Forever Shores by Peter McNamara Page A

felt for a moment as if mine were the sole consciousness active in the whole world. A trickle of cold sweat ran down my back, something I’ve only ever read about. In the last few weeks I had driven a powerful bike across vast plains, much of the landscape nearly barren due to the El Nino drought and maybe the Greenhouse Effect, I’d once come close to a fall from the skidding machine under the hooves of a hundred spooked cattle, and that had scared me without getting in my way; that was fear in the service of sharpened instincts and self-preservation. In Tansy’s deathly quiet bathroom, I felt like wetting my pants.
    My neck hurt. I got a sudden picture of how grotesque I looked, craning on the edge of the bath, which broke my mood. I laughed softly to myself and stood up, unkinking my spine, put my hand on the curtain to yank it back. The window nearest to me creaked ever so slightly, and I heard it open a little.
    This was impossible. I was on the second floor of a tall old structure without a fire escape or any of that modern nonsense. I’d checked carefully to confirm my memory of the garden: no new lattices, the trees were all sensibly positioned metres away to prevent fire hazards, and Tansy’s ladder was inside the house, not even outside in the locked shed. Dugald O’Brien was not raising a single wuffle in the night, let alone a bark at intruders. What the hel l ?
    My heart slammed, and my mouth was dry. I pushed myself back against the edge of the bath, back corrugated by the tiles of the wall, stared with difficulty through the gap. The nearer window was quietly pushed all the way open. I heard a muffled scuffle and a naked female back appeared in the window frame. A long brown leg came over the window sill, probed for the floor. My boots were sitting in plain view beside the toilet. Well, lots of people leave their clothes scattered about. Not in Tansy’s house. But then these intruders would hardly be familiar with the nuances of Tansy’s housekeeping policies. Don’t be ludicrous, August, what would you know about what they know about? There’s a naked woman climbing in a second-storey window!
    She stood in the bathroom, her back to me. I felt an impulse to reach out and give her the surprise of her life with a playful smack on that pertly rounded ass. Less offensive, no doubt, than whacking her with the cricket bat, which I still clutched in my right numb hand; that might be sensible, if unsporting, but it wouldn’t teach me anything about her bizarre activities. She was leaning out into the air, grunting and heaving, and suddenly hauled in the heavy front end of a very dead adult male through the window. The body stuck, shaking the window frame.
    â€˜Don’t shove, Maybelline,’ she said in an angry tone. ‘You got the shoulders jammed.’
    There was a tricky moment when the corpse withdrew a little, as she angled the shoulders, then surged back into the room to join the two of us. The far end of the corpse came into view, supported by an overweight muscular woman. Her biceps rippled impressively as she pushed the stiff hind quarters over the sill. The first woman let the carcass thud to the tiles. With a business-like grunt, Maybelline vaulted into the room. She was rather hairy, that much was obvious, her bikini line distinctly unfashionable. I thought I was drugged, or hallucinating, and then the first woman turned to face the bath, and I was sure of it.
    Beauty like this you do not see, I told myself numbly, not in the real world. (That estimate was so astonishingly wrong, in such an astonishing way, that I simply note it here for the record.) Neither of the women was much older than me. University students, maybe, playing a preposterous prank. They moved about their macabre task with dispatch and grace, making a minimum of noise.
    â€˜Help me with his clothes, loon.’
    Inside half a minute they’d stripped him of his shoes, suit and