“Ghosts?”
“Mm hmm.” He moved across to the man and showed him the handbill. “Got this today, in the newspaper. Ever hear of anything like that?”
The man shook his head. “Can’t say that I have, no.”
“You think such a thing is possible?”
The man shrugged. “They do say anything’s possible. Maybe ghosts see everything in one hit ... the then, the now and the to come. Maybe time doesn’t mean anything at all to them. Could be they just hop right on board of their fog time machine and go wherever or whenever they’ve a mind.”
Bennett looked again at the handbill, his eyes tracing those curly letters. “But why would they want to come back ... ghosts, I mean?”
“Maybe because they forget what things were like? Forget the folks they left behind? They say the living forget the dead after a while: well, maybe it works both ways.” He shrugged again, looked down into his coffee. “Who knows.”
Was the man nervous? Bennett frowned. Maybe he was breaking some kind of celestial rules by moving the conversation to a point where the man would have no choice but to corroborate Bennett’s belief ... and maybe that would mean—
He thrust the handbill back into his pocket and the man looked immediately relieved, if still a little apprehensive.
“Yeah, well,” Bennett said in a dismissive tone, “what are ghosts but memories?”
The man nodded. “Right. Memories. I like that. And what is Heaven but a small town ... a small town like this one. A small town that’s just a little ways up or down the track.”
Now it was Bennett’s turn to nod. “You know,” Bennett went on, “we used to play a game, back when I was a kid, where we used to say which sense we would keep if we were forced to give up all but one of the senses, and why.
“Kids would say, ‘hearing’ and they’d say ‘because I couldn’t listen my records,’ or they’d say ‘sight,’ ‘because I couldn’t read my comic books or watch TV or go to the movies.’”
“And what did you say?”
Bennett smiled. This was a story he’d told his father on more than one occasion. “I used to say I wouldn’t give up my memory, because without my memory nothing that had ever happened to me would mean anything. Everything I am—forget the skin and flesh and bone, forget the muscles and the sinews and the arteries—everything I am is memories.”
The man smiled. “You ever stop to think that maybe you’re a ghost?”
Bennett laughed. “Did you?”
And the man joined in on the laughter. “An angel, maybe.”
“An angel?”
The man shrugged. “A messenger. That’s what angels are ... messengers.”
“Yeah? And what’s your message?”
The man laughed. “Oh, that would be telling now. Wouldn’t it.”
Bennett suddenly realized he could now see the house across the street quite clearly. Could see the front door opening ... could see the unmistakable outline of Jenny Coppertone stepping out onto the front step, staring up into the sky. Then she turned around and went back into the house.
Bennett heard the muted sound of a door slamming.
The fog’s hold on the world was weakening.
He looked across at the man standing in front of the sink, saw him frowning at the mug of coffee, shuffling his arms around like he was having difficulty with it. Maybe it was too hot for him ... but, hadn’t he been drinking it all this time?
Outside, a car went by slowly, its lights playing on the mist.
Then the haurrrnk! blasted again, the same sound he’d heard before ... but different in tone now. This time it sounded more like a warning.
The man dropped the mug and Bennett watched it bounce once, coffee spraying across the floor and the table legs and the chairs.
Bennett watched it roll to a stop—amazingly unbroken—before he looked up. The man was looking across at him, his face looking a little pale ... and a little sad.
“I couldn’t ... I couldn’t keep a hold of it,” he said.
“You have to go,” Bennett said. He knew it deep in his heart ... deep in that place where he knew everything there was to know.
“Yes, I have to go.”
“I’ll see you off—”
The man held up his hand. “No,” he snapped. And then, “No, I’m sure you’ve got things to do ... things to be getting on with.”
“Memories to build,” Bennett added.
“Right, memories to build.” He moved forward from the counter, unsteadily at first, watching his feet move one in front of the other as though he were walking a tightrope. Bennett made to give him a hand but the man pulled away. “Can’t do that,” he said.
They stood looking at each other for what seemed like a long time, Bennett desperately wanting to take that one step forward—that one step that would carry him twenty-seven years—and wrap his arms around his father, bury his face in his father’s neck and smell his old familiar smells, smells whose aroma he couldn’t recall ... how desperately he wanted to give new life to old memories. But he knew he could not.
As he reached the door, the man stopped for a second and turned around. “You know, my son, when he was a kid, he had a nickname.”
Bennett smiled. “Yeah? What was it?”
“Bubber.”
“Bubber?” Oh my god ... Bubber . . . it was Bubber because I—
“He had a stutter—nothing too bad, but it was there—and his name was ... his name began with a B.”
Bennett could feel his eyes misting up.
“Kids can be cruel, can’t they?”
It was all he could do to nod.
The door closed, the screen door slammed a ricochet rat-a-tat and Bennett was alone again ... more alone than he had ever felt in his life. “Take care,” he said to the empty kitchen.
And you, a voice said somewhere inside his head.
He waited a full minute before he went to the door and opened it, stepped out into the fresh December air and walked to the street. “And what was the message, old timer?” he said.
The fog had gone and the watery winter sun was struggling through the overhead early-morning haze.
Cars were moving up and down, people were walking on the sidewalks, but there was no sign of the man.
“Hey, Bennett!”
Bennett gave a wave to Jack Coppertone as he pulled the handbill from his pants pocket. It was now a flyer for The Science Fiction Book Club; maybe that was what it had always been. As he folded it carefully, thinking back to that final sight of his visitor pulling open the door, he suddenly turned and ran back to the house.
On the table, right where the man had placed it, was a hat.
The message!
Bennett walked carefully across the kitchen, heart beating so hard he thought it was going to burst through his chest and his shirt, and reached for it, closing his eyes, expecting to connect with just more empty air.
But his fingers touched material.
And he lifted it, not daring to open his eyes ... he was breaking rules here, of that he was sure ... but maybe, just maybe, if only one or maybe two senses were working, he could pull it off. He lifted the hat up and buried his face inside the brim.
What are ghosts but memories? he heard himself saying from just a few minutes earlier. And there they were ... memories. The only question was, were they from the past or the future?
Almost as soon as he had breathed in, the fragrance dissipated until there was only the smell of soap and the feel of Bennett’s empty hands cradling his face. But deep inside his head, the memories were still there, smelling fresh as blue bonnets in spring air.
Haurrrnnnnnnnnk!
Bennett looked at the window and saw that it had started to snow.
THE FOLD
Conrad Williams
CONRAD WILLIAMS is the author of the novels Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Blonde on a Stick and Loss of Separation. He has also written four novellas: “Near
ly People,” “Game,” “The Scalding Rooms” and “Rain.”
Williams is a past recipient of the British Fantasy Award, the Littlewood Arc Prize and the International Horror Guild Award. He is the author of more than eighty short stories, some of which appear in his first collection, Use Once Then Destroy. A new collection, Open Heart Surgery, is forthcoming from PS Publishing, as is the anthology Gutshot, which marks his debut as an editor.
The author lives in Manchester, England, with his wife, three sons and a big Maine coon cat.
“The idea for this story came during a visit to my favorite Manchester bookshop, Sharston Books, which is based in a warehouse on an industrial estate,” Williams explains. “There are thousands of books there, and it would take you years of browsing to assess them all. There are two levels and, sometimes, when it’s quiet, it is possible to hear the people on the upper level moving from stack to stack.
“There are the usual creaks and groans that you find in an old building, but there’s something odd about it, too, something about people flicking through ancient pages, picking up books that might not exist anywhere other than this place in which one is standing.
“There are books here that are so buried that it’s feasible they’ve never been opened since the shop began trading, twelve years ago. It seemed a great place to locate a story involving creatures that are beyond history.”
During his research, Williams stumbled upon a list of names attributed to fallen angels and their origins: “I liked the name ‘Malpas,’” he says, “and when I saw that this was an angel who appeared as a crow, I felt that it was too good an opportunity not to put in some references to this most horror-friendly of birds.”
MALPAS HALTED AT THE FOOT of the stone steps outside his tower block and, as always, glanced behind him to check that nobody had followed him home. Black snow edged the pavements. The moon was the merest swipe of light, like an afterthought in a painting of the night. Malpas’ breath came in white flutes.
It was taking longer to cross town. He could feel death in his bones, worming, trying to break him down, but he was a tough old bird. It would be some time yet.
“If at all,” he muttered, and began to climb.
The lifts were working, thank Christ, and he ascended to the twelfth floor and pulled out from his pocket a bunch of old, discolored keys. As he reached for the lock, his eye caught the scar in the pad of fat at the base of his left thumb. It was like a star; its twin lay on the back of his hand. Where the angels kissed you, his mother had once told him.
Inside, he threw off his coat and scarf and sat in the armchair by the window. The dark seemed fastened to the planet; on some nights, especially in winter, he could believe that it would never go away, that it was adhered for good to everything. Whenever he looked in the mirror—or, as now, caught his reflection in the muddied glass of the window—it might be the case that he had spent eons in the dark, and had evolved to cope better with it.
His eyes were like two faded smears of ash on a pale grey cloth. His hair, once so black it seemed to contain streaks of blue, was white. He had never liked his mouth, a ruddy, wide crevice: his large, hooked nose seemed to be permanently trying to obscure the horror of it. He kept that mouth closed for much of the time. He watched the street for a while. A taxi. A bus. A man in a wheelchair being pushed across the road. A man—a blind man—with a white stick, tapping at the pavement, head ranging around as if he could see what surrounded him. What looked like wings were attached to his back, but then Malpas saw that it was a pale grey rucksack. Getting old, going blind myself, he thought.
After he had rested and his breath and color had returned some, he moved to the back room, where his bed and his workbench lay, each covered in books and photograph albums, craft tools and ancient maps of the world. He never slept in here; his armchair was for dreams. This was his store room and sanctuary. He worked hard in here. So it was now.
He switched on the radio and twiddled the tuner until he found a station playing classical music. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and leaned over the dead carrion crow. Rigor mortis had drawn its wings in towards the body. Malpas stretched them out and parted the feathers on the chest until he could feel the crest of its breastbone. He nicked the skin with his scalpel and gently peeled the membrane away from the bone. He kept peeling and teasing with the scalpel, sprinkling borax on to the meat to keep it dry, until the body of the bird had been separated from its chamber of skin.
He snipped away the joints at the extremities and turned his attention to the neck. He pulled the skin gently away from the skull, like a hood that has been drawn too tightly. He dug out the eyes with tweezers, packing the sockets with borax and fiberglass wool. The thing looked like some ghastly, famished creature emerging from a covering of snow.
Malpas was unfazed by the grisly aspects of this work. It calmed him. To see the anatomy of a once-living creature was like being admitted to view a sacred secret.
He scoured the skull of its contents and packed it. He threaded fake eyes through the padding in the sockets and carefully introduced the skull back to its skin hood. He had been working solidly for three hours now. The tower block was still and quiet. He could believe there was nothing else in the world but for him and Messiaen and this broken pound or so of Corvus corone.
He had no idea how he possessed the taxidermist’s skill. Presumably, at some point, he had taken a course; he couldn’t remember. But then, the same could be said about any aspect of his life. He had stumbled blindly through his sixty-odd years, groping for sense and stability, trying to understand other people and keep a lid on the fear he had of space and time.
He wished he had known his parents, his father particularly. He had a thing about dads, and wished he could have been one. He felt, sometimes, that he was a forsaken speck, a fluke, a freak, something never meant to have known the beat of a heartbeat, or the spark of a thought. The fragility of life assaulted him every morning when he turned a newspaper page or switched channels on the television.
The heart was a gnarly old muscle but it was shockingly small. And everything it was connected to was frail. Veins that you could pop open with your fingers like a peapod. The slapdash muddle of organs in the chest cavity. The brain wobbling precariously on top of a spine: it was like some joke, some plate-spinning trick, doomed to failure. There were so many ways to die, so many different insults and assaults the body could suffer, that it was astonishing so many people made it into old age, but then it wasn’t really old age at all. The puff of the world’s oldest person was an unheard gasp in the roaring, nine-billion-year life-span of the sun. Being surrounded by a family, knowing the warmth of a child’s soft skin, would help him sit easier with all of that.
He broke off from his work at a little before 1:00 a.m. He poured himself a small whisky and sat in his chair, watching the other tower blocks in his estate, the lights switching off, and the bodies moving within each TV screen window. He tried to remember a time before he was old, but it was difficult. There was a suggestion of youth, at some point, but, as in the aging eye, there was a misty cataract preventing him from seeing anything in detail.
He finished his drink and rubbed at his face and his hands, until the stiffness had been chased from them. He returned to the crow and finished the job. The last thing he did, before sewing the cavity shut, was to carefully insert a golden hair from a tin he kept in his tool drawer. There was a lock of hair in there, belonging to a boy that had died in childhood. Something he had come across over the years. Something he felt it was important to own.
By 3:00 a.m. the bird was ready. He packaged it in bubble wrap and folded brown paper around it, securing everything with string. He went back to his chair. He thought a little about this strange flourish that he discharged at the end of each commission but could not remember the origin of it. A secret, a private signature most likely? It didn’t really matter, but he couldn’t stop now. He felt he owed it to the dead boy, whoever he had been. It was some skewed
way of keeping him vital in this world. He went back to his chair and drank some more and watched some more and fell asleep.
In the morning he awakened to an ash-colored sky. He had been dreaming of his own father, of whom he might have resembled. Cary Grant, perhaps. Or Johnny Weissmuller. At some point that man must have picked him up, cuddled him, tickled him, made him laugh.
The taste of digesting whisky was unpleasant at the back of his mouth. It was too cold to wash, or change his clothes. He took scant pleasure from the fact that, as an old man, he could pretty well do as he pleased in matters of personal hygiene, for he had nobody to chide him about it.
He took a bus from his flat to a crossroads half a mile north, where he caught a connection that took him to the neighboring district, a matter of a ten-minute journey. Here he disembarked and walked the final quarter of a mile to the industrial estate.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 36
