Nocturnes (2004) Read online

  Those who stood, listening and praying, had lost children to what lay below. It had drawn them in through its small, wooden gate, luring them with the wondrous colors of its flowers and their strange, intoxicating scents. Like flies attracted to a pitcher plant, they had entered and died, drowning in strange desires that they could not comprehend. Afterward their bodies were interred in the garden, and the flowers grew sweeter still.

  Then, as the tale would have it, the prayers stopped, a fuse was lit, and a great mass of earth exploded into the air. The waters surged forth, exploiting the breach, and descended into the glen. Whatever had once lived in that place—the animals, the insects, the trees and plants, every living thing—had died on that day in a brown muddy torrent.

  Or so they must have hoped. Now this place that they named Baal’s Pond was deeper than any other stretch of the river. No sunlight penetrated to its depths, and no fish swam there. The water was so dark as to be almost black, like oil. It even felt different on the skin: it was viscous, and when clasped in cupped hands it dripped like honey through one’s fingers. Nothing could live in such an environment. I still do not believe that anything lives down there.

  For whatever is down there is not alive.

  It exists, but it is not alive.

  I was sixteen years old on the morning that we went there together for the first, and last, time, Catherine and I. She too was sixteen, but so far beyond me that the months between us were really years, and I felt awkward and powerless around her. I know now that I was already in love with her, with what she was and with the promise of what she would become. She stood at the edge of that dark place, and her brightness appeared to mock it. Her hair was blond and hung loosely on her back and shoulders, and the sunlight made her tanned skin glow. But when I looked into the water there was no reflection of her on its surface, as though she had already been devoured by the blackness.

  She turned to me as she cast aside her clothing and said: “Are you afraid?”

  And I was afraid: I was afraid of the stillness of the water. It should have moved swiftly, fast as the flow that poured into it from the higher ground above, but it did not. Instead, there was a sluggishness about it, a lethargy. At its eastern extreme, where the flooded glen ended and the slope of the hill began, the river regained some of its lost energy, but it seemed that the water had been tainted by its contact with this place, for a thin film of oil was now revealed by the sunlight upon it.

  I was afraid too of what our parents would say if they discovered that we were in this place, if they knew what we were planning and if they suspected what my thoughts of her were. That, in its turn, led me to my greatest fear: my fear of her. I wanted her badly, so very badly. My stomach tightened every time I looked upon her. Now, seeing her naked for the first time, it was all that I could do to stop myself from trembling. I shook my head.

  “I’m not afraid,” I said.

  In my mind, I replayed fantasies of a life we might have together; of marriage, and children, and love, and the touch of her skin against mine. We had kissed, Catherine and I, and I had tasted her before she pulled away from me, laughing. Yet with each kiss she lingered a little longer, her laughter a little more uncertain, her breath a little shorter.

  And I lived and died in every kiss.

  “Are you sure?”

  She stood on the bank and glanced at me over her shoulder. She was smiling, and there was that promise in her smile. She could tell what I was thinking. She could always tell. Then, with one short peal of laughter, she took a deep breath and arced into the pond. There was no splash. The surface simply separated to allow her passage, then bound itself together again behind her. No ripples appeared, and the rhythm of the water lapping at the bank remained undisturbed.

  But I did not follow her. I looked into that black pool, and my courage left me. Instead, I waited for her, shivering, the grass sharp beneath my feet, the wind cold against my skin, and willed her to emerge once again from the water, her laughter baiting me and her eyes calling me to her.

  But she did not return. Seconds passed, then an entire minute. I stared into the pool, hoping to see her golden form just below the surface, but there was nothing. There was not even birdsong in this place, and no flies buzzed. I thought of the warnings, the old tales. Others had descended into those depths, and some had never been seen again. The riverbanks had been searched in the hope that the waters might yield up their bodies, but they never did. Now only the bravest or most foolhardy came here, young men who hoped that their youthful displays would be rewarded by an embrace, or more. And when at last they walked away from this place, their hands entwined with those of another, they promised themselves that they would never return, for they were the lucky ones. They knew that others had not been so fortunate.

  And so my love for her overcame my fear, and I closed my eyes and followed her into the depths.

  The water was unimaginably cold, so cold that I felt my heart would stop beating and freeze within my body, and its strange thickness made it difficult to swim. I looked up and could not see the sun, yet there was a light of sorts. I could perceive my hands in front of my face, but the palms were lit from below, not above. I twisted in the water, facing the bed of the pond, and kicked back with my legs, moving toward the source of the illumination.

  There was a house at the bottom of the pond.

  It was built of stone and had two windows, one at either side of the door, and a roof that might once have been thatched but was now no more than slats and struts. The remains of a low stone wall curled like arms around what might once have been a garden, a gap in the middle where a gate had once hung, and a ruined chimney stack pointed an accusing finger toward the bright, blue, unseen world above. The light came from behind the windows of the dwelling, moving slowly from side to side as if what was bearing it were somehow trapped and, like a caged animal, had bound up its madness in relentless motion. Around the house, tall thick weeds grew, each fifteen or twenty feet in length and swaying gently in the flow. I had never seen anything like them before. It seemed to me that there was something wrong with them, for their swaying made me uneasy. It took me only seconds to realize what it was about them that troubled me.

  Their rhythm was not being dictated by the current of the river. Instead, they moved independently of it, seeking, probing, spreading themselves through the dark waters like the tentacles of some great sea creature searching for prey. And at the end of one weed, something golden thrashed, and a broad halo of hair was briefly burnished by the light from below. Catherine looked up at me, her cheeks swollen as she tried to hold in the last of her air, and shook her head desperately. Her hands reached for me, the fingers grasping. I began to swim to her, but the weed wrapped itself once more around her body, twisting her in a circle as it did so, tightening its grip upon her. Catherine’s mouth opened, sending a stream of precious bubbles toward me. Her eyes grew wide and her lips seemed to form my name as the dark green water entered her body. Her thrashings increased in intensity and her hands lashed out at the weed, her fingers wrenching wildly at it. Then her lungs flooded, her struggles became feeble, and she grew still as she drowned. She hung in the depths, her arms outstretched and her eyes open, staring into eternity.

  Even then I thought that I could save her, that somehow I could bring her to the surface and pump that foul water from her, that I could fill her with life from my body and taste once again her breath in my mouth. But as I tried to swim to her, she began to recede from me. I thought at first that it must be some illusion, that the water was simply deeper than it at first seemed, but the ruined cottage continued to grow nearer even as she drew farther away from me. I watched helplessly as the weed pulled her deeper and deeper down until, with one final jerk, she was yanked through the doorway, and I understood at last that the weeds were growing not around the house, but from within it.

  Inside the cottage, the light stopped moving. Through the wreckage of the roof, I saw Catherine anchored to the bed
of the river, the weed still tight around her waist. There came the muffled, distorted sound of an old chain clanging on stones as the light approached and surrounded her, then wrapped her in its embrace. It assumed a shape: arms and legs formed, thin and pale, the muscles wasted and the skin hanging loose upon the bones. I saw long white hair writhing in the water. I caught a glimpse of naked flesh, wrinkled by the relentless flow of the river and pitted with ugly red sores. Old female breasts, flat and lifeless, pressed themselves against the still form of my beloved Catherine, as it bent as if to kiss her.

  I was almost within reach of the roof now and, for the first time, the being seemed to sense my approach. It twisted toward me, raising its face to mine, and I saw its mouth. Where lips and teeth should have been, there was instead the round, sucking hole of a lamprey, red and engorged. It opened and closed, pulsing quickly, already tasting the girl it had ensnared. Above the mouth, black lidless eyes regarded me blankly before its hunger finally overcame it and it turned away to begin its work. I tried to wrench one of the struts from the roof to use as a weapon, but my strength was failing and my head ached from the effort of holding my breath. I felt certain that I had only seconds of air left, but I would not leave Catherine to this thing.

  Yet as I gripped the wood, I sensed movement around me. White things shimmered at the periphery of my vision. I looked to my left and found that the length of weed closest to me no longer moved gently in the flow. It could not, for the burden it held constrained it. Strands of green had wrapped themselves around the legs of the boy, holding him in place even as he seemed to be reaching for the surface, but this one was long dead. There were dark patches around his unseeing eyes, and the edges of his bones showed like knives beneath his skin. His lips were torn and bruised where that lamprey mouth had attached itself to his for one final kiss.

  All around me, boys and girls hung unmoving in the water, each anchored securely by the weeds that emanated from the ruined house below. Some were naked, while tattered clothing still clung to the bodies of the others. Their hair shifted softly in the current, and their hands moved in small strokes, imitating life even in death. They were all here: all of the lost, all of the young dead, their shades lingering in the depths, waiting to welcome another to their ranks.

  I felt a huge surge of pity and fear, and my mouth opened with the shock of what I was seeing. Immediately, water rushed into my nose and mouth. I panicked and thrashed my legs, Catherine now forgotten in the urge to save my own life. I did not want to die down there, to be touched in my final moments by the thing that dwelt in the old house before joining the ghosts of children in the waters of that place.

  It was my panic that saved my life. I felt something rubbery lashing at my heel as the weed tried to gain some purchase on my body, but I was already leaving it behind as the light below me faded and the dark water filled my lungs, until the sky at last exploded above me and the sweetness of the air dazzled my senses.

  For two days they dragged the river and probed with poles the depths of Baal’s Pond, but they never found her. She was lost to us, lost to me, and she dwelt thereafter in a place where black waters flowed and the ghosts of the young hung in the current and watched her, unspeaking. She still waits for me there, and I will join her, soon enough. I have been back there many times since, although now it is fenced and gated, and the land around it has been sown with briers and poisonous plants to discourage the incautious. The surface of the pool still devours the light, and the thing below still waits, pacing hungrily, a being of pure appetite, as it was in life, as it is in death. It lives in a world of only two colors: red, the color of lips and lust.

  And green.

  Deep, dark green.

  Miss Froom, Vampire

  To begin, it is a matter of record that Miss Froom enjoyed a reputation as a gardener of some note. Her roses were the envy of many a retired army man who, after a lifetime of inflicting destruction on others, now believed that he had found an outlet for his hitherto unexplored creative urges, the impulse to cultivate roses being one that traditionally strikes males in the autumn of their years, and is generally encouraged by their weary spouses as it gets their husbands out of the house for long periods of time. It is a little-remarked fact that many a retired gentleman has unwittingly avoided a messy death at the hands of his wife by the simple expedient of picking up a pair of pruning shears and departing for greener pastures.

  Had Miss Froom’s expertise extended solely to roses, she would still have been assured a permanent place in the gardening lore of the county. But the lady in question also produced wonderful marrows, marvelous carrots, and cabbages with the otherworldly beauty of alien sunsets. At the annual fair in Broughton, which was to the county’s gardeners what Crufts is to besotted dog owners, Miss Froom was the yard-stick by whom others measured their successes, and their failures.

  Curiously, Miss Froom’s accomplishments aroused little ire among her male peers, a circumstance not unrelated to her general attractiveness. Her age was largely indeterminable, but most suspected that she was in her early fifties. Her hair was very dark, and unstreaked with gray, a condition that led the more uncharitable women of the village to suggest that her color was only natural if the good Lord had a palette that included Midnight Haze or Autumn Night. Her face was quite pale, with full lips and eyes that appeared alternately dark blue or deep green, depending upon the light. Her body was full, although she tended to dress rather conservatively and rarely exposed more than an ivory neck and the faintest hint of bosom, a restraint that merely added to her allure. Miss Froom was, in short, the kind of woman of whom men spoke favorably when they were freed from the constraints of censorious female company. She was also the kind of woman of whom other women spoke, and perhaps not always kindly, although there were those among them who might have felt something of their menfolk’s baser admiration of Miss Froom, were they capable of admitting it to themselves.

  A lane ran behind Miss Froom’s cottage on the outskirts of the village, from which she could sometimes be glimpsed in her garden, digging and pruning in order to maintain the quality and beauty of all that grew there. She would always refuse offers of male help with even the most taxing of labors, arguing with a smile that she liked to believe that whatever awards accrued to her as a result of her work were entirely hers, and hers alone. The men would tip their hats and go about their business, regretting that an afternoon spent in the company of the very lovely Miss Froom was to be denied them once again.

  And so it might have come as a surprise to these gentlemen, had any of them been present to witness the occurrence, when Miss Froom hailed a young man who was bicycling by her garden one bright spring afternoon. The gentleman, who came from the neighboring village of Ashburnham and was largely unfamiliar with matters horticultural, and therefore with the reputation of Miss Froom, stopped and leaned his bicycle against the wall. Peering over, he saw a woman in beige trousers and a white shirt resting on a spade. The young man, whose name was Edward, allowed himself a brief moment to take in the woman’s appearance. Although the sun was shining, it was still a chilly day, but the woman seemed untroubled by the cold. Her hair was tied up loosely on her head, and her lips were very red against the pallor of her complexion. She was quite stunningly attractive, Edward thought, for a woman three decades his senior. In fact, her face looked vaguely familiar, and Edward wondered if one of his more private fantasies had somehow come to life before him, for he felt certain that a woman with just such a face had occupied his imagination in a most pleasant way at some point in the past.

  “I was wondering,” said the woman, “if you might have a moment to spare. I’m trying to break the soil in order to sow, but I’m afraid there’s still a touch of winter to it.”

  Edward dismounted, opened the gate, and entered Miss Froom’s garden. As he drew closer, she seemed to grow in beauty, so that Edward felt his jaw drop slightly in her presence. Her lips parted and Edward caught a glimpse of white teeth and a hint of pink
tongue. He tried to speak, but only a hoarse croak emerged. He coughed, and managed to compose a relatively coherent sentence.

  “I’d be happy to help you, ma’am,” he said. “It would be my pleasure.”

  Miss Froom seemed almost to blush. At least, she approximated the movements of one who was a little embarrassed, but only the faintest rose of blood bloomed at her cheeks, as though she had only a little to spare.

  “My name is Miss Froom,” she said, “but you can call me Laura. Nobody calls me ‘ma’am.’ ”

  Laura was Edward’s favorite name, although he could not recall himself ever noticing that before. He gave Laura his own name and, introductions complete, she handed him the spade.

  “It shouldn’t take long,” said Miss Froom. “I do hope I’m not keeping you from anything.”

  Edward assured her that she was not. By now he could not even remember why he had come to the village to begin with. Whatever it was, it could wait.

  And so they worked, side by side, in Miss Froom’s garden, sharing small details of their lives but largely silent, Edward occupied mainly by thoughts of the woman close beside him, and the faintest scent of lilies that emanated from her person.

  And Miss Froom?

  Well, suffice it to say that Miss Froom was thinking of Edward in return.

  As the light began to fade, Miss Froom suggested that they finish up, and inquired if Edward might like to step inside for some tea. Edward readily agreed, and was about to take a seat at Miss Froom’s kitchen table when she asked him if he wouldn’t like to wash his hands first. Now it was Edward’s turn to be embarrassed, but Miss Froom hushed him and led him by the hand up the stairs, where she showed him into her spotlessly clean bathroom and handed him a towel, a wash-cloth, and a bar of clear soap.