Story: Drownings (part ten)

Drownings

(part ten)

In the morning…

Fog more than fogs of memory, riddled with corpse dust, one could only call it, figures in the dress of ages, with a fish-belly gleam to their skins, pressing into visibility but eased back.

As though the heavy mist were a membrane.

McAlley waited at the bench for Faia to appear. Dustin and Victor were not there to denounce their killer, but Herbertson, suffering, could be heard. His hands slapped the iron rail. Startled grunts and whimpers came to McAlley’s ears.

He supposed the dead—Bitterroot’s engine had summoned them, after all—were impeding him, making themselves material to him, as life welled in their repairing veins. “Come along, sir! Why did you ever set foot in the tunnel?”

Feet on gravel. Stephen Herbertson, damp, brown-haired and overcoated, spotted McAlley and flung himself, hugging onto the bench.

“My God! I’m ill, I must be! Please…”

“Have a seat, Mr. Herbertson. The sun will rise.”

Faia’s red coat, her purposeful gait, and she, coming clear to them, took her place as opposite sentinel, Stephen shivering between the two. Faia rested her tote, and bent for a thermos. “Hot tea. Cinnamon ginger.”

“No. It’s nauseating.” A flagging hand meant the sage and grease of sausages, the scorched-flour smell of pancakes. Breakfast cooking at the Old Parish Inn.

“Ginger will settle that.” She handed Herbertson the cup.

“And so it was calm for you yesterday,” Faia said. “Your wife sounded unsuspecting.”

“If you are Julia…”

“And I am Swan,” McAlley said.

“Yes, yesterday. Joanel and I don’t. She doesn’t want to… But the thing creeps. It, no, it blooms.” Herbertson seemed to wake to implications. “You found a body. You saw.”

“Why, right there.” McAlley pointed to the riverbank, from where a number of the drowned were peering, eyeballs strangely fresh in faces that were not. Afloat upright; treading, if their feet could bear the weight. Not gruesome to himself nor to Faia, who had numbered the centuries, while Herbertson cringed and shrank. Wept without awareness of it.

They did not really see, the drowned; they were not really commanding his gaze with vengeance. They were like new puppies, waving limbs and sniffing after the life source.

“What have you made, at your Bitterroot Cooperative? Some infernal machine.”

“Only…energy.”

“You thought it wasn’t you, causing the world to go bad, then?”

10

Drownings

Drownings (part one)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)