Epilogue

  Sawney Bean had lost count of the miles he’d covered. He squatted in a distant cave. Heather rolled outside and he could see the clouds moving overhead through a chink in the rock.

  “Yes, this will do very well,” he said to himself, “very well indeed.”

  The Author

  Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Albedo One and on Tor.com. She’s been anthologised in Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best British Fantasy and Best British Horrorinheritance. She has recently been shortlisted for a 2016 British Fantasy Award in the Best Short Story category. Visit her online at www.priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com.

  BREATHING

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  illustrated by Richard Wagner

  He wakes up to the sound of his own breathing. This is not unusual, although each morning it seems louder than it did the morning before, and the sound occupies more of his day. He lives far from any highways, and far enough from his nearest neighbor, that sometimes his own breath is practically the only sound he hears. When he was a child in bed he was sometimes terrified by the noise of his blood pulsing in one ear – as if his heartbeat were trapped somewhere inside his pillow – and this new obsession with breath feels much the same.

  It has been this way for months: his breathing, the turn of a page, the exhalation of a cushion, the creak of the bed, his breathing, his hands preparing food, the click of the fork against china, his cup knocking the wooden table, his breathing, his breath. Now and again he sighs for companionship, but it brings back only a vague recollection of being held.

  He comes to believe that the rest of the world is breathing with him, as a breeze lifts the curtains and stirs the pages of his book, as he unscrews the cap of the milk jug and smells the cold, as clouds float past his windows, as the trees glide back and forth within their anchored locations, as the shadows outside creep and multiply and eventually swallow everything he sees. Breathing occurs everywhere. Respiration is universal.

  His mother, who spent her last few hours chasing her breath and never quite catching it, would admonish him about his inaccuracies, insisting that the difference between breathing and respiration was some essential distinction whose significance he hadn’t yet grasped. “Breathing, Charlie, is what happens when you expand and contract your ribcage. You have to use your muscles in order to breathe. Respiration is a chemical reaction. Oxygen and glucose are converted into carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Human beings and animals breathe, plants do not. Plants respire. Insects don’t breathe either. They obtain their oxygen through diffusion.”

  Although Charlie learned to appreciate the way his mother’s mind worked, he didn’t care for her distinctions. He much preferred metaphor. “The world breathes,” he told himself when alone. “And I am flying in its breath, so fast sometimes all the details blur.”

  Ten, and eleven, and past midnight and he still hasn’t fallen asleep, as he is waiting to hear the breathing that is not his. It is certainly not something he wants to hear – just the anticipation terrifies him. But he can’t fall asleep knowing it might be coming, and he has convinced himself these sounds of another’s breathing might come at any moment. He has heard them a few times now, quite distinct from his own, but he was so tired at those times he might have been confused.

  Sometimes the open bedroom door moves, ever so slightly, even when all the windows are closed. Sometimes that glass bird hanging in the bathroom swings on its invisible fish line, jerkily, as if batted. His wife had loved the way it caught the light in the morning. Sometimes water streams from the tap, even though he is sure he squeezed the handle shut. Sometimes he doesn’t feel alone here in the house, even though he has become alone everywhere. Sometimes there is this intimation of breathing that is not his own, and as much as it frightens him, something about that breathing is unaccountably precious.

  Charlie never tells anyone he was once married. He’s removed the ring, although a raw channel has worn into the skin it once covered. If they happen to ask he simply tells them he is single, without explanation. Now and then the thoughtless remark, the “I guess you never found the right woman,” remains unanswered.

  Like most modern clocks, his bedside alarm displays these large segmented numbers, but makes no ticks. Some nights he stares at these numbers for hours, following the silent but rhythmical rearrangement of digital segments as 10 becomes 11 becomes 12. And some nights that’s when the sound of the other breathing begins, a strained gasping, a rattle transitioning into a congested growl at the bottom of his wife’s throat, as if all the ticks of time have congealed together in their haste to be done.

  His wife had lived that way, on the other side of their wide bed, for days it seemed, although it had probably been only a mouthful of hours, her still hands folded insect-like on top of the covers. Only her mouth moved, really, the spastic power of it nodding the head and jolting the chest: automatic, muscular inhalation and exhalation, her body’s final act.

  He’d stayed with her most of that evening, then gone to the guest bed because he couldn’t sleep with that future memory unfolding there alongside him, and then he’d come back. Back and forth, up and down, all night.

  All that was a lifetime ago, but that was the way they passed their last minutes together, as these stiff bits of time appeared and disappeared across the face of his silent clock. And then their marriage was gone, swallowed up by the sound escaping with her final breath.

  He is awakened again in the middle of the night by the breathing: as ragged as his attempts to find the meaning in it, as persistent. He reaches for her as if forgetting, as if the hard facts of the event could ever slip his memory. That part of the bed is cool and unruffled, the sheets smooth and polished. He waits there with his hand still on her side of the bed, banking on the possibility that this is simply another dream. When it comes again, a distant intake of air followed by the beaten gasp, he swings his feet out of bed and sits there on the edge.

  Sometimes it begins this way – he is aware of his own breathing, and then he is aware of the other’s. Sometimes it is so loud and insistent inside his skull he develops a rhythmical headache, the pain creating sharp flashes of light at the corners of his eyes. Sometimes that illumination stays, and everything he sees appears viewed through a filter.

  Tonight the tortured sounds of this breath are so loud and distinctly distant Charlie feels compelled to investigate. He travels the dark house with a flashlight, his slippers whispering across the hardwood floors. He is reluctant to switch on the lamps, afraid their glare might hide more than they reveal.

  In the living room he stumbles over a pair of shoes left out. He can’t remember taking them off, or when. A tide of magazines and newspapers spills across the floor to the left of the couch. He remembers sampling them, gazing at pictures, now and then reading a stray description of things he no longer cares about. On the coffee table a glass lies on its side, the wood beneath it marred by a ghostly film. Under the table is a package he’d received in the mail, the corners and sides smashed, the encircling tape shredded but never breached. He doesn’t remember trying to open it, or what made him abandon the attempt. Since his life changed he has done a lot of things he cannot remember, or understand.

  He gasps for air, having held his breath for too long during the search. He listens to the way the sound of it scatters and fades into the mess his house has become. He waits for an echo, or a repetition, and realizing he hasn’t been hearing that breathing for some time prepares to return to bed.

  But that’s when it returns, rising out of the shadowed corners and spreading across the walls: the gasp, followed by the choked return of air, too loud for anything normal, making his eyes flash with pain.

  The door to the coat closet is open, the hangers jammed to one side, a tangle of coats and shoes and old camping gear fallen onto the tiled entryway. He’d been desperately seeking something, he remembers, although he has no memory of what it might have been.

  A sharp inhalation shakes him, and a pained sigh pushes him deeper into the house. His own breathing becomes more difficult as he fixates on its awkward mechanics. The inside of his mouth is painfully dry. He finds he can hardly breathe when someone else breathes with so much pain.

  In the kitchen he pauses beside the refrigerator and listens. He is convinced he can hear that other breathing struggling inside. And when he opens the door he is sure what comes out is some kind of exhalation, but it is not the breathing he’s been looking for.

  His eyes flash again from the pounding, and the dark hall is highlighted with a kind of ghostly bioluminescence. He catches only a glimpse of what passes him: a bare arm, the side of a shoulder, and he can’t remember the last time he smelled his wife’s hair, and yet he can smell it now.

  In the dining room everything lies hushed beneath a heavy drape of darkness. Even with the flashlight he finds it difficult to apprehend more than a few inches at a time. There are dirty dishes on the dining room table. He can’t remember when last he ate there. He moves slowly, feeling anxious for his own breath, his own heart. Something is wrong with both of them, he thinks, and he feels disappointed. The arrival of this word surprises him, but he is convinced it is the correct one.

  Going from one doorway to the next he is suddenly captured by vertigo, and no matter how much he shakes his head it will not let him go. He can feel the rest of the world pushing him around as if he were spinning inside a great emptiness. It was a mistake to have ever left his bed. What had he really expected to find? The imagination always promises everything, both the wonderful and the terrible in unending supply, but at the end of the day it all goes away, leaving you alone in bed with the lights out and only the compulsive and enigmatic movements of the air to accompany you.

  He crashes face-first into glass, embarrassing himself with a humiliated cry. He slides open the patio door and cool air drifts past him into the room. The breathing is out there – softer than before, but still distinguishable from his own anxious wheezing. The paving stones shine with damp, and fearing he might fall he kicks off his slippers. He steps outside in his bare feet, listening carefully as he pads across cold stone into wet grass. There are woods behind the house, and a border of opulent green embraces and shields it from prying eyes. Animals are frequent visitors, and he cannot deny the possibility that one may have gotten inside the yard, or maybe even inside the house. He understands how a bird with a damaged wing can somehow sound like a soul lost and confused by concluding events. Or how a starved animal’s hungry activity might mimic an attempt to deliver a final speech. Their last day together she said nothing to him, not a single word.

  Charlie has been unable to look at animals since his wife died. He finds their darting eyes, their cautious grace, too painful to contemplate. He won’t even glance at a dog being led by its owner down the sidewalk, and if a cat crosses into his yard he usually turns away. He is not sure why. He knows they live short and brutal lives, many of them, and he can’t believe it’s worth it simply for some scattered spells of freedom. His wife had loved animals, and maybe that’s where the pain lies. She felt sorry for their fragility, that they died so quickly and often.

  Do they know that this house is his? Do they pay any attention to him at all?

  His mother, if she were still alive, would scold him for his fantasies. He wonders if his wife would be disappointed to see him now, moving cautiously about his own house like a thief.

  There is a soft, explosive snort, followed by those sounds of harsh but persistent breathing, of something more emotional than the simple mechanical sounds of dying. But he’s no expert in any of this. He’s ill-prepared for these events, or right now for anything else it seems. The breathing continues, rough and directionless, and too compelling to ignore. It seems to come from somewhere beyond the dark outline of trees, out of the darkness itself, perhaps, stubborn and resistant to interpretation.

  Charlie and his wife used to talk about what they would do, if one were to lose the other. Of course they would still live on and find some kind of happy life. Of course they would connect with someone else, and make some reinvention of who they were and why they lived. They had planned it all out the way they planned to spend their money: so much for essentials, so much for treats, so much for forgiveness and a blanket permission to thrive. A haunting had never been anticipated.

  As the world breathes the trees sway closer than he is comfortable with, but then pull back, breathing out and breathing in. Across the yard a head appears out of a line of heaving bushes, swaying slightly, and then Charlie sees the rest of the body.

  The antelope stands nearly motionless, gliding its head back and forth ever so slightly as if undecided, as if waiting for Charlie to make the first move, ready to run if the move feels wrong.

  Charlie is stunned. The creature breathes so loudly – a stuttering of ragged gasps, distorted and multiplied – that Charlie can hear nothing else. Fear makes his muscles rigid, and he waits to the very edge of suffocation as he studies that other breath.

  Sometimes a predator will drive these animals down out of the foothills and into the city, but what kind of predator Charlie has no idea – it’s something he doesn’t want to think too much about. And once here – where could such a creature hide? He considers that it might have been in hiding near his back yard for ages.

  It’s just an animal, he tells himself frantically. There’s nothing it can do to hurt me. He actually doesn’t know this for sure, but the thought still reassures him.

  The creature continues to gaze at him, its body stiff with focus. The hair along its neck appears slightly frosted from the cold, the hair on its lower jaw white, with black on top of the muzzle leading back to the large eye sockets high on the skull. Its chest heaves, appearing stained. Suddenly it charges him, moving faster than any animal Charlie has ever seen. He has no time to move, and covers his head protectively.

  It stops only a few feet in front of him, reeking of musk. It’s much larger than he expected. The sounds of its labored breathing are thunderous. Charlie raises his head and tries to look at it directly, thinking that perhaps that’s what you’re supposed to do with a threatening animal, assert your human superiority.

  The animal’s face has been ravaged, the skin torn and hanging here and there in flaps, with one eye blinded, a dull pale stone wrapped inside a network of scar tissue. He looks barely able to hold up his own weight. He nods drunkenly, as if ready to collapse. His nostrils pulse rapidly, struggling for more air.

  A male. Charlie is somehow surprised by this. The horns rise too tall above the skull, and they have that barb. And it isn’t an antelope, but a pronghorn. His mother would have been pleased by the accurate reclassification. Although this one is much larger and broader than average, an authentic force of nature. Enormous heart, enormous lungs. It’s the fastest mammal around. Why the pronghorn is still standing here Charlie has no idea. But he has started to breathe with it, dragged into its painful rhythm – it seems he has no choice. His chest begins to ache, and there are sharp pains along his ribs, and he begins to seriously wonder if he’s having a heart attack. But there have been so many times the past few months he’s thought this – he’s been in so much pain – and every time they say it must be emotional, and that he should try to relax. “You should talk to someone” – he’s heard this again and again.

  The animal continues its struggle for air, taking Charlie with it, to the edge of consciousness and a failure of normal eyesight. That earlier apprehension of bioluminescence returns, and Charlie is swarmed by the faint glowing outlines of hundreds of people, wandering aimlessly through this limited space, searching for whatever they might be searching for, but unable to say. There is no way to find any remnant of his wife inside such confusion, but he is compelled to try, and twists his head around, and says her name, and goes blind from weeping.

  The pronghorn snorts explosively and blood pours out of its mouth. Charlie follows the blood down to the massive rusty mat across the animal’s chest, and finds the leaking wound around the side, a jagged fragment of wood protruding, and bobbing with each arduous breath. A piece of a fence post, he thinks, or a branch from a tree.

  The spastic breathing, the nodding of the head, the jolting chest, and the last gasps attempting to eat the air. Charlie can see that it’s about to run again, and once it’s gone there will be no recapturing it. There’s nothing to be done for it, but Charlie can’t help wondering if he got it to a vet if for once a miracle might be possible.

  It springs at the same time Charlie grabs, and once he has his arms around its neck he locks his fingers and won’t let go, and is dragged for a while, his mouth full of hair and blood, until this magnificence finally shakes him off, and disappears into the dark.

  He lies there attempting to catch his breath, and wonders if this time it’s even possible. He can’t hear himself breathing; he can’t hear anything. Back there in the house behind him a challenging silence waits, and after he checks himself for damage that is where he intends to go.

  ***

  Steve Rasnic Tem’s last novel, Blood Kin (Solaris, 2014), won the Bram Stoker Award. His next novel, UBO (Solaris, January 2017), is a dark science fictional tale about violence and its origins, featuring such historical viewpoint characters as Jack the Ripper, Stalin and Heinrich Himmler. He is also a past winner of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards. A handbook on writing, Yours To Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Fiction, written with his late wife Melanie, will appear soon from Apex Books. Steve has published many stories in Black Static, as well as our sister publications Interzone and Crimewave.

 

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