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STEPHEN DEDMAN

Stephen Dedman is the author of the novels The Art of Arrow Cutting and Shadows Bite, and more than ninety published short stories. His most recent book is Never Seen by Waking Eyes, a collection of his horror fiction. He has won the Aurealis and Ditmar awards, and been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Sidewise Award, the Seiun Award, the Spectrum Award, and a sainthood. For a bibliography and news updates, check out http://stephen-dedman.livejournal.com/

This story was inspired by (i) an entry in The Guinness Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, (ii) spending too much time wondering what King Lear’s wife or wives must have been like, and (iii) a deadline.

The doctor looked at his Rolex, and waited for the vultures to return.

It was a futile gesture, born of habit: the watch said exactly the same thing as the other clocks in the room, including the one on the television screen that claimed to be sent direct from the Greenwich Observatory. Sixteen minutes to midnight, give or take a few seconds. A moment later, he heard a bell toll from the next room, the huge library that the women called the trophy room. A quarter to.

“What hour now?” he whispered, glancing at the ancient actor lying on the bed, his face barely visible beneath the respirator and the electrodes of the EEG and other devices that the doctor tried not to think of as instruments of torture. There was no reply, so the doctor muttered the next few lines himself. “I think it lacks of twelve. No, it is struck. Indeed? Then I heard it not: then it draws near the season wherein the spirit held his wont to walk.”

Still no reply; the only indication that the old man’s spirit hadn’t already walked was the sound of his laboured breathing and the gentler rhythm of the EEG display. The doctor looked at the TV screen, noticing movement at the back of the crowd as bobbies scuffled with an intoxicated and boisterous reveller. Happy fucking new year.

He turned his attention back to his patient, and friend, of forty years. Robert Dulac had been overly fond of his drink, consistently ignoring his doctor’s advice that he cut back on it, and on the cigarettes. He’d mostly stayed off less legal drugs while he was in England, though he claimed to need them to endure the vicious madness of Hollywood. He hated needles, especially after his second wife’s death, but his aquiline nose might have been designed for inhaling powders. And he’d continued to work long after Ken Foster had suggested he retire, returning to Stratford to play Cassius, then Claudius, then Prospero, until collapsing after a bravura performance as Lear at the Olivier. And now painkillers and other drugs were constantly flowing into his veins, keeping him in a dreamy stupor. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep,” Foster murmured.

“Doctor Foster?”

Foster turned around as Dulac’s eldest daughter, Rhiannon, walked in. He’d forbidden smoking in the house, so the two women disappeared out onto the balconies several times an hour. The weather outside was foul, and Rhiannon still seemed to be shivering. Her black dress was respectable enough for funeral wear, but too thin for the cold. Maybe, the doctor thought uncharitably, she’d been hoping that the old man would die in time for her to go to a party.

“He’s still alive,” said Foster, a little more harshly than he’d intended.

As if on cue, the middle daughter - Gwen - walked into the sick-room. “And there’s still no sign of Cory,” she said. “She should have been here half an hour ago.”

“Maybe her plane was delayed,” said Foster.

“I called the airport already. It got in before the worst of the storm hit. I don’t think she’s coming.”

Foster glanced at Dulac, but the old man gave no sign of having heard.

“And even if she does get here, will he know?”

Foster didn’t answer.

“The show must go on,” said Rhiannon, dryly. “Applaud loudly enough, and he’ll come back for an encore.”

“Maybe it’s not about him seeing her,” said Foster. “Maybe he wants to give her the chance to say goodbye to him.”

“Is that any excuse for torturing him like this?”

“It’s what he asked for,” said Foster, and this time, the harshness in his voice was deliberate. “He wanted to give your sister time to get here, and he made me promise not to turn the machine off until tomorrow morning.”

Rhiannon snorted, and sat down in one of the antique Chippendale chairs. “Jesus,” she said. “He specified New Year’s Day?”

The doctor shrugged, and looked at the digital clock on the TV screen: 11.51 pm. “Maybe he wanted to see in the new millennium,” he said.

“The millennium’s got nothing to do with it,” said Rhiannon. “It’s the ankou.”

“The what?”

“You know how superstitious he was,” she said. “Never lighting three on a match; never saying ‘Macbeth’ if he could help it; never wearing yellow, even in the seventies; all that crap. Well, the ankou’s this ghost or whatever, that they believe in where he grew up. He told me about it when I was a kid.” She glanced at Gwen. “Scared the shit out of me, gave me nightmares for weeks, which is probably why Mum wouldn’t let him tell you the same story.

“Anyway, the ankou is sort of like the banshee, and sort of like the grim reaper. It comes to your house and screams or knocks or whatever when you’re about to die. It has long white hair and it can turn its head all the way around like that girl in The Exorcist, and it has two helpers, skeletons, who help carry the dead away to this cart it rides in.”

“Doesn’t sound all that scary to me,” said Gwen. “He played worse monsters in some of his movies, and he told us all about those.”

“I wasn’t finished,” said Rhiannon. “If you’re the last person to die in your parish that year, you become the ankou for a year, and you have to go around collecting the dead. And you know how much Dad hated bodies. He wouldn’t use a real skull when he played Hamlet - they had to buy a plastic one. He wouldn’t even go to funerals unless it was a closed casket, and even then…”

Foster was silent. He knew that Dulac had been conspicuously absent from the funeral of his first wife - Rhiannon and Gwen’s mother - but that had been several years after their very messy divorce. Margaret Dulac-Stuart had been a film editor turned sharp-tongued director, and Dulac had often said that their relationship should have been left on the cutting room floor where it had begun. He’d suspected aloud that neither of his elder daughters was his own, but Foster had pointed out that both had been cursed with the distinctive Dulac proboscis. Neither had it now, of course; Margaret had paid the best cosmetic surgeons in Hollywood to trim their noses down to more normal dimensions.

Alison, Dulac’s second wife and Corinna’s mother, had been very different - a moderately talented actress, barely half her husband’s age, she had been possessed of a delicate, almost elfin, beauty. She hadn’t lived long enough to lose that beauty, dying in L.A. of a drug overdose that had eventually been ruled accidental. Cory looked almost like a clone of her mother, except for her eyes: instead of being afflicted with her father’s nose, she’d inherited his dark green irises. Her father had notoriously doted on her, often at the expense of her less beautiful half-sisters, and she had grown up with her mother’s impulsive and wilful temperament - very different from the more careful Margaret and her daughters. Possibly the only things all the family members had ever had in common was a fondness for show business and a weakness for alcohol. Rhiannon and Gwen had followed their mother’s example by joining Alcoholics Anonymous, but Cory hadn’t. Rhiannon liked to say that her youngest sister thought that AA was a bra size.

“I’ll phone the airport again,” said Gwen, breaking the silence. “Maybe they’ll tell me whether she was on the plane. Or maybe she couldn’t hire a car, or find a taxi driver who’d come out here in this weather. I know I wouldn’t, if I had a choice.”

Rhiannon nodded, and Gwen walked out. The eldest sister looked at her father expressionlessly, then said softly, “He wouldn’t know whether she was here or not, or what the time was, would he?”

Foster didn’t answer.

“If the stroke was as bad as you say…”

“There’s some brain activity, and he’d be in pain - very severe pain - if we stopped the drugs. How much he remembers or recognizes… there’s no way of being sure.”

“Maybe he’s lucky.”

“I doubt he’d agree.”

“I mean… if she doesn’t turn up. He’ll never know.”

Foster shrugged.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters, doctor?” She didn’t bother asking whether he had any children; Foster had never bothered hiding in the closet.

“One brother,” said the doctor, looking at the EEG readout. “Why?”

“You were the elder?”

“Yes.”

“What does your brother do?”

“He’s a librarian. Why?”

“Were you the favourite child?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Do you know what’s in my father’s will?”

“No.”

“Do you think he’s left anything to us, or has it all gone to Cory?”

“I’d have no way of knowing. She’s younger, still single, still at school - in theory, anyway,” he conceded. “Maybe he thinks she needs more than you do.”

She smiled thinly. “You’re one of his oldest friends, and even you’re not going to pretend that he’s treated us fairly. She’s been his favourite since she was born. Maybe before that.”

Foster shrugged.

“You’re her doctor, too. You’d know if there was any truth to the rumours about the two of them…”

“There isn’t,” he said, sharply. “Did you start that story?”

“Me? Why would I do such a thing? Just because the two of them hated me?”

He yawned, and looked at his watch again. A minute before midnight. “Nice fairy story, but you left out the evil stepmother.”

Rhiannon stared at him as though he’d just slapped her, then gave him a crooked smile. “Okay. Alison never actually treated me badly, even after Cory was born. And yes, Mum could be a bitch sometimes, but you can’t say she wasn’t provoked. And at least she was honest. Is it right that a father should love one child more than the others, is it fair to any of them, just because they have different mothers, or one is prettier than the others, or -”

The clock in the library began to chime the hour. As if on cue, Gwen walked in, her expression bleak, her cell phone in her hand.

“Turn off the machine,” she said.

“It’s not—”

“There’s no reason to wait,” she snapped. “I just spoke to the hire car people. Then I spoke to the police. There’s been an accident. Cory wasn’t as sober as the clerk seems to have thought, and the weather…” She shook her head. “She isn’t going to make it. Let him die in peace. Turn the machine off.”

* * * *

Dulac heard the crunch of wheels on the wet gravel outside, and a resounding knock on the main door. He tried to sit up, but his body was too heavy and held down by all the incomprehensible medical apparatus; it was all he could do to open his eyes.

The ankou stood beside his bed, turning its head around completely to examine the other figures in the room. Two skeletons stood behind it, one on each side. Dulac broke into a wheezing laugh at the realization that at least he’d survived into the next year. Someone else would be King of the Dead, going from house to house in the parish to call for the -

The ankou turned her face to him, and he recognized the elfin features and dark green eyes, and screamed.