Dark Terrors 3 (51 page)

And also, that archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists and cryptographers were allowed brief viewings of the artefact over the next year and only the sketchiest, conflicting conclusions regarding the glyphs on the stone were drawn: that they might have been made by Vikings, or Phoenicians, or Minoans, or Atlanteans; that they might be something like Sanskrit, or perhaps the tracks of prehistoric sea worms, or have been etched by Silas Desvernine himself. The suggestion by a geologist of no particular note, that the stone itself, oily black shale with cream flecks of calcite, was not even native to the region, was summarily ignored by everyone but Silas. Who ignored nothing.

One passing footnote mention of ‘the Butterhill Stone’ in a monograph on Mahican pottery and by 1918 it was forgotten by the busy, forgetful world of men and words beyond the safeguarding walls of Silas’ Castle.

* * * *

‘Wake up,’ she says. ‘You must wake up,’ and he does, gummy blink, unfocused, and the room’s dark except for the light of brass lamps with stained glass shades like willows and dragon-flies and drooping, purple wisteria.

‘You’re dying, Silas,’ and he squints towards the great cage, cage that could hold lions or leopards and she looks so terribly small in there. Deceptive contrast of iron and white, white skin, and she says, ‘Before the sun rises again . . .’

Big sigh rattle from his bony chest and ‘No,’ looking about the desk for his spectacles. ‘No, not yet,’ but she says ‘You’re an old man, Silas, and old men die, eventually. All of them.’

‘Not yet,’ and there they are, his bifocals perched on a thick book about African beetles, ‘there’s a new war, new ships that have to be built,’ and he slips them on, frame wire bent and straightened and bent again so they won’t sit quite right on his face any longer. Walking cane within reach, but he doesn’t stand, waits for the murky room to become solid again.

‘Let me go now,’ she says, as if she hasn’t said it a thousand thousand times before, as if it were a new idea, never occurred to her before and he laughs. Froggy little strangled sound more like a burp. ‘You’re trying to trick me,’ he says, grins his false-toothed grin at her and one crooked finger pointed so there can be no doubt. ‘You’re not a sibyl,’ and it takes him five minutes to remember where he’s put his pocket watch.

‘I can hear your tired old heart and it’s winding down, like your watch,’ and there it is, in his vest pocket; 4:19, but the hour hand and minute hand and splinter second hand still as ice. He forgets to wind it a lot these days, and how much time has he lost, dozing at his desk? Stiff neck crane and he can see stars through the high windows.

‘You can’t leave me here, Silas.’

‘Haven’t I
told
you that I won’t?’ still watching the stars, dim glimpse of Canes Venatici or part of the Little Bear, and the anger in his voice surprising him. ‘Haven’t I said that? That I’ll let you go before I die?’

‘You’re a liar, Silas Desvernine. You’ll leave me here with all these other things that you’ve stolen,’ and he notices that her eyes have settled on the tall glass case near her cage, four tall panes and the supporting metal rods inside, the shrivelled, leathery things wired there. The dead feathers that have come loose and lie scattered like October leaves at the bottom of the case.

‘You would have destroyed them if I hadn’t put them there,’ he mumbles, ‘Don’t tell me that’s not the truth,’ turning away, anything now to occupy his attention, and it was true, that part. That she’d tried to eat them after they’d fallen off,
Jesus Christ,
tried to
eat
them, before he took them away from her, still warm and oozing blood from their ragged stumps.

‘Please,’
she whispers, softest, snowflake excuse for sound, and ‘Please, Silas,’ as he opens a book, yellowbrown paper to crackle loud between his fingers, and adjusts his bent spectacles.

‘I keep my promises,’ grumbled, and he turns a dry page.

* * * *

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s
Gothic and Goth-noir short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Sandman Book of Dreams, Love in Vein II, Lethal Kisses, Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium, Noirotica 2, Brothers of the Night and the previous volume of Dark Terrors. Her first novel, Silk, is due from Penguin/RoC. She made her comics-writing debut in DC Comics’ The Dreaming, for whom she now writes fall-time. As for the background to her story in this volume, the author recalls: ‘In part “Estate” grew out of a drive with Christa Faust and her father along the Hudson River Valley on a misty, cold afternoon in February 1996, although we didn’t make it as far upriver as Storm King or Pollepel Island. And I’d been reading a lot of Charles Fort and Edward Gorey, and suffered a recent obsession with the great American industrialists. I suspect it will be the first in the long story cycle to be collected as Tales of Pain and Wonder. “Estate” was written to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads and to Black Tape for a Blue Girl.’

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* * * *

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

When after two days the discomfort in his side had not stopped, merely mutated, Richard began to get mildly concerned. It didn’t hurt as often as it had at first, and he could make a wider range of movements without triggering it; but when the pain did come it was somehow deeper, as if settled into the bone.

Christine’s answer to the problem was straightforward, and strident in its logic and delivery. He should go to Casualty, or at the very least to the doctor’s surgery which was just opposite their new flat in Kingsley Road. Richard’s view, though unspoken, was just as definite: bollocks to that. There were more than enough dull post-move tasks to be endured without traipsing up to the Royal Free and sitting with stoic old women and bleeding youths in a purgatory of peeling linoleum. As they were now condemned to living on a different branch of the Northern line to Hampstead, it would require two dogleg trips down to Camden and back out again - together with a potentially limitless spell on a waiting-room bench - and burn up a whole afternoon. Even less appealing, for some reason, was the prospect of going just across the road and explaining in front of an audience of whey-faced locals that he had been living somewhere else, now lived just across the road, and wished to both register with the doctor and have his apathetic opinion on a rather unspecific pain in Richard’s side. And that he was very sorry for being middle-class and would they please not beat him up.

He couldn’t be bothered, in other words, and instead decided to dedicate Monday to taking a wide variety of objects out of cardboard boxes and trying to work out where they could be least unattractively placed. Christine had gone back to work, at least, which meant she couldn’t see his occasional winces or hear the swearing which greeted every new object for which there simply wasn’t room.

The weekend had been hell, and not just because Richard hadn’t wanted to move in the first place. Or rather he had, in one way; he had believed that they
should
move, instead of actually wanting to. It had come to him one night lying in bed in the flat in Belsize Park, listening to the even cadence of Chris’s breathing and wondering at what point in the last couple of months they had stopped falling asleep together. At first they’d drifted off simultaneously, facing each other, four hands clasped into a declaration, determined not to leave each other even for the hours they spent in another realm. Richard half-remembered a poem by someone long dead - Herrick, possibly? - the gist of which had been that though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one is hurled into a several world. Well it hadn’t been that way with them, not at first. Yet after nine months there he was, lying awake, happy to be in the same bed as Chris but wondering where she was.

Eventually he’d got up and wandered through into the sitting-room. In the half-light it looked the same as it always had. You couldn’t see which pictures had been taken down, which objects had been removed from shelves and hidden in boxes at the bottom of cupboards. You couldn’t tell that for three years he had lived there with someone else.

But Richard knew that he had, and so did Christine. As he gazed out over the garden in which Susan’s attempts at horticulture still struggled for life in the face of their joint indifference, Richard finally realized that they should move. Understood, suddenly and with cold guilt, that Chris probably didn’t like living here. It was a lovely flat, with huge rooms and high ceilings. It was on Belsize Avenue, which meant not only was it within three minutes’ walk of Haverstock Hill, with its cafés, stores and Tube station, but Belsize ‘village’ was just around the corner. A small enclave of shops specifically designed to cater to the needs of the local well-heeled, the village was so comprehensively stocked with pâtés, wine, videos and magazines that you hardly ever actually needed to go up to Hampstead, itself only a pleasant ten minutes’ walk away. The view from the front of the flat itself was on to the Avenue, wide and spaced with ancient trees. The back was on to a garden neatly bordered by an old brick wall, and although only a few plants grew with any real enthusiasm the general effect was still pleasing.

But the view through Christine’s eyes was probably different. She perhaps saw the local pubs and restaurants in which Richard and Susan had spent years of happy evenings. She maybe felt the tightness with which her predecessor had held Richard’s hand as they walked down to the village, past the gnarled mulberry tree which was the sole survivor of the garden of a country house which had originally stood there. She certainly wondered which particular patches of carpet within the flat had provided arenas for cheerful, drunken sex. This had come out one night after they had come back from an unsuccessful dinner party at one of Chris’s friends, both rather drunk and irritable. Richard had been bored enough by the evening to respond angrily to the question, and the matter had been dropped. Standing there in the middle of the night, staring around a room stripped of its familiarity by darkness, he remembered the conversation, the nearest thing they’d yet had to a full-blown argument. For a moment he saw the flat as she probably did, and almost believed he could hear the rustling of gifts from another woman, condemned to storage but stirring in their boxes, remembering the places where they had once stood.

The next morning, over
cappuccinos
on Haverstock Hill, he’d suggested they move. At the eagerness of her response
he felt a band loosen in his chest that he hadn’t even realized was there, and the rest of the day was wonderful.

Not so the move. Three years’ worth of flotsam, fifty boxes full of stuff. Possessions and belongings which he’d believed were individual objects metamorphosed into generic shite which had to be manhandled and sorted through. The flat they’d finally found to move into was tiny. Well, not tiny; the living room and kitchen were big enough, and there was a roof garden. But a good deal smaller than Belsize Avenue, and nearly twenty boxes of Richard’s stuff had to go into storage. Books which he seldom looked at, but would have preferred to have around; videos which he didn’t want to watch next week, but might in a couple of months; old clothes which he never wore but which had too much sentimental value to be thrown away. And, of course, the Susan collection. Objects in boxes, rounded up and buried deeper by putting in further boxes, then sent off to be hidden in some warehouse in Kings Cross. At a cost of fifteen pounds a week this was going to make living in the new flat even more expensive than the old one - despite the fact it was in Kentish Town and you couldn’t buy chicken liver and hazelnut pâté for love or money.