by Kelly Ledbetter
Edward spotted them as soon as he stepped onto the train platform. They, the Others, had a strange shimmer about them, a distortion of the air as if heat from the desert sands were pouring out of their skin. As far as Edward could tell, he was the only one able to see them: the other people on the platform, the regular ones, pushed past the two men and the woman, whose traveling dress was slightly shabby, without even a first glance.
Edward fingered the train ticket hanging on a cord around his neck. The Other men conferred over an unfolded map while the woman studied the horizon as if expecting to see the entire Luftwaffe or something equally disastrous. But the Germans wouldn’t fly this far inland. That was why Edward had been sent to the country where orphans would be safe.
The thought of returning to the rich man’s vacated country mansion, full of thirty children and one apathetic matron, made Edward’s heart sink. His cot was hard as plank, the food was flavorless, and most of the other children cried at night. The village school didn’t even have a compass or a protractor, so Edward’s drawings on whatever scraps of paper could be found had to be judged by eye rather than by straight edge. On the train ride, in his mind, Edward had redrawn the ruined buildings of London, mending the damage, straightening the lines.
The Others stood on the platform, turning the map this way and that, radiating heat waves. The stationmaster was to convey Edward to the orphanage, but Edward would rather get crushed by falling rubble. He crossed the platform as the train released a whistle and a burst of steam, chugging away north.
“Excuse me,” Edward said to the Others.
All three of them fixed him with expressions of surprise. The men had round, forgettable faces, similar enough to pass as adult siblings; but the woman’s features were sharp–a jaw whose angle could be precisely calculated, arched eyebrows the inverse of her curved lower lip. Lipstick, Edward noted. His mum was always wanting some, before she died.
“I say, are you lost?” Edward stayed outside their radius of shimmering air, about four feet away,. “Perhaps I could help.”
One of the men, who was carrying a well-traveled briefcase, consulted his watch, then the sky. It was after five in the evening, and would be dark before seven. The Others communicated by glance.
“You are a child,” said the woman woodenly. She could have been a marionette with a hinged jaw, the puppeteer elsewhere, offstage. No animation showed behind her eyes, as in Edward’s nightmare of running toward his mother, whose utter failure to recognize him always jolted him awake.
“I’m eleven,” Edward told her. “Almost not a child.” He glanced at the stationmaster, who was frowning pensively at a piece of paper, and tucked the train ticket inside his cardigan. ”Where are you from?” he asked, buttoning up his coat.
Again the trio of Others conferred with their eyes; then the man with the map pointed a stubby finger. The woman said, “We wish to go here.”
Under the man’s blunt fingernail, Edward read the tiny printed words: Stretford Abbey. A strong awareness of the stationmaster’s frown and the prospect of cold supper inspired his answer.
“Follow me.”
#
The history of Stretford Abbey involved a slow entropy into ruin. Conquered, reconquered, ransacked, and burned, it had finally been abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century in favor of the smaller chapel in town, the vicar explained one long summer afternoon. The matron had organized the supposedly educational tour to get the war orphans out of the house. For his part, Edward had settled into the second row of blackened pews to sketch the arches of the empty windows. The paper he’d filched from the rubbish bin smelled of sausage, which made him hungrier. The glassless window casings reminded him of empty eye sockets.
The Others’ walk from the station to the Abbey would take fewer than twenty minutes by cutting through a frozen meadow; the Others followed Edward single file. The overhead expanse of gray cloud rolling in deadened the sound of their footsteps crunching the brittle, icy grass. All of Edward’s belongings fit inside the satchel slung over his shoulder, which thumped against his thigh whenever he took a long step. None of the walkers spoke, though twice Edward almost turned to ask the Others again where they came from. Not England, not Germany. From a place where it was never so cold your breath turned to mist.
In the gloaming, Stretford Abbey seemed something out of the legends of Arthur: the dwelling of some atavistic, child-eating giant. Edward’s heart quailed a moment at the sight of the lichen-encrusted stone hulk, but the Others increased their pace, overtaking Edward in coils of wavering air. With a reluctance that surprised him, he traced their tracks toward the abbey.
Edward passed through the doorless entrance just as the clouds fully concealed the sinking sun. Though the abbey’s roof had long since burned away, the stone walls themselves acted as an ice box to preserve the pervading cold. Edward hugged himself, clenched fists jammed under his armpits for warmth. He lingered in the doorway, afraid to approach the Others who stood by the massive stone altar.
At the head of the aisle, before the nave, the man with the briefcase flicked open its latch with his thumb. He gently extracted a golden orb the size of a dove’s egg and, cupping it in his palm, extended his arm to the woman. She took the egg reverentially, raised it to her red lips, and bit off the narrow end so savagely Edward could hear her teeth click from the other end of the abbey. A spurt of dark golden treacle spread over her mouth and chin.
Then bodies of the Others began to release a hot, dry wind, as from the open door of a clay furnace, which poured from them in a deluge stronger and hotter by the second. The egg in the woman’s hand gushed its yellow yolk onto the floor in a far greater quantity than such a small container should have produced. The desert wind whipped so fiercely that Edward braced himself against the stone wall just to keep his feet. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the growing puddle of molten gold.
Above the gusting wind Edward heard the woman shout a sentence in a language that was not English, not German. At once the egg flashed a blinding bright white. When Edward blinked the water from his eyes, all was changed.
Stretford Abbey was restored to its original beauty, just as the vicar had described it. Its wooden pews shining with polish, its altar gilt, and each stained-glass window a hagiographic portrait–St. Peter with his keys of heaven, St. Catherine with her spiked wheel. A jeweled chalice perched on a velvet altar cloth. The warm glow of creamy candles in dozens of candelabra illuminated the painting on the vaulted ceiling. Edward stared in stupefied awe: as if the pain of centuries had never touched it, the abbey stood now not only resplendent at its pinnacle of luxury but also enriched by a patina of its glory renewed.
“How?” Edward cried to the three Others. He wanted a magic egg for himself, a miraculous panacea for the whole city of London. It would lift rubble from the streets, repair the broken buildings, restore the last place he’d been happy to warmth and light. All made beautiful, whole, perfect.
The Others seemed not to hear him as they looked about themselves with satisfaction. The woman wiped the golden juice from her lips with the back of a hand. The egg shell she crushed and dropped to the floor at her feet.
Edward ran forward to pick up the brittle pieces with hands no longer stiff with cold, but the golden slivers were too hot to touch. Edward sucked his stinging fingers and noticed for the first time that everything in the abbey shimmered with heat just as the Others had at the platform. “Who are you?” he asked the woman.
The woman turned her dispassionate gaze upon him. “We are collectors.” She sounded as though she were sight-reading from a script.
“What do you collect?” Edward found himself panting as hard as if he’d just taken the mile from the train station to the abbey at a flat run. The heat was becoming overwhelming. He felt wild with fear and exhilaration; the egg had transported ruin to majesty in half a second. No matter how hot–if he had such an egg, he would eat it too.
The woman tilted her head, jarring the acute angles in her face. “Moments, things,” she answered. “Things that are no longer and will never be again, in the moment when they cease.” She reached out and touched Edward’s left cheek; her fingertip with its golden veneer burned like a fresh bead of wax. Edward flinched away.
“We did not expect to collect you as well, almost-not-a-child.”
“I want–” said Edward, but he couldn’t finish the wish. An egg. The past. London. My mum. Escape. Perfection.
Stretford Abbey had become so unbearably hot because it was burning. Thick, churning smoke constricted Edward’s lungs and blinded his eyes. Coughing, he pressed his sleeve over his nose and staggered down the central aisle while beauty ignited into flames around him. He burst outside, his lungs tightened now by the thin winter’s night air. Roiling orange and yellow consumed the entire abbey. Within, the men watched the fire tonguing the ceiling. The woman watched Edward.
Edward retreated from the burning building until he began to feel cold inside his coat. Alone he watched Stretford Abbey’s second destruction: it had been reborn for demolition and would return irrevocably to decay. No one would come rushing to quench the flames that shattered the stained glass out of its casings. Like the Others themselves, only Edward could collect this moment that would never be again.
The conflagration lasted less than half an hour, dying far sooner than any real fire would. When Edward reentered the building, there were no ashes, embers, or Others. Edward even searched the ground before the altar for the fragments of eggshell, but it was as if nothing had broken there at all.
Except for the wound on Edward’s face where the woman had burned him, which stung in the cold wind as if her finger were still pressed there.
Though desolated by the loss of the egg and the Others, Edward could guess what attraction preserving impossible memories might have. He and his mother sharing after-school tea in a more perfect London. Life before the nightmares of booming and cracking and breaking. The bitter sweetness of such recollections was that they would never happen again. There is no return to such places and times.
Perhaps knowing this made him entirely not a child.
Edward began the trek back to the train station. If the stationmaster could be woken, Edward would have a ride out to his cot of tears. Whenever he could next come by some paper, he knew what he would sketch. A stained-glass panorama of London as it was, all angles and glory, the way the Others would see it.
© 2012 Kelly Ledbetter
Original fiction debuting at Residential Aliens.
Tags: Kelly Ledbetter, short story, speculative
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