The Weird Part 154

'Yeah,' Beasley said. 'You okay?'

Partridge was not sure. 'Uh,' he said. He rolled his head to survey the twilight vista. 'Beasley.'

'Yeah?'

'All this.' Partridge swept his hand to encompa.s.s the swamped gardens and the decrepit outbuildings. 'They're letting it fall down. n.o.body left from the old days.'

'You and me. And Nadine.'

'And when we're gone?'

'We're all gonna be gone sooner or later. The docs...they just do what they can. There's nothing else, pal.' Beasley gave him a searching look. He shook his s.h.a.ggy head and chuckled. 'Don't get morbid on me, Hollywood. Been a good run if you ask me. h.e.l.l, we may get a few more years before the plug gets pulled.'

'Is Montague still here?'

'Why do you ask?'

'I heard someone yelling, cursing. Earlier, while I slept.'

'Huh. Yeah, there was a little fight. The old fella didn't get his golden ticket. He wasn't wanted. Few are. He shipped out. Won't be coming back.'

'I guess not. What was he after?'

'Same thing as everybody else, I suppose. People think Toshi is the Devil, that he can give them their heart's desire if they sign on the dotted line. It ain't so simple.'

Partridge had a wry chuckle at that. 'd.a.m.ned right it's not simple, partner. I'm still selling my soul to Tinsel Town. No such luck as to unload the whole shebang at once.' Partridge shook with a sudden chill. His memory shucked and jittered; it spun off the reel in his brain and he could not gather it fast enough to make sense of what he had seen in the disjointed frames. 'Lord, I hate the country. Always have. I really should get out of here, soon.'

'My advice when you get on that bus, don't look back,' Beasley said. 'And keep your light on at night. You done with that?'

'Um-hmm.' He could not summon the energy to say more right then. The strength and the will had run out of him. He put his hand over his eyes and tried to concentrate.

Beasley took the empty gla.s.s and went back into the house. Darkness came and the yard lamps sizzled to life. Moths fluttered near his face, battened at the windows and Partridge wondered why that panicked him, why his heart surged and his fingernails dug into the arm rests. In the misty fields the drone of night insects began.

He eventually heaved to his feet and went inside and walked the dim, ugly corridors for an interminable period. He stumbled aimlessly as if he were yet drunk. His thoughts buzzed and muttered and were incoherent. He found Toshi and Campbell crouched in the den like grave robbers over a stack of shrunken, musty ledgers with hand sewn covers and other stacks of photographic plates like the kind shot from the air or a doctor's X ray machine. The den was tomb-dark except for a single flimsy desk lamp. He swayed in the doorway, clinging to the jam as if he were in a cabin on a ship. He said, 'Where is Nadine?'

The old men glanced up from their doc.u.ments and squinted at him. Toshi shook his head and sucked his teeth. Campbell pointed at the ceiling. 'She's in her room. Packing. It's Sunday night,' he said. 'You should go see her.'

'She has to leave,' Toshi said.

Partridge turned and left. He made his way up the great central staircase and tried a number of doors that let into dusty rooms with painters cloth draping the furniture. Light leaked from the jamb of one door and he went in without knocking.

'I've been waiting,' Nadine said. Her room was smaller and more feminine than the Garden Room. She sat lotus on a poster bed. She wore a simple yellow sun dress and her hair in a knot. Her face was dented with exhaustion. 'I got scared you might not come to say goodbye.'

Partridge did not see any suitcases. A mostly empty bottle of pain medication sat on the night stand beside her wedding ring and a silver locket she had inherited from her great grandmother. He picked up the locket and let it spill through his fingers, back and forth between his hands.

'It's very late,' she said. Her voice was not tired like her face. Her voice was steady and full of conviction. 'Take me for a walk.'

'Where?' He said.

'In the fields. One more walk in the fields.'

He was afraid as he had been afraid when the moths came over him and against the windows. He was afraid as he had been when he pulled her from the water all those years ago and then lay in his hammock bunk dreaming and dreaming of the crocodiles and the bottomless depths warm as the recesses of his own body and she had shuddered against him, entwined with him and inextricably linked with him. He did not wish to leave the house, not at night. He said, 'Sure. If you want to.'

She climbed from the bed and took his hand. They walked down the stairs and through the quiet house. They left the house and the spectral yard and walked through a gate into the field and then farther into heavier and heavier shadows.

Partridge let Nadine lead. He stepped gingerly. He was mostly night blind and his head ached. Wet gra.s.s rubbed his thighs. He was soaked right away. A chipped edge of the ivory moon bit through the moving clouds. There were a few stars. They came to a shallow depression where the gra.s.s had been trampled or had sunk beneath the surface. Something in his memory twitched and a terrible cold knot formed in his stomach. He whined in his throat, uncomprehendingly, like a dog.

She hesitated in the depression and pulled her pale dress over her head. She tossed the dress away and stood naked and half hidden in the fog and darkness. He did not need to see her, he had memorized everything. She slipped into the circle of his arms and he embraced her without thinking. She leaned up and kissed him. Her mouth was dry and hot. 'Come on,' she muttered against his lips. 'Come on.' Her hands were sinewy as talons and very strong. She grasped his hair and drew him against her and they slowly folded into the moist earth. The soft earth was disfigured with their writhing and a deep, resonant vibration traveled through it and into them where it yammered through their blood and bones. She kissed him fiercely, viciously, and locked her thighs over his hips and squeezed until he gasped and kissed her back. She did not relinquish her fistful of his hair and she did not close her eyes. He stared into them and saw a ghost of a girl he knew and his own gaunt reflection which he did not know at all. They were sinking.

Nadine stopped sucking at him and turned her head against the black dirt and toward the high, shivering gra.s.s. There was no breeze and the night lay dead and still. The gra.s.s sighed and m.u.f.fled an approaching sound that struck Partridge as the thrum of fluorescent lights or high voltage current through a wire or, as it came swiftly closer, the clatter of pebbles rolling over slate. Nadine tightened her grip and looked at him with a sublime combination of gla.s.sy terror and exultation. She said, 'Rich'

The gra.s.s shook violently beneath a vast, invisible hand and a tide of chirring and burring and click-clacking blackness poured into the depression from far flung expanses of lost pasture and haunted wilderness, from the moist abyssal womb that opens beneath everything, everywhere. The cacophony was a murderous tectonic snarl out of Pandemonium, Gehenna and h.e.l.l; the slaughterhouse gnash and whicker and serrated wail of legion bloodthirsty drills and meat-hungry saw teeth. The ebony breaker crashed over them and buried them and swallowed their screams before their screams began.

After the blackness ebbed and receded and was finally gone, it became quiet. At last the frogs tentatively groaned and the crickets warmed by degrees to their songs of loneliness and sorrow. The moon slipped into the moat around the Earth.

He rose alone, black on black, from the muck and walked back in shambling steps to the house.

Partridge sat rigid and upright at the scarred table in the blue-gray gloom of the kitchen. Through the one grimy window above the sink, the predawn sky glowed the hue of gun metal. His eyes glistened and caught that feeble light and held it fast like the eyes of a carp in its market bed of ice. His black face dripped onto his white shirt which was also black. His black hands lay motionless on the table. He stank of copper and urine and s.h.i.t. Water leaked in fat drops from the stainless steel goose-neck tap. A grandfather clock ticked and tocked from the hall and counted down the seconds of the revolutions of the Earth. The house settled and groaned fitfully, a guilty pensioner caught fast in dreams.

Toshi materialized in the crooked shadows near the stove. His face was masked by the shadows. He said in a low, hoa.r.s.e voice that suggested a quant.i.ty of alcohol and tears, 'Occasionally one of us, a volunteer, is permitted to cross over, to relinquish his or her flesh to the appet.i.tes of the colony and exist among them in a state of pure consciousness. That's how it's always been. These volunteers become the interpreters, the facilitators of communication between our species. They become undying repositories of our civilization...a civilization that shall become ancient history one day very soon.'

Partridge said nothing.

Toshi said in his hoa.r.s.e, mournful voice, 'She'll never truly die. She'll be with them until this place is a frozen graveyard orbiting a cinder. It is an honor. Yet she waited. She wanted to say goodbye in person.'

Partridge said nothing. The sun floated to the black rim of the horizon. The sun hung crimson and boiling and a shaft of b.l.o.o.d.y light pa.s.sed through the window and bathed his hand.

'Oh!' Toshi said and his mouth was invisible, but his eyes were bright and wet in the gathering light. 'Can you imagine gazing upon constellations a hundred million years from this dawn? Can you imagine the wonder of gazing upon those constellations from a hundred million eyes? Oh, imagine it, my boy...'

Partridge stood and went wordlessly, ponderously, to the window and lingered there a moment, his mud-caked face afire with the b.l.o.o.d.y radiance of a dying star. He drank in the slumbering fields, the distant fog-wreathed forests, as if he might never look upon any of it again. He reached up and pulled the shade down tight against the sill and it was dark.

The Hide.

Liz Williams.

Liz Williams (1965) is an English writer of science fiction and fantasy whose first two novels, The Ghost Sister (2001) and Empire of Bones (2002), were nominated for the Philip K. d.i.c.k Award. She is the daughter of a conjurer and a gothic novelist and has a Ph.D. in science from Cambridge. From the mid-nineties until 2000, she lived and worked in Kazakhstan. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative and many others. The beautifully written weird tale 'The Hide' (2007) conveys a sense of place and of modern unease reminiscent of M. John Harrison or Ramsey Campbell but with Williams' own unique perspective and style.

The birds were white as they flew over the marsh, across the reedbeds and the frosted meres, but as they drew level with the hide their shade changed, from white to black. I saw their crimson eyes, sparks in the cloudy dark, as they disappeared into the storm. Richard and I crouched in the hide and waited.

'Jude, can you see her? Can you see?' Richard whispered.

But all I could see was darkness, and the distant storm.

People lived here once. A very long time ago, when this land was called the Summer Country: named not for cowslip meadows or hazy warmth, but because it only appeared in summer, when the waters had retreated towards the Severn Estuary and the marshes were dry enough to be negotiated on foot. During all other times of year, this land gleaming wet marshes, dense beds of dull golden reeds, and groves of alder and unpollarded willow was the haunt only of ducks and herons, and the small people who lived along the causeways and in the lake villages.

Richard and my sister Clare and I had followed the Sweet Track the summer before, when the heat hung heavily over the water meadows, with the damselflies zooming through the kingcups that grew along the margins of the dug-out peat beds. The Track, discovered years before by an academic named Sweet, is an old road, one of the oldest in the country. I was researching it, and studying Sweet's own research, at the Moors Centre, lying right in the middle of Sedgemoor.

Hard to imagine winter, in those dreaming meadows. But I knew that come September the fog would start drifting in from the Bristol Channel, smelling of salt mud and sea, hiding first the whale-humps of islands, then the arch of Brent Knoll, then the flat lands all the way to the Tor with its tower. After that would come flood and then frost, and the long, dim, damp winter.

I'd been there for six months, but Clare was living in Manchester then, working as a fundraiser for some big arts project, and this was her first visit to the area. Her New Age soul was enchanted by it all, by the faux-Arthuriana of Glas...o...b..ry and the rather more real claims of Cadbury, by the startling caverns of the Mendips and the flat lands between, where the lake villages had once stood. She and Richard had apparently met through some university bird-watching society though I'd never known Clare to be interested in birds before. She was more enthusiastic about it in summer, perhaps, out in the wilds with a couple of bottles of beer and a blanket, and that's how we discovered the hide.

I hadn't realised it was there, although I'd been to the bird reserve a couple of times before. I must have walked right past it, but it was Clare who spotted it, as we walked along the track with the remains of a picnic in a rucksack.

'Richie! Jude! There's a causeway, in the reeds. Can we go and look?'

Moments later, she was gone. I remember feeling an odd moment of panic, as though she'd performed some unnatural conjuring trick. Then her voice came from among the russet ta.s.sels nodding several inches above our heads. 'Look at this! This is so cool!'

The causeway was built of slats placed on piles, close together and easy to walk on, with the addition of a handrail, which the original Lake Village structures would not have had. Quite contemporary and not all that old, judging from the scrubbed pallor of the wood. I'd have told her all this, but I'd grown too used to the rather glazed expression that came over Clare's face whenever I talked about my work. We'd both had our noses in books as kids, but they hadn't been the same ones. She liked the myths. She was less interested in fact.

At first, I couldn't see where the causeway led. A dogleg in the middle took it out of eyesight, deep into the reeds. Clare and Richard vanished around the bend. I stood for a moment, just before the turn. The reeds swallowed sound. Distant traffic and the lowing of cattle were cut off, and the sudden rattle of a coot in the rushes made me jump. When I turned the corner, I saw that the little causeway ended in a long low structure, also raised on pilings, but with a tarpaulin roof and a laminated National Trust information sheet tacked to the wall by the door. There was nothing ancient about this place; it was not even a reconstruction like the round houses at the Bronze Age information centre some miles away. It was a bird-watching hide.

As I came close to the door, I found something on the boards: a small black wing, very soft and dense. I didn't recognise the bird: this wasn't the right kind of terrain for blackbirds. Perhaps something kestrel, maybe had dropped it. It was clearly a recent kill; there was still a b.l.o.o.d.y fragment of meat on the bone, an electric red against the dull background of the planks. I picked it up and put it on the flat surface of the railing, not quite knowing why, as if it was a child's glove for which the owner might shortly return.

Inside, the hide was dark and still, stifling in the afternoon heat and filled with the limey odour of bird droppings. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that the floor was white with them. I looked up, but the rafters were empty. Swifts, perhaps, but I couldn't see any round hummocks of nests and they'd be in residence at this time of the year.

'Richard?' Clare's voice cut through the gloom. 'Come and see!'

I went around the corner of the central notice board. Clare and Richard were standing shoulder to shoulder and I stifled an old familiar sensation. I allowed myself to wonder what would have happened if Richard had met me first but I knew from experience that it wouldn't have made any difference.

When she saw me, Clare raised the hatch that faced out over the other side of the marsh, and fastened it with a wooden peg.

'Look.'

There was a heron among the reeds, a common enough bird in this area but still alien, predatory, as startling as a pterodactyl in its blue and grey plumage. It was stalking through the shallow water at the edge of one of the reedbeds and as we stared, breathless, the long beak stabbed downwards and came up with a fish. Silver caught the light. The heron flipped it up and swallowed, then was gone into the reeds in search of new prey.

We kept looking for a moment, hoping it would come back. Then Clare said, 'What are those?'

There were three of them, gliding over the crest of the reedbeds. They had long necks, long beaks, but at first I thought they must be gulls because their wings caught a shaft of sunlight, gleaming white as they turned. Then they veered again and I saw that their wings were shadow-black, a strange trick of the light. Cormorants, perhaps. They were common along the coast and you frequently found them inland, sharing prey with the herons. They were flying west, towards the estuary.

We watched them go and then, as if some decision had been made, we filed out of the hide like obedient schoolchildren, into the hot day, and back along the track. Clare said she wanted to go back into Glas...o...b..ry and see some of the shops. She wanted to buy a crystal, or something. I just wanted a cup of tea. We headed back to where Richard had left the battered 2CV.

The car park had been empty when we'd arrived, but now there were a few more vehicles in it. One of them was a van, painted in rough red and green stripes, a homemade hippie job. As we approached the car park, a young man came around the side: typical of travellers in this part of the world, dread-locks, mud-coloured clothes, a joint held between two fingers. A dog skulked at his heels, a black and tan thing with heavy jowls and a surly look. But the young man was affable enough.

'Nice afternoon,' he said. 'Been out to the bird sanctuary?'

'Yes, just for a stroll. We saw a few things.'

'You want to wait for evening. All the starlings come then like a cloud. Thousands of 'em. This place is known for it.'

'Starlings?' Clare asked. 'Maybe we'll come back. We found the hide.'

'Did you, now?' the young man said. He took a drag on the joint; sultry smoke coiled into the warm air. I thought there was a fractional sharpening of his interest, but perhaps it was only the dope. 'See anything?'

'A heron,' I said. He nodded, interest waning, until I added, 'And some cormorants.'

'You saw those?' He was staring at Clare, not me, half amused, half something else, an expression I could not identify. But that he was looking at her at all irritated me. 'Black or white?'

'Black,' I said, not understanding. 'You don't get white ones, I thought.'

'Sometimes you do.' The young man spoke with a.s.surance and I didn't know all that much about birds. I wasn't prepared to argue the toss. 'How many?' 'Three. There were three of them.'

'Okay. Well. Let's hope you don't see them again.' I was about to ask him what he meant but he turned away, clicking his fingers at the dog, which was wandering. Richard opened the car and we drove into Glas...o...b..ry, where Richard and I spent the rest of the afternoon in one of the little cafes around the market cross while Clare shopped. If I thought about the bird sanctuary at all, then or in the days that followed, it was simply as a fading memory of a half-pleasant, half-painful afternoon. I did not think about the cormorants at all.

For the next few months, I was busy with research in the Centre and elsewhere. Richard and Clare went back up north and I tried not to wonder when I'd see Richard again. I knew I'd never be able to tell her how I'd started to feel about him, and I didn't want to. There was something behind the New Age stuff in her, something compet.i.tive and deep, something sisterly, and not in a right-on feminist way. Anyway, it was too embarra.s.sing to talk about and G.o.d knows it wasn't as if it hadn't happened before. Perhaps she knew what was going through my head, all the same. I told myself that she seemed happy with Richard and I should be happy for them, and could not be. There should be a natural end to it, now they had returned to the north.

But when I next saw them, and summer itself was over, I found that things weren't as I'd thought.

I'd been to a conference at Lancaster, stopping off at Clare's on the way back. But when I got to her place, she wasn't there. Instead, I found Richard.

She'd been moody ever since they came back, Richard told me, over a gla.s.s of wine in a nearby bar. It was October now. At first he'd put it down to anxiety over the coming months, the time when the success or failure of Clare's fundraising bid was going to be decided. She was snappy and short-tempered, which was new to Richard if not to me, and he'd deemed it wiser to leave her alone to get on with her work. At first, he thought this approach was a success: she was heading off to the office every morning, but three weeks or so later he had run into a colleague of Clare's, who asked how she was, given that she was on sick leave.

'I didn't want to ask her about it,' Richard told me. He took a sip of his drink. 'But it freaked me out. I thought I thought she'd found someone else, but, you know, sick leave, it's not just sneaking off for an hour or two.'

'Is there someone else?' I felt a cold growing elation at what he was about to say and I hated myself.

'No. I don't know. She said there wasn't, but I I didn't believe her. I told her I did, then when she went out the next morning, I followed her. She went straight to the ca.n.a.l and sat on the bank. For the rest of the day, as far as I could see. I went to a pub for lunch, even, and when I came back, she was still there.'

'Maybe she reckoned you'd follow her, and she thought she might as well lead you on.'

'Maybe.' He looked dubious. 'I suppose I wouldn't have blamed her.'

'Funny place to sit, the Ship Ca.n.a.l. It's not exactly Hawaii.'

Richard looked suddenly defeated. I nearly reached out to him but stopped myself in time. 'It's a s.h.i.thole, Jude. They keep saying they cleaned it up for that sports bid, but it's still a murky, dirty drain. What appeal could it possibly have?'

Unless you were thinking of chucking yourself into it, I thought, but did not say, and I hated myself a little more. There was something gruesome about the idea of my sister sitting by the side of that grim channel of water, staring into grey sc.u.mmy nothing, contemplating what?

'Did you follow her again?' I asked.

'A couple of times. She went back to the ca.n.a.l once, and then the next time she just wandered around. This was a few days ago.'

'Do you think she's having some kind of breakdown?'

'I don't know. She's been worried about her work, thinks they screwed up on the funding bid, didn't have enough of the required elements. I tried talking about it last night and she said she thought she needed a break. I was wondering if she could come down to you for a few days. I know it's not exactly the weather for it, but it's not the weather for perching on the side of the b.l.o.o.d.y Ship Ca.n.a.l, either.'

All I could see in his face was concern. I had the sense of a trap, closing. I bit back what I had so nearly told him and felt something brush my clenched hands under the table, something soft, like feathers.

'Of course she can come,' I said.

Having her in the house was odd and awkward, even more so because Clare exhibited none of the signs of anxiety or depression that I'd been expecting. That made me think that the main problem lay with Richard and that, of course, gave me hope. But I told myself that I was being stupid. Clare and I went out to dinner at the local pub on the night she arrived, and when we got back to the house I bolted up to bed before we really had a chance to talk, not that we were likely to. She'd never been in the habit of opening up, after all.

I went to sleep quickly, but in the middle of the night, something woke me up. I sat up in bed, clutching at the covers. There was no one in the room, but it smelled dank, like marsh water. Worrying about damp-proofing and winter, I went back to sleep.