The car coasts and I steer to the verge, my mind a blank. I feel nothing. I have come too far to pretend to have control over my life now. Enormous snowflakes fly past the windows like huge moths. I can no longer discern white from black.
The car stops, and at the same time, the snow ceases to fall.
I see her then, a woman standing beside the road against the vast rising mass of the forested hill behind her. She wears a slick black jacket and long black boots. As far as I can tell, she wears neither skirt nor stockings. The blue-tinged white of her bare skin shines. Her hair is so blonde it seems to give off its own radiance.
She turns slowly and looks at me. My heartbeat slows. I tell myself she cannot see me, that it would be impossible to see anything in all the light streaming towards her.
She comes towards the car, approaching the passenger door in a sturdy undulating stride. She taps at the window with nails as long and curved and transparent as a dragonfly’s wings.
Aside from her hand splayed against the window, I can see only her torso, the patent leather, a liquescent black, outlining her hips and breasts. The passenger door opens and she enters the car as smoothly as a dancer, letting in an icy blast of air that vanquishes the warmth. She is older than she looked from a distance and more stocky. Her hair glows with a silvery pallor that might be strands of grey. I cannot tell her age. Her skin is like fine velvet, but there are intricate webs of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes. Her mouth is purple-black, as if she has just sucked some dark fruit whose juice has stained her lips, but her eyes are the bright miraculous blue of the skies above my own land, and nothing is more pure or relentless than that.
‘You are tired?’ she asks in heavily accented English.
‘I have not slept for a long time,’ I say.
‘It is long. The road.’
She reaches out and switches off the headlights. We are plunged into the intimate ghastly green of the dashboard light. The colour makes her look as if she is a corpse, and her eyes seem transparent. Her hair now looks black, as if it has become saturated with the night, or with something seeping out from the heart of all her whiteness. ‘What do you want?’ She speaks English as if through a mouthful of liquid.
‘I am looking for my shadow,’ I whisper. My own voice sounds foreign. I have never been so close to a woman before.
‘I have what you are seeking,’ she says. Then she leans away from me, and draws aside the slick black edges of the coat like the lips of a wound, to reveal the full, smooth curve of her breasts where they are pressed together into a voluptuous cleavage. They are white as milk and downed like a peach. She reaches a pale hand between them and scoops one breast out. It is so soft that her fingers sink into it. She gestures at it in a businesslike way and I recoil.
I shake my head. I want to tell her that I am a man, not a child to be suckled. Not some doddering senile fool returned to infancy. But she reaches out her free hand to grip my neck, and pulls me towards her. Only then, with her hair swept back to bare her throat and bosom fully, do I notice a dark vein snaking from her neck to her breast. It writhes under her skin as if it has its own life and moves towards the tip of her breast.
She is strong as a peasant and a ripe odour flows over me as she lifts the breast and pulls me to it. To drink the shadow in her, to be drunk by it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Erica Wagner and Allen & Unwin for their graceful and almost mythic patience with me throughout the long, slow creation of this book. Thanks also to my editor, Nan McNab, for being unfailingly graceful under fire, and brave enough never to let me get away with less than my best. And finally, thanks to Zoë Sadokierski for her lovely, lovely design.
These four stories were previously published, two in a significantly different form:
‘The Man Who Lost His Shadow’ in Dreaming Down-Under Book 1, edited by Jack Dann, Voyager/HarperCollins, 1999
‘The Dove Game’ (dedicated to Danny) in Gathering the Bones, edited by Jack Dann, Voyager/HarperCollins, 2003
‘The Stranger’ (dedicated to Danel O) in Exotic Gothic 3: Strange Visitations, edited by Danel Olson, Ash-Tree Press, 2009
‘Metro Winds’ (dedicated to Fernanda) in Exotic Gothic 4: A Postscripts Anthology, edited by Danel Olson, PS Publishing, 2012
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I sobelle Carmody is one of Australia’s most loved fantasy writers.
She is best known for her brilliant Obernewtyn Chronicles and for her novel The Gathering (joint winner of the 1993 Children’s Literature Peace Prize and the 1994 CBC Book of the Year Award). She has written many short stories for both children and adults and was co-editor with Nan McNab of the fairytale anthologies, The Wilful Eye and The Wicked Wood.
With her partner and daughter, Isobelle divides her time between Prague in the Czech Republic and her home on the Great Ocean Road in Australia.
Also available
Metro Winds Page 33
