The tram slowed and came to a halt. The woman stood up, and walked towards the door at the front. As the door opened, she looked back down the tram. Alex looked back at her. Then she walked down the steps of the tram and out onto the street. The door closed and the tram started off again.
Alex jumped up, ran to the back of the tram, threw open the door, and jumped down to the street from the footplate, nearly falling flat on his face. They were in an old part of the city, close to the river, where the streets narrowed and sloped down towards the dark water. The woman had crossed the road, but she must have heard him jump from the tram because she stopped and turned, looked at him crouching in the road between the cold metal tram-lines. The warm red lights of the tram receded into the mist, then it turned a corner, and was gone. She looked at him, said nothing.
“Don’t be scared, please,” he stammered. “I don’t mean—I just—I had to talk to you.”
She stayed on the other side of the street, but didn’t walk away, didn’t look around in alarm for help. He crossed the road towards her, hands held wide, making trembling circles in the air.
“Please, you must be freezing. Let me just walk with you, wherever you’re going. Just—just let me just walk with you a little while, and then I’ll go, I promise.”
She smiled, a slow sad smile, and nodded. Alex knew that whatever happened in the next few days, whether he was sent to the front or not, whether he lived or not, he would remember that smile until he had memory no longer. She began to walk, and he fell in beside her, talking more than he knew he ought to, but desperate to try and say in a few minutes what it could take a lifetime to tell.
The road came to an end facing the high brick wall of a warehouse that overlooked the river. An alley ran off alongside the warehouse. The woman hesitated, as if she were uncertain of the direction to take. She turned towards the alley, and then stopped, and looked at Alex for a moment. Her perfection made him want to cry. The autumn air was cold on his face, the night was still, everything was quiet and perfect. Everything was sharp, the world more real than Alex had ever known it, beauty and meaning in every damp brick, in every tree that reached dark fingers towards the night. She held out her hand to him, and he took it. Her skin was like the most delicate statue carved from ivory, unblemished, pale, cold as stone.
Alex had known that she was dead from the first moment he saw her on the tram. He did not care. In this city, amongst the rotting leaves and the distant thundering of the guns, the difference between the dead and the living did not seem very important to him any more.
“Let’s walk,” he said to her, “I’ll help you find them. Your family. I’ll help you find them.” Her fingers tightened on his, and they walked on together. Halfway down the alley, Alex heard footsteps behind them. He turned, and saw three men. One of them carried a large knife, the sort a butcher would use to cut joints of meat. Another swung something in his hand, something that was white and indistinct in the soft mist that rose from the river. As they came closer, Alex saw that it was a bunch of lilies.
He looked around the alley. If they ran, the men would catch them before they reached the end. A yard or two away, a solid door was set into the brick of the warehouse. It was padlocked and barred, there was no way through, but leaning in the doorway was an old iron shovel, its edges corroded and half eaten away with rust. Alex picked it up.
“Go,” he said to the woman. “Go. Find your family. Be as quick as you can. Do you understand? And thank you. Do you understand? Thank you.”
She looked at him and he could not tell if she knew what she was saying or not. Then there was a slight squeeze of her fingers on his, and his hand was holding nothing but air and she was walking away down the alley.
“We’re going to pass,” the man with the knife said in a conversational voice. “Whether you stand there or not. You know what she is. Move.”
“Who is he?” the man carrying the lilies said, sounding nervous. “I don’t know him. He’s not her family, I told you, I know the family, that’s how I knew she’d be coming back. They’re all waiting for her in the house. It’s only on the next street, if we don’t take her now, here…”
The three men kept walking towards Alex. The man with the knife was slapping it gently against his free hand.
“Get out of the way,” he said. “We’ve got no quarrel with you. Walk away and let us put nature back how it ought to be. It’s the new way. Way things ought to be. Soon the war will be over and it will all be like this. You’re either with us, and the future, or you’re with them, and the past. Stay where you are, and we’ll make you like her. What do you care anyway? Why are you bothering? She’ll be dead inside a week.”
Alex thought of his grandfather, of the way that the river at home curved between the fields and shone secret and silver in the light of the moon, of the trains full of soldiers that rattled off up into the hills towards the mud and the fear, of the dead that walked the city, and he thought about the gentle curve of her neck and the feel of her hand upon his.
“So will I,” he said, and raised the shovel.
ABOUT THIS STORY
Thanks for reading Lilies. I hope that you enjoyed it.
"Lilies" was first published in Postscripts magazine, Number 2, Summer 2004. It was reprinted in 2005 in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 (ed. Stephen Jones).
If you want to read more stories like Lilies, then you might like my collection of stories called Ice Age, which includes Lilies and seven other strange and chilling stories. I have also published a collection of my award-winning short crime fiction, Nowhere To Go.
Please think about leaving a review of Lilies, even if just a short one – it helps other people find the story too.
I'm always happy to hear feedback from readers - email me at
[email protected], find me on Twitter at twitter.com/littorally or at my through my website, iainrowan.com.
Iain, March 2011
Cover photo: Grace, by Kalaskai
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