by Simon Avery
She felt the ground shift from beneath her feet and then she was beside Felicity again and the fire was welcome warmth on her face. All of Dave’s papers were burning now. There was only one thing left to toss onto the fire. It clambered up out of the earth as she took out the Polaroid. They could see its form shivering between the flames, its distorted face wrenched in misery, anger and whatever else Dave had given it in order to live.
She tossed the picture onto the fire and watched it shrivel in the flames.
11
Something Dave had said during their last phone call returned to Susanna the morning after the ritual:
It seems to me that if you yearn for one thing, you have to accept that you’ll have to let something else go in order to have that thing.
Whatever she’d expected of the mandrake hadn’t really occurred, or if it did, she didn’t recall it in any great detail. There were no mystical journeys or strange sexual urges to sate. After the fire, the two women had returned inside and made a cup of tea that tasted like earth, and then they went to bed. It was all very British of them. They slept together, falling asleep instantly. Susanna woke in the night and found Felicity curled up in her arms, like an infant. She was sleeping soundly. Perhaps it was the first night’s rest she had in a while. But the homunculus wasn’t gone. Not yet. Susanna could hear it in the corner of the room, spitting and whining, clinging to the shadows. After a while she drifted back to sleep. She wasn’t afraid of it anymore, of what it represented.
The next day, with Felicity’s help, she finished the bulk of the work that needed to be done at the house. There was more to be done of course, but it was time to go home. At the door, Felicity gave Susanna her phone number, although they both knew they’d never speak again. There was no need. And whatever had transpired between them had shifted Felicity’s demeanour to that of an over-gracious teenager. It made Susanna feel old.
When Susanna returned home that night and found the homunculus waiting for her in the dark rooms, she felt undeterred, unafraid. She saw it for what it was. Either it would eventually diminish to nothing or she would learn how to live with it. That was what people did every day of their lives.
The next morning she’d risen with what felt like optimism. She was a little suspicious of it at first, but she cradled it for a while and she sensed it was the start of something new. Next week, after scattering Dave’s ashes in the garden of remembrance – another ritual fraught with emotion – she’d start looking for a new house. Perhaps she’d even begin looking for a new job. It was time to go back to the world.
Born in 1971, Simon Avery lives and works in Birmingham. Over the last twenty-two years he has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Crimewave, The Best British Mysteries IV, Beneath the Ground, Birmingham Noir, Terror Tales of Yorkshire and Something Remains. He has been nominated for the Crime Writers Association Dagger award and the British Fantasy Award. He can be contacted via Facebook and his blog at simonavery/blog.wordpress.com.
Thanks to Adrian Jones, Brian Baker, Joseph Hegarty, Peter Brown, Colin Clynes, ManDick Tam, Steve Lowe and Alan Harper for their friendship and encouragement over the years. Thanks are also due to Andy Cox for his continued support, and the much missed Joel Lane, who showed me how it was done and had unfailing belief in my abilities. To Gary McMahon, Ted Grau and Nicholas Royle for their kind words about The Teardrop Method. And to Amanda Collin, for making sure I never give up.
