by Paul Haines
No . . .
There’s a man with a shotgun crouched in the back seat, swathed in black robes. Only his eyes are visible, dark eyes, almost feminine. Jack hears the man’s battle cry, high-pitched and filled with terrible rage. Then the shotgun goes off with a muffled bang and the soldier stumbles backwards, away from the car. He lands hard on his back in the dirt, his ruined chest already soaked with blood. The chinstrap of the soldier’s helmet snaps, and it comes loose and rolls aside. Jack sees the man’s face, lying there in the reddening sand, the horrified expression, the pain. The moment of death.
It’s Jack’s face. As he knew it would be.
He watches himself die in the blood-stained dirt, transfixed, but at the far edges of his awareness something else is bothering him. A deep drone, barely audible at first, but getting louder. It fills his head, makes his vision blur. He closes his eyes and covers his ears with his hands, hunched over on the side of the road. It gets louder, more insistent.
Strong hands grasp his shoulders and yank him over backwards. He yelps and tumbles, flails blind and useless at his assailant. A hot gust of air rushes over him, dragon’s breath, filled with the stink of smoke and oil. Then the deep drone becomes deeper still, and slowly fades to nothing. Jack is on his back, and that man, that familiar stranger is standing over him, looking down at him with those damned mirror eyes. In them, Jack looks tiny, pathetic, like a frightened child.
“Jesus, Jack,” the man gasps, “that was bloody close! Are you okay?”
Jack doesn’t respond, just climbs to his feet. His legs are shaky. He turns away from the man, back to the road. The black car and jeep are gone. He is gone. His body, dead in the sand.
“Come on,” the driver says, “let’s go.” He puts his hand on Jack’s shoulder. The man’s touch scorches like a hot iron, straight through Jack’s uniform to the tender flesh beneath, and he twists away. He looks once more to the road, to the desert, but he knows now that there’s no escape there, no escape anywhere.
Defeated, he returns to the car.
They pull out of the station and continue to drive in silence. Jack doesn’t know how long they’ve been driving now. It feels like days, weeks maybe, though the sun’s never gone down, the temperature’s never dropped. It’s always been hot and bright. Jack would give anything to see the sunset, to be wrapped in the cool night air. Instead he’s here, in this car, with this man-shaped thing behind the wheel. It’s his fate, like that story of the man who spends eternity pushing the rock up a hill. No, more than his fate. His punishment.
He sees something on the road in front of them. There, in the distance, almost lost in the ripples of heat haze, is another car. It shimmers and becomes the army jeep, on the same side of the road as them, coming fast.
He looks over at the driver to see if he’s noticed the oncoming jeep, but the man has changed. He’s now the dark complexioned younger man, the driver of the black car, his large sunglasses covering his eyes. Sweat trickles down his face. He looks frightened. The car has changed as well, become older, the seats upholstered in cracked brown leather, a musty, used smell filling the air. The heat, though, the heat is the same. The heat is always the same.
Jack looks back to the road ahead, across a bonnet now black and dirty and dented, and sees the flashes from the back of the approaching jeep. Chunks of the road ahead leap into the air. Then bullets pierce the bonnet of the car, holes appear like magic tricks, pop pop pop. The windscreen explodes inwards, shatters into a million geometric pieces. The driver jerks back and forth in his chair, and splashes of blood burst from his white shirt, shockingly red. He doesn’t make a sound, not so much as a grunt. The car swerves, a little at first, then more, as the man’s dead hands pull it this way and that. Jack knows it’s going to crash.
No . . .
Then another bullet, far behind all the others, finally finds him. It enters him, pierces him. Violates him. It doesn’t even touch the edges of the hole in his chest, but he still feels his heart explode, his dead ghost of a heart, like the houses on the street outside, gone yet still there. The seat against his back rips open, and a sound he can’t quite identify comes from behind him, a horrible animal-like shriek that makes his guts twist inside him. He gasps.
“Jack?” a voice asks him, a familiar voice, still filled with that quiet concern.
Jack looks over at the driver, the dead man with the bloodied white shirt, and he’s gone, replaced again by the man in the dark suit with mirrors for eyes. He’s not sure which is worse. The windscreen is whole once more, the bonnet intact. But the sounds still ring in his ears, echo and hum. He shakes his head, looks away from the eyes, those looking-glass eyes.
“It’s all right, soldier,” the man says, his attention mercifully back on the road again. “We’re almost there. Almost home.”
Jack’s chest hurts. If he had a heart, it would be breaking. This was too cruel. All he’d ever wanted was to go home, all through his time overseas. And now he’s dead, and home is nothing but a distant memory, a heat mirage on a long desert highway. A brutal illusion.
The car slows again, pulls into a driveway. A house appears out of the mists, red-bricked and tin-roofed. Three windows and a door, painted in nostalgic watercolours in Jack’s eyes. He watches as they pull up in front of it, mesmerised and appalled.
It’s his house. He’s home.
The lie is almost perfect. The gardens aren’t as lush as he remembers them, the roses wilted and faded by the ceaseless sun above. The windows are dirty, the path dotted with scattered brown leaves. But it’s so close, so damn close, that it makes him feel dizzy. He wants to cry, but there are no tears in him, he’s as dry as the desert, dry as old bones, dry as dust.
The driver gets out of the car, then walks around and opens Jack’s door. Jack steps out, gravel crunching beneath his booted feet. He looks around, at this house surrounded by thick blue vapours, the house he grew up in. No, not the house he grew up in, just a good likeness, it has to be. The man leads him away from the car, towards the front door.
He’s only taken a few steps when the door opens, and he sees his parents.
For a moment, one wondrous moment, he believes it, believes it all. The mists disappear and he’s in the front yard of his childhood home, surrounded by the streets and houses of familiar memories. There are the musical sounds of birds coming from the many native trees and bushes planted all around. Cars drive past at a sensible speed on the road behind him, making soft comforting roars. He can smell the lemon tree in the front garden, the sharp citrus tang in the cool autumn air. And there, on the front door step, are his mum and dad; older, yes, but still his mum and dad, still real. They look at him and . . .
The make-believe world fractures and fades when he sees his parents’ eyes. They’re the same as the driver’s, terrible silver-plated mirrors embedded deep in their sockets. He is trapped in them, once, twice, three times, four. Each reflection smaller and more misbegotten than the one before. Most of all, he sees the hole in his chest, dark and deep and decayed. These . . . these things masquerading as his parents, these monsters in human costumes, walk towards him, their arms open, ready to gather him up like a helpless baby, carry him away into his own private hell. The mists roll in again, the suburban paradise engulfed once more by the desert and the heat and the smell of old blood and rotting meat.
Jack turns away from them, from the house and the people and the lies, turns back to the car. All he wants now is to be driven away from here, anywhere, anywhere but here. But the car is wrecked, peppered with bullet holes, tyres half-buried in the sands. The windscreen is a ruined glass jigsaw puzzle, jagged pieces scattered across the front seats, across the bloodied corpse of the olive-skinned man behind the wheel. Jack’s hands are hot and sore from firing the heavy machine gun in the nearby jeep, battered by the recoil. He holds his pistol out in front of him with both hands, arms straight like he was trained. He approaches the back door, releases his gun with one hand to open it up. Pulls
on the handle, and inside . . .
No . . .
The dead woman looks like she’s in her twenties. She’s dressed in a traditional Islamic hijab, all black, but the veil has fallen away from her face, revealing high cheekbones, those beautiful dark eyes. Her mouth is slightly open. A bullet has struck her in the temple, torn away the flesh and bone there, leaving a ruined jagged crater the size of a man’s fist. Jack can see fragments of her skull, and beneath them, the sponge-like pink tissues of her brain. The side of her face is painted bright red. One arm is flung back on the seat, a blood-splattered finger raised to the sky.
The other cradles her baby.
The child is wrapped in a blanket, once white, but now stained with blood, its mother’s and its own. Its head lolls to one side, small chubby hands held out, palms up, imploring, begging, pleading. It’s been struck in its tiny chest, the impact of the bullet all but quartering the baby. A jumbled bloody mess lies in its lap, and it takes Jack an awful moment to realise that it’s the baby’s internal organs, guts and lungs and heart, all shredded up and spat out by the force of the gunshot.
Jack hears a noise, a sickening high keening like an animal caught in a trap, and for a second or two he thinks that the child is somehow still alive, wailing for its dead mother. But the sound isn’t coming from the baby. It’s coming from Jack. He feels something crumble and fall deep inside himself, in his chest, like he’s collapsing into himself.
“Doctor?” a voice so much like his mother’s says softly from somewhere behind him, thousands of miles away. “What’s wrong with him?”
His wrist still itches and hurts, where his watch strap digs into it. He scratches at it, but there’s no watch there. His fingernails dig at the bandages, and blood blooms beneath them again. From far away, he can hear their voices, the creatures with his parents’ faces and mirrorballs for eyes, concerned, worried. Gentle hands on his shoulders, on his back, soothing. He doesn’t feel them, can’t feel them. Can’t face them, can’t see himself reflected in them. Can’t.
His heart is gone. His heart is gone, and he can never go home.
Soil From My Fingers
Lisa L Hannett
I could convince falconers to trade six hawks for two of my hens. I could navigate borderlands without steering the caravan into Meito ghost fields. I could ford winter rivers, violent with fast-moving ice, without losing any of my stock. If duty called I could lead the Pasha’s warriors into battle, and guide most of them back out again. My clan was ten wagons strong; my brothers’ sons would add three more to that count before we set out on our next travelling days. Some believed I could make dead vines bear fruit or teach lame goats to walk, if only I wielded the right tools. Had the right ingredients. Spoke the right words. These things I could do and more. But it all meant nothing if no one remembered me, if I couldn’t give my wife a child.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. When we were first married, mystery and excitement drove me to Astrith’s wagon every night. I’d walk past the campfires above which spitted hares roasted, ignoring the rumble in my belly in favour of a lower hunger, earning smiles from my cousins and brothers. It was bad luck for husbands to live with their brides until after a first child was born; skittish young ghosts shy away from wombs when men are forever booming into them. I was determined to get Astrith with child, so we could start our life together. Properly. Without risking barrenness, or worse, being cursed with the unnatural offspring breaking this taboo would bring.
Astrith’s laugh gave me shivers, her touch was assured, her embrace was open and warm. I couldn’t wait to join her in bed each night, to renew our efforts at giving our House an heir. The clanwives would serenade me with a chorus of luck-giving whistles as I stepped out of the flickering light into evening’s deepening shadows; more often than not, my mother would give me a skin of fermented mare’s milk to bring as a gift. Thus armed, my hands and face and cock scrubbed clean, I would knock on the fresh green paint of my wife’s door, and wait for her to invite me in.
Deep yellow candle glow spilled down the wooden steps leading up to her caravan when she opened the door that first night. Astrith had been beautiful then. Her fair skin was made tawny in the ambient light, her black hair unplaited, her blouse unlaced and revealing. I nearly dropped the skin of milk when I saw her. Nearly tumbled back down the stairs and into the familiar sounds of falling night: cook pots clinking on heated stones, knives being honed by the fireside, axes splitting enough logs to keep darkness at bay, stories being told in murmurs. Closing the door, I’d turned to Astrith and blamed my clumsiness on the green-eyed cat winding itself around my ankles. I’d had a reputation among traders and warriors to uphold. Never let it be said that Tomaken is a stumbler.
Astrith had laughed at my excuses; a resonant, healthy sound. She’d bent down and shooed Sorokin, her favourite cat, away from my feet. While she was down there, she’d made quick work of my pants’ drawstring. Within moments, I was praying to the Meitoshi, thanking them for blessing me with such joy.
* * *
My knuckles were stained green from three years of nightly knockings. One thousand nights joining my wife, observed by her broods of kittens; one thousand days of tears marking Astrith’s wan features, and mine, as the cradle I’d built remained empty. She continued to welcome me, with arms and legs and heart; but after she’d twice expelled the bloody husk of a baby long before it was due in this world, Astrith’s enthusiasm for my affections grew thin.
“Keep trying,” my mother said, her breath visible in the late winter air. She took my hands, gave me a milk-skin kept warm by the fire. I placed it beneath my thick woollen vest; its heat did little to thaw the block of ice in my chest. “The moon is waxing, the stars are spinning. The time for growth and change is at hand.” When she patted my cheek, her hand was shaky. The whistle she sounded as I shuffled to Astrith’s wagon was more than a little forced.
My wife was sitting at the small fold-out table in the caravan’s far end, next to a potbellied stove that exuded more heat than was needed for such a small space. Her doeskin mantle was bundled in her lap, wrapped around something I couldn’t quite see. Not the baby, I prayed, when I noticed Astrith’s eyes were red from crying. Six months she had kept this one; I dreaded seeing the infant’s lifeless form, shrivelled in her lap. But there was no blood-stained nightdress, the woven floor-coverings hadn’t been rolled back to expose scrub-able boards, the tin chamber pot was still empty and tucked away in a corner. I held the door open, thinking Sorokin would want to escape the stifling heat—she had grown to be an outside cat, one who preferred being cold. When she didn’t appear, I closed the door and took a few halting steps toward my wife.
“I’ve looked everywhere,” she said, staring down at the mewling, writhing mass in her arms. “Beneath the mattress, in all the cupboards, behind curtains. In the footlocker, the undercarriage, in the crawlspace above the bed. I even pried slats away from the walls”—I saw two wooden boards, leaning next to Astrith’s horse-head fiddle—“but I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“Couldn’t find what, Breath of My Heart?”
Dark circles ringed her eyes, and her voice broke when she said, “The curse against mothers that plagues this house. There must be a hidden fetish, a poisoned charm in these walls. How will I carry this child to term when even poor Sorokin has been taken from me?”
My heartbeat quickened. I loosened Astrith’s grip on the cloak, pulled its covering folds away, revealed Sorokin’s still form. Six naked kittens squirmed at their mother’s cold teats, blinking blindly and struggling for supremacy. The two smallest ones looked like they wouldn’t endure the next five minutes; the four others weren’t faring much better.
“Only one need survive,” I said, plucking the strongest kitten from the litter, shifting the rest to the floor. I whispered life-giving words, pierced a small hole in the milk-skin with my teeth, then pressed the charmed liquid to the creature’s mouth. She snuffled and gulped greedily.
&nbs
p; “We’ll defy this curse as a family. You and me, and Katla here.” Astrith smiled at the name. “The moon has changed for us three, My Breath. You’ll see.”
* * *
The baby seemed reluctant to join us. Our clan had journeyed throughout the travelling days: we’d crossed the heart of the grasslands; we’d scaled the steppes (avoiding the bandits that roamed those lands); and our path had reached the wooded foothills surrounding Zhureem Ordon, the Pasha’s mountain-top fortress, when my daughter declared she was ready to be born.
She was more than two weeks late; Astrith’s confinement was long and painful. The midwives earned their keep all day—their cheeks grew ruddy, their summer tunics stained with sweat, as they ran to and from the river carrying canteens of water for boiling or for rinsing blood-soaked rags. They wouldn’t cut the child from her mother’s womb, no matter how badly it pained them to see Astrith struggle: to remove a creature thus would deem it unborn. The ancestors would keep its spirit, leaving only the shell of an infant behind. It would be better for mother and child to die than to bring such an abomination into the world. Our clan prided itself on its band of heirs; we had yet to lose any of our offspring to the ghost fields. With the Meitoshi behind me, we wouldn’t start with my child.
I remained at our camp while my men went hunting in the forest. They nodded their approval when I volunteered to tend the horses, beasts renowned for their wiliness, before they disappeared into the trees. For hours I dug post-holes for the animals’ temporary pens in the clearing opposite our wagons and tents. I could hear Astrith’s cries even there. They’d started off strong, but had grown weaker and weaker until my spade, ringing against rocky soil, drowned them out.
The sun had passed her torch to night’s guardian before Chinta, the eldest midwife, came to collect me. She placed her wizened hand on my shoulder, not flinching at the filth and sweat she found there, and whispered, “It’s time for you to come.”
