Ellen Datlow - Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

She left the bedroom door slightly ajar and went down to the kitchen. A puddle covered the tiles by the door and threatened to become a stream. She took the mop and listlessly dabbed at the water.

When she looked up Geoffrey stood framed in the door window, rain sheeting off his wide-brimmed hat like a veil. She opened the door.

“I asked at the post office where you were,” he said. “They asked me to bring your mail. Said you hadn’t been down in a week.”

“Five days. Come in, then.”

She hung his coat off the back of a chair in the corner and set his hat on the seat. She ran the mop over the new puddle he made and closed the door.

He dropped a bundle of envelopes on the table, then stood back, hands in his pockets. Conny thought he looked just like a boy expecting a scolding.

“We haven’t seen you since Reading,” she said.

“I’m working at the foundry.”

Conny waited. She expected a reaction, a recognition, a response—from herself. But nothing happened. She pulled a chair from the table and sat down.

“In Birmingham,” she said, “you worked in a warehouse. Ipswich it was a street cleaner and in Bath a stable. I’d gotten so used to you being wherever we were that… it took three more moves to realize that you’d abandoned us. Five years since you and I started. Eight before that. A lot of time and effort to just walk away from.”

“I didn’t—”

She waited for him to finish. When he said nothing, she continued. “He got very sick in Cambridge. I thought he’d die. The thing is, I forgot all about you then. I didn’t think about you at all till just now. Isn’t that odd?”

Geoffrey’s face twisted in a painful scowl. Conny thought his scar would open. “I wondered…” He looked toward the ceiling. “Is he—?”

“Upstairs. Still sick.”

Geoffrey sighed. “He hasn’t written anything since Cambridge, then.”

Conny stared at him, a chill settling in her bowels. He gave her a quick, wry smile, then sat down across from her.

“Did you ever ask him if there’d been anyone before you?” he asked.

“No.”

Geoffrey gestured at his face. “William wrote a story in university about two boys who became best friends. He didn’t know a lot about friendship. The university journal wouldn’t print it but the word got around that he’d written it and that it was about me and him. Some lads took it on themselves one night to exact moral realignment. I don’t remember much besides William holding me in his arms, screaming, him with a bloody nose and me with a map of the Suez Canal across my face.”

“So had there been?”

“What?”

“Anyone before me.”

“Just me.”

From upstairs came the sound of coughing. Conny listened, willing it to stop. When it worsened, she stood.

“Stay,” she said. He nodded and she went up to William.

His fever broke. Conny cleaned him up and changed his sheets, then cleaned the rest of the sickroom. At one point she looked around to see him watching her, eyes half-lidded. His face moved as if to smile. Perspiration broke across his cheeks.

Toward evening the rain stopped and she opened his window to let out some of the smell. She finished mopping the floor and went into the next room.

Boxes of books stacked against one wall. A plain table served as a desk. Conny picked items up and put them down, not really straightening anything. He had yet to do any work here. Paper waited on one end, the ivory pen and ink bottle by the lamp, and the bulky typewriter he almost never used on the other end. She picked up the bottle; the same one, all this time. The traces of their blood must have long since disappeared. Perhaps some few molecules had worked into the glass wall. He always refilled it when the ink ran out, the bottle and the pen constant, lifelong companions.

She ran the mop lightly over this floor and took the bucket down to the kitchen. She was hungry but too tired to bother cooking anything. She tore off a piece of bread and poured a glass of wine and went up to her own room, just across the hall from William’s. She lay down, wondering what it would be like to stay in one place forever.

She opened her eyes to a wash of brilliant moonlight silvering the walls of her room. The silence around her seemed like the night holding its breath. She was absolutely awake, her pulse fast, as if something had frightened her from sleep.

No light in the empty hall except a dim glow that picked out the stairwell from below. She descended the steps cautiously.

The main room held a bluish light—moon reflected off water—that leached color and detail from the furniture, yet gave the impression of perfect illumination. She paused on the last step, letting the feel of the old wood against her feet register as solid, as real. A faint breeze shifted her hair, tickling her face.

Movement caught her eye. She stared across the room, against the wall, by the long divan. Another movement—an arm shifted, swimming through the unreliable light. Conny stepped to the floor and threaded her way between chairs and tables, and stopped before the couch.

The arm moved again and a face came up out of shadow.

“He’s writing again,” Geoffrey said.

Morning light turned the room to dusky gold. That’s how I feel, Conny thought.

Gradually, she became aware that she was lying belly down on the floor. She pushed herself up, triggering a series of small aches and twinges, and rolled onto her buttocks. Geoffrey lay stretched out on the divan, one arm over his face. Conny crawled over to him and perched on the sofa edge, her hip against his side, and walked her fingers across his stomach.

He snatched her hand and held it, running his thumb up and down her palm.

“Good morning,” she said.

“How long has it been?” he asked.

She tried to find a way to misunderstand him—she wanted to keep the golden feelings—but she knew what he meant. “Since Cambridge. A little before, maybe.”

“For both of us, then.” He lowered his arm and looked at her. “I ran away after Reading. I blamed you. I thought we shouldn’t be doing this and it was you kept finding me and insisting. But that wasn’t it. I wanted to see if I could live on my own.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “Sure. If you can call it living. Tasteless food, stale air, meaningless routine. No reason to get up in the morning except that it’s too bright to sleep. You?”

“I’ve been too busy taking care of him to notice.”

He gave her a skeptical look. Then, abruptly, he frowned and sat up. William stood at the bottom of the stairs, a long nightshirt covering him to his shins, staring at them. He held a thin sheaf of paper in his hand.

JANUARY, 1933

Conny’s lungs emptied in quick stages as her thighs relaxed. The coils in her stomach released across her ribs, over her back, along her arms, and ebbed away. She folded against Geoffrey. Where their skin touched sweat oiled the contact, let them slide minutely with each inhalation and exhalation; at the exact line along which their skins parted, evaporation cooled. Moisture ran from her shoulders, into the runnel of her spine. In the sudden stillness she heard the faint scratch of pen nib on paper.

“My god,” Geoffrey breathed, “the man’s prodigious.”

Conny nodded, face sliding on damp hair. She opened her eyes. Across the room, by the window, William hunched over the small table, working.

“What do we do if he dies?” Geoffrey asked quietly.

Conny raised herself on one arm. “That’s not funny.”

“Wasn’t meant to be. It’s a serious question. We ought to think about it.”

She kissed his neck, licked the salt from the hollow of his throat. “Not now.” She lay back against him and he ran his fingertips lightly along her sides and over her hips and buttocks. It still surprised her sometimes how gently he could touch her.