this world, that drips darkness onto the carpet? I open my eyelids finally and turn around to see which it is.
The town of Port McCarthy died slowly, choked by the darkness that rolled towards it without warning on waves as black as night. While the rest of the world saw this from a distance, Suzanne and I suffered the full brunt of the accident there, we suffered the crashing waves of darkness that would not stop, would not end, until it spread through our lives as surely as it had through Port McCarthy. Even now I feel it, and even now I wish I had known some way to halt its progress before it was too late. But that’s the way with accidents; they come when we are not prepared, and in their wake they leave devastation and death. As soon as that black oil was spilled in Port McCarthy, there was no hope for me, for Suzanne, for us. It doesn’t surprise me in hindsight that there is no sun in Port McCarthy, instead only dark clouds. The sun forsook us then. While we laughed and smiled and embraced in ignorance the seeds of our destruction had already been planted.
It doesn’t take me long to pack my bag, my distaste for the town all but palpable. The dog in the next room has not made a noise in some time, and I pray it doesn’t start because I worry what I will do if it does. Not once do I look at the crack in the wall, at the stain that has spread from it across the carpet. I want to, but if I succumb I fear I will be drawn too far into the darkness to ever extricate myself.
I rush down the stairs, nearly slipping on something that coats them. The tattooed girl at the front desk clicks her studded tongue against her teeth as I sign out and hand her the key.
“You aren’t staying?”
“There’s nothing here to see anymore,” I mutter, my head down, and scurry from the Windhaven Inn while trying to dispel the image of that dark child from my memory. If the girl says anything more to me, it does not register.
I stop on the porch of the Windhaven Inn, my hastily packed bag in my hand, and look up at the dark clouds that are like an indelible stain upon the sky. And I wonder, for a moment, if it’s not my soul that has been so marked.
Then, at the foot of the steps, I see the large six-toed cat once again. It still stares blankly ahead as though it is waiting for something but has forgotten what. It sits, blocking my passage, but I don’t dare touch it — I cannot bring myself to relive the experience of feeling its matted fur slide across its body. As I watch I see that what it chews is not grass, not any longer. I put my bag down and take a hesitant step towards the creature, not heeding the low growl it gives as warning. Instead, I crane my head further until what I see between its teeth is the head of a flower from which a long stem trails back to the ground; a flower that has impossibly sprouted through a dark oily film and beneath an even darker sky.
A flower. A life for a life. A promise of re-growth.
I reach towards the old cat but it only growls and bites.
JOAN AIKEN
Hair
JOAN DELANO AIKEN MBE (1924–2004) was born in Rye, East Sussex, the daughter of Pulitzer Prize- winning American poet and ghost story author Conrad Aiken. She began writing at an early age, and in her early twenties she had some of her stories broadcast by the BBC.
In the 1950s she joined the editorial staff of
By now a full-time writer, she produced two or three books a year for the rest of her life. Her more than 100 titles included
Aiken was also a life-long fan of ghost stories, particularly the works of M. R. James and Fitz James O’Brien, and her own contributions to the genre include the novels
More recently, Small Beer Press published
A Guest of Honour at the 1997 World Fantasy Convention in London, Joan Aiken won the Guardian Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and in 1999 was presented with an MBE for her services to children’s literature.
TOM ORFORD STOOD leaning over the rail and watching the flat hazy shores of the Red Sea slide past. A month ago he had been watching them slide in the other direction. Sarah had been with him then, leaning and looking after the ship’s wake, laughing and whispering ridiculous jokes into his ear.
They had been overflowingly happy, playing endless deck games with the other passengers, going to the ship’s dances in Sarah’s mad, rakish conception of fancy dress, even helping to organise the appalling concerts of amateur talent, out of their gratitude to the world.
“You’ll tire yourself out!” somebody said to Sarah, as she plunged from deck-tennis to swimming in the ship’s pool, from swimming to dancing, from dancing to ping pong. “As if I could,” she said to Tom. “I’ve done so little all my life, I have twenty-one years of accumulated energy to work off.”
But just the same, that was what she had done. She had died, vanished, gone out, as completely as a forgotten day, or a drift of the scent of musk. Gone, lost to the world. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, he thought. Not matter, no. The network of bones and tendons, the dandelion clock of fair hair, the brilliantly blue eyes that had once belonged to Sarah, and had so riotously obeyed her will for a small portion of her life — a forty- second part of it, perhaps — was now quietly returning to earth in a Christian cemetery in Ceylon. But her spirit, the fiery intention which had co-ordinated that machine of flesh and bone and driven it through her life — the spirit, he knew, existed neither in air nor earth. It had gone out, like a candle.
He did not leave the ship at Port Said. It was there that he had met Sarah. She had been staying with friends, the Acres. Orford had gone on a trip up the Nile with her. Then they had started for China. This was after they had been married, which happened almost immediately. And now he was coming back with an address, and a bundle of hair to give to her mother. For she had once laughingly asked him to go and visit her mother, if she were to die first.
“Not that she’d enjoy your visit,” said Sarah dryly. “But she’d be highly offended if she didn’t get a lock of hair, and she might as well have the lot, now I’ve cut it off. And you could hardly send it to her in a registered envelope.”
He had laughed, because then death seemed a faraway and irrelevant threat, a speck on the distant horizon.
“Why are we talking about it, anyway?” he said.
“Death always leaps to mind when I think of Mother,” she answered, her eyes dancing. “Due to her I’ve lived in an atmosphere of continuous death for twenty-one years.”
She had told him her brief story. When she reached twenty-one, and came into an uncle’s legacy, she had packed her brush and comb and two books and a toothbrush (“All my other possessions, if they could be called mine, were too ugly to take”), and, pausing only at a hairdresser’s to have her bun cut off (he had seen a photograph of her at nineteen, a quiet, dull-looking girl, weighed down by her mass of hair) she had set off for Egypt to visit her only friend, Mrs Acres. She wrote to her mother from Cairo. She had had one letter in return.
“My dear Sarah, as you are now of age I cannot claim to have any further control over you, for you are, I trust, perfectly healthy in mind and body. I have confidence in the upbringing you received, which furnished you with
