mustn’t miss it.
He glanced back, over his shoulder. Gwen had heard the boat’s engine. She stood half-way between the sea and the waterfall with its foul pool. Her spear was grasped tightly in her hands. Like a young Amazon, Geoff thought. But then he heard the boat’s motor cut back and concentrated on what he was doing.
The put-put-put of the boat’s exhaust came closer. Geoff took a chance, glanced round the rim of the rock. Here they came, gentling into the channel between the rock and the cliffs. Spiros’s brother wore slacks; both men were naked from the waist up; Spiros had the tiller. And his brother had a shotgun!
One chance. Only one chance.
The boat’s nose came inching forward, began to pass directly below. Geoff gave a mad yell, heaved at the loose wedge of rock. For a moment he thought it would stick and put all his weight into it. But then it shifted, toppled.
Below, the two Greeks had looked up, eyes huge in tanned, startled faces. The one with the shotgun was on his feet. He saw the falling rock in the instant before it smashed down on him and drove him through the bottom of the boat. His gun went off, both barrels, and the shimmering air near Geoff’s head buzzed like a nest of wasps. Then, while all below was still in a turmoil, he aimed himself at Spiros and jumped.
Thrown about in the stern of his sinking boat, Spiros was making ready to dive overboard when Geoff’s feet hit him. he was hurled into the water, Geoff narrowly missing the swamped boat as he, too, crashed down into the sea. And then a mad flurry of water as they both struck out for the shore.
Spiros was there first. Crying out, wild, outraged, frightened, he dragged himself from the sea. He looked round and saw Geoff coming through the water—saw his boat disappear with only ripples to mark its passing, and no sign of his brother—and started at a lop-sided run up the beach. Towards Gwen. Geoff swam for all he was worth, flew from the sea up onto the land.
Gwen was running, heading for the V in the cliff under the waterfall. Spiros was right behind her, arms reaching. Geoff came last, the air rasping in his lungs, Hell’s fires blazing in his heart. He’d drawn blood and found it to his liking. But he stumbled, fell, and when he was up again he saw Spiros closing on his quarry. Gwen was backed up against the cliff, her feet in the water at the shallow end of the vile pool. The Greek made a low, apish lunge at her and she struck at him with her spear.
She gashed his face even as he grabbed her. His hand caught in the loose material of Geoff’s shirt, tearing it from her so that her breasts lolled free. Then she stabbed at him again, slicing him across the neck. His hands flew to his face and neck; he staggered back from her, tripped, and sat down in chest-deep water; Geoff arrived panting at the pool and Gwen flew into his arms. He took the spear from her, turned it towards Spiros.
But the Greek was finished. He shrieked and splashed in the pool like the madman he was, seemed incapable of getting to his feet. His wounds weren’t bad, but the blood was everywhere. That wasn’t the worst of it: the thing he’d tripped on had floated to the surface. It was beginning to rot, but it was—or had been—a young man. Rubbery arms and legs tangled with Spiros’s limbs; a ghastly, gaping face tossed with his frantic threshing; a great black hole showed where the bloated corpse had taken a shotgun blast to the chest, the shot that had killed him.
For a little while longer Spiros fought to be rid of the thing—screamed aloud as its gaping, accusing mouth screamed horribly, silently at him—then gave up and flopped back half-in, half-out of the water. One of the corpse’s arms was draped across his heaving, shuddering chest. He lay there with his hands over his face and cried, and the flies came swarming like a black, hostile cloud from the cave to settle on him.
Geoff held Gwen close, guided her away from the horror down the beach to a sea which was a deeper blue now. “It’s OK,” he kept saying, as much for himself as for her. “It’s OK. They’ll come looking for us, sooner or later.”
As it happened, it was sooner. . .
D. F. LEWIS
Mort au Monde
DES LEWIS was born in 1948 and is married with two children. In 1968 August Derleth rejected two of his tales for being “pretty much pure grue”, since when he has been published widely in the genre in small press publications on both sides of the Atlantic.
His disparate literary influences include H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Robert Aickman and Philip K. Dick, and Lewis’ growing reputation in the genre resulted in the award-winning small press magazine Dagon publishing a special issue devoted to his fiction last year.
With “Mort au Monde” we hope to introduce his distinctive, disturbing prose to an even wider audience.
I SLEPT HEAVILY . . . too heavily by half. For things had crept on all fours through the open door, which I could have sworn I left shut, squawking heads quietly tu
rning from side to side in search of cast-off human meat to suck upon.
I woke with the dream still going on in a small part of my brain. For I convinced myself that I actually saw a pair of widely set eyes searing the darkness with beams of bloodshot fire.
But it was no doubt daytime in the real world and I suddenly recalled my own name. Muirfield came back first . . . then David . . . and, finally, the place, named St Perrin. With some pain, I rose from the bed and staggered towards the window . . . which I proceeded to unshutter with some amazement at the brightness of the sun already shafting along the tips of the distant hills.
It all fitted somehow. But, for some reason, I could not fathom why my loved one, Marianne, was sleeping in a separate room. I knew that if I walked along the musty corridor from my door numbered 2, I would find a screwed-on plate showing 5. Those who slept between us, those unseen, unnamed chaperones, were only just to be heard stirring in their beds, as I crept past their doors towards number 5. It was dark on the landing, and it was difficult to make out the hazy cross-hatching of the banisters leading down to the lower storeys; I was dizzy for a moment, but gathered myself for meeting my loved one.
Marianne had allowed her hair to fall to her shoulders since I last saw her at dinner the previous evening. The unrevealing mouth . . . the deceptive drapes of the night-dress . . . the hollow in the throat . . . the peeping toes . . . all gave me an impression that she had struggled against the odds not to be taken unawares. What gave the game away were the red eyes.
It was when a deep grunt from further inside her room commanded the shutting of the door, that I decided I ought to return to my own territory, to retrieve different dreams from under the bedclothes, dreams that I could more easily live with.
Hot croissants with coffee are too light for an Englishman. I yearned for toast and marmalade, eggs and bacon, steaming pots of strong tea, honey on the cornflakes, milk by the church, freshly squeezed oranges. Marianne sat opposite, staring into her large bowl of coffee, as if she were trying to read the future. I could have told her that the past is more mysterious—but I didn’t.
I don’t know if I’d noticed it before, but her eyes were nearly all white, carrying upon their surface small round yolks of darting brown like particles under the microscope. Unlike most people I’d met, I could not read her soul through such deceptive apertures. It was as if I had indeed been defeated by someone who was using my eyes to race me to the bottom of my own soul.
“Where shall we go today?” She spoke towards the sounding board of my face. “I think we should take advantage of a sunny day, by going to the coast.”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we stay in these grounds, and read or something?” I never discovered whether these words of mine made any sense, for her next statement did not follow them on. Even in the most crudely formulated conversations, there is at least a thin thread of logic weaving in and out of the various tangents and non-sequiturs. But, evidently, not in a conversation with dear Marianne.
“I expect we wouldn’t have come here at all, if it hadn’t been for your Mother, David.”
I was pleasantly surprised, nevertheless, to hear her use my name when addressing me. This gave me renewed encouragement to respond: “Well, it was very kind of her to let us have this place for the summer . . .”
“The nights are so long in this chateau. Sleep is insufficient to cover them.”
What the hell was she talking about? My upbringing had taught me that sleep was not a pleasure, merely a necessity . . . “for entropy to be slowed down”, as my late grandfather had always said.
Well, we did go to the seaside that day, despite the slanting rainclouds that swept in by lunchtime from across the sea. I had been hoping to see some of those old-fashioned girls sun-bathing; in the event, there was just a mass of twirling umbrellas along the promenade.
Finally, the pair of us resorted to the old part of the town, full of climbing alleys and countless spired churches hogging the skyline. Being abroad had ceased to be a novelty long since, but the foreignness of that place really got under my skin. I felt the whole thing was an episode from an alternate universe, one in which I was the unsung hero and Marianne the singer.
She cut me dead at every turn, just with her eyes. I felt diminished to the quick, for she only had eyes for complete strangers (or, at least, for people who seemed strange to me). Until I realised that they must have slept in the bedrooms between us . . . for a fleeting moment, I thought they were distant relations, who had remained incognito, just for the sake of appearances. Like all people not in your immediate vicinity nor party to your conversation, they sounded like Undergrunts, with squeezed-up eyes and thin lips.
I snatched Marianne’s hands and, running towards the harbour, we were only just in time to catch the last rollonrolloff for England . . . which carved a slow path into the rising moon. As night came upon us again, we were soon to discover that our respective cabins were decks apart.
Too late to realise that it was sailing in the wrong direction, Marianne clasped me tight: even her eyes could not hide her fear. And we kept vigil for what could be an endless night, without even resorting to our cabins, calling each other by our names in case we forgot; careful not to betray any emotions that would give the chaperones a reason to come out of hiding.
THOMAS TESSIER
Blanca
THOMAS TESSIER was born in Connecticut, where he currently lives. Educated at University College, Dublin, he spent several years in London, where he worked as a publisher and was a regular contributor to Vogue.
His superior horror novels include The Fates, Shockwaves, The Nightwalker, Phantom (nominated for the 1982 World Fantasy Award), Finishing Touches and his latest, Secret Strangers.
“Blanca” is a eloquent ghost story, told in Tessier’s immaculate prose, that has disturbing echoes in today’s headlines.
WHENITOLD A FEW close friends that I was going to Blanca, their reaction was about what I had expected. “Why?” they asked. “There’s nothing to see in Blanca. Nothing to do except disappear.” Sly smiles. “Watch out you don’t disappear.” “Maybe that’s why I chose it,” I said with a smile of my own. “It might be nice to disappear for a while.”
For a travel writer who has been on the job ten years, as I have, it isn’t so easy to escape. The good places have been done, the mediocre ones too. You name it and I’ve probably been there, evaluating the hotels, sampling the cuisine, checking out the facilities and amenities, chatting up the locals. It’s a great job, but I was tired of the regular world. What I needed was a therapeutic getaway, to spend a couple of weeks in an obscure backwater doing nothing more than sipping cold beer on a terrace and reading a good book.
I knew people in the business who’d been to Blanca. It’s boring, they told me. Miles and miles of rolling plains and rangeland. There’s a dead volcano somewhere in Blanca, but it isn’t worth climbing. Yes, the towns are neat and the people are pleasant enough. There’s never any difficulty getting a clean room and bed for the night. But nothing happens, there’s nothing to do. No monuments or ancient ruins. No carnival, no festivals or feasts. The night life is said to be fairly low-key, so if you’re looking for that kind of action, which I wasn’t, there are much better places to go. Blanca was cattle country, and the only good thing I ever heard about it was that the steaks were excellent.
Blanca is not a nation but a territory, overlapping several borders in that region of the world. The native Indians were crushed nearly two centuries ago. They survive, a sullen minority now thoroughly domesticated by generations of servitude as cheap labor cowhands, meat packers, and household help. The European settlers tried to create Blanca as an independent state, but numerous rebellions failed and it was eventually carved up by its larger neighbors. But Blanca is Blanca, they still say there, regardless of the boundaries that appear on maps.
Because Blanca has comparatively little to offer the visitor, it is not on any of the main routes. I had to catch two flights, t
he second of which stopped at so many featureless outposts along the way that it seemed like days before I finally reached Oranien. With a population of nearly one hundred thousand it is easily the largest city in Blanca.
I checked into the Hotel des Vacances, which was within walking distance of the central district but just far enough away to escape the noise. My room was large and airy and had a small balcony that overlooked two residential streets and a park. It was comfortable, and not at all like a modern luxury hotel.
I slept for nearly eleven hours that first night, had steak and eggs for brunch, and then took a lazy walk around the center of Oranien. The narrow side streets had a certain pioneer charm—the original hard-clay tiles had never been paved over and remained neatly in place. But the most remarkable feature of the city was its state of cleanliness. I began to look for a piece of litter and couldn’t find so much as a discarded cigarette butt. It reminded me of parts of Switzerland, or Singapore.
On the top floor of a department store I caught a view of the southern part of the city, a vast stretch of stockyards, abattoirs, and railroad tracks. All the beef in Blanca passed through Oranien on its way to the outside world. I’d come to a dusty, three-story cowtown, and it was the tidiest, best-scrubbed place I’d ever seen.
But then I’d heard stories about the police in Blanca. They were the law, and if you had any sense at all you never challenged them. Littering ranked close to treason by their way of thinking, and while that might seem harsh to some, I had no problem with it. I’ve seen immaculate places and I’ve seen squalor; on the whole, I prefer the former. Besides, it had nothing to do with me. I was on vacation, recovering from a personal mess, exorcising old demons (including a wife). The first few days I was in Oranien the only cops I saw were chubby little men in silly uniforms, directing traffic. They looked like extras in some Ruritanian operetta.
“Not them,” Basma said quietly. “The ones you must worry about are the ones you can’t see. The men in plain clothes. They are everywhere.”
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