Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (28 page)

Stiff and bleary, I opened the blind. There was ice in the bay.

I saw Thewlis close to the base; he
’
d only just set out on
his rounds of the ragged shoreline. He glanced up at me, waved. I waved back,
and thought about the glitch with the generator and how I could fix that one
last thing before I left.

I sighed and blinked hard at my headache, and that
’
s why I didn
’
t
quite see the lunging shadow. If I saw it at all it was a blur on the edge of
my vision, like a fleeting, flaring
cataract.

I heard his hoarse howl, and then I was running, grabbing my boots on,
not bothering with my anorak. I hoped Thewlis could keep his hold on the frayed
edge of the ice, because he wouldn
’
t live if he went in
the water, not when something had pulled him there like a striking snake.

I thought I ran fast, but by the time I reached the brink of the land,
scattering offended penguins, there was nothing on the ice but a smear of
blood.

We found Thewlis later that day: me, two fishers, and my own
replacement plus the supply ship
’
s crew after it docked.
We hunted for hours, and I thought we might not see him again at all. One of
the fishers from the little town brought a pistol; it was too late for that,
but I didn
’
t say so.

When we found his sodden corpse, Thewlis was barely touched; I thought
he might even be alive, till we rolled him over and saw his skull, crushed by a
single bite.

When we told Sylvie she ran sobbing in shock to her mother, who stood
soberly at the base door and wrapped the girl in her arms and kissed her
dappled hair.

~

Later, the two of us argued so badly that the others left us alone to
it, going outside to try to smoke in air that was minus ten and falling.

“It was a leopard seal,”
I yelled at Elin. “I
’
m
not changing our plans. We
’
ll
still take
Sylvie
when the ship leaves. It
’s dangerous here.
”

“It isn
’
t dangerous for her,”
she spat. “Thewlis
antagonised it. He must have.”

“You
’
re being selfish,”
I shouted. “Because you
don
’
t want to leave.”

“And neither does she. And she never will.”

And of course she flew out again, slamming the door so hard it bounced.
I rolled my eyes. Her rage was too much of a habit for me to care. Instead of
caring I drank more, and laughed with the crew and the new engineer and the men
from the settlement, and drank even more. Sylvie played quietly in the corner
of the room with her plastic Sea Life animals, and looked morosely, but only
occasionally, towards the door.

I drank beyond the point of not caring, to a state of suddenly caring
very desperately. I was drunk and maudlin and angry, so when I stood up fast, I
knocked over the chair.

I blinked, and stared at the abandoned Sea Life set. “Where
’
s
Sylvie?”

~

Sylvie wasn
’
t
far away. I saw her in the light of stars and ice: ice in the bay, ice on the
edge of land and life. The child was laughing, dangling her bare feet into
freezing water, leaning down to the sleek raptor head raised above the greasy
slick of ice.

“No,”
I screamed. “No.”

It bared dinosaur teeth as ancient as death. Sylvie hesitated, looked
back at me, then at the seal. I was drowning its growls with my furious
frightened yells, and I was outpacing the
men
behind me. I
’
d scared her. Sylvie began to cry.

“Daddy,”
she wailed.

As I hurtled towards her I saw that blurred shadow lunge again, and the
seal had her leg.

And I had her arm, but only just. I looked at the seal and I knew it
would tear her in half sooner than let her go. It glared hatred, my daughter
’
s
blood on its teeth, and suddenly I
wasn
’
t
drunk any more. I wasn
’
t drunk when I yelled “Shoot
it! Shoot it!”
and the man running up behind me fired a shot into
the sleek reptilian head.

But my vision was blurred all the same, and my eyes stung with awful
grief, and the head was sliding under the surface, wolf-eyes turning dull, full
of hatred, then full of nothing but death, and then lost in the deep cold
water, trailing a single tendril of blood.

~

I took Sylvie home. I didn
’
t love the island any
more. My daughter had health checks and hospital treatment and an education,
but she walked with a limp ever after, a limp and a faraway sadness. She limped
down the aisle on her wedding day, and she limped to the boy Culley
’
s
baptism, and I daresay she limped the day she went to the sea at last and didn
’
t come
back.

On that day and many days after, Culley
’
s father howled with
grief, so I got him drunk and patted his shoulder, but I knew I shouldn
’
t
cry myself because, after all, I
’
d cheated the sea of
her for long enough.

And I did have Sylvie
’
s son, because Sylvie
was better than her mother. She was just selfish enough to go to the sea, but
not quite selfish enough to take the boy with her.

Still I worry. I go down to the bay that
’
s a mirror reflection
of one in the far south, and I shiver in the darkness and count seconds, and
wait for Culley to not-come-back.

And sometimes him not-coming-back isn
’
t the worst thing I
imagine, when he smiles at me and his canines gleam in moonlight, and his hug
is so strong and fierce it could drag me under.

I keep the rifle in the Land Rover.

It
’
s not as if I
’
ll need it.

a knot of toads

~

by Jane Yolen

“
March 1931: Late on Saturday night
,”
the old man had written, “
a toad came into my study and looked at me with
goggled eyes, reflecting my candlelight back at me. It seemed utterly unafraid.
Although nothing so far seems linked with this appearance, I have had enough
formidable visitants to know this for a harbinger.”

A harbinger of spring, I would have told
him, but I arrived too late to tell him anything. I’d been summoned from my
Cambridge rooms to his little white-washed stone house with its red pantile
roof overlooking St Monans harbor. The summons had come from his housekeeper,
Mrs. Marr, in a frantic early morning phone call. Hers was from the town’s one
hotel, to me in the porter’s room, which boasted the only telephone at our
college.

I was a miserable ten hours getting there.
All during the long train ride, though I tried to pray for him, I could not, having
given up that sort of thing long before leaving Scotland. Loss of faith, lack
of faith—that had been my real reason for going away from home. Taking up
a place at Gerton College had only been an excuse.

What I had wanted to do this return was to
mend our fences before it was too late to mend anything at all. Father and I
had broken so many fences—stones, dykes, stiles, and all—that the
mending would have taken more than the fortnight’s holiday I had planned for
later in the summer. But I’d been summoned home early this March because, as
Mrs. Marr said, father had had a bad turn.

“A verrry bad turn,” was what she’d
actually said, before the line had gone dead, her r’s rattling like a kettle on
the boil. In her understated way, she might have meant anything from a twisted
ankle to a major heart attack.

The wire that had followed, delivered by a
man with a limp and a harelip, had been from my father’s doctor, Ewan Kinnear. “Do
not delay,” it read. Still, there was no diagnosis.

Even so, I did not delay. We’d had no
connection in ten years beside a holiday letter exchange. Me to him, not the
other way round. But the old man was my only father. I was his only child.

He was dead by the time I got there, and
Mrs. Marr stood at the doorway of the house wringing her hands, her black hair
caught up in a net. She had not aged a day since I last saw her.

“So ye’ve left it too late, Janet,” she
cried. “And wearing green I see.”

I looked down at my best dress, a soft
green linen now badly creased with travel.

She shook her head at me, and only then
did I remember. In St Monans they always said, “After green comes grief.”

“I didn’t know he was that ill. I came as
fast as I could.”

But Mrs. Marr’s face showed her disdain
for my excuse. Her eyes narrowed and she didn’t put out her hand. She'd always
been on father’s side, especially in the matter of my faith. “His old heart’s
burst in twa.” She was of the old school in speech as well as faith.

“His heart was stone, Maggie, and well you
know it.” A widow, she’d waited twenty-seven years, since my mother died
birthing me, for the old man to notice her. She must be old herself now.

“Stane can still feel pain,” she cried.

“What pain?” I asked.

“Of your leaving.”

What good would it have done to point out
I’d left more than ten years earlier and he’d hardly noticed. He’d had a decade
more of calcification, a decade more of pouring over his bloody old books—the
Latin texts of apostates and heretics. A decade more of filling notebooks with
his crabbed script.

A decade more of ignoring his only child.

My God
, I thought, meaning no
appeal to a deity but a simple swear,
I am still furious with him. It’s no
wonder I’ve never married
. Though I’d had chances. Plenty of them. Well,
two that were real enough.

I went into the house, and the smell of
candle wax and fish and salt sea were as familiar to me as though I’d never
left. But there was another smell, too.

Death.

And something more.

It was fear. But I was not to know that
till later.

~

The study where evidently he’d died,
sitting up in his chair, was a dark place, even when the curtains were drawn
back, which had not been frequent in my childhood. Father liked the close,
wood-paneled room, made closer by the ever-burning fire. I’d been allowed in
there only when being punished, standing just inside the doorway, with my hands
clasped behind me, to listen to my sins being counted. My sins were homey ones,
like shouting in the hallway, walking too loudly by his door, or refusing to
learn my verses from the Bible. I was far too innocent a child for more than
that.

Even at five and six and seven I’d been an
unbeliever. Not having a mother had made me so. How could I worship a God whom
both Mrs. Marr and my father assured me had so wanted mother, He’d called her
away. A selfish God, that, who had listened to his own desires and not mine.
Such a God was not for me. Not then. Not now.

I had a sudden urge—me, a
postgraduate in a prestigious university who should have known better—to
clasp my hands behind me and await my punishment.

But
, I thought,
the old punisher
is dead. And
—
if he’s to be believed
—
gone to his own
punishment
. Though I was certain that the only place he had gone was to the
upstairs bedroom where he was laid out, awaiting my instructions as to his
burial.

~

I went into every other room of the house
but that bedroom, memory like an old fishing line dragging me on. The smells,
the dark moody smells, remained the same, though Mrs. Marr had a good wood fire
burning in the grate, not peat, a wee change in this changeless place. But everything
else was so much smaller than I remembered, my little bedroom at the back of
the house the smallest of them all.

To my surprise, nothing in my bedroom had
been removed. My bed, my toys—the little wooden doll with jointed arms
and legs I called Annie, my ragged copy of
Rhymes and Tunes for Little Folks
,
the boxed chess set just the size for little hands, my cloth bag filled with
buttons—the rag rug, the over-worked sampler on the wall. All were the
same. I was surprised to even find one of my old pinafores and black stockings
in the wardrobe. I charged Mrs. Marr with more sentiment than sense. It was a
shrine to the child that I’d been, not the young woman who had run off. It had
to have been Mrs. Marr’s idea. Father would never have countenanced false gods.

Staring out of the low window, I looked
out toward the sea. A fog sat on the horizon, white and patchy. Below it the
sea was a deep, solitary blue. Spring comes early to the East Neuk but summer
stays away. I guessed that pussy willows had already appeared around the edges
of the lochans, snowdrops and aconite decorating the inland gardens.

Once I’d loved to stare out at that sea,
escaping the dark brooding house whenever I could, even in a cutting wind, the
kind that could raise bruises. Down I’d go to the beach to play amongst the
yawls hauled up on the high wooden trestles, ready for tarring. Once I’d
dreamed of going off to sea with the fishermen, coming home to the harbor in
the late summer light, and seeing the silver scales glinting on the beach.
Though of course fishing was not a woman’s job. Not then, not now. A woman in a
boat was unthinkable even this far into the twentieth century. St Monans is
firmly eighteenth century and likely to remain so forever.

But I’d been sent off to school, away from
the father who found me a loud and heretical discomfort. At first it was just a
few towns away, to St Leonard’s in St Andrews, but as I was a boarder—my
father’s one extravagance—it might as well have been across the country,
or the ocean, as far as seeing my father was concerned. And there I’d fallen in
love with words in books.

Words—not water, not wind.

In that way I showed myself to be my
father’s daughter. Only I never said so to him, nor he to me.

~

Making my way back down the stairs, I overheard
several folk in the kitchen. They were speaking of those things St Monans folk
always speak of, no matter their occupations: Fish and weather.

“There’s been nae herring in the firth
this winter,” came a light man’s voice. “Nane.” Doctor Kinnear.

“It’s a bitter wind to keep the men at
hame, the fish awa.” Mrs. Marr agreed.

Weather and the fishing. Always the same.

But a third voice, one I didn’t
immediately recognize, a rumbling growl of a voice, added, “Does she know?”

“Do I know what?” I asked, coming into the
room where the big black-leaded grate threw out enough heat to warm the entire
house. “How Father died?”

I stared at the last speaker, a stranger I
thought, but somehow familiar. He was tall for a St Monans man, but dressed as
one of the fisher folk, in dark trousers, a heavy white sweater, thick white
sea stockings. And he was sunburnt like them, too, with eyes the exact blue of
the April sea, gathered round with laugh lines. A ginger mustache, thick and
full, hung down the sides of his mouth like a parenthesis.

“By God, Alec Hughes,” I said, startled to
have remembered, surprised that I could have forgotten. He grinned.

When we’d been young—very young—Alec
and I were inseparable. Never mind that boys and girls never played together in
St Monans. Boys from the Bass, girls from the May, the old folk wisdom went.
The Bass Rock, the Isle of May, the original separation of the sexes. Apart at
birth and ever after. Yet Alec and I had done everything together: messed about
with the boats, played cards, built sand castles, fished with pelns—shore
crabs about to cast their shells—and stolen jam pieces from his mother’s
kitchen to eat down by one of the gates in the drystone dykes. We’d even often
hied off to the low cliff below the ruins of Andross Castle to look for
croupies, fossils, though whether we ever found any I couldn’t recall. When I’d
been sent away to school, he’d stayed on in St Monans, going to Anstruther’s
Waid Academy in the next town but one, until he was old enough—I presumed—to
join the fishing fleet, like his father before him. His father was a stern and
dour soul, a Temperance man who used to preach in the open air.

Alec had been the first boy to kiss me, my
back against the stone windmill down by the salt pans. And until I’d graduated
from St Leonard’s, the only boy to do so, though I’d made up for that since.

“I thought, Jan,” he said slowly, “that
God was not in your vocabulary.”

“Except as a swear,” I retorted. “Good to
see you, too, Alec.”

Mrs. Marr’s eyebrows both rose considerably,
like fulmars over the green-grey sea of her eyes.

Alec laughed and it was astonishing how
that laugh reminded me of the boy who’d stayed behind. “Yes,” he said. “Do you
know how your father died?”

“Heart attack, so Mrs. Marr told me.”

I stared at the three of them. Mrs. Marr
was wringing her hands again, an oddly old-fashioned motion at which she seemed
well practiced. Dr. Kinnear polished his eyeglasses with a large white piece of
cloth, his flyaway eyebrows proclaiming his advancing age. And Alec—had I
remembered how blue his eyes were? Alec nibbled on the right end of his
mustache.

“Did I say that?” Mrs. Marr asked. “Bless
me, I didna.”

And indeed, she hadn’t. She’d been more
poetic.

“Burst in twa, you said.” I smiled, trying
to apologize for misspeaking. Not a good trait in a scholar.

“Indeed. Indeed.” Mrs. Marr's wrangling
hands began again. Any minute I supposed she would break out into a Psalm. I
remembered how her one boast was that she’d learned them all by heart as a
child and never forgot a one of them.

“A shock, I would have said,” Alec said by
way of elaborating.

“A fright,” the doctor added.

“Really? Is that the medical term?” I
asked. “What in St Monans could my father possibly be frightened of?”

Astonishingly, Mrs. Marr began to wail
then, a high, thin keening that went on and on till Alec put his arm around her
and marched her over to the stone sink where he splashed her face with cold
water and she quieted at once. Then she turned to the blackened kettle
squalling on the grate and started to make us all tea.

I turned to the doctor who had his glasses
on now, which made him look like a somewhat surprised barn owl. “What do you
really mean, Dr. Kinnear?”

“Have you nae seen him yet?” he asked, his
head gesturing towards the back stairs.

“I… I couldn’t,” I admitted. But I said no
more. How could I tell this man I hardly knew that my father and I were virtual
strangers? No—it was more than that. I was afraid of my father dead as I’d
never been alive. Because now he knew for certain whether he was right or I
was, about God and Heaven and the rest.

“Come,” said Doctor Kinnear in a voice
that seemed permanently gentle. He held out a hand and led me back up the
stairs and down the hall to my father’s room. Then he went in with me and stood
by my side as I looked down.

My father was laid out on his bed, the
Scottish double my mother had died in, the one he’d slept in every night of his
adult life except the day she’d given birth, the day she died.

Like the house, he was much smaller than I
remembered. His wild, white hair lay untamed around his head in a kind of
corolla. The skin of his face was parchment stretched over bone. That great
prow of a nose was, in death, strong enough to guide a ship in. Thankfully his
eyes were shut. His hands were crossed on his chest. He was dressed in an old
dark suit. I remembered it well.