The Best British Fantasy 2014

by Steve Haynes

  Ahren had thought it was ridiculous to map a myth, yet here he was in the clouds. It was the only place Lucy could be. He recalled the prayer flags flapping in the wind and his own prayers scattered amongst the clouds. This was the only place left for him to find salvation.

  The last time he had seen Lucy was the day of her eighth birthday. He should have known that she wouldn’t find the treasure he’d hidden, though he’d drawn a map. The map that led her into the woods and away from the house. She didn’t like maps but she was a willing playmate and wanted to please her brother. Ahren had waited at the trail’s conclusion – land’s end, with the locket he’d bought for her wrapped in a box with a blue ribbon. He waited until the sunlight was gone and returned home to the flashing lights of a parked police car.

  They searched the woodland but could find no trace of her. Ahren told them they were looking in the wrong place. They needed to look up.

  Ahren’s father had sworn never to sell but after Lucy’s disappearance, the land had become abhorrent to him, polluted in the way the cities were not. A reminder of innocence stolen – paradise lost.

  It was what the developers had wanted all along.

  Ahren was lost. He knew on this cloudface, without his equipment, that was tantamount to death. He’d tried following his hand-drawn map but the cloudmist was too thick. He needed to find shelter. He considered making his way back to the cabin, throwing himself at the old man’s mercy but then he remembered what he’d told Lucy. If you ever get lost climb up and look down, then you can see the way home.

  Ahren made his way to the edge of a cloudmass and lay face down. He tried to peer through the cloud, pressing his face into it. He couldn’t see much of the world below, only what the starlight permitted. He remembered all the trees he’d climbed after Lucy’s disappearance, despite his aversion for heights. He remembered the one where he’d found a torn piece of her white blouse. She’d tried to climb up and away as well. He’d always thought if he just climbed high enough he’d be able to see her. He’d moved into the highest tower-blocks, scaled mountains and finally arrived here at the top of the world, but the view below was always a disappointment.

  Lucy was gone.

  He pictured the prayer flags, the white one representing the clouds, ready to wave it in surrender. He stared down at the emptiness below, feeling gravity’s pull. He was at land’s end, the edge of the world. His underworld was waiting to greet him. He could easily step off the map.

  Instead he pulled out the map from inside his outgear. He unfolded it to look at the white expanse he had covered. This was what other’s sought, a blueprint of the unknown. It would be worth a lot to the Company, and to others. It wouldn’t be virgin land then, it would be crowded with people and tower-blocks.

  The wind played with the paper, curling its edges. Ahren gripped it tighter.

  Done with the Compass-

  Done with the Chart

  He ripped the map along its latitudinal and longitudinal lines. He scattered the pieces into the wind, an offering to the clouds to be blown like prayers above the heads of men.

  He lay on his back and unfolded Sally’s drawing. It was a mirror image of the constellations above. He traced the lines between the stars, imagining them connected by an enormously long string that spanned the galaxy like the contours on a map. It would take light years to follow the threads, to navigate his way through the cosmos. He could follow the stars as old explorers used to. Maybe the stars would lead him to her.

  Above, a single star burst across the sky, shining beautifully bright as it expired. She was up there somewhere, Ahren knew, and once he found her he would finally have a place to rest.

  In the distance he heard the sound of hooves and the whinnying of a horse, floating among the clouds.

  SARAH BROOKS

  Trans-Siberia:An Account of a Journey

  with Added Notes from The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to Greater Siberia (by L. Girard, Mauriac Publishing, Paris, 1859)

  The sole means of passage across the Greater Siberian wastes is by train, for those who can afford the ticket, and the risk.

  I left Beijing at seventeen, carrying a box of pencils and a suitcase held together with rope. At the station families sobbed and embraced. I tried not to look. Nor did I let my eyes widen at the size of the train, its wheels as tall as a man’s shoulder, the iron bars over the windows as thick as my arm. The green paint was faded, but the gold lettering on the carriages still stood out: Beijing to Moscow.

  My breath caught in my chest.

  Armed guards checked my Chinese papers and the letter of invitation from the Paris Conservatoire des Arts. I was handed waiver forms by representatives of the Trans-Siberia Company, releasing them from any responsibility for my safety and any guarantee of our eventual arrival in Moscow. I kept my expression blank because I was a man now and I could not be afraid.

  But my hand shook as I affixed the seal bearing my name. Red ink smeared the paper.

  The great train of the Trans-Siberia Company (est. 1800) crosses the border wall two hundred miles from Beijing. It is three thousand miles to Moscow. The journey takes seven days.

  The greater part of the train was the so-called cattle-sheds, carriages partitioned by a dozen thin walls, three bunks clinging to either side. I squeezed onto my top bunk, so close to the carriage roof that I was able to sit only if I hunched my shoulders and lowered my head, for all that I was small and slight. But up there, at least, I was away from all the nervous voices, raised as if to ward off gathering fears.

  On the bunks below were loud, quick young men from the south, with sunburnt skin. They splashed sweet-smelling liquor into chipped glasses and rummaged in their bags to produce parcels of nuts, dried fruit, packs of cards. One took out a crumpled photograph and smoothed it on his knee, propping it up against the window, and the others whistled and shouted such things as the aunties at the orphanage would have had the skin off my buttocks for even thinking.

  I peered down, to see a grainy picture of a woman, her silk qipao slit up to her thigh, her lips full and dark in her pale face. She stared right up at me. I looked away.

  ‘To keep us company through the long nights, my friends!’ They laughed and crashed their glasses together.

  One glanced up at me. ‘She doesn’t bite, countryman. Come and join us in a drink to her fine health!’

  I muttered my excuses and curled back into my bunk.

  ‘Maybe not to his taste,’ came the whisper from below, and a wave of raucous laughter.

  A familiar, empty feeling sat heavy in my gut. I will climb down, I told myself. I will pour their liquor down my throat, roar out meaningless, terrible words like a man should do, take up their picture and hold it to my lips. I will not be afraid. Here, on this train, I will make myself new, make myself into a man. Climb down, I said.

  I didn’t climb down. I lay on my stomach and stared out between the bars of the window as the low, ornate buildings of Beijing gave way to the farmsteads of the borderlands. The train travelled slowly. Slowly enough to see the farmers’ faces as they straightened up from their work to watch us pass. Some of them took off their hats.

  In Greater Siberia it is believed that the shadows have faces. In the deep forests yellow eyes watch the train.

  We crossed the border at night. The carriage slept at last, rattling and snoring along the shuddering rails but I lay wide awake, watching the window for the last lights to blink out. A final settlement, then the lights of the border wall, then nothing at all but the empty lands.

  When I closed my eyes there were things in the darkness. Things just outside the window. Things formed out of rumours and half-heard stories. Whispering, creeping things. They crowded closer until I swore I could hear their long fingers at the glass.

  I woke, shaking. No sleep for me. Instead, I crept from the cabin and made my way to the dining car with my
sketch book. Paper and pencils. Safety in shadows and lines.

  But my hopes for solitude were shattered. Every lamp in the dining car burned, every table crowded with travellers, with laughter and music and sweat.

  I squeezed myself into the nearest seat. I was good at being small, good at passing unnoticed. Taking out my book, I tried to calm my breathing, to banish the movement and noise and lose myself in the familiar hush that seeing – really seeing – always brought; a gemstone earring as it brushed against a neck, the puckering of skin around a scar, the dark strands of a braid of hair. How the lights caught the gold embroidery on women’s dresses, how they lit their reds and purples from within and there in the dark glass of the windows we were all doubled, both within the train and without.

  A woman in blue caught my eye. I traced the curve of her neck, the curl of her dark hair. The blue stones around her neck were deep and watery, her skin untouched by rouge. All around her men snatched greedy, stolen glimpses, but no-one approached her. She was more alone than anyone here. I bent my head closer to the page.

  A voice in my ear. ‘Do we scare you so much?’

  My pencil skittered, drawing a line across her cheeks. I looked up into dark blue eyes and I was lost for words, as always, though the aunties beat me and told me Speak, boy, or are you as foolish as you look?

  She gestured to the page. ‘Faces, trinkets, hair. We are more than this, you know.’

  Her tone was serious but her eyes merry. She spoke in French, the common tongue of Europe, still unfamiliar on my own tongue, though I had spent many hours over my books. So many words needed, to say so little. I felt the flush deepening on my face.

  ‘I . . . I am a student, only,’ I manage. I could not hold her eye but looked down at my paper and twisted my pencil around and around in my fingers, waiting for her to leave.

  She didn’t leave. She down sat beside me, her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, and watched me as I began to draw again. She was so close that her hair brushed against my cheek.

  ‘They are beautiful,’ she said, ‘your sketches.’

  I told her, slowly, haltingly, that I would go to study in Paris on a scholarship. I told her that I was lucky, luckier than I could ever have imagined.

  ‘Orphans need to be lucky,’ she said. ‘They have to make their own luck.’

  When I looked up, quickly, she laughed at my expression.

  ‘You can tell,’ she said. ‘You can tell the ones who travel lightly.’

  Orphans have to make their own luck. They have to find their own places. I have always remembered this.

  ‘My name is Elena,’ she said.

  ‘I am no-one’, I said. ‘My family name is Wu, which means ‘nothing’, and is what all the orphans are called. My given name is Gulou, which means Drum Tower, and is where I was found, before the aunties took me in.’

  She looked at me for so long that my skin began to feel tight and funny. Then she smiled, a great big smile, and said, ‘Well that is a name to be proud of.’

  And I think, for the first time, I was.

  I drew. She watched. The train hurtled through the darkness and I forgot all about the things outside.

  Some travellers say that the cost of the train is much higher than simply the ticket. They say that there is another price, unique to every traveller.

  I slept until the morning was almost over and when I opened my eyes she was my first thought. Elena. Her name was Elena. She thought my sketches were beautiful.

  The landscape had moved in closer during the night. Outside the window trees clustered so near that they brushed the glass, and greenish underwater light filtered into the train.

  I watched for her all day, half hopeful, half scared, not letting myself look at last night’s work, afraid that I would not have captured her as I hoped, that under my pencils she would have faded to a poor shadow of what she was. Instead, I sat in the dining car and ate food I couldn’t pronounce, found the observation carriage, all glass and iron bars, where there were ladies in silks and men who talked too loudly. And I looked up at every rustle of skirts and every whispery, sibilant murmur of French.

  Once, a thump came from the roof above, and to cries from my fellow passengers I looked up to see through the bars an orange eye amidst feathers and scales, great claws and wings spread wide. A lady beside me swooned, carefully.

  But I forgot to be scared. I forgot because all I could think was how beautiful those wings were, pale purple and laced with red veins. How beautiful horror could be.

  That night before I slept I turned at last to my book. To Elena and her voice in my head saying, ‘You have nothing to be afraid of.’

  Yet as my eye fell upon the pages, I could not stop myself from crying out. The book dropped from my hands.

  Impossible. Impossible. Perhaps I was more tired than I knew. Perhaps the journey had played on my nerves. Shaking, I picked it up again. I blinked, but the pictures remained. Not the face I remembered but something else entirely. A strange, clawed, twisted thing with dark, inhuman eyes.

  I slammed the book shut. When I slept, it was to troubled dreams.

  In this region grows an interesting genus of fir tree, identifiable by its red-tipped needles and sap. The tree is said to appear to be bleeding. The remains of human settlements can also still be seen, long deserted.

  The aunties told us the world is unkind. They told us to rely on ourselves alone. They said that this would make us strong, that fear was for children.

  When I was afraid, I took out my pencils. I drew things to show they couldn’t hurt me. I drew the older boys as they slept because in sleep they were gentle. And the aunties, as we studied they would let their faces fall slack, when they thought we weren’t looking. They would turn old before my eyes and I would be less afraid.

  But here, in the midst of the wastelands, I had lost even this small solace. I feared some twisting of the brain. Something broken. Elena must have seen what I created, she must think me a monster. I tore out the pages of my book, kept them hidden against my skin. I feared my madness could be seen by others.

  Outside the window the trees wept red tears. We passed a wooden church, alone on a low hill. The roof was caved in, the whole structure leaning, tilted by the wind. There were no windows.

  Never stopping, on and on across the continent. Never stopping, the only way to be safe.

  ‘Safe-ish’, the mutters went, the jokes. ‘Safer’.

  But not yet saved.

  On the third day we slowed perilously close to walking pace, the track winding past still lakes whose surfaces did not reflect the sky. I stood, nose to the window, rapt and appalled by the non-colour of the water, if that is what it was, and the scuttering, scuttling things, carapaces shining and black.

  And in the midst of it all, yellow flowers, a cluster of fragile petals around a central cup, green tendrils creeping upwards. I peered closer, amazed that nature so delicate could exist here, and thrive. But as I watched, something fleshy and red shot out from the flower cup towards a creeping, thorny creature. A flickering tongue; it grasped the creature and pulled it towards those pale petals, faster than I could have believed, and the petals opened, and the teeth were revealed. Row upon row. Sharp and shining.

  I stumbled backwards. Other tongues darted out, quick as snakes.

  ‘The flowers are hungry,’ said a voice beside me. ‘Like everything here is hungry.’

  Elena. I had not seen her since that first night. In the daylight she seemed more real, more earthly. How could I have captured so twisted a likeness? The wrongness was within myself. I could not meet her eye.

  ‘Where is your sketchbook?’ she asked, standing beside me and watching the terrible, greedy flowers. ‘Such rare things deserve preserving, too.’

  I shook my head, still unable to look at her. ‘I thought . . .’ I began.

 
‘That you had found something beautiful?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Something that I didn’t have to be afraid of. But I was wrong.’

  We stood in silence for a while, as the train picked up speed again, to its familiar rattling, rolling pace. Finally Elena said, ‘Well then, that just confirms my conclusions.’

  I turned to her. ‘Your conclusions?’

  ‘That you, Monsieur Orphan,’ she said, ‘may have been found in a drum tower, and may be prone at times to self-pity – ’ (this with raised eyebrows) ‘ – but are nonetheless possessed of common sense, a most under-rated gift.’

  I could not resist laughing.

  ‘If you are not afraid of everything outside this train,’ she went on, ‘then you are a foolish man.’

  She put her hand on my arm, and I am happy to tell you that I did not stammer, or blush, or lower my eyes, but stood, contented and unfoolish.

  A strange sensation! And strange that it should be here, in this unknown land, with this unknown, blue-eyed woman.

  If anything unusual occurs, remain calm. Return to your cabin immediately and lock the door. Stuff your ears with wax, or cloth if no wax is to hand. Make as little sound as possible. Keep an upright position, your back against the wall and your eyes open. Keep your pistol close.

  By the fourth day a kind of patient inertia had gripped the train. We became used to waiting our turn for the wash-rooms and trying to keep clean in the one tiny sink in each carriage. We became familiar with the dining car and the same diet of cured meat, bread and olives every day. We learned how best to propel ourselves down the corridors to the swaying rhythm of the train, when best to close the curtains against the approaching night and the shadows outside that moved alongside us with eerie grace. We learned not to look.