The Second Wish and Other Exhalations Page 14

  And now Chylos was very angry indeed. “You two!” he snapped like a bowstring. “If you had heeded me at the rites, these many generations flown, then were there no requirement for our efforts this night! But … perhaps I may still undo your mischief, even now, and finally rest easy.”

  “That can’t be, old man, and you know it,” this time Alaze spoke up. “Would that we could put right that of which you accuse us; for if our blood still runs in these tribes, then it were only right and proper. But we cannot put it right. No, not even with all your magic. For what are we now but worm-fretted bones and dust? There’s no magic can give us back our flesh…”

  “There is,” Chylos chuckled then. “Oh, there is! The magic of this stone. No, not your flesh but your will. No, not your limbs but your lust. Neither your youth nor your beauty nor even your hot blood, but your spirit! Which is all you will need to do what must be done. For if the tribes may not be imbrued with your seed, strengthened by your blood — then it must be with your spirit. I may not do it for I was old even in those days, but it is still possible for you. If I will it — and if you will it.

  “Now listen, and I shall tell you what must be done…”

  Eileen McGovern and ‘Gordon Cleary’ stood outside The Bam in the deepening dusk and watched the Black Maria come and take away the battered Angels. As the police van made off down the estate’s main street Eileen leaned towards the entrance to the disco, but her companion seemed concerned for her and caught her arm. “Better let it cool down in there,” he said. “There’s bound to be a lot of hot blood still on the boil.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Eileen looked up at him. “Cer­tainly you were right to bundle us out of there when it started! So what do you suggest? We could go and cool off in The Old Stage. My father owns it.”

  He shrugged, smiled, seemed suddenly shy, a little awk­ward. “I’d rather hoped we could walk together,” he said. “The heat of the day is off now — it’s cool enough out here. Also, I’ll have to be going in an hour or so. I’d hoped to be able to, well, talk to you in private. Pubs and dance halls are fine for meeting people, but they’re dreadfully noisy places, too.”

  It was her turn to shrug. It would be worth it if only to defy Gavin. And afterwards she’d make him see how there was no harm in her friendships. “All right,” she said, taking Cleary’s arm. “Where shall we walk?”

  He looked at her and sighed his defeat. “Eileen, I don’t know this place at all. I wouldn’t know one street or lane from the next. So I suppose I’m at your mercy!”

  “Well,” she laughed. “I do know a pretty private place.” And she led him away from The Barn and into an avenue of trees. “It’s not far away, and it’s the most private place of all.” She smiled as once more she glanced up at him in the flooding moonlight. “That’s why it’s called Lovers’ Lane…”

  Half an hour later in The Barn, it finally dawned on Gavin McGovern that his sister was absent. He’d last seen her with that Gordon Cleary bloke. And what had Cleary said: something about having to drive later? Maybe he’d taken Eileen with him. They must have left during the ruckus with the Angels. Well, at least Gavin could be thankful for that!

  But at eleven o’clock when The Barn closed and he had the job of checking and then shifting the stock, still she wasn’t back. Or if she was she’d gone straight home to The Old Stage and so to bed. Just before twelve midnight Gavin was finished with his work. He gratefully put out the lights and locked up The Barn, then crossed to The Old Stage where his father was still checking the night’s take and balancing the stock ledger.

  First things first, Gavin quietly climbed the stairs and peeped into Eileen’s room; the bed was still made up, undisturbed from this morning; she wasn’t back. Feeling his heart speeding up a little, Gavin went back downstairs and reported her absence to his father.

  Burly Joe McGovern seemed scarcely concerned. “What?” he said, squinting up from his books. “Eileen? Out with a young man? For a drive? So what’s your concern? Come on now, Gavin! I mean, she’s hardly a child!”

  Gavin clenched his jaws stubbornly as his father returned to his work, went through into the large private kitchen and dining room and flopped into a chair. Very well, then he would wait up for her himself. And if he heard that bloke’s car bringing her back home, well he’d have a few words to say to him, too.

  It was a quarter after twelve when Gavin settled himself down to wait upon Eileen’s return; but his day had been long and hard, and something in the hot summer air had sapped his usually abundant energy. The evening’s excite­ment, maybe. By the time his father went up to bed Gavin was fast asleep and locked in troubled dreams…

  Quite some time earlier:

  … In the warm summer nights, Lovers’ Lane wasn’t meant for fast walking. It was only a mile and a half long, but almost three-quarters of an hour had gone by since Eileen and her new young man had left The Barn and started along its winding ways. Lovers’ Lane: no, it wasn’t the sort of walk you took at the trot. It was a holding-hands, swinging-arms-together, soft-talking walk; a kissing walk, in those places where the hedges were silvered by moonlight and lips softened by it. And it seemed strange to Eileen that her escort hadn’t tried to kiss her, not once along the way …

  But he had been full of talk: not about himself but mainly the night — how much he loved the darkness, its soft velvet, which he claimed he could feel against his skin, the aliveness of night — and about the moon: the secrets it knew but couldn’t tell. Not terribly scary stuff but … strange stuff. Maybe too strange. And so, whenever she had the chance, Eileen had tried to change the subject, to talk about herself. But oddly, he hadn’t seemed especially interested in her.

  “Oh, there’ll be plenty of time to talk about personalities later,” he’d told her, and she’d noticed how his voice was no longer soft but… somehow coarse? And she’d shivered and thought: time later? Well of course there will be … won’t there?

  And suddenly she’d been aware of the empty fields and copses opening on all sides, time fleeting by, the fact that she was out here, in Lovers’ Lane, with … a total stranger? What was this urgency in him, she wondered? She could feel it now in the way his hand held hers almost in a vice, the coarse, jerky tension of his breathing, the way his eyes scanned the moonlit darkness ahead and to left and right, looking for … what?

  “Well,” she finally said, trying to lighten her tone as much as she possibly could, digging her heels in a little and drawing him to a halt, “that’s it — all of it — Lovers’ Lane. From here on it goes nowhere, just open fields all the way to where they’re digging the new road. And anyway it’s time we were getting back. You said you only had an hour.”

  He held her hand more tightly yet, and his eyes were silver in the night. He took something out of his pocket and she heard a click, and the something gleamed a little in his dark hand. “Ah, but that was then and this is now,” Garry Clemens told her, and she snatched her breath and her mouth fell open as she saw his awful smile. And then, while her mouth was still open, suddenly he did kiss her — and it was a brutal kiss and very terrible. And now Eileen knew.

  As if reading her mind, he throatily said: “But if you’re good and do exactly as you’re told — then you’ll live through it.” And as she filled her lungs to scream, he quickly lifted his knife to her throat, and in his now choking voice whispered, “But if you’re not good then I’ll hurt you very, very much and you won’t live through it. And one way or the other it will make no difference: I shall have you anyway, for you’re my girl-Friday!”

  “Gordon, I—” she finally breathed, her eyes wide in the dark, heart hammering, breasts rising and falling unevenly beneath her thin summer dress. And trying again: “Tell me this is just some sort of game, that you’re only trying to frighten me and don’t mean any … of … it.” But she knew only too well that he did.

  Her voice had been gradually rising, growing shrill, so that now he warningly hissed: “Be quiet!” And
he backed her up to a stile in the fence, pressing with his knife until she was aware of it delving the soft skin of her throat. Then, very casually, he cut her thin summer dress down the front to her waist and flicked back the two halves with the point of his knife. Her free hand fluttered like a trapped bird, to match the palpitations of her heart, but she didn’t dare do anything with it. And holding that sharp blade to her left breast, he said:

  “Now we’re going across this stile and behind the hedge, and then I’ll tell you all you’re to do and how best to please me. And that’s important, for if you don’t please me — well, then it will be good night, Eileen, Eileen!”

  “Oh, God! Oh, God!” she whispered, as he forced her over the fence and behind the tall hedge. And:

  “Here!” he said. “Here!”

  And from the darkness just to one side of him, another voice, not Eileen’s, answered, “Yes, here! Here!” But it was such a voice …

  “What… ?” Garry Clemens gulped, his hot blood suddenly ice. “Who … ?” He released Eileen’s hand and whirled, scything with his knife — scything nothing! — only the dark, which now seemed to close in on him. But:

  “Here,” said that husky, hungry, lusting voice again, and now Clemens saw that indeed there was a figure in the dark. A naked female figure, voluptuous and inviting. And, “Here!” she murmured yet again, her voice a promise of pleasures undreamed, drawing him down with her to the soft grass.

  Out of the corner of his eye, dimly in his confused mind, the rapist saw a figure — fleeting, tripping, and staggering upright, fleeing — which he knew was Eileen McGovern where she fled wildly across the field. But he let her go. For he’d found a new and more wonderful, more exciting girl-Friday now. “Who … who are you?” he husked as he tore at his clothes — astonished that she tore at them, too.

  And: “Alaze,” she told him, simply. “Alaze…”

  Eileen — running, crashing through a low thicket, flying under the moon — wanted to scream but had no wind for it. And in the end was too frightened to scream anyway. For she knew that someone ran with her, alongside her; a lithe, naked someone, who for the moment held off from whatever was his purpose.

  But for how long?

  The rattle of a crate deposited on the doorstep of The Old Stage woke Gavin McGovern up from unremembered dreams, but dreams which nevertheless left him red-eyed and rumbling inside like a volcano. Angry dreams! He woke to a new day, and in a way to a new world. He went to the door and it was dawn; the sun was balanced on the east­ern horizon, reaching for the sky; Dave Gorman, the local milkman, was delivering.

  “Wait,” Gavin told him, and ran upstairs. A moment later and he was down again. “Eileen’s not back,” he said. “She was at the dance last night, went off with some bloke, an outsider. He hasn’t brought her back. Tell them.”

  Gorman looked at him, almost said: tell who? But not quite. He knew who to tell. The Athelsford tribe.

  Gavin spied the postman, George Lee, coming along the road on his early morning rounds. He gave him the same message: his sister, Eileen, a girl of the tribe, had been abducted. She was out there somewhere now, stolen away, perhaps hurt. And by the time Gavin had thrown water in his face and roused his father, the message was already being spread abroad. People were coming out of their doors, moving into the countryside around, starting to search. The tribe looked after their own …

  And beneath the luststone:

  Alaze was back, but Hengit had not returned. It was past dawn and Chylos could feel the sun warming their mighty headstone, and he wondered what had passed in the night: was his work now done and could he rest?

  “How went it?” the old wizard inquired immediately, as Alaze settled back into her bones.

  “It went… well. To a point,” she eventually answered.

  “A point? What point?” He was alarmed. “What went wrong? Did you not follow my instructions?”

  “Yes,” she sighed, but—”

  “But?” And now it was Chylos’s turn to sigh. “Out with it.”

  “I found one who was lusty. Indeed he was with a maid, which but for my intervention he would take against her will! Ah, but when he saw me he lusted after her no longer! And I heeded your instructions and put on my previous female form for him. According to those same instructions, I would teach him the true passions and furies and ecstasies of the flesh; so that afterwards and when he was with women of the tribe, he would be untiring, a satyr, and they would always bring forth from his potent seed. But because I was their inspiration, my spirit would be in all of them! This was why I put on flesh; and it was a great magic, a gigantic effort of will. Except … it had been a long, long time, Chylos. And in the heat of the moment I relaxed my will; no, he relaxed it for me, such was his passion. And… he saw me as I was, as I am …”

  “Ah!” said Chylos, understanding what she told him. “And afterwards? Did you not try again? Were there no others?”

  “There might have been others, aye — but as I journeyed out from this stone, the greater the distance the less obedient my will. Until I could no longer call flesh unto myself. And now, weary, I am returned.”

  Chylos sagged down into the alveolate, crumbling relics of himself. “Then Hengit is my last hope,” he said.

  At which moment Hengit returned — but hangdog, as Chylos at once observed. And: “Tell me the worst,” the old man groaned.

  But Hengit was unrepentant. “I did as you instructed,” he commenced his story, “went forth, found a woman, put on flesh. And she was of the tribe, I’m sure. Alas, she was a child in the ways of men, a virgin, an innocent. You had said: let her be lusty, willing — but she was not. Indeed, she was afraid.”

  Chylos could scarce believe it. “But — were there no others?”

  “Possibly,” Hengit answered. “But this was a girl of the tribe, lost and afraid and vulnerable. I stood close by and watched over her, until the dawn…”

  “Then that is the very end of it,” Chylos sighed, beaten at last. And his words were truer than even he might suspect.

  But still, for the moment, the luststone exerted its im­memorial influence …

  Of all the people of Athelsford who were out searching in the fields and woods that morning, it was Gavin McGovern who found the rapist Clemens huddled beneath the hedge­row. He heard his sobbing, climbed the stile, and found him there. And in the long grass close by, he also found his knife still damp with dew. And looking at Clemens the way he was, Gavin fully believed that he had lost Eileen forever.

  He cried hot, unashamed tears then, looked up at the blue skies she would never see again, and blamed himself. My fault — my fault! If I’d not been the way I was, she wouldn’t have needed to defy me!

  But then he looked again at Clemens, and his surging blood surged more yet. And as Clemens had lusted after Eileen, so now Gavin lusted after him — after his life!

  He dragged him out from hiding, bunched his white hair in a ham-like hand, and stretched his neck taut across his knee. Then — three things, occurring almost simultaneously.

  One: a terrific explosion from across the fields, where John Sykes had kept his word and reduced the luststone to so much rubble. Two: the bloodlust went out of Gavin like a light switched off, so that he gasped, released his victim, and thrust him away. And three, he heard the voice of his father, echoing from the near-distance and carrying far and wide in the brightening air:

  “Gavin, we’ve found her! She’s unharmed! She’s all right!”

  PC Bennett, coming across the field, his uniformed legs damp from the dewy grass, saw the knife in Gavin’s hand and said, “I’ll take that, son.” And having taken it he also went to take charge of the gibbering, worthless, soul-shrivelled maniac thing that was Garry Clemens.

  And so in a way old Chylos was right, for in the end nothing had come of all his works. But in several other ways he was quite wrong …

  Mother Love

  In Dagon’s Bell & Other Discords, I did something that ev
ery horror, SF, and fantasy writer does (or used to do, but I’ve been around for some time now!) at least once in his writing career: an aftermath story. I’ve always thought this sort of story has to be short, sharp, punchy. And that’s the way I’ve done them. The story in Dagon’s Bell was called In the Glow-Zone, and this one is called Mother Love. But there are mothers and there are mothers. And as any American will tell you, sometimes there are real mothers!

  With a high-pitched whine the bullet took a long groove out of the rock wall to his right, showering him with sharp splinters. He flung himself awkwardly to the ground, feeling a splash of blood on his face where one of the hot, flying fragments had caught him. Simultaneous with the second crack of the rifle, another bullet kicked up dirt in his eyes with a buzz and a thud as it buried itself in the ground a few inches in front of his nose. He waited for a few seconds, blood pounding, before peering cautiously from his prone position along the narrow rock passage to where the girl stood — tattered denims moulding the fine shape of her wide-spread legs — squinting down the sights of her weapon … sights which were centered squarely on him!

  “Lady, if you’re planning to scare me, you’ve done it already. If you’re trying to kill me, aim a little more carefully — I hate the thought of bleeding to death His voice carried to her, a hoarse, panting shout as she began to squeeze the trigger for the third shot. She eased her finger slowly out of the trigger-guard to leave it lying there, a thought’s distance from sudden death.

  “What are you after?” The way she said it — menacing, low so he could hardly hear — it was more than a question; it was a warning, and he knew he would have to answer carefully. Only sixty feet separated them and there was nowhere he could run. If she was any good at all with that rifle she could put a neat hole right through his head before he made five yards.

  “Lady, I seen your fire-smoke earlier in the day, and I smelled your cooking a mile off. Smelled pretty good to a man who hasn’t ate in three, days — and when I did last eat it was a rat I was lucky enough to catch!” His panting came a little easier now. “But lady, if you want me to move on … you just say the word and I’ll be on my way. I’d be plenty obliged, though, if you’d allow me a bite to eat first.”