Screaming Science Fiction Read Online Free PDF

Perhaps it had been “we think….” But now there was just an emptiness, with nothing out there at all except the world and all of space and all the other stars and worlds in it. And for the first time in my life I experienced loneliness. Even with someone right there beside me, I was lonely….
     

     
    It was mid-September, still warm but very soggy, and fog lay like a milky shroud on the ocean where Perring’s Rock stuck up like a partly clenched fist from the grey surging water, its lighthouse index finger pointing at the leaden sky. Perring’s Rock was the sloping acre and a half plateau of some drowned mountain, rising seventy or eighty feet out of the sea with the lighthouse built at the highest point of the slope. There was something of a tiny scalloped bay and beach to the west, away from our approach path, and a flat area on our side of the lighthouse picked out with typical helipad patterns.
    Like ninety per cent of all lighthouses the Rock had been abandoned since before the turn of the century, when super high-tech Radar, Skyspy and the W-sats had put them out of business for good. But the way they’d built this one, the sea wasn’t going to claim it for a long time still to come. And desolate? The place looked about as lonely as I now felt. Except as we landed I saw that it wasn’t, or saw something which caused me to think that it wasn’t.
    It was Andrew himself!—leaning over the rail of the lighthouse’s circular balcony or platform, waving to us through the blast from our fans as we came down. Then I was free of my straps and sliding the cabin door open, out of my seat and down under the rotors before they’d even nearly stopped turning, and running up the rock-carved steps to pause at the foot of the tower. And there was my brother up top, still leaning on the rail high overhead, his shirt-sleeves flapping in a breeze sprung up off the sea. Except…he wasn’t looking down at me at all but at something else. And he was so still, so very still there at the rail. Not so much leaning on it, I now saw, as propped up by it.
    I was inside and up the steps three at a time; and no need to worry now about the state of my heart for I was galvanized, my actions electric, supercharged! Yanked aloft by a fear and a pain beyond physical pain, I hurtled up those steps, while from behind and below me Josh Bertin’s cry followed despairingly from the well of the corkscrew: “Ray!…Ray…!’
    Up to the old lamp room I swept, and on up its iron ladder and through the open trapdoor on to the flat, circular roof. And there was Andrew clinging to the iron three-bar safety rail—or rather hanging on it. One foot had slipped through and jammed there, dangling in space, and the other leg was bent at the knee, propping him against an upright. His left arm lay loosely along the top rail, while his opposite shoulder and arm lolled stiffly across it, supporting his weight. With his shirt-sleeves flapping like that and his head on one side, he looked like…like a sorry scarecrow fallen from its cross. And I saw that I was right and he hadn’t in fact been looking at us as we came in but at something else, down on the beach—as he’d blindly stared at it ever since his final, killing pain had reached out to me and knocked me out during the flight.
    The mist had curled away a little and now I too could see it there on the narrow shingle strand. A beached whale, with three great, deep crimson slashes across its spine where some liner’s screw had broken its broad back!
    The blood was still pumping, though very sluggishly now, sporadically; overhead the gulls wheeled and cried their excitement, like vultures waiting for the last spark to flicker low and expire; out at sea a cow and her calf stood off and spouted, and it seemed to me that over and above my own pain I could feel something of theirs, too.
    …Until, like ice-water down my back, there dawned the realization that I could actually feel it , and finally I