Stephen Jones - Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror

‘Savannah!’ Leesa screamed. Then the bird’s wings beat twice and it was gone. Poul’s pulse sped up. The lake had never seemed so empty. He remembered Dad, who had stood at the end of the pier, mute, when they pulled Neal out. Now he stood on the same board.

A high voice called from the lake, a child. Poul looked up, his skin suddenly cold. It called again and Poul saw her, lying on the diving platform a hundred feet away, Savannah.

He didn’t know how he got there — didn’t remember swimming, but he was up the diving platform’s ladder, holding his weeping daughter instantly. She nestled her head under his chin and shook with tears. Before she stopped, Leesa arrived in the boat, and they both held her.

Finally, when Savannah’s crying had settled into a sob every minute or two, Leesa said, ‘How did you get out here, darling? You scared us so.’

Between shuddery breaths, Savannah said, ‘I didn’t mean to go so far, and I couldn’t get back. I paddled really hard, but I fell out. The wind pushed the raft away.’

She looked from Poul to Leesa, her eyes red-rimmed and teary.

‘I swallowed water, Daddy. I couldn’t breathe.’

Poul swallowed. He could feel the snorkel in his mouth, the solid, leaden ache of water in his lungs.

Leesa gasped, ‘Thank God you made it to the diving platform. We could have lost you,’ and she burst into tears herself.

Through Leesa’s crying, Savannah looked at Poul solemnly. ‘I didn’t swim, Daddy. The little boy helped me. He took my hand and put me here.’ Savannah rubbed her eyes with the back of her arm. ‘He kissed my cheek, Daddy.’

Poul nodded, incapable of speech.

‘He looked like the boy in your baby pictures.’ She sniffed, but seemed more relaxed, her fear already becoming vague. ‘My eyes didn’t play tricks on me.’

Poul spent the sunset sitting on the end of the pier, his toes dipping in the lake, surrounded by the watery symphony: aqueous rhythms beating against the wood, lapping against the shore. And fish. He sat quietly, and the fish came: a school of blue gill, scales catching the last light in a thousand glitters swirling in front of him and then were gone. Later, when the sun had nearly disappeared, a long, black shape glided by, its eye as big as a quarter, a long row of teeth visible when it opened its mouth. Poul had finally seen a pike.

He sighed, pushed himself up and found Leesa in the kitchen. She’d already put Savannah to bed in their room upstairs.

She looked at her coffee cup dully. It was almost hard to remember what he’d loved about her when they’d first met, then she turned her head a little and brushed back her hair, and for a second, it was there, a picture of Leesa when they were young. Before Savannah. Before coming to the lake had become so reluctant. The second disappeared.

He pulled a chair out for himself and turned it around so he could lean his arms on the back. She didn’t speak. Poul shut his eyes to listen to the woods behind the cottage. The air there was always so moist and living, but it didn’t penetrate into the kitchen. With his eyes closed, he could swear he was alone in the room.

‘I want a divorce,’ Poul said.

Leesa looked at him directly for maybe the first time in a year. ‘Why now?’

The low, slanting sun cut through the trees behind the cottage, casting a yellow light in the room. He knew that on the lake, now, it highlighted the waves, but didn’t penetrate the depths. Fisherman would be out, because the big fish, the serious fish, moved in the evening. The evening was the best time to be on the lake, after a hard day of swimming, of hiking in the woods where he’d played with Neal, and just before they went to bed to tell each other stories until sleep took them, two brothers under one blanket lying head to head, and they dreamed.

Poul said, ‘When you realise a thing is bad, you’ve got to let it go or you’ll drown.’

James Van Peltlives in western Colorado with his wife and three sons. One of the 1999 finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, he teaches high school and college English. His fiction has appeared in, amongst other places, Analog, Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative and Weird Tales. Upcoming work is scheduled to appear in Asimov’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. When he is not teaching, writing or raising kids, he hunts for an agent to represent his first novel. ‘ “Savannah is Six” has some autobiographical roots,’ says the author. ‘When I was young, my family vacationed on an Indiana lake each summer. Although I never tried the sand in the boots trick, the fish fascinated me, and I spent many happy hours with a face mask looking for them. Now I’m a father with three sons. We haven’t been to the lake yet, but I’m stunned by the depth of the relationships between the brothers. All that, a sad divorce, and a love for Ray Bradbury went into the story.’

We would know it as soon as we got there, Vanessa insisted — and more than once. We would know the right place when we found it and not one moment before, so there was no point in second-guessing ourselves. Stop trying so hard. No formal itinerary and that was just the way we should keep it.

‘How about here?’ Heather had suggested a couple of weeks ago at the Tower of London, before we’d left the city for the countryside. Forty-eight hours before that we would’ve still been somewhere over the Atlantic.

‘Absolutely not, you can’t be serious,’ Vanessa had vetoed. ’ Are you?’

No reply, just Heather and her puckish little smile, betraying nothing. Even I couldn’t be sure, when I’d known her so much longer. It wasn’t often you could catch Heather giving away anything more than only as much as she wanted.

‘It was the ravens, wasn’t it?’ I asked her later, on the Tube, starting to feel as though I might be catching on to the way she was thinking here and now, in this world instead of the one we were trying to leave behind. Not that it looked all that different yet — those butt-ugly American fanny-packs and the murderous stress of business commuters look the same everywhere — but we at least felt the potential unfurling before us.

Ravens live at the top of the Tower, we had discovered. Live up there under ceremonial guard. Very serious business, those ravens. Tradition holds that the fate of England hinges upon them. Should the ravens ever leave the Tower, fly away, England will be sure to fall.

‘Maybe something about them did make me think of my parents’ marriage,’ Heather said.

‘I thought you wanted to do this.’

‘I do. I just don’t want to do any of it like they did.’

‘In that case, I’d say you’re off to a flying start.’

See, the catch with the ravens is that they can’t soar away even if they want to. The feathers at the ends of their wings are clipped — prisoners, as surely as any heretic or rightful heir to a stolen throne who’d ever been a guest of the Tower when it was operational. It’s possible that if one of them wanted out badly enough, it could tumble off the edge of the parapet and fall like a glossy black stone. But I suppose they’re more apt to simply spend their days pecking at the free buffet and eyeing the sky with longing.

Naturally I hesitated to share this insight with her — the considerate thing to do, given the way her mother had leapt from a hotel window when Heather was fourteen, half her lifetime ago. Which hadn’t done her father’s political career any favours, coming as it did during a re-election campaign. He’d soldiered on in the race, claiming that this was what his poor beloved late wife would’ve wanted, but even his tarnished silver tongue couldn’t sell that one to anyone who wasn’t already lining his pockets. By election night, the Senator was a historical footnote.