by Anthology
“Mum?” He said it quietly, as if not to disturb her. There was no response, no sign she recognized him.
“She ain’t spoke a word since she come here,” the guard said.
Edward didn’t need to wonder why. He could feel despair tolling from her like a great bell, ringing in his bones and chiming the sadness of her life. At least she wouldn’t suffer much longer. The will to die pulsed within her, stronger than blood. The echoes of it buffeted at him like a sad wind.
He wondered if he was strong enough to handle the intensity of her despair. Taking an echo of yearning or lust into his body was enough to muddle his brains and fill his heart with desire until he could exhale it into a phial; the prospect of taking in a sadness so deep that death was preferable terrified him. He felt for the phial in his pocket, reassuring himself he would only have to carry the emotion in his body until he was out the front door.
Edward kissed his mother gently on the forehead and said a silent prayer for her soul. Anxious to be gone from here, he tipped his head back and unlocked that strange place deep in his chest that he had discovered. The place that allowed him to harvest and hold the echoes.
He took a cautious breath, terrified that the emotions of two hundred lunatics would flood into him like a river finding an open weir gate. He knew his mother’s emotions well, though, and narrowed his focus on them. Her despair sifted into his lungs, sinking naturally to the spot beneath his breastbone. No other echoes followed. He breathed deeper, harvesting her sad bounty. When he had taken all he could hold, he locked the echoes in his chest.
Relief at his success lasted only a second before the echoes took effect. The terrible desolation of spirit was stronger than he could have imagined. It threatened to crush him to the floor. Despair and hopelessness overwhelmed him, suckling on his energy and will. He knew if he didn’t leave quickly, he might not leave at all. Edward pushed himself up from his knees, standing unsteadily.
“I’ll go now.” His voice was a whisper. The guard had seen nothing of his struggle; he nodded and led him back down the stairs.
The distance to the front door seemed twice what it had been before. Edward was despondent beyond tears, beyond words—beyond life. He held fast to the reason he had undertaken this awful task, the money that would help Samuel. He wondered if experiencing this despair was his penance for selling the echoes, inflicting them on the criminal, even if it was the man’s just due. When he finally reached the barred gate, the guard fumbled with the key.
Without warning, Edward was struck from behind. His body crashed into the bars and there was a sickening crunch from his coat pocket where he had placed the small phial. A sharp pain needled into his hip as a sliver of glass pierced the skin. His guard turned and swung at the old man who had run for the door when Edward arrived. The lunatic fell backward and the second guard wrestled the man to the floor.
When the two-fingered guard finally opened the gate, Edward threw himself out into the cool, fall air and stood on the front lawn, shaking. The fright of the incident was nothing to the horror of the broken phial. He slipped his hand gingerly into his pocket and pulled out the shards of glass, dropping them onto the lawn.
The journey home was torture. His mother’s hopelessness and misery dragged at him like a weight, trying to pull him to the ground. It whispered at him to give up, to give in, to lie down and die. It mercilessly nurtured every sorrow he had ever felt and revived them as if they were new. Near home he tripped and stumbled, falling to the gutter. Unwilling to get up again, he lay with his face against the horse piss and offal of the streets, and wished the sludge deep enough to drown him.
A hand pulled at one coat sleeve. “Ist tha’ druffen o’ yonderly?”
The northern accent was almost too thick to understand. “Ill,” Edward managed, crawling to his knees. “Not drunk.”
Strong arms tugged him to his feet. “Tha’s bist git ter ‘oome.”
Home. Samuel.
Edward nodded and waved off further help. He moved forward once again.
When Edward finally reached his house, he groped for the skeleton key. Throwing the door open, he stumbled to the under-stair cupboard. He dropped to his knees and rummaged for the first bottle he could find.
Lifting the glass to his mouth, Edward exhaled the dreadful echoes. Instead of flowing out easily with his breath, they came out reluctantly, thick and sticky. He corked the bottle, folded himself on the floor, and wept.
***
The next morning, Edward was unable to rise from bed. He needed to deliver the potion to Mrs. Winston today to collect the rest of his fee, but even that failed to motivate him. His mother’s despair had been too heavy and he had carried it too long. It had formed a bond with his loneliness, with unhappy memories of his childhood, his wife’s death, and with the gloom that poverty brought. He had become a victim of his own potion, the echoes blending with his native emotions until there was no telling one from the other.
Guilt plagued him over the thought that Samuel would live now with his depression, just as Edward had lived with his mother’s. Samuel brought him tea and pleaded for him to rise. Edward knew he had to get up; he had to get the money for Samuel.
When they arrived at Mrs. Winston’s, Samuel went with Simone to the garden while Edward was shown to the sitting room. He handed the phial to Mrs. Winston.
“And now?” she asked.
“I take no part in giving the potion,” Edward replied.
“Yes, Mr. Ferris, I am aware of that. How do you suggest I proceed?”
“The man must breathe the potion in. It’s best done by placing the open bottle close under a person’s nose when they’re asleep, and whispering them a suggestion.”
“I see,” Mrs. Winston said. Her steely gaze pinned him. “Do you believe this will work, Mr. Ferris?”
“I do,” Edward said, chilled by the thought of the strength of the echoes in that tiny jar.
Mrs. Winston strode to the mother-of-pearl box and returned with the remaining five gold sovereigns. They gleamed when she placed them in the palm of his hand. She saw him to the hallway where the manservant stood waiting, having just called Simone and Samuel in from outside. Samuel was shoving something into his pocket.
“What do you think?” Samuel asked the maid, eyes shining with a happiness that Edward rarely saw.
“I think it smelled like summer,” she replied in her lilting accent, smiling at the boy.
Edward wondered what new treasures Samuel had collected from the garden, flowers perhaps. Simone looked up then and saw him, as did Samuel.
“Come now,” Edward said. “Time to leave.”
“He’s a lovely boy,” Simone said. Her gaze lingered on Edward a moment longer than necessary, appraising him and making him self-conscious. She smiled her crooked smile at him.
They followed Simone through the kitchen. “A cup of tea before you go?” she asked.
Samuel looked up at him with pleading eyes.
Despondency rang inside Edward like a funeral bell and he was in no mood for flirtation. Even if he mistook the look in her eyes, he was not fit company for conversation of any sort.
“I cannot,” he said.
She ruffled Samuel’s hair in farewell and stood watching from the door as they left.
***
Edward awoke the next morning to find Samuel staring at him. The boy was already dressed, standing at his bedside with an anxious expression.
“Can we visit Miss Simone today?”
Simone. The name stirred something warm inside him. It sounded sweet on Samuel’s lips, familiar, as if Edward had just heard her name a moment before. Perhaps he had been dreaming of her. Of her sweet, crooked smile.
“We’ll not be going round to Mrs. Winston’s anymore.” The thought disturbed him. He realized that he wanted to see Simone again.
Samuel continued to stare at him. Edward looked into his young face, tight with hope. “We don’t see clients afterwards, you know that, and anyw
ays they’ll be moving soon.”
“Maybe you could have a note sent afore they go, an’ we could meet her at a tea shop or somewhat, as you could pay with the money you made.” It tumbled out in a fountain of hopeful words.
Yes. What would be so wrong with that?
Edward sought inside for the despondency of the past two days and felt it lessened, diluted. Instead of a depression he had believed would drag him down the same well as his mother, a buoyant anticipation overlay it now. He remembered the appraising look Simone had given him before they left, and smiled to himself.
And then he remembered waking to Samuel at his bedside as he dreamed of Simone.
Edward sat up in bed and stared at Samuel. The boy’s face went wide and guilty.
“I just thought it would be nice to see her again. I liked her so much and she reminded you o’mother.”
How did Samuel know that? He couldn’t have felt the echoes of such a flitting emotion. Or could he?
Edward threw off the bedcovers and hurried downstairs in his nightshirt. He pulled open the under-stair cupboard and yanked the box out. Both love potions were there.
Samuel appeared at his side, looking as contrite as only an eight year-old could. Edward rested on one knee in front of the cupboard, confused. “Samuel, what have you done?”
The boy answered in a mumble. “She liked you, an’ you’ve been so sad.”
“Did you use a potion on her, Samuel?”
“No.” He shook his head emphatically, looking surprised at the accusation.
“Did you use one on me?”
Samuel studied the toes of his boots.
Edward reached forward and fished in Samuel’s pocket, coming up with a blue phial. “Where’d this come from then?”
“I took an empty to Mrs. Winston’s yesterday,” Samuel confessed without looking up. “I talked about you to Miss Simone an’ then told her I was smelling the flowers I held, and then I said I was breathing the flowers into the bottle I brought.” He looked up, pleading. “She’s a’feared to lose her job an’ her home. An’ she does like you. She likes me too.”
“Samuel,” Edward squeezed the phial in his hand nearly to the breaking point, “you’re telling me you harvested echoes from her?”
The boy nodded, tears welling in his eyes.
“What could you o’possibly harvested?” Every echo Edward had ever harvested, even love, had been obsessive, nearly violent in strength. He had felt nothing from Simone.
“The liking you and the hoping I guess,” the boy mumbled.
Edward pushed himself off the floor and sank into the hall chair. He should rage fit to match one of his father’s rages. He should beat the boy for using a potion on him, even though he had sworn he would never raise a hand to his son. Instead, Edward sighed. He was the one who had taught the boy after all.
When he let go of the anger, other feelings drifted to the surface and he recognized them now—hope, desire and anticipation—the gentle aspects of early infatuation. They muted his despair until he hardly felt it. He had never imagined such quiet emotions could counter such brutal ones.
So Simone liked him. Unlikely as it seemed, perhaps it was possible. After all, she had touched something in him just in their brief time together. She missed her son and her husband, and genuinely seemed to like Samuel. Perhaps tea was not such a bad idea.
His voice, when he found it, was gentle. “Put that bottle up where you found it.”
Samuel put everything away and closed the cupboard door. Edward stood, his heart lightened with possibilities. With hope. He pictured Simone ruffling the boy’s hair and felt an urge to do the same.
“Let’s see about having a note sent ‘round to Miss Simone, shall we?”
The Clouds in Her Eyes(Short story)
by Liz Colter
First published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future, Vol. 30 (May, 2014), edited by Dave Wolverton
A breeze caught at the blades of the windmill, producing a groan of protest from the hub. Amba glanced up at the weathered shaft and cracked wooden blades, both unlikely to see repairs with the well nearly dry. Above the windmill, a great sheet of heat lightning crackled purple and yellow across the dark sky; the sky that promised rain every day as if unaware that it had no moisture left to give.
Looking anywhere except to the fields, Amba returned to poking the ground with the point of her copper herding rod. Eventually, the vastness of the land drew her eyes across the acres of dirt, flat and featureless, punctuated only by the containment poles.
The ship was there, closer each day. Its sails billowed and the great wooden hull heaved on invisible waves that rolled between the ship’s dry keel and the dirt of the farm. It had advanced nearly to the top of the second field, the one where the grubs matured into young sparkers. By tomorrow the ship would be in the first field.
It was no use running for Father. She had done that when it first appeared as a speck on the horizon, at the waning of the last moon. Father had seen nothing. The speck had grown steadily larger, and still he had taken no notice. By the time the Wind Moon was waxing, the sails and the hull had been distinguishable and she had pointed it out again. He’d stared unseeing and unbelieving at the horizon, then grunted and turned away.
He never mentioned it afterward; never said if he thought she was lying or teasing or, worse, hallucinating, as she had during her illness. If it concerned him, he fostered it in silence, as he did all his worries.
Amba had worked hard to take over her brother’s duties in the fields after Jass died. Her father did his best to accept her as a surrogate, but telling him that a ship he couldn’t see was sailing over their fields threatened her fragile progress with him. She had resolved not to mention it to him again, no matter what.
The ship was close enough now that she could see men on the deck and details of the figurehead: a body, an upraised arm holding something. She wondered if the ship would sail right up to the house, or through the house. She wondered if she would drown when the unseen ocean washed over her.
Mustering her resolve to walk into the field, she went first to the corral to collect her mallet, then scanned the dirt in the top field until she spotted a ripple in the soil. Approaching the disturbance, she tapped her slender rod into the ground just behind it. The ripple surged away from her. Father said the copper tasted as bitter to sparkers as immature haza beans tasted to Amba.
She pulled the rod from the ground and tapped it in again at a safe distance behind the sparker. Mature sparkers were the most dangerous. Even with the herding rod’s leather grip, they could give a nasty jolt if she came too close. Zigzagging with the erratic path the creature took, she herded it toward the opening in the small circle of poles that made up the corral. Once the sparker entered, she jammed her herding rod into the ground and hurried to replace the missing containment pole before the sparker wriggled out again.
***
I have one ready,” she told Father when she found him in the shed, already changed into his heavily padded harvesting clothes. His only reply was to bend and take one handle of the glass cage. She lifted the other side of the container and together they carried it to the corral.
Her father’s quiet manner had been peaceful and comforting when Amba was young, but after the fever killed Mother he had become more distant than quiet. When Jass died, her father had withdrawn further still. Amba wished that she knew how to find the old him, wherever he had gone, and help him find his way back. She needed him. She was broken in her own way, with an emptiness since her illness, since Mother’s death, that had never filled up again. It ached sometimes, in the hollow just below her breastbone.
They reached the corral and set the cage down. Amba braced herself to watch Father harvest. She hadn’t been there when Jass died, but she had seen him afterward, his eyes frozen wide with pain, the burnt and flaking skin that she had scrubbed from his chest and hands before they buried him.
Her father was slipping on his heavy g
loves when she turned suddenly at the sound of a deep voice shouting behind her. For a moment, she had forgotten about the ship. A large man stood at the wheel and the men on deck scurried to follow some order. The ship was too far away to make out what he’d said, though he had raised his voice, as if over the roar of wind and waves.
Amba turned back to find her father staring at her. She flushed under his silent, probing gaze. He held her eyes for a long moment—not searching for clues to her thoughts—but looking at them, studying the clouds in the dark brown of her irises. The clouds that the fever had left behind. His brow furrowed in concern before he turned, wordlessly, and stepped into the corral.
Amba hurried to push the cage against the containment poles to make up for her lapse. She stood well back, holding the heavy glass lid ready. Her father moved around the edge of the corral, staying close to the safety of the poles. He pushed his hooked rod into the ground and angled it to tease the sparker from the soil. When the back of the creature broke the surface, he swept the rod deftly under its twisting body.
Once wrenched from the soil they were ugly things—grayish-brown, like giant eyeless slugs, but with nublike tails and a multitude of tiny legs that propelled them through the soil. This one was a monster, as long and as thick around as her thigh, its many legs clawing at the air.
If any of the spines on those legs connected with her father’s clothing, the sparker would cling to him, charring his skin and stopping his heart. Father kept the sparker well away from him, though, and in one smooth motion slipped it between the poles and into the glass container. Amba quickly slid the top into place.
The creature thrashed against the dry glass of its confines, sparking like a mirror image of the heat lightning flashing in the sky. Those sparks lit lamps and powered the great wheels and fans in town, though water and food were what made them most valuable. Bereft of soil to soothe it, the sparker began to secrete water into the container even as Amba and her father carried it back to the shed.