Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

Sir Florian shivered then, in the cold morning air. A strange thought came into his head, which he could not understand at all but which filled him with a longing more desperate than any he had known before or ever would again.

O for a fiery gloom and thee!

He could not understand at first what it was that he longed for, or why, but the thought persisted nevertheless, as plaintive as the echo of a soul torn apart by damnation, until he began to remember. He never recovered all the memory, but in the fullness of time he remembered far more than enough, with the consequence that the enigmatic thought echoed down his straight bright days—and deeper still in his long and lonely nights—though he lived to be a hundred years and more.

O for a fiery gloom—and thee!

The Light That Passes Through You Conrad Williams

I WAS ON MY way to work when Louise appeared, seeming to peel away from the gray cement walls of the block of flats opposite. She drifted into my arms. I could feel her bones, thin and febrile, poking through the shredded leather of her jacket. As I drew her inside, I noticed it was a jacket I’d given her, five years ago—the last time I’d seen her. She made sticky, glottal noises into the crook of my arm as I led her upstairs. Her hair was matted with dog shit; her mouth pinched and blue.

“What are you on?” I asked, but the question could have been directed at myself. I should have been taking her to hospital. She didn’t answer.

I sat her down in the hallway while I ran a bath. My face dissolved in the mirror.

“Can you…?” Clearly, she couldn’t, so I undressed her myself, trying to keep my eyes off the breasts I’d once caressed. Unbidden, a memory of me rubbing olive oil into them on a hot beach somewhere made my cheeks burn. “Let’s get you into this bath. Come on Louise.” She’d lost weight. The skin around her navel was purpuric and slightly raised, like that of an orange. I hoped her condition was due to vitamin deficiency and exhaustion. I wished I hadn’t written to her.

She revived a little when the suds enveloped her. She found some kind of focus, frowning as I no doubt looped in and out of view. Her slight overbite rested upon her bottom lip: something I’d once found irresistible. Now she just looked afraid.

“It’s been like—” she began, and coughed a thick clot of mucus on to her chin, “—like I’ve been drowning. All this time. Just as I thought I was leaving, going out like a candle, you rescued me.” She collapsed slowly into, the water; her ribs, for a moment, seemed like huge denuded fingers pressing against the flesh from inside, trying to punch their way out.

There was nothing particularly unusual about our relationship to warrant my attempt to contact her. At the time, I was nineteen, she eighteen. We said we loved each other. Although we had no money and still lived with our parents, we believed we were independent, different from anyone else because we were intelligent; we were mature about sex.

We were stupid. We were children.

We holidayed in Wales one summer, borrowing a caravan that belonged to a friend of my father’s. We buried each other in the sand and lost sleep, fucking with impunity. It was exciting, hearing her approach an orgasm without fear of a parent barging in on us. She missed a period.

I wanted to go with her on the day she aborted. I’d traveled to Stockport with her to make the appointment, sitting in a waiting room trying to avoid the female faces around me, watching faded vehicles slew across wet, wasted dual carriageways which reached into the dun fug over Manchester. Louise’s mother went with her when the time came because she paid for the operation. The private clinic was picketed by pro-lifers that day. Louise told me they pleaded with her to reconsider, that they would help to bring up the baby. It fluttered in her womb. Ink blot eye. Fingernails.

When I saw Louise again, she’d gained something which made me nervous for a while, something which shone dully in her eyes as if the surgeons had implanted some strange, ancient wisdom at the time of termination. We talked about it and grew very close; smiles and kisses drew a frosting over the bad area, like icing decorates the mold in a cake. I suppose we believed we were richer for the experience. Louise became clinging; I thought it was love. I never believed that we would be together forever but she didn’t doubt it, as if this trauma provided a bond we must never break. Sometimes I’d lie awake at night feeling like the carcass of a sheep; she, a dark scavenger of emotions, burrowing ever deeper into the heart of me. That I felt guilty for entertaining such thoughts shouldn’t have brought me comfort but it did.