EQMM, September-October 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Hello, yes, I want to report a kidnapping—yes, I said kidnapping!” half shouting the word.

  "Tell them how little he is!” Gwen screeched.

  Trying to wave her off, but without success—she hovered over me—I somehow managed to provide all the information requested by the operator. Once I'd finished, the mad dance churned up again, only it was more out of control than before, swirling around the room and accompanied by bellows and screams and tears, lots of tears. Especially from my wife.

  Unable to take it anymore, I sprang out the back door to plant my feet on grass for a few moments, hoping to establish solid footing in my perspective too. And there they were, beyond the twisted, barren apple tree: Mrs. Rhinosos and my sixteen-week-old, unbaptised son. It had never occurred to me—to any of us—that he could have been carried just a few feet outside. Our minds would only permit us to think that if he'd been taken out of the house, it had to be far, far away.

  Mrs. Rhinosos had walked into the house and straight up the stairs; and in the confusion, the one or two people who happened to notice her had assumed she had a right to be among us. Into the empty bedroom she went, picked up the baby, stepped down the back stairs, out the kitchen door, and into the yard. Planned or not, her timing had been brilliant.

  Sitting in a rusted outdoor rocker, the witch looked as hunched over and as coil-haired as I remembered her from my childhood. Even her saucer-brimmed hat, with its crushed paper lily, seemed left over from those days. My baby, buttoned up in a frothy white suit, was giggling joyfully as the woman famous for her empty life held him close against her broad chest. Afraid to frighten her into doing something peculiar, I stepped softly over the grass up behind them, and was about to reach down and snatch the child out of her arms when she said, without looking back at me, “Your son, he is beautiful. What is the name you will give him?"

  I stiffened and stuttered, “John ... Christopher."

  "Good strong name for good strong baby.” She sighed, looking long into my son's face, which was pink with laughter and sunlight ... no shadows whatsoever of Original Sin.

  As I stood there wondering how she'd heard about the baptism—secondhand through one of my mother's visits to the old neighborhood, I supposed—a gang of relatives came bursting out of the back door of the house, growling audibly, teeth bared. I made a face and raised my right hand like a school crossing guard. Mr. Loch, Harriet, and Bruce stopped short on the grass. But Merrula kept coming.

  "You'd better not take another step,” I threatened.

  My aunt froze and suddenly looked hurt—looked human, the way she used to look before she'd begun to find evil everywhere. It was almost as if, for just a moment, she saw that evil existed more in her own mind than in the world.

  I never felt a single pinpoint of coolness touch my hands or face, so I didn't realize it had begun to rain until I saw the dots of wetness spreading on the paper lily stuck into the old woman's hat.

  "Mrs. Rhinosos, would you like to come to the christening?"

  Faded green eyes of another place and time she turned on me, and said, in a child's voice, “Ah yes, Alex, I'd like very much."

  Mrs. Rhinosos began pressing her black witchy shoes into the grass, rocking the chair gently back and forth, never allowing her eyes to move away from the baby's face. Watching intently, my family, flat-footed on the hardscrabble lawn, didn't speak, didn't stir. Not until a figure in a dark blue shirt and trousers emerged from the back door, Gwendolyn right on his heels; his eyes were sharp, hers were wild. Fleetingly I mistook him for a man of the cloth, but then I noticed that the heel of his hand was resting on the gun in his holster. This time I raised both arms high and frantically waved them off. The officer stopped, but Gwen pushed past him, forcing me to intercept her midway across the lawn by wrapping my arms around her waist. Though she kept wriggling to break loose, I managed to hold on to her long enough to allow my son to remain in Mrs. Rhinosos's wrinkled arms a minute longer: After all, in the wider scheme of the universe, the baby was as much hers as ours.

  Copyright © 2009 Tom Tolnay

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  Fiction: THE SAME AS SHE ALWAYS WAS by Keith McCarthy

  Keith McCarthy, a pathologist himself by trade, debuted a fictional series starring British forensic pathol-ogist John Eisenmenger in 2003. The books, in the same vein as Patricia Cornwell's forensic thrillers, have received strong reviews (though they're not, PW warned, for those with weak stomachs!). After a break for a nonfiction book, the author has just delivered the seventh Eisenmenger novel, Corpus Delicti, which Severn House will publish in late 2009.

  am the same as I always was.

  I am the same as I always was.

  Acts do not change us. Acts spring from what we are, and what we believe, and perhaps most important of all, what we desire. I am still the Gilly I was on the first day I met Greg, as I was on the day that he left me, as I was on the day that the police came to call.

  It was Greg who changed, not me, Greg who altered the bargain, who changed the rules, who ripped up the contract. Greg who stole my life from me without even realising it.

  I still love Greg and I always will, until the day I die.

  * * * *

  The rain comes suddenly but not unexpectedly. When Greg and Gilly set out on their walk from the pub in the Forest of Dean where they are staying for the weekend, the wind was blustering and clouds, fluffy and bright, moved briskly before it, casting huge, traveling shadows on the land around them. He said to her then that he thought it would rain and she said, “Maybe, but let's go anyway."

  Gilly loves walking. When Greg first met her, eleven years ago, it was on a walk, one for a breast-cancer charity, because her mother had died of the disease and because his mother had had a cancerous lump but was cured. She has vividly red hair and freckles and Greg has loved her from the first moment he saw her.

  "We should take waterproofs."

  "Why?” she asks. “If there's a shower, we'll find some shelter somewhere; wait for it to stop."

  "If it does stop."

  She laughs. “So what if it doesn't? We've nowhere else to go, nothing to be late for."

  And so they set out, walking through the lush green valley, beside dry stone walls, past pretty cottages and copses and fields of potatoes, corn, and grass. They have not been here since their honeymoon and the smells, the sights, the tastes bring back that time, reminding them of just how much they need the relaxation and respite from the stresses of their oh-so-busy lives.

  Especially now.

  * * * *

  A marriage is a pact. Everyone knows that, don't they? And a pact involves sharing and pooling, giving and taking, so that something is created, something that exists that had no existence before. Gestalt. A third entity that is part man, part woman, but most important of all, part neither of them. A creation that is every bit as real as a work of art, or an invention...

  Or a child.

  * * * *

  They have come because they need to escape their troubles. They know that a week in the Forest of Dean will be only a temporary respite, but they also hope that it will allow them to see each other anew, to regain something that they both know (without saying as much) they have lost and, more importantly, that their relationship has lost.

  Recent times have been hard.

  Greg's IT consultancy has been going through a difficult phase and he has had to lay off all but one of the eight people he once employed; he has hopes to gain a new contract from a national retail distribution company but fears that he is too close to the horizon of financial breakdown, the point beyond which no business returns.

  And Gilly...

  Poor Gilly has just terminated a pregnancy. She is thirty-eight now and she fears that she has made the wrong decision.

  Who can blame her?

  Three miscarriages preceded this pregnancy, one of which was at eighteen weeks and therefore the worst; she had dared then to hope that she might gain her prize
.

  The only prize that she has ever really wanted.

  * * * *

  When did I realize that a child was all I ever desired?

  How odd it feels, to have longed for something for so long, yet not to have known it, not until recently. When I was young, I played with my dolls and teddies, yet I did not consciously appreciate that this was all that I wanted; when I was a teenager, I had boyfriends but not, I am sure, because I saw them as a means to motherhood. Yet now I know that that was precisely my reasoning.

  It frightens me, this recognition that I am driven, that I always have been driven, that perhaps all my decisions in life were guided by an imperative over which I have had no control, that was wired into me, whether by fate or blind chance.

  Or God.

  * * * *

  After forty-five minutes, when they have just stopped to admire two ponies in a field, he asks her, “Are you all right?"

  She looks up at him and smiles. “Oh yes."

  This starts off fine but ends with a catch in her throat. She looks quickly away, back to the ponies.

  "Hey,” he says gently, tapping her on the shoulder.

  A nod. Shoulders hunched and a nod that is tensely sprung. She does not look at him.

  "Gilly."

  He puts his arm around her shoulders, grasps the soft blue cashmere, squeezes them gently, lowers his face to be level with hers. Another quick nod, but this time with a sniff; still no words.

  The ponies are skittish, kicking and suddenly galloping in short spurts. Perhaps they sense the coming rain.

  Greg says quietly, in her ear, “You did the right thing."

  For a moment, she continues to stare fixedly at the ponies, but the sniffs come more and more quickly until she suddenly begins to cry continuously. Another squeeze of her shoulders and she turns to him and buries her face in his thick woollen jumper; she smells his eau de Cologne, the one she gave him for their first Christmas and that he still says he likes.

  "We couldn't have coped.” He is so calm, so reassuring, so certain.

  "But..."

  "We both agreed, didn't we? Do you remember, Gilly? How we agreed?"

  Face still buried in his sweater, still trying to burrow into him, to hide from her grief, she nods slowly and only after hesitation. He is holding her tightly, but she draws comfort from it. He says, “You're not strong enough on your own. You would have needed me, and at this moment, with things so difficult, I couldn't have given you the support and got the business going again."

  There is no nod this time. She withdraws slightly, looks up into his face where she has always found so much security. “I didn't realise that it would be so horrible."

  He holds her face in his hands, smears tears with his thumbs. “I know, I know,” he whispers, although she wonders just how he can know. “In a few years, when we can more easily afford it, when we're more established."

  "But I'm getting old. What if I can't have any more?"

  A laugh, one that tells her she is being silly, that of course she will have more.

  "You will,” he says. There is something of command about this but it is couched in the softest, most gentle of tones. “These days, no one is too old."

  It is flippant, almost insulting. The easy response to the unimportant fears of a subordinate.

  "I knew that it wouldn't be easy, but I didn't think it would be this hard...."

  For a moment he does not speak, then, “You're too close to it, Gilly. It was only a month and a half ago. By the time Christmas comes, you'll be able to think logically. You'll see then that it was all for the best."

  And this makes her realise that he does not understand at all, that he had thought it was easy, that he still thinks it is. A light anaesthetic, a short sleep, and—hey presto!—no more problem.

  Yet six weeks on, she still feels dirty, filled with sin, tainted by guilt.

  She says, “I hope so.” But she is thinking through his words, his tone, the thoughts that must lie behind them.

  A smile, and what he presumably believes is a warm laugh, as he replies, “You'll get over it, Gilly. This will help. You'll see."

  And then he kisses her and holds her again for a long, long time.

  "Okay?” he asks.

  She says that, yes, she is, because she can see that this is what he wants her to say.

  They continue on their walk.

  * * * *

  Greg rescued me.

  That sounds like an overstatement—hyperbole, I believe they call it—but that is what I always believed.

  My mother had died after a long illness and I thought that I was coping by being busy and by helping Dad come to terms with the situation, and by jumping into charity work. Except that I wasn't. I was fading, day by day, good deed by good deed, and I was completely ignorant of it all.

  Greg gave me back a skyline, something to aim for, a concept that there was an outside world as well as the place where I lived.

  I just wish I thought that he knew what he was doing.

  I'm afraid, you see, that he did not perform any of his chivalrous acts consciously, that he has always been blithely unaware—if not uncaring—of what he did.

  Which is fine, I thought at first.

  After all, most good in this world is done unconsciously, as an unintended byproduct of acts performed for different, perhaps selfish, reasons.

  Oh dear.

  I wish I hadn't said that.

  * * * *

  They are staying in an old coaching inn. The bed is fairly comfortable, although Greg complains that the mattress is too soft and giving him backache.

  They have not made love for six months.

  The meals are hearty, with far too much on the plate; the puddings are straight out of Gilly's childhood, gorgeous, fat-filled sweetnesses that steam and beckon the diner with siren sighs.

  Gilly is not really hungry.

  It is a friendly pub, with a husky, deep-voiced landlady and low beams and the scents of scenes still remembered.

  Gilly suspects that Greg is having an affair.

  * * * *

  The first drops come after two hours. They are large drops, cold but not startlingly so. Greg looks up into the sky, his prominent nose and Adam's apple silhouetted against the sky in which the clouds are now grey but still bright. He looks at Gilly. She has fully recovered, is back to a young, professional woman on a short break.

  "I think it's going to be heavy,” he says. There have been occasional mild flurries of rain, but this is different; the wind has got up and there is a slight chilled dampness around them.

  They are in the middle of a small hump-backed bridge that crosses a fast-running stream that cuts deeply into a gully. Greg is leading because Greg always leads and Gilly is happy with that. She loves him, after all.

  She looks around, points. “There's an old cottage over there. Why don't we shelter there?” It is some distance away, through some overgrown woods; it looks deserted, almost a ruin, but the roof appears to be intact.

  He nods, holds out his hand for her, then they run together over the bridge and to their right, off the single-track road and into the woods. The rain becomes harder, the noise of its attack louder. By the time they reach the cottage, it is surprisingly torrential and they are very, very wet.

  * * * *

  How did I know that he no longer loved me?

  This question torments me.

  If I could answer it, I would be so much happier, so much more contented, but contentment is a rare commodity, worth killing for, perhaps. I would be happy because then I would be certain in my mind, and uncertainty is killing me.

  But it is not to be. Certainty is second only to contentment in scarcity.

  Yet, without a doubt, I knew that he had a lover.

  It was like something seen out of the corner of my eye, a dancing spectre that teased me by leaping away as I turned my head to catch it.

  But that did not mean that it does not exist.

 
; The knowledge was there in his smile, his kiss, his kindnesses.

  All I lacked was proof.

  But I still loved him. I will always love him. He had his faults, but so do I. I thought to learn to live with it.

  Because I love him.

  * * * *

  The cottage had once been whitewashed, was now flaking. The faded blue front door is half off its hinges, the windows without glass. There are the remains of a garden, with a path in front of it.

  There is even a well.

  Breathless from the exertion, Greg says, “The gingerbread's fallen off."

  Gilly laughs. “I hope the witch has gone, too."

  Greg looks around. There is no hallway and they are standing in the sitting room. There is no furniture and leaves are piled in the corners. The ceiling is low and beams cross it.

  "It would have been a nice house, once."

  "I guess."

  He is taking in every detail, examining it, almost as an architect might, seeing possibilities in the decay. “We could live here,” he says, but he does not say it loudly, although she hears it.

  "I couldn't."

  He looks around and the thing that she sees is a good-humoured smile. “It's wonderful! What's wrong with it?"

  "It's small and pokey and probably subsiding and almost certainly damp. And it's nowhere near anywhere."

  He laughs. “But it's charming, too."

  "I don't want to live in charming, Greg. I want to live in convenient, warm, spacious, and cheap."

  A shrug of the shoulders. “You can't have everything."

  "And what about work, Greg? We're in the middle of nowhere here."

  "You know that I can do most things remotely. If I arranged matters properly, I would only need to be in the office one day a week."

  "Does that send the right message? I mean, does that tell your clients that you're completely committed?"

  He becomes angry. “My clients understand that commitment is nothing at all to do with sitting in a box in a city."

  Wondering why he is so defensive, she backs away, changes the subject. “What about children? I'm not sure that this would be a particularly suitable place to raise a family."