Shamus Dust by Janet Roger

Author:Janet Roger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Distillation of a Cordial Promise

I was lying face down on a beach in a shallow pool, shivering and listening to the dragging tide. Above or below high water I couldn’t tell, and what interest I had was theoretical because I was going no place. My left side had been worked over by somebody who practiced, I had a mouth and nose full of blood and grit, and I hadn’t figured out how to spit yet, let alone crawl.

There had been haunted hours of the same chasing dreams, twisted shadow plays of scratching rats and witches’ bedtime stories spinning in halls of mirrors, strange, unfriendly and impossible to grasp. They brought with them a smell of night at an ocean’s edge, a lift and crunch of footfall, a voice fractured and dissolved beyond understanding, talking without letup in my ear. Then the footfall scuffed around me on the shingle, a hand scooped under my shoulder and shook it hard. The soft, crazed voice leaned closer and still made no more sense to me than weeping in a madhouse. No use. I was slipping sideways again, spiraling like a seashell in a rock pool. Not touching bottom but falling through mile-wide spaces I didn’t know existed, in between wet grains of sand.

When I surfaced, I had my coat tucked under my chin for a blanket and a fire was cracking lazily nearby. The heat licked at my cheek and a sound of soft, low keening was making me curious. Not that curious, but enough to lift an eyelid and take a look around. Wide acres of a warehouse floated in the light from the fire. A plantation of cast iron columns stood shadowed in close rows. A roof pitched over studded beam sections stayed the weather directly overhead. The rest of the burned-out building was shattered and open to the stars, jittering under a hard frost. At the limit of the firelight a figure was sitting on the edge of a mattress, lean and hollowed, knees pulled up to his chest. He was tugging the ends of a blanket across the shoulders of a ragged blue suit, writing with a pencil stub on his shirt cuff one slow mark at a time. His tongue worked along his teeth as he wrote. Spittle trapped in the stubble under his lip. And from some Ypres or Delville Wood or Vimy Ridge or Paschendaele, every restless atom of his limbs danced the perpetual St. Vitus of shell-shock. I lay watching him for a time, then looked around at the rest of the building.

A bonfire flared in the center of the floor where the old soldier camped out. In the shadows beyond, a line of blown-out windows hung high in a wall. At the foot of the wall there was a heap of charred planking, dragged out of the weather for fuel. A skinny mongrel with a tiger-stripe was snuffing around in it. Except for the three of us, what was left of the warehouse seemed deserted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.