In A Season Of Dead Weather Read online

In A Season Of Dead Weather

  by Mark Fuller Dillon

  Cover designed and drawn by Tragelaphus.

  Copyright 2013 Mark Fuller Dillon

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Lamia Dance

  Never Noticed, Never There

  Shadows In The Sunrise

  When The Echo Hates The Voice

  Who Would Remain?

  The Weight of Its Awareness

  The Vast Impatience Of The Night

  Acknowledgements

  *****

  Lamia Dance

  On a cold November night when I was eighteen years old, I went with several students to a run-down movie house, and rediscovered the truth about myself: the truth I had long hoped to conceal.

  On that night, when we stepped out of the wind and into the grimy, dark-paneled lobby of the cinema, I was already unsure of my decision to tag along. The need had driven me -- the need, and a sense of being trapped within the laboratories and lecture halls of university routine. For seven days a week, I studied; I lacked the time for anything else. And I certainly lacked the money; only my scholarship had allowed me to attend classes in the first place; only my grants had allowed me a tiny room in residence and the two meals a day that left me constantly hungry by nightfall. So when I learned about the foreign cinema club and the movie house that offered substantial discounts to university students, I decided -- against my better judgment -- to hide myself within a crowd.

  I came to realize my mistake as soon as I entered the lobby with the twenty or so fellow-students. As one of the few unattached people in a crowd of couples, I had felt exposed and isolated on the long walk through the stabbing wind to the movie house; but once in the lobby, I began to feel as well that old anxiety that always hit me whenever I stood on the verge of watching a film. The reek of popcorn butter and dusty carpet, the shadows in the corners, the faded posters sagging on the mottled walls -- everything reminded me of how uncomfortable I had always felt in cinemas. As the others stood in groups and chattered in open, friendly ways, I began to feel like a cast-off anatomical skeleton propped up within a long winter coat.

  To conceal my discomfort, I wandered toward a series of smudged glass frames on the wall, where information on the short films to be screened that night was posted. Directors and actors were detailed in page after page of text, but there were no pictures, no mention of storylines, no indication of what the films were actually about. The only clues offered were exotic titles that meant nothing to me. As I stared at one of them -- Lamia Dance -- I felt the sudden presence of a young man at my side.

  "That's a poor translation," he said. "They're not really lamiae. They're something else... something even better."

  "I wouldn't know," I said, in a voice far too weak and tremulous. "I don't know a thing about films."

  Then I stared helplessly at the faded crimson carpet spotted black with ancient grime and starred with scattered popcorn salt, until I felt him move away from me and back into the crowd.

  Finally, armed with ticket stubs,tall cups of soda-pop, and striped cartons of popcorn, the students filed into the theatre. I tagged along and sat hesitantly in a seat right beside the aisle, from where I could see the others ease out of their bulky coats and jackets: beautiful young people, shedding unwanted and unnecessary shields. The man in front of me, having laughed at some comment from his warm and lovely girlfriend as she unwound her scarf, glanced at me, huddled in my thick coat, and said, "You know, you really should take that off, or else you'll get used to the heat... and then you'll freeze on the way home tonight."

  I smiled back and shrugged off my coat, pretending that my shields, too, were unnecessary. Yet I wondered how anyone could call a university home. Did he find it so easy there, to blend right in?

  For the next few minutes, my stomach trembled from a combination of hunger and the need. I stared at the frozen ripples of dim light on the scarlet curtains straight ahead, at the curved lamps glowing like pale subterranean toadstools on the angled walls, and realized once again how ill at ease I felt in cinemas. I knew the reason why, but whenever that reason bubbled up into memory I turned aside with firm resolve and listened to the clever, relaxed conversations all around me. I reminded myself that I had come here to hide within a crowd; and then the curtains parted, the voices died, the darkness fell and covered me.

  A beam of light stabbed the darkness, and a faded blue title card appeared on the screen: Short Subject. The man ahead of me turned to his girlfriend and whispered a name or a word that eluded me; it sounded vaguely Slavonic.

  Blackness followed; then another beam stabbed out, and letters indecipherable to me, Cyrillic perhaps, crawled across a slowly turning vortex of magenta, scarlet, blue and purple. Despite the apparent age of the print, with its occasional spray of speckles and its occasional flickering scratch, the colours were unfaded, deeply saturated and vibrant. The man ahead of me whispered something about 1940s Technicolor.

  With the credits over, the vortex faded to black. Then a faint light appeared: I seemed to float through a black tunnel of forest or jungle growth, through a complex network of leaves and branches writhing in the wind and silhouetted against a crimson glow in the darkness up ahead. The tunnel mouth widened, and suddenly I drifted free above a jagged plain of black volcanic rock beneath a twisting sky of slate-grey thunderclouds. For seconds at a time, the clouds took on a deep crimson glow from a hidden sunset, only to fade once more into lifeless greys. But then a tower loomed above the plain, swelled and lengthened as I raced toward it; when the sunlight struck, the tower glowed like a furnace coal, impossibly present against the blackened sky.

  At the base of the tower I began to rise, and passed several storeys wound like the coils of a serpent around a high pillar. Each level bristled with elaborate stone carvings; they reminded me of serpent heads thrust into the sky with jaws agape... and at that point, I began to feel the slow uncurling of anxiety deep in the pit of my stomach: I had seen this film before.

  My fear increased as the music crept in, rose above the moaning wind and drowned it out with the deep bass clangour of distant gongs; I knew that music all too well.

  By now I had risen to the peak and to a circling, vertiginous view of serpent jaws bristling high above the plain. As the furnace glow of sunset faded, a faint beam of magenta light appeared amidst the forest of carvings: light from a circular opening. I drifted forward until I stared straight down and began to sink within the tower, descending past tier after tier of indigo marble: a series of concentric rings that narrowed like the levels of a stadium as I neared the lowest circle.

  And then, at exactly the moment I expected, the sombre hues of indigo marble and deep magenta light vanished in a wild burst of colour that made the audience around me gasp in surprise. The upper surface of each tier was now lit from within like a ring of stained glass, to reveal abstract lines and pinpoints of aquamarine, turquoise blue, violet, and neon pink. The distant gongs gave way to bright clattering rhythms, like shards of glass and crystal falling onto metal plate.

  I sank into my seat, torn between fear and the practical desire to conceal that fear -- the same dual response I had experienced when I was shown this film, repeatedly, at the age of five, one year before my parents went away and never came back.

  By now I had reached the lowest circle, the arena of this amphitheatre. In the crazed light that rose from the stained-glass floor, I could see five doorways equally spaced within the ring of marble. The music paused with anticipation... until a face I knew very well peered from one of the doorways and swept the arena with a slow, searching gaze. T
hen the young man stepped with cautious dignity onto the arena floor. In the audience, a few people laughed or tittered, for the man, slim and muscled like a dancer, was completely naked.

  I was now beyond anxiety; I felt as if a spotlight had speared and plucked me from the dark mass of the crowd.

  As the clattering music burst into new levels of volume and complexity, the man circled the arena in a slow dance that surged into a rapid display of athletic energy. There was nothing effete about him; he moved with the leaps and lunges of a martial artist, driven by increasingly barbaric, accelerating rhythms, lit from below by wild splashes of colour that rivaled the frenzied music. And then --

  And then, as he danced, a faint sibilance rose against the music; long, lean silhouettes arced and swayed into view on the tier just above his head. From unseen doorways, the silhouettes emerged to blacken the stained-glass floor of their own encircling tier, to form slender patterns of darkness upon the wild colours. The sibilance increased, became a complex hissing that somehow suggested language without suggesting anything remotely human.

  The dancer froze in place, suddenly alert; sweat glistened on his torso as he took several deep, slow breaths. Once again, as I had on many occasions over the years, I wondered if he knew what was coming, if he had any idea of how little time was left to him for breathing.

  On the tier above his head, the hissing discussion ceased; a decision had been made. One of the silhouettes dipped a slow, curling length of itself from the upper circle, and then the man saw her; he stood without movement as she lowered herself in coil upon coil to the stadium floor, until she reared back above the sprawling circles of her body to face him.

  Despite her vast length, her proportions were graceful and slender, with the lean, concealed power of a boa constrictor. Beneath her cobra's hood, her large head was completely reptilian, with the jaws and upper snout of a python; yet below the neck, her body took on the semblance and size of a human being's, with the torso, slim abdomen and subtly flaring hips of an attractive woman. Her mimicry extended to the breasts, the navel, the pubic mound of a woman; and as this upper body swayed back and forth in slow, sinuous movements, it revealed a perfectly convincing set of shoulder blades, a tapering back and small, rounded buttocks -- yet the rest of her was the long and undivided body of a serpent. Limbless, hairless, disturbingly alien, she remained unspeakably beautiful, and her dorsal scales threw off reflected light with an emerald iridescence.

  For several heartbeats, man and serpent remained in place; then the man lunged toward one of the exit doorways. He had almost made it before she sent out a gliding length of coil to block his way. He lunged again, in the opposite direction, and again she uncoiled a length of her long, slender body to block the path. Soon she had blocked all five doorways and forced the man toward the central point of the arena circle. Panting and glistening, he stood in place once more , poised to flee from any movement.

  After a pause, the music returned with a softer texture, like metal brushing upon metal in a murky pool of water. The serpent now swayed her upper body with the seductive motion of a woman dancing; her coils began to move in slow spirals of emerald on the stained-glass floor. She gazed down upon her own sliding movements, then raised her ophidian head to reveal impossibly green, impossibly beautiful eyes.

  The man spun away with a lifted forearm to block her from sight. Then he launched himself into a dance of his own, a dance of escape from her dance of seduction. Yet no matter where he moved, she seemed to be there first with her gently rocking human curves, her beguiling eyes. With every veer away from her, he found his way blocked by winding coils. Soon he was encircled by rings of emerald that slowly closed upon him.

  Finally, retreating from her eyes with his arm again pressed upon his face, he tripped and fell backward upon a slowly writhing mound of coils. As he threw back his arms to break his fall, she thrust her face toward him in a smooth gliding rush... and then she had him. She had him; he stared back at her in panic for a heartbeat, until the sheer beauty of her gleaming eyes overcame him. His rictus of fear became a slowly spreading smile; his body relaxed and settled back upon her coils. She held his gaze inescapably, swayed her head from side to side, and seemed to smile herself when she saw his head turn lazily to follow.

  Now entranced completely, and completely in her power, the man lay fully quiescent and fully aroused. She noted this with apparent amusement, and flicked her long tongue at his mouth with playful frequency. Arching her woman's body above him, she rubbed and slid against him teasingly, coaxed his arms and hands to wander as she held him at all times with the fascination of her eyes.

  Then she eased herself down and pressed herself upon him -- an embrace without arms -- and began to move with a slow, compelling insistency. The music surged in waves, on and on, until suddenly stopped by the man's helpless cries of release.

  Cold sweat stung my eyes.

  She lay upon him as his breathing slowed, cradled him within her coils, held his gaze with her own. He smiled up at her, sleepy and defenseless, and slowly turned his head back and forth to follow her renewed swaying. Again, this apparently amused her, and she watched him intently as her movements slowed and finally came to a stop. Then his eyelids fell shut, and with that smile still upon his face, he sagged within her coils, unconscious.

  She lowered him gently to the floor, and as his chest rose and fell in sleep, examined him minutely with her flickering tongue. Then she poised her mouth above his head, and began to stretch her jaws impossibly wide....

  It took her a long time to swallow him. The pulsing movements of her jaws engulfed his head and neck; his shoulders and torso took a bit more effort, but the rest of him went down her throat with ease.

  In the end, she relaxed, uncoiled herself upon the stained-glass floor, and apparently savoured the muscular contractions deep inside her.

  Then she glanced toward me; she looked directly at me with a knowing, unmistakable look, and I knew exactly what she meant to imply: This is what you want. This is what you need. This has been your secret, but now the secret is unlocked within your heart at last.

  Fade to black.

  Sweating in the silence, I was ready for the audience to turn and stare at me, to point at me with dawning awareness. I braced myself for their shouts of discovery, their cries of shock and fear. Yet nothing happened. They whispered to themselves, unaware; they laughed quietly at private comments, without suspicion, without a sense of danger. None of them understood what they had seen; none of them knew what watched them from the night.

  When the next film began, I took my coat and slipped away as quietly as possible. I stepped out of the cinema doors to find the world suddenly white: snow whirled beneath the streetlamps, and the wind pierced my back as I set off down residential streets toward the campus.

  Every house on every street polluted the night with glowing windows, where men and women moved in silent, inexplicable dances of relationship. At the sight, I remembered the last time I had seen my parents, but then the need arose and blotted them from memory. They were gone, they were finished; they had shown me a film repeatedly when I was five years old, then they had left me with the need and nothing else.

  When I reached the university and found myself through force of habit outside the Department of Medicine, I stood alone in the gusting wind and watched the snow arc past me like a storm of eyes -- brilliant eyes, compelling eyes, glinting in the lamplight -- and I knew that I would learn to serve the need right there, with all the tools a scholarship had offered: scalpels for dissection, scalpels for destruction, scalpels like a row of gleaming viper fangs. After years of need, I knew exactly what I wanted.

  High above my head, embedded in the caduceus emblem on the wall, the twining serpents watched me and began to writhe.

  *****

  Never Noticed, Never There

  On a wet Sunday afternoon in April, Robert Piedmont left his townhouse on Springland Crescent and never came back. His wife later told police
that Robert had seemed unlike himself that day; in the hour before he left, she had caught him staring at her, at the wallpaper and stippled ceiling, as if they had been puzzles to resolve. He said nothing when he slipped into his black raincoat and stepped outside; he ignored her questions, scowled in perplexity for a final moment, then eased the front door shut. By the time she had reached the doorway he was nowhere in sight.

  One year later, while packing to move away from Springland and its painful memories, Mrs. Jocelin Piedmont phoned her brother and told him in a quiet, detached voice that her husband was alive, concealed within the house: "I've heard his footsteps on the staircase... his hand reached for me straight through the wall." She had found messages in the cellar, blurred notes on damp paper she could barely read.

  Concerned for her mental health, her brother drove immediately to Springland, only to find the front door open and the townhouse empty. Mrs. Piedmont never came back; she had apparently joined her husband.

  Unseen, unsensed, unmindful of their absence, the world moved on.

  ~

  When he began to study graphic design in Ottawa, Tom Lighden came to realize just how small a part observation played in his life. From brief, barely-adequate glimpses of the world around him, he had built up a series of mental models that allowed him to navigate between obstacles without stumbling. He could cross a busy road while avoiding cars; he could walk from class to class while totally preoccupied without getting lost. But when asked to draw one of the university lecture halls or his tiny rented room from memory alone, he faltered. The shame of it forced him to study the world with greater concentration. Never again would he trust any impression made at first glance.

  He taught himself to stare. He carried scraps of paper with him at all times and drew studies of everyday things: the gleaming gnarls on a maple tree after the bark has peeled away to show the wormlike trails of larvae; the spikes of frost on a window pane, pale and branched like coral; the scintillant, moonlit wrinkling of the water on the surface of the Rideau Canal.