by Mark Morris
The gag was a small hand towel. It was long enough to wrap around someone’s neck. When the time came.
* * *
I wonder what you’d be like if you weren’t able to let it all out?
I remembered Sue saying that, and as every lit or darkened stretch of time passed me by, I dwelled on the idea more and more. It was painful to do so because it was what they wanted, but it also bit at me, like a single invisible piranha darting in to nip away chunks of my skin and flesh. The idea began eating me whole. I’d always regarded myself as grounded and reasonable, fair and nice, but I’d never seriously attributed that level-headedness to the fact that I purged my demons on the page. That was a fanciful notion about writers, the same as going hungry in a garret feeding your creative muse. I’d been poor before my writing became successful, and I knew that being cold and hungry only went to fuck the muse over, not nurture it. Similarly, I’d always believed that I lived life as me whether I wrote or not. It was a hobby turned into a job, not a necessity. It was a form of therapy, perhaps. But it wasn’t essential.
I’m going to bite her face off, I thought. When she next leans in to wash my face with a damp flannel, I’ll lurch up and chew off her nose.
That wasn’t me, before or after writing.
I’ll choke him with the gag. Squeeze so tight that he turns blue and his eyeballs bulge and he pisses himself as he dies.
The unfinished book didn’t matter.
Night and day swapped places, fast and slow, and with darkness and light I planned, and became disgusted and delighted with my daydreams of violent escape.
There was some routine, though it was irregular, and it didn’t help me count the hours and days. They always came down together. Alan held the spear, Sue released my bonds and fed me. They both stepped back against the wall at the bottom of the staircase while I stretched and used the bucket. Sometimes they let me walk back and forth a little, but there was very little talking. Perhaps they thought that conversation might help me defuse whatever they thought was building inside me. This is science, Alan had said, and they treated it as such. I was an experiment. I wondered when they thought the results might begin to show themselves. After forty days? Sixty? A year?
People would be missing me by now. I had a few friends, but we rarely socialised at each other’s houses. I saw some of them for a hike every few weeks up the local mountain, and it would probably take them some time before they even realised I wasn’t there. It was my agent who’d be most concerned at unreturned phone calls and emails. I suspected it would be her who ended up calling the authorities. A search of my house. No signs of forced entry or struggle, no notes, my car still parked in the driveway. Mail piled behind the door. It was all so cliched. If I wrote it as a book, my agent would wrinkle her nose and say, But it all feels so familiar.
Only I could change the plot.
* * *
In the end, they failed. Part of me thinks they really wanted an explosive ending, one in which I escaped and beat them, maybe even murdered one of them, and then they could revel in their freaky, insane experiment. Now we know what you’re like when you can’t let it all out on the page, Sue would say, and they’d have their story. I could not see past such an ending. What happens next?
It didn’t go that way. In the end it was all very mundane, an anticlimax that left them with their eyes wide open, surprise soaking in like water into dry wood.
Sue untied me. Alan stood back with the spear, but it had been sixty days, or eighty, and he wasn’t expecting any trouble from me. He was on guard, but in reality his guard was down. Maybe he was thinking about what they’d be having for dinner, or musing on how they’d get rid of me when the time came. Part of me couldn’t believe they hadn’t planned for that, but there was an impulsiveness to them, too. They swing. They move. They kidnap a casual friend and keep him in their basement.
I turned to the corner where Sue had placed the bucket, then turned back and flicked the gag at Alan’s eyes. I’d kept it clasped in my right hand for the past couple of hours, and it was damp and heavy with sweat. Its end snapped across his right eye, and in that moment of shock I stepped inside the stabbing radius of his spear, grabbed it with one hand, and slammed his head back against the wall. It wasn’t a hard impact, but it was enough to stun him. I pushed past him to the first step, then turned to face them with the spear raised before me.
My legs were shaking. I was weak, dizzy from the rapid burst of energy and adrenaline, but this was my moment, and I could hardly believe how easy it had been.
Sue’s eyes sparkled. She glanced at Alan. His right eye was closed, but his left was wide and staring at me, not with fear or surprise, but expectation.
“You’re idiots,” I said. I prodded forward with the spear and Alan flinched back, but Sue only watched the blade jab towards her husband. “Idiots. What you did to me, so unfair. So... inhumane.”
“It’s been seventy-eight days,” Sue said. “How do you feel?”
I want to stab you in the eye, I thought. I want to watch your brains leak from your skull. But I smiled. “I feel free.” I started backing up the steep stairs, very slowly because I didn’t trust my strength. It was shocking how weak I’d become, but I was also driven by the sense of outside, the idea of an open space larger than ten feet square and seven feet high. I wanted distance and sky.
Alan took a step towards the bottom of the stairs and I paused, pressing myself against the side wall. If he came at me I’d have to be firm and ready to stab him. The idea was abhorrent, and rather than make me angry or determined, it just made me sad.
“There’s a GoPro on the kitchen table,” Alan said. “Will you wear it? When you go outside?”
I laughed. It was little more than a cackle in my pained throat, and it set me into a coughing fit that almost doubled me up. I panicked, afraid that they’d overpower me and imprison me again, and that would be the last chance I’d have to escape.
But they wanted me to escape. It was part of the experiment.
How come they’re not afraid for themselves? I wondered. I could just kill them now. Perhaps that was a risk they’d been willing to take, or maybe they had intended to release me in a controlled way. Aim me, like a missile. Or a rabid dog.
I coughed another laugh.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll put on the GoPro. Want me to email any footage to you?”
Alan blinked at me, communicating nothing. Linked live to their fucking iPad, I thought. My thoughts were mixed, confused, hysterical from my confinement and my sudden chance at freedom. I hoped that fresh air would blow away the collected cobwebs of over two months and sort my thoughts into some order.
I backed up the staircase until I pressed against the kitchen door. I’d watched them open and close it enough times to be able to locate the handle by touch, set among a mess of heavy locks and bolts. I’d always wondered why it was built to be locked from the inside, as well as from without. It didn’t matter now.
The door drifted open and I backed out of that wretched basement for the first time in over two months. The air felt different – lighter, redolent of cooking and cleaning smells, and no longer heavy with hopelessness.
I’m out, I thought. As I kicked the door shut I heard the thud-thud of Alan or Sue running up the stairs, and I crouched, heart hammering, spear ready to jab out. I’ll just get them in the leg. Enough to stop them.
The door was tugged shut from the other side, and I heard the hasty clank of two bolts slamming home, and the ker-clunk of the mortice lock turning. They’d locked themselves in the basement. Away from me. They were afraid of me.
I laughed again, and this time it sounded more genuine, less desperate and mad. It was a laugh of freedom, but also an understanding of how ridiculous this all was. How crazy.
I felt changed from my incarceration, but not in the way they thought. I felt level and fine. They�
�d fed me and watered me, and though weak in body, my mind was once again flowing and functioning.
I looked around the kitchen. There was a toolbox tucked under the small two-person table. I dragged it out and opened it, found a handful of nails and screws, and went about fixing the door into its frame from the outside. I turned the table on its side and screwed it across the doorway. Then I hauled the kitchen dresser across and pushed it in front of the door and table. Plates fell from the dresser and smashed on the floor. I liked the sounds of destruction. I’d heard little but my breathing and loud music for weeks.
“I’m going now!” I shouted. No reply from beyond the doorway. I imagined them listening, excited and nervous.
I plucked a chisel from the toolbox, knelt, and used it to make a coin-sized hole between two floorboards. Then I sat back, thinking.
They haven’t changed me.
I found what I wanted just outside the back door and brought it inside.
I’m the same person I was two months ago, only...
More experienced.
I attached the hose to the cold tap in the kitchen sink and cut off a short length. The cut end I wedged between floorboards, aimed at the hole so that it couldn’t be prodded away from below. Even if it was, I would take out some insurance.
I turned on both taps. Water from the hose splashed down into the basement, and I heard a startled cry. With the sink plugged and the overflow blocked with a chunk of soap, it soon spilled over the worktop and floor. The water flowed between floorboards and down into the basement.
I raided the fridge and sat at the kitchen table. I made sure the Go-Pro was aimed at me while I ate, hoping they were watching. Hoping they could see how normal I still was, and how in control. How nothing they’d done had changed me at all.
I ate for some time, and found a bottle of beer which I raised to the camera before drinking. There were a few thuds from below, a series of bangs against the door, and then a shout that was quickly stifled. Nothing else. Calculating how long it would take for the water to fill the basement was beyond me, so I simply sat and listened. I’d always loved the sound of running water, and I had plenty of time.
I decided that I was not going to finish the book I’d left behind. After all this, I had a new one to write.
There was no science in what I was doing. No emotion.
This was research.
Swanskin
Alison Littlewood
Later, it is not so much the attack that I see, again and again, in my mind, but what came after it.
The two of them were walking along the shore at evening, a distance ahead of me. The sky and sea were as grey as each other, and the air still had winter’s cold nip, carrying now and then a scouring of sand into my face. The town was behind me, a pretty little spill of houses built into the side of a cliff, nothing but the sea in front of it and miles of flat brown land behind. Across the dunes, just ahead of the couple, was a quiet little river mouth, where swans gathered and dabbled for pondweed, no doubt dreaming their strange avian dreams of the north.
I could not make out their features, but I knew who they were. Horrocks, his very name meaning ‘part of a ship’, owned the largest fishing boat in the fleet; and Syl, his young wife, who walked a little straighter than he and stood a little taller. If I had not recognised her form I would have known her by her hair, which was more golden than the evening sun and rippled finer than the sea.
Horrocks was hunch-shouldered under the weight of a pack, his head turned to the sand, while Syl gazed upward, into the sky. And yet both of them stopped when a riotous clamour arose, seemingly from nowhere, a sound I could not place. It echoed from the dunes and at first I thought of machinery, coming from the town perhaps, though I had never heard such a thing before; and then the wings appeared, as if from out of the ground.
Suddenly they were everywhere, surrounding the two of them, flocking above their heads. The birds were dark against the sky, yet I knew them to be white, for I recognised their cruciform shapes, their chiselled heads, the long, graceful arch of their necks.
Horrocks stumbled. He raised one arm to fend them off as they fell upon him, beating and stabbing. Each one of them was wider than Syl was tall. I rubbed at my eyes, wondering if it was some illusion formed of the sand – swans, I knew, did not attack men, not like this, not all together. One at a time perhaps, if he strayed too close to its nest, and even then, I was certain the stories must be lies: that a swan’s wing could break a man’s leg; that they had once drowned a man at the edge of the sea.
Horrocks fell to his knees. The birds were shrieking in a kind of blood lust, the beating of their wings a tumult. I couldn’t tell if Horrocks cried out; I couldn’t see his face. He had blundered into the sea, I realised, though was now hidden by the chaos of feathers and flight.
I began to run towards them, even as I realised that his wife had not moved at all. Syl stood by, no doubt shocked into stillness, horrified; fear-frozen.
Horrocks pushed himself up from the water, roaring and choking the salt from his lungs. One moment the air was thick with plumage; and in the next the swans were gone, beating and creaking their way back towards the river.
All was suddenly quiet. I slowed a little, the sand making hard work of it, but they hadn’t seen me; they didn’t look at me all the time it was happening. I am uncertain if they ever knew I was there.
After the attack, Horrocks got to his knees and then his feet. His trousers were darkened with seawater, but he did not trouble about that. He did not pause to retrieve his pack from the waves. He half walked, half stumbled to where his wife still stood, tall and motionless. He stepped in front of her, straightening before striking her, hard, across her lips.
* * *
Unnatural, they say later, ensconced in their booths, pints frothing across the upturned barrels that pass for tables in the Anchor. Uncanny. A freak.
It is the same every night, at least when they are not at sea. The men of the town sail and fish and go home to hot meals and warm beds, but before they sleep they retire to the alehouse, spinning their yarns about the women who are trying to trap them. And yet tonight it is not the same, not quite. There is unease in their words and in their sidelong glances, which meet and slide away from each other.
Their words are cutting. They speak of the chatter of women, meaningless as the gabble of geese. They speak of the one thing they are good for, and spurt laughter before falling silent again, staring into their tankards.
They haven’t yet said the word witch, but it isn’t far behind unnatural. The air is thick with it, the echo of a thought that is louder than their obscenities, their laughter.
Soon I will go to sea. I shall be one of them – sitting at their table, talking as they do, flushed with drink and laughter. I was intended for a farmer, but the death of my parents ended that; now I live with a distant and ancient relative, a dry husk of a woman, in a tiny cottage nestled halfway up the cliff. The soft ploughed land of my childhood has become rock; the air I breathe has turned to salt.
I leave them, ducking out of the tavern in time to see a bevy of the town’s women walking by, arm in arm. I stop and watch them go. Syl is at their centre, the tallest, though I can see little of her face; it is almost concealed by a dark hood. When she sees me, she passes a hand across her mouth, as if to conceal her swollen lips.
Contrary to the men’s talk, they do not gabble. Indeed, they do not say a word. One of Syl’s companions looks at me sidelong. She is softer made than Syl, though still tall, still elegant. I think I make out, as she goes, a single white feather caught in the soft curls of her hair.
* * *
At evening, we sit before the fire, my aging relative and I. She rocks in her chair, staring into the flames while my gaze is drawn, over and over, to the window. There is nothing out there but the dark. It is parcelled into tiny squares by the leaded glass
.
“You begin to see, then,” she says.
I turn to her. Each crease on her face bears its own deep shadow. Her eyes look rheumy, as if damp with tears.
“See what, Aunt?” I call her Aunt, but she is more distant than that in relation. Still, she has never blamed me for burdening her; she never reminds me of the thinness of our bond, that I am a stranger here.
She takes the pipe from between her lips, freeing a skein of mist scented of sandalwood and cloves.
“You’ll know the truth soon enough.” She gestures towards the window with the pipe’s stem, just as a pale shape passes across the sky.
“The swans,” she says. “They winter here. But here is not their home. That is what you sense, boy, when you look at them.” She silences me with another wave of her pipe.
“Sometimes, a swan may shed her feathery skin. She casts it off and becomes a lovely maiden. And if a man should steal her skin – why, then she will stay, and keep her human shape, and be his wife, as long as her skin is kept from her. But sometimes, a whole flight of her sisters will come. They will try to free their sister and her swanskin.”
Her eyes reflect the fire’s gleam. “You should beware,” she says. “Find a nice girl. A good girl. Not—” She spits, mutters something about unnatural forms.
I do not answer, am not certain how, and she takes to gazing once more, before nodding in her chair. I do not wake her; I wish to keep to my own thoughts. Somehow, I never once doubt the truth of her words. I half close my eyes, picturing the massing of the swans, the way they swooped on Horrocks as he walked with his wife along the shore. I remember the way he struck her; I see again her grace as she touched her fingers to her lips.
Unnatural forms, my aunt had said, echoing the gossip at the Anchor. But she never did tell me which of their forms was unnatural: whether it was their human or bird shape that was to be feared.
* * *
The fishermen have sailed, the town left to the women, and to me. I wander the little streets between tall white houses, each set on their own angle, and try not to stare in at the windows. When I reach the largest, though, I cannot resist. I pass by it often and see Syl pacing the rooms, back and forth, restless, and I wonder: is she searching for her skin?
