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:
As Mr. Oake jogs his comical way up the avenue, something even more hilarious happens: the concrete turns into a ribbon of rippling silver water. But Mr. Oake doesn’t sink; no, he stands on a flatbed barge slowly forging its way upstream. From his terry cloth headband extrude scarlet serpentine heads. His jogging shorts become a gilt loincloth, his sweaty T-shirt an embroidered breastplate. Instead of his silly standing-in-place jogging, Mr. Oake floats majestically up East Blithedale. The pumping of his skinny-flabby arms mimics priestly exhortations to the setting sun.
Fear flutters up Laurel’s spine; she has been dancing with Dolly Dagger, after all. But she is an artist, isn’t she? That destiny must bring some small ecstasies, along with the agonies. Could she be tapping into an archetypal pool, the mythos within the Egyptian Book of the Dead?
All right! At once she accepts the silver waves lapping at the lip of her deck. She feverishly tries to capture Mr. Oake’s majestic journey with her pastels. All right; East Blithedale is the great river, she the maker of hieroglyphs.
But the waves grow quiet, the concrete firms, the magic flees. Or so it seems.
As she watches and sketches, a hummer zooms up to the feeder above her deck. The aggressive male Anna’s, with his flashy hood of red. She flips the page, tries to sketch him, too, when another hummer comes.
He startles her.
Chup-chup-chupl and the Anna’s spirals away. The new hummer; he is a dusky charcoal gray, strangely dark even in the evening light. She can see at once that his head is pale, round, oblong. She keeps blinking her eyes, straining to see.
This hummer doesn’t have a beak!
He hovers there, not sipping sugar water. He’s got a tiny, round, flat pale face, eyes that are not bird eyes, and wrinkles, she is quite sure she can see wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, streaks of pale gray over his crown. He looks directly at her and nods his tiny head, then darts away into the twilight arbor.
She is stunned. The archetypal pool; is she drowning in its delusions? No! She saw him, saw the hummer only too clearly, not more than two feet away from where she sits. She slaps her sketchpad shut and staggers inside.
She collapses on the couch, sinks into the exhausted sleep morphine permits. Hypnogogics: she sees the ox and the ax, his helpless head, how his rage imbues the sacrificial blood with the dumb will to survive.
And dreams of flashing red lights. She flutters, blinded, beating furiously, before them. She keeps hearing over and over the sound of sirens wailing in the night.
Jerry is red-eyed and puffy-faced. For once Laurel is the one remarking on how awful he looks.
“David died last night," Jerry says.
David is Jere’s lover of fifteen years. Two dapper gents with a spectacular townhouse in Diamond Heights, trips abroad, good taste and success, perhaps an extra-relationship affair or two like any other long-term couple. Until David, a forty-seven-year-old stockbroker, tested positive and started down that slow cruel road of no return.
“We loved each other very much,” Jerry says.
But Laurel doesn’t know how she can comfort him. In a weird way, she envies the Jerrys and Davids of the world. They got what they wanted. She and Christopher, they coupled blindly, with expectations that could not be fulfilled, and they failed.
“I bet David is pissed.” This is all she can say in a brittle voice. “I bet he and the others will be waiting to beat the crap out of the first doctor who comes over to the other side and didn’t have the balls to try the DNA mutation, FDA testing be damned.”
He looks at her with those big brown eyes, like, gee, Laurel, a bitch to the very end and fucking crazy, too. Then a deep-down look like yeah, this makes sense to him. Or maybe nothing makes sense to him anymore.
“Hey,” he says. “You know that old guy up the street from you? The one you call The Ancient Jogger?”
“Mr. Oake?”
“He died last night. Heart failure. Eighty-four years old, isn’t that something? While we’re on the Big D, thought I’d better tell you since you knew him.”
“Oh hell, I didn’t know him. God; I guessed eighty-two. Well, at least you’re holding down the fort, Jere.”
“I tested positive last week,” he says.
Laurel uncorks chenin blanc at ten in the morning. Jerry declines a cigarette; Laurel chainsmokes four. They talk about their wild youths and their almost-as-wild middle years. Is living to old age such a great idea after all? they joke.
Jerry leaves at noon. Laurel lies down on the couch. She is dizzy from the wine. Her mouth tastes like ashes. She keeps seeing a tiny, wrinkled face, eyes that are not bird eyes.
Dark, beating wings fill her dreams.
Birds throughout antiquity symbolize the human soul, Laurel reads in the tiny, hand-printed book. Playing the book oracle, she finds significant passages. The Latin aves means both bird and ancestral spirit. In the Rig-Veda, the bird of Savitri is the Higher Self that struggles for expression, seeking freedom from the cage of mundane life. Birds, like angels, are emissaries between heaven and earth. Birds are symbols of thought, imagination, aspiration, spiritual longing, the swiftness of cosmic creativity. Birds are possessors of occult secrets. Birds are givers of omens.
Laurel smokes a cigarette with great pleasure out on her deck. It is five o’clock on a Saturday night, and she’s got a bottle of cabernet sauvignon sitting next to her chair. She took morphine earlier. She’s started coughing like when she smoked three packs a day, that deep-chested hack that usually tells the average moron to quit. Laurel, she tells herself, you are not the average moron anymore, hell no, so she lights another and picks up a beautiful pastel called dusty rose.
The Collins girl strides by in her usual adolescent huff, bound for her family’s house on East Blithedale. Oh, those angry dark eyes, the pinched face that would be pretty if she didn’t scowl so much.
But instead of envying the girl’s youth and rebel vitality, Laurel decides to transform her on the sketchpad. Now goes earnest young royalty, crowned with her long and lovely hair, off to quest among the eucalyptus and date palms.
Laurel has seen twenty-five hummers today. She keeps a separate page in her sketchpad where she ticks off each sighting in groups of four short lines slashed by a fifth. Tick! Five groups of five.
This gives her focus, keeps her alert, lets her forget herself from time to time: keeping track of hummingbird sightings.
Despite the morphine and the wine and the cigarettes, she can feel a heavy dull pain in this body of hers. Not just in the gut, but all over, everywhere. She is not pissed off anymore. She is not entirely without the bitterness, no, and not entirely resigned. But she is aware of a turning away from the world. She unplugged the phone jack. She turned off the thermostat. She dumped old food, rotting alfalfa sprouts, from the refrigerator. She made her bed for the first time in months, sheets and blankets tucked in neatly at the corners, turned down at the top, as though for guests.
What a glory to sip wine and smoke and sketch just like the independent, eccentric, successful artist she once fantasized she would be one day. In a weird way, she feels this is it: she has made it. Here is Laurel, working on sketches for a major new fantasy triptych; “Princess of the Arbor,” she decides to call it. Now sits the Mill Valley artist, observing hummingbirds from her deck.
The light changes and changes again. The black-chin is sitting on his perch, the flamboyant Allen's is flitting nearby. The two commence squabbling—chup-chup-chup!—being belligerent little bastards . . .