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:
The aged youth stifled a yawn, sat cross-legged, and laced his fingers over his knees again.
—I have a feeling it’s not such a good idea for you to take that away.
—Oh, you do, do you? Well, that’s all very fine. Tell me, have you invented a magic formula so we can fill our bellies on air? When you do that, don’t look so mopy, will you?
—That’s my trouble, ma’am, I don’t know how I should look.
—Of course not. If you did, I’d give you the back of my hand! Oh, go on. What a boy you are to tease me like this, so early in the morning!
In three days, the crone was woven into a jacket.
The woman who had woven it went out on the street carrying it over her arm.
On the corner by the factory, she called out to a passer-by.
—Mister, how about a nice jacket? It’s good and warm. You won’t catch any colds with this on.
—Why, maybe you’re right. It’s even warm to the touch.
—Of course it is. This is one hundred percent wool, I’ll have you know! Clipped from live sheep.
—It almost seems as if someone was wearing it until this moment.
—Nonsense. This is no second-hand item. I just finished weaving it myself.
—Are you sure something else isn’t mixed in with it?
—Come closer and feel it again. The wool is from a live ewe.
—Maybe so. Hey, did you hear that funny noise? When I pinched it, it yelped. Is that because the wool is from a live ewe, too?
—Don't be silly. All you heard was the growling of your own belly. You must have eaten some rotten beans.
Inside the jacket, the young crone fought back her tears. Seeking to become the jacket completely, she thought with a brain of cloth and felt with a heart of cloth.
The crone’s son came by.
—Ma'am, are you going to sell that jacket? I have a feeling it’s not such a good idea.
—Oh, you do, do you? Well, I have a feeling you’d better not stick your nose in my business! That s all I need, to be teased by a pauper like you.
—Jackets are made to be sold, aren’t they, he mused.
—And don't forget it. Anyone who thinks they’re made to be worn has got another thing coming. Say, mister, come take a look! This would look terrific on you. All the girls'll give you the eye. And you’ll never catch cold.
But try as she would, she found no takers. It wasn t that the jacket was poorly made. The knitting needles she d been using for the last thirty years were by now extensions of her fingers, and with them she had woven a sturdy, practical garment. Nor was it the season, for soon it would be winter.
The problem was simply that everyone was too poor.
The people who needed her jacket were too poor to buy it. Those who could afford it were members of the class that wore expensive, imported jackets. So the jacket ended up in a pawnbroker s storehouse, in exchange for thirty yen.
All the pawnshops were already full of jackets. And all of the houses in town were full of people who owned no jackets. Why didn’t they complain? Had they forgotten that there even were such things as jackets?
Crushed by poverty like so many pickles at the bottom of life’s barrel, the bags of skin surrounding their flesh had been drained of dreams, souls, and desires.
Ownerless and unprotected, these dreams and souls and desires hung now in the air like invisible ether. They were what had needed jackets. Yes, that was it. The same poverty that kept people from buying jackets had robbed them of anything inside requiring the protection of one.
The sun stooped, shadows lengthened and paled, winter arrived. Traces of the escaped dreams, souls, and desires of the poor gathered in the sky as clouds, cutting off the sunlight and making the winter bitterly cold.
Trees shed their leaves, birds molted, and the air became as smooth and slippery as glass. People walked hunched over, ends of noses turned red, and words and coughs froze in the air like clouds of cigarette smoke, causing suspicious teachers to whip their students, and foremen their laborers, out of misplaced zeal. The poor feared the coming of night and mourned the coming of dawn. Men in foreign jackets spent all their time cleaning and polishing their hunting rifles, and women in foreign jackets pirouetted before their mirrors thirty times a day, adjusting expensive furs around their necks. Skiers melted wax for their skis, and skaters oiled grindstones to sharpen their skates. The last swallow flew away, and the first coal-seller stood on the streetcorner, rubbing his hands to keep warm.
All of this, along with the normal changes attendant on the coming of winter, chilled the cloud of dreams and souls and desires within and without until each dream, each soul, each desire froze and crystallized. And one day, they began falling to earth as snow.
In such orderly fashion did the snow fall, filling all crevices, that when you stared hard it seemed rather as if space itself was flowing heavenward. The snow soaked up all sounds of ordinary life in the streets. In the strange quiet, late at night, you could hear the soft jingle of snowflake brushing snowflake, like the chiming of tiny silver bells in a great, soundproofed room.
Naturally, this snow of crystalline dreams, souls, and desires was no ordinary snow. The crystals were wonderfully large, complex, and beautiful. Some had the frigid whiteness of fine, thin porcelain, and others the faint off-white glow of ivory shavings made with a microtome; still others bore the seductive gleam of thin, polished fragments of white coral. Some looked like an elaborate arrangement of thirty swords, others like seven varieties of plankton in layers, and still others like the most beautiful crystals of ordinary snow, seen through a kaleidoscope and magnified eightfold.
And this snow was colder than liquid air, for someone witnessed a flake of it fall into liquid air and vaporize with a puff of steam. It was also unusually hard. Those sword-shaped crystals could have shaved whiskers.
When automobiles passed over it, far from melting in accordance with the law of regelation, the snow jingled underneath and its sharp edges slashed the tires to ribbons. Nearly every substance known to science would either be cut to pieces before it could grind down one of those snowflakes, or freeze before it could melt one away.
What examples should one give to illustrate such coldness? In imitation of Verlaine, should one speak of the snow that fell on the brows of lovers sitting cheek-to-cheek in a wintry park—and left them hard and unmoving as a painted Dali sculpture? Or of the snow that fell on the brow of a man with a temperature of 106, as he lay groaning on his deathbed—freezing him midway between life and death, unable to stir in either direction? Or of the snow that fell on a beggar’s oilcan stove as it burned feebly by a tumbledown wall, freezing the flames motionless as glasswork?
Hour after hour, day after day, night after night... on and on fell the snow, ceaseless as the conveyor belt in a Ford factory. Endlessly, softly it fell, with a jingle as of tin on wood floors, falling on branches of roadside trees,
on mailboxes,
on empty swallows’ nests,
on roofs,
on roads,
on sewers,
down manholes,
on streams,
on railway bridges,
on tunnel entrances,
on fields,
on birdhouses,
on charcoal burners’ lodges,
and on the pawnshop storehouse where the jacket lay. . . .