The Color of Paradox Read Free

bloodlust was tied to what I’d seen, seven weeks into my future, at the end of the world. I’d been infected. Some rot was blooming within my mind or soul.
    What could I do but fight it?
    I should go out, take in a little air, feel the rain on my face. Or eat—Mrs. Farmer would fix me tea, I’d wager, even if Willie had no idea of proper female behavior. I could go upstairs and meet the convalescents.
    Instead I sat on the steps in the blessed dim and quiet, trying to still my thoughts.
    After about an hour a satchel appeared in mid-air, at waist-height—the height of the gurney. It was scorched. A scrap of strung hide was burning into its bottom.
    It flopped onto the mattress, just as I had, and lay there, smoking. I thought of horse droppings, suddenly, steaming on frosty lawns.
    Inside the satchel I found bundles of letters and a paper-wrapped package, tied in string and all neatly labelled, like an odd Christmas parcel. Names: mine, hers, someone named Robert Chambers and Kenneth Smith.
    I opened a package with “Jules Wills III” on it, and found a wallet containing thirty dollars in American bills. A small fortune.
    The brown paper the wallet came in had been inked with facts and figures I was meant to memorize: my birthday in 1898, Willie’s in 1895, our parents’ names. There were notes outlining a sketchy little cover story about growing up on an estate in the West Dorset countryside, and the circumstances that had brought us to America.
    The tale was Willie had married a man who’d brought her here. He’d died in the Great War and so she’d set up the convalescent home. Our parents had sent me out to check on her.
    “Is the post in?” Her voice at the top of the stair made me jump. “I smell smoke.”
    I coughed, stood, passed it up. Her eyes travelled over the basement—she saw the soot-mark from the bag on her virginal mattress and I realized I wasn’t meant to have brought up the tarpaulin.
    “You put the mattress there?” I asked suddenly. “You’d have fallen onto—”
    I gestured at the floor and wondered if she’d broken anything when she hit the concrete.
    She extracted the bundle with her name on it and passed me a bunch of letters. “From Father,” she said. I could sense she was debating her answer.
    “Please, Willie. I don’t mean to be beastly. None of this is what I expected.”
    She shook her head. “There was no mattress. How could there be?”
    “It’s only a yard, I suppose. Were you hurt?”
    “Grady and Biggs broke my fall.”
    “Who?”
    “Agents fourteen and fifteen. What remained of them, anyway.”
    I’d have expected her to leave after that grisly revelation—Willie seemed to love a good exit line—but instead she gave my shoulder an absent pat and started opening her letters. “The brown sheets speak plainly—they’re meant to be burned. The letters we can keep. They don’t say anything revealing.”
    “Aren’t they afraid we’ll miss one of the brown sheets—fail to burn it?”
    “They don’t last. The ink fades and the paper tatters within a month or two.”
    The letters from my false parents ordered me to mind my sister, mind my health, and remember the considerable spiritual benefits of prayer and clean living. In other words: obey my C.O., stay physically fit, and try to avoid going mad.
    The note from ‘Father’ was written in the Major’s hand. He wanted me to set up a bank account and asked me to make some modest but specific investments. Cash would be provided for further deposits. There was also an allowance: this much for clothes and kit, that much for expenses as I ‘made myself useful.’
    Useful. The letter hinted that I might indulge a bit of a carousing and gambling habit, by way of ingratiating myself with local gossips and crooks. This would be funded as long as I wrote home about whatever they told me.
    A license to drink and gamble. There were worse things.
    “Mother,” whose handwriting I didn’t recognize, said I