Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant by Ramsey Campbell, Peter Rawlik, Mary Pletsch, Jerrod Balzer, John Goodrich, Scott Colbert, John Claude Smith, Ken Goldman, Doug Blakeslee Page A

here?” Cammie asked.
    “You were always here on the lake shore,” the woman repeated in the nonsensical way characters so often did in dreams.
    “But, I was in the mansion across the lake.” Was it foolishness to quibble in a dream?
    “There is nothing across the lake but empty fields,” the young woman said. “Although there are those who claim to have seen a phantom city out there, like our own, only a shadow.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “What is there to understand? This is your home and has always been. What more need you know than that?”
    “No, it isn’t. I’ve never been here before.” Yet, even as she said that, Cammie felt uncertainty creep over her. Surely she had dwelt here forever? Or, had she been here in her dreams? After a short pause of confusion, she went on. “No, no, that’s right. I lived in the mansion across the lake. I’ve never been here before. This place doesn’t exist. This is just a dream.”
    “Cammie, why do you say such things? You’ve always lived here with me.”
    “No, I haven’t! I don’t even know who you are!”
    “Cammie!” the young woman gasped in shock. “That’s a cruel thing to say!”
    “Who are you?”
    “It’s me, Cassie! Honestly, what is wrong with you?”
    “I don’t know...” Where did she belong? Here or across the lake in that phantom mansion? Which was real and which was not? Was either real? She shook her head, attempting to clear it, recall her past.
    “Come walk with me ...” The woman held out her hand and she took it, walking with her through the shadowy city of soaring towers.
    It was like the freakish offspring of London and New York as she had seen them in photos and on the movie screen, possessing the great age of the former and the skyscraping buildings of the latter. It was a bizarre amalgam; bizarre yet strangely familiar. The towers seemed so great of height that they passed behind the swollen belly of the ivory moon.
    “I can’t stay here,” Cammie said, at last, her voice plaintive. She knew she had to leave, yet part of her was pained at the thought.
    “Oh, Cammie, there’s no need to be this way.”
    “I have to leave; I have to go home.”
    “There is nowhere else; this is your home.”
    “It isn’t, Cassie. Oh, I wish that it were, but it isn’t; it isn’t...”
    “Well, decide not now, Cammie. Let the red dawn surmise what we shall do, when the twin suns sink beneath the lake and all life is through...”
    She was silent for a while as they walked through the empty streets of the funereal city, attempting to make sense of that. Eventually, she had to ask, “What does that mean?”
    “That is how our passion play ends.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “When the twin suns descend and boil away the lake in a coruscation of flame, this city shall cease to exist and all life here shall end.
    “I don’t understand...”
    “You shall shortly. See, there to the north, the twin suns burst into fiery dawn.”
    She turned her gaze northwards and, amidst the towers, she did, indeed, see two fiery red suns blaze into existence. With a horrific inevitability, the two balls of flame fell towards the lake as waves of heat rippled out towards them. Cammie felt her skin blister and bubble and slough away, just as the cloud lake boiled away in a hiss of steam, the rising clouds joining ash and dust to form twin mushroom-shaped plumes.
    “We die in Lost Carcosa,” she thought she heard Cassie say before her consciousness evaporated in flame.
     
    *     *     *
     
    “Now, where has that dopey Sheila got herself to?” Rob wondered.
    He’d woken to find himself on the veranda alone and her bed unslept in. It was now noon and he was beginning to worry.
    “I guess I’d better go looking for her ...” he muttered, and headed for the battered old skeleton of a Model T that served him for transport. He was trying to imagine just how far she might have gone since last he saw her. He’d have to spiral out from