Fiona cleared the plates into the sink, and that was the end of dinner. “Shall I help?” Grant had been brought up to offer.
“That’s her work.”
Since Fiona smiled indulgently at that, Grant didn’t feel entitled to disagree. “I’d better go and phone, then.”
He imagined he saw a pale shape lurch away from the window into the unspecific dimness—it must have been Fiona’s reflection as she turned to blink at him. “He said you had.”
“I ought to let my friends know I won’t be seeing them tonight.”
“They’ll know when you don’t, won’t they? We don’t want the waves carrying you off.” Wiping her hands on a cloth that might have been part of someone’s discarded garment, she pulled out a drawer beside the sink. “Stay in and we’ll play a few games.”
While the battered cardboard box she opened on the table was labelled Ludo, that wasn’t quite what it contained. Rattling about on top of the familiar board inside the box were several fragments of a substance Grant told himself wasn’t bone. “We make our own amusement round here,” Fiona said. “We use whatever’s sent us.”
“He’s not your lad.”
“He could be.”
The scrape of Grant’s chair on the stone floor went some way towards expressing his discomfort. “I’ll phone now,” he said.
“Not driving, are you?” Tom enquired.
“Not at all.” Grant couldn’t be bothered resenting whatever the question implied. “I’m going to enjoy the walk.”
“He’ll be back soon for you to play with,” Tom told his wife.
She turned to gaze out at the dark while Tom’s stare weighed on their visitor, who stood up. “I won’t need a key, will I?”
“We’ll be waiting for you,” Fiona mumbled.
Grant sensed tension as oppressive as a storm, and didn’t thank the bare floorboards for amplifying his retreat along the hall. He seized the clammy latch and hauled the front door open. The night was almost stagnant. Subdued waves smoothed themselves out on the black water beyond the sea wall, inside which the bay chattered silently with whiteness beneath the incomplete mask of a moon a few days short of full. An odour he no longer thought it adequate to call fishy lingered in the humid air or inside him as he hurried towards the phone box.
The heat left over from the day more than kept pace with him. The infrequent jab of chill wind simply encouraged the smell. He wondered if an allergy to whatever he’d eaten was beginning to make itself felt in a recurrent sensation, expanding through him from his stomach, that his flesh was turning rubbery. The cottages had grown intensely present as chunks of moon fallen to earth, and seemed less deserted than he’d taken them to be: the moonlight showed that patches of some of the windows had been rubbed or breathed or even licked imperfectly clear. Once he thought faces rose like flotsam to watch him from the depths of three successive cottages, unless the same face was following him from house to ruined house. When he failed to restrain himself from looking, of course there was only moonlit dimness, and no dead cat in the general store. He did his best to scoff at himself as he reached the phone box.
Inside, the smell was lying in wait for him. He held the door open with his foot, though that admitted not only the infrequent wind but also more of the light that made his hand appear as pale as the receiver in it was black. His clumsy swollen fingers found the number in his pocket and held the scrap of paper against the inside of a frame that had once contained a mirror above the phone. Having managed to dial, he returned the paper to its niche against his unreasonably flabby thigh and clutched the receiver to his face with both hands. The fourth twosome of rings was parted by a clatter that let sounds of revelry at him, and belatedly a voice. “Who’s this?”
For longer than a breath Grant felt as if he was being forced to stand up in class for a question he couldn’t answer, and had to turn it back on the questioner. “It’s Ian, isn’t it?”
“Bill,” Ian said, and shouted it to their friends. “Where have you got to?” he eventually thought to ask.
“I’ve broken down on the coast. I’m getting the car fixed tomorrow.”
“When are we seeing you?”
“I told you, tomorrow,” Grant said, though the notion felt remote in more ways than he could name.
“Have a drink for us, then, and we will for you. Won’t we, you crew?”
The enthusiasm this aroused fell short of Grant, not least because he’d been reminded of the water accompanying dinner, a memory that revived the taste of the meal. “Don’t get too pissed to drive tomorrow,” Ian advised and made way for a chorus of drunken encouragement followed by the hungry buzz of the receiver.
Grant planted the receiver on its hook and shoved himself out of the box. Even if Baiting had boasted a pub, he would have made straight for his room; just now, supine was the only position that appealed to him. As the phone box shut with a muted thud that emphasised the desertion of the seafront, he set out along the top of the submerged wall.
It was broad enough for him to feel safe even if he wobbled—luckily for his career, however distant that seemed, teachers didn’t have to be able to swim. He wouldn’t have minded being able to progress at more than a shuffle towards the landmark of his car blackened by the moonlight, but the unsynchronised restlessness flanking him made him feel less than stable, as if he was advancing through some unfamiliar medium. The luminous reflection of the arc of cottages hung beneath them, a lower jaw whose unrest suggested it was eager to become a knowing grin. The shape of the bay must be causing ripples to resemble large slow bubbles above the huddle of round whitish shapes along the middle of the sea wall. He still couldn’t make them out, nor how many images of the moon were tracking him on or just beneath the surface of the inlet. The closer he came to the halfway mark, the larger the bubbles appeared to grow. He was within a few yards of them, and feeling mesmerised by his own pace and by the whispers of the sea, when he heard a protracted stealthy wallowing behind him. He turned to find he had company on the far end of the wall.
It must be a swimmer, he told himself. Its glistening suggested it was wearing a wet suit rendered pallid by the moon; surely it couldn’t be naked. Was the crouched figure making a joke of his progress? As it began to drag its feet, which struck him as unnecessarily large, along the wall, it looked no more at home on the path than he felt. Its head was bent low, and yet he had the disconcerting impression that it was presenting its face to him. It had shuffled several paces before he was able to grasp that he would rather outdistance it than see it in greater detail. He swung around and faltered just one step in the direction of his car. While his attention had been snared, another figure as squat and pale and dripping had set out for him from the opposite end of the wall.
He was paralysed by the spectacle of the pair converging effortfully but inexorably on him, the faces on their lowered heads indisputably towards him, until a movement let him peer in desperation at the farthest cottage. The front door had opened, and over the car roof he saw Tom. “Can you come and help me?” Grant shouted, stumbling towards him along the wall.
The cottages flattened and shrank his voice and sent him Tom’s across the bay. “No need for that.”
“There is,” Grant pleaded. “That’s in my way.”
“Rude bugger.”
Grant had to struggle to understand this meant him. It added itself to the sight of the advancing figure pallid as the underside of a dead fish. The closer it shuffled, the less it appeared to have for a face. “What are they?” he cried.
“They’re all the moon brings us these days,” Tom said, audibly holding Grant or people like him responsible, and stepped out of the cottage. He was naked, like the figures on the wall. The revelation arrested Grant while Tom plodded to the car. Indeed, he watched Tom unlock it and climb in before this sent him forward. “Stop that,” he yelled. “What do you think you’re doing? Get out of my car.”
The Cavalier was no more likely to start first time for a
naked driver than it ever did for him, he promised himself. Then it spluttered out a mass of fumes and performed a screeching U-turn. “Come back,” Grant screamed. “You can’t do that. You’re polluting your environment.”
No doubt his protests went unheard over the roaring of the engine. The sound took its time over dwindling once the coastline hid the car. The squat whitish shapes had halted once Grant had begun shouting. He strode at the figure crouched between him and the cottage and, since it didn’t retreat, with as little effect at the other. He was repeating the manoeuvre, feeling like a puppet of his mounting panic, when that was aggravated by a burst of mirth. Fiona had appeared in the cottage doorway and was laughing at him. “Just jump in,” she called across the water.
He didn’t care how childish his answer sounded if she was capable of saving him. “I can’t swim.”
“What, a big strong lad like you?” Her heartiness increased as she declared “You can now. You can float, at any rate. Give it a try. We’ll have to feed you up.”
Beyond the spur of the coastline the sound of the car rose to a harsh note that was terminated by a massive splash. “That’s the end of that,” Fiona called. “You can be one of my big babies instead.”
Grant’s mind was refusing to encompass the implications of this when Tom came weltering like a half-submerged lump of the moon around the bay. Grant dashed along the sea wall, away from Fiona and Tom. He was almost at the middle section when he saw far too much in the water: not just the way that section could be opened as a gate, but the pallid roundish upturned faces that were clustered alongside. They must be holding their breath to have grown clear at last, their small flat unblinking eyes and, beneath the noseless nostrils, perfectly round mouths gaping in hunger that looked like surprise. As he wavered, terrified to pass above them, he had a final insight that he could have passed on to a classroom of pupils: the creatures must be waiting to open the gate and let in the tide and any fish it carried. “Don’t mind them,” Fiona shouted. “They don’t mind we eat their dead. They even bring them now.”
An upsurge of the fishy taste worse than nausea made Grant stagger along the wall. The waiting shape crouched forward, displaying the round-mouthed emotionless face altogether too high on its plump skull. Hands as whitish and as fat jerked up from the bay, snatching at Grant’s feet. “That’s the way, show him he’s one of us,” Fiona urged, casting off her clothes as she hurried to the water’s edge.
She must have been encouraging Grant’s tormentors to introduce him to the water. In a moment fingers caught his ankles and overbalanced him. His frantic instinctive response was to hurl himself away from them, into the open sea. Drowning seemed the most attractive prospect left to him.
The taste expanded through him, ousting the chill of the water with a sensation he was afraid to name. When he realised it was the experience of floating, he let out a howl that merely cleared his mouth of water. Too many pallid shapes for him to count were heaving themselves over the wall to surround him. He flailed his limbs and then tried holding them still, desperate to find a way of making himself sink. There was none. “Don’t worry,” Fiona shouted as she sloshed across the bay towards him, “you’ll soon get used to our new member of the family,” and, in what felt like the last of his sanity, Grant wondered if she was addressing his captors or Tom.
DROWNING
by Gregory L. Norris
She was different than the others, beautiful in a manner that defied the word’s conventional definition. From the instant Homer’s eyes locked with the specialized tank, and hands in heavy gloves peeled back the protective layers of sphagnum, and she was born back into this modern world after dying untold centuries in another, his heart reacted with powerful emotion. Homer Callison fell in love with the dead woman from the bog.
“Careful—careful,” he barked, his façade disguising the truth. “Exposed to air, these bodies absolutely fall apart.”
The museum’s Downshire liaison held up his gloved hand. “No worry, sir. She’s pickled properly in bog acid. We’ve seen to everything. She’ll be as lovely in New York as in the shadow of Drum Keenagh Mountain. And as intact.”
Homer exhaled through his nostrils and nodded. “Let me see the rest of her.”
The liaison—Aileene or Aelwife, Homer couldn’t exactly remember the man’s name given the upsurge of energy and heat within his blood—rolled back the peat. Downshire Woman, as she was referred to in the museum’s communiqués, lay supine in the suspension with hands folded over stomach in a funereal pose. She floated atop a layer of sphagnum, the barest smile frozen upon her lips. Highly acidic water, the bog’s low temperature and lack of oxygen had preserved the dead beauty’s skin. Calcium phosphate in those same conditions had dissolved her bones and eroded her right leg from the knee down. The left formed a gnarled club, almost to the shin.
His entire body reacted in tiny electric prickles, the pins and needles from sleep. Only Homer was awake.
“Magnificent,” Homer sighed.
“That she is, a true beauty,” said Aileen or Aelwife. “A rare find, indeed.”
The sallow yellow-green tint of the bog water in the tank glowed around the mummified corpse. Homer’s gaze wandered over Downshire Woman’s angelic face, the swell of her breasts, and the rough weave of her clothing visible through the solution. Pinned to the tunic was a trio of black beads, glass or polished volcanic stone, Homer assumed. Long seconds later, Homer blinked. He didn’t realize he’d held his breath until the last sip of air began to boil in his lungs.
“Done,” Homer said. “I’ll be returning to the States and taking her with me.”
The liaison’s smile sharpened. “Now, wait a minute, Mister Callison. There are one or three finer details yet to discuss.”
The briny stink of the surrounding landscape registered for the first time in multiple short breaths. With it came the fear she wouldn’t be theirs, his. Homer’s heart galloped. He choked down a dry swallow and then got right into the other man’s face.
“I don’t care about details—name your price. I’m authorized to pay you on behalf of the museum.”
The man—his name was neither Aileen nor Aelwife but Aberdeen—nodded. “As you wish.”
“Now. Immediately. See to it.”
Homer tipped his gaze back to the makeshift glass sarcophagus and gasped. Downshire Woman’s eyes were open and aimed at him. He blinked and understood it was the glass beads he’d focused upon, not her eyes. Those were tightly shut, submerged in a solution of bog acid powerful enough to dissolve bones. The depths would forever separate them, more so than even the centuries between his life and her death.
A stiff wind rose, bitter with the lingering chill of the early spring and the sea located close to the bog; the sea, which had created the conditions here. Homer shuddered. The sensation of being watched persisted. He realized the origin owed to Aberdeen and his men, the peat harvesters who’d discovered the sad beauty from another time. Jealousy replaced the flicker of unease. A storyline played out in Homer’s imagination in which he was her liberator.
“Sir?” Aberdeen repeated.
“Yes, whatever is required.”
“So you’ll be overnighting in the village?”
Homer looked higher. The darkening gray palette overhead threatened more rain. “No,” he said and then reconsidered haste. The trek through what felt like miles of Sitka spruce, lodge pine, and European larch stretched longer before them, especially with Downshire Woman’s fragile remains in tow.
The first drops of a cold downpour pelted the bog. Some struck the open pools with empty, plunking notes. Haste? Beyond Drum Keenagh and the Downshire, even greater distances awaited. The whole of the Atlantic, in fact.
“Yes, but I’ll depart the moment I’ve secured transportation.”
Aberdeen ordered his men into action through grunts. A wooden cart used for hauling peat appeared. A glass seal was placed over the sarcophagus. Rough hands maneuvered Downshire Woman’s resting plac
e up, onto the cart, and under cover of a burlap tarp.
Homer, she called to him, only none but he heard the dreamy song of her voice. Please don’t leave me, Homer!
“I won’t, my love,” Homer answered.
Aberdeen turned to him. “You say something, Mister Callison?”
“No, now get on with your work. I’m not paying you to— ”
“Thus far, you haven’t paid us anything,” Aberdeen said through that slippery smile.
The return trip to the village of Hill Hampstead passed with maddening slowness. Aberdeen and his men had packed her in peat, as instructed, but Homer imagined the beauty jostled with every bump, and suffered knotted insides and sore feet as he walked beside the horse-drawn cart.
His room at the Rampion Inn was on the second floor at the top of a narrow staircase. There was no question his find, his beauty, would not travel to the room with him. A new anxiety possessed Homer on the final leg of the journey. She wasn’t cargo or livery to be stacked with dried goods and other supplies.
Rain hammered Hill Hampstead and robbed the world of its color, as the bog had his beauty. Beautiful Downshire Woman. His—
Homer’s next breath came with difficulty. From somewhere nearby, a woman’s sob reached through the rain’s sharp staccato. The entire world wept around him through the rain’s tears. Not even the blanched gold of lit windows representing dry rooms drove out the sorrow or the growing chill.
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