That she would die here, as Máthair had, as her Gramma had.
She swept out the barn and laid down new straw, then walked out across the field to the cliffs and just stood there as the sheep grazed, watching the waves thunder into the rocks in cascades of white foam. After a few hours, she went back to the cottage to fix supper-she should get back to Abby’s house, but she didn’t want to. Not yet.
She crumbled newspaper and placed it on the grate, then put a few turves of peat on top. She reached up to the mantlepiece for the book of matches and crouched back down.
The pack was empty. She tossed the empty cardboard into the fireplace. The stillness of the house struck her then, the silence lurking inside even as the storm softly lashed the structure. She wanted to cry, hunkered there in front of the cold, dead fireplace, listening to the rain patter and splash against the windows and roof while the house itself was consumed with somber quiet.
She heard the door open, heard footsteps cross quickly toward her. A dark hand reached past her shoulder and touched the paper. A flame curled away, yellow fire spreading as the paper began to crackle and smoke curl away toward the flue. She could hear the ticking of a watch. “I knew I could find you here when you weren’t at Abby’s,” he said.
He was smiling at her, uncertainly. She tried to frown sternly at him. “You broke your promise,” Moira began, but Gary shook his head.
“I promised Caitlyn that if I could, I’d go home,” he said. “I got as far the train for Belfast before I realized that I was going the wrong way.”
“ Gary..” She stopped. Took a breath and let it out again. She wasn’t going to hug him, wasn’t going to smile at him, because if she did either of those things, she’d be lost. “It’s going to happen soon. I can feel it. You should have gone. I want you to go.”
“Is that what you really want? To be alone? To be with Wide Abby when it happens and not me? If it is, tell me now and I’ll go.”
“He cupped his large, dark hands around her cheeks, warm and soft and loving. He kissed her forehead, and she sank into his embrace, pulling herself tightly to him, a child again, sobbing into his chest. He simply held her, rocking back and forth as they sat on the floor in front of the fire. “I don’t want to die, Gary,” she said. “I’m so scared… so scared…”
“I know, I know,” he crooned, whispering. “I’m scared, too. But whatever happens, I’ll be with you. I promise you that. I’ll be with you.”
WITH A FLOURISH AND A FLAIR by Kevin Andrew Murphy
Pleasant evening, artist. A present. And a responsibility.” Sam looked up from his sketchbook just in time to see miniature squid attempting to escape from pirouline cookies, the pastry flutes impaled in a goblet filled with guacamole mixed with pomegranate seeds, winking like demonic eyes behind the round facets. While on one level he knew it was meant to be an exotic appetizer, fusion cuisine of the East-meets-West-goes-South-then-hits-the-other-side-of-the-galaxy school, the end result looked like nothing half so much as a sundae for the Elder Gods.
Hastet benasari Julali Ackroyd, earth’s first and currently only Takisian chef, set the eldritch offering on the table in Martha Stewart’s “It’s a good thing” presentation position.
Sam knew enough to smile, trying to avoid the wide-eyed “Help me!” stares and frantic tentacles of the squidlets which were, he noted out of the corner of one eye, frozen into position with strands of carmelized sugar.
“And the responsibility?”
“Inclusion in tomorrow’s brunch menu?” She preened, smoothing down her apron. “Since you’re already redoing it, I thought this might be Starfields’ new feature item.”
It looked more like a feature from the Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. A diorama of the Swarm Invasion perhaps, or one of the more disturbing examples of the Monstrous Joker Babies. But Sam knew it would not be politic to say so. Not if he wanted to keep his job. “Um… could we do it as table placards?”
“As you like,” said Hastet. “I just showed my husband, and he said it would be perfect for Halloween.” She beamed at the mass of tentacles, then frowned. “But that’s not till Wednesday, isn’t it?”
Sam gestured to the patrons in costume about the restaurant. “People celebrate early.”
“Oh good.” She pursed her lips then. “I haven’t given it a name yet. I was thinking ‘Takisian Surprise,’ but given the last one, I don’t think that would sell.” Absently, she tucked a stray brown curl under her chef’s pepperbox. “Jay also said something about ‘Lovecraft’ when he saw it. But that would be for Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t it?”
Sam pictured Cthulhu got up as Cupid and was immediately sorry he had. “No, not exactly.”
Hastet rolled her eyes. “You earthlings have too many holidays.” She gave a grandiloquent wave of dismissal to the tentacle parfait, which Sam guessed to be the Takisian equivalent of ‘Whatever.’ “I trust your judgment. Just let it speak to you.” With that, she slipped back through the arch to the kitchen, leaving Sam alone with the otherworldly hors d’oeuvre.
He leaned closer and gave it a wary glance, half expecting it to go scuttling across the table.
It was looking back. A nameless thing from the far depths of space. Bloodstone eyes watched below, flat lavender ovals stared above. Lidless. Unblinking. Alien. Sam wondered how it could possibly speak to him, afraid that it would.
Then it did: “Nice hat you have there.”
A lifetime of living in Jokertown had taught Sam that the most unlikely things could speak. Plants. Animals. Even the urinal in Squisher’s Basement. Things that had once been people, and horribly, on some level, still were, the wild card twisting their bodies into forms no longer even remotely human. But only rarely did they become entities as bizarre as Hastet’s new appetizer. “What?”
“I said ‘Nice hat,’” the dish of tentacles and avocado ichor repeated, its voice incongruously dulcet and feminine, albeit slightly annoyed. “Had it long?” Sam then realized that none of the squid were moving their lips, and unless the eldritch sundae were telepathic-always an option when dealing with victims of an alien virus-it was more likely that the speaker was someone behind it.
He sat up straight and looked past the sugar-frosted cephalopods.
The voice belonged to a woman. A nat woman to all appearances, mid-thirties but damn fine for all that, as petite or even more so than Hastet, with one of those figures you usually need corsetry to get, displaying it to best advantage in a tux shirt, black tie, swallowtail coat, black satin short-shorts, and cobweb-patterned black fishnets over stiletto heels. This ensemble was topped off with a top hat, worn over masses of Titian curls somewhere between Dr. Tachyon and the naturally vain girl from Peanuts. Accented with devil red lipstick and nails, the whole look said either stage magician or hooker, or something with the same effect thrown together for a semi-elegant semi-trashy evening of clubbing the Saturday before Halloween.
Sam heartily approved of the outfit, and the woman in it, and not just because his was almost the same, except he had the cobweb lace as cravat and cuffs, jeans instead of short-shorts, Does in place of stilettos, and slightly more gothic taste in nailpolish. And black velvet gloves, at least on his left hand. He tapped it to the brim of his own top hat. “No, just picked it up.” Sam felt a grin steal across his face as he took in the sights, since up close she looked even better than when he’d first noticed her an hour ago. “Nice threads yourself. Columbia, or Sally from Cabaret?”