Unnatural Selection

THIRTEEN

When it came to work, Maude Bewley was not the sort to procrastinate. The more of tomorrow’s work you did today, the less work you’d have to do tomorrow; that was her motto. This was the reason she was still puttering around in the Star Castle kitchen at ten o’clock at night. By doing some of the breakfast preparation now, she’d have that much less to do in the morning. She wouldn’t have to come in until it was time to put on the bacon, which meant she could stay in her warm bed an extra half hour, a welcome treat that her joints would appreciate. Having seen to the juices and milk in the refrigerator, she set out the warming pans in the dining room, making sure there was fuel in the burners; laid out the silverware, dishes, and cups; filled the urn with water and its basket with pre-ground coffee (not a one of these Americans wanted tea, even in the morning!); and stepped back to survey her handiwork. Very nice. Everything looked clean and appetizing.

She went back into the kitchen to put up her feet and have a nice, steaming cuppa and a snack at the corner table. She’d gotten chilled right through to the bone walking up to the castle from her flat in town this morning-this bloody fog!-and never had totally warmed up. She got a fairy cake from the refrigerator, poured the milk and tea into her cup, plunked in two teaspoons of sugar, and sat down with a sigh, pulling up another kitchen chair for her poor feet. As Kozlov’s cook and housekeeper, the work itself wasn’t too hard on her feet, and the additional guests weren’t really a problem because the girl from Bryher was coming in every afternoon for three hours to tidy up their rooms and help with the kitchen work.

But the walking up and down Garrison Hill Road all the way from Buzza Street every day, usually twice-that was killing her. Mr. Kozlov knew it, too, which was why, nice man that he was, he’d been pestering her about moving into one of the rooms in the castle. She’d thought about it. Imagine living in a castle! There would be real advantages, too; not only the ease, but think of the money saved. Only what was she supposed to do about her sister Grace, who lived with her in the flat in town? Grace was getting old now, and she’d never been very independent, even when she was a girl. Timid, easy to intimidate, that was Grace. What would she do on her own, after they’d roomed together for the last twenty years? Oh, she had her job at the bank, so money wasn’t the problem, but she needed someone to look out for her, Grace did. Someone to sort of intercede with the world on her behalf.

Besides, being in this dreary, chilly old place day and night with nobody for company but that bossy, creepy Mr. Moreton and Mr. Kozlov himself? Brr. You could barely get a civil word out of Mr. Moreton, and as for Mr. Kozlov-nice as he was, she was lucky if she understood two words out of every ten.

She wafted the cup gratefully under her nose, sipped, and swallowed. She could have been drinking tea all along, of course, but Maude Bewley preferred to put off pleasure until the labor was out of the way. So it was a reward, as you might say. And so much more enjoyable this way, with the work over and done with. She peeled the paper from the cake, bit through the soft raspberry icing, and washed the mouthful down with tea. She could feel the hot, sweet liquid flow all the way to her stomach, radiating outward, soaking into her body and easing her bones. With the second sip, her head began to nod. With the third, she was asleep.

The dream, like all dreams, began in the middle. She was lying under an enormously high waterfall. Not in the stream of water itself, but behind it, protected by a shelf of rock far above her. She herself was on another rocky shelf, midway down the face of the cliff. The shelf was small, just big enough to hold her, and it was high above the bottom, hundreds of feet, but she wasn’t frightened. It was quite pleasant there, and she dreamed she went to sleep and dreamed again. In her dream’s dream the pleasant waterfall, without changing, somehow became sinister and heart-stoppingly threatening. She fought to wake up and dreamed she did. Looking up, she saw a huge, amorphous, blobby thing poised at the top of the fall, a gigantic, formless presence that filled her with dread. To her dismay it tipped over the edge and came plummeting down on her. Unable to move, she squeezed her eyes shut and stopped breathing. She heard the thing whoosh by her, and she knew she had to wake up-really wake up this time-before it hit the bottom, or she would die when it struck.

She heard it hit, however-a slushy, thunky sound, not the ear-splitting crash she’d expected-and she didn’t die. She did wake up, however.

She found herself on her feet, disoriented, the fragments of the shattered teacup still skittering on the slate floor. No longer cold, she was sweating now. She had the terrible feeling that it had been more than a dream, that, just outside, some thing had plunged by the kitchen’s high casement windows to smash itself on the paving stones of the narrow, moatlike passageway that ran around the castle just inside the inner retaining wall of the ramparts. A few years ago, in fog much like this, a gull, unable to see, had flown smack into the upper part of the castle and done just that. She had been in the kitchen finishing up the lunch dishes at the time, and she had heard it plunge by the window, or perhaps seen it out of the corner of her eye. She had gone out to investigate, almost stumbling over the bloodied, broken, still-living creature lying on its back, and the experience haunted her still.

Could it have happened again? Only whatever it was, if there really was anything, had sounded bigger than any seagull. Well, she wasn’t going out into that passageway this time, not in this nasty murk. She’d once seen a big rat running around out there, or rather heard a rat, or something that sounded like a rat. The whole thing was probably just her dream anyway-this awful fog had upset her mental balance-and if it wasn’t, let somebody else find it this time.

She gathered up the pieces of the broken teacup with a wet cloth, shrugged into her still-damp coat, and went home.