Dieter froze, and his heart raced, causing his blood to feel as if it boiled. Straightening up, he closed his eyes and tried to feel the room, to reevaluate it. He directed his listening to all parts of the room, and he released his grip from Renee"s lifeless body. The heaving sounds continued from somewhere else in the room.
Renee was gone, and something else was in that room with him.
His breaths became shorter and faster, taking in more dust from the wreckage. He touched around the bed, wishing he could hold his lover, but instead his fingers found the cold copper bedpost and he held onto it, trying not to cough.
He knew he had to leave. He knew he would die just like Renee if he stayed in that building much longer. Dieter"s toes tested the slippery floor beneath him. The rocks and gravel at his feet cracked and scratched the floor while he turned to face the bed, both hands around the copper k.n.o.b on the top corner of the bedpost. The bed shook abruptly, and Dieter jumped back. He could hear Renee"s body drop from the bed onto the floor.
The coils whined from the weight of another replacing her. Dieter could feel the other in the room, but Dieter couldn"t see.
The foundation of the building began to creak and Dieter felt the floor sway side to side until it broke into a violent shake. He tried to pull his body close to the copper bedpost, but slipped on the wet floor, his knee crashing with rock, and his hip cracking from the impact with the floor. Dieter screamed in pain while being thrashed against the debris from the wreckage. He saw the light in the room dimming as the soil crawled further up the window. He screamed until his breath ran out, but could not hear it in the jarring noises of the sinking building. The shaking decreased and the building settled a little deeper into the ground.
He heard a scream, not realizing it was his own. He struggled to his knees, putting most of his weight on the uninjured one. Dieter began to feel the floor in front of him and started to find his way through the chaos. Dust coated the air in a thick cloud, making visibility impossible. Dieter coughed and squinted, trying the see in the room blackened by dust.
His fingers patted the large cement fragments and he crawled around them. In the blackness, he approached a fleshy obstacle. He patted what felt like skin leading to a large arm. The skin was cold, but it wasn"t Renee"s. A sob built up in Dieter"s chest and escaped through his teeth, "Please?"
The fragmented cement and rocks shifted under the other body while it sat up, Dieter"s hands still on its skin. "Please? Whoever you are, please help? I need out." Dieter could feel the warm saliva drip down his chin as he laid his head on the other"s thigh.
He felt a cold, rough hand on the back of his head, and then it moved down his neck and onto his back. He heard the breathing start again, each breath like a hiccup. A shrill between pauses. The rhythm accelerated, louder, like a machine starting up, but all thoughts of saving Renee"s body left his mind; now he only wanted to save himself.
Dieter looked up into the darkness, sniffling and slurping up the liquids spilling from his face. His pulse quickened. The other"s hand on his back became heavier, curled into a fist, and gripped his shirt.
Dieter held his breath and closed his eyes. The heavy hand lifted him to his feet. Dieter hopped on his uninjured leg, which caused the cracked bones on his other side to swing in the flesh bag that held them together. Dieter bit his lips and groaned as his leg collapsed from under him, but the hand held him up. The pain was overwhelming. His fingers found the other"s shoulder, and he tried to get a hold of it in order to support himself. He heard a sharp crack, then a pop, and felt the other"s neck jerking as it thrashed from side to side. He found himself losing his grip on the other"s cold body.
Dieter placed both of his hands around the other"s neck. Crack. The cold body began pulling itself closer, and he felt a long, cold, slimy tongue lap at his cheek and ear. Crack. The head jolted back, whipping the wet tongue on Dieter"s skin. Crack. The head snapped again, and what felt like another tongue followed the same path. He broke from the hold and pushed the other away.
Dieter swung his arms around in the dark, spinning and slipping on one foot. The sounds of the breathing were all around him, bouncing off every surface and tearing at his eardrums. The hand grabbed at the back of his head and a leg snaked around the thigh and shin that supported him. All within the matter of moments, the other pulled back and thrust its mouth into Dieter"s shoulder. Crack.
The other"s head jerked, breaking the bone that lay beneath its grip. An iron flavored kiss, one similar to Renee"s. For a second, he welcomed it, because it made her seem alive to him again.
But then he realized this wasn"t Renee, and this wasn"t going to end with the kinky s.e.x which had always been his reward for enduring her physical abuse. The other gnawed around his clavicle and left the insides of his flesh exposed.
The two bodies fell to the ground, and Dieter screamed from the pain, but he could not hear the noises that left him because the razor-sharp buzzing smothered all other sounds. His body lay over sharp metal and manmade rock, and he could feel the sticky warmth of his own blood on his shoulder. His hands searched for a weapon. He gripped a piece of plywood, but did not have the strength to lift it. His fingers fell upon a piece of cement, small enough to curl his fingers around. Dieter tightened his hand around the rock and threw his arm up, bringing the rock down on the other"s head. The gnawing stopped long enough to let Dieter roll to his side. He kicked at the floor, pushing his body across it, but hitting debris with his bleeding shoulder.
The dust in the room was beginning to settle, and Dieter could see the other in front of him, the sun peeking through the top of the window at its back. He lay on his back and squinted through the gray cloud. The body towered over him, blocking the light with its shadowy ma.s.s. He could hear the sounds of wet fleshy pieces rubbing and smacking.
Dieter watched the other"s head jerk to the side and heard it snap. Its black profile formed what seemed like large pinchers coming from its face. Dieter couldn"t breathe. The other grabbed hold of his ankle. Crack, it snapped the bone beneath, and began to pull him back. The head jerked again. Crack, and the body was on top of him once more, gnawing his wounded shoulder, tearing flesh away from bone.
Frantically Dieter struggled to get away from the other"s grasp as he searched the area for another piece of masonry, but his hand met with a metal shard. He lifted the shard and then brought it down into the other"s upper back.
The shrill buzzing relaxed into quick heaving again. He was enveloped in a searing pain from his shoulder and he needed to get out. Dieter kicked at the floor, now sliding more easily across it due to the other"s maroon, slick blood. The room began to freckle in white, and all that he could taste or smell was iron. The pain pulsed strong through his body, pulsed stronger, and then dulled. It dulled until the pain ended, and all he could hear was the other"s rapid breathing behind him, but now there were pauses in between, and in those silences, were the lapping sounds before the gnawing.
About Lala Drona.
Lala Drona is a freelance writer, poet, artist and jane-of-all-trades. She is the perpetual foreigner in a world of seek and hide.
OF EVIL.
by Graham Masterton.
It was raining so hard that Mark stayed in the Range Rover, drinking cold espresso straight from the flask and listening to a play on the radio about a widow who compulsively knitted cardigans for her recently-dead husband.
"It took me ages to find this shade of gray. Shale, they call it. It matches his eyes."
"He"s dead, Maureen. He"s never going to wear it."
"Don"t be silly. n.o.body dies, so long as you remember what they looked like."
He was thinking about calling it a day when he saw Katie trudging across the field toward him in her bright red raincoat with the pointy hood. As she approached he let down the window, tipping out the last of his coffee. The rain spattered icy-cold against his cheek.
"You look drowned!" he called out. "Why don"t you pack it in?"
"We"ve found something really exciting, that"s why."
She came up to the Range Rover and pulled back her hood. Her curly blonde hair was stuck to her forehead and there was a drip on the end of her nose. She had always put him in mind of a poor bedraggled fairy, even when she was dry, and today she looked as if she had fallen out of her traveler"s joy bush and into a puddle.
"Where"s Nigel?" he asked her.
"He"s still there, digging."
"I told him to survey the ditches. What the h.e.l.l"s he digging for?"
"Mark, we think we might have found Shalott."
"What? What are you talking about?"
Katie wiped the rain from her face with the back of her hand. "Those ditches aren"t ditches; they used to be a stream, and there"s an island in the middle. And those lumps we thought were Iron Age sheep-pens, they"re stones, all cut and dressed, like the stones for building a wall."
"Oh, I see," said Mark. "And you and Nigel, being you and Nigel, you immediately thought, "Shalott!""
"Why not? It"s in the right location, isn"t it, upstream from Cadbury?"
Mark shook his head. "Come on, Katie, I know that you and Nigel think that Camelot was all true. If you dug up an old tomato-ketchup bottle you"d probably persuade yourselves that it came from the Round Table."
"It"s not just the stones, Mark. We"ve found some kind of metal frame. It"s mostly buried, but Nigel"s trying to get it out."
"A frame?"
Katie stretched her arms as wide as she could. "It"s big, and it"s very tarnished. Nigel thinks it could be a mirror."
"I get it...island, Camelot, mirror. Must be Shalott!"
"Come and have a look anyway. I mean, it might just be sc.r.a.p, but you never know."
Mark checked his watch. "Let"s leave it till tomorrow. We can"t do anything sensible in this weather."
"I don"t think we can just leave it there. Supposing somebody else comes along and decides to finish digging it up? It could be valuable. If we have found Shalott, and if it is a mirror-"
"Katie, read my lips: Shalott is a myth. Whatever it is you"ve dug up, can"t you just cover it up again and leave it till tomorrow? It"s going to be pitch dark in half an hour."
Katie put on one of those faces that meant she was going to go on nagging about this until she got her own way. They weren"t having any kind of relationship, but ever since Katie had joined the company, six weeks ago, they had been mildly flirting with each other, and Mark wouldn"t have minded if it went a little further. He let his head drop down in surrender, and said, "Okay...if I must."
The widow in the radio-play was still fretting about her latest sweater. "He"s not so very keen on raglan sleeves...he thinks they make him look round-shouldered."
"He"s dead, Maureen. He probably doesn"t have any shoulders."
Katie turned around and started back up the hill. Mark climbed down from the Range Rover, slammed the door, and trudged through the long gra.s.s behind her. The skies were hung with filthy gray curtains, and the wind was blowing directly from the north-east, so that his wet raincoat collar kept petulantly slapping his face. He wouldn"t have come out here at all, not today, but the weather had put him eleven days behind schedule, and the county council were starting to grow impatient.
"We"re going to be b.l.o.o.d.y popular!" Nigel shouted. "If this is b.l.o.o.d.y Shalott!"
Katie spun around as she walked, her hands thrust deep in her duffel-coat pockets. "But it could be! A castle, on an island, right in the heart of King Arthur country!"
Mark caught up with her. "Forget it, Katie. It"s all stories-especially the Lady of Shalott. Burne Jones, Tennyson; the Victorians loved that kind of thing. A cursed woman in a castle, dying of unrequited love. Sounds like my ex, come to think of it."
They topped the ridge. Through the misty swathes of rain, they could just about make out the thickly-wooded hills that half-encircled the valley on the eastern side. Below them lay a wide, boggy meadow. A straggling line of k.n.o.bbly-topped willows crossed the meadow diagonally from south-east to north-west, like a procession of medieval monks, marking the course of an ancient ditch. They could see Nigel about a quarter of a mile away, in his fluorescent yellow jacket and his white plastic helmet, digging.
Mark clasped his hands together and raised his eyes toward the overbearing clouds. "Dear Lord, if You"re up there, please let Nigel be digging up a bit of old bedstead."
"But if this is Shalott-" Katie persisted.
"It isn"t Shalott, Katie. There is no Shalott, and there never was. Even if it is-which it isn"t-it"s situated slap bang in the middle of the proposed route for the Woolston relief road, which is already three-and-a-half years late and six-point-nine million pounds over budget. Which means that the county council will have to rethink their entire highways-building plan, and we won"t get paid until the whole mess has gone through a full-scale public enquiry, which probably means in fifteen years" time."
"But think of it!" said Katie. "There-where Nigel"s digging-that could be the island where the castle used to stand, where the Lady of Shalott weaved her tapestries. And these were the fields where the reapers heard her singing! And that ditch was the river, where she floated down to Camelot in her boat, singing her last lament before she died!"
"If any of that is true, sweetheart, then this is the hill where you and I and the Historic Site a.s.sessment Place would go instantly bankrupt."
"But we"d be famous, wouldn"t we?"
"No, we wouldn"t. You don"t think for one moment that we"d be allowed to dig it up, do you? Every medieval archeologist from every university in the western hemisphere would be crawling all over this site like bluebottles over a dead hedgehog."
"We"re perfectly well qualified."
"No, darling, we"re not, and I think you"re forgetting what we do. We don"t get paid to find sites of outstanding archeological significance or interest, we get paid not to find them. Bronze Age buckle? Shove it in your pocket and rediscover it five miles away, well away from the proposed new supermarket site. An Iron Age sheep pen, fine. We can call in a JCB and have it shifted to the Ancient Britain display at Frome. But not Shalott, Katie. Shalott would b.l.o.o.d.y sink us."
They struggled down the hill and across the meadow. The rain began to ease off, but the wind was still bl.u.s.tery. As they clambered down the ditch, and up the other side, Nigel stood up and took off his helmet. He was very tall, Nigel, with tight curly hair, a large complicated nose, and a hesitant, disconnected way of walking and talking. But Mark hadn"t employed him for his looks or his physical co-ordination or his people skills. He had employed him because of his MA in History and his diploma in Archeology and Landscape, which were prominently displayed on the top of the company notepaper.
"Nigel! How"s it going? Katie tells me you"ve found Shalott."
"Well-no-Mark! I don"t like to jump to-you know-hah!-hasty conclusions! Not when we could be dealing with-pff! I don"t know!-the most exciting archeological find ever! But these stones, look!"
Mark turned to Katie and rolled up his eyes in exaggerated weariness. But Katie said, "Go on, Mark. Look."
Nigel was circling around the rough gra.s.sy tussocks, flapping his hands. "I"ve cut back some of the turf, d"you see-and-underneath-well, see?" He had already exposed six or seven rectangular stones that were the color of well-matured Cheddar cheese. Every stone bore a dense pattern of chisel-marks, as if it had been gnawed by a giant stone-eating rat.
"Bath stone," said Nigel. "Quarried from Hazlebury most likely, and look at that jadding...late thirteenth century, in my humble opinion. Certainly not cut by the old method."
Mark peered at the stones and couldn"t really see anything but stones. "The old method?"
Nigel let out a honk of laughter. "Silly, isn"t it? The old method is what quarrymen used to call the new method-cutting the stone with saws, instead of breaking it away with bars."
"What wags they were. What makes you think this could be Shalott?"
Nigel shielded his eyes with his hand and looked around the meadow, blinking. "The location suggests it, more than anything else. You can see by the way these foundation-stones are arranged that there was certainly a tower here. You don"t use stones five feet thick to build a single-story pigsty, do you? But then you have to ask yourself why would you build a tower here?"
"Do you? Oh yes, I suppose you do."
"You wouldn"t have picked the middle of a valley to build a fort," said Nigel. "You would only build a tower here as a folly, or to keep somebody imprisoned, perhaps."
"Like the Lady of Shalott?"
"Well, exactly."
"So, if there was a tower here, where"s the rest of it?"
"Oh, pilfered, most likely. As soon its owners left it empty, most of the stones would have been carried off by local smallholders for building walls and stables and farmhouses. I"ll bet you could still find them if you went looking for them."
"Well, I"ll bet you could," said Mark, blowing his nose. "Pity they didn"t take the lot."
Nigel blinked at him through rain-speckled gla.s.ses. "If they"d done that-hah!-we never would have known that this was Shalott, would we?"
"Precisely."
Nigel said, "I don"t think the tower was standing here for very long. At a very rough estimate it was built just before 1275, and most likely abandoned during the Black Death, around 1348 or 1349."
"Oh, yes?" Mark was already trying to work out what equipment they were going to need to shift these stones and where they could dump them. Back at Hazelbury quarry, maybe, where they originally came from. n.o.body would ever find them there. Or maybe they could sell them as garden benches. He had a friend in Chelsea who ran a profitable sideline in ancient stones and 18th century garden ornaments for wealthy customers who weren"t too fussy where they came from.
Nigel took hold of Mark"s sleeve and pointed to a stone that was still half-buried in gra.s.s. There were some deep marks chiseled into it. "Look-you can just make out a cross, and part of a skull, and the letters DSPM. That"s an acronym for medieval Latin, meaning "G.o.d save us from the pestilence within these walls.""
"So whoever lived in this tower was infected with the Black Death?"
"That"s the most obvious a.s.sumption, yes."
Mark nodded. "Okay, then..." he said, and kept on nodding.
"This is very, very exciting," said Nigel. "I mean, it"s-well!-it could be stupefying, when you come to think of it!"
"Yes," said Mark. He looked around the site, still nodding. "Katie told me you"d found some metal thing."
"Well!-hah!-that"s the clincher, so far as I"m concerned! At least it will be, if it turns out to be what I think it is!"
He strode back to the place where he had been digging, and Mark reluctantly followed him. Barely visible in the mud was a length of blackened metal, about a meter-and-a-half long and curved at both ends.