She looked at him. His expression was avid, but it was also sad, his pale eyes melancholy in the brilliant sunlight. He drew her to him and gazed out above the treetops, then pointed across the blue water.
“That’s where we were. Your hotel, it’s right there, somewhere.” His voice grew soft. “At night it all looks like a fairy city. The lights, and the bridges . . . You can’t believe that anyone could have built it.”
He blinked, shading his eyes with his hand, then looked away. When he turned back his cheeks were damp.
“Come on,” he said. He bent to kiss her forehead. “Got to keep moving.”
They drove to the next house, and the next, and the one after that. The light and heat made her dizzy; and the scents of all the unfamiliar flowers, the play of water in fountains and a swimming pool like a great turquoise lozenge. She found herself wandering through expansive bedrooms with people she did not know, walking in and out of closets, bathrooms, a sauna. Every room seemed lavish, the air charged as though anticipating a wonderful party; tables set with beeswax candles and bottles of wine and crystal stemware. Counter-tops of hand-thrown Italian tiles; globular cobalt vases filled with sunflowers, another recurring motif.
But there was no sign of anyone who might actually live in one of these houses, only a series of well-dressed women with expensively restrained jewelry who would greet them, usually in the kitchen, and make sure they had a flyer listing the home’s attributes. There were plates of cookies, banana bread warm from the oven. Bottles of sparkling water and organic lemonade.
And, always, a view. They didn’t look at houses without views. To Suzanne, some were spectacular; others, merely glorious. All were more beautiful than anything she saw from her own windows or deck, where she looked out onto evergreens and grey rocks and, much of the year, snow.
It was all so dreamlike that it was nearly impossible for her to imagine real people living here. For her a house had always meant a refuge from the world; the place where you hid from whatever catastrophe was breaking that morning.
But now she saw that it could be different. She began to understand that, for Randall at least, a house wasn’t a retreat. It was a way of engaging with the world; of opening himself to it. The view wasn’t yours. You belonged to it, you were a tiny part of it, like the sailboats and the seagulls and the flowers in the garden; like the sunflowers on the highly polished tables.
You were part of what made it real. She had always thought it was the other way around.
“You ready?” Randall came up behind her and put his hand on her neck. “This is it. We’re done. Let’s go have a drink.”
On the way out the door he stopped to talk to the agent.
“They’ll be taking bids tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll let you know on Tuesday.”
“Tuesday?’ Suzanne said in amazement when they got back outside. “You can do all this in two days? Spend a million dollars on a house?”
“Four million,” said Randall. “This is how it works out here. The race is to the quick.”
She had assumed they would go to another restaurant for drinks and then dinner. Instead, to her surprise, he drove to his flat. He took a bottle of Pommery Louise from the refrigerator and opened it, and she wandered about examining his manuscripts as he made dinner. At the Embarcadero, without her knowing, he had bought chanterelles and morels, imported pasta colored like spring flowers, arugula and baby tatsoi. For dessert, orange-blossom custard. When they were finished, they remained out on the deck and looked at the Bay, the rented view. Lights shimmered through the dusk. In a flowering quince in the garden, dozens of hummingbirds droned and darted like bees, attacking each other with needle beaks.
“So.” Randall’s face was slightly flushed. They had finished the champagne, and he had poured them each some cognac. “If this happens – if I get the house. Will you move out here?”
She stared down at the hummingbirds. Her heart was racing. The quince had no smell, none that she could detect, anyway; yet still they swarmed around it. Because it was so large, and its thousands of blossoms were so red. She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”
He nodded and took a quick sip of cognac. “Why don’t you just stay, then? Till we find out on Tuesday? I have to go down to San Jose early tomorrow to interview this guy, you could come and we could go to that place for lunch.”
“I can’t.” She bit her lip, thinking. “No . . . I wish I could, but I have to finish that piece before I leave for Greece.”
“You can’t just leave from here?”
“No.” That would be impossible, to change her whole itinerary. “And I don’t have any of my things – I need to pack, and get my notes . . . I’m sorry.”
He took her hand and kissed it. “That’s okay. When you get back.”
That night she lay in his bed as Randall slept beside her, staring at the manuscripts on their shelves, the framed lines of poetry. His breathing was low, and she pressed her hand against his chest, feeling his ribs beneath the skin, his heartbeat. She thought of canceling her flight; of postponing the entire trip.
But it was impossible. She moved the pillow beneath her head, so that she could see past him, to the wide picture window. Even with the curtains drawn you could see the lights of the city, faraway as stars.
Very early next morning he drove her to the hotel to get her things and then to the airport.
“My cell will be on,” he said as he got her bag from the car. “Call me down in San Jose, once you get in.”
“I will.”
He kissed her and for a long moment they stood at curbside, arms around each other.
“Book your ticket back here,” he said at last, and drew away. “I’ll talk to you tonight.”
She watched him go, the nearly silent car lost among the taxis and limousines; then hurried to catch her flight. Once she had boarded she switched off her cell, then got out her eyemask, earplugs, book, water bottle; she took one of her pills. It took twenty minutes for the drug to kick in, but she had the timing down pat: the plane lifted into the air and she looked out her window, already feeling not so much calm as detached, mildly stoned. It was a beautiful day, cloudless; later it would be hot. As the plane banked above the city she looked down at the skein of roads, cars sliding along them like beads or raindrops on a string. The traffic crept along 280, the road Randall would take to San Jose. She turned her head to keep it in view as the plane leveled out and began to head inland.
Behind her a man gasped; then another. Someone shouted. Everyone turned to look out the windows.
Below, without a sound that she could hear above the jet’s roar, the city fell away. Where it met the sea the water turned brown then white then turgid green. A long line of smoke arose – no, not smoke, Suzanne thought, starting to rise from her seat; dust. No flames, none that she could see; more like a burning fuse, though there was no fire, nothing but white and brown and black dust, a pall of dust that ran in a straight line from the city’s tip north to south, roughly tracking along the interstate. The plane continued to pull away, she had to strain to see it now, a long green line in the water, the bridges trembling and shining like wires. One snapped then fell, another, miraculously, remained intact. She couldn’t see the third bridge. Then everything was green crumpled hillsides, vineyards; distant mountains.
People began to scream. The pilot’s voice came on, a blaze of static then silence. Then his voice again, not calm but ordering them to remain so. A few passengers tried to clamber into the aisles but flight attendants and other passengers pulled or pushed them back into their seats. She could hear someone getting sick in the front of the plane. A child crying. Weeping, the buzz and bleat of cell phones followed by repeated commands to put them all away.
Amazingly, everyone did. It wasn’t a terrorist attack. The plane, apparently would not plummet from the sky; but everyone was too afraid that it might to turn their phones back on.
She took another pill, frantic, fumbling at the bottle and barely getting the cap ba
ck on. She opened it again, put two, no three, pills into her palm and pocketed them. Then she flagged down one of the flight attendants as she rushed down the aisle.
“Here,” said Suzanne. The attendant’s mouth was wide, as though she were screaming; but she was silent. “You can give these to them—”
Suzanne gestured towards the back of the plane, where a man was repeating the same name over and over and a woman was keening. “You can take one if you want, the dosage is pretty low. Keep them. Keep them.”
The flight attendant stared at her. Finally she nodded as Suzanne pressed the pill bottle into her hand.
“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. “Thank you so much, I will.”
Suzanne watched her gulp one pink tablet, then walk to the rear of the plane. She continued to watch from her seat as the attendant went down the aisle, furtively doling out pills to those who seemed to need them most. After about twenty minutes, Suzanne took another pill. As she drifted into unconsciousness she heard the pilot’s voice over the intercom, informing the passengers of what he knew of the disaster. She slept.
The plane touched down in Boston, greatly delayed by the weather, the ripple affect on air traffic from the catastrophe. It had been raining for thirty-seven days. Outside, glass-green sky, the flooded runways and orange cones blown over by the wind. In the plane’s cabin the air chimed with the sound of countless cell phones. She called Randall, over and over again; his phone rang but she received no answer, not even his voicemail.
Inside the terminal, a crowd of reporters and television people awaited, shouting questions and turning cameras on them as they stumbled down the corridor. No one ran; everyone found a place to stand, alone, with a cell phone. Suzanne staggered past the news crews, striking at a man who tried to stop her. Inside the terminal there were crowds of people around the TV screens, covering their mouths at the destruction. A lingering smell of vomit, of disinfectant. She hurried past them all, lurching slightly, feeling as though she struggled through wet sand. She retrieved her car, joined the endless line of traffic and began the long drive back to that cold green place, trees with leaves that had yet to open though it was already almost June, apple and lilac blossoms rotted brown on their drooping branches.
It was past midnight when she arrived home. The answering machine was blinking. She scrolled through her messages, hands shaking. She listened to just a few words of each, until she reached the last one.
A blast of static, satellite interference; then a voice. It was unmistakably Randall’s.
She couldn’t make out what he was saying. Everything was garbled, the connection cut out then picked up again. She couldn’t tell when he’d called. She played it over again, once, twice, seven times, trying to discern a single word, something in his tone, background noise, other voices: anything to hint when he had called, from where.
It was hopeless. She tried his cell phone again. Nothing.
She stood, exhausted, and crossed the room, touching table, chairs, countertops, like someone on a listing ship. She turned on the kitchen faucet and splashed cold water onto her face. She would go online and begin the process of finding numbers for hospitals, the Red Cross. He could be alive.
She went to her desk to turn on her computer. Beside it, in a vase, were the flowers Claude had sent her, a half-dozen dead narcissus smelling of rank water and slime. Their white petals were wilted, and the color had drained from the pale yellow cups.
All save one. A stem with a furled bloom no bigger than her pinkie, it had not yet opened when she’d left. Now the petals had spread like feathers, revealing its tiny yellow throat, three long crimson threads. She extended her hand to stroke first one stigma, then the next, until she had touched all three; lifted her hand to gaze at her fingertips, golden with pollen, and then at the darkened window. The empty sky, starless. Beneath blue water, the lost world.
MARK MORRIS
What Nature Abhors
MARK MORRIS BECAME a full-time writer in 1988 on the British government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the publication of his first novel, Toady.
His thirteenth novel, Doctor Who: Forever Autumn, was recently released, and his fourteenth, The Deluge, will be published by Leisure Books. The author’s short stories, novellas, articles and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and he is editor of the HWA Bram Stoker Award-nominated Cinema Macabre, a book of fifty horror movie essays by genre luminaries.
Forthcoming titles includes a Hellboy novel, The All-Seeing Eye, and a novella entitled It Sustains, which will be published by Earthling in summer 2008.
“ ‘What Nature Abhors’ was inspired by an otherwise extremely pleasant visit to Hampton Court Palace with my wife, Nel,” Morris explains. “It was a sunny day, and we were strolling through the gardens when we came across the statue of a figure, the upper half of which was tightly draped in black plastic.
“A sign explained that the statue had been damaged by the elements and was awaiting restoration, but the sight of it, like an upright, partially concealed murder victim, was arresting, incongruous and deliciously eerie, and it stayed with me.”
WHEN MEACHER OPENED his eyes the train was empty, though he had thought it was the jolt of the brakes that had woken him. He stood up, the low-level anxiety of disorientation already beginning to grind in his belly. The carriage was old and grimy, and smelled musty, as if each threadbare seat had absorbed too much sweat over too many years. The upholstery and stained carpet was predominantly grey with overlapping flecks in two shades of bilious green that jittered like TV interference on the periphery of his vision.
Outside the window the stone walls of the station building looked smoke-blackened, except for pale oblongs where the station’s name-plates had been removed, probably by vandals. As far as Meacher could see, it was not only the train that was deserted but the platform too – and so profoundly, it seemed to him, that he suppressed the urge to call out, oddly fearful of how intrusive, or worse insignificant, his voice might sound in the enveloping silence.
Stepping into the aisle, he automatically reached towards the luggage rack above his head, but found it empty. Had he had a bag, or even a jacket, at the outset of his journey? It would have been unusual for him to have travelled with neither, but his brain felt so dulled by fatigue that he honestly couldn’t remember. He sat down again, intimidated by solitude and by his own aberrant memory. He had a notion that the merest glimpse of a guard or another passenger, or perhaps even the incomprehensible blare of a station announcer’s voice, would be all that he would need to restore his sense of himself and his surroundings.
However when he realised, ten minutes later, that he was actually holding his breath in anticipation of a hint of life besides his own, he decided he could be passive no longer. He stood up with a decisiveness that was for no one’s benefit but his and lurched along the length of the carriage, his arms pumping like a cross-country skier’s as he yanked at seats to maintain his momentum.
Once on the platform he paused only briefly, so that he would not have to consciously acknowledge the absence of life. The EXIT sign caused his spirits to flare with a disproportionate fierceness if only because, albeit impersonal, it was a form of communication, and hinted at more to come. He stumped through the arch beneath the sign and found himself in a ticket office containing back-to-back rows of red metal seats and an unmanned ticket window. From above this too a name-plate had been removed, and with such care that Meacher wondered whether the place was understaffed because it was on the verge of closure.
The station was certainly small enough for this theory to be feasible, or at least appeared too inconsequential to have been granted a car park, because a further exit door led down a flight of stone steps and thence to what appeared to be a town centre side-street. Even out here there was no indication of life, though Meacher felt optimistic that he would encounter some sooner rather than later. There were signs of human occupation – the stink of
stale urine as he had descended the steps, discarded confectionery wrappers and food cartons emblazoned with comfortingly iconic logos: McDonalds, Kit Kat, KFC. On the far side of a pedestrian crossing a chalked sign in a pub window promised BIG SCREEN SKY SPORTS! Meacher might have ventured inside to freshen his dry mouth with something sweet and fizzy if the pub’s wooden doors, so hefty they put him in mind of a dungeon, had not been firmly shut.
The pub’s neighbours were equally inaccessible. Indeed, a grubby jeweller’s and a shop which contained second-hand musical instruments had reinforced their unwillingness to attract trade via the employment of metal shutters. Meacher wondered what time it was. If the shops were closed and the pub not yet open he guessed it must be somewhere between six and seven p.m. Looking up afforded him no clue, because the greyness between the rooftops more closely resembled a thick net stretched between the buildings than a portion of sky.
He started to walk, though had no real idea in which direction the town centre lay. The silence was so unnerving that even the tiny crackle of grit beneath his soles made him wince. The narrow streets with their shuttered store-fronts all looked the same, and after a while he began to wonder whether he was walking in circles. His mind still felt oddly inactive, as though unable to form thoughts of any substance. Every so often he didn’t so much stop to listen as stumble to a halt, as if he was a machine that periodically needed to conserve its energy to recharge. Unless his senses were as faulty as his memory, it seemed he was utterly alone. There was neither the distant rumble of traffic, nor even the faintest trill of birdsong.
Perhaps it was Sunday and everything was shut. The thought was less a comfort, and more an attempt to prevent his sense of disquiet escalating into fear. In truth he knew that no town centre was ever this devoid of life. Something had happened here, probably while he had been asleep on the train. The town had been abandoned or evacuated for some reason, and somehow he had been overlooked.
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