Soft laugh. “If it wants her, then it should have her. Go ahead, honey. Get in the fire.”
On hands and knees, I climbed up into the hearth, moving slowly, so as not to scatter the embers. Clothes burned away harmlessly.
To sit in fire is to sit among a glory of warm, silk ribbons touching everywhere at once. I could see the room now, the heavy drapes covering the windows, the dark faces, one old, one young, gleaming with sweat, watching me.
“You feel ’im?” someone asked. “Is he comin’?”
“He’s comin’, don’t worry about that.” The man who had brought me smiled at me. I felt a tiny bit of perspiration gather at the back of my neck. Warmer; getting warmer now.
I began to see him; he was forming in the darkness, coming together, pulled in by the heat. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, young, the way he had been. He was there before the hearth and the look on that young face as he peered into the flames was hunger.
The fire leaped for him; I leaped for him and we saw what it was we really had. No young man; no man.
The heat be a beast.
Beast. Not really a loa, something else; I knew that, somehow. Sometimes it looks like a man and sometimes it looks like hot honey in the darkness.
What are you doing?
I’m taking darkness by the eyes, by the mouth, by the throat.
What are you doing?
I’m burning alive.
What are you doing?
I’m burning the heat beast and I have it just where I want it. All the heat anyone ever felt, fire and body heat, fever, delirium. Delirium has eyes; I push them in with my thumbs. Delirium has a mouth; I fill it with my fist. Delirium has a throat; I tear it out. Sparks fly like an explosion of tiny stars and the beast spreads its limbs in surrender, exposing its white-hot core. I bend my head to it and the taste is sweet, no salt in his body at all.
What are you doing?
Oh, honey, don’t you know?
I took it back.
In the hotel room, I stripped off the shabby dress the old woman had given me and threw it in the trashcan. I was packing when Carl came back.
He wanted to talk; I didn’t. Later he called the police and told them everything was all right, he’d found me and I was coming home with him. I was sure they didn’t care. Things like that must have happened in the Quarter all the time.
In the ladies’ room at the airport, the attendant sidled up to me as I was bent over the sink splashing cold water on my face and asked if I were all right.
“It’s just the heat,” I said.
“Then best you go home to a cold climate,” she said. “You do better in a cold climate from now on.”
I raised my head to look at her reflection in the spotted mirror. I wanted to ask her if she had a brother who also waved his hair. I wanted to ask her why he would bother with a cold woman, why he would care.
She put both hands high on her chest, protectively. “The beast sleeps in cold. You tend him now. Maybe you keep him asleep for good.”
“And if I don’t?”
She pursed her lips. “Then you gotta problem.”
In summer, I keep the air-conditioning turned up high at my office, at home. In the winter, the kids complain the house is too cold and Carl grumbles a little, even though we save so much in heating bills. I tuck the boys in with extra blankets every night and kiss their foreheads, and later in our bed, Carl curls up close, murmuring how my skin is always so warm.
It’s just the heat.
TIM LEBBON HAS WON two British Fantasy Awards and a Bram Stoker Award, and his work (including the following story) has been optioned for the screen on both sides of the Atlantic.
His books include the novels Face, The Nature of Balance, Mesmer, Until She Sleeps, Dusk, Desolation and Into the Wild Green Yonder (with Peter Crowther), plus the novellas Naming of Parts, White, Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark), Changing of Faces and Dead Man’s Hand. Lebbon’s short fiction has been collected in As the Sun Goes Down, White and Other Tales of Ruin and Fears Unnamed.
Brian Keene is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the author of The Rising, Terminal, City of the Dead and other novels. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and is collected in No Rest at All, No Rest for the Wicked and Fear of Gravity. He contributed one half of the Earthling Publications chapbook The Rise and Fall of Babylon back-to-back with John Urbanick, and he is also the fiction editor of Horrorfind.com.
“I’ve written several stories based during the First World War,” reveals Lebbon, “and this is one of my favourites. The scale of that destruction, that waste of life, that slaughter, has always had a profound effect on me, and when Brian and I worked on this story I read quite a bit around the subject. I felt terrible for giving those poor soldiers something even more awful to deal with than the hell of the trenches, but it all came together for me with the end of the story, and that wide-ranging twist on events.”
“‘Fodder’ was a real treat to write,” Keene admits. “Tim is not only one of my best friends – he’s also an author that I have an enormous amount of respect for. I knew that in collaborating with Tim, I would have to be on top of my game. We originally wrote the story for a William Hope Hodgson tribute anthology, and the character of William was based (very) loosely on him. We both had relatives that served during the First World War, so we wanted to touch on that. We also wanted to add the very real element of the flu bug that killed tens of thousands of people at the end of the war.”
“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”
—Wilfred Owen
THE SUN WAS ALREADY scorching, yet Private William Potter’s watch showed only nine o’clock. The straps of his knapsack chafed his skin as he walked. He tried to ignore the protests from his aching muscles, but his blistered feet were balls of flame, and his neck was burned lobster-red. He had never felt so exhausted.
The remaining men of the British 3rd Infantry shuffled southward. Swirling clouds of dust, kicked up by their boots, marked their passage along the road towards Argonne. Around them, the beet fields had come to life with the buzzing chatter of insects and the birds’ morning chorus, interrupted only by muffled booms from the front; intermittent, yet always present. The sounds of battle were drawing closer with every step.
William blinked the sweat from his eyes and listened to the symphony around him, losing himself in the strange beauty of the moment. The strings and brass of the remaining wildlife accompanied the angry percussion of man. A new poem began to suggest itself to him then, and he longed for a sheet of paper and a pen to write it down. He was away pondering the first line when he slammed into Liggett.
“You, Bollocks,” the irate Corporal spat in his thick Cockney accent? “why don’t you watch where yer going?”
“Sorry, Liggett,” William mumbled apologetically. “I was listening to the birds.”
“Oh yeah, listening to the birds, were you? Walking around with your bloody head in the clouds more like.” He stopped to rescue his dropped cigarette from the dirt.
“He’s right, William,” laughed Winston. “Keep going like you are, you’ll float above this mess one day.”
“Leave him be,” Morris said, coming to his friend’s defence. “You can laugh all you want now, but William will have the last laugh when he writes a book about all of this.”