David Nickle - The 'Geisters

The Insect was out. And tears? Tears only fed it.

The door to the front steps was jammed, as was the sliding door to the balcony; a part of Ann knew this would be so even before she checked. She tried various things to smash the glass—a chair, a frying pan, and finally Ian Rickhardt’s laptop, still playing their wedding on its draining battery. Any one of them would have done the job. But Ann wasn’t surprised, when at the end of it the only thing shattered was the laptop. Ann wasn’t that strong to begin with, and the Insect had a way of pulling her punches for her, at times such as these.

Smoke rolled down the stairwell, crawling across the ceiling of the living room, lit as if from within by the flames from the second floor. Ann bent low and drew in what air there was.

She wouldn’t be breathing long and she knew it. The smoke, the heat of the flames… she would suffocate, immolate, one or the other or both, very soon now.

The Insect had her, and it knew it too. It pounded triumphantly on the walls, shook the windows in their runners. Outside, it would be stirring up a storm. Nearer: flames roared and the room lit orange, as something caught. The smoke pressed her down further, and she rolled off her knees, so her face touched the floor.

It would not be long. And there was no way out.

Ann shut her eyes, and went the only other way she could.

In.

“Why?”

She stood in mud, among the shattered foundations of the castle tower that she and Eva had built together. The sky overhead was a rolling storm. The stones of the tower stretched like the spine of a huge beast, over a dark hill and into twisted branches of a ravine.

It was no place Ann had dreamed. Yet when her eyes closed, when she sought the safe place—this was where she landed. The field of her defeat.

She wished Eva were here now, or available somehow, to help her—to reconstruct, to find the Insect… rope it back inside. What might she say? First, she would tell Ann to banish this ruin from her mind; to think of bright banners and trumpets sounding, of victory marches. Set her subjects to work, reconstructing the tower, while riders spread out across the land, accompanied by hounds who had gathered the scent of the Insect.

Above all, she would tell Ann: Step out of the mud.

But Ann could not; it was thick and deep, and her ankles were mired in it. And as she looked down, Ann realized there was no need to send trackers after the Insect. For in that mud, it crawled and clicked in a multitude of itself, centipedes and blue-backed beetles the size of her fist churned through the mud, spun about her ankles, crawled up as if to consume her.

“ Why? ” they clicked and whirred, mocking with their tea-coloured wings and mandibles—with their pounding, growing louder, on the walls of the beach house, “ Why does it ever go so? ”

“Why are you trying to kill me?”

“ The heart wants what the heart wants ,” sang the Insect through the buzzing of its flies, the chirps of crickets… the sharp crack, of a wooden doorframe.

Ann felt arms underneath her own, and then the floorboards dragging against her legs. She tried to open her eyes but couldn’t—the smoke stung too badly. Then she was off the ground entirely, draped over shoulders. Someone was shouting, and coughing—and she was moving. At once, there was a sharp pain as her shoulder hit against something hard. And then a wash of cool air—a stomach-lurching shift—and gravel biting into her back, her thigh.

“Ann!”

She opened her eyes, and looked up into Michael’s. He knelt over her. He was shirtless, the thin blond hairs on his arms, crawling up his shoulders, turned into a halo of orange sparks by the light of the burning building behind them.

He slapped her lightly on one cheek. She stopped him from doing the same on the other with her hand. She coughed, and coughed, and eventually managed to sit up, and tell him she was all right.

“Thank God,” he said. “Oh thank God.”

He took her in his arms, and she held him too—and they sat like that, as the flames climbed into the night sky, until the sirens announced the arrival of the firefighters and the ambulance.

Ian Rickhardt was apologetic, but not to Ann. Michael kept him away from her after the fire. The two men had their conversation in a courtyard of Tobago County Hospital, while Ann drew oxygen and waited for the results of a chest X-ray and a blood test in the emergency department. Ian wheedled and bargained, but Michael held to his guns.

When he returned to Ann’s bedside, he was alone.

“He’s going back,” said Michael. “What an awful idea he had, coming here. I won’t let him do that to you again.”

Ann shook her head and pulled the oxygen mask aside. “I’m fine,” she whispered.

And she was fine. Ann hadn’t taken in very much smoke at all before Michael got to her, and she’d kept clear of the flames, so there were no burns to treat. She’d re-opened the fish-bite on her knee, but that was a simple matter of cleaning and re-dressing. Her throat still felt raw and her voice deepened half an octave. But Michael thought it sounded sexy and so did she.

Given all that, Ann agreed when Michael suggested they could book a suite at the Coco Reef resort and ride out the rest of their honeymoon in style. That made sense in more ways than one. It would be nice to restart the whole honeymoon, and draw some good from it; and really, Ann wasn’t sure she wanted to get on a plane just now.

Given all that.

As for Ian Rickhardt: he sent a card and a basket of fruit and rum to their suite, but otherwise had the good sense to make himself scarce.

He wasn’t the only one. Ann tried calling Eva Fenshaw five times. She left four messages. But Eva didn’t seem to be answering. Eva didn’t seem to be around.

Ann hoped she was all right.

“It’s the fish woman!” said the man at the beach.

Ann opened her eyes and squinted out from under the beach umbrella.

The man was tall and thin, with a long face and a thick beard, olive skin and light brown hair. He wore a pale blue tank top shirt and swimming trunks that went down to his knees, and carried two bottles of Corona: one with the lime stuffed inside, the other with fruit still peeking out the neck. She recognized him from the expedition to the reef. But she had no idea what his name was, so she smiled and waved and said hello. He solved the mystery instantly.

“I am Paolo. We met on the Calypso boat.”

“I’m Ann. We did.”

“I remember your name,” he said. “You were devoured by a fish. You don’t forget something like that. How is your knee?”

She was wearing a flesh-hugging patch of a bandage now, and underneath, it was feeling a good deal better. She said so.

“I see you’re without a drink,” he said, and offered the fresher of the two Coronas. She smiled and fended it off with a hand.

“Thanks but no. I hope you didn’t get that for me,” said Ann. “I’m giving my liver a break.”

He shrugged and grinned. “No loss in trying,” he said, eyeing one beer, then the other. “But my work is cut out for me. May I join you?”

Ann was sitting in a wooden chair joined to another by a small table, and the other chair was empty. She motioned to it.

“Where is your dashing husband?” he asked as he took the seat and set the beer bottles between them.

“Inside. He’s sleeping off a sunburn.” It was true; Michael had pulled her from the burning beach house unscathed. Their first afternoon here, he’d fallen asleep on his stomach by the pool, stayed there for an hour, and that was all it took. Funny old world, he’d said.

“He won’t mind me sitting here?”