The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction MarchApril 2010 (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Book 118) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

Actually, their hour-long hike around the fort's perimeter proved more interesting than Saffron had expected.

The place was ruinous, and for that reason picturesque. At two spots, sinking foundations had caused huge cracks to open in the walls, and she made sure that her camera caught the crooked daggers of pale sky thrusting down through the bricks. Barbed wire hadn't been invented when the fort was built, so rows of sharp wooden spikes—Corman called them the abates —still projected from the dunes, dry and gray and worm-eaten like driftwood. She took a series of pictures through the spikes to suggest both the fort's original warlike purpose and its present hopeless decay.

Meanwhile Corman chattered about life in the 1860s, which he knew in detail. He explained the problems of supplying the fort in bad weather, of securing fresh water for the garrison in the absence of natural springs, of keeping the men healthy so close to the malarial coast. There'd been other problems, he recalled, in the days when Fort Clay was used as a prison both for Rebel sympathizers and common criminals. Along with forty or so men, a dozen women had been jailed, charged with a variety of crimes great and small—spying, prostitution, insulting the flag, emptying chamber pots on the heads of Union soldiers. Keeping them secure from rape among a crowd of unwillingly celibate males had not been easy.

"Bathing was a problem," he mused. "The men skinny-dipped by the roster on the Gulf side of the fort, women on the land side. While the ladies were washing, guards were posted with orders to turn their backs and not to peek. I don't think those orders were always obeyed," he added, with a dry little chuckle.

That gave Saffron another idea. How about taking some nude photos in her studio, and having the geniuses at the lab transform them into ghostly images against the grim, looming walls of the fort? A little nudity never hurt anything. And how about a bit of softcore porn as well? With all those randy males around, surely the jailed hookers found some way to ply their trade, prison or no prison. She could fabricate some sex scenes, pale forms suggesting the repressed passions of men and women locked up under a discipline that made captives of the soldiers as well as the prisoners.

Ghosts Along the Mississippi was fine as a model. But her book would be a lot more salable if she put a bit of Robert Mapplethorpe into it as well.

The afternoon was advancing and the sunlight hot when she and Corman wended back through the vaulted gateway into the Parade. She was tired and sweaty, and the walls shut off the breeze from the Gulf. In her bag, along with two more cameras and some extra lenses and filters, she'd brought a couple of small Evian bottles. She gave one to Corman and downed the other herself. Sharing the water completed their transformation from strangers into companions, even collaborators.

"You were saying that the men actually welcomed the Headsman's arrival as a break in the routine," she reminded him.

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