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:
“I check on it too,” she said.
“Really.”
“Yes,” she said. “Someone keeps coming in and leaving it open.”
Either the frogs had already been and gone, or else they were getting wiser and waiting. We walked back up to the house. The day was dying and the shadows were long and deep, and the houselights glowed yellow-on-blue like a twilit jack-o’-lantern. The Minx took hold of my hand as we climbed the wooden steps. Only a couple of hours before, she’d been winding me up to bursting point outside the monkey house and she’d known it. Now this. I couldn’t help thinking, and not for the first time, that the worst thing in the world for me would be to lose her.
And, of course, eventually to lose her was one of the few things in my life that could fairly be called inevitable.
With only a few days left of our stay, we found ourselves less inclined toward loading up the car and going looking for late-season amusements and so instead we just stayed around the place. I’m not exactly sure what we did, but the time carried on leaking away from us anyway. Anything we needed, we could usually get it from Willi’s Market. The only problem was that we couldn’t mention the name of the place when the Minx was in earshot without her latching onto it and getting us helpless with laughter.
Sometimes the Minx walked down with me. Thursday was one of the days when she didn’t.
It was a rambling, one-storey building set back from the road with space for about half a dozen cars in front of it, and although it wasn’t big it sold just about everything from fresh bread to padlocks. It was clean and it was bright and it was modern, and the only note that jarred when I compared it to similar places back home was the sales rack of shrink-wrapped pornography stuck in there by the checkout between the Disney comics and the chewing gum. One man seemed to run the place on his own, at least at this quiet time of year when there were only the few locals and late visitors like ourselves to keep it ticking over. He wore a sports shirt and glasses and combed his thinning hair straight back, and whenever I went in we communicated entirely by nods and signs and smiles.
As he was punching up my stuff on the till, I brought out the little girl’s picture and showed it to him.
He paused in his work and looked at the picture. He wasn’t certain of why I was doing this, and so he looked closely without any reaction other than mild puzzlement for a few moments. Then he glanced up at me.
He shook his head. There was sadness and sympathy in his eyes.
And he said something, and right there and then I’d have given almost anything to know what it was; but I just took the picture from him and stowed it away again, and I nodded my head as if I understood. The words meant nothing to me, but I thought I knew the tone of them.
It was the tone, I believed then, that one would use when speaking of someone else’s tragedy.
As I was walking back along the side of the shore road, I felt as if the formless apprehensions of the past few days had suddenly come together and made a creature with a name. Its name was dread, and it sat in me like an angry prisoner with no sight of daylight. A few cars zipped by me, one with a windsurfing board on its rack. I knew I’d closed and bolted the gate behind me, I knew it, and yet . . .
In my mind’s eye I could see the Minx running hell-for-leather down the drive, giggling in mischief the way she often did, with Sally screaming a warning and falling behind and the Minx too giddy to realise what she was being told . . . Someone keeps coming in and leaving it open, she’d said, and I’d paid her no attention . . .
But who? Apart from our weekend neighbours, we were the only ones to be using the gateway at all. Wczs there someone who’d been prowling around the place, and I’d overlooked the evidence because it was the Minx who was telling me and I was so used to the workings of her imagination that I was dismissing the truth along with the usual dose of unreality?
Come to think of it, the garage door had been standing open when we’d gone to get the bike a few days before.
And I still hadn’t found that damned paperback, even though I was pretty sure of where I’d left it.
And there was the Visitors’ Book, which had planted the seed of my unease.
And the reaction of the checkout man in Willi’s Market, that had brought it into flower . . .
Pretty thin fabric, I know.
But by the time I reached the house I was running.
Sally saw me coming up the drive. I must have been a sight. Breathless, my shirt half-out, the bag of groceries crushed up against my side. She was out on a sun lounger in front of the house, and she raised her head and squinted at me. I slowed. Everything seemed normal, and I was a dope. But I wasn’t sorry.
“Where’s the Minx?” I said.
“She’s set herself up with a picnic on the porch,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” I said, almost sharply, and I walked past her and up the steps to the covered entrance. As my eyes adjusted to the shade, I could see the Minx; in a world of her own as she so often was, with plates and crockery from the kitchen set out on the outdoor dining table and her all-time favourite doll, clothes long gone and the rest of her distinctly frayed around the edges, propped up outside. She’d hijacked the big tub of margarine and a packet of biscuits, and Sally must have a opened a bottle of cola for her to round off the feast. She was just raising it to her lips and tilting it as I came into sight.
Nothing amiss here.
And then, in an instant, I saw that I was wrong.
I don’t know exactly what happens when you’re in a situation like that. You can see the most minor detail with the utmost clarity, and it burns itself deep into your awareness; but it’s almost as if the sheer volume of information suddenly slows the speed of processing, so that you don’t seem to act or react in any positive way at all. You see your own failure, even before it’s had the chance to happen. Disaster’s heading straight for you like a rocket, and your responses are moving like letters in the mail.
If I had any talent with a paintbrush, I could probably reproduce the scene exactly. The well-worn sheen on the checkered vinyl cloth. The sunlight, backlighting the Minx’s hair as she raised the bottle. The mismatched china and the scattering of crumbs. The open margarine tub, its contents churned like an angry sea. The last inch of flat cola.
And the live wasp in the bottle, floating toward the neck as the bottle was tilted.
She screamed and dropped the bottle, and clapped both her hands to her face. The wasp was on the deckboards now, buzzing furiously but too wet or too damaged to rise; she’d squeezed it between her mouth and the rim of the bottle as it had tried to escape, and it had reacted the only way it knew how. Which got no sympathy out of me at all. I stepped on it quickly, and it popped like a grape.
The Minx was still screaming as I hauled her up and onto my knee. Sally was already on her way up the steps. I tried to pull the Minx’s hands away, but she was hysterical. Sally was saying “What is it, what’s happened?” and I remember thinking, completely unfairly but in the lash-out, bite-anything manner of a run-over dog, that she should have been right there and this should never have been allowed to happen. Which makes no sense, of course, but that’s the way I was thinking. I don’t think it showed on the outside, but I was in a panic. I didn’t know what to do. We were in the middle of nowhere in a place where we didn’t speak the language, and there was a crisis here and I didn’t know what to do.
The stinger was still in the Minx’s lip, like a tiny yellow thumbtack. I managed to pick it out carefully with my thumbnail. And what then? I tried to have a go at sucking out the poison, but the Minx beat me away. Sally ran to the kitchen and brought back half an onion to rub the wound, but the Minx batted that away too. She was screaming for a plaster, the little-kids’ answer to every hurt. I handed her over and went for the first-aid kit in the car.