Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

Back at their rundown hotel room, the couple made love. Rattled by what they had seen, they drank to excess, and things ran wilder than usual between them, married ten years.

Marline sat at an angle leaning forward, hands on Martin’s ankles, facing his feet, as he lay on his back, in the reverse cowgirl , pornographic industrial standard pose, provider of unobstructed views. They had started prone, two layers, both face up, with her on top. Disembodied hands stroked her, leaving her too open and exposed, as if naked in public with some unspeakable object inside. She slid upright and forward, into the unpremeditated position, a natural extension of the first, really, looking upward as she rocked.

A single red light bulb, forming the sole illumination, bare, dangled on its brown plastic wire from the ceiling, casting a garish glow throughout the room. The double shutters were closed, and the chamber, already damp from their showering, became even more so, heating up.

The entire tawdriness of the situation inspired Marline to a totally uncharacteristic frenzy. Replying in the dialogue of the flesh, Martin grew enormous, larger than ever inside her, and imagined himself in the cheapest of houses of prostitution, some bold and promiscuous whore working him for all his money’s worth. The red light added to the fantastic aspect, that of being in a Fellini film, or a Turkish camp of ill-fame, where poor young widows, respectable and married the one day, the next, with no one to protect them, are thrown headlong into the wildest of debaucheries, with no escape.

Marline’s face was invisible as Martin clenched her smoothly sculpted, heaving buttocks. Perfectly rounded, they were starting to fleck with pigment from the hours in the Cretan sun, complementing the rest of her freckled body, now writhing like a snake, as she and he both gasped for breath. He held those nether spheres tightly from behind, as it seemed otherwise she would rocket off him in her now fierce motion.

Her short red hair was like a helmet, and under the crimson bulb, dark. At the moment of ecstasy, she turned for the first time to face him, from over her shoulder. Her sharp jaw was distended – like a John dory , the thought came to him from nowhere – and her eyes were wild. She was not looking at him. She saw beyond, to something else. He could not recognise her again; this was the face of an entirely different person: had he met this one in the street, he would not know her.

The more he looked at her frenzied eyes, the more strange she appeared, until he conceived her a demon, the devil itself, no woman, no wife he knew. At their mutual orgasm, a chill of irrational fright ran through him, but he closed his eyes, taking in air in huge gulping heaves, uncaring.

Flush fading, consciousness revived, Martin saw Marline collapsed forward across his legs. He was still inside her, the sticky wetness draining down from his crotch and then his buttocks, turning cold on the sheet beneath him. She rolled off, and resting on her side, eyes closed, a smile across her mouth, murmured something about going out again, a night-cap. Then she yawned.

“Napoleon slept here, did you know? Ierapetra’s ‘holy rock’ in Greek,” he said.

Marline was already putting on her clothes.

Dropped off past the lines of delayed traffic still waiting to cross the old narrow bridge, they had gone more or less straight up from the sea, from the small settlement clinging to steep slope above coastal highway.

At the upper end of the little hamlet, by the trailhead, they tipped their heads back to see the inland range hanging above. It had been his idea to go up it and explore its interior, part of a larger plan to walk the island from east to west. This day’s march would link together sections done previous seasons, thus completing eastern Crete, an opportunity provided by doctor’s orders, after a second, work-related breakdown.

Old women, bent nearly double and swathed in black, assured them they were on the right way, no guarantee in itself, as Greeks would rather die than admit to ignorance of any subject, no matter how far removed from their normal competence. Enormous cliff faces towered to the east; they had come down from there two years back, an epic struggle to find a disappearing track.

Village noise was soon below them, growing ever more faint and distant, replaced by the always present susurrant wind. The trail, an old respectable Cretan path, wound steadily upwards in large or smaller switches. After an hour’s trudge or more in the expanding sunlight, they stopped on a shoulder, the site of some stronghold of Minoan refugees, driven to the heights after their civilisation had collapsed. While Marline put together a picnic, Martin puttered about on the partially excavated ruins above.

There was not much more to see than dry stone walls, crumbling remnants of some ’20s dig, German or Italian, he did not remember what the guidebook said. The overwhelming vista looked north over the Ægean, with Thera somewhere volcanically looming, invisible in the slight haze, on the horizon distant before him.

Only one thing distinguished the fast decaying ruins from any modern wreckage of local revolution: a flat, carved stone bowl, cut into the living rock, like some small birdbath. Cracked in several places, stains covered one side of the interior.

They ate, and before wrapping up after their little meal, Martin looked out over the scene in front of them, and without preamble, spoke out.

“You know, when I grew up in Rochester, I never felt comfortable with the sky.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, there was always something, something about it that never felt quite right. D’you know what I mean?”

“Not really . . .”

“At first I thought it was the colour. Summers were warmer then, or so it seems now. I’d lie back, on the grass of a lawn in July, and stretch out, looking up at the sky. It would be cloudless, and the heavens so deep when I concentrated, I felt I was plunging into them.

“It was then I began to get a strange impression, that the vast inverted bowl I was falling into was somehow wrong .”

“What do you mean?”

He paused, and all was silent but for the wind. “I’m not quite sure how to express it – alien, perhaps?” he continued.

“I thought perhaps it was just the flatness of hue the sky can attain on a clear day in the middle of the year. But with the notion established in my mind – I was only eleven or twelve the first time I conceived it – or rather, made it articulate, since I later realised it was a perception I had had all along, that I was only then putting into words – I came to the conclusion that the feeling was more general.

“It could come upon me other seasons of the year, when the sky had a different colour, under other conditions of time and temperature. For a while, I thought something was wrong with me.

“I developed the odd notion that I was born with an instinct of how a proper sky should look, I mean, in the old days people seldom moved from the districts where they were raised. Rooted in the soil, they might just in some way become attuned, after generations, to the look of a certain latitude and longitude, so that any variation in colour of air or position of sun from that imprinted on their bones, would somehow appear odd.”

He paused. “I mean, some animals have iron in their brains, they’ve found out, onboard compasses that always point north, so . . .” His voice trailed off, and they were silent for a lingering moment.

“You’ve never mentioned that before. If you want to know,” she said with a slight smile, “I think it’s all a load of rubbish.” She flicked out playfully with her foot at his leg, as they sat.