The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: MARCH 6, 644

  Three months have passed. Shina cannot keep herself away from me.

  She was thinner now, her cheeks gone hollow, face full of strain and some deep and thoughtful interior struggle: a unique experience, for her. She’d been driven here to me, almost against her will. I knew the moment I saw her shifty eyes that she had come to me with a purpose.

  She wanted something from me, something only I could give, and she was trying to work up the courage to demand it. Our conversation, if you could call it that, was full of pauses and uncertainties. Life had carried us so far apart that Queen Shina and I had nothing to discuss.

  Finally she broke out: “Ashterat! I can’t live by his side any longer. Give me a poison!”

  “Poison? For you?”

  “No.” She smirked. “For the King.”

  If I refused her, she would try something else. Lady Death has countless faces for humanity and to find a method to kill is not difficult, even for a Queen.

  But if I chose, I might leave some small hope for the King. For the King, if not for Shina.

  I found a vial for her and I filled it to the rim with the Potion.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: MARCH 9, 644

  He was older now, the age Lavendul had once been, and he had not forgotten the dark bond between us. It brought him to Bourgeois House.

  A storm was raving this night, not any storm of my doing. It was a storm with the taint of the Beasts Outside, full of baffled fury. I saw him skulking past my window, lit by a flash of thunder, and I opened the gate to let him in.

  He was drenched, his dark hair plastered to his forehead. He wore no hooded mantle, this time.

  “Shina is dead!” he told me. “When I survived the poison, she drank it herself, and it killed her. Why did you spare me so long, Ashterat?”

  “Because you refused it.”

  “I really refused to drink?” He was unbelieving.

  I laughed at him. We slipped together into the World Outside. To Forest Mansion, to the room of the clock. Everything veiled in dust. “Strike the midnight!” I screamed at the clock.

  But the clock did not strike.

  Rassigart raised both hands in a gesture of power, and beneath his steady gaze the ancient wood of the clock cracked and gave way. The mosaic face shattered, and the machine fell into a heap. I watched, without moving, without trembling, without fear. Within the shattered debris I thought I saw a pale shape rising upward, as thin and formless as a sigh of relief.

  The new King—the Taskre King!—turned toward me.

  His mind was ablaze with strange and terrible light. I could not bear those glowing eyes. His hands on my flesh were like two coals. He pressed possessive, icy lips on mine, and I knew he was not human any longer.

  * * *

  —

  I will not write in my diary any longer. I do not need to write any more. Other people will write about us now. They will tell our story nonetheless.

  But they will never dare to tell everything.

  D. F. Lewis (1948– ) is an English writer and editor who has published well over one thousand stories since 1986, including multiple appearances in The Year’s Best Horror Stories and Best New Horror, and won the Karl Edward Wagner Award from the British Fantasy Society in 1998. From 2001 to 2010, he edited the Nemonymous magazine/anthology series, which published stories whose authors were (usually) anonymous and then named in subsequent volumes. “A Brief Visit to Bonnyville” originally appeared in 1995 in the magazine The Third Alternative and was reprinted in Lewis’s 2003 collection Weirdmonger.

  A BRIEF VISIT TO BONNYVILLE

  D. F. Lewis

  1

  “WHICH WAY IN?” asked the guide.

  I was amused by his cool-staring simplicity, as if he had put himself in my hands, despite the fact that I had employed him to help me around a difficult town.

  The building in question was the first we had seen approaching anything I had in mind. Not that I was necessarily intent on renting a house here of all places. Since I liked things with edges and finite form, being on the coast was a plus—but what about the complex mapwork of streets? I would never grow accustomed to it. The routes all finished at the fish front, that was true. But what was the point of wasting time heading inland again—only to lose myself time after time? Nothing could prevent me from making my decision in the goodness of time. And no guide would rush me—specially one who didn’t know his exits from his entrances.

  Eventually, he introduced me to the landlady who we discovered pegging up some smalls in the side garden. We needed to traverse an allotment and breach a fence in order to reach her—but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “How long you looking for?” she asked.

  “Since ages ago,” I replied, misunderstanding her question. Indeed, I had been perturbed by the depth of her voice and the manner in which she kept looking at the guide rather than at myself.

  “I mean how long do you want the place for?” she finally managed to splutter out, under the gaze of the guide. I almost expected him to reply on my behalf, forgetting, as I did, for a moment, that he was not somebody I had hired to initiate actions or make decisions or help out when my mind failed. He was an ordinary guide, an agent—not a brainwright.

  Gathering my thoughts towards their leading-edge, I said:

  “Can we have an open-ended arrangement, vis-à-vis any lease?”

  “Bonnyville’s only vacant for the Winter.”

  She still locked eyes with the guide, whilst answering my question.

  As we all knew, it was currently late Autumn.

  I had not noticed that the establishment owned a name, least of all one that would have better suited a French township than a particular English seaside mansion. I was reminded of the guide’s impertinence in querying the whereabouts of the house’s entrance. Perhaps if we found that we would find the nameplate.

  “Only for the Winter?”

  “My daughter Thomasina is returning in the Spring.”

  And, as if conjured up by the very mention of the name, the parasol of a young lady popped in and out of a side entrance, as she evidently officiated her luggage being manhandled to the outside—in readiness, no doubt, for a taxi’s arrival.

  Being Autumn, there was that unexpected chill in the air and the lady motioned us to take advantage of a minor entrance such as the one being used by Thomasina, rather than resort to the long way round to the main one—where the Bonnyville nameplate could no doubt be found fixed to the wall.

  By then, Thomasina had vanished back into the house, leaving no sign of her as we negotiated the servants’ quarters. Only one old man took any notice of our passage, raising his eyes, as he did, from the task of sticking soles to old shoes. The smell of hot glue was more than a little heady, causing me to feel as if breathing was an exercise in contrived dreaming.

  I gazed askance at the guide—or at least I hope I did—as if, incredibly, I blamed him for the strange thoughts which had failed to by-pass my mind. Meanwhile—and there had not been much generosity in time for this to happen—Thomasina’s Mother had led the guide (and he me) towards a corridor which no longer carried the odour of servants.

  Although I did not wish to show it openly, I was rather impressed with the ambience of Bonnyville. I caught the glimpse of the interior of a room—the one, in fact, where Thomasina herself was still packing—her own glimpse of me coincidentally meeting mine of her.

  I noticed, however, despite there only being a split second available to make such notice, that there was a cat or suchlike arching its back on her bed. A black one with sleek sides. I hoped it was not being left behind.

  I hated pets.

  The guide, seeing me dither at the door, led me by the hand towards where Thomasina’s Mother was dem
onstrating the sea-view from one of the landings. Except it was now entirely black out there, making the exercise pretty pointless. She did not say anything—so, without even the benefit of a supporting glance from the guide, I compensated by stating the less than obvious:

  “The sea.”

  I breathed deeply as if the salt tangs were present there on the landing. It was true that we could hear the screech of gulls, but sounds were always, in my experience, less guarded against than smells. The shout of the cook—the aroma of freshly baked bread…I knew which I preferred as they competed to permeate those winter walls, during my brief visit to Bonnyville.

  2

  Having entered Bonnyville—in the first instance—by means of a side entrance. A trader’s door. A servant’s late night escape route home. Call it what I might. Having entered, as I was saying, in such a manner, I did not—could not have even begun to—guess what a devil’s own job it would be to find the main exit. The one to where I imagined a spiral stairway, with gilded balustrades, would lead. Where all due pomp and circumstance would arise. Where, in short, it was to be my right to go and come during that long, long season at Bonnyville.

  Indeed, if the truth were known, I never even found a side entrance, let alone the front one. I spent all those bright days—when a sprightly walk along the sea front would have done me the world of good—winding my path from floor to floor, from storey to storey, threading the corridors, being waylaid by servants for their day’s orders, stumbling through sweaty kitchens, dark wine-cellars, brick-a-bracketed attics…

  I should have retained the guide. He returned to the town where, he claimed, his mother was ill. He didn’t like pets, either. And the place was crawling with them. Some of them, not pets at all.

  Thomasina’s Mother—as well as Thomasina herself—had fled the Winter for warmer climes. And, left to my own devices, I sometimes couldn’t even find myself—and abandoned a body in a bed—to act as go-between for any dreams. Whilst someone else ghosted the corridors as well as conducting wordless conversations out of any servant’s earshot.

  The cook’s complaints were never very far away. Grilled gull was all she ever seemed to serve, following whole days of cursing the kitchen maids. I wonder how she caught them, I thought. Like swans, surely gulls were preserved creatures. Poaching went on at the seaside as well as the Scottish moors, I assumed. The sound of seagulls, yes. Gunshot, yes. Unless it was the coastguard’s cannon.

  Never leaving the brick environs of Bonnyville, I failed to discover the secret of this—and of other things.

  Until I met one of the girl servants, who took more pity on me than most. Her name was Claura—I think that was how it was spelt—and she was chambermaid when Thomasina was in residence. It had not seemed correct, presumably, for her to act as chambermaid to such as I. Despite this, she became my confidante in an increasingly lengthy winter.

  She enlightened me on the gulls’ lot and that of the housebound pets. I can barely recall her, although I did, at the time, fall in love with her increasingly familiar face. And, yes, her skimpy uniforms.

  3

  Without a shadow of doubt, most memories will return, as long as the person recalling them is patient. Claura was in fact about seventeeen, eighteen at a push, with dark ringlets and a penchant for evening frocks—the latter, of course, when she wasn’t in uniform.

  She was often full of her older brother—who, she told me, was in the army fighting in one of the wars.

  “Well, you can’t fight in more than one war at a time,” I said, trying to put some humour into my voice.

  Luckily, she smiled. We were sitting in the breakfast room, she having finished plying me with my usual fish dish: me digesting such food fresh from the town’s fish front (about a half a mile, she told me, from the trippers’ promenade): she veering from such sea subjects with natter of different weight.

  The two of us had built up a rapport; mind, it wasn’t even Christmas yet. I guessed she hadn’t worked at Bonnyville for long, judging by her age—which I hadn’t at this stage been rude enough to query. As the large corner clock impinged its rhythm on my consciousness, she told me of the place where she was born: a shanty-town a bit further along the coast. Most of the houses were glorified beach huts—and there was Sweet Tina’s, a shop with nothing but net curtains to sell. Hovels with broken balconies. A sea-wall which kept the tides from venting their winter wrath upon the down-trodden byways and telephone-pole lined streets. A pub with large goggle-eyed fish in a tank. Sun-glittering waves.

  Innsmouth was what she called the place, I think.

  The clock at Bonnyville impinged its rhythm upon my consciousness—as it often did immediately prior to me making a decision to utter something I had been plucking up courage to utter:

  “What is Thomasina really like?”

  The addition of the word “really” struck exactly the right balance, if I say so myself, implying, as it did, that I had already some knowledge of Thomasina other than her parasol and the hustle-bustle of her departure from Bonnyville.

  “She likes teasing her mother,” was the strange reply. Claura’s smile had become one of teasing in itself, instead of indulging me my tactless joke.

  “About what?”

  “About visitors saying that there’s romance in the air. And that the cook doesn’t buy poultry from the poulterers but shoots gulls from the cliff…”

  I laughed. I had myself heard much about seagulls from listening to the backchat of other servants. It seemed to be Bonnyville’s running theme as well as its scene-set of screeching sound. Yet this was the first time that I actually began to believe that gulls were used by the kitchen staff in stews and grills. Until then, I had been sure it was simply a joke.

  One self-effacing footman, who had earlier whispered in my ear about black gulls that flapped silently at night above Bonnyville’s topmost roof, almost lost his credibility gap in the light of hindsight provided by Claura’s cliff-shooting anecdotes. I could even imagine the cook—plump, rubicund, her layered skirts flying—as she scaled the beetling crags: gull-gun ready-cocked.

  4

  Bonnyville eventually shaped itself within my mind as a “calling-place”: not an uncommon term amid people such as I—and having originally encountered this term when a small child, I had ever since sought out an example of one. There are ghostly undercurrents to the term and religious overtones. Much like a minaret in the East. Or a house for earthbound spirits much spoken of in macabre literature.

  Truth to say (which is almost as redundant a thing to say as “needless”), I had suspected, if not consciously, that I had stumbled upon the very calling-place that had haunted me since that crossover period between being a baby and a child. Thomasina’s Mother—and, later, Claura—were mere ingredients of its plan to entangle me in its nest of rooms, hallways and attics.

  I was, of course, thankful that it was to be a brief visit, albeit one lasting the length of Winter. However, it was a pity I had not anticipated the horrors that a gentle ghost generally does not fetch.

  Under the cover of darkness and the gull screams, I was soon to torture the servants whom I grew to love merely because they existed around me. And to tell such a story is in itself a torture, albeit nothing when compared with the torture that twists its pen in the wounds.

  Yet, calling it a story cannot conceal things that were both true and needlessly inevitable. Not fictions on the hoof, but honest derivations from the destiny which I set in motion by my mere presence at Bonnyville. Yes, there is no doubt I arrived there actually to seek out a story. Yet, strangely, not the story I eventually found myself writing—proof, if proof were needed, that facts were their own fulfilment.

  I was forced to write things I thought I would never need to write. Things that made me as vulnerable as anybody else. Plots that contained myself and wouldn’t let go.

  5
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  I suppose the first occasion in which I learned about matters which would later change my memory were from the lips of Claura herself.

  This was surprising because I had not yet met any of the other servants—well, not met them sufficiently so as to talk to them or even listen to them surreptitiously. I tell a lie: there had been the cook and her lengthy remonstrations from the kitchen—but one couldn’t heed them. There were mere interjections which meant the same whether anybody else listened or not.

  I remember Claura’s loose tongue did tighten up as soon as she saw me lift my eyes towards her as she made my bed. I recall her words exactly, although, in retrospect, they sound too stylised, too made up, too—what’s the word?—contrived. Too much intended to take the story along than indicate the independence and unreliability of reality. You see, proper existence is illogical. All else is a series of stories. Whatever the case, Claura said the following out of the blue, as a non-sequitur, as—what shall I say?—a throwaway line, a birdbrain concoction:

  “There are not really black gulls at night.”

  “What are they then? Baby demons from Hell?”

  My reply was unconsidered, although, now, I realise it was the best thing to say. How little did I know that I had indeed hit the nail squarely on the head. At the time, I assumed she was saying that gulls were white, whatever the state of the light or the time of day.

  “What you two in a huddle about?”

  The face that appeared in the doorway of my bedroom was one bearing the imprint of the young footman’s. A rather cheeky smile for one so self-effacing, I thought, especially as I was formally the paying guest in the house and he one of the servants. I sensed this was Claura’s beau and, as if seeing her for the first time—through the catalyst of his wide-set eyes which twinkled below a ginger thatch—I caught myself looking at her breasts which the uniform did little to conceal. Yet there was insufficient opportunity for stirring any longings in my valve-knotted heart, since the footman with the face was quickly followed by someone I did recognize.