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:
. . . when she sights another strange dark hummer, its gorget sparkling black the way obsidian gleams. Like any hummer, it zooms up to the feeder, scaring away the others, and hovers there.
Her heart beats at the sight of the dark bird. Dusk again, although she immediately intuits that dusk has nothing to do with the hummer’s appearance.
She stares until her eyes tear; fear clouds her vision. She blinks, stares again, and this is what she sees: a tiny dark bird body hovering; the fantastic wings, the illusion of simultaneous upbeat and downbeat, a black lace fan so fast is the movement; an ebony wedge of tail bobbing like a frenetic ballast.
And a delicate, rounded, flat-sided head with a face: the face of a sulky adolescent girl. And more: the illusion of long and lovely hair spilling down around sloping bird shoulders.
So tiny. So fantastic! Charming in the way all hummers are infinitely charming.
But ominous: The sparkling black feathers, the tiny, pale face, its soft dark eyes almost wistful. No, impossible! Laurel wishes she could deny her perception like she’s denied so many other things.
The hummer disappears into the arbor from which sunset flees in shafts of dusty rose.
A long, cold shudder makes her drop the sketchpad and pastels, reach for the woolen shawl draped over the back of her chair. The heavy, dull gut-pain throbs, but she does not move. She sits on her deck, snuggles into the shawl, and smokes and drinks and smokes some more. And waits.
There is something Laurel must witness here tonight. She dozes and wakes, shivers as the fog rolls in, and dreams of a river like a shining silver ribbon.
The sirens come at last after midnight. So close and shrill and jarring that Laurel wakes up at once, painfully knocking her left knuckles against the side of the chair. The Collins house. A green and white ambulance, two squad cars. Crackle of static, the bland, doom-filled voice of police radio garbled in the night. “One five zero, one five zero; we uh have a shsh at shsh East Blithedale; uh confirmed; attempted suicide, female, seventeen years old ...”
The mother is sobbing, the father paces hopelessly, and they bring her out on a stretcher with a tube up her nose, tubes in her arm. They shove her into the ambulance, slam the doors, race off, sirens wailing.
But Laurel can tell from how the paleness of her sulky face surrenders to the paleness of the sheets that she will fly away tonight.
Becoming a bird in visionary trance is a widespread symbol of initiatory death and rebirth into eternal consciousness. Shamans and prophets in the South Pacific, Indonesia, Central Asia, the Americas, Siberia, as well as ancient Egypt, have claimed transformation into birds. Aztec priests wore ceremonial robes made entirely of hummingbird feathers. Voodoo mam’bo use the carcasses of hummingbirds to entice the presence of the mystere Simbi, the mercurial, aerial loa who conducts the souls of the dead past the crossroads of eternity. Yogis say ecstatic soul-flight is the first magical power to be developed on the path of deathlessness.
Laurel turns on the radio exactly at four in the morning. Is there any news of a young woman’s attempted suicide, is she stable, critical, DOA? But the late-breaking news is the usual thing: soldiers are invading a mud hut village somewhere; a multimillionaire actress is divorcing her gigolo husband amid much scandal; the mayor of a local municipality is caught with his hand in the public cookie jar. No one gives a fuck about a seventeen-year-old girl disturbed enough to take her life or, for that matter, a forty-seven-year-old stockbroker breaking the heart of a brown-eyed homecare nurse who loved him for fifteen years.
How can anyone care? Death is everywhere: smashed animals on the freeway, rain forests crashing down, mothers crushed beneath collapsed freeways, young men gunned down for a rock of crack or a political philosophy.
The living should care; the young should attend to the old; families should look beyond insular cares to the community; political activists should pause from selfrighteous panoramas to see their own beloveds.
Oh hell, should. Laurel does not care, either. No, she really doesn’t, and why should she? She is not among the living. The cares of the world do not concern her. She cannot protest or even remark upon the death in everyday existence. She is a yin to the yang of life. Denial, anger, bitterness, resignation; even this evolution of emotions presents itself as life-bound categories that make no sense anymore. She can feel how she is inexorably slipping into the dark.
And it’s okay. Yes. Her concerns have shifted: To the life in death. The flipside. The metaphysical balance: If death pervades life, then surely life must permeate death. Surely; beyond her fear, her horror, beyond her comprehension.
She turns off the radio, plays the book oracle, and contemplates images of birds in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
When the questing Isis discovered her dead husband Osiris at last, he who in ceremony symbolizes all the Dead, she hovered over his body in the form of a bird, sending forth the light of everlasting life from the sheen of her feathers.
The floating woman, her eyes rimmed in blue and black; there were arcs of shimmering color sprouting from her arms and shoulders. In the moment split between dreams and wakefulness the woman was, Laurel recalls, comforting, like a blanket or firelight, heat reaching into her cold, sick bones.
But that was right before the sudden pain, the metastasis. What does your comfort signify, Lady Isis?
Most charming of the avian hieroglyphs in the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the ba depiction of the human soul as a delicate, human-headed bird. Plate Twenty-three of the book reads: Opened is the way of the souls (a tiny, humanheaded bird), and my soul (the tiny bird again) does see it.
Chapter Nineteen is entirely devoted to the free, unfettered flying of, and feeding of nectar to, the ba. The ba has a corporeal, yet ethereal, existence. It converses with the gods and goddesses even while the humble earthly body still exists and is charged with taking the soul to the otherworld when the body dies. The ba is depicted as a territorial, inquisitive, hungry, sometimes belligerent, always frenetic being with a luminous presence and bright beating wings.
Dawn comes with a spectacular show of rose and gold. The eucalyptus and weeping willow sway and rustle, and Laurel wakes to their ancient presence, their sturdiness, their mute witness.
A sharp pain came again in the night. She took morphine, but Dolly Dagger does less and less for her. How can she explain what this pain is like? After the visceral torment, a disengagement. This is the personal grief at last, she knows; the final irrevocable coming apart of the vessel that once was the only carrier of her consciousness. However crappy it may have been, this body is all she knows. Of all goodbyes, this is the last.
Laurel goes to the bathroom. Another morphine shot in this awful skinny arm of hers. She washes her face. She combs what is left of her hair, wraps a purple silk scarf around her skull like a turban. Next makeup; thick, black eyeliner, dusty rose blush over too-prominent cheekbones; scarlet gloss smeared liberally on withered lips, make them flower-kissers.
Laurel, she tells herself, you look outtasight, baby.
She goes out to the living room, to the coffee table, and straightens the death books littered there. But her hand strays again to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the elegant hieroglyphs, the weird imagery.
Close eyes, flip the heft of paperbound wisdom, index finger seeking prophecy. And here: Chapter Nine, Plate Eighteen, at random and for the first time, the editor’s preface and notation:
The title of these works as a whole is a misnomer. In fact, if one must call this compilation of scrolls by a single name, one should refer to the title of this particular plate: The Book of Coming Forth Into Day To Live After Death.