Nightmare Magazine Issue 25, Women Destroy Horror! Special Issue

by Nightmare Magazine

  • • • •

  “This mark on my face—it isn’t anything to do with the birds. He hit me. Todd. He hit me.”

  “Christ. When was this?”

  “This morning. He just—did it.”

  “Had it happened before?”

  “No. Not . . . not really.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “With Pam Boys. You know, from the shop.”

  They stood still in the lane, in the dark, among the alopecia of the trees, balancing on spent feathers. No car would try to drive through, not anymore, and footsteps would be clearly audible. He had turned the torch off because its batteries were running low. He had had a solar-powered torch, too, but it went without saying it was unrechargeable.

  He had an urge to touch her, hold her, comfort. But George grasped very well this was not gallantry or outrage—despite the fact that the image of her bastard husband hitting her incensed him. No, it was desire, lust. But then. What else was left? It puzzled George too, the manner in which, above all else, carnality survived, just as biological hunger and thirst, and an extraneous liking for the taste and effect of alcohol. Oh God. The Last bloody Days of Pompeii. Eat, drink, and be merry before the volcano exploded, or the circus lions came to tear you limb-from-limb. Just as in the old B movies. But also, be fair, here at least, where some quiet remained, courtesy and camaraderie also persisted, a sort of familial gentleness. Be gentle then.

  “I’m so sorry, Alice.”

  She came into his arms, there in the near-blind blackness of the lane. She was beautiful, smooth, and pliant, and her hair curiously rough and savage. Her mouth was as appetising as he had believed it would be. When they drew apart, she shuddered. “Can we get inside the house—I don’t like being out here in the dark.”

  He switched the torch back on.

  Not until they reached the gate of Cigarette Cottage did it occur to him he had not heard, nor even in the ray of the torch seen, a single magpie. By some fluke they had somehow missed the ones that must have gone on rising all about, as they continually rose, as he had even seen them rising at six this evening. What power sex had, sex, (not love) that drove out fear.

  • • • •

  During the night he went to get a bottle of water downstairs, and stood at the window looking out into the front garden. Three foxes grouped there, limned by the light of the candle. All males, he thought, young, healthy enough, but huddled on the wild lawn and staring in at him, exactly as he stared out at them. It was as if they wanted something from him. He wished he could offer something. But maybe what they asked for was what everyone wanted: an answer. Their eyes flamed, all surface, luminous in a spiritless way that made him think of rabies posters from the 1970s—or of demons.

  Animals had been behaving oddly for days. You did not notice, then an especially unnatural event made you see, and so recall other incidents. He had first become aware of it with a cluster of robins, nine or ten, then almost twenty of them, a flock almost like that of starlings, flying round and round the copse, before dazzling off through the dirty dreary day-twilight towards the farm. Robins were generally solitary, just as foxes were, out of the mating season. But there had been the cats, too. Each screamed and cried and ran towards you, or from you, still calling. One he had met in the lane. It had a magpie feather in its mouth. The cat hurried up and down, up and down, not dropping the feather, not chewing it, growling low in its throat. Some animals had simply vanished. Consensus opinion had it they were hibernating, misled as were the trees. That—or they had got wise to the idea they also might be shot for food. The absence of all gray squirrel activity, squirrels that even in a real mid-winter were often about, was telling enough. He had not seen or heard any frogs or pigeons, nor heard a single dog bark or howl for weeks, either. There were no insects. Even the clothes moths had gone away.

  George turned from the foxes, collected the water, and went back upstairs.

  Alice sat up in the bed, no longer sobbing. She had wept after they first made love. Then fallen suddenly asleep against him. Later she woke and told him she had always wanted him, had fantasies about him. “But you’re better.” So there had been more sex, rich, brain-flooding orgasm. And then she had begun to sob again, could not stop. She said, “It isn’t about him. Sod him. He can fuck off. It’s the rest. It—reminds me of that Hitchcock film—”

  “From the story by Daphne du Maurier?”

  “Was it?”

  George did not say that the short story had been far bleaker and more terrible than the film. “But those birds attacked, didn’t they,” he reminded her instead. “Our magpies—they just fly upward.”

  “Oh,” Alice whispered, “what’s going to happen?” She knew he could not tell her, beyond the obvious, which was bad enough.

  He said, “It’ll be all right, Alice.”

  “Will it?”

  “Yes.”

  And then she had calmed, knowing, he supposed, (as he did) that either it would or it would not. Out of their hands. Better off also therefore out of their minds. Now they drank the water.

  “Can I stay?” she said, like a child.

  “Please do stay.”

  “I can leave once it gets—once it’s lighter. I don’t want you to feel—I know you like to be alone.”

  “How do you know that?” he inquired, playfully.

  “So you can write.”

  “That,” he said. He visualised the unfinished story trapped there on the computer screen, now lost in space. Backing up had hardly mattered when the whole bloody lot went. He could have foretold, and printed it. But then, why write stories while Rome burned.

  “Do you remember the PM talking, just before Radio 4 went off the air?” she surprised him by saying.

  “I didn’t listen. He gets—got on my tits, frankly.”

  “But that night he was so good, he was . . . It brought out the best in him.”

  They laughed, bitterly. Then lay down to sleep, back-to-back. How long since he had felt that sumptuous comfort, female flesh against his? And for how much longer? Till the muffled sun rose behind the black and white sky? Until the food and bottled water were all gone? Tears ran also from his eyes. He cried then quietly, not to wake her. The pillow soaked them up, his tears, as eternity soaked up all such flimsy things, weeping, blood, the shells of beasts and men.

  In sleep he felt rather than heard a vague amorphous rumbling. Thunder? Some storm created by the choking of the stratos—or a phantom train perhaps, once more enabled to run all those miles off in Stantham. Asleep, he did not care. He was dreaming of Lydia, faithless after all as Alice, (or Todd), Lydia in that hotel in Paris, thirteen years ago.

  • • • •

  In the moments before daybreak, or what now passed for it, George’s dreams altered into a perfectly coherent recollection of researching magpie legends, which he had done about nine days before. The book was an old one, something he had picked up in London in the 1990s. A writer never knew, he had always maintained, what might or not ultimately be useful.

  Birds of Ill-Omen and Evil Luck. This had been the heading. But at the end of the section came a concluding paragraph, with the sub-heading: Exonerating the Magpie:

  The Magpie is often badly thought of, as reputedly it refused to don full (black) mourning at the death of Christ. However, this would seem to be a misunderstanding of the story. In an older version, the Magpie donned half mourning, it is true, to show respect for Christ’s suffering and death. But the bird’s snow-white feathers were intended to indicate that life continues after death, and that indeed Christ Himself would rise physically from His tomb. Why else does the Magpie remain with the Zodiac sign of Virgo, the Virgin, which connects directly with the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ? At least, apparently, Jesus and Mary were sure that the Magpie was both innocent of all blame, and a witness to the Great Truth. And for that reason the Virgin herself added to his elegant attire the extraordinary sheen of blue, (Mary’s own sacred colour), which is to
be seen most evidently on his wings.

  • • • •

  Almost morning, technically; it is about twenty minutes short of five o’clock. The sky has a colourless darkness but is strangely faded at a point near the zenith. Gradually this thinning of an upper canopy begins to fill with muffled, dulled, but undeniable light.

  In the woods birds do not sing. Then a shrill chorus, not song but warning, surges up, fragments, and ends.

  From the copse across the lane no bird rises. No magpie rises. All about nothing stirs. Silence is concrete now. Stone.

  To scan from horizon to horizon is to fail to detect any movement. Not an animal slinks or runs along the earth, let alone takes wing in the lower element of the sky.

  No magpie rises.

  No magpie rises.

  Since 8:00 p.m. yesterday evening, as surprisingly only a very few have noted, nowhere on the landmass of Britain has a single magpie risen to fly straight upward. Or in any direction.

  Above, just east of the zenith, the hole, for so it is, continues dully to grow lighter. Perhaps too it perceptibly widens, just a very little.

  Then, to the north, another dim vague thinning seems to be taking place, another occult lightening appears to be wearing through.

  Over the fields, miles up it seems, and in some other dimension, a loud indescribable crack bellows through the air. A splintering line scribbled in silvery radioactive ink careers across the masked dawn-dusk of the heavens.

  A kind of storm, cloudshift and whirlwind, discourages darkness. The episodes of lights brilliantly flash now, knife-like. Then, the sky—is falling.

  It is falling everywhere. Far off, near, immediately overhead.

  It falls in masonry blocks which, as they descend, drop apart in chunks and waterfalls and tidal waves, and all is blundering and spinning downward. Bodies. The corpses of dead birds. A million million, a trillion trillion. Lifeless and almost weightless yet, in this unthinkable and unavoidable mass, a weight of unguessable and incorrigible proportions.

  The air resounds to a type of steely scream. Whether voiced or only a by-product of the avian deluge, it swamps and pierces all and everything.

  Death begins to slam against the earth.

  The prelude impacts are awesome enough.

  Before vision becomes only a mosaic, like scenes from an ancient and damaged film, it is feasible to see whole boughs snapped off from trees, on buildings a slide and tumble of slates and chimneys and TV aerials, satellite dishes, shattering and scattered—smashing with the white-black downpour of death to the ground below.

  From the church in the village the clock is silent as its automatic hands approach ten to five, yet the bell in the tower, if barely audible, clangs dolefully. Part of the church roof has been riven open and, cascading by, the dead are striking the bell.

  But now the next phase of impact is arriving. To this the prelude was nothing. In the woods the young trees reel, are toppling. Hedgerows and fences crumple and disappear. From the little pool huge gouts of water are displaced—who would have thought it could hold so much?

  Whole roofs buckle now. Joists give way. Windows collapse. In the village street shop-fronts disintegrate one after the other as if bombed. The pavement and road are piled high, the gardens. At the half-built estate all the building is coming undone. Something is on fire at the farm, smoke curdling upwards, but blotted away almost at once as the rain of the dead pours on—the main road is hidden. Even the stranded cars are covered over. Fields, tracks, hills, landscape—all now under this thick white-black snow . . .

  Through the cacophony of rushing, the whine and shrill of the great lost scream, no individual sound is to be deciphered.

  The cottage on the lane is piled high, high as its roof, as if with discoloured sandbags. The pub is only a mound, a sort of heap of unclean washing, featureless and silent, a mashed tree lying against it.

  The magpies fall. The ultimate gush of the volcano. They drop and strike and crush and break and are broken. They cover and they bury everything. They load the world like bandaging, like grave-wrappings. And still they are falling. The heads of distant oak trees—drowned. Eradicated.

  And the stench, the thunder that seems never likely to end, tempest, tsunami, eruption. Poor things. Poor things. It is 5:00 a.m. The church clock does not chime, even if anyone could hear it.

  High, high above the fall, from the widening, shining chasms in the darkness, light foams clear as clean water. And in the east the sun has risen, is visibly rising, like the pitiless eye of Man Himself.

  Not for the first time—from an idea by John Kaiine.

  © 2010 by Tanith Lee.

  Originally published in Brighton Shock!,

  edited by Stephen Jones.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tanith Lee was born in 1947 in London, England. Slightly dyslexic, she failed to learn to read until almost eight years old (when her father taught her). At nine she began to write and hasn’t stopped since. In 1975, DAW Books published her epic fantasy novel The Birthgrave and so rescued Lee from lots of silly jobs at which she was extravagantly bad. Since then, she’s written more than ninety novels and collections and more than 300 short stories. She has also written for BBC TV and radio. She has won or been nominated for twelve major awards. She lives on the S.E coast of England with her husband, writer/artist John Kaiine, in a house full of books and plants, under the firm claw of two cats.

  To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

  . . . Warmer

  A.R. Morlan

  Art by Stacy Nguyen

  Before Edan Westmisley faxed his summons to my agent, my only legitimate (as in you could see my face) claim to semi-demi-fame was the Steppe Syster’s “Love Victim” video where I licked the tattoo of the chest of their lead guitarist, Cody Towers.

  Yeah, that was me. Not that anyone makes the connection between the big-hair, tits-swaying-in-a-bikini-top, thong-bottomed retro pre-AIDS bimboid slithering up the paint-drizzled riser towards Cody’s semi-desirable, love-handled bare torso, tongue out and lashing against candy-apple lips, just before he notices me, slings his Stratocaster behind his pimply back and hoists me up by the armpits, so I can lovingly slurp off his licorice-icing tattoo (painted on over his Dermablend-smeared real phoenix-in-flames tattoo by a bandanna-covered bald-pated tattoo artist) in slo-mo close up, and what I am now, thanks to Edan Westmisly and his once-in-a-career offer—

  —the offer he didn’t share with my agent, or with anyone employed in his hidden/not hidden studio; the offer which held out the promise of me becoming something far more spectacular and memorable than just a tattoo-devouring bimbo . . .

  • • • •

  “Thaaat’s riiight, kiddo, Edan Westsmisley, Gran’ Poo-ba-supremo at Genuis Productons, as in get your mini-skirted bum down to his office, pronto—”

  It wasn’t unusual for my agent, Gerhard Berbary, to speak in italics, but for him to even come close to swearing (he was Canadian, which made “bum” synonymous with “ass” or worse), something much bigger than just another metal video shoot or frontal nude body-doubling part was at stake here, especially as far as Gerhard’s cut was concerned. And at this point in my “career,” considering how few videos, walk-ons and tit-’n’-ass inset shots he’d been able to round up for me, I knew that he would’ve sold my corpse for morgue gape shots if it would’ve netted him a commission . . .

  Not that being dead could’ve made me feel any less uneasy than Gerhard’s wake-up call about Westmisley wanting me to come to his studio early that afternoon; while I didn’t consider myself an “insider” when it came to the music scene, I did have subscriptions to Billboard, Variety, Rolling Stone and Spin . . . and with all my free time, especially after the “Love Victim” shoot, I’d had the opportunity to learn more than I actually cared to about Mr. Westmisly, formerly of the sixties Fluxus movement (a well-to-do group of what Gerhard dubbed “art
-farts” which included Yoko Ono and her bare-buttocks-in-a-row film, really classy shit like that), and currently sole owner, stockholder, president, and producer-in-residence at Genius Productions Ltd., a record company that produced hard-core industrial, techno, alternative, and speed metal acts (like Steppe Syster), almost none of which ever charted higher than 150 on the Billboard Album Chart, but which were killers on the college charts—all the more ironic because Westmisley had supposedly (if the unauthorized bios reviewed in Rolling Stone could be believed) been all-but-bodily-thrown out of every university in Europe and on the East Coast, for a little more than simply flunking out or missing dorm curfew—

  (—as in things even pay-to-say journalists like Kitty Kelly were afraid to reveal after one unauthorized bio writer turned up belly-bloated on the Nantucket shoreline after interviewing some ex-Vassar co-ed in her nursing home bed . . . the bed she’d been confined to after dating soon-to-be-ex-Harvard alumni Westmisley—

  —one of the same universities he’d later endow with trifles like libraries, gymnasiums and radio stations during the early eighties, after he’d finished the last round of chemo-and-radiation for his near-fatal bout with skin cancer.

  He’d contracted said skin cancer during a two-year round-the-world junket in his favorite yacht in the mid-seventies, when he was on his collecting binge . . . and he’d sped home across two oceans with close to a dozen countries breathing down his burnt-to-jerky neck, threatening legal action for whatever illegal/endangered baubles he’d “bought” . . .)

  And now Edan Westmisley wanted me to drive to his office, for a reason even my agent didn’t know—I asked Gerhard twice, “You mean to meet with him, like face-to-face?” and both times, his answer was the same . . . and as maddeningly vague:

  “You want me to read you his fax? Here it is: ‘Gerhard, please send your client from the Steppe Syster “Love Victim” shoot to my office for a private meeting, noon today.’ Hear that dear heart? The man said ‘Please’ . . .”