After Sundown

by Mark Morris

  How many like her are left? Cara doesn’t know. She sees them sometimes, back home in California. People walk them on leashes in the parks like dogs. Sometimes they are missing a limb. They move slowly as though through water. Maybe the ones who are left wish they were dead too. If no one wants her when the movie star dies, the state will cull Cara like the others.

  The movie star thinks of Cara as family. I am one of the lucky ones.

  Cara takes the blue and white pills, then the white and yellow one. They go down her throat with plastic ease. She paints the ivory lengths in her mouth with the little brush.

  The pain takes her. She is in its molten core. Her limbs are threaded with fire, bones jagged. Pain swills around, finds the cracks in her. Dimly she hears the phone ringing. She cannot answer. She has no hands, no arms, no voice. She is just pain. Time expands and contracts.

  Through the tumult she thinks, I’m a coward who can’t bear to be alone.

  * * *

  She breaks the surface slowly. Each limb feels like lead. Cara is surprised to find that the night has passed and a cold dawn hangs over the river. She licks her smooth top gum, her blunt teeth. The grey mantel lies over the world. Everything is dulled once more. She takes a new implant from the box. It is not advisable to stay offline too long. They like to keep track. The sharp legs pierce her flesh and then flip out, fixing the little button in place on her skull. She dabs at the thin trickle of blood that runs down her brow. There is no power in it, now.

  The phone rings. “I’ve been calling and calling,” the movie star hisses. “They’re gone, Cara.”

  * * *

  The TV roars, a movie about a kidnapped girl. The movie star cries and eats pistachios from a silver bowl. Pistachio shells litter nearby surfaces. A quiet man in a beautiful suit perches on the arm of a chair. He nods and listens to the movie star, draws no attention to himself. Cara understands that he is important.

  “I could have been here, in bed, when they came,” the movie star says. “I could have been killed in my sleep.”

  The hole in the safe gapes like an eye. The combination lock has been neatly cut out. “Tidy,” the man says, almost approvingly. “Professional.” The thief came during the three hours the movie star was on set. It suggests that they knew her schedule, somehow, knew she wouldn’t be in her room in the middle of the night.

  * * *

  The movie star moves to a different suite and the hotel stations a security guard outside her door. She tells Cara to stay with her until she falls asleep.

  “Could you, you know?” the movie star lifts her lip in a snarl and taps one of her perfect canines, to show what she means.

  Cara shakes her head.

  “Come on,” the movie star says. “You could protect me better than these idiots.” Her eyes light up at the thought of Cara shedding blood for her. She doesn’t seem to understand or care what would happen to Cara, after that.

  Cara feeds the movie star a spoonful of sleeping draught from a gold bottle. “The car will pick you up at 7:00 a.m,” she says. The movie star says “Mmmm,” not listening. She has found one of her movies on TV. Her head starts to nod. On screen the movie star churns butter and wipes sweat from her brow.

  The movie star is young but she has travelled in time and lived many lives. She has farmed wheat in Kansas; raced horses dressed as a boy; fought righteous courtroom battles trembling with conviction; walked home alone at night with footsteps following ever closer behind her; fallen in love many, many times with men and women on bridges, in diners, at parties in New York loft apartments, on buses, on a submarine, in war-torn deserts and once up a tree.

  But it is this movie in particular that Cara remembers. There is a moment coming soon where the woman played by the movie star discovers that the harvest is spoiled.

  Cara watches. The moment, the discovery of the ruined crops, is coming now. The movie star strides across the stubbled blighted fields, skirts billowing, brave and slender as a wand, face crumpled in grief. The camera slowly, lovingly zooms in on her face. In that moment her expression is Axel’s. The eyebrows like dark wings, the hurt and furious gaze, are his. And the expression is hers, Rose’s, as she died, battling the disease. Infinite betrayal, high cheekbones. Rose, who has been in the ground so many long years. Her haughty, furious face passed down through the generations. Cara touches the screen, strokes the cheek with a shaking hand.

  The movie star rolls over in her sleep, groaning, and Cara starts as if waking. Her hand has left a long smudge on the screen. She rubs it away with her sleeve and goes back to her room.

  * * *

  The phone wakes her again at 5:00 a.m., and she holds the receiver sleepily to her ear. “Try to go back to sleep,” she says. “You have two hours until the car.” Through the receiver she hears light, frightened breathing.

  Cara pads along the corridor and lets herself into the movie star’s suite. The movie star snores heavily, arms flung out as if in flight. Another of her movies is playing. It must be a marathon. On screen the movie star looks across a crowded bar in astonishment, at a woman who looks exactly like her. It is the one where she plays a pair of long-lost twins. She hated making that one, Cara remembers. So much work. The stand-in who read the other twin’s lines was the wrong height so the eyeline was always off. The movie star is caught forever gazing slightly to the left of where her long-lost sister stands, as if she can’t bear to look into her face and feel so much.

  Cara watches the movie star sleeping deeply for a moment. Then she closes the door silently behind her. Another one. The calls happen several times a night, now. Cara pictures Greta standing like a statue in the dim lobby, receiver pressed to her ear, as the pastel lights move over her frozen smile.

  Whatever Greta means by them, the calls have become a strange comfort to Cara. She sits and listens to the silence for minutes on end, stroking the old-fashioned spiral cord. She pretends the dead are calling. Her brother or her daughter. “Rose,” she whispers into the vague crackle of the line, “I miss you.” And the silence seems to hold an answer.

  * * *

  The movie star picks at quartered pieces of grape. She went to a club with some of the other actors last night. She raises her dark glasses to look at Cara. She has startling white compresses under her eyes, snail venom patches to take down the puffiness. “Can we do the touch thing?”

  “You’re hungover,” Cara says. “It will make you sick.”

  “If you don’t do it I’ll throw up in your lap.” The movie star grins. Not her pretty, public smile, but the rude healthy grin of the girl she once was, who built dams in streams and caught lizards in her quick hands, who stayed out all day and almost wept when it was time to come inside at night. “Please, Mama.” She called Cara that when she was little, before she understood the way things were between them.

  “Ok,” Cara says, “it’s your funeral.”

  Cara thinks for a moment, then goes to the heavy earthenware jar that stops the door to the suite’s vast living room. The jar is full of peacock feathers, green and sheeny blue. Cara draws out a single quill.

  She concentrates, makes her mind an arrow, points it at the movie star. Slowly, Cara traces the feather over her palm, thrilling at the light touch, barely-there. Across the table, she hears the movie star catch her breath. Cara raises the peacock feather to her face, traces it over her closed eyelids, her earlobes. “Sure you can handle this?” Cara asks.

  “Bring it on,” the movie star says.

  Cara pushes the soft silky end of the feather gently into her own ear. Her ear canal is unbearably full of whispering touch. Ten feet away the movie star shrieks and claws at her ear. “Ok, stop,” she begs, almost weeping with laughter.

  Cara smiles and grazes the inside of her ear with the feather, again and again, as the movie star screams and rubs furiously at the side of her head. Cara is laughing too, so she doesn
’t notice for a moment that the movie star has stopped. She looks at Cara with her blank blue gaze.

  “You’ll be there, won’t you?” the movie star says. “You’ll probably organise everything perfectly. My funeral.”

  * * *

  They discovered the game when she was a girl and had not yet become the movie star.

  It was a hot spring day and the jacaranda threw frilled shadow on the edges of the softball field. The smell of warm earth rose up from under the bleachers. The movie star’s mother sat silent like a ghost. Cara stood beside her. The leash hung silver about her neck, fastened to the bleachers. They both watched as the small figure ran base to base. She was going like the wind. Cara felt her heart swell with pride at her grace, her speed. But the ball was chasing her, and as she slid into third in a cloud of dirt, the kid on base hurled himself towards it. There was a sound like a carrot broken in two. The girl’s face was a mess of blood and dirt. She didn’t cry as she got up, knees dusted brown and palms bleeding. She was trying so hard not to. The movie star’s mother started as if waking from a dream. She was already deep into the pills by then. She rarely saw anything that was not inside herself. Her face was blank as she walked towards her daughter, too upright, like a puppet with the string drawn tight. The mother put a vague hand on her daughter’s shoulder. The girl did cry then, tears mingling with the blood on her chin.

  Her mother stood for a moment longer and then walked off the field, not back to the bleachers but into the trees, in the direction of the car. She could only handle so much at a time.

  Cara wanted to run out into the field, wanted to take the girl in her arms and soothe her. She knew she couldn’t. The leash held her in her place by the bleachers. But she wished for it so hard she could almost feel the shape of the small, familiar silky skull under her hand. Don’t cry, she thought. Don’t let them see that. Then Cara saw the yellow-blonde head move, as if leaning into a caress. She looked at Cara, and smiled a little through the blood and tears. Cara caught her breath. She could feel the warmth of the sun in the hair under her palm.

  Cara was scared, when they got home, that the girl would tell her mother. But she didn’t – not that day, or any day since. She and Cara keep the secret.

  She doesn’t know if others have it; this connection, this vicarious touch. She has never had it with anyone else, not even with Rose.

  * * *

  Cara is crossing the lobby with an armful of freesias when the man arrests Greta. He wears another beautiful suit of herringbone. He does it quietly with a word in Greta’s ear. He does not touch her. Greta screams as if he had. Then she whispers, “I didn’t do it.” Her eyelash paint runs down her face in green and blue streaks.

  Cara drifts nearer. She says to Greta, quietly, “I enjoyed my midnight phone calls.”

  Greta looks at her, mouth a skewed ‘O’. “What?” she says. “What phone calls?”

  “She’s been harassing me,” Cara says to the man in the herringbone suit. “Nuisance calls to my room at all hours of the night.”

  “We’ll make sure we go into that in due course,” he says smoothly. Cara can tell that they won’t. It’s not important, what happens to Cara. She is property.

  “I didn’t call you,” Greta pleads, tearful, as if that would mend all. Cara looks at her in surprise. She can see that Greta is telling the truth.

  The man holds out his hand. Greta puts her silver nametag into his open palm. He follows her respectfully out of the glass doors, into the street. A black van is waiting.

  As expected they find the movie star’s jewels in Greta’s bag with a copy of the call sheet. That’s how she knew the movie star’s schedule. There are only seven pieces of jewellery, however; the platinum and sapphire cuff is missing. Greta must have sold it already. “That was my favourite,” the movie star says. “These other things are just trash. I’ll donate them to charity when we get home.” Cara knows that whichever piece was missing, it would have been the movie star’s favourite.

  Cara packs the recovered jewels into their bags, into their boxes, the travel safe.

  “I could have been killed,” the movie star says once more, standing before the mirror. She smoothes the dark wing of her eyebrow with a licked finger. Her cheeks are plump, still luminous with the residual effects of the transfer.

  * * *

  Shooting is finished. Cara packs the movie star’s shoes, encasing each one in an individual silk bag. She will be glad to get back to Los Angeles. There are special parks in the city where they don’t lace the air so heavily. Cara can go outside, see the sun. People in California want her to feel she has rights. The old world has no such concerns. Maybe it’s more honest that way.

  The travel unit is waiting in Cara’s room, a long silver cylinder. Its mouth gapes wide. Cara gets in and the lid slides silently closed, sealing her in darkness. There is a brief hiss, and then the synthetic scent of roses. The hormones are designed to smell like flowers. The light mist settles. Her skin absorbs it quickly. Sleep nudges at her. She is alone at last. The implant can’t see in the dark.

  As she drifts, Cara recalls the tinny bite of the safe as it gave to her teeth. Dreamily she slides up her sleeve, stroking the platinum and sapphire cuff where it is fastened high on her forearm. She found a way to commemorate the moment, after all. For some reason she didn’t want to leave this with the rest of the jewellery, in Greta’s bag.

  The cuff is valuable but that’s not why Cara took it. She can’t sell it – she can’t even look at it in the light, unless she wants the implant to record it. She does not know exactly why she kept it. If she is caught it will be the end of her. Cara fingers the fine mesh of the platinum. She can’t give it up. The movie star’s voice echoes in her mind: I love you, Cara.

  Cara thinks, You can’t love someone you own. But she thinks of the little girl on the softball pitch, her face wet with tears. There are different kinds of bondage.

  Sleep begins to take her in its dark folds. She slips into memory. Firelight on a cave wall. Elk blood runs hot between her teeth. Rose, her brother’s dead smile. The time before the weak came, with their poison mist and their pills, before they hobbled her limbs and took her teeth. The fear that lived in all their eyes, then – those eyes looked up at her, not down on her as they do now. When the powerful still ruled the earth, from the dark.

  Cara hopes the dead will call again; that she will hear their beloved, cold breath through the receiver, through years and time and space; feel them reaching for her with their silence, telling her that she is not forgotten. She hopes and hopes.

  Branch Line

  Paul Finch

  He’d been ‘Ricky Gates’ when he was at school. Now, he preferred the more adult ‘Richard Gates’. Which was understandable. He was fifty-nine, after all.

  While they didn’t find him as odious as they’d expected, his presence was discomforting. He was a hefty man, expansive around the gut, but with a barrel chest, immense shoulders, big arms and heavy-knuckled hands. He probably only stood about 5’11”, but he was seated when they entered, so it was difficult to be sure. His hair was long, lank and grey, his jaw grizzled, his face pale and pockmarked. He was rolling his own at the time, a delicate process, which he worked at carefully, not stopping even when they sat down. He watched them intently though, his eyes deep-set and red-rimmed.

  “Let me guess,” he finally said. “You want to know about Brian O’Rourke?” He didn’t bother waiting for an answer. “I understand. A young boy disappears in curious circumstances… curious but also mundane. An ordinary afternoon during the summer holidays, the sun shining, the sky blue. An everyday location – a little isolated, but not especially far from town. Mysteries of this nature rarely fade, do they? It’s only logical that questions will be asked – time and again – of the last person allegedly to see him alive.”

  He sat back, his rollup dangling between gnarled, nicoti
ne-stained fingers.

  One of them leaned forward, offering a light. He accepted, chugging for a few seconds. The cigarette was unfiltered and smelled foul. One of the visitors coughed. This was 2019. Indoor smoking was rarely permitted these days.

  Gates smiled.

  “Alas,” he said. “I can only tell you the same thing again. My statement will be exactly as it was that long-ago summer of 1973. Not one single aspect of it has changed. You know why?” He smiled again, more broadly, showing stubby yellow teeth. “Because, incredible as you’ll find it, it’s the absolute truth.”

  * * *

  It begins with a ghost story.

  Have you heard this tale? About the old Branch Line that skirted the eastern edge of our borough? You know it vaguely. Then, let me appraise you fully.

  First of all, you need to think of the Branch Line as a railway ring road, which allowed coal and other freight bound for Preston and Blackburn to head north and at the same time avoid clogging up the passenger workings in our town centre. But it also functioned as a short-cut from the Manchester line into central Lancashire, so from time to time it transported passengers as well, and that’s a crucial point.

  It was discontinued in the late 1950s, but by 1973 the rails and sleepers still occupied the old track bed, albeit forgotten and overgrown. It ran along a deep cutting, which was accessible on the east side of town from the spoil-land encircling what was then the defunct Alexandra Pit. From there, it led several miles southeast to northwest, traversing industrial land initially but after that farmland and finally woods that once used to be part of the Hanbury Hall estate but which by the 1970s were owned by the local authority, and therefore were wild and untended. Finally, it crossed Twenty Bridges, as we called it, a disused Victorian viaduct. It wasn’t possible to go further along the Branch Line than this as the viaduct was unsafe, and entry to it barricaded with barbed wire.