His credit card on the counter, bright and toy-like, the clerk brushing hair from his eyes: “Do you want a box or anything? A gift box?”
“No,” he said. “Just put it in a bag.”
Raining, still, and nearly dark as he pulled into the driveway, heart in peculiar race and he called her name when he entered, made his voice normal, called her name again as he walked through the darkened house with the bag tight in his hand, room to room: nothing: she was nowhere so circle back to the living room, silent and dark, rain like voices to make a chorus, secret chorus in a language all its own as
“Here I am,” her voice, very quiet and then again, as if he had not heard: “Here I am.”
Past the sofa, in the corner where wall met wall and she was naked: and hooded, draped in a hood so shapeless and so black as to give no breath of the female, no hint of the human inside. If there were eye-slits, he did not see them; there must be holes for breathing, but in this light he could not be sure. Gaze without words but an alien shudder, as if some other creature, bullet-shaped, past fathoming, were rising from the fragile flesh of her body, the sloping shelf of shoulders made from bone.
The bag made a sound as it touched the floor; his fingers trembled on the straps, the heavy red buckles of the mask.
“I brought you something,” he said.
Silence: arms crossed, her breath in hitching motion, both of them waiting for him to strip and cross the room.
Chaz Brenchley
The Keys to D’Espérance
Chaz Brenchley has made a livingas a writer since he was eighteen, and 1999 marks his twenty-third anniversary in the job. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and is also the creator of a major new fantasy series, The Books of Outremer, based on the world of the Crusades. He is a prize-winning former poet and has also published three fantasy books for children and close to 500 short stories in various genres.
He was Crimewriter-in-Residence at the St. Peter’s Riverside Sculpture Project in Sunderland, which he describes as “a bizarre experience” and which led to the collection Blood Waters. His novel Dead of Light is currently in development as a movie, and he won the British Fantasy Society’s 1998 August Derleth Fantasy Award for the sequel, Light Errant.
“ ‘The Keys to D’Espérance’ is one of those very rare stories that I wrote because I had to, without any market in mind,” explains the author. “I was — as ever — broke, and supposed to be working on a book that was already late; and for a month there was nothing I could do but put that aside and work on ‘D’Espérance’. Which then sat around for years, waiting for the right publisher to turn up.
“I was so pleased when Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press offered to do it as a chapbook, that was perfect. It is very much the first of a series of stories about the house, in which I hope to write obliquely about the history of Britain through this century. I have the next couple of stories in my head, only waiting for me to find the time to write them.”
Actually, by the time the keys came, he no longer believed in the house.
It was like God, he thought; they oversold it. Say too often that a thing is so, and how can people help but doubt? Most facts prove not to be the case after all, under any serious examination. Even the Earth isn’t round.
One day, they said, D’Espérance will be yours. You will receive it in sorrow, they said, and pass it on in joy. That is as it is, they said, as it always is, as it should be.
But they said it when he was five and he thought they meant for Christmas, they’d never make him wait to be six.
When he was six they said it, and when he was seven and eight and nine.
At ten, he asked if he could visit.
Visit D’Espérance?they said, laughing at him. Of course you can’t, you haven’t been invited. You can’t just visit. You can’t call at D’Espérance. In passing, looking at each other, laughing. You can’t pass D’Espérance.
But if it was going to be his, he said at twelve, wasn’t he entitled? Didn’t he have a right to know? He’d never seen a painting, even, never seen a photograph…
There are none, they said, and, Be patient. And, No, don’t be foolish, of course you’re not entitled. Title to D’Espérance does not vest in you, they said. Yet, they said.
And somewhere round about fifteen he stopped believing. The guns still thundered across the Channel, and he believed in those; he believed in his own death to come, glorious and dreadful; he believed in Rupert Brooke and Euclidean geometry and the sweet breath of a girl, her name whispered into his bolster but never to be uttered aloud, never in hearing; and no, he did not believe in D’Espérance.
Two years later the girl was dead and his parents also, and none of them in glory. His school would have no more of him, and the war was over; and that last was the cruellest touch in a long and savage peal, because it took from him the chance of an unremarked death, a way to follow quietly.
Now it must needs be the river, rocks in his pockets and thank God he had never learnt to swim. There would be notice taken, that was inevitable; but this would be the last of it. No more family, no one more to accuse or cut or scorn. The name quite gone, it would simply cease to matter. He hoped that he might never be recovered, that he might lie on the bottom till his bones rotted, being washed and washed by fast unheeding waters.
Quite coldly determined, he refused to lurk withindoors on his last long day. At sunset he would go to the bridge, rocks in my pockets, yes, and no matter who sees, they shan’t stop me; but first he would let himself be seen and hissed at and whispered about, today as every day, no craven he. It was honour and honour only that would take him to the river; he wanted that clearly understood.
So he walked abroad, returning some books to the public library and settling his accounts with the last few merchants to allow him credit. He took coffee in town and almost smiled as the room emptied around him, did permit himself the indulgence of a murmured word with the cashier on his way out, “Please don’t trouble yourself, I shan’t come back again.”
And so he went home, and met the postman at the door; and was handed a package, and stood on his doorstep watching as the postman walked away, wiping his hand on his trousers.
The package was well wrapped in brown paper, tied with string and the knots sealed. It was unexpectedly heavy for its size, and made softly metallic noises as he felt its hard angles shift between his fingers.
Preferring the kitchen in his solitude to the oppressions of velvet and oak, of photographs and memories and names, he went straight through and opened the package on the long deal table under the window.
Keys, three separate rings of keys: brass keys and bronze and steel, keys shorter than his thumb and longer than his hand, keys still glittering new and keys older than he had ever seen, older than he could believe, almost.
For long minutes he only held them, played with them, laid them out and looked at them; finally he turned away, to read the letter that had accompanied them.
An envelope addressed to him in neat copperplate, nothing extravagant; heavy laid paper of good quality, little creased or marked despite its journeying in with the keys. A long journey, he noted, unfolding the single sheet and reading the address at the top. His correspondent, this remitter of keys was apparently a country solicitor; but the town and the company’s name were entirely unfamiliar to him, although he had spent two months now immersed in his parents’ affairs, reading everything.