Devolution Z: The Horror Magazine April 2016 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moonriser Inc.
Published: 2016-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

***

Steam rose and the kettle clicked. Henry poured the water into the brown teapot and carried a mug and a couple of biscuits on a tray into the front room. The melodic trumpet announced the start of his British soap. He’d gotten so very engrossed in it since his retirement a few weeks ago.

It was all going well, apart from his joints. A hundred years without pain does not prepare one for the onslaught of arthritis, but a warm mug of tea does so help.

Two men on the television talked over the bar in the pub and Henry was distracted for a second by teenagers cavorting up the pavement, bathed in orange light. There was a wash of contentment he felt when thinking of young people: the pulse in their throats was perennially attractive. For all his experience of death, that final journey still filled him with trepidation the closer it came which, if he lingered on the thought for long enough, revealed itself as fear. For all his exposure to a few of the mysteries of the universe, he had only been a servant: he knew not what lay beyond the veil.

The young rarely think of death nowadays—not here, anyway. It wasn’t always so. Ypres was filled with nothing but death and how he loved being there, but it was so many lifetimes ago, it was as though they weren’t his memories. There was a Private on his table, drowning in his own fluids, who wanted to speak. Holding him down after nicking his carotid artery, he kicked and clawed and gasped. His hand reached up to Henry’s collar not to assault the field surgeon, but to hold onto life. Henry remembered the wallet in the Private’s breast pocket: the letter home, the sepia photo of his wife and child. Tears now blurred out Henry’s vision of the Private, just as the Private’s tears blurred out Henry’s implacable face, as death came to take him. Now those tears were a mirror through time, reflecting the beginning back to the end in an infinite reoccurrence. Some things never change, other things do.

A tear is a curved prime and doesn’t merely reflect, but also bends and distorts. Why remember the Private now? Henry tutted at himself. He knew perfectly well why: fear is sometimes too obvious. But there he was again, stretched through time, this wasn’t how Henry had ever remembered the Private before. The kicking, the struggling, the terror in his eyes. It had been much more peaceful before. More satisfying.

Flickering lights brought Henry’s attention back to his living room. A cobbled street on the flat screen pixelated and northern English accents stuttered their lines. The hairs on the back of Henry’s neck bristled, and the panicked face of the Private, pestered with gluttonous blue bottles, beseeched wordlessly.

“Hello, Henry.”

Henry jumped in his seat, startled as his eyes rested on her unassuming form, sat nonchalantly in the armchair across the room, as if nothing in this world, or the next, could stop her.

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