Ellen Datlow - Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

We tooled up and down the main drag, trying on sunglasses and hats. She fingered jewelry and squeezed the arms of thick sweaters, which made me feel even hotter. I pointed out the egg-tipped folly of GM-TV and she scoffed when I told her it was a listed building. I showed her where I’d seen Adam Ant handing over some coins to a charity collector as we crossed the walkway over the Grand Union Canal into a tight knot of stalls and alcoves. The heat was building up here; candles were sagging on their displays and the drifts of antiques shone dully in a solid mass of bronzed light. Every time Louise brushed against me or held on to my arm, I sagged, as if she were transmitting weight through her touch. At such moments, she would perk up and become animated, trying on hats or mugging in smeared mirrors, laughing as my face grew greasy and pale.

The stream of people was endless. The pavements were so obstructed, pedestrians spilled into the road, slowing the traffic which began to trail back toward Mornington Crescent Tube. The crowds seemed to be swelling, like a single bloated body, inflated by sore tempers and the ceaseless, airless heat. I pulled Louise into a café, worried by a mild panic that had transmitted itself into an hallucination of us crushed beneath a stampede of bodies as they attempted to escape their stifling skins. I bought cappuccino, hoping I could relax sufficiently at the counter before she noticed my discomfort.

When I turned round, Louise was bathed in sunshine. Because of the angle of her chair and the way the sunlight was blocked by the weirdly squashed conglomeration of buildings, only she was favored by its color. It invaded the thick pile of her hair, seeming to imbue each filament, like one of those carbon fiber lamps. It moved across her face like thick fluid and, somehow, seemed of her too, picking out the configuration of her bones slouched inside their fleshy housing, curled into the chair. A comma of wet sunshine touched her lower lip and I found myself wishing I could kiss it away. I still wanted her, even after such a long time had passed. No time at all. Everyone around her seemed to diminish, shadows on the wane, growing sluggish like figures trapped in tar. And then she looked at me. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what kind of fire it was that filled her eyes, certain only that it wasn’t human but then the moment passed, and she smiled and everyone was a component of the greater animation around us once more. She just seemed like a willowy girl, lost in the scrum. Unremarkable.

“Get this down you,” I said, pushing across her coffee. “It’ll put hairs on your chest.”

“This place, Camden that is, reminds me of my last few years,” Louise said, furring her top lip with the froth of her cappuccino. I don’t know why, really. Something about the way everything feels sad and unreal but is all disguised by movement. I bet this place seems more like its true self when the shops close and everyone pisses off.”

“What have you been up to these last few years?” I asked that, when all I wanted to know was how she’d turned up in such a state on my doorstep. Now she looked in some semblance of control, I was finding it hard to believe that I’d seen her like that, in extremis.

“It felt like I was being followed. No, that’s not right, it felt like I was being hunted. I had to keep moving or I felt I’d be consumed by something so big I couldn’t even see it. Just an aspect of it, I saw, usually in sleep, moving furiously, like an engine part well-oiled, pistoning and thrashing around. It belonged to something that was vast and after me. Hungry for me.” She took another drink of coffee, then reached over and tapped a man in a vest and combat trousers on the shoulder. Asked him for a cigarette. After he’d lit it for her, she turned back to me and spoke around a mouthful of bluish smoke.

“I left Warrington just after we finished… after you finished with me. I got a job with a waste disposal firm in Keighley.”

“Keighley? Why Keighley, of all places? Middle of nowhere.”

“No, I was the middle of nowhere. Anywhere, everywhere else was a grip on something real. I was on Temazepam by this time, for my depression and insomnia but it wasn’t working. The doctor gave me Prozac, and that was better, for a while, until I wanted to do nothing other than sit in front of my window and watch the litter being blown across the street. I kicked all that but it was like the feeling had settled into me and wouldn’t go away. I slept late, ate less, became constipated. I began to appreciate a particular kind of darkness I found in the loft. There was a cat, Marlon, his name was, that would sleep up there. Made his way over the roofs and climbed in through a hole in the eaves. We’d curl up together, flinching whenever a bird’s claws rattled on the tiles. It was almost magical. I felt safe; that thing that was looking for me wouldn’t have me here. It was just me and Marlon and the dark. Holding on to Marlon’s fur kept me real and sane. If he wasn’t there, I think I would, have just… well…”

“How long were you in Keighley for?” I asked, sensing a dangerous moment of self-disclosure if I let her carry on.

“Not long. I hitched a lift to Scarborough and did some work at one of the hotels. Cleaning rooms in the daytime, serving behind the bar at night. I liked it. Days off, I’d walk along the beach up to the amusement arcades. I met boys there. When it got dark we’d go behind the generators and I’d just let them do what they wanted to me. I went with this really gaunt, ill-looking boy called Felix. He was half Croatian. I sucked him off and when he came—”

“Jesus, Lou—”

“—when he came, there was blood in his semen. He blamed it on me, said I’d infected him—some nonsense like that—and he tried to strangle me. I didn’t fight him off. I was struck by how beautiful he looked in the thin light rising from the harbor behind us. I think he got scared when I smiled at him. He left me alone. I like to believe you were thinking of me at that very moment. My Guardian Angel, rescued me with some attention.”

I laughed nervously. I didn’t like anything she was telling me. I was jealous and I was resentful of her for keeping a hold on to me. My letter hadn’t been a cry for reunion, it had been a friendly endeavor to find out what was happening to someone I cared about. But I found myself hooked on her story. “And then?” I asked, my voice dead, resigned.

“I stayed in Scarborough for some time. A year or so. Things changed. I found that I seemed to be waking into thick air. Walking, blinking, breathing—it was all such an effort. Things weren’t right while somehow keeping a surface of normality. I’d see something odd, but everybody else’s reaction would be non-existent and it might be hours or days before I told myself that no, it was not right but by then I’d suspect that it happened at all.”

“What kind of things? What are you talking about, Louise?”

“I’m talking about the skeletons of fish on the beach flopping around, trying to get back into the water. I’m talking about sand castles that didn’t dissolve when the tide touched them. A couple kissing under a streetlamp whose heads melted into each other.”

“Tcha!” I said, rocking back on my seat and attracting a few glances from the punters sitting nearby. She’d drawn me into her story so effectively that this nonsense had spat me out, like a newborn, unable to cope with me sudden influx of normal sensations. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. She wouldn’t give up on it though.

“A dog smoking a pipe. A parrot on a smiling tramp’s shoulder picking his brains from a bleeding eye socket. Burning children playing leapfrog on a lawn.”

“Stop it, Louise.”