Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (47 page)

He nods once, keeping his sad eyes on the whistle.

“Be a good boy for Mummy, won’t you?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“And ...”
Don’t forget me.
“Remember that I love you.”

“I love you too, Dad,” he says, and his eyes finally meet mine. Even in the darkness I can tell that he too is trying not to cry.

We hug once more, and I don’t want to let him go. But I have to. I gently lean him back through the window, back to reality, and tousle his hair.

As we close the window I see him raise the whistle to his lips in one last salute—blood of my blood, possessing the terrible secret of my family with all the innocence of a four year old—but this time I hear nothing. Then the curtains close, and he is gone.

I replace the screen and stagger away from the window, letting the tears flow freely. The night dissolves into a blur and for a moment I can’t think ...

When I regain my senses I am standing on the front lawn like a grotesque monument to mortality, tainting the suburban air with my stench—

Alone.

So, now what?

I resist the temptation to leave Kerry a note. Telling her ... what? That I love her too? That she deserves to rot in hell? That I hope she and Graeme are happy?

Fuck that. The more I think about it, the more I want to kill them. I bite down on the impulse, knowing it won’t do anyone any good, especially Stephen. Someone has to look after him now that I’m gone. I can only hope that it won’t be Graeme. If there was only some way I could hurt him without hurting Kerry at the same time ...

For want of an alternative, I return to the Commodore and assume my familiar position on the stained driver’s seat. The tank is less than a quarter-full, but that may be enough, depending on where I intend to go. But where is that?

Sydney hides a lot, but it can’t possibly hide an obviously dead person, gradually rotting.

I am dead, impotent. I am also a cuckold killed by his business partner, and the anger refuses to fade. But there’s no way I can report my murder in person, and to phone anonymously would be pointless. Even if the police believe me and pass on the report to Coober Pedy, what would they find? An empty pit with some blood and hair at the bottom. Nothing to link Graeme with his terrible crime.

Unless I drive back to Coober Pedy again.

Or ...

I smile in the darkness, then. Maybe death isn’t the complete disadvantage I thought it was. I can use my very handicap as a weapon.

I don’t need somewhere to hide; I need a
grave.

The engine is still warm and the wagon starts easily despite the long drive. I glance back once as I pull out from the curb. The house is still dark; Stephen must have gone back to sleep. That’s good.

Then the house—home no longer—is gone.

Graeme’s city-side apartment—which he lets for half the year, but is empty at the moment—is in Silverwater, less than ten minutes’ drive from Argent Lane. The small, single-bedroom maisonette is tucked at the end of a cul-de-sac filled with blocks of flats and strata-share units. I park the Commodore two blocks away and walk the rest of the way. Luckily, the hour is late enough to make it extremely unlikely that anyone will see me: the walking dead in their midst.

I climb the iron gate, fish the spare key from its hiding place under a small gnome by the back door, and let myself in. Taking a chair from the kitchen, I position it in the hallway under the trapdoor leading into the ceiling.

A sudden fear that my sagging flesh might fail me at the last minute proves groundless. I have just enough strength to haul myself into the dusty crawl-space. The chair will have to stay where it is. After carefully wiping the edges of the hole clean of my fingerprints, I put the trapdoor back in its place and inch on hands and knees across the wooden beams.

It is dark and quiet in the ceiling, if a little dirty. I find a space in one corner by the air-vent leading to the bathroom in the adjoining maisonette and settle down to wait. I have my wallet and my mobile phone. There’ll be no mistaking me, no matter how long I have to wait. And I’ll be here when they come. If the smell hasn’t alerted the neighbours by tomorrow morning, then I’ll use the phone to tell the police myself. I’m a concerned resident in the area who’s heard an argument, I’ll say; and perhaps I should do that anyway, to help pin the blame on Graeme. I don’t want my appearance to be written off as a coincidence. I don’t want him to escape me now ...

The only thing I haven’t got is company. But that’s all right; my time has come and gone and I don’t need Old Max any more. My own bones will have to do instead. My bones and my thoughts, lost in the dusty crawl-space between life and death.

for Sebastian

~ * ~

AFTERWORD TO:

..........................................................PASSING THE BONE

Because I don’t like doing things the usual way, this story started with a simple dare to write something with a zombie in it (see the notes to
“Entre les Beaux Morts en Vie”)
and became the hardest thing I had ever tried to put down on paper. It wasn’t intentional in the slightest. Sometimes the best stories aren’t.

The core idea was simple enough. Man with a hereditary curse is killed by greedy business partner, who also happens to be cuckolding him. The curse brings the protagonist back to life, giving him the perfect opportunity to gain revenge.

But that wasn’t the kind of story my heart wanted to write that day. I didn’t want my zombie to be a shambolic, brainless monster. I wanted him to be entirely sympathetic. His decay was more about the way his life had fallen apart than the dissolution of humanity. And besides, the curse was
hereditary.

Giving him a son he’s desperate to farewell before he falls entirely to bits was the easiest thing in the world. Writing the farewell
—
well, that was a different story. It mirrored my real life a little too closely for anything like comfort. And while writing can at times be cathartic, at other times it can just extend painful moments beyond all proportion.

“They say suffering’s good for writers,” Noel Coward once quipped. “It strengthens their psychology.”

While it certainly strengthened this story, I’m very glad to report that real life had a happier ending.

<>

~ * ~

A VIEW BEFORE DYING

The moment Rod Hallows opened his eyes, he knew something had gone wrong. He could feel it—even if, for the moment, he could see nothing. His first instinct was to call for help, but the feed from Control had ceased, the inside of his helmet was utterly silent, and only the virtual light cast by his implants broke the darkness surrounding him.

The truth of where he was sank in only gradually. He had closed his eyes as the d-mat process had begun, just seconds ago, but that brief blink had lasted twenty-two point four light years and almost a quarter of a century. He found it hard to imagine—and wondered whether this might itself be the cause of the problem he sensed. From rest to ninety percent of the speed of light in one timeless instant; who knew what effects that would have, until he tried it?

Well, he
had
tried it—and now he was on
Saul-i,
mid-way through its long journey to another star. If he was conscious, he told himself, then it must be so.

Having come that far along his journey to realization, he moved his arms and legs. Everything there seemed in order, at least; he had arrived intact. But still the gut-feeling nagged, that something had gone terribly, terribly
wrong ...

The feeling was confirmed when the airlock door slid open and his suit’s radiation alarm began to sound.

For a brief instant he froze, transfixed by the view. His last sight had been of the disembarkation facility in near-Earth orbit. Now Earth had disappeared, leaving nothing but subtly distorted stars in its wake. Except—and he forced himself to remember this, to keep his sense of perspective—it was
he
who had moved, not the universe around him.

When the alarm finally registered, he realized that it was a cautionary alert; had the radiation levels been too severe, the doors wouldn’t have opened at all. But when he tried to access the probe’s mainframe via his implants to find out what was going on, he was greeted with stony silence.

He cursed to himself. Whatever had happened had been severe.

Tugging gently on the frame of the airlock, he drifted out of the tiny d-mat enclosure and onto the surface of the probe. Before he took any drastic steps, he needed to look around.

Behind him, the airlock slid shut automatically. As he attached a line to the hook beside the airlock door, a faint vibration registered through his fingertips. The d-mat capsule was already powering-up for the next arrival: Roald Gehrke, the team’s computer systems analyst. Apart from the vibration, the probe was still.

After checking the suit’s systems to ensure his life-support and EMU were operating correctly, Hallows left his perch with a gentle kick and headed for an access-ladder. From there he pulled himself through perfect weightlessness down the long axis of the probe. As he passed from handhold to handhold, the remains of nanomachines left behind by previous refit crews scattered beneath his fingertips like small puffs of dust and dissipated slowly through the vacuum. How many remained active but quiescent, awaiting
his
refit crews’ commands, he had no easy way of telling. Without the mainframe to assist him, he was restricted solely to visual clues.

As he crawled towards the rear of the probe, the implants automatically scanned his vision for anomalies. Apart from the light from the stars around him he was in complete darkness, with nothing but vacuum for light years in every direction. Bright though the stars were, they did little to dispel the shadows shrouding his immediate environment. Only with the gain on his implants turned to maximum could he make out any details at all.

Perversely, everything on this side of the probe seemed normal: no damage, no evidence of a major catastrophe; nothing to explain what had happened to cause the rise in incident radiation.

Saul-1
was seventy metres long and approximately eleven wide, with gap-toothed holes in its matte-grey skin exposing a solid mess of girders, struts and lattice-work beneath. The probe had an unfinished look—and, in a very real sense,
wasn’t
finished. The skin in particular was irrelevant to its overall structure, serving not as an external boundary but as a shield to deflect micrometeorites and hard radiation from fragile components. When the probe and its two sisters—
Saul-2
and
Saul
-
3
, years behind—finally arrived at their destination, the skin would be discarded entirely.

If
it arrived, Hallows thought grimly to himself. He glanced over his shoulder, forward along the probe, and was gratified to see Eta Bootis immediately ahead. To his naked eye, the slightly blue-shifted star appeared to be in the correct place, but there was no way he could be sure until he logged into the probe’s mainframe and analyzed the astronomical data. And to do that, he needed Gehrke’s help.

The feeling of utter isolation mounted, although he knew it to be irrational. The others would arrive soon enough, and then he would have someone to share his problems with. All he had to do was last that long. By then, he hoped, he would know what the problem was. Maybe, just maybe, he might even have fixed it.

When he came to the end of the access ladder he mounted the aft end of the probe and swung down beside the drive shaft—the most obvious source of a radiation leak, apart from the reactor core itself. He half-expected his suit’s alarm to intensify as he did so, and was mildly surprised when it remained unchanged. Puzzled, and temporarily lacking direction, he turned to look around.

Inactive for the past twenty-four years, the shaft now served as a home for various dishes and antennae, all pointing back towards Earth, locked onto the dim speck of light that was Sol.

All, that is, except one.

Hallows’ implants flashed a red halo around this solitary dish while a database scrolled schematics down the corner of his visual field. His stomach fell even before he glanced at the text. He didn’t need to be told what purpose the dish served, or what the malfunction represented to him personally. The transmit dish was potentially the most important on the probe; its failure spelled a death-sentence. Without it, they would never return to Earth.

Unable even to contemplate that possibility just yet, he turned away from the sight of the misaligned antenna. As he did so, something caught his eye further up the drive shaft. Again the implants threw a halo over the foreign object, but this time failed to identify it. The faint starlight was insufficient to illuminate so deep into the interior of the shaft.

He leaned further into the circular tube. The red-limned shadow might have been anything, but to Hallows it looked like a man: a man curled around himself with one hand reaching up to touch his face.

Somebody on the probe
... ? That was impossible. The previous refit crew had left years ago; the nearest people were back on Earth, light years away. The only way anyone could be aboard was if they were dead.

Swallowing a ball of apprehension, Hallows crawled into the shaft. The shadow didn’t move as he approached, but still he remained cautious. As the distance narrowed, he slowed himself unconsciously; by the time he was within a metre of the object, he had drifted to a halt.