The Anatomy of Love and Murder by Brian Stableford & Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford & Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, horror, suspense, short stories, french
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2017-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

IN VAIN

It was in the evening that the encounter, now unforgettable, took place. of which I retain precisely, almost by way of an obsession, the quotidian vision of the landscape that witnessed the event: the place where the event occurred that I would now assume to have been a dream, or rather a nightmare, if the daily vision of a place that remains exactly similar, and toward which a stupid force urges me every day to return, did not keep reminding me that it was real.

The region is almost unknown, and primitive; perhaps that is why I like it—but the sea also exercises the seductions of a lover upon me. Away from her, I experience a painful sensation of emptiness; I miss its sounds, ample and attractive, majestic and tender, the lullaby that its waves sing to sandy beaches, at the angles of which the pale brown profiles of cliffs loom up. For it isn’t the calm tideless waves that I desire, the blue lake that bathes the shores of sunny regions and golden archipelagos; I want the moving immensity, advancing with glaucous menaces, perfidious undulations, enlacing the reefs in their powerful grip, to flee thereafter, slowly, abandoning a carpet of brown algae to lacy foam, withdrawing to open water, not without abrupt returns and long kisses.

How many hours were spent thus in horizontal reveries on the rough ridges of rocks, caressed by the breeze, impregnated with humid dust, which leaves its saline trace on the lips, bitter and yet sweet! The ambience embalmed with the perfume of gorse and heather, and no importunate intruder to trouble my pleasant solitude. Better than the cicadas, better than the birds of the fields, the song of forgotten and noisy seashells accompanied delightfully vague dreams, hatching out in the random breezes, while the undulating waves played with them, speckled with silvery gleams.

That day, the equinoctial low tide of the Ocean had uncovered an unusual span, and I was wandering through the pale green and pink mosses, the prodigiously fine lacework, paneling the flints. Beneath their thin filigree, there were translucent and fulgurant colorations, which oscillated between the somber lacquer-work: carmines edged with snowy fire, bright vermilion reds and incandescent violets, soft lilacs heightened by coral hems, speckled here and there with scarlet patches. Marine lianas, wracks interlaced their serpentine networks, composing a darker carpet of Havana velvet, in which ran multiple glints of amber and bright ocher, contrasting with the bitumen of the clearly excised shadows. Sometimes, on the edge of a hiatus, on a ridge, a crab raised up its arachnid structure, ceasing to run obliquely to rear up, motionless and anxious, in the curiously detailed posture of a Japanese bronze. Through the water of little limpid pools, sparkling like polished metal mirrors, diaphanous transparent shrimp were swimming gracefully, in abrupt fits and starts, with lovely curving movements of their antennae; sea anemones were vibrating all their thin and numerous animal-flower filaments, and slender fish, like rapid black streaks, were darting back and forth, rippling the flat surfaces of the pools.

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