Free SYLVIE'S RIDDLE by Alan Wall

calls?'
    'I have to monitor all calls to the Institute; it's done on a strictly one-in-X random-selection principle.'
    'Well, I'd appreciate it if, in future, one-in-X is someone else and not me. Because I don't like it.'
    'Goodness. You do seem to be making a habit of taking the bull by the horns at the moment.'
    'Not sure about that, Hamish. But I've always been very good at taking the Jock by the jockstrap. And I once saw a farm demonstration: how to turn a bull into a bullock. So watch it.'
    Then as she was turning away, he said this: 'Oh, by the way.
    Your husband phoned this morning. He wondered if you might be here, since you apparently weren't there. Sadly not, I told him. I had no idea of your whereabouts, of course, any more than he did.'
    Sylvie drove through the Birkenhead Tunnel in a state of chilled exasperation. No graffiti down here, she noticed. Even the taggers weren't prepared to endure so much carbon monoxide for their urban art. She put on the cassette that her best student had given her the day before. Paul Darcy. Through the Concrete Corridors. 'He's into some of the same things you are,' the student had said. She tried to concentrate on the music and ignore the hundred thousand tons of w ater thrashing about above her.
 
Dreams and speculations, fragments washed up by the waves
Ruins under mountains and ancient treasures deep in caves
I stepped into your labyrinth, I heard the monster roar
But a doctor in a white coat with a clipboard led me gently to the door
And when you arrived with a pen-torch and a smile on your face
Bringing all the medicine I'd need for my stay in this place
Through the concrete corridors, your smiling words were feathery and slight
When the blindfold came off, darkness flashed not light.
 
    Another minotaur, then. Blinded by passion and bewilderment. But she couldn't concentrate, and switched over to the news instead. More slaughter in the caverns there. Bombs going off in the mountains. When she arrived back she heard the sound of one of Johnny and Owen's films. She walked across to the set and switched the sound off.
    'Why did you phone the Institute this morning?'
    'To find out where you were ... how you were.'
    'How very solicitous. You bugger off to Llandudno and then start snooping around after me.'
    'I wasn't snooping. Anyway, where were you?'
    'With a friend.'
    'Have a name, this friend?
    'I don't owe you anything, Owen. I'm not saying you owe me anything either, but I definitely don't owe you anything.'
    'Do you want a coffee?'
    'Yes, please. I'll go have a shower and get changed.'
    'I like the get-up, to be honest. Only hope your friend did.' Then he went to the kitchen . She turned and looked at the silent images on the screen. Tom posters on a decaying wall. Balls of dead grass blowing down the street. A child crouched beside a blown-up truck, his face a miniature diagram of the world's desolation.
    'Do you want me to sleep in the other room again?'
    'Yes please.'
    But he came to bed anyway, half an hour after her. Lay beside her. Placed a hand on her breast.
    'No.'
    'It was so warm the other night.'
    'So warm you went to Llandudno the following day. It had been a long time before that, Owen. Given everything that had happened. Maybe you haven't remembered it all yet. Alex, I mean.'
    He hadn't removed his hand; neither had she.
    'I was just trying to help you remember who you were. So much of sex is politeness, remember. A woman in one of your scripts says that.'
    Only minutes before falling asleep did she remember Henry.
    She hadn't phoned him back. He'd survive the night though, wouldn't he?
     

Earth, Water, Fire and Air
     
     
    Alex read the passage from The One True Elemental for the fourth time and told herself that the pain in her gut was merely the sound of earthly grossness leaving. So much corruption for so long had rotted the invisible conduits and made them flesh-like in weightiness and sloth. She was being pulled down temporarily towards what Lady