The Kimota Anthology by Steve Lockley, Stephen Gallagher, Neal Asher, Stephen Laws, Mark Chadbourn, Mark Morris, Paul Finch, William Meikle, Peter Crowther, Graeme Hurry Read Free Book Online Page B

always disturbed.
    Gill returned and beckoned to him to come out of the bedroom. “Well, what are we going to do now?” she said in a hard voice as if it was his responsibility to find a solution.
    “I don’t know. What do you think we should do?”
    “For Christ’s sake, John. I’ve got a heap of washing to do. There’s a sink full of dirty pots that you should have...”
    “Oh, shut up!” He forgot himself and almost shouted it. There was a split second pause and then Christopher let out a loud bawl of shock that developed into a wailing cry.
    “Now look what you’ve done,” Gill hissed, pushing past him.
    John had stomped halfway down the stairs when Christopher suddenly stopped crying. A second later he heard Gill catch her breath. He leapt back up two steps at a time before she had a chance to call his name.
    “What is it?” he said anxiously. Gill had plucked Christopher from the cot and was staring at him, wide-eyed and frightened.
    She held the baby out, mutely, and John took him in his huge hands, afraid of what he would see. Christopher was still breathing, but he appeared to have been frozen: his eyes were wide and staring unwaveringly, and his little lips were blue. His body was rigid, like a block of wood, and there seemed to be a spiderweb tracing of frost across his skin, following the pattern of veins. It glistened in the light that came through the window. John was transfixed with shock. Gingerly, he stretched out his fingers and brushed the down of Christopher’s cheek. It was like touching a window on a mid-winter morning. He snatched his hand back and rolled his fingers into a fist as if that would deny the sensation.
    “Christ...”
    Christopher hovered there for a moment, and then John clutched him to his chest and ran downstairs. Gill found them in front of the gas fire in the lounge. Christopher was swathed in thick towels from the kitchen as the fire roared on full, while John rubbed his son’s delicate hand, the tears streaming down his cheeks.
    “What’s going on?” he said as Gill breezed through the door. He looked pale and lost. “This isn’t right. It’s not natural.”
    Gill ran forward and knelt next to them, holding John tightly as the emotions bottled up by the stress of the previous few months came flowing out. For a moment, things were just as they had been. All John could feel was the bottomless well of love he had felt on his wedding day, and he could tell Gill felt it too. It washed out around them and swept them together, making them forget how they had drifted apart. It’s not dead, John thought with a rush of relief, and then he looked back at Christopher and everything was driven from his mind.
    It took half an hour before the chubby pinkness returned to Christopher’s limbs. Soon he was chuckling and kicking on the mat in front of the fire as if nothing had happened. John and Gill felt emotionally drained and they flopped back on the mat with their son silently while they tried to make sense of what had happened. Nothing could account for the blue frost or the depth of cold his skin radiated. They couldn’t bring themselves to discuss exactly what was the root cause, but in the privacy of their thoughts, they both turned to dark, unscientific things.
    That afternoon John cleared all the junk out of the other bedroom and moved Christopher’s cot in. He was convinced the nursery was the basis of the problem - “cold air currents circulating or something like that” - and he knew the spare room was always like an oven when the central heating was on.
    It took them both a long time to get to sleep that night; they had returned to their old routine of repeated checks on Christopher’s well-being, even though he seemed warm and relaxed in his new home. The worries persisted, even in their sleep.
    Gill woke suddenly in the early hours. The clock radio glowed 3.15am, but she felt clear-headed and alert as if someone had slapped her across the face. The Green