At the Edge of Waking (35 page)

The Cellarer told him so, and the Lady did not disagree.

They searched all the next day, all the day after that. Paul clung to his mother’s side until she chased him away like a stray dog; then he walked in the line where the experienced searchers told him to walk. They had a helicopter out, flying over the sparsely wooded hills. They had dogs, trained animals and neighbor’s pets who counted the twins as friends. Paul walked along the bank of the stream that ran down the west side of the valley, knowing with a knot of guilt in his gut that as soon as the searchers climbed the castle rock they would find—

But he wasn’t there. Claude. He wasn’t where Paul had left him. The searchers said so, and they had climbed to the top, looked all around.

Paul couldn’t believe it. He
didn’t
believe it, and on the third evening he went up the valley himself, exhausted and sick with shame. He had fought with his mother. She wasn’t speaking to him. She wasn’t speaking to anyone, just looking, looking, looking, and calling Claude’s name until she was as hoarse as a crow. So when the rest of the searchers were giving up for the day—night was falling and a wintry cold seemed to be pouring down from the deep blue spaces between the stars—he went back up the valley and climbed castle rock in the dark. Claude was there, as Paul had known he would be, sitting in a litter of dead leaves and smashed plaster and pages torn from a book. When Paul reached the top of the rock Claude looked up, and for a long time they just stared at each other in the last of the daylight. Claude was filthy, bloody, smelling of piss. He looked strangely old, as if the three days had been three years in a fairy hill. He did not speak. They had once been able to read each other’s minds, but Paul could not guess what Claude saw when he looked at him. Paul found it harder and harder to meet his eyes and finally he had to look away.

But he was still strong enough to pull his brother up and help him down to level ground.

Story Notes

Three Days of Rain

I wrote “Three Days” as a tribute to one of the greatest American short story writers, Ray Bradbury. His stories are so often about people trembling on the edge of some great beginning or ending in their lives, and are so full of the power of nostalgia, of the human need to cling to the idea of Home even in the strangest lands, even at the end of the world. Also, and not coincidentally, it typically takes me three days to write the first draft of a short story.

Of course, there is also a certain amount of ecological despair at the story’s heart. If you’ve ever flown into Phoenix, Arizona, and seen all the lawns and golf courses and swimming pools shining under the desert sun . . .

Cold Water Survival

For the longest time “Cold Water Survival” was a title in search of a story. Then the fabulous Ellen Datlow asked me to write something for her Lovecraft tribute anthology. My favorite Lovecraft story is probably “Shadow over Innsmouth,” but I had recently seen Werner Herzog’s great Antarctic documentary,
Encounters at the End of the World,
and the breaking up of the massive southern ice sheets was very much on my mind. So “At the Mountains of Madness” became my inspiration, and the story was born.

By the way, I went in with the firm intention to disallow all tentacular activity, but by the end the sneaky little bastards had crept in, in spite of everything I could do.

Brother of the Moon

Yet another story that arises from my fascination with 20th -century history. This one comes from the collapse of the USSR and its satellites. Originally I meant to write about a mercenary company that takes over a country with the attitude that they cannot possibly do a worse job than any of their employers, but then I caught sight of the relationship between our hero and his sister, and the plangent tone of love and loss took hold. Weirdly, considering the undercurrents of war, incest, and suicide, I think it’s one of my sweeter stories, with a rare happy ending.

The Rescue

In the USSR and elsewhere, political dissidents, and especially the rebellious children of the powerful, were sometimes sent to mental hospitals to be tortured in the name of re-education. The people who did this were morally insane. Hence the story.

I have to say, I think it’s one of the tightest, creepiest, most psychologically subtle pieces I’ve ever done, and I love the way the haunting keeps almost to the background until the end. I take no credit for any of that, by the way. This is one of those stories that just used me as an intermediary to get itself down on the page.

Country Mothers’ Sons

I was offered a commission to write a werewolf story, and I was so happy to be asked that I accepted without much thought.
Sure, I’d love to!
was swiftly followed, however, by,
Oh crap, now what do I do?
As far as I can remember, my original idea was to write about the crazy guy who lived in the woods outside a neighboring town. How I got from there to a widow in post-WWII Europe I’m not entirely sure, but I like the way her narrative slowly fills in what she doesn’t want to say out loud, even to herself. It’s a fairly self-conscious literary story, and I’m not sure how well it fitted into the anthology it was commissioned for. I’m very fond of it, though. I love the image of the pigeons on the rooftops worshipping the moon.

Proving the Rule

This novella was one of my very first commissions, for an anthology about wizards, and as with “Country Mothers” I had blithely accepted before it occurred to me how seldom I write about conventional magic-user types. In my stories, magic tends to be what happens to my characters, not what they do. So I had to think for a while before I came up with an angle on the idea that I liked, and then it took me a few false starts before I hit upon the early Electric Era setting. That was what really brought the story to life—that, and the image of Graham waiting for Lucy in the pub, so grudgingly in love.

Virgin of the Sands

“Virgin” was more consciously inspired by other people’s fiction than most of my stuff. Olivia Manning’s
Levant Trilogy
and Michael Ondaatje’s
The English Patient
both lent me images and ideas; and the latter, particularly, suggested a sensuality, and a sexuality, that is rather unusual in my writing. I was surprised, though, when the story was picked by two different erotica anthologies. To me it’s a horror story—very much a horror story—about the dehumanizing aspects of war.

Gin

For my excellent mother’s sake I should say that “Gin” does not arise from my personal experience. I think the story really came from the sense I had as a child, of glimpsing the strange inner lives of other children’s families. Certainly the setting is drawn from the neighborhoods I lived in back then: the closed-in house with the dried-out lawn, silence on the outside hinting at the desperation within. The drawer full of broken dishes came from a dream. The mattress full of maggots was a waking inspiration. It still makes me shudder.

Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom

This must be the single most intimate story I’ve ever written. At its heart lies a deep conflict I carry within me, between my very pragmatic and skeptical self who keeps the difference between fantasy and reality extremely clear, and the self who lives in and by my imagination. But what really inspired me—or at least, what energized me—to write “Queen” was the purchase of a very expensive bodhran that I could not afford. I keenly remember walking down an icy street in Ottawa in January, the sun blazing out after an ice storm, the wind blowing skaters down the Rideau Canal, and the whole story, beginning to end, hitting me with such force that I skidded into the nearest café, drum and all, and wrote down the first couple of scenes.

The Long, Cold Goodbye

This is one of my very favorite stories. I loved writing about all that cold. I wrote the story in June, and I can remember looking up from the computer and being thoroughly disoriented by the green grass and flowers outside my window. But it is the tenderness at the heart of the story, and the bittersweet sense of the friendship that should have been a love affair, that makes it live for me.

Mind you, if it unsettles anyone who lives, as I do, on land stolen from indigenous peoples by false or broken treaties, then that’s definitely a bonus.

Castle Rock

I went to high school with two sets of twins. One pair, identical boys, seemed entirely happy with their lot, but the other pair, a brother and sister, were cruelly divided by her congenital bone ailment. The brother-twin seemed to live under a perpetual shadow of guilt. I think those two pairs became a kind of template for me: the doubled self, and the doubled self divided. Add a wary fascination with the cloudy boundary between imagination and delusion, and voila: Castle Rock.

Publication History

“Three Days of Rain” © 2007 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Asimov’s.

“Cold Water Survival” © 2009 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Asimov’s.

“Brother of the Moon” © 2007 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Fantasy.

“The Rescue” © 2010 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Postscripts.

“Country Mothers’ Sons” © 2010 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Full Moon City.

“Proving the Rule” © 2008 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Book of Wizards.

“Virgin of the Sands” © 2006 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Lust for Life.

“Gin” © 2006 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Eidolon.

“Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” © 2007 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Interfictions.

“The Long, Cold Goodbye” © 2009 by Holly Phillips. Originally appeared in
Asimov’s.

“Castle Rock” is original to this collection.

About the Author

Holly Phillips is the author of the novels
The Burning Girl
and
The Engine’s Child.
She is also the author of many short stories, many of which have been collected in her World Fantasy Award-nominated collection,
In the Palace of Repose,
and have appeared in such magazines as
Asimov’s, Fantasy, Clarkesworld, Weird Tales, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, On Spec,
and anthologies such as
Full Moon City, Interfictions, Shine,
and
Lovecraft Unbound.

OTHER BOOKS BY HOLLY PHILLIPS

In the Palace of Repose

The Burning Girl

The Engine’s Child