whump. whump
A deep creaking noise punctuated that heavy sound. The window filled with black, then cleared again after an age. Blackness once more. Then soft light.
She opened the curtain. A blade of the windmill swung past her, trailing ragged edges of its sail. Down towards the end of the lawn, a huddle of people sat, a pinkish mass in the gloaming. Were they having a midnight party? Why had she not been invited? Maybe they wanted to leave her to her grief.
She shrugged herself into her towelling robe and picked her way through the shadows to the main door. The air was warm, pungent with salt. She followed the path around to the garden, stepping through an arch crowded with roses. The windmill creaked and thudded, underlit by strange, granular arcs from lamps buried in the soil.
She was halfway across the lawn when she saw the women were naked. They were surrounding something, dipping towards it and moving away. She recognized the young girl who had watered the lawn, the old woman and Karen, who was lying back, cigarette in one hand, Brenda’s thigh in the other. Brenda was talking to some other women. Claire realized she had not seen a man since the pub in Cockley Cley. The sergeant-major bustling out of the door. Holding up his hand. Mouthing something.
whump. whump.
The windmill had not borne sails when they arrived that morning. She took another, hesitant step forward when she was spotted. One of the policewomen pointed at her. They all turned to look, peeling away from the dark, wet core of their interest. She saw their bodies were smeared with blood. The old woman wore feral slashes of deep red across her forehead and neck.
Claire felt a slow, hot release against her thigh as she turned to look at the blades of the windmill, wrapped in the still wet hide of her boyfriend. Turning back to the women, who were advancing towards her now, she reached beneath the folds of her robe, sank her fingers into her own blood and began to paint.
Conrad Williams confesses that his first attempt at fiction had a Tyrannosaurus Rex eat a village of prehistoric people. He adds in mild defence that his favourite films at the time starred Doug McClure. Moving on, he has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer and his work has been published in many small press and professional publications. Recently his short fiction has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Sunk Island Review, AbeSea and Dark Terrors 2. Upcoming is a story in Ellen Datlow’s Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers. ‘“The Windmill” came to me during a sleepless night in a windmill on the Norfolk coast last year,’ reveals Williams. ‘Almost all the events in the story really happened. When I got to the Fens, it felt like I was part of a Miserablist film, something that grew from the same rotten tap root as The Wicker Man and Deliverance. Something naive and parochial, but which simmered with hideous possibilities. I reckon this is the nastiest story I’ve ever written,’ adds the author.
Sharp Edges
STEVE RASNIC TEM
In such an intense physical act like murder, between the victim and the murderer there is something sensual…the death orgasm and the sexual one.
Jane spent hours shaving her legs, despite the fact that the act tangled her in anxiety. Even in her nervousness, however, the results never failed to fascinate: the warm pink smoothness of the legs, the skin scraped so thin one might have seen the blood pulsing just beneath the surface. Then there were the occasional nicks: in particular the granular abrasions around the heel and ankle, where the skin came so close to the bone it appeared painted on. When first cut open her pale skin pinkened, as if suffused with a new liveliness, then the tiny beads of blood oozed out on to the surface, and Jane found the look and smell of them oddly comforting, like milk for a baby, confirming for her that this life was, indeed, real. Although beneath the surface pleasure a profound terror lurked.
Jane had many such terrors, and her psychotherapist believed that if she faced the smallest among them first, the grip of her more dramatic fears might begin to loosen. She wasn’t sure about this, but would never think of arguing with him. Besides, shaving her legs was important to her appearance.
So when she shaved with the razor she held her breath. It steadied her hand. But there were still the inevitable slips, the skin torn, the pale flesh of the calf washed with a translucent spread of blood. She’d gasp and run to the mirror: staring eyes dilating rapidly in the high polish of the glass. And each time, behind her in the clouds of steam from the shower, she could see the knife blade easing aside the crisp plastic curtain.
Maxwell sawed carefully through the hollow handle of the cane, inserting the narrow knife in one opening and carving out the other end to create a close, smooth-fitting sheath for the blade. He supposed you could purchase such a device, but he felt more comfortable making his own. He doubted his particular version could kill, but killing wasn’t what he was after with this instrument. It was intended merely to probe, to produce seemingly accidental scratches, evidence of all the sharp edges a young lady might discover in the standard urban environment.
In the park, conveniently crowded that afternoon, he created a long vertical tear in a young woman’s calf as she passed him jogging. Because of her exertions, the shrouding effect of oxygen depletion, he imagined it was several seconds before she felt the pain and by then he was safely around the bend and stepping briskly down another pathway.
In the local supermarket, obscured behind an elaborate tropical fruit display, he was able to spear a much larger woman in her left buttock. He left the store halfway through a long harangue as she threatened the manager and anyone else in view with legal action. Maxwell had been pleased by the symmetry of the blood stain flowering across the back of her dress.
In similar fashion he continued into the evening, poking, prodding, raising the vaguest signature of blood on women of all ages. Although his escape was uncomfortably narrow at times, he felt no real threat to himself during these activities, for he was simply playing the flirtatious tease, the bashful lover. He was seeing who bled and who did not, and how much. Later, much later, and after extensive courtship, he might open their many mouths for a bright red kiss. But such revelations had to be approached slowly. He had always understood that women were shy creatures, reluctant to give up their secrets, which made what they withheld all the more important. Women were men’s complement, their supplement, their completion and their explanation. Open up a woman and you might finally know her, and find the missing pieces of yourself.
Maxwell had left his special cane in the car during dinner at Catalina’s, a local restaurant sporting an atypical European diner theme, when he saw the young woman he would soon know as Jane enter and take a booth a few feet away. As was his habit, he looked to her fingers first, which were a brighter pink near their ends than on the shafts, with very little nail. He assumed she must chew on her fingers to an obsessive degree, and later observations only confirmed this. He would often wonder during their ensuing relationship whether her fingers bled much, and if she sucked this blood, and whether she waited for a large amount to well up before licking, or sucked her fingers constantly, taking the blood before it had the opportunity to stain her pale skin.
Although there was nothing particularly dazzling about this young woman in her twenties, she had a pleasant face, long reddish-brown hair which was immanently touchable, and people noticed her. He had no immediate explanation for this, but patrons turned their heads when she entered, looked up at her and smiled, and invariably she smiled back, even to the scruffiest of diners. This was dangerous behaviour on her part, he concluded after watching these exchanges for several minutes. Obviously people could see that she was the sort of person who would sit down next to a Charles Manson to chat if a Charles Manson were only to smile at her with even vague politeness. She had this pitiable need to please everyone she met. She was soft, vulnerable, a pale Riding Hood in the woods. She was the kind who walked barefoot on a beach strewn with broken glass, not out of bravery or even foolishness really, but simply out of a sense that this is the way one behaves, however wrong-headed her senses might be. Maxwell was immediately drawn to her.