Marie Brennan - In Ashes Lie

This one contained trousers, shirts, jackets and, to my surprise, a large pair of thick yellow fisherman’s oils and sailing boots. There was a small, important-looking box at the bottom of the wardrobe. I opened it and found a stethoscope, a small first-aid kit, a thermometer, and several special and painful looking metal tools the nature of which I dared not speculate on. I pulled a white cotton shirt off its hanger and a pair of gray trousers. In a drawer I found underpants which didn’t quite fit comfortably, and a pair of thick black socks. Dressing, I felt cautiously around my left shoulder and ribcage, probing for damage, and finding that every bone was properly set, every inch of skin correctly healed, not even a scar, not a trace of dry blood.

The shirt cuff reached roughly to the same point where my thumb joint aligned with the rest of my hand; the trousers dangled around the balls of my feet. The socks fitted perfectly, as always seems the way. The shoes were several sizes too small; that perplexed me. How is it possible for someone to have such long arms and legs, and yet wear shoes for feet that you’d think would have to have been bound? Feeling I might regret it later, I left the shoes.

I put the business card and the fifty pounds in my trouser pockets and headed for the door. On the way out, we caught sight of our reflection in the big mirror and stopped, stared, fascinated. Was this now us? Dark brown hair heading for the disreputable side of uncared for—not long enough to be a bohemian statement, not short enough to be stylish. Pale face that freckled in the sun, slightly overlarge nose for the compact features that surrounded it, plonked as if by accident on top of a body made all the more sticklike by the ridiculous oversize clothes it wore. It was not the flesh we would have chosen, but I had long since given up dreams of resembling anyone from the movies, and with the pragmatism of the perfectly average, come to realise that this was me and that was fine.

And this was me, looking back out of the mirror.

Not quite me.

I leaned in closer, turning my head this way and that, running my fingers through my hair—greasy and unwashed—in search of blood, bumps, splits. Turning my face this way and that, searching for bruises and scars. An almost perfect wakening, but there was still something wrong with this picture.

I leaned right in close until my breath condensed in a little gray puff on the glass, and stared deep into my own eyes. As a teenager it had bothered me how round my eyes had been, somehow always imagining that small eyes = great intelligence, until one day at school the thirteen-year-old Max Borton had pointed out that round dark eyes were a great way to get the girls. I blinked and the reflection in the mirror blinked back, the bright iris reflecting cat-like the orange glow of the washed-out streetlamps. My eyes, which, when I had last had cause to look at them, had been brown. Now they were the pale, brilliant albino blue of the cloudless winter sky, and I was no longer the only creature that watched from behind their lens.

runrunrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN RUN!

I put my head against the cold glass of the mirror, fighting the sudden terror that threatened to knock us back to the floor. The trick was to keep breathing, to keep moving. Nothing else mattered. Run long and hard enough, and perhaps while you’re running you might actually come up with a plan. But nothing mattered if you were already dead.

My legs thought better than my brain, walked me out of the room. My fingers eased back the door and I blinked in the shocking light of the hundred-watt bulb in the corridor outside. The carpet here was thick and new, the banisters polished, but it was a painting on the wall, a print of a Picasso I’d picked up for a fiver—too many years ago—all color and strange, scattered proportions—which stole our attention. It still hung exactly where I’d left it. I felt almost offended. We were fascinated: an explosion of visual wonder right there for the same price as a cheap Thai meal, in full glory. Was everything like this? I found it hard to remember. I licked my lips and tasted blood, dry and old. Thoughts and memories were still too tangled to make clear sense of them. All that mattered was moving, staying alive long enough to get a plan together, find some answers.

From downstairs I heard laughter, voices, the chink of glasses, and a door being opened. Footsteps on the tiles that led from living room to kitchen, a clink where they still had-n’t cemented in the loose white one in the center of the diamond pattern; the sound of plates; the roar of the oven fan as it pumped out hot air.

I started walking down. The voices grew louder, a sound of polite gossipy chitchat, dominated by one woman with a penetrating voice and a laugh that started at the back of her nose before traveling down to the lungs and back up again, and who I instinctively disliked. I glanced down the corridor to the kitchen and saw a man’s back turned to me, bent over something that steamed and smelt of pie. The urge to eat anything, everything, briefly drowned out the taste of blood in my mouth. Like a bewildered ghost who can’t understand that it has died, I walked past the kitchen and pushed at the half-open door to the living room.

There were three of them, with a fourth place set for the absent cook, drinking wine over the remnants of a salad, around a table whose top was made of frosted glass. As I came in, nobody seemed to notice me, all attention on the one woman there with the tone and look of someone in the middle of a witty address. But when she turned in my direction with, “George, the pie!” already half-escaped from her lips, the sound of her dropped wineglass shattering on the table quickly redirected the others’ attention.

They stared at me, I stared at them. There was an embarrassed silence that only the English can do so well, and that probably lasted less than a second, but felt like a dozen ticks of the clock. Then, as she had to, as things probably must be, one of the women screamed.

The sound sent a shudder down my spine, smashed through the horror and incomprehension in my brain, and at last let me understand, let me finally realize that this was no longer my house, that I had been gone too long, and that to these people I was the intruder, they the rightful owners. The scream slammed into my brain like a train hitting the buffers and tore a path through my consciousness that let everything else begin to flood in: the true realization that if my house was not mine, my job, my friends, my old life, would not be mine, nor my possessions, my money, my debts, my clothes, my shoes, my films, my music; all gone in a second, things I had owned since a scrawny teenager, the electric toothbrush my father had given me in a fit of concern for my health, the photos of my friends and the places I’d been, the copy of Calvin and Hobbes my first girlfriend had given me as a sign of enduring friendship the Christmas after we’d split up, my favorite pair of slippers, the holiday I was planning to the mountains of northern Spain, all, everything I had worked for, everything I had owned and wanted to achieve, vanished in that scream.

I ran. We didn’t run from the sound, that wasn’t what frightened us. I ran to become lost, and wished I had never woken in the first place, but stayed drifting in the blue.

Warrior

Witch

Midnight Never Come

In Ashes Lie

Published by Hachette Digital 2009