Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction Read Free Page A

words.” He paused. “Words on groans. It made me feel sick in the stomach.” Barny fell silent. Nate grunted with strange satisfaction then.

    The woman seemed to go with the man. She appeared in many of my visions—was perhaps in half of all the things I saw. Not the woman of early on, when I first began to see. No, she had gone, as had the other man, the one with the smiling eyes. This lady was different altogether. She was slim, with blonde tresses, and had about her a nervous air, as though she were a penned animal who now and then sensed the hidden bars. She appeared often, smiled often, or had done. I saw her in ways that made me blush, but—and this will sound weird—I was not ashamed. Those visions came like especially gleaming gems among other pretty stones, lovingly, gently gifted to me.

    The bus rattled on toward Blackwall as the night drew down, and its motion lulled me. But there was no fader knob at play in Nate that night. The further we went, the more the cyclones tore through him, as though time were compressing to the end of all things and each maelstrom was eager to spend its strength before it lost the chance. One minute he was probing us for information, the next he would slap the window or thrust his head between his knees.

    We got off the bus, same penguins, same order, and in the wake of the rattle and sway of the bus, it felt as though the cool air settled on my shoulders like a shawl. We walked down a road that Barny said looked over the river and, in the distance, the alien lights of Perth’s pocket of skyscrapers. A breeze was stirring, and it brought up the tang of salt and river-weed.

    I guess you’re still wondering what we were doing there? Well, it has to do with our man, Mr Stephen Brand. For all I know, his mug shot was plastered on the back of our bus, which whined its way off into the dark streets as though it had never been there. You see Mr-Stephen-Brand-age-36 was a missing man.

    That had taken a bit of figuring out. Barny must have seen Stephen’s face on TV in the missing person’s slot before Law & Order many times and, likewise, I had heard his name each time before the show’s trademark dun dun percussive. But had it not been for the wiles of serendipity, we would never have made the connection, and might have been at home that night, tucked up in bed.

    Brand had been missing since January, his wife also. No family contactable. The details given in the missing persons blurb had the feeling of flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of unknown lives, stumbled on by investigators and yielded up to the public almost apologetically. Mr Brand, said the blurb, was an amateur musician, and collector of rare and exotic instruments. We knew our man was a musician. I had watched his hands dance, and sometimes trip, across fretboards and frames, and Barny had heard snatches of alien sounds. But we would never have made the connection if the blurb hadn’t mentioned one harmless little detail. It had noted one instrument in particular, a sitar. Neither of us had a clue what a sitar was—until a classmate show-and-tell’ed his specimen at school. I felt the thing, Barny saw it; and that was the spark to the tinder.

    Our man had a sitar, there was no doubt, and being boys this meant the missing man might be one and the same. It didn’t take long for us to marry the other clues up to this hypothesis, his apartment, rented with the tiniest sliver of a river view, his job as a nurse, and in no time, as far as we were concerned, his identity was a fact.

    Barny, bless him, had blurted that we should tell the police. I replied caustically, “Yeah, right. ‘Officer, my deaf friend here and I have recently received second-hand hearing and sight, respectively, and as a consequence, and quite coincidentally really, have come to believe that we may be able to tell you more about Mr-Stephen-Brand-age-thirty-six, maybe even find him.’ Come off it, Barn.” Nate kicked me. I