D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘They’re too late. Thank God.’

And I was hurt. More than anything else at that moment,. I was hurt. That I shouldn’t have known. That she shouldn’t have told me.

Simply because there’d been less and less to say, we’d been saying less and less. But there should have been a moment, something more than just a mere cessation, that I in my closeness, in my blind closeness, might have known. An event between us. An importance. As if there hadn’t been enough events and importances.

But I was hurt, and stood up, knocking over something, a table, something that had been too close. My eyes cried. I ran across the grass toward the approaching, egg-beating clatter. And stopped. She was dead, and I ought to have known better. I did know better. I did.

Gerald came after me only slowly. He didn’t snatch or pull. ‘They’ll come down in the playing field by the gym,’ he said. ‘It’ll be some minutes before they get here.’

I had a sudden, precise, imaginary picture from the helicopter now low over the trees. The school with its swooping roof and blue glass, turquoise really; the lawn behind its woven fence, striped neatly, shadowed with foreshortened trees; us, staring up; near us Kate, Katie-Mo, Kathie, Kath, Katherine…

‘She’s all right?’ I asked, ashamed now.

He caught my meaning at once. ‘Tired,’ he said. ‘Nothing more.’

Anyway, how could it matter? Hadn’t I seen puke and shit and piss, and loved her? He led me back across the lawn and let me help him pick up the table I had spilled. Groping around, I found bowls and cutlery. I set them on the table, carefully, the right way up. Then we sat down to wait.

I don’t know what he was waiting for. Me, in all the shouting and anger and confusion that followed, I was listening for just one voice. I heard Vincent, and the doctor too late to do his irrelevant doctoring. Both of them were to avoid me: Vincent I would hear from later, through NTV’s solicitors; Dr Mason, for his own unexplained reasons, never. I heard some cameraman, worrying about the light. Then I heard Tracey. She was very close to me, and spoke softly.

‘You’ve come back,’ she said.

I hadn’t of course. Nothing is that easy. But I was well on the way.

D. G. Comptonis a science fiction author who also has written crime novels under the name Guy Compton and Gothic novels under the name Frances Lynch. His 1970 novel The Steel Crocodile was nominated for the Nebula Award, and he was named the 2007 Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He lives in Maine.

Lisa Tuttleis the Nebula Award-winning author of The Mysteries , The Pillow Friend , and The Silver Bough .