The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
“Mister, you want a blowjob?”
It wasn’t her voice. I looked up. It wasn’t even a woman.
I looked back down at the hands. I looked up at the face. They didn’t even belong together. It was a pockmarked boy and when he talked to me he stared off into space. There was no relation between the vacuity of his expression and the passion with which those hands caressed my hands.
“I don’t like to do such thing,” he said, “but I’m a poor college student and I needing money. So you can come back after 5 p.m. You not be disappointed.
The fingers kneaded my wrists with the familiarity of one who has touched every part of your body, who has memorized the varicose veins in your left leg and the mole on your right testicle.
It was obscene. I wrenched my own hands free. I barely remembered to retrieve my wallet before I ran out into the street.
I had been trying to find Dr. Frances Stone since I arrived, looking through the files at the corporate headquarters, screaming at secretaries. Although the corporation had funded Dr. Stone’s project, the records seemed to have been spirited away.
At last I realized that that was the wrong way to go about it. I remembered what Mike had told me, so the day after the encounter with Keo’s hands, I was back in Patpong, asking around for a good V.D. clinic. The most highly regarded one of all turned out to be at the corner of Patpong and Soi Cowboy, above a store that sold pirated software and videotapes.
I walked up a steep staircase into a tiny room without windows, with a ceiling fan moving the same sweaty air around and around. A receptionist smiled at me. Her eyes had the same vacuity that the boy at McDonald’s had possessed. I sat in an unraveling rattan chair and waited, and Dr. Stone summoned me into her office.
“You’ve done something with her,” I said.
“Yes.” She was shuffling a stack of papers. She had a window; she had an airconditioner blasting away in the direction of all the computers. I was still drenched with sweat.
The phone rang and she had a brief conversation in Thai that I couldn’t catch. “You’re angry, of course,” she said, putting down the phone. “But it was better than nothing. Better than the cold emptiness of the earth. And she had nothing to lose.”
“She was dying of AIDS! And now I have it!” It was the first time I’d allowed the words to cross my lips. “You killed me!”
Frances laughed. “My,” she said, “aren’t we being a little melodramatic? You have the virus, but you haven’t actually come down with anything.”
“I’m fine. Fine.”
“Well, why don’t you sit down. I’ll order up some food. We’ll talk.”
She had really gone native. In Thailand it’s rude to talk business without ordering up food. Sullenly I sat down while she opened a window and yelled out an order to one of the street vendors.
“To be honest, Mr. Leibowitz,” she said, “we really could use another grant. We had to spend so much of the last one on cloak-and-dagger nonsense, security, bribes, and so on; so little could be spared for research itself ... I mean, look around you . . . I’m not exactly wasting money on luxurious office space, am I?”
“I saw her hands.”
“Very effective, wasn’t it?” The food arrived. It was some kind of noodle thing wrapped in banana leaves and groaning from the weight of chili peppers. She did not eat; instead, she amused herself by rearranging the peppers in the shape of. . . “The hands, I mean. Beautiful as ever. Vibrant. Sensual. My first breakthrough.”
I started shaking again. I’d read about Dr. Stone’s great-grandfather and his graverobbing experiments. Jigsaw corpses brought to life with bolts of lightning. Not life. A simulacrum of life. Could this have happened to Keo? But she was dying. Perhaps it was better than nothing. Perhaps . . .
“Anyhow. I was hoping you’d arrive soon, Mr. Leibowitz. Because we’ve made up another grant proposal. I have the papers here. I know that you’ve become so important now that your signature alone will suffice to bring us ten times the amount you authorized two years ago.”
“I want to see her. ”
“Would you like to dance with her? Would you like to see her in the Chui Chai one more time?”
She led me down a different stairwell. Many flights. I was sure we were below ground level. I knew we were getting nearer to Keo because there was a hint of that rotting flower fragrance in the air. We descended. There was an unnatural chill.
And then, at last, we reached the laboratory. No shambling Igors or bubbling retorts. Just a clean, well-lit basement room. Cold, like the vault of a morgue. Walls of white tile; ceiling of stucco; fluorescent lamps; the pervasive smell of the not-quite-dead.
Perspex tanks lined the walls. They were full of fluid and body parts. Arms and legs floating past me. Torsos twirled. A woman’s breast peered from between a child’s thighs. In another tank, human hearts swirled, each neatly severed at the aorta. There was a tank of eyes. Another of genitalia. A necklace of tongues hung suspended in a third. A mass of intestines writhed in a fourth. Computers drew intricate charts on a bank of monitors. Oscilloscopes beeped. A pet gibbon was chained to a post topped by a human skull. There was something so outlandishly antiseptic about this spectacle that I couldn’t feel the horror.
“I’m sorry about the decor, Russell, but you see, we’ve had to forgo the usual decoration allowance.” The one attempt at dressing up the place was a frayed poster of Young Frankenstein tacked to the far wall. “Please don’t be upset at all the body parts,” she added. “It’s all very macabre, but one gets inured to it in med school; if you feel like losing your lunch, there’s a small restroom on your left . . . yes, between the eyes and the tongues.” I did not feel sick. I was feeling . . . excited. It was the odor. I knew I was getting closer to Keo.
She unlocked another door. We stepped into an inner room.
Keo was there. A cloth was draped over her, but seeing her face after all these years made my heart almost stop beating. The eyes. The parted lips. The hair, streaming upward toward a source of blue light . . . although I felt no wind in the room. “It is an electron wind,” said Dr. Stone. “No more waiting for the monsoon lightning. We can get more power from a wall socket than greatgrandfather Victor could ever dream of stealing from the sky.”
And she laughed the laughter of mad scientists.
I saw the boy from McDonald’s sitting in a chair. The hands reached out towards me. There were electrodes fastened to his temples. He was naked now, and I saw the scars where the hands had been joined at the wrists to someone else’s arms. I saw a woman with Keo’s breasts, wired to a pillar of glass, straining, heaving while jags of blue lightning danced about her bonds. I saw her vagina stitched onto the pubis of a dwarf, who lay twitching at the foot of the pillar. Her feet were fastened to the body of a five-year-old boy, transforming their grace to ungainliness as he stomped in circles around the pillar.
“Jigsaw people!” I said.
“Of course!” said Dr. Stone. “Do you think I would be so foolish as to bring back people whole? Do you not realize what the consequences would be? The legal redefinition of life and death . . . wills declared void, humans made subservient to walking corpses . . . I’m a scientist, not a philosopher. ”
“But who are they now?”
“They were nobody before. Street kids. Prostitutes. They were dying, Mr. Leibowitz, dying! They were glad to will their bodies to me. And now they’re more than human. They’re many persons in many bodies. A gestalt. I can shuffle them and put them back together, oh, so many different ways . . . and the beautiful Keo. Oh, she wept when she came to me. When she found out she had given you the virus. She loved you. You were the last person she ever loved. I saved her for you. She’s been sleeping here, waiting to dance for you, since the day she died. Oh, let us not say died. The day she . . . she ... I am no poet, Mr. Leibowitz. Just a scientist.”