by Jack Dann
Glancing to the reading table, I saw that all five books I had given him now lay open. There was a muffled thump from somewhere, like the sound of a motor accident in the distance. I returned to my work on some inane reference question from the local historical society. A smoke detector called its shrill warning from nearby. I looked up.
‘Someone smoking in the men’s toilets,’ said one of the shelvers.
‘Again,’ I replied.
I got to my feet with the usual reluctance. Ejecting smokers from the toilets always involved a confrontation. Ejecting Mister Brandel for smoking was bound to be even more of a challenge. Still, I was not surprised that he needed a smoke to steady his nerves after what I had done to him. I expected him to have one of those long-stemmed clay pipes, the sort that you can still find fragments of beside the Thames. As I approached the outer door I realised that something was wrong, however. There was the smell of sulphur on the air.
I had never dreamed how much smoke could be produced by a single gunshot. Mister Brandel was lying on the floor, on his back. His wig had landed in a urinal, and I now saw that his head was shaved. There was a neat hole, blackened at the edges, in his right temple. The exit wound took up most of the left side of his skull. In his right hand was a flintlock pistol, its barrel still smoking, and in his left was his beaver hat. The ball had continued on to shatter a mirror.
I was the first aid officer for the evening shift, but this was well beyond my training or experience. Workplace First Aid 2.1 does not prepare students for someone blowing his brains out with a half inch lead ball. I forced myself to go down on one knee and put my fingers to the body’s neck. The skin was warm, but there was no pulse. I stood, touching nothing, then recorded the scene with my phone camera.
The library was closed as a crime scene while the police and coroner did their investigations. Mister Brandel immediately became a source of considerable mystery to them. He had no identity whatsoever, aside from what was in the folder. In the weeks that followed the police found no match with his DNA, and no match on his key facial elements. The Costume Suicide Man, as he came to be known, was featured on the television news and even spawned a few websites.
When the police first arrived I was quizzed about what books he wanted. Because he had borrowed nothing, he had needed no library card — and thus had not needed to show any ID. Only my memory contained a record of his requests.
‘Why would history drive him to suicide?’ asked the detective as I showed him the books that the dead man had been reading.
‘I can’t say. He seemed as if he wanted to live in the past, like with all his period clothing.’
‘Oh yeah, it’s amazing how he got the costume, the weapon, everything, so accurate. Like I study this sort of thing for a hobby, you know, I’m into historical re-enactment. That body in the gents is authentic, right down to the tooth decay. Even his costume has the sort of wear that only comes with years of use. My redcoat uniform is just like that, proper wear from years of use.’
‘He had a particular interest in the poet Elizabeth Crossen,’ I said, pointing out the five books that lay open alongside his leather folder.
‘And apart from reading the books he never used any library facilities?’
‘He never so much as reserved a book.’
There had been chaos following the alarm being raised over Mister Brandel’s suicide. Very conscientiously I had removed the tapes for the monitor cameras that covered the information desk and front door, then locked them away for the police to examine. The new tapes did not go in until after I had substituted our library’s biographies of Elizabeth Crossen for those that Mister Brandel had just read. These found their way into my backpack behind the information desk. Naturally the staff were badly shaken by what had happened, but it was two hours before the police allowed us to leave. As I walked for the Underground station I thought of Harriet, and of how much I owed her.
The very first thing I did when I got home was to light a fire. Next I got out the scotch and poured myself a generous measure. By the end of my second glass the fire was burning hot enough for my needs. Into the flames went a stolen accessions stamp from the Nunhead library, and as this burned I began ripping up the biographies of Elizabeth Crossen and feeding the pages into the flames. I was working on the last book when Harriet phoned me. She had heard about the suicide on the news.
‘Whoever he was, he imagined that he really was a time traveller,’ I told her.
‘But why did he do it?’ she asked. ‘Nothing seems to make any sense.’
‘Obsession with the past,’ I replied. ‘Some people really let it get to them, you see that sort of thing if you work in a library for long enough. I think he fell in love with Elizabeth Crossen. In a way it was a clever fantasy.’
‘You mean he was pretending to be a time-refugee, and pining for his sweetheart in the past?’
‘Yes.’
‘That is just magical!’
How could I tell her the truth? Brandel had been killing Elizabeth’s suitors one by one, then travelling forward in time to read about how history had changed. It had never changed to his satisfaction, so he had gone on killing. Surely this said something about his chances with her, but love was apparently blind in this case. How many lives had I saved by driving him to suicide? Quite a few, I hoped, because I was feeling decidedly guilty. Could I be prosecuted for murder? Probably not. Accessory to suicide? Possibly. I could possibly plead self-defence on behalf of potential victims who had died back in the nineteenth century, and point out that I did it because there were no time-police … my head started to spin, and I decided to stay with the pretend-time-refugee story.
‘Brandel was reading of how Elizabeth married Robert Bell at the library tonight,’ I said aloud, as much to solidify this version of events for myself, as to tell Harriet. ‘I watched him, wallowing in grief as he read of how his girl met, then married, another man. He was unable to stand it any more, so he killed himself.’
‘But he’s not a real time traveller, is he?’
‘No, he’s just done a good job of looking like being one. So far the police can’t trace him as someone modern. As far as they are concerned, he might as well have been a time-refugee.’
‘Hey, intense. Like, in a sense he had got what he wanted. He escaped these times, and died as a man from, er, when did you say?’
‘1810.’
‘Wow. As plots go, it’s got a lot going for it.’
‘Yes, although it’s sort of real,’ I agreed.
‘Er, look I don’t want to sound, like, crass or anything, but I don’t suppose I could come over now, could I?’ asked Harriet in her rarely used tentative voice. ‘I mean, to get a few impressions while they’re fresh in your mind? This could make a fabulous book, in fact I think I could sell over a thousand copies if I get it out really fast.’
I had seen this coming, and I did not mind at all. First I had lost Emily, and then I had developed something of a crush for Elizabeth before saving her for a life with Robert Bell. I was lonely, and Harriet was the sort of company that I really needed.
‘Better be quick or you won’t get much sense out of me,’ I warned. ‘I’m about to pour my third scotch, and I’m stretched out in front of a roaring fire.’
‘Give me just twenty, I’m on a scooter, remember?’
The biographies of Elizabeth Crossen that I had hurriedly scanned and re-written from the originals, then self-published in runs of one copy each, had been quite slim. This was because in my version of history she had died in 1812. I read my tragic tale as I fed the last pages of the fifth book into the fire. I had Robert Bell taking the king’s shilling and going to fight in the Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon in 1809. This he had done to prove himself brave to Elizabeth, yet in doing it he had lost his life. When news of his death had reached her, she had gone into deep mourning. It had only been after a courtship of three years that she had finally agreed to marry Edwin Charles Brandel, formerly of the East
India Company. The marriage had been a brief but turbulent one, and had ended one night when he had beaten her to death, then shot himself out of remorse. Some of her last words, taken from a letter written only days before her death, were quoted on my final page.
‘He keeps railing against me for being bitter and disillusioned, and not being the girl he loved, yet how can this be? He only met me when fate had already squeezed the joy from my heart and rendered me desolate with loss. Edwin is just one of many who courted me, but fortune willed it that we should marry. Robert was my only true-love.’
When I had written the words, I had hardly dared to hope that they really would drive Mister Brandel to despair. Like a shot taken at a dangerous gunman at extreme range, my words had struck home through sheer luck. As the last page burned I sipped at my scotch and opened my own copy of Abercrombie’s definitive biography of Elizabeth Crossen. Mister Brandel was absent from the index, and both Elizabeth and Robert were recorded as living happily together into the 1860s. The lovers were safe, forever, in a fixed and constant past.
The doorbell chimed, then Harriet rapped at the door and called my name. I let her in, and she managed to ask half a dozen questions about Mister Brandel and his suicide before she remembered to ask me if I was feeling okay and give me a hug. By then I did not feel like anything other than immediate bed and sleep without company, but I was very much in her debt. Harriet had taught me about vanity presses, print-on-demand publishing, who to contact, and what they could do in what sorts of timeframes. Without her I would not be the anonymous publisher and pseudonymous author of five biographies of Elizabeth Crossen, each with a print run of one copy. Looked at from that perspective, the two of us were indeed a slightly peculiar version of Elizabeth Crossen and Robert Bell, and I even found the idea strangely alluring.
AFTERWORD
Avatars inspired me to write this story. From what I have seen, people who build avatars on the internet develop something perfect, which usually means fresh, fit, foxy, and financially secure. Well, who said virtual reality was anything to do with reality? I am an author, however, and when I build characters they must be interesting, not perfect, or real readers will not buy my books. In ‘The Constant Past’, Mr Brandel is trying to build his vision of a perfect lover from a real person. Most people probably agree that turning someone real into your idea of perfection is a better recipe for disaster than looking for a gas leak with a lighted match. Most people have probably learned this from direct experience.
— Sean McMullen
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THE FOREST
KIM WILKINS
KIM WILKINS was born in London, and grew up by the seaside in Australia. She is the author of seven supernatural thriller novels for adults, five psychic crime stories for young adults, and five fantasy books for children. She has won Australia’s Aurealis Award four times, and has a PhD in writing. Her novels include The Infernal, Grimoire, The Resurrectionists, Angel of Ruin, and the Gina Champion Mystery series. Her most recent novels are Rosa and the Veil of Gold, Giants of the Frost, and The Autumn Castle.
In the story that follows, Kim Wilkins reworks a classic tale to take us into the neon-lit world of danger and dark magic that can only be found on the other side of the mirror…
I.
My brother and I turned fifteen on the same day, but we are not twins.
His mother is my stepmother; his stepfather is my father. We were raised together from the age of seven. We squabbled over toys, mocked each other’s weaknesses, screamed red-faced that we hated each other in one moment and pored over comic books together the next. All this familiarity, however, was not proof against attraction.
My brother’s name is Hansel. On the day he turned fifteen, he was half-boy, half-man. He wore his hair long, and could almost be mistaken for a girl, except that his body had begun to change. His long limbs were becoming dense with muscle.
At our birthday party that day, I watched him across the table, beyond the limp cake that Mother had grudgingly spared an egg and a cup of flour for. And Hansel watched me because that is what we did. We watched each other. In the morning, while the grim skies above the city of Stonewold leeched themselves to muddy grey-green and the traffic began moving beyond our grimy windows. After school, while the black and white television flickered and grimaced in our gloomy living room. At supper, while our parents fretted about money and meted out string beans as though they were emeralds. And then at bedtime, across the four feet of space between our single beds. We watched each other, and our eyes became as hungry as creeping poverty had made our bellies.
And so my brother and I turned fifteen on the same day, and we watched each other turn fifteen and something insistent pressed on my heart while I watched him: a fear of loss, a horror of growing older. Perhaps it is hindsight that allows me to describe it, because at fifteen most feelings are indescribable. At fifteen, feelings are flashes of incomprehensible white heat, convictions are as unutterable as they are searingly vital. The fabric of being is stretched by the swing of that hinge between childhood and adulthood. Souls ache.
We were dispatched to bed after a supper of rough bread and dripping: Mother said that as we had eaten cake, we need not also eat a full meal. We said our goodnights as we had always said them and climbed into our individual beds. But the pressure on my heart would not abate and I tossed and turned for nearly an hour before I dropped into sleep.
It seemed only minutes later that I woke to see a dark figure standing at the window. It was Hansel, gently parting the curtain to look outside.
‘Hansel?’ I said.
He turned, smiled. The streetlight caught him across the cheek and my fingers prickled with the desire to touch him. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he said.
I turned back my covers and stood with him, pulling the curtain open now so that the familiar peaks and edges of Stonewold were in view. The orange streetlights turned the perpetually swirling cloud above to amber. The slick streets were empty, oily with rain and muck.
‘There is more, isn’t there?’ Hansel said.
‘Somewhere.’
‘They warned us in school that one day we would say these things.’ His fingers laid loosely on the windowsill. Long, tanned fingers with bitten nails.
One of the first lessons of our seventh grade was about puberty, how it would catch us and make us unhappy with what we have. How we would start to think about the forest.
‘Do you think anybody ever gets to the forest, Gretel?’ Hansel said.
‘We won’t, and that’s all that matters. “Born in the city, die in the city” — so the saying goes.’ I indicated with a tap on the glass the rusting, cut-out trees sprouting from the roof of the next building, the steel spirals mimicking organic shapes that hung from our own building. ‘This is the closest we’ll get to the forest.’
He leaned his head on the glass, closing his eyes so his long black lashes fanned out on his cheeks. ‘I know I could breathe among the trees.’ Then he opened his eyes and fixed me in his gaze. ‘But this feeling will go away. A few years, we’ll learn to bury it.’
‘I don’t want to bury it,’ I murmured, the pressure on my heart becoming painful. ‘I would rather suffer.’
‘I know,’ he said, and it was the profoundest thing he had ever said. His fingers reached for mine and clutched them. A moment hung suspended between us, a sliver of clarity in the fog of adolescence. He lifted my hand to his mouth and his tongue slid out and licked my index finger, wound around and down. An intoxicating weakness washed through me. He grasped me around both wrists gently and pulled me towards him, spreading my arms. ‘I want to be young forever,’ he said.
‘I do too.’ I could feel the heat of his body through my thin cotton nightie.
He kissed me. It wasn’t the first time, but the intent was new. All my senses flared into life and I moaned a little, a sound I’d never heard coming from me before. He pulled off his shirt, and I pulled off my nightie and my breasts were pressed against
his bare skin while two of his fingers trailed a Searing passage down my body, crept inside the elastic of my underpants and slid inside me.
Noise. Light. We jumped apart.
Mother was standing in the doorway, one hand on the light switch, the other hand clutching a pile of our folded laundry. ‘What’s going on?’ she shouted in a panicky voice. ‘Father! Come here.’
Father was there a moment later, his grizzled moustache drooping over his mouth as he stared at me, then Hansel, half-dressed, red-faced.
He marched in, grabbed Hansel roughly by the shoulder and pushed him out of the room. I quickly scrambled back into my nightie. The door of the bathroom slammed shut, and I heard the key in the lock. Father returned, wordlessly removed Mother from the room, then locked the bedroom door as well.
I sat on my bed, my heart thundering. The curtain still lay partly open, revealing a shard of the amber sky. I heard voices and crept to the door to listen. Mother and Father.
‘… shame upon this family,’ Mother was saying.
‘I won’t have that boy in this home any longer.’
‘And I won’t have that girl.’
A long silence. The subway roared beneath the building, shaking its foundations. Then Mother said, ‘We can’t afford to keep them, anyway.’
‘I’ll take them into the old city tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They’ll never find their way back.’
II.
Father was a concreter, a trade that many young men of his generation were trained for, but a trade that had rapidly become obsolete. As Stonewold grew, every inch of dirt and grass disappeared under a hard grey veneer. There was simply nothing left to concrete. He eked out a living on minor repair jobs. The rusty tray of his old XP utility was lined with concrete dust and the occasional hard lump that had set on the beige paint before he could clean it up. At dawn, Hansel and I were herded into the tray, where we were told to sit with our backs up against the cabin for safety. The ute took off, rattling over tramlines. We held hands.
