by Paula Guran
We went back to work on the tunnel that week. It was almost too somber to bear. Not a single joke, not a sloppy innuendo, not a crack about the weather, not even the reliable no-daylight vampire analogy. Not once. But the vibrations of the burrowing machines still soothed me, I suppose. I felt more myself than I had in a long time.
The project was two months behind, but no one mentioned it. Not even Annabel-of-the-Gantt-charts dared breathe a word about deadlines after what had happened.
And late was better than never. Our fresh thirty-meter excavation was soon double that. We were doing good work.
One night we got a little careless, detonated a badly calibrated blasting emulsion to loosen stubborn bedrock too close to the soft side wall. And we had on our hands another breach between Tube tunnel and river tunnel, this time a small one, fist-sized, likely harmless.
Philip brought me over to assess the damage.
“The Fleet must be at low tide,” I said.
“How do you want to fix it?” he asked.
“I reckon cement, this time,” I said. Ancient brickwork on the Fleet’s side had been damaged by the blast, chunks of it missing. There was a peephole gap clear through. I put my ear against it as if it were a subterranean conch shell.
The dirge of the buried river, soft and insistently there.
“Jo?”
“Go get the drilling crew and Thames Water’s engineer, please.”
“Yes boss.” Philip’s flashlight beam bounced away toward the mouth of the excavation.
I was alone.
I knelt in front of the breach, waterlogged rock and silt cool against the padded knees of my cargoes.
I can’t describe why I got so close. I felt turned around, turned upside down, like the furniture of my life was hanging from the ceiling. I wanted to sleep in the sunshine and rave all night. Wanted to compress London to a snow globe, then to a point. Wanted to swim in the Thames and take that impure brown water into my lungs.
There was dripping and burbling and my breathing overtop, a symphony.
I shone my flashlight through. On the other side, a blinding, slick, prismatic reflection, no depth. Bulk, right up close.
I took a work glove off. And I touched. Felt the give and muscle of an enormous living thing.
I suppose all stories are passed along with cheap words, tinsel and streamers. I know there’s nothing I can really say. And maybe the moment you touch a monster and don’t draw back is the moment you become one, molt your humanity. But I’d never felt so old and I’d never felt so buried alive. The expanses and alleys and green spaces of London were at that moment barely pockets of oxygen, barely enough for a day’s survival in a very, very long life.
And then it was gone. And Philip was back.
“You probably have this under control,” I said, because I didn’t, and I hurried toward the industrious snake of the up-escalator, my body a bundle of broomsticks wrapped in leather.
We completed the tunnel in the autumn of the following year. I attended the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Northern Line service—Camden Town to Luton Airport—in a pinstripe jacket and pencil skirt I’d dry-cleaned for the occasion. They stood me somewhere near the back, which was fine by me. I’d been offered a plus-one but didn’t invite Adarsh. I wanted to be there by myself.
Then, around Christmas, under a frosted Blackfriars Bridge, curls of metal chassis still glossy with the livery of a Northern Line train began to let out into the Thames where the mouth of the Fleet was. They ran dragnets at the outlet for a month or more. No human remains were recovered.
Around the same time a new species of amphibian was discovered in the shallows of the Thames. The Royal Society wanked and self-congratulated for weeks. The specimens were thought to be juveniles, or, crazy as it sounded, larvae. They were proper big babies, long as a human arm.
The tabloids published an exposé, all of them printing the same pixelated photo of an alleged specimen alongside a strip of measuring tape. It had hundreds of needle teeth and kind of sad, mopey, monochrome eyes and a keratin knob on its forehead and—most importantly—what appeared to be the yellow strap of a carriage handle embedded in its eel-like, translucent flesh. But tabloids are tabloids, and London is chock-full of stories. So people forget.
Oh, and the fossils in Hampstead Heath’s duck pond had a name now. They called the prehistoric beast the Dendan, after a mythical fish in the Arabian Nights. Said it was likely king of the aquatic food chain in its time, being bigger than a galleon, with a carnivore’s teeth and a stomach the size of a hotel room. A good one. A penthouse suite.
You’d think more people would have made the connection. Maybe I find it easier to believe impossibilities than others do. I don’t know.
I climbed out of my funk, little by little. The dreams mostly stopped. I like to think Fran had told me all I needed to know.
Now when I think about our terrible last day with Fran on the bank of the Thames, I can’t help but see it differently. Less like me being distracted and losing my little sister when our father went to fetch a pail of bait from the car. Less like her being picked up by a dirty and depraved pervert. More like Fran seeing the prismatic writhe of fish in the shallows, wading out to try to catch one, or to play.
I force myself to imagine it was quick after that, the bad swimming, the hurt.
Anyway, it’s all guesswork and fantasy. I don’t see the harm in building a sand fortress that protects your heart a little better.
That’s that. They asked me to work on the eastbound expansion of the Central Line, but I said no thanks. I enrolled in a paleozoology diploma course. Lectures at nine a.m. every other day. I’d forgotten how frantic London is during rush hour, how many lives there are to be shuttled along its roads and its bridges and tunnels. Deaths, births, seasons. How many stories the city can absorb like a sponge.
SARA SAAB was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She now lives in North London, where she has perfected her resting London face. Her current interests are croissants and emojis thereof, amassing poetry collections, and coming up with a plausible reason to live on a sleeper train. Her fiction has been published in venues including Clarkesworld, The Dark, Anathema, Shimmer, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection. She is a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.
ABOUT THE O’DELLS
PAT CADIGAN
I was just a little girl when Lily O’Dell was murdered.
This was before everyone was connected to the internet and people posted things online straight from cell phones. Infamy was harder to achieve back then but Lily O’Dell’s murder qualified. It was the worst crime ever committed in the suburb of Saddle Hills, or at least the goriest. One night in June, Lily’s abusive husband Gideon finally did what he’d been threatening to do for the two years they’d been married, using a steak knife from the set her sister had given them as a wedding present.
The police had already been regular visitors to the O’Dell house. Lily had pressed charges the first couple of times. Then a woman officer mentioned a restraining order and a jail term instead of probation and community service. After that, Lily always gave the cops some prefab story, like she’d fallen down the cellar stairs and hit the cement floor face-first and when Gideon had tried to help her up, she’d been so dizzy she’d fallen again. Was she a klutz or what? Maybe she needed remedial walking-downstairs lessons, ha, ha, but not cops coming between her and her lawfully wedded husband, no way, José!
Anywhere else, Lily O’Dell’s murder might have been predictable but people didn’t get murdered in Saddle Hills. They didn’t leave their doors unlocked—that era was long gone—but the streets were safe, the schools were topnotch, and all the parks had the newest playground equipment and zero perverts lurking near the swings. This was the true-blue suburban American dream and the O’Dells didn’t fit in.
For one thing, they didn’t have kids and for another, they weren’t even homeowners—they lived
in one of the neighborhoods’ few rental properties. No one expected they’d last long. Sooner or later, one of them would leave the other, who would skip out on the lease. Or they’d decide to start over somewhere else and skip out together. The company that owned the place would keep their damage deposit, shampoo the carpets, and rent to people who didn’t need the police to break up their fights.
Instead, Gideon O’Dell chased his wife around the block and through several backyards before catching her in front of our house. He stabbed her so many times, the knife broke and he was too blind with rage to notice—he just kept pounding with the handle until it slipped out of his grip. Everybody said when the cops arrived, he was crawling around looking for the blade.
And I slept through the whole thing. At four, I slept like the dead.
Mr. Grafton in the house across from ours had some kind of special power attachment for his garden hose. From my bedroom window, I watched him using it on the spot where the O’Dells had played out the final scene of their marriage. It didn’t look to me like there was anything left. When the For Sale sign appeared on his front lawn, I figured he was tired of power-spraying the road, which he’d started doing at least twice a week.
It was more than that, as I learned from my favorite hiding-place behind the living room sofa. My father told my mother and my older sister Jean (who at thirteen enjoyed the privilege of adult conversation) that Mr. Grafton’s wife forced him to go to the doctor. Now he had medicine that was supposed to make him stop power spraying the road. He told my father he didn’t like how it made him feel. Besides, he wasn’t a nutjob. He hadn’t hallucinated the O’Dell killing, it had really happened. So it wasn’t his fault that when he looked out his window at night, he could see it again, as clearly as if it were happening right that very moment.
My mother said Mr. Grafton was such a gentle man, he could barely bring himself to pull a weed. Jean said that explained why Mrs. G did all the gardening but not why Mr. G had lost his marbles.
I expected my parents to jump on her for that. But to my surprise, my father said, “No, honey, Gideon O’Dell lost his marbles, and one of the worst things about people like him is the effect they have on everyone around them.”
“Yeah, I bet Lily O’Dell would be the first to agree with you,” Jean said.
That got her a scolding. My father told her what had happened to Lily O’Dell was a tragedy, not a joke; my mother said it was bad luck to disrespect the dead. Then Jean peered over the back of the sofa and found me. “Hey, what do you call a little pitcher with big ears?” she said.
“Gale,” my parents said in unison. My father reached over, picked me up by the back of my overalls, and sat me on his lap. He started lecturing me about sneaking around and listening to private conversations. But I knew he wasn’t really mad because he did it as the Two-Hundred-Year-Old Professor with his glasses pushed far down his nose, which always made me giggle till I hurt.
The Graftons sold their house a month later. Jean asked if we were going to move, too. My father said just thinking about having to pack everything up made him want to run screaming into the street. It was supposed to be funny but none of us laughed.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I wasn’t thinking. Maybe without Joe Grafton power washing the street every two days, we can finally put it behind us.”
“Stains like that don’t wash out so easily,” my mother said.
My parents split up the summer I turned fourteen. I was surprised although I shouldn’t have been. Watching them grow apart hadn’t been much fun, and I’d had to do it alone. Jean went through high school in such a whirlwind of activities, she was never home even before she left for college.
I knew something was wrong but I thought they’d fix it; they fixed everything else. My parents were good people. We’d never had the police at our house, nor would my father ever chase my mother through the street with a steak knife. If there was a problem, they’d solve it.
Only they didn’t. They sat me down between them on the sofa to explain that my father was moving into a condo closer to his job downtown. My mother and I would stay in the house. I wouldn’t see as much of my father as before but all I had to do was call and we were still a family bullshit bullshit bullshit.
It was all so polite and calm, as if they were talking about something normal, like a dental appointment. Finally, they wound down and asked if I had any questions.
“Yeah,” I said. “What the fuck?”
They didn’t even have the decency to look shocked by the f-word. After a long moment, my mother said, “We know how upsetting this is, Gale—”
“You don’t know shit!” I yelled, wanting them to feel like I’d slapped them. Then I ran up to my room and slammed the door so hard it should have shattered into a million pieces, or at least cracked down the middle. I felt even more betrayed when it didn’t.
My first impulse was to call Jean and scream at her. She’d already know—yet another betrayal. Parents were on one side and kids were on the other, that was the natural law. She was supposed to be on my side, not collaborating with them.
I put down the phone on my desk. My parents would come up to try talking to me; if they heard me on the phone with my traitor sister, they’d put their traitor ears to my traitor door. I waited to hear the telltale creak in the hallway. I said loudly, “Dear Diary, I wish my parents would drop dead.”
They didn’t even knock. “That’s horrible!” my mother said. All the color had gone out of her face except for two pink spots on her cheeks. “How can you talk like that?”
“Because she knew we were listening,” my father said, although he didn’t look too sure of himself. “It’s completely normal for her to be angry. Even Jean’s p.o.’ed at us.”
“Oh, well, as long as everything’s completely normal, we can all relax,” I said. “It’s not like anyone’s getting stabbed in the middle of the street.”
My parents looked at each other. “Maybe we should move,” my mother said.
But we didn’t. My parents talked to a couple of realtors but there was nothing available nearby. We’d have had to move farther away, which was out of the question. My parents wanted to keep me in the same school.
I could have screwed that up by acting out. It would have been their worst nightmare and I spent hours fantasizing in my room. Drugs or booze would get me suspended but for immediate expulsion, I’d need a weapon, ideally a gun. With my luck, though, I’d end up shooting my own ass off. A knife would do, we had plenty of those.
Or I could just ditch school—that would actually create more legal problems for my parents than for me. My fleeting moment of guilt was drowned out by a rush of anger.
So what? Screw them. They do whatever they want, never giving a crap about my feelings. They don’t have to, they’re grown-ups. They can get away with fucking murder.
Except Gideon O’Dell—he hadn’t, and Lily hadn’t even gotten away with her own life. My mother’s words came back to me: Stains like that don’t wash out so easily. I thought it was odd she’d put it that way, as if she didn’t think whatever Mr. Grafton saw had been all in his head.
Which made me wonder for the zillionth time how the hell I could have slept through something like that. I was still a sound sleeper. One night not long before the O’Dell murder, lightning struck a nearby transformer during an especially violent storm, and there were fire engines and police cars all over the place. The commotion kept everyone in a six-block radius up all night, but if the power hadn’t still been out the next morning, I’d never have known.
* * *
At first, I thought I was dreaming. Then I heard more pounding and a male voice demanding someone answer the door. When my parents went downstairs, I almost went, too, before I remembered I was still mad and I didn’t want them to think I cared.
I raised the screen on my bedroom window so I could lean out and see what was going on. Two police officers were on our steps with my parents; they had on their
silly matching robes, like they were just regular and my father wasn’t sleeping in Jean’s old room until he moved out next week.
Another police car pulled up in front of the Graftons’ old house. I could see the people who lived there huddled close together on their front steps but I couldn’t tell if any of their robes matched.
“. . . bed between eleven and eleven-thirty?” one cop on the steps was saying.
“I went to bed shortly after eleven.” My mother’s voice sounded draggy and plaintive. “Don was watching a news program.”
“Were you asleep when your husband came to bed, ma’am?” the second cop asked.
“She usually is,” my father said coolly.
“I usually am,” my mother said, echoing his tone.
I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to tell the cops they were sleeping separately; it wasn’t like they were the O’Dells.
“Now, your daughter Gale—is she all right?” asked the other cop.
“Of course she’s all right.” My mother was suddenly wide awake and pissed off.
“We’d like to confirm that.”
“It’s four a.m.!” my father snapped. “She’s asleep.”
“Well, actually . . .” The second cop turned to look directly at me. So did everyone else.
I glared at everyone for a long moment before I pulled my head in. Lowering the screen, I saw the third cop talking to the people across the way. One was pointing emphatically at the street. Or rather, at a particular spot on the street.
I went downstairs. One cop was in the living room with my father and the other was in the kitchen with my mother. Sexist much? I thought; good old Saddle Hills. The cops asked me if I’d seen or heard anything unusual, like screaming. I told them the way I slept, I wouldn’t have heard a rock concert.
I thought they’d leave when it became obvious we’d all been asleep till they’d woken us up, but they didn’t. Apparently cop-obvious was different from obvious-obvious. They went through the entire house and my parents admitted that despite their matching robes, they weren’t happily married after all. It got boring; I stretched out on the sofa with a paperback.
