Maybe the atoms of the fall day tremble. They seem to. Briefly, everything is more, the roof slanting up to her like vast, brooding hands, the distant ocean cars full of unwritten stories.
Except her father. He looks so small up here.
For the first time in shameful weeks she aches to have her mother back. She aches even for the glances she’d catch toward the end, as though his fingerprints stood out on her skin like brands. She aches for another chance to sit by her hospital bed, to drape the sheaves of her hair across her mother’s (their neighboring shades of rusty orange) and translate the emotion that turned her head away on the pillow.
Her father leans close and breathes into her ear, “It’s beautiful. Just like our new family.”
Mr. Elling’s cheeks go on blowing a mournful joy between his house and hers. The sun rubs the trees and Betty sours, her tone darkening. Her father leans his head against her face; his eyelashes are wet. The halves of her heart gain dreadful weight.
The trumpet dips and rises and cuts out. Mr. Elling says to her, not even having to catch his breath, “That next morning I came out from under the Blue streaked with dirt, Betty tucked beneath my arm. And you know what came traipsing out of that hole with me? A mangy old tabby cat, ordinary as daylight. She glanced at me, licked herself a minute, and went off to find breakfast.
“Later on I’d wonder if the devil had been anywhere near New Orleans that night. And I ain’t saying God Himself came down from on high and slithered into that grave beneath the Blue, getting dirt under His fingernails just for me. I haven’t ever been able to say that. But it sure feels closer to the truth, somehow. I was all mended up, you see. My back popped as I bent and touched my toes. I ran my tongue across every single one of my teeth.
“And right then I felt I’d given up my soul. I could feel that empty space in me, all hollowed out. Even so, I didn’t go seeking fortune and fame, no, not then. I didn’t even touch lips to Betty quite yet. I never would go white fella hunting, neither. I put myself on a bus back to South Carolina, and I went to see my own daddy.”
She wishes her father would jump. She waits for it, her fingers clenched tight upon the peak of the roof.
“You need to realize,” Mr. Elling says, “that your daddy ain’t going nowhere on his own. Folks like him never do, and I can’t help you there. Betty had something special in her, but she never had no magic, bless her heart. For a minute, though, riding on that bus, I just knew she did.”
Her father kisses the hinge of her jaw. She feels his mouth smile.
“Now my mama was a proud, good woman,” Mr. Elling says, and there are rough edges in his voice. “The kindest mother a boy could want. She was in the ground hardly a year by then, and my daddy’s fists was mostly the reason she was there. And he still walked his little patch of earth, or he did those rare days he wasn’t curled up in drink.
“It was surprising cool in Greer when I stepped off that Greyhound. I found him snoring in his bed. I stood over him and me and Betty played him something awful. And we played him something sweet. By the time the sun set on us, he was hanging from the big oak behind the house. I sat on a patch of dirt and watched him twitch and swing. That patch had been scrubbed clean from years of my feet scuffing it, the times I’d sit listless on my old tire swing, hearing my mama cry through the kitchen window. The light painted my daddy in blood and I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t sad, neither, no ma’am.”
She waits (look at that sky) but her father does nothing. The horn cries out again, only for a beat, and then bleeds into silence. In the distance she expects a wet coughing to start up in its place, but of course Mr. Elling’s lungs aren’t clogged with age anymore. They are reborn.
And under her palm, Gillian feels the baby kick. The strangeness of it pulls the air from her.
“Now here’s where the deal gets sweet,” Mr. Elling says. “There is no deal. All a child’s got to do is pick up the telephone, and your daddy will face the music, same as mine. I didn’t do nothing except pass on and play you a tune. You were a good friend to an old man these last months. But you don’t have to be in that story I told. What you want to do is yours to want, and you ain’t got to give me or God a thing. Being happy sure would be nice, though.”
She turns to her father for a long moment. “Do I look pretty from down there?” she asks, and points down to the lawn, as perfectly trimmed as his beard. Her face is full of heat. The baby kicks again, demanding to be known.
“Of course you do, honey.” He smiles inside the beard. “You look just like your mother.”
Gillian places her hand against his side. He leans over and kisses her ear, breathes cinnamon fog into her hair. She gently digs her fingers into the meat of him. He giggles for a bare second, twisting away, and then he’s gone. By the time she hears the mundane thump on the ground, she’s already watching the sky stain at the edges. The air is still flushed with that misplaced summer sweetness. The tree line, the sinking sun, the starlings blur in her eyes.
There’s a wink of light across the way, the silver of close-cropped hair and the battered gold of Betty. Mr. Elling lifts her in a wave, says, “Thing about music is in the end, all we can do is face our own. I hope yours has some bop to it.” He steps away into his dark. The chair slows and stills.
She raises her own hand for a second. Below her is silence. She knows she should get inside. There’s a bundle of shingles she saw once in the garage. They’ll need to be dragged up to the attic and opened up. There’s a pouched belt heavy with hammer and nails that will buckle around her father’s waist. A tearful phone call to make, a swirl of ambulance lights, before she can at last return to her own narrow bed in her own narrow room.
She knows she should get inside. But she goes back to rubbing the curve of her belly in quiet, calming circles.
Ramsey Campbell
FETCHED
They had left the hotel just a few miles behind when Lawrence said “There’s somewhere else I used to go.”
“Striders Halt,” Violet read on the sign for the next motorway exit. “What was that, Lawrence?”
“A view of the whole valley. I could show you if you like.”
“Is it far?” At once she regretted sounding less than wholly enthusiastic. “If it means something to you,” she said.
“Only if it would to you as well. Maybe we can still salvage a little magic from the weekend.”
“I thought you thought it was fun.”
“I think we can do without that kind.”
She’d thought he’d shared her wry amusement. He must have been suppressing his reaction for her sake. The hotel he’d remembered from his childhood had turned out to be mostly occupied by several coachloads of old folk. They’d seemed to overwhelm the place, slowing it down to their speed and adding to its faint stale smell, filling the faded corridors with a mass of sluggish footsteps and effortful breaths. Lawrence might have intended to recapture some of his youth and share it with Violet, but instead they’d been reminded what could lie ahead for them. During the day they’d gone for walks on the hills and ridges, but the hotel was too remote from anywhere else to let them escape in the evenings, and so they’d been trapped with singalongs in the bar or into producing dutiful laughter at superannuated comedies on the television in the crowded lounge, where their neighbours kept turning to them to ensure they joined in. “Pet,” Lawrence added as if this summed up the entire experience.
“I never knew you disliked being called that so much.” After all, several of the old folk had used it to Violet as well. “I hope you’re mine at least,” she said.
“I don’t care to be patronised. I’m more than a little too old.”
Was he complaining or boasting? Since they’d both retired he seemed to have grown unsure of himself and defensive to compensate, as if all the easy authority he’d shown with his students had just been armour for his vulnerable nature. She’d assumed that now they weren’t lecturing they would have time to grow closer. They must
n’t settle into themselves if it meant that they drifted apart, and she signalled to leave the motorway. “Let’s see your view,” she said.
The January sun was lying low behind a vast slab of marble cloud. The icy glow blackened the exposed bones of the landscape. On either side of the road that wound between bare fields, hulking hedges bristled with thorns. Sometimes Violet glimpsed birds in the midst of the tangle of twigs, unless the restless objects were the only remaining leaves, shaken by the wind that sent a chill into the car. As the road straightened between the last of the fields, Lawrence sat forward. “What’s that in the way? It oughtn’t to be there.”
A line of wide bungalows blocked the end of the road, beyond a village green—an expanse of grass bisected by the road, at any rate. As the car emerged from between the hedges Violet saw that the bungalows extended out of sight past both ends of the green. “I expect someone else must have liked the view,” she said.
“Then they should have left it for the rest of us to appreciate.”
“Do you want to go back?”
“Back the way it was. Drive around for a bit, will you? Perhaps there’s still a path.”
“Drive where, Lawrence?”
“Wherever we’re allowed,” he said and gestured vaguely at the houses. “I’ll shout if anything seems familiar.”
A sign on stumpy concrete legs identified the bungalow road as Meadow Prospect. At least, Violet took that as the name, though a poster about a lost dog obscured more than half of the first word. Another fluttering poster drew her eye to a sign for a side road several hundred yards away—as far as she could make it out, Cliff Road. “Yes, try that,” Lawrence urged before she could ask.
Twin lines of elongated pale stone bungalows curved left and then right without hinting at the presence of a cliff. Violet was coasting around a third curve at a pace even she found sedate when one of the cars parked on the wide drives between the bungalows—a silver Jaguar—backed into the road at twice her speed. As she braked while Lawrence gasped and threw his hands up, the other driver lowered his window, leaving the Jaguar across the width of the road.
His receding hair was the faded brown of a vintage photograph. His eyes looked pinched narrow by wrinkles, more of which appeared to stretch his colourless mouth straight and thin. He apparently felt entitled to be heard with very little effort on his part, and Violet had to roll her window down, letting in a reason for a shiver. “Sorry, what did you say again?”
“I asked if Fetcher brought you here.”
“I don’t believe so,” Violet said, though the name sounded somehow familiar. “Fletcher, did you say?”
“I quite clearly said Fetcher.” The man frowned as if she’d put him to more trouble than was warranted. “You can’t be lost,” he said.
Was this an accusation or a question that didn’t bother sounding like one? Lawrence was lowering his window, presumably to ask for directions, when the man said “Perhaps you can tell me whom you’ve come to see.”
“Nobody at all. My husband wanted to revisit some of his old haunts.”
“I don’t know you,” the man said, scowling harder at Lawrence. “I’ve never seen you here.”
“Nor I you. I was here before you were.”
“No,” the man said with a smile too thin to contain mirth. “Nobody was.”
“I can assure you my parents and I—”
The man had already returned to scrutinising Violet. “I should have thought you were too old to be defacing our streets.”
“What the devil do you mean by that?” Lawrence demanded, leaning out of the window so violently that the car shook. “How dare you say that to my wife?”
“What can your companion be yapping about?” the man said without glancing at Lawrence. “I should try and keep him under control.”
Lawrence lurched across the metal sill and produced a series of shrill barks. “How’s that for yapping?”
“Don’t, Lawrence.” Violet had not just to stroke his arm but tug at it before he subsided onto the seat, rubbing his chest where the sill had bruised it. “Don’t let him reduce you,” she murmured.
“That’s your idea of a joke, is it?” The man’s face had grown angrily piebald. “Is it supposed to be how Fetcher sounds?”
“We don’t know anything about that,” Violet assured him. “I wonder if you could possibly tell us— ”
The man met this with such a glare that she hesitated. “I won’t expect to find you,” he said, “when I come back.”
“Expect what you like,” Lawrence retorted, but the man had already shut the window as firmly as his lips. As the Jaguar sped past, only just missing the wing mirror of the Viva, Violet saw the driver raise a phone to his face. “Tell who you want we’re here,” Lawrence shouted, twisting around to add “Tell your whole damned suburb.”
“That isn’t necessary, Lawrence. That’s not how we behave,” Violet said, though she couldn’t help feeling enlivened by how much younger his reaction made him seem. “Shall we call it a day?”
“Not while there’s so much light left. Just say whenever you’ve had enough of indulging me.”
The confrontation with the driver had affected Violet more than she cared for. Her legs weren’t quite steady, any more than her hands were on the wheel. Once she was close to the next street sign she was able to say “Fetcher.”
“Why are you saying that to me?”
“See, it’s why that person did.”
Another of the posters was stuck to the low sign. It showed a dog standing on its hind legs as though perched on its name, which was written larger than the message underneath. That was why the name had sounded familiar, and someone had scribbled over the animal’s face. So this was the defacing the Jaguar driver had referred to, and she hoped he’d meant that neither she nor Lawrence could have been involved. “What’s the matter with these people?” Lawrence said. “Don’t they want anyone to find their way?”
She scarcely had time to put the handbrake on before he unleashed himself from his safety belt and stalked over to the sign. Until he helped the wind to lift the poster, which covered half the first word, the sign appeared to name LEY ROAD. He was letting the poster fall back into place when a woman with disorganised grey hair hurried out of the side road, buttoning her long black coat. “Where’s the dog?” she called.
She was wearing leather slippers, Violet saw. Lawrence didn’t answer until the questioner was staring up at him from less than a yard away. “I’m afraid there’s no dog.”
“Of course there is. Don’t tell me you didn’t hear it.” Her voice was growing louder with each phrase. “You aren’t deaf, are you?”
“Is it your dog?”
“Why should it be? We look out for one another round here. We aren’t like the rest of the world.” Her frown might have been including him in the repudiation. “Now will you please finish wasting my time,” she said, “and tell me where it’s gone.”
“There was never any dog.” As she took a breath that suggested she was about to raise her voice even further Lawrence said “It was me.”
“Don’t be so childish.” She had indeed found more of a voice. “What do you mean, it was you?”
“My attempt at imitation.” When she looked both impatient and uncomprehending Lawrence treated her to a few barks. “That kind of thing,” he said.
Violet heard how apologetic he meant to be, but the woman stared at him as if facing down an animal. “Have you really nothing better to do at your age than play tricks?”
“Excuse me, madam, but you’d have to know the context. I—”
She shook her finger at the poster or at him. “Was that you as well?”
“I hardly think there’s much resemblance.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. Are you responsible for the damage?”
“Do you truthfully think that’s how I look?”
“I think you look incapable of answering a simple question.”
“No, I�
�m not responsible, and I can’t believe you could think for an instant I was. Now here’s a simple question for you. Can you tell us how to get to—”
“To wherever you ought to be? Just turn right round and scamper back where you came from.” She stalked away but turned to add “And I wouldn’t advise you to do any more pretending.”
As Lawrence yanked at his seat belt so hard that it snagged, Violet murmured “We don’t seem very welcome, do we? Shall we give up and go home?”
“Give up?” He blinked at her as if he hardly recognised her. “We never would have once,” he said. “Unless you’ve had enough of me.”
“You shouldn’t say such things. You don’t mean it any more than I do.”
“Then carry on.” As he succeeded in fastening his belt he muttered “They can’t keep the magic to themselves.”
He was speaking figuratively, of course, even if it sounded like rather too determined a bid to recapture childhood innocence. History had been his subject as much as hers, and it had taught them how people were led to believe magic was real, not just an enchanting fancy. As she turned along Valley Road she was relieved not to see the woman who’d accosted him, but there was no suggestion of the view he was seeking, just a succession of long squat houses that looked united in anonymity, resolved to exhibit no personality to strangers. Once the road stopped curving Violet saw a sign for Valley Crescent, or at least as much of the name as the dangling poster didn’t hide, but this road led her away from the direction Lawrence wanted her to take. She’d begun to share his dogged resolve to find whatever was to be found, and she followed Valley Lane into Valley Drive, which brought her to Valley Avenue. Each sign was partly obscured by a poster about the lost dog, and the face in each photograph had been disfigured beyond recognition, a sight that made Violet feel irrationally guilty, too much of an intruder. She had as much right to use the streets as anyone who lived there, not that a single resident was to be seen. A road presumably called Valley Row led to one that must be Valley Terrace, and she was starting to wonder if the names had been chosen to confuse outsiders. Then Lawrence leaned forward, clasping his hands together so fervently that she could almost have thought he was praying. “This has to be it,” he said.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 24