by Wayne Hill
Splinter Salem Part Two
Splinter Salem, Volume 2
Wayne Hill
Published by Wayne Hill, 2021.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
SPLINTER SALEM PART TWO
First edition. June 1, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 Wayne Hill.
ISBN: 979-8201261092
Written by Wayne Hill.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Splinter Salem Part Two
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
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About the Publisher
For Tommy and Marie.
1
The young cadet sits bolt upright — her hands clutching the sheets, white at the knuckles — with a deep gulp of air, like a drowning person resurfacing. Her eyes sting from the sweat that is tracing its way down from her forehead. Blinking several times, she slowly becomes aware of her vulnerability and lack of clothes. The information from her senses slowly makes its way to her foggy brain for processing.
“Oh God, my hand,” she croaks softly. The cadet feels like her left hand is very cold. She pulls the cold hand up from under the furs. She screams. Her hand is no longer flesh, but cold metal. She stares, wide-eyed, at the alien piece of metal at the end of her arm, her screams continue. She shakes her hand, as if trying to shake off the robotic thing, and the strange fingers move and brush each other with metallic shink-ing noises. The noises just make her scream louder.
Reaching the back wall of the cave, the fur blanket still wrapped around her, her screaming stops as the pain of her many injuries becomes urgent. Her adrenaline is keeping her from passing out, but it is stopping her from thinking straight. She holds her new metallic claw out in front of her and lets out another shrill scream.
“What in Hoolatian drum-weed are you screaming for, girl? You’re hurting my head. Now, enough! Enough. Calm yourself. You are safe.”
The young cadet had not seen Old Idra sitting in the shadows. Idra had been watching over the sleeping woman, smoking and amusing herself with the memories of her long life — some painful, some perfect. The old lady’s rasping voice sought out the now trembling and tearful cadet.
“You have nothing to fear now, young lady.” Idra strolls over to the only light source, a wood-burning aga. Traces of light escape from around the outside of the small metal door in its front. Idra opens the small metal door and the light of burning wood paints the cave with dancing shadows. Talon had lit the aga fire for Idra, as he always does, before he left. Shadows are cast on to the old woman; and the grinning human skulls lining the ceiling and the walls.
Seeing the shocking decorations, the cadet screams again. Idra closes her eyes and waits for her to stop.
“Even the nightmares will go eventually,” Idra continues softly. “And, within no time, you shall feel your old self again. Whatever that may be.”
“Please, d—d—don’t hurt me.”
Idra either ignores the cadet or does not hear her. The ancient crone continues shuffling around the cave. She lights her pipe using her lighting stick and, once the pipe is lit and puffing well, she closes the aga door and waddles across the cave to her enormous fireplace.
The young cadet had collapsed and was now lying on her side on the cold stone floor, half in and half out of her fur blanket. She has her normal hand over her scarred face and is moaning with fear and pain.
Idra uses the glowing end of the cane she used to light her pipe to start the main fire in the fossilised bone hearth. The crackling, as the fire catches, triggers painful memories for the young cadet. Memories of the snapping of twigs as she was chased through the woods by monsters. Laughing monsters that swept upon them and dragged them into underground caves. Caves where she was beaten by several of the males and gang raped. She remembered nothing after this brutal attack. She knew she must have been taken from there, but it seemed to her as if she had died in those caves.
“Your pains must be getting worse,” Idra says, but there is no response from the girl. She just lies where she fell and stares blankly into the nascent fire.
“This will help you,” the old woman shuffles over to the young woman and offers her pipe, bowl first.
“It hurts,” says the cadet, her first words were pleasing to Idra.
“This will make the pain subside. Take the smoke deep down into your lungs and try to hold it there.”
“Will it make the pain go away?”
“Of course, my dear.”
“What happened to my hand?”
“All in good time. Just smoke and relax and let Idra’s special blend heal those pains.”
“I’m cold,” says the cadet not showing any sign of grabbing the proffered pipe.
“Well then that’s no good,” grunts Idra. “Come closer to the fire — here, give me your arm! I will help you to a seat and then go get you your clothes.”
The young cadet nervously obliges because the old lady reminds her of her great-grandmother. She does not know where her great-grandmother is now. The Believer’s court banished her entire family, but to different places. She thinks then of her mother and father, as Idra helps her to an odd-looking sofa near the fire, and tears flow again.
“They’re all dead, aren’t they? They’re all dead.”
“Who, dear?”
“My family; all my friends.”
“If they were taken by the Barrenites — those monsters — then, yes. I’m sorry, child. There is evil in this world so powerful that, sometimes, it makes all the good people in this crazy world seem so very, very far away,” says Idra and holds out her pipe once more. “I truly am sorry for your loss, my dear, but try to smoke this. It will help dull the pain, both mental and physical. Trust me. I use it for these aching old bones.”
The cadet tentatively takes the pipe and — with, at first, shallow drags, and then deeper draughts — obliges the old woman. The results are astounding. The pain is all but gone after her seventh long toke. Her thoughts become clear. She requests her clothes and Idra points to where they lie, folded and patched up. She gratefully puts them on.
“I — I’m Sherindria Devlin. I am ... I was a cadet of the USA. I don’t know what I am now,” Sherindria says, looking at her metallic hand. “I don’t know what anything is.”
“Well, you look just splendid, don’t you? I used to have a uniform, just like that one. I’m afraid the Ol’ USA still have no dress sense or imagination. I’m Idra, by the by.”
“What is this, Idra?” Sherindria asks, holding her glinting metal hand out.
“That’s a gift from, Astilla,” Idra manages as she goes into one of her coughing fits.
“What happened to me?” Sherindria asks as she examines her new hand.
“The Barrenites took your old hand, and young Astilla — who has a gift with metal — was generous enough to give you a new hand. You have to admit, it does look glamorous,” Idra says.
“It’s a monstrosity. I want it off!” Sherindria says, futilely tugging at the metallic hand.
“And what about those that hurt you? Would you not like to hurt them back? You could do that now, with that monstrosity. I know what happens to young cadet women when they are taken by the Barrenites, young lady. Oh yes, I know what they do. I know from experience.”
Sherindria stops tugging at the hand and sinks, once more, into her dark place.
“Would you not like that, dear? Would you not l
ike to slice their balls off? Hmm?” Idra says, staring inquisitively at the young lady with the hard, onyx eyes of a woman who knows everything about the cadet.
“No,” Sherindria says in a small voice. “No. I just want my hand back. Please.”
“Interesting. Very well. Astilla left you this.”
Sherindria is passed a small vial of violet-coloured matter. “What is this?” Sherindria asks.
“I've absolutely no idea. You’re to pour some over the hand, and some into your left eye. Just don’t drink any and don’t ask me why, or which to do first, because I’ve forgotten.”
“What does it do,” asks Sherindria, turning the canister in her hand and watching the colour change from violet to deep red and back again.
“I think he said it would change into anything you like. Hmm, such a complicated soul, young Astilla,” says Idra, a slight smile touching her old lips.
2
Marie-Ann O’Shea wears long gloves to hide her mangy green fingers and forearms, a symptom of the final stages of the Dionysus virus. She tells Tommy that her blue tongue is caused by her love for colourful space grog. Tommy knows Marie-Ann is ill — they all are. It does not take a genius to know that something is wrong when black shapes swim under peoples’ skin.
At eighteen years of age, Marie-Ann is in the final stages of the terrible virus. The drunken culture of the lanes is a million miles away from the fearsome stories his father told him, but it is not without its darkness. The horror is just different. But, in this plague town, Tommy had discovered a force more corrosive and powerful than any weapon: love.
Marie-Ann and Tommy are falling in love. They are inseparable. Tommy listens to her singing the old, Gaelic songs she learned as a child. Her singing voice is clear and strong.
Tommy thinks it is the most beautiful he has ever heard.
Tommy loves watching her sing. Once or twice a week Marie-Ann puts on a show for the patrons of The Weeping Willow. Sometimes her father plays his flute, sometimes her mother joins in with her violin. On other occasions, locals join in with various instruments. Some are new to Tommy. There is a small, hand-held drum they called a bodhran (pronounced bow- rawn), which is struck with a small, wooden stick, the cipan. The old gentleman who owns and plays this Celtic drum is Bradach. Bradach agrees to give Tommy lessons but, unfortunately, he dies a week or so after they first meet. Tommy will always remember Bradach’s skill with the small drum, it always made the hairs rise on the back of his neck.
Marie-Ann makes finding Tommy appropriate accommodation her number one priority, as she feels sorry for him. She finds him a disused hut which the two of them fix up the best they can. Tommy stashes his personal belongings, including his joining tools, in a large safe donated to him by Marie-Ann’s father. ‘Everyone has things that are precious to them, my boy. It’s best to keep them close by so no one can pinch ‘em,’ he said.
As Tommy squeezes the gloved hand of Marie-Ann he thinks he has all the value in this world by his side, and he smiles at Marie-Ann, an easy and natural smile. She reads his smile and teasingly calls him ‘soft’ (and some other words to that effect), but he does not care. He has love.
Tommy has not revealed his EPC or joining tools to Marie-Ann yet, and he is uncertain whether he should. Would she consider him crazy? Or, worse still, a monster?
His thoughts and fears are based in the knowledge that the O’Sheas have, for generations, been born, lived, and then died in the Lanes. Their only knowledge of the vastness of the universe came from new prisoners that survived the journey to the Lanes, or, in the years preceding the virus, from the Guardians themselves. Tommy feels this isolation from new technology is strange and somehow beautiful but, as his love grows, keeping his greatest accomplishment from his sweetheart seems almost a betrayal.
Tommy awakes during the night. Several months may have disappeared into the bizarre melting pot of drunken culture that is the Lanes, but not a single night had passed that he did not see the clifftop massacre in his febrile dreams. He is used to bad dreams but tonight is worse than usual. Mutilated ghosts extend filthy tendrils from their open graves, and they snake across the ocean, slither over the seawall, and invade his sleep. Gruesome images bombard him in a steady stream that he finds hard to shake, even when he returns to the waking world. Tommy sits at the end of his bed sweating and trembling, moonlight gleams on a half-empty whiskey bottle at his feet.
Tommy grabs the bottle, rolling its cool smooth surface over his hot forehead, before biting out the cork and drinking deep. In the past few months, all the roughness of the fire water has disappeared, and he drinks half of what is left, re-corking the bottle. Anything to rid himself of these imaginings. The only time the nightmares fade is when he is with Marie-Ann. Everything about her is calming, but he cannot go to The Weeping Willow and wake her up every time he has a bad dream, although that is exactly what he wants to do.
He has the next best thing, though. Tommy has fixed Marie-Ann’s father’s memory plate projection unit and found eight blank memory plates. On these plates, Tommy has imprinted all his favourite memories. He sits up for an hour drinking whiskey and watching her sing. His mind becomes empty. He is content, lost in worlds of sound, in swaying motions, in form and colour. Sleep slowly gathers him back into her shadowy arms, but once there the nightmares find him again. At around nine in the morning, sleep defeated by his night terrors, he takes a walk along the barrier wall overlooking the sea, hoping the fresh air and bracing sea breeze will clear his head.
The sea is choppy, and the sky has a dark greenish hue to it, a distant storm colouring the horizon. Tommy sits for a few minutes watching seabirds dive for fish. He thinks about his mother and father. He wonders what they are doing now and if they are happy. He hopes they are not too sad when they think about him. He thinks of Talon and Daria for a while. Of how she never thinks of her father as a monster — to her, he is just a loving father. He draws out the knife that Thankwell gave him and smiles at the strange gift. “Let’s see what she thinks of me, Thankwell,” Tommy says to his distorted image on the blade.
At noon, Tommy finds himself at The Weeping Willow and in front of an incredibly angry Mr O’Shea. “She won’t even see her own mother and father. She’s barricaded herself in her room with several bottles of my potcheen, so I doubt there’s anything anyone can do until she decides to come out. You’re probably best to stay away until she’s in a better mood, lad. She packs a fair punch, so she does.” Mr O’Shea trundles off rubbing his head.
Tommy walks around the outside of the pub until he is under her bedroom window, three floors up on the western seaward side. He throws pebbles at her window and, at the third throw, the window opens and Marie-Ann’s pale, mascara-stained face pokes out. She smiles down at him but then the smile fades, as if the first drops of the imminent rainstorm have doused her inner fire. Tommy always thinks of her as a fierce, raging pillar of fire, but today she is diminished, more like a candle guttering in a strong draught.
“I’m not feeling well today, Tommy. I’m sorry... It’s just...I feel a little...” She sobs and her hands hide her face.
Tommy moves closer to the pub.
“Marie-Ann, I want to stay here with you, but the storm is coming. How about you let me in, and we talk? I have a bottle of scotch and some stuff to tell you. How about we get you out of that room, eh? It can’t be good for you to be locked up in there all day long. I know how you’re feeling. Honestly. It's best to get out.”
“O’ Tommy! You don’t know how I feel. You’ve only known me for a few weeks.”
Tommy feels a pain in his chest, as he watches her sob and gulp from her bottle of potcheen. It is almost as if the bond between them is slipping. It is a sharp pain. A pain he has not experienced since he read his mother and father’s letter all those months ago. His pain, and the considerable alcohol in his bloodstream, make his words increasingly harsh.
“I understand, Marie-Ann. I understand despair. I’ve been alone my entir
e life, but you’re the one light in this dark room I keep inside my head. You’ve illuminated a grey cold place in my heart where love was dreamt but never known. I’m fucking alone, like you! And I feel your pain! I’ve been banished from everyone I hold dear, and this is where I will die. You are my girl, my love, and we will die together. I hurt just as much as you! And, if you die, I’ll fucking die, too! Do you hear me? You crazy, Irish bitch!”
“How can you understand, Tommy? I was born here in the Lanes. I think I can even see the exact spot — over there! Between the fucking cabbages and Heindricht’s shithouse! This is never getting better for me. This is my life, now. This — this! — is everything I’ve ever known.” She takes another violent pull on her potcheen. “Fuck this rock of an island! I’ve never left this place and I’ll die here, Tommy. I’ll die and I haven’t done anything. I’ve got nothing! I’ve done nothing and I’ve got nothing. Nothing at all. I’m going to die without having lived. My life is shit! How could you possibly understand?”
She throws the now empty bottle at Tommy, slams the window shut and throws herself on her bed, screaming into the pillows.
Tommy could just hear her muffled crying from above, and he would do anything to make it stop.
“It’s fucking cruel, Marie-Ann! Life is cruel! But there are good things, too!”
“Like what? Like fuckin’ what? I’m dying, Tommy. Dying in this shithole! My life is nothing but drinking. Drinking to stay alive just to drink some more. Singing to a bunch of drunken criminals. That is my life. All of it! I wish I could fly away from this place. There’s a dome community on an asteroid and on it lives a community of artists and performers. I heard about it months back. I should have been born there. That would’ve been just fine, but no! I live here — in hell!” She lies there sobbing a while before a hand softly touches the back of her head.
