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:
“Aaargh!” he roared, “You dare touch my pot?! I forbid you to! For that both of you will . . . you will both . . . turn to stone for thirty-five minutes!”
Aunt Angelina suddenly froze the way children do when they play Statues. As fate would have it, my nose started itching and I was about to rub it with my hand when she inconspicuously but painfully jabbed me in the side, so I froze, too.
The Monster glared at us triumphantly, then grabbed the boiled chicken out of Aunt Angelina’s saucepan and ate it whole.
“A delicious bone!” he rumbled, licking his lips, and then took pity on us. “You can go now,” he said dismissively, and strode imperiously out of the kitchen, slurping soup from the top of the saucepan.
“Why did you give him your entire dinner?” I asked, when the door closed behind the Monster. “And where is his bone, anyway?”
“He didn’t have a bone!” said Aunt Angelina, “He hasn’t been to the store for a week.”
“Then what’s he looking for?”
“God knows! Maybe he forgot. Or maybe he’s just being that way to show us that everything's all right. But he doesn’t have any money, not a single kopeck, and he’s going hungry.”
“What about his pension?”
“He doesn’t have a pension! He’s an exhibition object, and ... he s been written off, dropped from the show.” Aunt Angelina lowered her voice. “It’s as if he doesn’t exist. And now I’m afraid about his room. I’m afraid he’ll be evicted. Just make sure you don’t tell Anna Lvovna.”
“I won’t breathe a word,” I said, also in a whisper.
Aunt Angelina and I began taking turns buying bones and chopped meat from the butcher and leaving them in the Monster’s refrigerator. On one occasion she left two apples and a small carton of kefir.
“All this meat’s very bad for him! It can ruin his digestion,” she said. “I wanted to buy him a big bottle of kefir but he always immediately bolts any food he has, so I bought a carton instead.”
“He’s bound to throw out the apples,” I said.
“We’ll see. Maybe he won’t realize. Lately his eyesight’s been getting poor,” and at that moment Aunt Angelina looked around at the door; Anna Lvovna was just coming into the kitchen.
“It makes me laugh just to look at the two of you,” she declared. “All this undercover charity—do you think I’m blind? Such pretense—what a show! And for whom! If he was human, it would be one thing, but he s not, he s just vermin. “You should feel sorry for him; after all, he’s old,” I said.
“My dear, pity’s not a feeling you should brag about, pity’s humiliating. And in this case,” she said as she put her coffeepot on the stove, “in this case, pity doesn’t enter into it. It was one thing when he was making himself useful in his ... in his freak show; we could put up with him then, but not now. Animals should live in the wild."
The Monster had crept into the kitchen so softly that we didn’t even know he was there. He now stood in the doorway and his eye was as ruddy as it had been in the first flush of youth.
“So, I'm an animal, am I?” he said slowly and slumped onto a stool. “I’ll show you."
His breathing was heavy and irregular, the sparse gray fur on his head and neck stood on end.
“I’ll show you. . . .Your. . .legs. . .will. . .give way. . .beneath you! . . . Yeah! . . . You will . . . all . . . fall ... on the floor . . . and then . . . One, two, three ... All fall down!”
Aunt Angelina and I collapsed simultaneously. Anna Lvovna remained standing, leaning against the edge of the stove, and grinned, staring the Monster straight in the eye.
“And you?” said the Monster. “What about you? This doesn’t mean you, I suppose? Fall down, I tell you!”
“Give me one good reason why I should,” she said, scowling.
“Because I’ve put a spell on you, that’s why.”
“Oh, you slay me,” said Anna Lvovna, going right up to him. “What have we here, a magician? All you know how to do is leave your scales all over the floor and help yourself to everyone else’s food! You’re just trash and you’re due for the dump! Just garbage. You’ve been written off!”
“Written off?” repeated the Monster in a whisper. “Who’s been written off? Me? Written off? Not true, not true! I can do anything! Look at them! They fell down!”
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Anna Lvovna burst out laughing. “They’re just pretending. They’re sorry for you, see. You’ve been written off. You’ve lost your job. I’ve been to the museum myself and I’ve seen the directive with my own eyes.”
“No!” The Monster leapt up from the stool and rushed from the door to the stove, thrashing his mangy tail across the floor. “I’ll show you. I’ll turn you into a rat! A rat! Now!”
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” was Anna Lvovna’s only reply, and suddenly she stamped on the Monster’s tail with all her might.
The Monster screamed. One after another great tears streamed from his eye, which immediately turned pale blue and dimmed. Aunt Angelina and I jumped up from the floor.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Let him go! An old man. Don’t be so cruel to him!”
“A rat! a rat!” hissed the Monster, forgetting himself, and he poked Anna Lvovna in the shoulder with a dark and crooked finger. “One! Two! Three!”
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” sniggered Anna Lvovna.
But now Aunt Angelina and I began to shout. “A rat! A rat!” we screamed. “You’re a rotten rat! Vermin! One! Two! Three!”
Suddenly Anna Lvovna was gone.
She had just been laughing in our faces, her shoulders shaking in her white blouse, when suddenly she was no more. She had totally disappeared, as if she had never existed.
The kitchen suddenly fell silent. Something live jabbed against my foot and immediately leapt away to the wall. I screeched and jumped onto the stool.
A large gray rat shot across the kitchen and scuttled under Anna Lvovna’s table. The Monster was whimpering softly, his face turned toward the wall.
“See,” said Aunt Angelina, “you did it. Don’t cry. Now let’s go and have some soup. ”
“It’s you who did it, not me. And it’s true, you know; I have been written off. There has been a directive.”
“What do we care about directives,” said Aunt Angelina, carefully stroking the Monster’s fur. “Don’t you be afraid of anybody. And if anybody touches you I’ll give him . . . I’ll give him ants.”
“And so will I,” I said. “Okay?”
The Monster didn’t reply. Slumped against the wall, he dozed off, shutting his eye and wrapping his thin hairless tail around his legs.
HUMMERS
Lisa Mason
Ursula Le Guin has described fantasy as “a different approach to reality, an alternate technique for apprehending and coping with existence.”
Fantasy, like myth and legend, provides a means of storytelling that at its best goes beyond mere entertainment to travel the inner roads of the human soul. The following story does this beautifully, using the form of fantasy fiction and the symbols of Egyptian mythology to enter one of the most mysterious lands of alclass="underline" the one that lies at the threshold of death. Readers who have experienced the loss of loved ones to cancer or AIDS will find this story cuts particularly close to the bone, but the fear of death is universal, and Mason’s exploration of this fear is both unsentimental and compassionate.
Lisa Mason has published short fiction in Omni and Asimov’s magazines, and her first novel, Arachne, was published in 1991. “Hummers” comes from the February ’91 issue of Asimovs.