He would walk just a little farther, he decided, and see what I was what. But not far. It simply wouldn't do to leave the station unattended for long.
Just a little way.
Vetter came in less than five minutes after Farnham had left. Farnham had gone in the opposite direction, and if Vetter had come along a minute earlier, he would have seen the young constable standing indecisively at the corner for a moment before turning it and disappearing forever.
'Farnham?'
No answer but the buzz of the clock on the wall.
'Farnham?' he called again, and then wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand.
Lonnie Freeman was never found. Eventually his wife (who had begun to gray around the temples) flew back to America with her children. They went on Concorde. A month later she attempted suicide. She spent ninety days in a rest home and came out much improved.
Sometimes when she cannot sleep — this occurs most frequently on nights when the sun goes down in a ball of red and orange — she creeps into her closet, knee-walks under the hanging dresses all the way to the back, and there she writes Beware the Goat with a Thousand Young over and over with a soft pencil. It seems to ease her somehow to do this.
PC Robert Farnham left a wife and two-year-old twin girls. Sheila Farnham wrote a series of angry letters to her MP, insisting that something was going on, something was being covered up, that her Bob had been enticed into taking some dangerous sort of undercover assignment. He would have done anything to make sergeant, Mrs. Farnham repeatedly told the MP. Eventually that worthy stopped answering her letters, and at about the same time Doris Freeman was coming out of the rest home, her hair almost entirely white now, Mrs. Farnham moved back to Essex, where her parents lived. Eventually she married a man in a safer line of work — Frank Hobbs is a bumper inspector on the Ford assembly line. It had been necessary to get a divorce from her Bob on grounds of desertion, but that was easily managed.
Vetter took early retirement about four months after Doris Freeman had stumbled into the station in Tottenham Lane. He did indeed move into council housing, a two-above-the-shops in Frimley. Six months later he was found dead of a heart attack, a can of Harp Lager in his hand.
And in Crouch End, which is really a quiet suburb of London, strange things still happen from time to time, and people have been known to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever.
The Star Pools by A. A. ATTANASIO
He wrapped his foot in a rag he found in the trunk of his car and sat for a while on the hood, looking out accross the swale to a clump of cedar pines where an hour before he had frantically dug up the mulchy earth. His cache was hidden in there.
Beyond the green colony of trees, the land was tortured and rose in great broken-backed steps towards a haze of iron-spined mountains. Nobody would be coming out here to look for anything but steelheads.
Reassured, already mindless of the itching throb in his foot, Henley Easton got into his car and swung out onto the highway. By dusk he was in New York City.
He had a leisurely dinner at Shakespeare's and decided o limp across Washington Square Park to find a doctor he knew. At the coruer of MacDougal and Fourth, a rush of dizziness staggered him. It happened so quickly there was no time to cast about for support. He stagsat iered on the curb, tried hard to make it back to the sidewalk. But his eyes glazed dark, and he slid to his knees. A moment later he was sprawled in the gutter, his awareness sinking into the shadows of his body.
There is a calling under the breath, a cry that goes on as a vein. It is the last senseless moment of the organism the instant of death that cries back through the narrow air from the ferrous edge.
SCHIAVONI AND MAL^MO~ Voorish R it~
Pain which even the cold stream water couldn't numb, a brittle, ruby pain. Henley Easton shuddered, down in the stream, up to his waist in water, trousers ballooning. Slowly he lifted the sharp rock he had stepped on, squeezed it hard, pressed it to his forehead, his lips. In the water, a cloud of blood swelling. The flap of skin on his foot winked open, closed. Seeing it and the blood holding back in the water, he thought he was going to be sick.
He limped to shore and spotted the familiar silt
He was still grasping the rock.With a lopsided heave, he sent it flying over the ha But tl of stone until he came back.
et was an endless dream. He wandered through dank, wight-lighted corridors that stank of rime and somewere children looking on, so he clutched at the bl,hing burnt. He was alone in the darkness, feeling his way along greasy walls and abrupt corners that mule-epped down into smoky grottoes. The air was murmurous with the sound of purling water and a rumble above the se~-
lines of his car parked at the edge of an escarprnund. Thtke distant voices or the far-off seethe of ocean rollers
was no bloed on its cutting edge, and he felt ashamed
teaming to shore.
He wandered it seemed for days, unable to wake.
of the fishing children and watched it arching along winding corridors were interminable, and after a while he forgot that he was dreaming. All that seemed to matter was that he plod on through the labyrinth, feel his way through darkness to freedo
above the reeds, falling into the shallows of the bank. ~rror that he, too, was a mammal whose loops of
But was he going the right way? Or was he coili ~ood held him like a garotte.
deeper into the maze? Later, even that anxiety wi~ Dragged under by the weight of his guts, clubbed
ered. He became, simply, movement, no longer hum~~itless by the stark remembrances of the earth devour-It didn't matter where he was going. Space flitted the earth, deafened by the terrible echoes of weeping in every direction. Movement had become his identity, he staggered through the mouth of the labyrinth continuum, so he walked and walked, letting echoes ring in his ears cluelessly.
Eventually helplessness overwhelmed him, and he realized he wasn't moving at all. Motion was an illusion. He was still. All things moved through him. And thinking that, he squatted in the black corridor and sang of the past lives twined in his brains: the memories oft wet humus, the mindless, gutless lives that led to first howl among the fronded swamp-ferns. And singing became laughing and screaming which tangled in the shadows with his hearing so that when the first memories of fur and warmth arrived, his mind was so numb with the nightmares of sharks cephalopeds that he continued speechless through mauled, bloodplastered recollections of his evolution, only occasionally letting a blind cry flap hopelessly away.
For an interminable time, he limped through the dark passages, once coming within a few meters of an exit, but because he had long ago forgotten just who he was and what he was looking for, he ran back into t
md howled a bowel-emptying cry into the sear of the
In.
Then he was awed to silence, for the landscape he’d entered was familiar enough to remind him that he was dreaming. There was a white horse nearby standing still as rock, its eyes an evil pink. Sea grapes and palmetto hung limp from long trelises above shocks of colourless grass. To the left was the sea, silver as mercury around a small boat with a black stick of a man standing in it, waiting.
White huts squatted on the right, each with a scant window. Everything was perfectly still and white. Even the sky was white - except for the sun. It was black. Seeing it, Henley felt his muscles melt, and he dropped to his knees. It was a fibrous black, an imense spore, too painful to stare at. He rubbed his yes and blinked.
He blinked. Nothing changed. The Javer sea was steaming beneath the virus star, a black haze meshed to the sky.
A thin breeze picked up, and Henley watched several shy leaves littering away towards the ironwood posts the corral. The white horse remained motionless, its pink eyes were staring. Closer now, the boats aw