Eastlick and Other Stories Page 6

  “Lord Frost bellowed something at me, seeming angry and confused. I drew breath to explain myself, but my lungs were stung by smoke and searing heat, and I was merely wracked with coughing.

  “‘Get up, man! Help me get her out of here!’ he cried, trying to drag me to my feet.

  “Still influenced by my internal foe, I heard only blame and outrage in my mentor’s voice. After all my efforts to win his admiration, he clearly now felt nothing but contempt for me. I found his censure quite unfair. He had no idea of the trials that had befallen me. With his help, I pulled myself upright at last, still intent upon explaining. But before I could, his face became that of the Devil itself—twisted, red and leering. I shrieked and scrambled back, shoving him away ... quite forcefully…” Shrewsbury’s restraint failed at last, and the anguished sob that had been building in his chest—for years—erupted. “I pushed him ... straight into the conflagration!”

  “Shrewsbury!” Rutherford exclaimed. “Calm yourself!”

  “Oh, dear God!” Shrewsbury wailed, rising from his chair. “Dear God, I killed him, Rutherford!”

  “It is but a memory!” Rutherford shouted, rising now as well to grab Wendell’s arms as if to keep him from destroying the study as Wendell knew he’d ruined Frost’s laboratory in his panic. “No one seeks to hurt you here! Be calm, old friend! ... Be calm.”

  “I could have saved him, Rutherford,” Wendell sobbed, collapsing into his friend’s bewildered embrace. “I could have saved them both, but I just stood there, frozen, immobilized by the sudden understanding of what I had done—not just then, but all along.” He wrenched himself from Rutherford’s arms, and staggered back to fall into his chair. “That is when the demon within me finally made its presence known. It started whispering accusations, audibly gloating at how easily I had allowed myself to be manipulated—as it still does ... to this very night.”

  “How could you have known?” his friend insisted, trying feebly to comfort him.

  “How should I have not?” moaned Wendell. “In all the world, I was one of just a handful who could have known... Who should have known…”

  “Shrewsbury, dear friend,” his host insisted, “what is gained by such self-torment?”

  “I saw him die,” Shrewsbury whimpered. “It was too terrible... I ran, Rutherford.” He buried his face in his hands again. “I left them both, and ran to save myself... It is only right that each night now I am required to return... Unable to run... Forced to watch…”

  “There are doctors who can help you,” Rutherford insisted. “There is no demon in your brain, my friend. Only guilt and horror, for which no one, least of all myself, could blame you after such an ordeal.”

  “They are free!” Shrewsbury rasped. “Do you not understand? With cause to fear us—no, to hate us even—and the only man who might have stopped them dead! By my hand!”

  Rutherford seemed about to speak again, but they were interrupted by a loud banging at the front door of his residence. Startled, Rutherford looked at Wendell, as if wondering whether it were safe to leave him there, then headed for the study door. Before he reached it, however, Mrs. Lamblittle burst in, followed by two burly constables.

  “There he is!” the housekeeper cried, pointing at Shrewsbury. Wendell made no effort to resist as the men hurried past her to seize him. Well-drunk on brandy, and quite depleted from so many months of such badly interrupted sleep, he just collapsed into their grasp.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Rutherford demanded. “Unhand him! He is my guest here.”

  “He’s no proper guest, Mr. Rutherford, no he ain’t!” Mrs. Lamblittle broke in shrilly. “It was treason he were talking! Said so himself. Treason and murder. I heard him, I did! I were listening in the hall the whole time, and glad of it.” At the scowl this brought to her employer’s face, she added, “I’m saving us all, and you’ll thank me for it later, I’ve no doubt.”

  Wendell watched his host struggle to frame some response, and lose that struggle. Quite wise, old friend, he thought. An up and coming barrister might not want to be heard defending a murderer caught in the act of treason. And just as well. If I am lucky, they will hang me now. Then again, to sleep, perchance to dream... Aye, there’s the rub…

  As the constables hustled Wendell toward the door, he felt the thing within him seize his body, and a shrill, unnatural laughter burst involuntarily from his mouth. Wendell screwed his eyes shut, trying to suppress this violation of his sovereign self, but to no avail. The thing inside him pried his lips apart once more, and a voice that he had never heard before outside of dreams screeched, “Self-destructive fools! You think yourselves so wise, your science so indomitable, but without us there can be no dreams! And what will England be without its dreams?” it cackled. “What will England be?”

  By the Sea

  This was my first invited story—a huge thrill. The post-apocalyptic anthology Grants Pass was looking for stories about people’s responses to the hope of a new start, in a safe place, after the world ended—Grants Pass, Oregon. Some of the stories were to involve people believing the story and trying to get to Grants Pass; others were to be rejections of that dream. The character of Elizabeth popped into my head, and the rest of the story just ... unfolded. Grants Pass appeared in the summer of 2009 and won an Australian Shadows Award for best horror anthology.

  _______________

  Elizabeth Barnett stood on the veranda, lifting a wiry hand to shade her eyes as she watched Christos sail away. The sun gleaming off the Mediterranean assaulted her, but the light was beautiful all the same. Sometimes the loveliness here made it hard to remember how thoroughly everything had gone wrong.

  Or maybe she was just being an old fool. Sunlight, kilometers of pale beaches thrust against bright blue water, hills covered with scrubby brush, khaki-colored rocks, and the occasional dark green cypress tree—it was not enough to hide the fact that she was very likely the last person left on the island. The last living person, anyway.

  She snorted and turned away from the sea before Christos, in his little white sailboat, had moved out of sight. No point in watching him go. He wouldn’t be back. She’d seen to that—they’d fought for weeks like rabid dogs. Or plague-infested weasels, more like. In the end, she’d set her teeth and scratched his lovely face with her long fingernails until the blood touched his chin. And still he stood, pleading.

  “Beth, come to Grants Pass, I know it’s real.”

  “It’s a lie, and you’re never going to get there on that damn fool thing anyway.”

  “This is our only chance.”

  “We have no chance.”

  He’d simply stood there, looking at her.

  “I have no chance,” she’d finally added, her voice bitter and dry. “I’m seventy-eight years old, and you know my health. I’ll die out on the water.”

  “You’ll die here.” He’d leaned forward, almost touching her, but holding back.

  That was when she’d scratched him, digging in with every last shred of strength she had. It was either that or touch him in a different way, and she’d held on to at least that much dignity, through it all.

  Now she would not watch him go. The world had died; what difference would one more person make?

  ~o0o~

  “Kayley’s journal,” Beth said out loud as she heated a slab of halloumi over a wood fire she’d built in the stove. Bitter as it still was, at least her voice had lost its edge of testy near-panic, she thought. Three days Christos had been gone, and although she was growing accustomed to the terrible silence, she still felt the need to speak to the air from time to time.

  She’d made this batch of the cheese herself, and she was proud of it, even if it didn’t have the tenacity of the stuff she’d been able to find at the market when she’d first bought this property, fifteen years ago. Or even the weaker but still salty-sweet cheese that Christos had come up with, using the thin milk they’d managed to glean from the last goat.

  “Bunch of adol
escent fantasies.”

  She might as well talk aloud. There was no one to hear, no one to judge. No one to answer.

  ... No one to brush her thinning grey hair, to stroke her hard and ropy shoulder muscles, to clear the weeds from her front walk. No one to argue back to her. To bring her a drink when the sun went down. To glance up from his work in what passed for her garden, his dark eyes smoldering at her as he...

  “Stop it, you stroppy old cow,” she muttered to herself. She finished toasting the cheese and then stood over the stove, eating it with callused fingers that hardly felt the heat of it.

  Then she stood, staring unseeing out the window as she remembered.

  ~o0o~

  Elizabeth Barnett, international best-selling author of The Caged Sword series of dark and twisted romantic fantasy novels. Elizabeth Barnett, the toast of London, New York, and Prague literary circles—at least, those circles civilized enough to consider the genre of romantic fantasy. Elizabeth Barnett, who shocked the world by retiring at the height of her fame and purchasing a three-million-pound estate in the hills outside Larnaka, Cyprus, with her third husband, James—seventeen years her junior and famous in his own right as the developer of those ridiculous computer games that children played, instead of reading decent fantasy novels.

  “The writing was on the wall,” she said to the window. The sea shimmered far below her, and Christos was not coming back.

  ~o0o~

  James had been one of the first to die. Maybe he had even brought the plague back with him, from his last trip to France ... but if he hadn’t, someone else would have. The plane had been full of people, and there had been ten more flights after that, before all air traffic had stopped. Beth had sat with him in the Apollonion Hospital on the Greek side of Nicosia—even then, with the wall down, the city was still deeply divided between Turk and Greek—holding his hand as he coughed blood, sobbed, and finally choked out his last breath. The sad-eyed doctors had searched their stub of what remained of the Internet, pumped him full of expired antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and steroids, and mopped up the effluent that had poured from her beautiful husband. He had died all the same.

  “You filthy bastards! You swine, you cowards, you Mediterranean cretins!” she had shrieked at them, wailing and beating at the chest of the infuriatingly calm chief resident. He’d stood and listened to her, blinking his large dark eyes, waiting for her to wind down.

  It was those Greek eyes that had prompted her to move here in the first place, when she could finally afford it. Not this doctor’s eyes per se, of course; but dark Greek eyes in general, remembered from some long-ago junket she’d taken with her editor and her agent. Three middle-aged British women on holiday, slumming in a sea of sweet Greek manflesh. Beth had always remembered that trip, long after she’d married reedy blond James. She’d always intended to end her life here.

  Just not like this.

  Beth shook her head, still standing at the window, the fire gone cold in the stove, the uneaten bits of halloumi sticking to her fingers, cloying. She felt sick to her stomach, and wondered for the thousandth time if the plague had finally found her as well.

  “No, nothing can kill you, old loon,” she said aloud, half-affectionately. She turned away from the window, taking the greasy pan from the stove. She set it in the sink without rinsing it. There wasn’t much water left in the bucket anyway; she’d have to go to the stinking well for more.

  Instead she went to the basement, or what passed for one. It was a low space half-dug into the rocky hillside, intended for a wine cellar. But Cypriot wine was harsh and sour, and her English palate had never adapted.

  She stood blinking in the dim space, waiting for her old eyes to adjust, and pulled down a fresh bottle of Bombay gin. She stocked the large bottles—1.75 litres—even though they were hard to maneuver above her glass, especially as the evening progressed. Before leaving the cellar, Beth counted the bottles. There were eighteen, not including the one she had in her hand.

  “That’s all you’ve got,” she said. “After that, it’s all over.” Her words were swallowed by the earthen walls.

  ~o0o~

  Seven weeks after Christos sailed away, Elizabeth Barnett sat in a leather chair with one of her own books in her lap—book seven of The Caged Sword series, and her personal favourite: Man and His Weaknesses. She could hardly stand to read books written by anyone else. They were never written as she would have done; they were over too soon, or too late; the relationship between the hero and heroine never rang true; and the endings were always contrived, seemingly invented merely for the purpose of making a good story.

  Well, of course they were, she knew that. But other people’s imaginations, to Beth, just seemed ... inferior.

  So she read her own work. And certainly there was plenty of it. When twilight fell, she lit a fire in the hearth and a small candle by her chair, refilled the glass of gin, and picked up the book again, chuckling to herself as Larion prepared to storm the Fair Castle Rhuligel and save Marleena. Naturally, Marleena would refuse to be saved; that was when the fireworks would start. “Oh, you minx, you little vixen,” she murmured.

  That was when she heard the crash from the back yard.

  Beth froze, holding the heavy hardcover on her lap. What was it? Definitely something large. Another goat?

  She heard another noise, not a crash this time, more like a bump. It was closer to the house.

  She slowly got to her feet, leaving the book on the chair. A goat would be good news: it would mean milk, or at least meat. She walked over to the doorway and peered down the hall, craning to see the back of the house, but it was too dark inside. A small window was set high on the back wall of the living room for cross-ventilation.

  She sidled over to the window and stood on tiptoes, but could not reach to see out.

  She could hear, though. She heard footsteps.

  “Who’s there?” she called, making her voice strong, projecting to the rear of the audience as she had done for years.

  The footsteps stopped.

  A goat would have kept on, ignoring her in its desperate search for food. What other animal could it be? The dogs were all long dead, eaten mostly by one another, and then by the remaining people.

  And the people were long dead as well. Most of them, anyway. If one in ten thousand humans had survived the plagues, that would have left Cyprus with a population of eighty. Not counting tourists, of course—but the tourist trade had slowed greatly before the final plagues. The last ten flights in had been matched by as many flights out before the planes were grounded for good.

  Moving quietly, Beth left the living room and went into the hallway that led to the back door. It was darker here, and there was still a little light outside. She made her way to the window in the door, staying back a bit so as not to be seen.

  A man stood in her back yard. He was staring at the house, the roof. The chimney. He must have smelled the smoke from her fire.

  Ignoring the clutch of fear in her chest, Beth studied the man. He looked terrible; he was clearly starving, and filthy. But he didn’t seem plague-bit. He was about fifty, maybe, though it was hard to tell in his condition—no, she corrected herself. It was impossible to tell. He could be thirty or seventy, who knew?

  Anyway, he appeared weak. Frail as Beth was, he was likely not a significant threat.

  By the looks of him, he was not Greek or Turk or Armenian or any of the other more customary inhabitants of the island. He could be at least as English as she was.

  What were the odds?

  As she watched, the man suddenly became animated. She sucked in her breath and pulled back farther from the window. He took a step toward the house, then stumbled and pitched forward.

  “Oh,” Beth said, as the man landed on his face on her cobblestones.

  ~o0o~

  He lay on a narrow bed in the guest room, still unconscious. Beth cleaned and bandaged his bloody forehead, and brought in some more halloumi—the last she had,
it would be canned food after this unless she found more milk—in case he woke up. He was breathing, but unsteadily; his temperature seemed high, but she was no doctor. Beth had never been a mother either, had never wiped a fevered brow as people did in her novels. Maybe he was plague-bit. But no, there were no buboes, there was no swelling. And the only blood was from his cut.

  She sat in a hard chair beside him, biting her lip. It had taken much of her strength to drag him here, and lift him up onto the bed. She wouldn’t have been able to do it at all if he hadn’t been so emaciated.

  The man’s eyelids flickered and he gave a small moan.

  Beth leaned forward, peering into his face. “Are you awake?”

  “Ah...” One eye fluttered open, then shut. He gave a long, sour exhale.

  Beth touched his shoulder, giving him a light shake, and touched his forehead again, next to the bandage. “Wake up.”

  He was silent a moment, then both eyes opened. “Wh ... mou ... uh...”

  “Do you speak English?” she asked.

  Now his eyes opened wider. “Yes.”

  “That’s good.” Beth stared into his face before looking away. “But then of course you do, everyone does.”

  The man blinked, staring at her. He asked, “Where ... where is everyone?” His accent was flat, broad—American, perhaps.

  “What do you mean?”

  He swallowed and glanced around the room. His face filled with fear. Terror, even. “Nobody’s here, are they?”

  “I’m here.” Was the man a fool? Quite likely. Most people were fools, and if they hadn’t been before the world fell apart, they certainly were now. Or, rather, they were dead now, the vast majority of them. And the fools like Christos had sailed off to follow a dream, a computer hoax, a cruel fantasy someone had written, about a place called Grants Pass, where society would begin again. As if there was any chance of that.

  “You...” The man struggled to sit up, and Beth didn’t stop him. He leaned against the pillows and shivered in the heat. “Who are you?”