The ginger-haired boy shook his head again. “They got different gods than us, gods no one even knows the names for, and that’s who the Amesbury witch was worshipping. Those gods from the bottom of the ocean.”
“Well, I think you’re a liar,” the girl told him. “I think you’re a blasphemer and a liar, and, also, I think you’re just making this up to scare us.” And then she stood and stalked away across the weedy lot, leaving the others behind. They all watched her go, and then the ginger-haired boy resumed his tale.
“It gets worse,” he said.
A cold rain has started to fall, and the drops hitting the tin roof sound almost exactly like bacon frying in a skillet. She’s moved away from me, and is sitting naked at the edge of the bed, her long legs dangling over the side, her right shoulder braced against the rusted iron headboard. I’m still lying on the damp sheets, staring up at the leaky ceiling, waiting for the water tumbling from the sky to find its way inside. She’ll set jars and cooking pots beneath the worst of the leaks, but there are far too many to bother with them all.
“I can’t stay here forever,” she says. It’s not the first time, but, I admit, those words always take me by surprise. “It’s getting harder being here. Every day, it gets harder on me. I’m so awfully tired, all the time.”
I look away from the ceiling, at her throat and the peculiar welts just below the line of her chin. The swellings first appeared a few weeks back, and the skin there has turned dry and scaly, and has taken on a sickly greyish-yellow hue. Sometimes, there are boils, or seeping blisters. When she goes out among the others, she wears the silk scarf I gave her, tied about her neck so that they won’t have to see. So they won’t ask questions she doesn’t want to answer.
“I don’t have to go alone,” she says, but doesn’t turn her head to look at me. “I don’t want to leave you here.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“I know,” she replies.
And this is how it almost always is. I come down from the village, and we make love, and she tells me her dreams, here in this ramshackle cabin out past the dunes and dog roses and the gale-stunted trees. In her dreams, I am always leaving her behind, buying tickets on tramp steamers or signing on with freighters, sailing away to the Ivory Coast or Portugal or Singapore. I can’t begin to recall all the faraway places she’s dreamt me leaving her for. Her nightmares have sent me round and round the globe. But the truth is, she’s the one who’s leaving, and soon, before the first snows come.
I know it (though I play her games), and all her apostles know it, too. The ones who have come down from the village and never gone back up the hill again. The vagrants and squatters and winos, the lunatics and true believers, who have turned their backs on the world, but only after it turned its back on them. Destitute and cast away, they found the daughter of the sea, each of them, and the shanty town is dotted with their tawdry, makeshift altars and shrines. She knows precisely what she is to them, even if she won’t admit it. She knows that these lost souls have been blinded by the trials and tribulations of their various, sordid lives, and she is the soothing darkness they’ve found. She is the only genuine balm they’ve ever known against the cruel glare of the sun and the moon, which are the unblinking eyes of the gods of all mankind.
She sits there, at the edge of the bed. She is always alone, no matter how near we are, no matter how many apostles crowd around and eavesdrop and plot my demise. She stares at the flapping sheet of plastic tacked up where the windowpane used to be, and I go back to watching the ceiling. A single drop of rainwater gets through the layers of tin and tarpaper shingles and lands on my exposed belly.
She laughs softly. She doesn’t laugh very often any more, and I shut my eyes and listen to the rain.
“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be, when they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea,” she whispers, and then laughs again.
I take the bait, because I almost always take the bait.
“But the snail replied ‘Too far, too far!’ and gave a look askance,” I say, quoting Lewis Carroll, and she doesn’t laugh. She starts to scratch at the welts below her chin, then stops herself.
“In the halls of my father,” she says, “there is such silence, such absolute and immemorial peace. In that hallowed place, the mind can be still. There is serenity, finally, and an end to all sickness and fear.” She pauses, and looks at the floor, at the careless scatter of empty tin cans and empty bottles and bones picked clean. “But,” she continues, “it will be lonely down there, without you. It will be something even worse than lonely.”
I don’t reply, and in a moment, she gets to her feet and goes to stand by the door.
THE HAG STONE
by CONRAD WILLIAMS
I
A DICEY FLIGHT • I ARRIVE SAFELY AT FORT REQUIN
IT WAS MY first trip anywhere in an aeroplane.
I know that must sound absurd coming from a man in his seventies, especially in this day and age when cheap flights are so freely available and people hop on and off aircraft as if they were buses; but I (nor my wife for that matter) had never entertained the thought to go travelling, let alone sight-seeing. My idea of hell was a hot beach in a land where English was not spoken, and endless hours were spent chasing away flies from whatever inedible repast might be put in front of me at a less-than-reputable restaurant.
No, my heart (though recently damaged) was meant to remain in England. However, the best-laid plans, and all that.
How was I to know I would suffer a heart attack? I say that with the lack of foresight we all of us are cursed with in regard to the proclivities of health, but the question really ought to have been: how could I have expected anything but a heart attack? For the seat of all my passion and feeling had been under assault for two weeks, since my darling wife, my beautiful Clarissa, succumbed to the persistent and aggressive cancer in her spine.
Though the likelihood is that I don’t have much time left on this Earth, what time I do have will no doubt be shadowed by the memories of her final months and the pathetic attempts by the medical staff to arrest the inevitable. Clarissa had quite reconciled herself to that long sleep; I, less so, and I’m afraid I was something of a quivering wreck whenever I sat with her in her hospital bed.
She seemed to be shrinking by the day, but her smile remained a constant, as warm and as inviting as it had been on the first day I was favoured with it, over fifty years previously. And the grip of her warm, smooth hand retained its urgency.
Alas, a sure touch and a ready smile are not enough to repel death, and she succumbed one rainy Tuesday afternoon while I was failing to persuade one of the vending machines in the corridor to yield a hot chocolate.
A fortnight later, not sleeping well, drinking rather more than I ought and in a constant mither of wringing hands and regret, I suffered, in the lobby of a city-centre hotel, what my doctor called a heart seizure. Arrhythmia, apparently: the chaotic spasming of the muscle. I was rescued by the smart thinking of a receptionist who had first-aid training and knew where the nearest defibrillating device could be found.
I was in hospital for a week, and then happily discharged with a hefty arsenal of pills to take every day for the rest of whatever life I had left. I was warned, before leaving, about depression, and that a number of renowned foundations were available for me to consult, but I would not have it. I’d never felt happier. I was convinced that the seizure had marked the return of my wife as something living, and within me, to provide succour and prevent me from falling into a funk of loneliness. Any murmurs from now on I would attribute to her, geeing me up, reminding me to take my medicine, or prompting me to remember her.