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

apologised.

    But the more I thought about it, the more I came round to the view that maybe we did have something to offer the police. Who was better placed than Barny and me, who were privy to the memories of his eyes and ears? Who knew his habits and haunts?

    One such haunt was Blackwall Reach. It recurred much in my mind’s eye. Each of us has a quiet place, I think, a place to sit, to put out the clamour of the world (or bathe in it)—its demands, its temptations, its despairs—and just be. And Mr Brand’s was Blackwall Reach, I was sure of it. Like a lodestone in my mind, the needle of my thoughts was drawn to it, and the idea that the mystery of Mr Brand might be revealed there. Pity I didn’t know his compass sported a many-coloured feather of needles.

    As we crossed the threshold into the bush hugging Blackwall’s cliffs, I yearned for the predictable footfall of the asphalt we’d left. Barny came behind me, and Nate led, holding my arm. I could feel him straining against it, eager to press forward. In his haste he almost pulled me down onto the dewy ground. A spider web clung to my face, and when I wrenched my arm free to pry it away, Nate went on.

    In that moment I felt my blindness keenly. I remembered a passage from the bible that Barny had told me. In it a fellow named John, who had lived on locusts and honey—spiders too perhaps—sent word from prison inquiring if Jesus was the One. John had thought so, but in the cell’s darkness his doubts had grown. Jesus’s answer began, “Tell him this: The blind receive sight…”

    How I yearned for that. True sight. Sight to see what made me stumble. Sight to see it, name it, and go around it. That verse rang in my head in the tangled gloom of the bush that night. But I remembered too that John’s head had ultimately rolled at the word of a girl probably no older than some of the kids he’d been baptising weeks earlier.

    Then I felt Barny’s hand on my arm, and I recovered my courage.

    And suddenly, as if my face had broken though a wave, I was free of the bush. We had reached the cliffs. Unfettered air caressed my skin, and the sound of the suck and spume below swelled.

    Then it happened.

    If I’d had the presence of mind in the minutes before to think clearly, I would have known what was coming. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered.

    I would have felt the terror in Barny’s clutch, for that’s what it was. I’d have asked, and he would have wailed at the maelstrom of groaning and crying that had made his head ring the nearer we went to Blackwall.

    I would have seen that as I fought my panic on Nate’s trail, images peppered me like never before, of Stephen Brand beating his way to the cliff’s edge, and noted it for the path of a madman, a pioneer, a zealot.

    Instead, all I experienced was the totality of sense that encompassed each of us, three-and-one, at the cliff’s edge, past and future combined: A stark vision of a woman standing there, dripping at the bush’s edge, for it was raining, and in her hands a gun. Pointed at me. At Stephen Brand. A flash of fire at its muzzle, and the oddly surprised, wondering “Uh.” This last not from the mute memory, but from Nate’s own mouth.

    Then Nate fell.

    And in my mind’s eye I fell too. I saw water and rock fly toward me, and then utter dark. It was the last vision I ever had.

    A kindly wave swallowed the sickening crunch as Nate met with the jagged limestone below. He was dead. I knew it without asking.

    I don’t remember for how long we stood and cried at Blackwall Reach.

    Given Nate’s ‘special’ status, and his parents desire to clear his name of any shadow of suicide, there was a post-mortem. I read the report. Naaman Gould, age twelve, suffered a heart attack, whereupon he fell to his death on the rocks beneath Blackwall Reach. His heart stopped, he fell, and his adolescent body crumpled like a soft drink can on the rocks below. That was forty-three years ago. And in