As he swung, the sun began to colour the sky. He was breathing so hard he sounded like a blue norther blowing in. The sun rose higher and still he swung, then he fell to the ground, his chest heaving.
When he looked about, he saw the thing was no longer moving. Norville was standing nearby, holding one of the marked rocks.
“You was doin’ so good, I didn’t want to interrupt you,” Norville said.
The Reverend nodded, breathed for a long hard time, said, “Saddlebags. If this is not medicinal. I do not know what is.”
A few moments later, Norville returned with the flask. The Reverend drank first, long and deep, and then he gave it to Norville.
When his wind was back, and the sun was up, the Reverend chopped the rest of the monster up. It had already gone flat and gushed clutter from its insides that were part horse bones, gouts of blood, and unidentifiable items that made the stomach turn; its teeth were spread around the well curbing, like someone had dropped a box of daggers.
They burned what would burn of the beast with dried limbs and dead leaves, buried the teeth and the remainder of the beast in a deep grave, the bottom and top and sides of it lined with the marked rocks.
When they were done chopping and cremating and burying the creature, it was late afternoon. They finished off the flask, and that night they slept in the house, undisturbed, and in the morning, they set fire to the cabin using
They walked out, the Reverend with the saddlebags over his shoulder, Norville with a pillowcase filled with food tins from the cabin. Behind them, the smoke from the fire rose up black and sooty and by night-time it had burned down to glowing cinders, and by the next day there was nothing more than clumps of ash.
CONRAD WILLIAMS
Wait
CONRAD WILLIAMS IS A three-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award. He is the author of the novels
Some of his short fiction has been collected in
The author is currently working on a novel that will act as a prequel for a major videogame from Sony, and a novel of supernatural terror set in France.
“‘Wait’ came about directly after a visit to Poole’s Cavern in Buxton, Derbyshire,” Williams reveals. “At the end of the system is a boulder choke. A radar scan in 1999 established that a greater network of chambers lie beyond it.
“It was quite awe-inspiring to think that we were feet away from a place that has not been seen by human eyes since the glaciers carved it out two million years ago.
“And then I began to think about means of access, and how every entrance can also be an exit. ”
THE SNOW HAD never really gone away. It swirled in his head, in memories of Julie’s cheap little ornament. And here was the same whitened motorway turn-off. Here the same crystallised countryside swelling against the verge. He had to stop the car at the accident site, although he had persuaded himself over the three-hour duration of his drive up here that he would not.
He parked in a lay-by and walked back. The telegraph post was no longer there. The car had almost torn it out of the ground, and might have done so had it not destroyed the passenger side of the car first.
Julie had not stood a chance.
The doctors he spoke to reassured him that she was unlikely to have felt anything, the impact was so swift, so massive. There was nothing to suggest an accident had taken place here.
Don had received a face full of broken glass, but he was otherwise unmarked. He could walk. He could get in and out of bed. He could turn his head. Everything that Julie could not. Even the cuts on his face had healed without leaving obvious scars. The scar he needed to heal was inside him. That was partly the reason for this trip. To confront the moment of his wife’s death, and to carry on to the place they had meant to be journeying. To find a way forward.
They had been a scant ten minutes away from Sheckford, that awful day. Now Don went back to the car and switched on the engine. He pulled out into the road. A blade of sunshine sliced through clouds and turned the snow golden. Apart from the streak of red far off in the distance, on one of the hills surrounding the town.
A lorry thundered by him, dragging up a great fan of slush that covered his windscreen, blinding him for a moment. His heart racing, he cleared the filth from the glass, his head full of collisions and the feel of all those icy pebbles of windscreen assaulting his face. The shock of cold air as his car was bisected. No scream. No sounds at all.
Now the red was gone from the hill. Or maybe it was a different hill, a different angle, an illusion formed by the sun and the strange refracted light coming off the crystals of snow and ice.
Maybe it was in his own eyes.
The doctor had explained to him that all that exploded glass had to go somewhere. There would have been some splinters he wouldn’t even feel. The force of the impact would have sent them into his flesh so fast, so smoothly, that there would have been no blood. There was the likelihood that he would carry minute slivers of glass around in his flesh for the rest of his life. Some survivors of bomb blasts, he was told, had suffered hundreds of tiny splinters of glass passing right through their bodies.
He was a year further away from her. He was a year closer to her.
Don would not let himself get distracted again. He completed his journey concentrating fully on his driving, checking his speed, his rear-view mirrors and keeping his hands at ten to two on the steering wheel. He let out a long, low sigh when he arrived at the hotel car park and turned the engine off. He listened to it ticking like some horrible countdown. Keep busy. Keep moving.
He got out of the car and strode past a woman holding a leash, calling into a clump of bushes for a dog that would not come. From the sounds of her, she’d been calling for some time. A red glove came up and rubbed at her face, perhaps in an attempt to coax the worry from it.
He checked into the hotel and tossed his suitcase on to the bed. The exact room they would have taken a year previously.
He turned but of course there was nobody else in the room. He stared at the reflection of himself in the full- length mirror fitted into the panels of the wardrobe doors. The mirror was not the best quality. Red paint edged it, indicating that at some previous time it had been part of some other furniture. The tain was scarred and there was foxing in the corners. A look of shabby chic, he supposed the hotel was going for, but it appeared out of place when compared to the rest of the room, which was formal, Edwardian, verging on the cold.
“God, you’d have hated this, Ju,” he whispered.
He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his fingers. Julie liked his fingers. She had described them as surgeon’s fingers, as early as their first date. He could do nothing for her, though, with these delicate fingers. He could not stave off death. He couldn’t find the life in her and coax it back, make it bloom, make it overpower the hurt that took her away. He felt bad that he had escaped with little more than bruises and shock (poor thing) while she had the life slammed from her in less than a millisecond. He wishes she were merely lost, like that dog in the bushes.
He unpacked, desultory, quietly panicked by his decision to come here. He didn’t know what to do. He had been filled with plans when he took that journey up with his wife. They were celebrating their third anniversary.
