drear, meagre dining-room. She felt she had become transparent, suffocated
Sheridan tooted on the Bentley's horn.
'Sssh!' muttered Camilla, and hurried out to join him.
The big car drove away.
Noreen was up in time to hear them go. She'd had a sleepless night, but no staying in bed for Noreen. No one to bring her a tray. She had the breakfast for the guests to cook, Jonas in a poor temper, the children giving her hell and the baby fretful. But she was smiling. She stood in the porch and listened to the deep purr of the big car's engine. There they go, the beautiful people. She was fingering a rectangle of chaste cream pasteboard, simply inscribed Camilla Siibu . Nothing else, no address, no phone number: that's arrogance, isn't it? But it doesn't matter. You never do see them again, the passing trade. She tucked the card into the drawer, where she kept a select collection of such trophies.
'I have lovely guests, sometimes,' she murmured. 'It's lovely to have them.'
And she returned to her domestic servitude, with a gleam of secret triumph in that beaming, rapacious smile; her naive hazel eyes no longer hungry, but replete.
They called ahead and booked a room in a place as far removed from that primitive B&B as money could buy. The country house hotel set in its own lush grounds: now this is more like it. Sheridan handed over the keys to the Bentley. Camilla flashed an automatically dazzling smile at the boy who took their luggage, and was faintly surprised to receive no eye-kick of appreciation in return.
They walked into the hotel, and how wide the lobby seemed. It was not crowded but full of people. No one glanced her way. Or if they did, by chance, happen to look in Camilla's direction, they appeared to see nothing. By the time they reached the desk, she was feeling disquieted, and strangely weary, as if that short walk had been a long trek across empty tundra. Camilla's progress through the human world has been, for so long, a continuous sip, sip, at the nectar of attention. Full-blown seduction is an occasional indulgence (she's not an addict, like Sheridan!). Her eternal beauty, everlasting youth, is nourished by subtler means. She doesn't even have to think about it, she is so used to eliciting the response. The admiration that comes back to her, from almost any human being, male or female, young or old, is her daily bread, the air she breathes. Beautiful people feed like this. The rest are there to be fed upon. That's the law of nature.
All the way up to their room, Sheridan placidly silent and indifferent beside her, she could not stop herself from peering at the glass walls of the lift, at a passing chambermaid, at the bellboy waiting for his tip. Nothing. She might as well be invisible. What's happened to me ?
'What's wrong with you, Cam?'
'Nothing,' she says, sitting in the middle of the vast acreage of their room, on the king-sized bed, sumptuous with pillows; the white sheets crisp and fragrant. But where's Noreen, with her humble, hungry eyes? 'I think I'll have a shower.'
She went into the bathroom.
As long as you can look at yourself in the mirror, you're not too far gone. That's what Sheridan says. One day all the mirrors will be empty, and sometimes, tired of the endless repetitive toil of her delicate feeding, she has looked forward to the day when there will be no more subtlety, when they will have no choice but to be monsters. Really, neither of them wants to cross that borderline. It will be a kind of death. It's a fate they prefer to put off as long as possible. But this is something else.
A fair-haired woman's face looks back at her, naked and weary: a little pale, a few fine lines, a few faint broken veins in the cheeks. There's nothing unusual about this reflection. It's neither old nor very young, neither beautiful nor ugly: there's certainly no mark of immortal evil. Oh, God, she whispers — the redeemed, the newly mortal. What's happened to me? She turns her face, she turns her face. It's no use. Wherever she looks, every light is coming, pure and clear, straight from the north.
Jack
Connie Willis
Connie Willis was named by Locus magazine as the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Writer of the Nineties. She made her debut in 1971 in the magazine Worlds of Fantasy, but only began appearing regularly in the genre in the early 1980s. The author of such novels as Lincoln's Dreams, Doomsday Book, Uncharted Territory, Remake, Bellwether, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Passage, plus the collections Fire Watch, Impossible Things and Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, she has won six Nebula Awards and eight Hugo Awards .
About the following novella, she reveals: 'I became fascinated by the Blitz the first time I went to St Paul's in London. It seemed impossible to me that the cathedral hadn't burned down that night in December (it still seems impossible), and I began doing research for the story that eventually became 'Fire Watch' (1982).
'In the course of my reading, I kept seeing references to body-sniffers, people who worked on the rescue squads who had an unusual knack for finding bodies. On a rational level, I knew that this was probably because they had exceptional hearing (everybody was practically deaf from the continuous din) or were good guessers, or else were exceptionally lucky. It did occur to me, though, that there might be another, more sinister reason'
The night Jack joined our post, Vi was late. So was the Luftwaffe. The sirens still hadn't gone by eight o'clock.
'Perhaps our Violet's tired of the RAF and begun on the aircraft spotters,' Morris said, 'and they're so taken by her charms they've forgotten to wind the sirens.'
'You'd best watch out then,' Swales said, taking off his tin warden's hat. He'd just come back from patrol. We made room for him at the linoleum-covered table, moving our teacups and the litter of gas masks and pocket torches. Twickenham shuffled his paper into one pile next to his typewriter and went on typing.
Swales sat down and poured himself a cup of tea. 'She'll set her cap for the ARP next,' he said, reaching for the milk. Morris pushed it towards him. 'And none of us will be safe.' He grinned at me. 'Especially the young ones, Jack.'
'I'm safe,' I said. 'I'm being called up soon. Twickenham's the one who should be worrying.'
Twickenham looked up from his typing at the sound of his name. 'Worrying about what?' he asked, his hands poised over the keyboard.
