by Ellen Datlow
“I found an old picture,” I said. “I had to look hard to see the resemblance—he didn’t have the long hair or beard in it. But that’d have been the point, right? He didn’t want to be recognised.”
Ed shook his head. “He always was difficult. Wrong.”
“Wrong? He’s not the one who killed someone.”
“He was a misfit,” said Ed. “He had so many advantages in life—advantages other men would have killed for. Dad never had them—he had to fight for everything he had. And what did Robin do? He threw it all back in Dad’s face. And then he ran away and vanished.”
“So why come and find him?” I said. “Why murder him?”
“I hadn’t heard from him in years,” said Ed. “Christ, we all thought he was dead. Dad had him declared dead, a couple of years ago. But then he wrote to me. Out of the blue.”
“What did he want?” I said. “Money?” Robin had never seemed particularly bothered about that, beyond the odds and ends he could pick up with odd jobs around town.
“Money? Oh, no. He had no interest in that, he said. Why would he? But he wanted to talk, Emily. He wanted to talk about the abuse.”
“What abuse?” But it was all falling into place. Robin had never said much about what had happened to him. There’d been stories of exploits and escapades with friends—equally wasted, of course—but nothing about his family, about wherever he and his wounds had come from.
“There was no abuse,” Ed shouted. “That’s the whole point. Dad was a good father. Stern, yes. He believed in discipline. That was all. Christ, you clip some little shit around the ear these days and it’s child abuse. He was just trying to bring us up right. To be men.”
But his eyes were full of pain, and I saw too much there. What had their childhoods held? What had Sir Richard York thought fit means to discipline his sons? Whatever it had been, it had left Robin afraid of anywhere that wasn’t his own four walls, left him starting awake at every sound in the middle of the night. And his brother? Everyone breaks in different ways, and finds different ways to deal with it. Robin’s had been to run and hide in another life. Ed had become the damage and called it normality.
That’s one of the things that lies in the deeps, never far enough from the surface; the only real difference between the broken ones and everyone else is that the broken ones know there isn’t one.
“But here was Robin—weak, he’d always been weak, and decadent, with his drugs and his sponging—here he was, putting our father—my father—in the same category as some bloody child molester. I wouldn’t have it. I wouldn’t let that degenerate blacken his name.”
“But he didn’t want money?” I said. The wind had started rising.
“No!” snapped Ed. “I told you. No, he just wanted to talk about it.”
“To who? The press?”
“To me, that’s what he said. But it wouldn’t have ended there. He’d have kept going, till it all came out. And I couldn’t have that. I wouldn’t allow it.”
“So you came here,” I said. “And you found him—on the coast road, right?”
“Crashed out on a bench,” said Ed. “Barely knew where he was, or who he was.”
“And you got him back into town, and then on here.” I nodded at the Emily’s deck. “How did you get him to the beach? A dinghy?”
“He was out of it.” Ed had sidled towards me, a little. “Vegged out as soon as I got him on the boat. He only came round at the end.”
He’d gone pale, with a greasy sheen of sweat. His eyes didn’t quite seem to see me. He didn’t look warm anymore, or kind. There are places in your head that have no room for those things. “I was going to hit him with something. Stab him, then put him over the side. But I couldn’t. Too … final. But I couldn’t let him go on. He’d …” Ed focused on me, and his eyes were almost pleading. “Dad dying, you see, it had brought everything back to him. That’s why he’d started talking about it, and if he wasn’t made to shut up he’d have told someone else, and it would have got out, and …” He gestured helplessly. “I couldn’t have that.”
And I did understand. You do whatever it takes to cope with the damage. And if anything threatens your coping mechanism, your safety, your sanctuary, you do whatever it takes to protect it.
“So you got him on the beach and cuffed him to the pipe.” Clive had been half right, then. Robin’s death had been the work of someone without the resolve to commit the act themselves, so they’d snapped on the cuffs and let the tide do the work. He’d only been wrong about who.
“He was unconscious,” said Ed. He was shaking. A single tear ran down his cheek. “He didn’t wake up. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t hear anything.”
He said it again, and then again. I wondered how many times he thought he’d have to before he believed it.
I thought at first that that was it: something else had finally broken, and he had nothing left to say or do. I’d wondered at first why he’d stuck around—why not leave once the job was done?—but it wasn’t hard to understand. If anyone had ever worked out who Robin really was, his long-lost brother spending a few days on this beautiful bit of the coast would probably rouse less suspicion than if he’d popped in and out of the harbour on the day of Robin’s death.
I unzipped the pocket on my denim skirt, but as I did Ed moved, lunging for me. I kicked him under the knee and he fell with a scream that echoed across the whitecaps on the bay. I make a point of always ordering boots with steel toecaps. They’re more weight to drag around, but if you ever need to defend yourself they’re a big help.
Before he could get up, I took the cuffs out of my pocket. They’d belonged to an old—and slightly kinky—boyfriend, but they were police issue. I snapped one around Ed’s left wrist, looped the chain around one of the iron railings on the deck and snapped the other bracelet shut around his right.
“What the fuck?” he shouted. He leapt up, or tried to, and I stepped back as he jerked and yanked at the chain. When I was sure the rail wasn’t going to give, I walked back along the deck, to a small box at the base of the railings. I guessed that was where he’d been looking towards before. Inside were a flare pistol and a couple of distress flares. I loaded the pistol, pocketed the spare, then went into the Emily’s wheelhouse and pointed her prow out to sea, before pushing the engines to full power.
“What the hell are you doing?” screamed Ed.
I ignored him and his frantic yanking at the chain, then went belowdecks and opened the seacocks. As water started flooding into the yacht, I went back up top, the flare gun cocked and ready just in case he’d got loose.
He hadn’t. He was slumped on his knees, red-faced and exhausted. “What are you doing?” he said. “What?”
The boat was already wallowing. Water splashed over the decks. “Justice,” I said, then pointed the flare gun skyward and fired. The distress flare streaked up. I reloaded and fired the other one, too, then climbed over the rail. “Oh, and by the way,” I said, “your brother was a better shag.”
He started screaming when I went over the side. I struck away from the Emily, watching as she surged forward and went under, her own screws driving her down. Into the deeps. Ed seemed to scream for quite some time before he choked and gargled into silence.
Reluctantly, because I hated to lose them and replacements would be hard to come by around here, I kicked off my boots, feeling lighter as they sank. Out towards the coast, a flare burst in the sky. The lifeboat was on its way.
I’d need to find Daniela as soon as I could, get the letter back and burn it. Meanwhile, as my teeth started chattering from the cold, I rehearsed what I’d tell Clive. Most of it would be true, but I’d leave out certain things—and, of course, Edmund York would be the one who’d opened the seacocks and chained himself to the railings, in a fit of remorse. But only after firing the flares from the gun he’d been aiming at me to stop me interfering.
As some old comedian used to say, all the right notes, but not necessarily in the righ
t order. Robin’s death was paid for, Clive wouldn’t know anything he didn’t need to, everything would stay in its proper compartment, and life would go on.
I told you: you do whatever it takes to protect the safety you’ve found.
The grey sea heaved, capped with foam. I looked a little longer towards the place where the Emily had been, then turned and struck out towards the shore.
FODDER’S JIG
LEE THOMAS
Leaving my office on a cool autumn evening, I nearly collided with a woman dancing on the sidewalk. She wore a navy blue skirt-suit designed too narrowly for her plus-sized frame, and she moved in spasms as if in the throes of a standing seizure. Her hands flew into the air and then thrust toward the ground, pulling her shoulders with them until she bowed as low as her ample midriff would allow. Remaining bent at the waist, she launched her arms back and upward as if mimicking wings, all the while stomping her feet–left, right, left, left, right–against the sidewalk. She whipped into an upright position and glared at me. Though I considered the possibility the woman had missed a text changing the time or place of whatever flash mob she’d intended to join, I came to the more likely conclusion that the dancer was just plain crazy. Dilated pupils, black portals into a demented nothingness, noted neither me nor the real world I inhabited. After a beat of absolute motionless, the woman grunted a series of nonsensical phrases, directing them my way and sending me back several steps as the blunt syllables wormed into my head. She restarted her frantic, tribal dance while a meager crowd gathered around. Several members of the ad hoc audience had their phones out, but they were using the devices to record the performance. Admittedly, the spectacle was entrancing in its ferocity and unlikeliness, but the woman needed help, and no one seemed willing to offer it. I took out my phone and dialed for emergency, but the moment the operator came on the line, the woman’s dance ended.
When her limbs ceased their bizarre choreography, she looked around with clear eyes, seeming genuinely confused. A skinny kid with a scraggly beard that reached the military beret atop the image of Che Guevara on his T-shirt fell into a fit of laughter and clapped his hands viciously. Others in the crowd picked up the applause. The woman appeared terrified and rushed into the building.
Within a week, the dancers were all over the news. Most of the reports came from cities along the Gulf Coast, but a few trickled in from landlocked towns. Message boards and wiki pages filled with information about the afflicted and offered uninformed, often ridiculous speculation regarding the cause of what was being called “Boogie Fever.” One callous jokester set the video of an elderly man thrusting and stomping and contorting his emaciated form in the middle of a road to the Benny Hill theme song. The clip went viral: over a million hits in three days.
For many of the afflicted, dancing was the first symptom.
Three months later, I stood in the living room of the condominium I’d shared for a bit less than a year with a man named George Caldwell. George called the apartment his “divorce shack.” In reality, the place was a spacious and beautiful condo with a view overlooking Galveston Bay, and though it may have fallen short of the manse he’d spent thirty years of his life paying off, most people wouldn’t have complained.
The morning had all but vanished as I packed a few remaining mementoes and the items of clothing I considered necessary. My suitcase and two small boxes waited by the door. I procrastinated, checked drawers and cupboards, sifted through the closets one last time. I wouldn’t be coming back to this place.
Memories of George filled the apartment like the morning light, suffusing the rooms, pinging with painful glare from shiny surfaces. Before the dancing and the seizures, before the horrifying news reports, and the night he’d walked in a trance to meet thirty-six others on the sandy shore of Galveston Bay, I’d shared this home with a handsome, gruff, good-natured man, who would never again walk across its polished oak floors.
A remembrance of scotch set my tongue to tingling. The scent of his cologne momentarily filled my nose.
A marble-and-glass table ran across the center of the floor-to-ceiling window opening onto the patio and overlooking the bay. At the table, I placed a set of keys, George’s set, on a brochure for the trip he and I would never take. I reminded myself to contact the cruise line to inform them we would not be sailing from Amsterdam to Budapest on their luxury liner, and then I wondered if it was even necessary.
None of the cruise lines would stay in business. Civilians were avoiding the water these days.
The brochure held my attention. Covered in dust, it was like a funeral program, memorializing a future that was never going to happen. I’d looked forward to traveling with George. I’d looked forward to everything with him.
We met online through a hook-up app two years before the Emergence. George’s profile was typical for a “discreet” married man. No pictures of his face. No real information save for his sexual endowment and the things he liked to do with it. Our first meeting tracked a predictable course: an awkward “Hello,” followed by frenzied groping and undressing. After sex, we both rinsed off and engaged in a little more conversation-sans eye contact. Then, George presented me with a hurried “Let’s do this again,” before he fled my house, stumbling over the threshold as he dashed for the Mercedes he’d parked around the corner.
I chanced a look outside and saw the bay. The surface glittered under the early morning sun. The twinkling touch of sunlight on the surface would have been beautiful under different circumstances. But I could only see glimmering blades, metal shards. Teeth.
After that first visit, I didn’t expect to hear from George Caldwell again, but he surprised me. Sort of. The next couple of months, he visited sporadically. Our encounters were mostly physical. He was a married man of standing in the community, and I was a drive thru: convenient, quick, fundamentally satisfying, but a pleasure he felt embarrassed for indulging.
Three months in, he began staying longer. Brief chats evolved into actual conversations. I found out about the man and his life, which revolved around a perpetually dissatisfied wife, a spoiled son who had grown into an unbearable adult, and an obvious, if muted, depression. He admired me. He envied me. He asked me to spend a weekend with him in Austin.
I said no.
At that point in my life, I wasn’t looking to train a sixty-three-year-old closet case. I’d come out in the late 70s, survived the 80s, and had spent the next twenty years with a quiet, though pleasant, alcoholic named Calvin, whose liver finally disintegrated the year after we’d retired to Galveston.
The other issue, which I found to be the more significant reason to avoid a weekend retreat with George, was the fact that ever since our first meeting, I’d spent far too much time thinking about him. In the days between George’s visits, I swung from whimsical notions of how we would spend our next meeting to outright fury every time he had to cancel. At the center of these fluctuating emotions was sadness. Or maybe melancholy was a better word. I understood the cliché, even as I lived it: hopelessly pining for a married man. I’d started loving him too quickly, and that was not a thing to be encouraged, considering our situation.
Closing my eyes against another view of the disconcerting bay, I turned from the window and stepped to the center of the room. When the doorbell rang, I flinched.
I couldn’t imagine who would be at the door. Maybe it was the real estate agent, though I doubted it. She’d agreed to swing by, “If I can.” Her disinterest was understandable.
No one wanted to live near the water now.
“It’s happening all along the coast,” I call to George.
On the evening news a video clip of a little girl with a purple butterfly barrette in her blonde hair fills the screen. The child is dancing the same tribal dance I had witnessed only a few days before. The video comes from Holly Beach, Louisiana. An anchorwoman with silky black hair appears following the clip, and she says that more than a dozen incidents have been witnessed in the past week. She smiles a
nd expresses her certainty that “Boogie Fever” is just the latest cultural meme, no different from Planking or the Mannequin Challenge.
George walks through the room with a glass of scotch, the flavor of which I’d never enjoyed until I tasted it on his tongue. He is naked, as is usually the case when he is home. A devotion to nudity is one of the many lifestyle changes George has adopted since leaving his wife. His body is burly and well shaped, having far more to do with genetics than any devotion to exercise. We go to the gym three days a week, and while I earn sweat on the treadmill and weights, George frequently chooses to lounge in the steam room until I am finished.
“What’s happening along the gulf?” he asks, taking a moment to pause in front of the window to gaze over the nighttime bay.
“This dancing thing,” I say. “Like that woman outside my office.”
“People will do anything for attention,” he says. “Why is something like that even on the news? The economy is going to shit again; protests and riots are springing up every other day; and two nights ago, about thirty people walked to a beach in Bermuda and vanished. Any one of those things strikes me as considerably more relevant than a bunch of idiots wiggling their asses for a camera.”
“Wait, Bermuda?”
He sips his scotch. “These people–police think it’s around twenty or thirty of them–just got up in the middle of the night, walked out of their homes, and disappeared. Loved ones reported a bunch of missing persons, and the authorities tracked several of them to a cove. They found footprints and some personal items, but no people. Bermuda isn’t a big island. I went there on business a few times. You can’t really hide there.”
“They could have chartered a boat.”
“Not likely,” George says. “The missing persons weren’t part of a social club. In fact, two of them were just visiting the island. They had no connections to anyone there.”
I don’t have a response to that.
“Anyway,” he says, “I’m going to bed. I have to meet the lawyers in the morning. Time to see what else Eugie thinks she’s entitled to for having me pay her bills for thirty years.”