Adeline didn't smile and she didn't stop. With her tiny, weak, rotting arms, she piled her people one atop the other. She tired. But building a castle was work, wasn't it?
What kind of Lord or Lady could rest on the labour of their people and never lift a hand to help?
*
Princess Adeline stumbled and Lady Crescent was there to catch her. The Lady was swift and her thin, pale hand was beneath Adeline's feet to help her higher.
Thank you, Lady Crescent.
No, Princess, said the Lady. Thank you. I bring word and sustenance.
Word? asked Adeline, swaying, perhaps a mere ten feet from the edge of the world.
Your people love you again, Princess. And soon?
Soon?
Soon you will be Queen.
Adeline slumped against the wall, so close, and took what Lady Crescent offered.
What little I have is yours...my Queen.
A small meal, but now, three weeks since the last bodies joined her nation, a feast.
Adeline worked through the night. She ached and burned and sweated, that sweat stinking and slick on her withered skin. She toiled, covered in her delirious thoughts, her feet slipping in the rotted bellies of her people. Down, she would slip, her feet tearing through the weakest of flesh. Then, as she thought she must surely tumble to the base of her tower and be too tired to ascend once more, her foot, or her hand, or her knife-blade hips, would catch on something solid. She would clamber once again to the summit, and with her, pull one more man or woman along. One more. Always, one more.
When the sun rose the rains came again to wash her down, and Adeline lay on mud.
*
Adeline woke. Her pain reached her head, and it pounded. Her sorrow reached her limb and they cried. In her tiny hand she found she clutched a curved, toothed bone in her fist.
Lady Crescent, she remembered.
Before she slept again, she dragged herself away from the pit. There were great machines there, yellow coloured with thick blades and shields of steel. Mechanised knights some siege engine of the enemy, she could not fathom.
Here and there, plastic boxes that smelled of shit. There would be liquid in there, she thought, but the kind that would poison. Adeline, Princess or Queen or nothing at all, dragged her feeble body to the only tree she could see, and at its base she thrust the jawbone into the earth.
*
Rain fell, and the sun didn't break the clouds, but it was warmer than the pit. Naked and nearly broken, Adeline found a bottle of something that might have been water in a squat, artificial building and she felt like a Princess again, even if a poor one, and without a castle.
The great machines would not move, and her body was just as ruined.
But there was water, and plenty of it. And there was food, wasn't there? Perhaps not here, in the mud where she lay...but somewhere.
If I'm patient, she thought. If I'm patient.
*
Madness roiled around inside the Princess' mind. Hunger, pain, delirium, sickness. A horde that battered and assaulted her walls without end.
Looking up at that solitary tree, she saw a nest. It was low, and she knew how to climb. It was how she'd been born, wasn't it?
The eggs were perfect.
I'll cook these myself, she told the jawbone at the base of the tree.
But she had no skillet, and her handmaidens and servants and the cooks and the kitchen helpers...were...
She ate the eggs and pushed such thoughts back, hard enough that they stumbled.
*
Dozing, more than sleeping, Lady Crescent woke her.
Queen Adeline?
Hmm?
You cannot be a Queen without a castle.
I have no subjects, Adeline mumbled. I have no people. My people are dead.
Half-asleep as she was, part of her understood that which, awake, she would not.
Then build your castle so they can see. Built a castle in white. Be a good Queen.
When Adeline woke, she knew what she had to do.
*
Raining, still.
Always raining now.
The water turned the earth to mud. Some ran down the hill. Most stayed.
The earth was softer now and softer was good for Adeline. The foundations she was to lay weren't of trenches dug in the ground that could flood and might have to wait for summer to dry. They were better. They meant more than brick, or concrete, or steel driven deep.
Queen Adeline planted another stone in the mud, one of many she laid already - these stones were made of bone. They were cleaned of flesh, and pale and strong.
She had enough to built high, and proud. And it would be white, wouldn't it?
Ivory.
If it was a castle fit for a Princess, then it would be perfect for a good Queen.
People would come. She was sure of it.
Lady, what are you doing? they would say.
Lady? No. I am a Queen. The last Queen. I am made of bone, and of ivory, and this you see is my castle.
And would they, her people, lay those bones with her?
Adeline looked around and over the top of the half-wall she had already built. In the distance a man sat in the lee of the wind and rain against that square, squat building, eating from a ragged, open tin. He watched her.
You're nuts, girl, aren't you?
She ignored him. If she was going to be Queen...if people were going to understand that she was Queen...she would need to prove herself such.
Another day, he was there. His face was sallow - hungry like she was, but he had more hair. His face was filthy and his beard teemed and shifted around his face, as though it were a larder full of insects.
He threw her a tin over the shallow wall of bone. She glanced down, and saw that there was food left inside. The tin seemed a silver bowl, filled with the finest repast she'd ever known. But she did not take it.
She could not remember quite how to read the words that were written there.
Does it matter?
The food inside the tin, just the scraps the man left, pulled at her, dragged her, confused her and nearly made her head swim with need.
Instead, she ate worms and beetles that squirmed up through the wet earth. The food stayed where it was for an hour, or two.
Adeline swallowed every insect she could find, there, inside the growing circle of bone. Finally, tears in her eyes from denying herself the dregs in the tin, she took up more and more bones and jammed them deep into the sodden earth.
The man didn't want to waste the food he'd gifted her, but he, too, was stubborn. Proud, maybe. Yet it was the man with the lice for a beard who gave first, and for some reason neither would ever understand, as he reached the bones that made the rudest, earliest form her walls might become, he stopped.
May I come in? he asked.
Perhaps, she thought and wondered, he is mad as me.
If you bow, she said, you may.
The End
I like to put something lighter in a collection, because life isn't unrelenting dark, and neither is my brain. This was published in the 2012 Leap Year Edition of an anthology titled 'Daily Flash'. I didn't get a contributor's copy, and I certainly didn't see anyone's wedding tackle, but we should probably leave that there...
A Short History of Time, Please
Before we were all born - the us as we are; the people of the future - the people of the past conquered the universe.
Queen Victoria knew her time on earth was nearing the end. She had to prepare the way for her people to survive. And so, the people of England left behind clockwork androids, so intricately designed that none could tell the difference between them and the natural humans of the wider world.
The stars beckoned.
Queen Victoria sent her favourite nephews, two small boys still in shorts (with their nanny in tow) to pave the way.
The boys, armed only with a catapult and a blunt penknife, defeated all known species within the alpha quadrant of the Milky Way, and sust
ained only a grazed knee between them.
Their nanny, Petunia, had her period. She, nor the boys, made any kind of fuss.
To this day, the Victorians live on, far beyond the intellectual and scientific grasp of modern humans. They build bridges to the stars, and run trains on egg yolk, and occasionally solve equations of galactic proportions with nothing more than an abacus.
We have duvet days and bemoan our lot when the landlord calls, ‘Time, Please,' and while we tick and tock, time runs out.
The End
This is a story I did send out to two magazines. They said no, so I gave up, because honestly, why not just stick it in a collection and be done with it? Life's too short...unless you're THE MAN WITH SPIDERS...oh, OK, I'll stop. Here's the story.
The Man with Spiders in his Eyes
1. A House Sewn in White
Menzies Donaghue always had an affinity with spiders. It wasn't like he kept them as pets, or sought out rare and exotic varieties from sellers on the Internet - it wasn't one particular kind of spider, or even that he loved them especially. Rather, it was the spiders that seemed drawn to him.
As a baby, Menzies Moses' basket, then cot, were often strewn with fresh, quivering webs, even in such a short space as babies rest between their cries and changes and feeds. A younger child; he remembered staring at a globe lamp as he slept, and spiders would crawl from continent to continent, until weary of seeing the world they would make their homes high in the cold corners his bedroom. His mother would chase them off with a duster, attacking the cornices and ceiling roses with vigour. She would often swear if they were quick or fat. He got older, as kids tend to, and the spiders were bolder and even stubborn. Mrs. Donaghue would use the broom, or the long attachment on her hoover. His father suggested conkers placed around the room. It was an old widow's remedy, passed down from his mother, and her mother, and maybe a time before that, long ago when spiders crawled over peasants in the dark hovels of people who couldn't afford to burn a candle all night long.
It didn't work. Nothing did.
But the thing which people never really understood was that while it bothered them, it bothered Menzies Donaghue not at all.
He moved from Scotland in his seventeenth year and never returned to settle there again. It was the navy that called to him; perhaps due to those long evenings watching spiders hop easily across oceans and seas, but more likely for the chance to be a man and to earn his own keep. He lived in Southampton for a while (at least in between his long stints aboard large ships, he did) and worked for the navy, who owned him, though only for the first five of his years at sea. Later, he found it wasn't the vessel that drew him, but the sea. He took work on merchant ships and toward the end of his life at sea he was first mate on cargo ships down and around the Cape of Good Hope and up the eastern African coast. The money was good, the tax easy, and his pockets were never empty.
Money wasn't a problem. Spiders were - not the fact of them, but the way people saw him, and how they would be wary of the man who lived with spiders. The creatures followed Menzies wherever he went. Warmer climes brought rarer spiders, not less. They would climb the vast chains that anchored the ships, or stowaway in luggage, on containers or shipments. And when they set sail those spiders would somehow find their way to Donaghue's cabin or quarters or his mean and hard bunk, and so people shunned him because they didn't like spiders.
Donaghue didn't like them, either. Not especially. It didn't bother him, being surrounded by them, or worry him, or even annoying him to find something fat and hairy crawling and exploring him whenever he stirred from sleep, or in the shower, or even scuttling to and fro along the edge of the toilet while he sat to make his morning deposit.
Yet no matter how hard he tried to explain that it was the spiders which followed him, he could not mollify or placate his shipmates. Toward the end, he understood that these people - normal people - could feel nothing but revulsion for the man who sometimes woke with fine webs tangled through his thatch of unruly hair.
Eventually, he grew tired of the derision and with money from working overseas half the year and hardly paying tax, and then with the money from his inheritance when his mother (who survived his father by fifteen years) passed away, Donaghue bought and settled in the home he'd die in. A rambling house in a Kentish country village, just on the outskirts of a quaint place that couldn't fight sprawl and growth and affordable housing.
Retired to his country home at the relatively young age of fifty, he was happy for a time. His life was peaceful, easy, and quiet. Routine kept him sane and the quiet and the simplicity of this new life he found to his liking. In the mornings, he would walk to the town and buy the things he wanted, or needed. He kept his needs small, because he was alone and a man alone consumes far less than a man with family.
His spiders where, it seemed, his only remaining kin.
He would cook, read, sit and stare at his garden or the sky, then sleep.
This he did for nearly twenty years.
Near his seventieth year, his trips to town began to feel unpleasant, and he took the journey only when he felt it necessary. The people he'd known well enough to speak with either died, or moved away, or retired to watch grandchildren and television quiz shows.
The frequency of his trips to the village butchers, grocers, and the good bakery lessened until it was perhaps just once a week that he walked the country lanes, if that. He became a rarity and then, later, almost an apparition.
He no longer woke with spider's gossamer webs in a thatch of hair, but with white strands across a bald pate like a judge who forgot to remove his wig. Things like this - a slow creep - passed unnoticed. One day, Menzies woke and stared in the mirror and did not understand why his eyes were blurred and rheumy, or his hair white and thin and sparse, or his nose seemingly larger on his face, or whose teeth he brushed that seemed more dry and brittle and yellowed than those white marble tombstones he remembered.
As he grew old, Menzies Donaghue's house followed. His garden, a thing he'd once enjoyed and taken pride in, was littered with cans and weeds, the grass long enough to be a meadow, the trees, uncared for, sprawled with dead and gnarled limbs.
And inside the house, of course, webs hid their denizens in each corner, hung from light fittings, spiralled around the legs and nooks of any furniture that remained to Menzies, from the wooden banisters and balustrades, from beneath the bed and windows frames and the blotched mirror on the mouldering and mildewed bathroom cabinet. Those webs were as varied as the spiders whom he shared his large house with: old and yellowed and abandoned and newer, whiter, webs. Thick webs, funnel webs, and others of no discernible pattern created by strange arachnids which somehow followed him home from his many travels. Common house spiders would nest in the loft and the empty rooms of his large, cold house. In the kitchen cupboards were cup-a-soups and quiet, sleepy things that liked the dark. When he reached within to find something to eat (the older he got, the rarer his appetite) those spiders might crawl along his arms, or up his loose sleeves, or simply brush the back of his paper-skinned old man hands.
My bones must look like webs, he thought more and more often now his final years were laying heavily on his thin shoulders. He would ready himself for sleep each night and stare at his sunken flesh and raised bones. The tendons on the back of his hand moved beneath the skin like strands on a web might in a breeze, or those knocked by vibrations as prey caught somewhere down a line and stuck.
*
2. DOG
The sun shone; early spring, a lick of warmth on Menzies' skin. At his age, cold bit hard and a warm day was welcome as a woman's touch to a younger man. His cupboards were mostly empty. His stores were reduced to a jar with a metal clasp that held his tea which he drank with a little lemon from a plastic bottle. Since hitting his eighties his stomach had been upset by the slightest smell of coffee, and now in his early nineties ('Still spry, Mr. Donaghue!') he could no longer handle milk. Most things, really. Sometimes, if he was poorl
y, he'd try to take a nutritional drink from the chemist. Once, that chemist was a local, independent thing. Now, it was a Boots, and the chain store charged more than he was willing to pay for a powder with a few extra vitamins.
Once, he would have taken this walk and been happy for the exercise. Only a mile, no more, but long enough for a man in his nineties who was held together by the kind of stubbornness old, old people have that stops them from dying or going to the doctors if they feel unwell. The kind that get on with it and don't complain. They're all over the world, those old people. They shuffle from place to place slowly enough to enjoy the sunlight while the younger people sit in doctor's surgeries for their colds, or queue for hours in supermarkets, or watch televisions late into the night in case they miss their shows and then watch their television phones (as Menzies Donaghue, the oldest of old school, thought of them) in case they missed something else.
Menzies took the walk to town and gazed up, down, around. There, Mrs. Smithson lived and raised three children, and later one grandchild when social services deemed their mother unfit to raise the child herself. Menzies remembered the child - Smithson's ward, he supposed. The girl had been polite and friendly. Boyish, perhaps. He seemed to remember she had gone and become a veterinary surgeon.
A good job, he figured.
Not a curmudgeon as such, Mr. Donaghue. More that he was just a man who resisted change and didn't like that which seemed inevitable.
Mrs. Smithson's home had three ruined cars in the front garden in the place of her pear tree, and shingle instead of grass.
People couldn't be bothered to mow a lawn, even. Too busy watching something on a screen.
Such a thing, he wondered, must be extremely stressful.
The butcher's was a newsagents. The grocers was gone, as was the post office. The post office was simply boarded over, probably overrun with rodents on the inside. The grocers was one of those mini-supermarkets. At the other end of town Donaghue was given to understand the fields were gone and 'affordable housing' sprouted instead. There was a newsletter that came around he read each month. Apparently the older fixtures in the village that was more a town now were up in arms and in a pickle about the woodland on the southern side of town. The Town Council were more than happy to put up houses in the place of trees.
The Cold Inside (Horror Short Stories) Page 3