they could not help, but no, they had not seen a soul in the past half hour. Claire felt her head filling with grey. She smelled Trebor mints and Earl Grey on the woman’s cardigan. The next thing she was aware of, she was sitting on a high-backed wooden chair in the dining-room, her eyes fixed on a cut-glass bowl filled with boxes of Kellogg’s Variety packs. The old woman was holding Claire’s hand. The other guests — a woman in a pair of khaki shorts and a fleece; a willowy woman in a track suit sucking vampirically at a cigarette — watched, concerned, from the corner of the room.
The latter introduced herself as Karen and looked as though she had smoked herself thin. The type of woman who hurried a meal, picked at it really, just so that she could have the cigarette afterwards. Claire wondered if that was the way she had sex too. She drew the smoke so deeply into her lungs that it was almost without colour when it returned.
Her partner, Brenda, offered to call the police and look around the dunes outside. ‘The tide here is pretty innocuous but, you know, water is water.’
Claire sat in the room, looking at Jonathan’s travel bag. It had not been zipped up properly; a corner of his Bolton Wanderers flannel was sticking out of it. Two WPCs arrived. She told them what she knew, which was nothing. They made notes anyway. Checked the car. Told her to relax and there would be someone to talk to her in the morning. Best not to go anywhere tonight. In case Jonathan should return.
‘He’s got the car keys anyway,’ she said. The policewomen laughed, although she had not meant it as a joke.
She watched them go back to their car. They talked to the old woman for a while, one of the policewomen turning to look at her through the window for a few seconds.
She ate with the other couple at the ridiculously large dining table, Brenda quick to let her know what a sacrifice this was as they had aimed to go to the Red Lion in Upper Sheringham for food. Karen puffed before and after courses and during mouthfuls. Her cheeks seemed permanently hollowed.
‘Has he ever done this before?’ she asked.
Claire started to cry through her food, something she had not done since her childhood. She had forgotten how hard it was to eat and cry at the same time.
‘I can’t talk. I’m sorry.’ She left them and went to her room. She drew a hot bath and soaked for twenty minutes, tensed for his knock at the door and his impatient, stabbing voice. She never realized she would miss him so much.
Later, she watched the dark creep into the sky. Mars clung, a diamond barnacle, to the underside of a raft of cloud. The birdspotters were still out there, a mass of coloured Kangol clothing and Zeiss lenses. There was even a tripod. Cows stood in a far-off field like plastic toys.
Pale light went on outside. A soft-looking girl carrying a hose slowly drifted around the perimeter of the windmill’s grounds wetting the plants and the lawn. An overweight dog ambled alongside her. Claire listened to the fizz of electricity until it calmed to a dull murmur and then went to bed.
Sleep claimed her quickly, despite her loneliness and the alien posture of the low-slung room. Her dreams were edgy, filled with vertiginous angles and lurid colours, as though she were a film director trying too hard. She was in a car too big for the road, ploughing through a village where there were no men. She was heading towards a windmill in the distance that did not seem to get any closer. Occasionally she would drive over some indistinct shape in her path. Before long, the roadkill became larger. Some of it wore clothes. It did not impede her progress; she drove straight over it.
whump. whump. whump
Shanks of flesh squirted up on to the windscreen. The engine whined as it bounded through the bodies.
whump. whump. whump
Awake. Grainy blackness separated into the lumpen shapes of furniture and pictures on the wall. Imperfect light kissed at the curtains, turning them into powdery tablets.
‘Jonathan,’ she whispered, softly, hopefully.
whump. whump
A deep creaking noise punctuated that heavy sound. The window filled with black, then cleared again after an age. Blackness once more. Then soft light.
She opened the curtain. A blade of the windmill swung past her, trailing ragged edges of its sail. Down towards the end of the lawn, a huddle of people sat, a pinkish mass in the gloaming. Were they having a midnight party? Why had she not been invited? Maybe they wanted to leave her to her grief.
She shrugged herself into her towelling robe and picked her way through the shadows to the main door. The air was warm, pungent with salt. She followed the path around to the garden, stepping through an arch crowded with roses. The windmill creaked and thudded, underlit by strange, granular arcs from lamps buried in the soil.
She was halfway across the lawn when she saw the women were naked. They were surrounding something, dipping towards it and moving away. She recognized the young girl who had watered the lawn, the old woman and Karen, who was lying back, cigarette in one hand, Brenda’s thigh in the other. Brenda was talking to some other women. Claire realized she had not seen a man since the pub in Cockley Cley. The sergeant-major bustling out of the door. Holding up his hand. Mouthing something.
whump. whump.
The windmill had not borne sails when they arrived that morning. She took another, hesitant step forward when she was spotted. One of the policewomen pointed at her. They all turned to look, peeling away from the dark, wet core of their interest. She saw their bodies were smeared with blood. The old woman wore feral slashes of deep red across her forehead and neck.
Claire felt a slow, hot release against her thigh as she turned to look at the blades of the windmill, wrapped in the still wet hide of her boyfriend. Turning back to the women, who were advancing towards her now, she reached beneath the folds of her robe, sank her fingers into her own blood and began to paint.
Conrad Williams confesses that his first attempt at fiction had a Tyrannosaurus Rex eat a village of prehistoric people. He adds in mild defence that his favourite films at the time starred Doug McClure. Moving on, he has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer and his work has been published in many small press and professional publications. Recently his short fiction has appeared in
Sharp Edges
STEVE RASNIC TEM
In such an intense physical act like murder, between the victim and the murderer there is something sensual…the death orgasm and the sexual one.
Jane spent hours shaving her legs, despite the fact that the act tangled her in anxiety. Even in her nervousness, however, the results never failed to fascinate: the warm pink smoothness of the legs, the skin scraped so thin one might have seen the blood pulsing just beneath the surface. Then there were the occasional nicks: in particular the granular abrasions around the heel and ankle, where the skin came so close to the bone it appeared
