Miranda had fallen to her knees. The red blood that ran from her nose was shockingly bright against her white skin. She dabbed at it with the back of her hand, saw me looking at her, and said, “It took him. I saw it. I saw it eat his soul.”
“It took the ghost he created at the moment of dying. If there are such things as souls, I have never seen one.”
Donny Halliwell said, “I don’t know what you two are talking about. I don’t want to know. Just tell me he was going to kill you.”
“Something of the sort,” I said. My leg was hurting quite badly now, a swelling, bone-deep ache. My trouser leg was soaked with blood. My shoe was filled with blood.
Donny Halliwell stuck the pistol in his jacket pocket. His hand was shaking so badly that it took him three tries. “He made me shoot you,” he said.
“I know.”
“It wasn’t my idea. None of this was my idea. I don’t even know where I am. Last thing I remember properly is opening the door to him. And then everything sort of fell away. It was like I was in the back of my head, watching things happen on a very small TV.”
“He hypnotized you,” I said.
“Where’s Rainer?”
“He helped me, and then I sent him home.”
“He was so excited when this bloke wrote to him — something about those stupid books of his. He trusts people too much. Are you sure he’s okay? At some point I think I gave him some kind of drug.”
“I gave him the name of a man who can help him,” I said.
“I better go and see how he is,” Donny Halliwell said. “He isn’t too good on his own.”
“Of course,” I said, and was relieved when the big man crashed away through the belt of scrubby trees.
Miranda shuddered once, all over, and said, “I thought he was going to finish us off.”
“So did I. Is your mobile phone working?”
‘“Course. I’ll call an ambulance.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said, and gave her the telephone number of a sympathetic doctor. After she had made the call, I told her to open the briefcase and bring me my book.
She could not quite meet my gaze when she handed it to me. It was a heavy quarto volume bound in the hide of an unborn calf tanned by age to an uneven buttery colour, its pages made of good-quality linen paper. I ran my fingers over the intricate knot embossed in the leather under the stamped gold title. “After my parents died, it was important to me to recreate their library. This was the last volume I needed — the rarest, and the most expensive. You would not believe me if I told you how much I paid for it,” I said, and threw it into the canal.
It made quite a splash.
“You’re mad,” Miranda said.
“I should have done it some time ago. Our dead friend was right about one thing: times have changed. And it is time to let go of the past. Now, would you be so kind as to cut a branch from one of those elders?”
“What are you going to do? Stake him through the heart?”
“Cagliostro was no vampire. I do not want Dr Barrow to find us here, with the body. If I am to hobble to the road, I will need a crutch.”
“Then what?”
“Dr Barrow will take me to his home, he will treat my wound, and I will make up a story for the police.”
“I mean, what about me?”
“The police will want to talk to you about your father, but I can vouch for you.”
“He hurt me,” she said, plainly and simply. “After Mum left, he came into my room every night and hurt me.”
“And when you could, you hurt him in turn. I understand. But by destroying him in that way, by dedicating your life to his punishment, you would also have destroyed yourself.”
“I wanted to kill him,” she said. “But I didn’t want his ghost haunting me. I can see them sometimes, ghosts, but I can’t do anything with them.”
“You did quite well with Cagliostro’s pet.”
“They’ll put me away, won’t they?”
“I have never before taken on an apprentice, Miranda. I have lived a solitary life ever since I moved to London. Last night, you said that I had no real friends. That I did not let anyone get close to me. And you were right. But times have changed, much more than I believed when I first began to walk the streets at night. You have a powerful gift, and I can teach you how to use it, if you will let me. But I should warn you that it will not be an easy path.”
“Teach me.”
She said it with a sudden, raw, naked passion, and in that moment I had my first glimpse of the real Miranda, the human being who hid behind the sullen, wary mask of a child brought up on the stones.
“Teach me,” she said. “Teach me stuff.”
Mike O’Driscoll
The Silence of the Falling Stars
Born in London, brought up in the south-west of Ireland and living in Wales for the last seventeen years, Mike O’Driscoll remains uncertain about where he really belongs.
He has worked in construction, transport and recruitment, and owned his own business (a video rental store) for five years, this last being an enjoyable experience apart from the near-bankruptcy. For the last four years he has worked in childcare, combining the terrors of fostering with the less rigorous demands of working part-time towards a Master’s degree in Literature.
O’Driscoll has been writing short stories for fifteen years, and his fiction has appeared in The 3rd Alternative, Interzone, BBR, Crime Wave, Peeping Tom, Nemonymous, Albedo One, Indigenous Fiction and Fear, plus online at Infinity Plus, Eclectica and Gothic.net. He has also contributed to such anthologies as Off Limits, Lethal Kisses, Darklands, Last Rites and Resurrections, Decalog 5, The Sun Rises Red, The Dark: New Ghost Stories, Gathering the Bones, Thackery Lambshead’s Pocket Guide to Eccentric or Discredited Diseases and all three volumes of Cold Cuts. His regular comment column on the horror genre, “Night’s Plutonium Shore ”, which has appeared for over two years at the Alien Online website, was recently transferred to a new home in the pages of The 3rd Alternative.
About the following novella, the author recalls: “Travelling by rail and road across America back in 1996, I made a detour to Death Valley, prompted mostly by imaginary encounters with desert landscapes in countless films and books. It is one of the few places I’ve ever been which I would describe as truly ‘otherworldly’, evoking, as it does, an unsettling sense of isolation and mystery, combined with a fragmented geological weight and power.
“For a long time afterwards I tried repeatedly to write a story set in the valley, but could never come up with a narrative frame that would do justice to the landscape. When the opportunity came to write a ghost story for The Dark, I began toying with the idea of using Death Valley as a locale to explore the relationship between consciousness and landscape, originally intending to cast the valley itself in the role of ghost. Early drafts were written while listening to Hank Williams, and I guess that over the weeks, the story became more imbued with the desperate sense of loneliness and longing that haunts so many of Hank’s songs.