Getting Fictional: "The Kiss" , A Short Story For Beth

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Back in March, I drew the result of a Tuckerization competition, which is where a reader gives their name to a character in a short story or a book.

The winner was Beth /Pegasus 358 and I promised the story would be featured right here on the Supernatural Underground.

So without further ado, today I give you The Kiss, a short story that features a "Beth" as the main character.

Enjoy!

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The Kiss

by Helen Lowe

Fairy lights rippled across the darkened harbor, illuminating the crowded faces on the boathouse deck. Someone yelled from the adjoining carpark, and a few moments later Beth heard the cough of a car engine. More yells followed, and laughter mingled with the smash of breaking glass.

The place would be a mess in the morning. Beth leaned against the edge of the pier, enjoying the breath of cooler air off the sea, her eyes fixed on the darker water beyond the dance of lights. Phosphorescence touched a wave edge, further out, and a light winked from the far side of the bay. Someone floundering, Beth thought, or maybe lighting a lamp in a one of the old baches that had no electricity …

Not like the new, flash houses that dotted the Point above the boathouse. “New people,” Marg at the store had said, and sniffed—just as if Beth wasn’t a summer visitor herself, working on an archaeological dig the next bay over.

“Found anything interesting yet?” That was Dave, taking advantage of a gap in the crowd to finally reach her side. He was as local as you could get, even if he was working a summer job, too, researching the harbour’s water quality and correlations to various shellfish populations. Beth took the beer he held out, chinking her bottle against his before taking a long swig.

“Here?” she asked innocently, then laughed at his grimace. “No, I knew you meant the dig.” She drank again. “Not yet, unless you count a couple of nails I found today. But they’re not even old enough to catalogue, let alone coming from the mission station. If it was ever here,” she added, momentarily gloomy.

Dave shrugged. “There’re a hundred bays to this harbor and records from those days are erratic at best. Just because the last survivor was picked up from the Point doesn’t mean the station was here, although I suppose it makes somewhere nearby more likely.” He grinned at her. “Look on the bright side, though: they’re paying you to grub in the dirt.”

“They are.” The band inside the hall was picking up pace and Beth studied her beer, avoiding Dave’s gaze. She told herself it was because she didn’t want to plunge into the noise and heat and lose-packed bodies inside, but really, she didn’t want to dance with Dave. But if she made eye contact, she knew he would ask her …

“Hey Dave, dance with me!” Jess, Marg’s daughter, broke away from her friends and seized Dave’s arm, dragging him into the thick of the dancing. Beth smiled and shook her head as he glanced back, before the crowd closed between them. She could see the trail of Jess’s friends, though, weaving their way into the heart of the dancing. If she stayed put, Dave would come back—or they all would—and drag her into the dancing, too. Although Beth suspected that Jess would delay that as long as possible …

Grinning, she downed the last of her beer and headed toward the steps that led directly to the beach, negotiating knots of revellers until she stood on the smooth half-moon curve of sand. The Point cast a long shadow across its far end, the silhouette of a solitary tree marking where the land ended and the harbour began.

The patupaiarehe*, the faerie people, were supposed to have come out of the sea there once, and the last survivor of the failed mission had been found beneath the tree, starving and delirious, by a whaling ship’s crew. And a young woman from the Point had drowned herself beneath its shadow when the lover who sailed away to fight in the First World War had never come sailing back again.

The tree was ancient and gnarled enough to spark as many stories as it had roots, the long cables twisting down the Point’s rocky face. Beth strolled toward it, and although the music and laughter spilled after her, the waves were a soft, accompanying swish. The path up to the tree was a steep twisting scramble, but the rising moon was bright enough to see by. Once Beth reached the top she saw the moon track, a silver-gilt path across the night harbour.

Another narrow beach lay on the headland’s far side, almost immediately below her, and she saw there was a boat beached just above the surf line. The man beside it was standing in the creaming foam, drawing in what looked like a net. He was wearing ragged, cut-off jeans, his bare back a play of moonlight and shadow in the uncertain light. But he must have sensed her presence, because he turned, holding the net in one hand while the other gestured in equal parts greeting and salute.

Beth’s hand rose in answer, aware of the tree’s darkness at her back as he began, unhurriedly, to gather in the net. As far she could see there were no fish in it, and he folded the empty strands across the boat before coming to stand beneath her promontory, is hands on his hips as he stared up. “You’re new,” he said. The lilt of the waves was in his voice. “One of the summer people.”

His hair was wet, she thought, and the stray glimmer across his shoulders and chest could be either water or sweat. The sounds of the party had grown distant and the lap of the waves filled the space between them. “The fact you say that,” she said finally, “means that you must be local.”

He laughed. “I am.” He gestured invitation. “Come down, summer girl.”

Summer girl… Beth felt as though a thread spun of moonshine and phosphorescence was drawing her down to the dark figure below. He was smiling, she could sense as much as see that, and when he extended a hand to help her down the last zigzag slither, his fingers were unexpectedly warm. But he did not relinquish his clasp once she reached the beach, and now the thread between them was electric, its current leaping between their joined fingertips. Still smiling, he leaned in close and kissed her.

His lips were silk and salt and the moon’s cool fire, as Beth was on fire, kissing him back. His hands were on her hips now; her palms exploring the play of muscle across his back as his lips drew her in deep, deep… The rush of memories that came with the taste of the sea on his lips, and the depth of the kiss, was like being caught beneath a wave and swirled violently about, first one way, and then another. A part of Beth was still herself, kissing the stranger on the moon-dark beach; the other was the procession of women who had been drawn to the exact same tryst, time after time.

“Sometimes I save them.” The whisper was quicksilver in her mind, the flash of a fish leaping between water and air. In that moment Beth was the last survivor from the lost mission, delirious with thirst and hunger as the voice of the sea lured her here, here, here to this headland with its solitary tree. But she would not have lived to be rescued if the young man who came out of the sea at dusk had not breathed in life with his kiss and left a gourd of fresh water at her side.

“And sometimes I do not.” Now Beth was the young woman who had gone to the Point to mourn her lost lover and been drawn into deep water with the night—only to float back in on another dawn, wrapped in the seaweed shroud of her hair. Lured by a kiss and drowned, as Beth was being drawn in, her mouth and body melded to the young man from the sea while the waves broke in a welter of foam around both their knees.

No! The part of Beth that was still herself tried to pull away, but the arms about her tightened and the man whose lips still held hers took another step back, so the next wave was a slap against their hips.

“But I love them well before I drown them deep.”

Now the quicksilver thread was laughter, and despite the part of her that was panicked, terrified, Beth was still in thrall to his dark allure. Folklore eddied through the swirl of memories: tales of patupaiarehe and selkies, of water horses and the Old Man of the Sea: faerie folk in all their guises. Now the waves were breaking about their waists—but as the swell rocked them both, Beth managed to slide a hand free and into her pocket, groping for the two disdained nails from today’s dig. She had thrust them into her pocket and forgotten them, but now her hand closed convulsively around their cold iron.

The young man’s hands dropped away from her and his head arched back, freeing Beth’s lips as he hissed like a cat, his shape fraying into something ancient and wild, shaped out of bone and sea kelp. Her fingers still clutched about the nails, Beth staggered backward, out of the water and past where the boat lay beached—only now it was no longer a boat but a log, draped about with seaweed. She circled well clear of it, her eyes still on the figure in the surf. His eyes glowed, luminous as mother-of-pearl, but the rest was dissipating into spindrift and the night’s shadow.

“And sometimes,” she told him silently, because her teeth were chattering too hard to speak aloud, “they spoil sport and save themselves.”

“Presumption…” The cat’s hiss was in her mind, but the eerie eyes were fading now, too. By the time Beth reached the tree again the harbour was as she had first seen it: the moon tracking its path across dark water, with only a log beached above the high tide line. Shuddering, she drew in deep steading gulps of air and balled her fists to stop them shaking—but she made sure she held onto the nails.

“Beth! Hey, Beth!” Dave’s voice called up to her, but there were others with him, Jess and the whole crowd of dancers laughing and strung out across boathouse beach. At least one of them had a torch, spinning its beam around like a spotlight.

“We’re going to have a bonfire here on the beach. Come on down!” Jess called out, although she sounded grudging.

They would never believe the explanation for her dripping jeans, so she would just have to say she slipped—which in a way, Beth supposed, she had done. She shivered as she started the descent to the far safer side of the Point, reliving the wash of memories and the young woman who had been saved, as randomly as another had been drowned. Far more drowned than saved, though, if the memories had told true…

“Still,” she said to Dave later, when the bonfire’s initial blaze had burned down into a friendly glow and her jeans were drying, stiff with salt, “I think I may try looking further afield for the mission station site. Maybe over toward Last Bay, since Marg says there’s a sizeable area of flat land there.”

“But no reliable water supply.” Dave grimaced. “What makes you think it’s a more likely site than around here, though?”

Beth shrugged, fingering the nails in her pocket. “Oh, call it a hunch. But it can’t hurt to look.” She shivered as the wind off the harbour picked up, huddling deeper into her jacket. “I think I’ll go by road, though, even if it is the long way round.”

* Patupaiarehe, fairy race who (primarily) dwell in the sea, according to the folklore of New Zealand's Maori  people 

© Helen Lowe, 2015: All Rights Reserved

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Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and blogger whose first novel, Thornspell (Knopf), was published to critical praise in 2008. Her second, The Heir of Night (The Wall Of Night Series, Book One) won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012. The sequel, The Gathering Of The Lost, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award in 2013. Daughter Of Blood, (The Wall Of Night, Book Three) is forthcoming on January 26, 2016. Helen posts regularly on her “…on Anything, Really” blog, occasionally on SF Signal, and is also on Twitter: @helenl0we.

Bird Of Passage, Part 2 – Swinging Into 2015 With Story!

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Credit: B. Miller

Last month I posted the first half of a short story, Bird Of Passage – all part of gettin' fictional on 2015. :)

This is the second and final part of the story, but before you get reading, there is more.

As promised last month, all commenters over the two parts of this story will go in a "Tuckerization" draw  i.e. the winner's name will be used for a character in a future short story to be featured here on the Supernatural Underground during 2015. Or if you prefer, you may post your comment on the linked post on my own blog.

The opportunity to comment will remain open until next time I post on 1 March (2015) and in the event of multiple commentators the draw will be via Random.org.

Now onward, into the story.

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To read the first part, click on Bird Of Passage, Part 1

Bird Of Passage: Part 2 

© Helen Lowe, 2014

The following morning was grey and overcast, threatening rain, and the house was so quiet I thought Debbie must have already gone out.  "Fry up time," I said out loud, and broke some eggs into the pan. I was buttering the toast when Debbie appeared, yawning mightily and looking pale above a man's old fashioned, plaid dressing gown. But it wasn't the dressing gown that made me pause, knife in mid-air. "What's that you've got on your head?" I demanded.  "It looks like a Rastafarian tea cosy!"

"Probably," she said, without much interest. She wasn't interested in eggs either, just made herself a large mug of herbal tea and stared into it as though she could read her future in the cloudy depths. I put her subdued spirits down to obvious, Saturday night causes and addressed my energies to the eggs. Neither of us spoke for some time, and it was only when I was tidying up that she said, "I may have to stay on a bit longer. Is that OK?"

"Has your course been extended?" I asked. "How long for?"

"Probably only a few weeks," she said. "An opportunity's come up to do something more, and there's the set project I'd like to finish here as well, because it's going to be impossible to take with me."

"It must be big," I said, and she nodded. "Will you be able to sell it here then, before you leave?"

She nodded again.  "I think so. I'll have to. So is that OK with you? The staying on, I mean?"

"Yeah, sure, of course," I said. I grinned, unable to resist teasing. "You're not too much trouble, for one of Tom's friends."

She smiled faintly. "Tom means well. I can give you some money, too, of course.”

I hesitated, then shrugged. “It doesn't matter. I don't really need it, you know."

She regarded me gravely across the rim of the mug.  "That's what Tom said. He said some aunt of yours left you a legacy, along with the house."

"Great-aunt," I corrected, "and the legacy is mainly for the house, to maintain it. Unfortunately, I still have to work for a living."

Her smile deepened momentarily, before she banished it. "That must be hard."

I laughed and looked out the window, assessing the day. "It looks like it's going to clear up after all. Why don't we go out to the harbor heads and see that wreck?"

She put the mug down and peered out, too. "Really? It would be so great to get out of town for a while."

"Let's do it then," I said.  "That is, so long as you wear something other than that tea cosy thing on your head."

Debbie grinned. "I'll wear a beanie: To spare your sensibilities."

*

"It feels quite different out here," she said, a few hours later, when we had parked the car and were walking out to the beach. "It's wilder, of course, and more open – but the town's always so drab and grungy. It's turned in on itself."

"Focused on past glories," I agreed. "But it grows on you after a while, all the same."

"There's too much stone," Debbie said. "And not enough trees, not down on the flat anyway. The town's turned its back on the harbour, too.  So it's all just stone, stone and more stone; that's what makes everything seem so heavy.” She paused, her eyes tearing up as she stared into the wind. “It weighs down on the soul."

I felt my eyebrows lift. "I thought you'd like stone, being a sculptor."

"That's different. It's not an environment."  She stopped, looking around at the long, lonely stretch of beach, the ocean and the brooding sweep of sky. "Now this is an environment! But where's the wreck?"

I pointed towards the far end of the beach. "It's just the wheel really, although I expect there're plenty of spars beneath the sand. You can just see it – there, in the surf."

We walked in silence after that. The wind was brisk, cool but not freezing, and Debbie seemed absorbed by the shifting colours of the sea and the multitude of birds, great flocks of them along the water margin and around the deeper pools. "I could watch them forever," she said, and did, standing motionless for a long time.

"I wonder how many of them are birds of passage," she said, when we moved on, "like the godwits further north? They say they migrate from New Zealand to the Arctic and back again every year. Isn't that amazing?"

I agreed that it was, but thought that most of the birds on this beach were permanent residents. By that stage we had come up to the paddle wheel, shell encrusted in the creaming surf, and I had to relate what I knew of the wreck, which wasn't a lot. The ship, I volunteered, had been called the Victory, the same name as Nelson's flagship, and now the beach was named after it as well.

"There were a lot of wrecks on the Coast too," said Debbie, with a shiver. Her face clouded and she said she felt like a rest, so we sat on the edge of the dunes, watching the waves and the wading birds. Debbie's eyes followed a gull's flight.  "I wonder if they know where they're going, those godwits," she said softly, "or is it just instinct they follow, out across the vast ocean?"

I said nothing, just watched the gull myself, not sure an answer was required.

"We're not that different, are we?" she continued after a while. "People, I mean. We have all sorts of ideas about what comes after, but we don't really know. We're like the godwits, compelled to head into the unknown with only a feeling, faith maybe, to guide us."

I looked at her, staring out at the horizon with her beanie pulled down over her ears. Her eyes were shadowed, even somber. Although that, I thought, might just be the effect of the day, which had grown overcast again. Sitting so close, I felt my awareness of her shift and sharpen, like changing up a gear on the bike. I could see the film of salt on her lips and imagine their taste beneath mine, the same wild tang as the ocean, and after that – what?

I almost did it, leaned that bit closer and kissed her, but caution prevailed. There was too much I didn't know – about Debbie's relationship with Tom, or how far I wanted to take things with her staying in the house for an open-ended period. Hasten slowly, I told myself, watching another seagull beat into the headwind. Wait and see how things go.

Debbie looked around then and smiled; the cloud cover shifted, letting through a gleam of sun. "Perhaps not you though," she said, still pursuing her line of thought. "I think you're a shore dweller at heart."

"Never looking beyond the horizon at all," I agreed, lightly, since it was true. I am not a reflective person. Later, and not without bitterness, I was to think – and not an observant one either. But that afternoon I was just pleased to see her mood lighten, and to hear her say, when we turned for a last look down the beach, "This has been a fabulous afternoon. I'd like to come out here again some time."

She never did, though. I don't know how long it was, after that, before I realised the hats were more than just an alternative fashion statement, and that although she really was working on a sculpture at the design school, the main course was at the hospital. As I said, not very observant, but even I couldn't fail to notice the signs in the end—which seemed to come swiftly after that. The bitterness stemmed from realizing, too late, how deeply she had gotten under my skin. I was almost surprised at how bereft I felt, listening to the emptiness of the house after she died.

"I should have warned you," said Tom, when he was staying on after the funeral. "Debs always was the sort who grew on you quietly – the kind you end up really missing."

I said nothing. What could you say to a man who had stayed on at the glaciers even when he knew how really sick she was. But that was Tom for you, he would always leave the hard yards to someone else. For a moment, I came close to hating him, sitting there so calmly, squinting down at his roll-your-own.

"She must have really liked you though," he said, "because she's left you one of her pieces of stone. It's a bit different from the usual – and big. It'll take the pickup and both of us to get it up here."

It did – and I saw what he meant about it being different. The sculpture was a bas relief, rather than one of the customary, figurative pieces, but it was all there, captured in the face of the stone: the long sweep of the beach and the solitary godwit wheeling, called to an unknown shore and striking out on its uncharted journey. I looked at it for a long time, and then I got Tom to help me put it in the garden, under what had been her window, facing out to the harbor and Victory Beach.

 

The End

Victory Beach

 

"Bird Of Passage" Part 1 – Swinging Into 2015 With Story!

Credit: B Miller

 Happy New Year, dear Supernatural Undergrounders!

 I thought I should start the new year the way I mean to go on – with story. This is the first half of a two-parter: the second (and final) half will post next month.

If you like, I may post more stories as 2015 progresses, so do let me know. All commenters over the two parts of this story will go in a "Tuckerization" draw (via Random), i.e. the winner's name will be used for a character in a future short story.

Meanwhile: Enjoy!

– – – 

Bird of Passage: Part 1

© Helen Lowe, 2014

 She was sitting on the lowest step of the fire escape when I got home, accompanied by one of the neighborhood cats that regard the overgrown shrubbery as a kind of no-man's-land, belonging to all their kind and to none. This cat, lean as all the others, was crouched a careful yard, perhaps as much as two, from the steel toes of her boots. You could see though, that in the cat's mind at least, they were together, sharing the speckled sunshine that fell through the overhanging oak. It overshadowed everything that tree, even the two-storey villa with its characteristic, witch's hat gable.

"Do I know you?" I asked, coming down the narrow path beside the house and stopping at the sight of her. The cat was up and away before I had finished speaking.

"You frightened her," she said. She did not seem troubled herself, even though I was scowling, wondering what on earth she was doing in my overgrown excuse for a back garden – who the hell she was.  I had already found the first evidence of her presence at the front of the house: a large, haphazardly stuffed pack, a heavy coil of rope and an ice axe.  She was wearing some kind of velvet hat pulled down over her ears, but her eyes were pale as abalone shell, shifting from blue to green in a round, tanned face.

"I'm Debbie," she said. "Tom's friend, from the Coast.  Aren't you expecting me?"

A number of answers hovered on my lips: the obvious – no, closely followed by the observation that any friend of Tom's should know better than to rely on him to arrange anything.  The third response was that Tom's friendship was not necessarily a passport to mine, especially if this Debbie thought she could emulate his habits and stay for months on end, living hand to mouth and preying shamelessly on my goodwill.  I met her look of friendly inquiry and hesitated, before deciding on a different approach.  "So where is Tom these days?  The last I heard he was going to Australia."

Debbie nodded.  "He changed his mind.  He was up near Westport the last I saw him, and going to the glaciers after that.  That's when he said he'd ring and let you know I was coming through."  She smiled, a slight, wry twist of her lips.  "He said you had plenty of room here, and wouldn't mind if I stayed for a bit."

I regarded her cautiously, taking in the steel capped boots, the velvet hat and the wide, patchwork skirt beneath a black, fisherman's jersey.  I thought of some of the other birds of passage that Tom had sent through, and decided that this Debbie might be one of the odder kind.  "What are you here for?" I asked.  I did not add, and for how long, not yet.  "Surely it's not for climbing?"

She looked puzzled for a moment, then shook her head.  "Not me.  I just brought that gear through for someone else – I'll drop it off tomorrow.  I'm here to do a course at the Polytech."

Uh-oh, I thought.  "How long's the course?"

The smile reappeared, and stayed a little longer this time.  "Don't worry, it's only for two months, at the design school.  I'm kind of a sculptor, and they're having a symposium."

So I let her stay.  I suspected, rightly, that a "kind of a sculptor" would not be well up in funds, which was presumably why Tom had sent her to me in the first place, and that she was relying on living rent-free to get through the two months.  It was a big house, and I usually put visitors downstairs so they didn't get in my way.  But this time, moved by some obscure impulse, I gave Debbie the big, upstairs room with the witch's turret.  I rationalized that it was coming on to winter and would be too cold and dark downstairs, a cold that she would feel after the northern regions of the Coast.  Besides, there would still be half a house between her room, which looked out towards the harbor, and mine, which faced the sun. 

The room I gave Debbie was big and sparsely furnished like all the others in the house, but the view down the harbor was fantastic.  She walked to the window as though drawn by a magnet, and stood there, gazing out.

"I'd love to go there," she said at last, "right to the end of the harbor.  There's something about it that draws you in – or is it on?  It makes me feel there's something mysterious out there, waiting to be discovered."

"It's easy enough to get there," I said.  "You can drive right out to the heads.  There's a beach there, with the remains of an old wreck on it.  You can still see the paddle wheel, standing up in the surf."

"I'd like to see that," she said, so softly that I almost didn't catch it.  Then she gave herself a little shake.  "But I'd better get on top of my course first."

I didn't see a great deal of her, after that.  I had a big project on and was often working late, and Debbie's course seemed to demand early starts and more than a few late nights of her own. 

"Although that's because we just like to hang around, talking about what we're doing, rather than because we have to work late," she confessed, on one of the nights when our paths crossed.  She was cooking, and it was only after we had been talking for some time that I realized she was making enough for me as well.  She had brought a bottle of wine, cheap but cheerful as she put it, and insisted on sharing that, too.  Apparently the course was going well and a few of the local galleries were showing interest in her work – so, as Debbie said, it was all good. 

She certainly looked good, I thought, in a matching crimson hat and jacket, one of her Op shop acquisitions.  She was wearing a vivid carmine lipstick to match.  "Cheap and cheerful," Debbie assured me, with her slow, deep smile. "Like the wine."

The next time I saw her for any length of time was three weeks later, on a Saturday morning when I was trying to get both the mountain bike and myself out of the house.  I asked her, on auto-pilot, how the symposium was going and it was only later, pumping furiously uphill, that her slight hesitation struck me.  There had almost, I thought, changing down a gear, been constraint in her reply.  She had looked tired, too, with noticeable shadows under her eyes. It must be the course, I decided, they seemed to like burning the candle at both ends – and promptly dismissed the matter from my mind.

*

 

To read the second and final part of Bird of Passage, posted on February 1, click on:

 Bird of Passage, Part 2