by John Farris
"This is ninety percent fantasy," I said.
Nhora looked queerly at me. "I don't think so. Let's finish it."
"Girls who are not feebleminded could never allow themselves to be smeared with—"
"It happens, though. Shhh."
After a while I couldn't choke down any more of Clipper's filth and sat gazing at the fire. Nhora calmly took the book from me and continued to turn the pages, mild as a nun at vespers, until she was done. Then she got up to move around the room, sighing, the diary in her hand.
"Throw it on the logs," I said.
"Not yet. The last entry was just four nights ago. Corrie Billings's older sister, Angela."
Clipper had always been precocious. At the age of ten he'd come to me in a high state of excitement and described at length spying on Boss while Boss enjoyed one of the more comely colored women at Dasharoons. "Flopping crazy on her back like a big frog when a dog plays with it," Clipper said with lubricious enthusiasm. So he'd been very much like Boss in one respect, which I pointed out to Nhora.
"No, Sshamp," Nhora said. "Boss loved, he truly cared about, women. Clipper hated them. That's plain from what he wrote. It wasn't the sex he craved, it was their pain and humiliation."
"What does this prove about Clipper? How does it make him a murderer?"
"It doesn't. But there was a side to him none of us suspected. Sexually he was perverse, driven. A slave of his particular demon. There's a notable omission in his diary."
"You mean Corrie?"
"Not a single word about Corrie."
"All of the older women were identified by a code letter. He may have done the same for Corrie, because of some, uh, as you suggest, perverse form of gallantry."
"I doubt that he ever did more than kiss Corrie goodnight," Nhora said thoughtfully. "Poor Corrie. No way for her to know just what she'd fallen in love with. Fooled like the rest of us—she was doomed any way you look at it. Oh, and if you were wondering, I'm not in Clipper's diary."
"I didn't think you were," I said, flushing.
"He never so much as looked at me the wrong way."
"We still don't know any more than we knew before. About why he killed." I lay back on the bed, lightheaded, my heartbeat erratic.
"I could make some tea," Nhora said. She was near the hearth. She stooped and threw the opened diary into the flames. Gratefully I closed my eyes.
I must have gone to sleep almost immediately. But I kept rising and falling, as if levitated, from the depths of unconsciousness to a fevered half-awareness of wind, rain, lire and shadow. Awareness of Nhora, coming and going, and watchful beside the bed. Once she had me drink the tea she'd prepared. It was scented lightly with hibiscus, spoiled by a bitter aftertaste.
"Why don't you close your eyes?" Nhora said, a sheltering hand on my forehead. "You're afraid, aren't you? Don't be afraid, Sshamp. I'll take care of you. Close your eyes. Sleep."
But I wasn't comfortable in this room. Instead of sleeping, I dwindled. The ceiling banged up and down like the lid of a box played with by a bored or angry child. Magic threatened. Nhora yawned, revealing perfect back teeth and a moist pink palate. I shuddered. She was too big, and I was too small. Her tongue curled lazily, touched the roof of her mouth. Then, with the yawn fading, Nhora's stealthy, opened eyes caught a gleam of firelight. The green of her eyes slicked to idol gold, dazzling and iridescent. The libidinous diary of my brother smoked in chunks, occasionally flaring as air reached the thickly layered pages.
Nhora stroked me, raising gooseflesh. I dreamed phantasmagorically.
The fire swarmed and was animated. Clipper and his playmate-victims came whooping from the flames that consumed his diary. Antic, nubile, not many of them past childhood, they tricked and flashed like ravenous eels in acts of copulation. I was shamefully aroused by their orgiastic cries.
Other monsters appeared: black men, their bodies calcimined, puckered with meaty bullet holes. They chanted in African tongues. Boss wore Nhora's head like a stopper on his bloodstained shoulders, her pinpoint eyes now hooded, rimmed a dreadful black. Her hair was twisted in strong coils around the still sinewy but aged body of my father; I heard the crunch snap buckle of bones. The demons of the hearth chased Corrie from the flames. She watched, in a brown study, eyes intolerably broken, Clipper's tupping gallop between her knees. I cried out for relief for all of us.
"But nothing's there," Nhora said, bending over me, the green silk robe peeling dryly from her body. She had a smaller bust than I'd imagined, demurely teated.
"Look," she said. Just for a moment there were two of Nhora, one kissing me with, a flickering tongue, the other a mirror image standing before the hearth, where the fire had gone to char and ashes, this Nhora undraped to the waist like a marble goddess, looking pensively over one shoulder at our intimate alliance.
My trousers had been opened and my blouse was unbuttoned. Nhora was delicately astride for all her size, somewhat finicky and hesitant about my vigorous protrusion, prigging testily, recoiling, then with a wisp of breath going down and relaxed as if into a soapy bath, saying, "I'll be careful; won't hurt you," as she mistook my own sharp intake of breath for an expression of pain. Instead I was light-headed with desire.
In the palm of my hand I weighed the suspenseful fullness of one breast and then the other. I said, "I thought you were having—"
"It stopped. Don't worry, let me make love to you. Lie back, don't do anything. I'll do it for us."
So I dreamed again but not dementedly, this time from the center of my groin, the pleasure being deep and all the more enjoyed for its casual wickedness. Nhora swayed in the tree house of my manly trunk, eyes like caged deathbirds brightly tuning, her hair let down to drape my thighs, navel coming unraveled as it gave suck, viny limbs arustle and wrapping me to the bed. Cunning nails traced all the long bones, studied the smoky running of my veins, hands cold but neat oval nails colder still and whitening out in my brain like fish gleam in heavy ice, like stopped comets. Splitting then at her demand, first with difficulty like a virgin rosebud then a ripe splashed apricot yielding up all fruit, blood, plasm, marrow to fill the dark and quiver everywhere around us, a dense cold cloud in which our collective breath burned like radium.
Long afterward, stretched full length in a drowse upon me, her breasts flattened on mine, she licked my ears. It felt strange, and tickled. But I liked it. I liked whatever Nhora wanted to do to me.
"Now," she said, laughing, "you'll hear the thoughts of animals. Like Melampus of the legends, you'll always understand their language."
I kissed her humid lips. "Do you?"
"Sometimes," Nhora said, and sighed. Her beating heart made a warm spot on my chest, but the rest of me was moldering cold.
When she slept for a while I returned to my rooms and took a hot bath, hot as I could stand it. But the chill returned as soon as I was dry. I had so little vitality I could barely move about. A shot of whiskey helped, but I think I may never be warm again. Nor in a state of grace. My mind turns to images of sere landscapes, ice-burdened seas. Only Nhora'a heart has warmth. Only her passion matters to me.
She has come naked into the sitting room, a hairbrush in one hand. She smiles faintly without looking at me. She goes to my bed and sits where I may see her through the door, just by lifting my eyes.
Nhora brushes her hair, hazing it down over her breasts.
Her lovely bosom bobs and weaves.
In a moment she will be finished, and wanting me.
And I'll go.
II
HAWKSPURN MARSHES
Yorkshire, England
June 16, 1942
The ancient estate of Hawkspurn, three miles south of Nuncheap village and on a hill overlooking the placid marshlands, boasts an extensive Georgian house with a façade of magnesian limestone, maintained gleaming white by the action of rain and scouring winds from the not-too-distant North Sea. There is a domed roof considered to have architectural significance, and a well-stocked library 1
00 feet in length on the ground floor. A portion of the estate is lease-farmed, crossed and recrossed by luxurious blackberry and lingonberry hedgerows, some of which are fishnetted during summer to discourage birds from stripping them clean—the 680-acre marsh contains one of England's first bird sanctuaries.
A spring-fed race divides the estate (the spring water has long been valued for its supposed medicinal properties). There is a gristmill down where the race widens and yields its tumbled clarity to the dankly green River Ouse; a ruined friary dating from the fourteenth century; and an ornamental park half-heartedly kept up by the Fullerite Medical Missionary Society, which inherited the estate and uses it as the final home of those honorable men and women gone to seed, some prematurely, after long service in the grueling heat of Africa.
On the morning the bomb exploded in the park at Hawkspurn, killing one old man instantly and causing great fear in the neighborhood—particularly among children boarding at the farm next door who recently had been evacuated from hard-hit sections of London and Manchester—there were a total of eight retired Fullerites and a staff of fourteen, mostly middle-aged women, in residence.
A call was made to the local Civil Defense office shortly before 11 A.M. In turn the Bomb Disposal Unit at Driffield Aerodrome was alerted, and within the hour the BD lorry arrived.
Lieutenant Ronad Kellow, R.E., soon discovered that something unique had transpired. A flash sufficiently brilliant to have been observed for at least a quarter-mile on a gorgeously clear day was not the result of any bomb or parachute mine the experts were familiar with. There was no crater, which signified a rare explosion above ground level, ruling out the possibility that a buried UXB had gone off. Also, no report of an unexploded bomb had ever come from the Hawkspurn area. An explosion above the ground was certainly feasible, but this close to Hawkspurn House any type of explosion involving more than a minimum burster charge would have created a shock wave strong enough to pulverize every window in the place. No one who was in the house at the time reported feeling the slightest bump. Only a couple of panes showed cracks, which examination proved had been there for many weeks.
Testimony of several children who were bathing in a pond 200 yards from the park was, at best, confusing. All had been aware of the pale green flash, and two children facing the park when it occurred suffered painful but superficial corneal burns. It was as if they had tried to stare down the sun. Two children maintained there had been a terrific bang and roar, of the sort they were accustomed to hearing at home. The others vehemently challenged this observation, but said they had noticed a brief, hurricanelike wind.
Lance Sergeant McDougal's sensitive nose detected no odor of TNT lingering anywhere in the park. No shrapnel damage was visible, yet trees, shrubs, the grass itself had been withered and bleached in a circle nearly fifty feet in diameter. And there was a victim, the poor man reportedly disfigured, all clothing ripped away by the force of whatever it was.
Lieutenant Kellow didn't know, he only feared there might be more of them around: some novelty Jerry's armorers had concocted, "sapper funnies" the BD lads called them, although there was nothing at all amusing about the devastation caused by the pie-shaped butterfly bombs painted a bright yellow to attract curious children, nor the big ones that rained down and dug in but didn't go bang until some luckless soul set off a trembler switch or a sapper ran afoul of a new type of anti-handling fuse.
After making a report to his group captain by telephone, Lieutenant Kellow sealed off Hawkspurn estate and began to conduct a thorough search for examples of small but deadly ordnance—a long-range shell, perhaps—loosed from German planes operating over the North Sea beyond the scan of coastal radar.
In the early afternoon, help arrived—in style: Kellow looked up from a hedgerow he was investigating to see a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville bearing slowly down on him. His first angry impulse was to order it out of the area; then he noticed the distinctive red mudguards and the blue filter over the near sidelight and guessed correctly that a legend had appeared.
Sir John de Roke Massenglil, 14th earl of Luxton, 10th earl of Sattersfleld, M.P., a fellow of the Royal Society, was a youngish man of fifty who had voluntarily attached himself to the Department of Scientific Research and had a number of men from the Bomb Disposal Experimental Unit under him. He'd made it his business to investigate the unusual, and he specialized in defusing unexploded bombs under the most urgent and perilous conditions, including, recently, one that had landed within the confines of the National Physical Laboratories, threatening a number of top-secret research projects. The hands of a safecracker, extraordinary patience and intuition and, of course, pure good fortune through the grace of God Almighty had saved him from being atomized on a number of occasions. In an emergency he'd once put a delayed-action fuse out of commission by firing a pistol bullet through the fusehead. Nervy, that.
Lord Luxton didn't appear the least daring: His features were regular enough, but he had vague eyebrows and a pale pencil mustache; a pained, shy smile diverted attention from his eyes, which were intelligent and softly curious. They'd said his lordship despised protocol in the field, but Lieutenart Kellow stood at attention until Lord Luxton was forced to salute. It seemed to embarrass him.
"I'd heard you were in Cardiff, my lord."
"I motored to Ripon yesterday to read a paper at the Engineering School. Word came down about your funny; thought I'd have a look."
"Delighted, my lord." Kellow gestured toward the house and grounds. "But I haven't come up with a thing." He had to make an effort not to stare at Lord Luxton's hands, which were oddly without nails, the end of each finger blunt and pink as a cow's muzzle, of no use for labor. His lordship had the habit of carrying his hands protectively against his body, snuggled beneath the breastbone, as if they'd just been born. They did look exquisitely sensitive, which may have accounted for his success in handling intricate detonating mechanisms.
Luxton looked with interest at the great white house as they descended into the park. On the veranda a man in a wheelchair was placed in the sun by a nurse who wore a severely ecclesiastical pale-blue-and-black uniform.
"Fullerites, aren't they?"
"Yes, my lord. A vanishing sect, but still active among the heathen. They're well endowed with estates such as this one."
"I know. Cousin of mine left them a vast sum many years ago."
"Do stay within the flags, my lord; we haven't ruled out the possibility of something lethal in the ground hereabout."
"Sorry."
Luxton took his time within the devastated circle, fingering leaves and studying browned blades of grass. He stared at the clear blue sky, then summoned Kellow.
"Where was the body found, Mr. Kellow?"
Kellow pointed to an oak tree with a branched trunk that stood thirty feet away. "Wedged nearly upside down in the crotch of the great oak. All clothing blown away, some bits of it embedded in the flesh. The shoulders and arms were partly flayed, undoubtedly from being driven with such force halfway through the tree."
"Is there a reliable description of what the blast, or flash, looked like?"
"One of the children survived a parachute mine that went off not far from her home in Manchester. She said our blast was similar to that of the mine, but without the terrible growling, the concussion waves and pressure on the eardrums."
Lord Luxton nodded. "A large ball of shimmering light, with, perhaps, concentric rings of color—lavender shading to green—at the heart of the fireball."
"Why, yes, almost word for word. How did you—"
"I've survived a magnetic mine blast myself. But this, obviously, was not a mine. Nor could it have been a bomb filled with flash compound for night aerial photography. Either one would have left at least a trace of its substance behind. Therefore we have something entirely new, an experimental weapon fearsome beyond belief, or else all this"—he swept a hand around the withered circle—"resulted from a spontaneous and perverse
act of nature."
"A bolt from the blue?" Kellow said incredulously.
Instead of replying, Lord Luxton walked slowly to the oak tree, after a while venturing to touch the trunk carefully, as if it were 'a bomb casing.
"Who was the victim?"
"A Dr. Eustace Holley," Kellow said, consulting his notebook.
"No one else in the park at the time? That is fortunate."
"Many of the in—the residents, my lord, are too unreliable to be left on their own out of doors."
His lordship looked around. "Inmates? Is that what you were about to say?"
"They're not referred to as such by staff, but some of them are—apparently they often went mad in the bush. The attrition rate, even among our colonial officials in the more hospitable coastal regions of tropical Africa, is quite high."
"Yes, isn't it. Perhaps I should have a look at the body. Would it be inside?"
To Kellow's surprise, their request to view the remains encountered resistance, even resentment. No one seemed to have time for them. There was a great deal of muted but urgent scurrying about in the dim halls, cries and whimpers from befuddled, apprehensive residents. The gentlemen from Bomb Disposal were allowed to cool their heels for an unconscionably long time in the outer office of the administrator. When Kellow began to be vocal about the delay and threatened action in the name of the minister of home security. Lord Luxton smiled more painfully than usual and excused himself.
In the ground-floor hall he encountered two workmen carrying buckets of calcimine and brushes to the stairs.
"Can't scrub it off," one of them complained. "Charcoal on these old walls? It's there for eternity."
"Waste of time painting it over," said the other. "A new course of stucco, that's what's needed."
