by John Gribbin
Q: You’re losing all of us, Professor. Castor and Pollux?
A: Sappho’s parents. Have you any idea how rare fossils are? To become one, you have to be very stupid and lie down to wait to die on a river bed. Ninety-nine percent of the species that have been and gone upon this world would never have been so daft or so unfortunate. I know, too mind-blowing to think about, isn’t it? Which may be why most people don’t. We therefore know almost nothing of the vast arrays of species, including intelligent dinosaurs, and intelligent forbears of modern birds, that once lived on Earth. Sappho’s parents are examples of such. She and I prepared films and books to teach them about our world when they arrived and to explain that they should treat me as their parent, the one human being they could trust, the exception that proves the rule. I saddled up Castor last night and flew here on his back, an exhilarating nocturnal journey across the rooftops of Paris, I can tell you. Sappho used to pluck her feathers so that she could conceal herself in human clothes, but her parents are not going to be so shy. We’ve decided to start a sort of public information campaign, and my turning myself in was just the start of it. When people see the evidence splashed across their screens, they’re finally going to start believing all the ‘crank’ stories I’ve been leaking onto the internet for the last ten years. I’m not the mad scientist, CERN are, and they need to be stopped. Like I say, turn on your television. By now I estimate that the French President should be as besieged as a pile of pumpkin seeds in his offices, by a giant bird pecking all the glass out of his windows, and the custodians of a certain famous tourist landmark should be starting to regret all those vindictive anti-pigeon measures….
V
The Eiffel Tower was only supposed to be a temporary building. The thought is always buried in the back of the mind of every visitor, Parisienne and foreigner alike. Those lifts bounce to a worrying degree as they stop at each floor. Today the effect is heightened by the unexpected arrival of a two metre tall bird – with vibrant red and orange plumage, savage green eyes and vicious beak – alighting on the top of the lift car and attempting to bite its way through the cables. For weeks, nervous local jokes have been used to mask the Parisiens’ growing disquiet at proliferating rumours of the wing beats of huge birds being heard flapping over the rooftops on dark nights, and of disturbingly loud thumps heard on flat roofs overhead, as if something monstrous is strutting about up there.
Bored with the lift carriages, whose emergency brakes would in any case prevent catastrophic descent even after the cables are severed, Pollux makes her way up to the viewing platform itself, which the proud city fathers had so wisely enclosed in a decorative cage to prevent suicides many decades beforehand. The mesh is mostly dense enough to prevent her beak penetrating too far, although a few appendages are lost proving the issue, but she still causes several strokes and heart attacks. The point, as ever in our brave new media-savvy world, is publicity. The footage of sixty terrified men, women and children being pecked at, hounded and tormented by a giant bird with vicious talons and a particularly blood-curdling screech, three hundred and twenty metres above Paris, will certainly burn its way indelibly into the public retina. Pollux is also actually quite a gentle and intellectual creature at other times, but has been told to play up stereotypical expectations for the cameras. As a cynical man once said, nobody ever lost a fortune underestimating the public intelligence. She will fly off before the army helicopters and fighter jets get here, or maybe bring a few down on the way for her amusement. The tourists will be mostly rescued and unharmed, led away in single file down the seldom-used escape stairs. But the point will have been made: in the complacent minds of all the self-satisfied bourgeois French and in the soiled underpants of their president. Shout the news from the rooftops. History is attacking us, fuelled by our blind ignorance of it, on which it feeds. The threat is here, it is upon us. Not from foreign immigrants and terrorists but from ourselves. Not from elsewhere, but elsewhen.
The Last Days
by
Tej Turner
Tej Turner has just begun branching out as a writer and been published in anthologies, including Impossible Spaces (Hic Dragones Press) and The Bestiarum Vocabulum (Western Legends). In 2015 Elsewhen Press published The Janus Cycle, his first novel. He is currently engaged in writing an epic fantasy series.
His parents moved around a bit while he was growing up so he doesn’t have any particular place he calls “home”, but most of his developing years were spent in the West country of England. He went on to Trinity College in Carmarthen to study Film and Creative Writing, and then later to complete an MA at The University of Wales, Lampeter, where he minored in ancient history but mostly focused on sharpening his writing skills.
Tej recently returned from backpacking his way across Asia, keeping a travelblog (http://tejturner.wordpress.com) to let his friends and fans follow him on his adventures as he gallivanted around Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Nepal. When he is not trekking through jungles or exploring temples, reefs, and caves he is usually based in Cardiff, where he works by day, writes by moonlight, and squeezes in the occasional trip to roam around megalithic sites and the British countryside. The next time he has enough money he will be flying off on another adventure.
“There is no easy way to tell you this, Mr Morecombe... but there are some things you must know before I let you see your wife,” he said, as I sat myself down.
I have always liked Dr Hammond. Throughout every ordeal we have endured since this nightmare began he has somehow known the correct way to compose himself, however good or bad the news he was about to deliver. But this time, even Dr Hammond was struggling. He couldn’t look me in the eyes.
“The tumours have grown again, and last night she had a seizure... we managed to get it under control,” he hurriedly added. “She’s still alive, but we have not managed to get any response from her. The areas of her brain which were damaged during the seizure were where the sensory–”
He went into doctor talk. A tidalwave of words which sounded like they were lifted straight out of an encyclopaedia. I stopped listening half way through, not much of it made sense to me apart from one crucial point.
“So she can’t... see or hear?” I whispered, as I felt the blood drain from my face.
He nodded gravely. “I think it is time... I mean...” he scratched his head and looked at the ceiling. “When the cancer metastasised we told you that the chances were small... but now I think we have reached a point where the best we can do is make her comfortable. I’m truly sorry, Mr Morecombe.”
A few minutes later, I was finally allowed to step into the room and I saw her. She was lying under white sheets, with sterile, colourless walls around her and several plastic tubes spiralling out from her arms and her neck, connecting her to the grey machines that were keeping her alive.
I stood in the doorway for a while: I was too scared to approach her at first. Which was silly because I knew she couldn’t hear or see me. I was scared of doing the wrong thing. What was the right thing to do?
She was thinner, again. How could that have happened in a mere few hours?
When the cancer first began I was amazed at how healthy she still looked – it made it almost hard to believe what the doctors claimed was going on inside her. Now, she truly looked ill. Her face was gaunt. I could see the bones of her cheeks through the thin layer of her cracked skin. The flesh around her eyes was blue.
And the shocking thing was that she was still beautiful, and if anything I loved her even more. The nature of some of that love had changed, though – some of it had been replaced by the kind of emotion you feel when you encounter an abandoned puppy or a starving child. The type of love which makes people drop everything and sprint across a busy road, or a predatory animal take another creature which is usually their prey into their paws and lick their wounds.
“Alica,” I said, as I approached her. I knew it was useless saying her name. The doctors had already told me that she couldn’
t hear me. Or see. She was trapped in a world of mute darkness. Did she even know what was going on?
I took her hand. She smiled faintly when I first touched her – was it because she knew it was me?
I traced eight letters onto her palm.
I love you
I remember the first time I met you.
I had just finished University and was staying at my parents. I was enjoying that last summer everyone has just after they graduate. They live in their old bedrooms, see their old friends, and live rent-free just before they venture off into the ‘real’ world. I went to the fete. That fete that so many villages in the West Country have, every summer. And then to the party in the evening. The sort which happens after every fete. In the same field, every year. The ones where bales of hay are stacked around as seats, and the normal rules of behaviour are eased. Even some of the kids are drinking cider. A folk band is playing, and everyone is dancing. Most of them don’t even like that kind of music, usually.
You were there. You were the girl who turned up because you were visiting some distant family or an old friend. The one that every guy tried to flirt with because you were new. Including me. I hovered around you, and tried to make it look like an accident. When I finally caught your attention I asked you where you were from.
“Around,” you said, smiling as you drank from that plastic cup which was probably filled with wine. You gave me that look. The one which said; ‘I know you’re trying to flirt with me, and I don’t mind’. “I’ve moved around a bit.”
You were always like that – a bit mysterious. Even now, after three years of being together, there are so many things I don’t know about you.
“I remember that night too,” she said.
I jumped in my seat, startled. Her lips were moving. She was talking.
It was as if she knew what I had been thinking. How was that possible?
“I noticed you long before you even spoke to me,” she said. “Did I ever tell you that? Well, I’m telling you now. I even asked my friend about you.”
“Alica,” I said, prodding her shoulder. “Can you hear me?”
No response. Of course she couldn’t hear me.
But how did she know what I was thinking?
Maybe it was just a coincidence.
Or maybe not; I decided to try something.
I took her hand again and ran the tip of my finger across her palm. The same words.
I love you
When I met you I was ready to start a career and settle down. I was applying for jobs in offices and banks. I was set upon a path which led towards financial stability.
I can see now that such a banausic existence would have been meaningless. You pulled me off the treadmill and dragged me to the window. You pointed to the hills, and I realised that there was a whole wonderful world out there. You taught me that there was so much more to living.
“Do you want to come to work in a hotel in Scotland with me?” you asked one evening. “It’s on an island.... and, oh Joshua – it’s beautiful! Look!”
You showed me a picture on the screen. It truly was beautiful, but I was more mesmerised by the smile it brought to your face. We had only been seeing each other for a few weeks at that point, but we had become almost inseparable. The summer was almost over, and none of the applications I had filled, or interviews I had attended, had come to anything.
I said yes. It was spontaneous, not the sort of thing I would usually do, but I am so glad I did. The pay was crap, it was cold, and isolated, but we were given a free room and the people were very friendly. We ended up living there for an entire year.
“I was so nervous when I asked you,” she said. Her lips were moving again. “I didn’t think you would say yes, but it was one of the happiest moments of my life when you did. Maybe I should be laid to rest there... would you do that for me? Scatter my ashes around that tree we used to sit by. I think that is where I belong.”
Tears spilled from my eyes, uncontrollably. I had to pull my hand away from hers to catch them.
I didn’t want to think about that. Not yet. How could she be so frank and accepting of what was happening to her when it was tearing me apart?
It should have been me being the strong one, not her. She was the one who was dying. She was entering the unknown. For my entire life I had thought of myself as a believer, maybe not in a Christian god, but I had always been convinced that there was something beyond this material world. That everyone had an essence – a soul, if you will – which could never cease to exist.
But now, as I was watching Alica fade away, I suddenly realised how uncertain I was. What if there really was nothing beyond this life? What if this was it?
What if when Alica went, she was truly gone?
My thoughts were interrupted by the door opening. Footsteps echoed across the floor, but I didn’t care enough to turn around and find out whose they were.
“Mr Morecombe,” a voice said. It was Dr Hammond, with a nurse standing beside him. “Do you mind? We’ve just come to–”
“She’s talking to me...” I whispered.
“You have managed to get a response?” he said, looking at her. “That’s... good. I am glad she–”
“Doctor,” I said, turning to him. “There’s something weird going on. Every time I touch her she knows what I am thinking. Look.”
I held her hand again.
Alica, Dr Hammond has come to check up on you, I said with my inner voice.
I had doubts. I was not just doing it to prove it to him, but also to myself. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just my imagination playing tricks on me. I have heard that people often go crazy in times of grief.
“Dr Hammond,” she whispered, dispelling my fears and making my heart surge with joy for the briefest of moments. “I want to thank you... for all that you’ve done for me. I know you tried... I...” she winced, finally letting some of her pain show. “I’m grateful.”
There was a long silence which followed her words. A little tear ran down the side of her face so I dabbed it with a tissue.
“It’s good that you’ve found a way to communicate,” Dr Hammond eventually said. “Many people under similar circumstances don’t–”
“No,” I shook my head. “You don’t understand. All I have been doing is writing ‘I love you’ on her hand. But somehow she knows what I am thinking. Don’t you think it’s strange? How does she know you are here?”
“There are many subtleties about communication... not all of which we understand,” Dr Hammond said, shaking his head. “I am sorry, Joshua, but I think this is just–”
“But it’s similar to what Ben–” the nurse beside him interjected.
“No!” Dr Hammond cut her off. “This is not the time for any of your old wives’ tales.”
His face contorted irritably, and hers went red. She turned her eyes to the floor.
“Anyway, Mr Morecombe,” he then said, turning back to me. “I am sorry, but there are things which must be tended to concerning your wife. May I suggest you come back in a few minutes? Maybe you could go and get some lunch or a coffee...”
I didn’t eat any lunch. I sat in the nearest chair to her room and watched the door. Dr Hammond wasn’t in there for very long. In fact, as I watched him step out of the room only a few minutes later, it made me feel angry. Was that all the time he could spare for my wife now that she was dying? He had always had plenty of time for her before.
I went back inside. The nurse was still there, dutifully replacing one of the see-through bags of liquid which was being pumped into my wife by the tubes.
“Mr Morecombe?” the nurse said. She paused from what she was doing and stared at me.
“Yes.”
“I just wanted to talk to you... about what you said....” she hesitated. “About your wife.”
“What is it?”
“Is she psychic?” she asked.
My kneejerk reaction was to say ‘no’. But then I looked at Alica, and realised that
it wasn’t necessarily true. I took her hand again.
I love you
The more I think about it, the more I realise that there has always been something enigmatic about you.
I remember that terrible day my father left. When it came to light that he had been having an affair with that slut from down the road.
Before I even found out about it, you ran into my study. “Ring your mother!” you said. It was unusual, because the two of you didn’t even get on very well. I asked you why, but you just shook your head. “Ring her now! She needs you!”
I rang her, and she was in tears. She did need me.
Somehow, you knew.
Or that time you made us cancel our plans to visit my friends. “No!” you said. You actually looked terrified. “We can’t go!”
I thought it was because you were just nervous about meeting them. We had a massive argument that day, but you won in the end.
Later I found out about that pileup on the motorway. It was on the news.
When we were living on that island in Scotland, every morning you used to cast your eyes out of the window and tell me if it was going to rain or not. Your predictions were often different from the official forecast, but you were always right.
There are so many examples... I can’t even remember them all...
