“…I can see the beach from my window. And half a mile away, on the point, there’s Carter’s grocery. Not a crust in the kitchen. Dare I chance it? Do I want to? Let’s see, now. Biscuits, coffee, powdered milk, canned beans, potatoes—no, strike the potatoes. A sack of carrots….”
The man on the beach grinned mirthlessly, white lips drawing back from his teeth and freezing there. A year ago he would have expected to read such in a book of horror fiction. But not now. Not when it was written in his own hand.
The breeze changed direction, blew on him, and the sand began to drift against his side. It blew in his eyes, glazed now and lifeless. The shadows lengthened as the sun started to dip down behind the dunes. His body grew cold.
Three hairy sacks with pincer feet, big as footballs and heavy with his blood, crawled slowly away from him along the beach….
No Way Home
Like “Snarker’s Son”—but very unlike it, too—“No Way Home” is a parallel universe story, first published in the prestigious
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF)
in September of 1975. I was still a serving soldier and had recently spent time back in the UK on leave (furlough). But many of the highways seemed to have been extended, rerouted, changed—some of them even appeared to have mutated!—while I’d been out of the country. Also, I was used to driving on the right-hand side of the road and back in the UK I was driving on the left again; or maybe I was just tired out and not taking enough care reading the road signs. Whatever, the fact is I’d gone and got myself lost. Now how in
hell
can you get lost in your own backyard? Well, actually it’s easy—even in your own backyard—and easier still in hell….
If you motor up the Ml past Lanchester from London and come off before Bankhead heading west across the country, within a very few miles you enter an area of gently rolling green hills, winding country roads and Olde Worlde villages with quaint wooden-beamed street-corner pubs and noonday cats atop leaning ivied walls. The roads there are narrow, climbing gently up and ribboning back down the green hills, rolling between fields, meandering casually through woods and over brick- and wooden-bridged streams; the whole background forms a pattern of peace and tranquility rarely disturbed over the centuries.
By night, though, the place takes on a different aspect. An almost miasmal aura of timelessness, of antiquity, hangs over the brooding woods and dark hamlets. The moon silvers winding hedgerows and ancient thatched roofs, and when the pubs close and the last lights blink out in farm and cottage windows, then it is as if Night had thrown her blackest cloak over the land, when even the most powerful headlight’s beam penetrates the resultant darkness only with difficulty. Enough to allow you to drive on the narrower roads, if you drive slowly and carefully.
Strangers motoring through this region—even in daylight hours—are known occasionally to lose their way, to drive the same labyrinthine lanes for hours on end in meaningless circles. The contours of the countryside often seem to defy even the most accurate sense of direction, and the roads and tracks never quite seem to tally with printed maps of the area. There are rumors almost as old as the area itself that persons have been known to pass into oblivion here—like gray smoke from cottage chimneystacks disappearing into air—never to come out again.
Not that George Benson was a stranger. True, he had not been home to England for many years—since running off as a youth, later to marry and settle in Germany—but as a boy he had known this place well and must have cycled for thousands of miles along dusty summer roads, lanes and tracks, even bridle-paths through the heart of this very region.
And that was why he was so perturbed now: not because of a pack of lies and fairy stories and old wives’ tales heard as a boy, but because this was his home territory, where he’d been born and reared. Indeed, he felt more than perturbed, stupid almost. A fellow drives all the way north through Germany from Dortmund, catches the car ferry from Bremerhaven into Harwich, rolls on up-country having made the transition from right- to left-of-the-road driving with only a very small effort…. and then hopelessly loses himself within only a fistful of miles from home!
Anger at his own supposed stupidity turned to bitter memories of his wife, then to an even greater anger. And a hurt….
It didn’t hurt half so much now, though, not now that it was all over. But the anger was still there. And the memories of the milk of marriage gone sour. Greta had just upped and left home one day. George, employing the services of a detective agency, had traced his wife to Hamburg, where he’d found her in the bed of a nightclub crooner, an old boyfriend who finally had made it good.
“Damn all Krauts!” George cursed now as he checked the speed of his car to read out the legend on a village signpost. His headlights picked the letters out starkly in the surrounding darkness. “Middle Hamborough?—Never bloody heard of it!” Again he cursed as, making a quick decision, he spun the steering wheel to turn his big car about on the narrow road. He would have to start back-tracking, something he hated doing because it seemed so inefficient, so wasteful. “And blast and damn all Kraut cars!” he added as his front wheels bounced jarringly on to and back off the high stone roadside curb.
“Greta!” he quietly growled to himself as he drove back down the road away from the outskirts of Middle Hamborough. “What a bitch!” For of course she had blamed him for their troubles, saying that she couldn’t stand his meanness. Him, George Benson, mean! She simply hadn’t appreciated money. She’d thought that Deutschmarks grew on trees, that pfennigs gathered like dew on the grass in the night. George, on the other hand, had inherited many of the pecuniary instincts of his father, a Yorkshireman of the Old School—and of Scottish stock to boot—who really understood the value of “brass.” His old man had used to say: “Thee tak’ care o’ the pennies, Georgie, an’ the pounds’ll tak’ care o’ theysels!”
George’s already pinched face tightened skull-like as his thoughts again returned to Greta. She had wanted children. Children! Damned lucky thing he had known better than to accept that! For God’s sake, who could afford children?
Then she’d complained about the food—like she’d been complaining for years—saying that she was getting thin because the money he gave her was never enough. But George liked his women willowy and fragile; that way there was never much fight in them.
Well, he’d certainly misjudged Greta, there had been plenty of fight left in her. And their very last fight had been about food, too. He had wanted her to buy food in bulk at the supermarkets for cheapness; in turn she’d demanded a deep freezer so that the food she bought wouldn’t go bad; finally George had gone off the deep end when she told him how much the freezer she had in mind would cost!
She left him that same day; moreover, she ate the last of the wurstchen before she went! George grinned mirthlessly as he gripped the steering wheel tighter, wishing it were Greta’s scrawny neck. By God—she’d be sorry when she was fat!
Still, George had had the last laugh. Their home had been paid for fifty-fifty, but it had been in George’s name. He had sold it; likewise the furniture and the few clothes she’d left behind. The car had been half hers, too—but again in George’s name, for Greta couldn’t drive. It was all his now: his money, his car, everything. As he’d done so often in the last twenty-four hours, he took one hand from the wheel to pat reassuringly the fat wallet where its outline bulged out the upper right front pocket of his jacket.