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:
“Well,” I said, “what did you expect at the end of the world?”
“You really shouldn’t deface yourself,” I said as we strolled back to the hotel where we were squatting. If you could really call it a hotel—there was no charge to stay there, no service, and no amenities. “I know it doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t heal, either. Now you’ve got permanent hash marks, and besides not being terribly attractive, they’ll probably catch on everything.”
Jim sighed. “I know. I get bored.”
“Right.” I laughed. “For the last twenty years, you’ve been telling me I should learn how to stop and smell the roses and now you’re the one who’s complaining about having nothing to do. ”
“After you’ve smelled a rose for long enough, it loses its scent. Then you have to find a different flower.”
“Well, self-mutilation is different, I’ll give you that.” We passed a young guy dressed in leather with an irregular-shaped fragment of mirror embedded in his forehead. “Though maybe not as different as it used to be, since it seems to be catching on. What do you suppose he’s smelling?”
Jim didn’t answer. We reached the circular drive that dead-ended the street in front of our hotel, which had gone from motorcycle parking lot to motorcycle graveyard. On impulse, I took Jim’s hand in my own as we crossed the drive. “I suppose it’s the nature of the end of time or whatever this is, and the world never was a terribly orderly place. But nothing makes sense anymore. Why do we still have day and night? Why does the earth keep turning?”
“Winding down,” Jim said absently. “No reason why the whole thing should go at once.” He stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the hotel. “Listen.”
There was a distant metallic crashing noise, heavy wheels on rails. “Just the trams running again. That’s something else—why does the power work in some places and not in others?”
“What?” Jim blinked at me, then glanced in the general direction of the tram yard. “Oh, that. Not what I meant. Something I’ve been wondering lately”— there was a clatter as a tram went by on the cross street “—why we never got married.”
Speaking of things that didn't seem important anymore—it wasn’t the first time the subject had come up. We'd talked about it on and off through the years, but after eighteen years together, the matter had lost any urgency it might have had, if it had ever had any. Now, under a blank sky in front of a luxury hotel where the guests had become squatters, it seemed to be the least of the shadow-things my life had been full of, like status and career and material comforts. I could have been a primitive tribeswoman hoarding shiny stones for all the real difference those things had ever made. They’d given me nothing beyond some momentary delight; if anything, they’d actually taken more from me, in terms of the effort I’d had to put into acquiring them, caring for them, keeping them tidy and intact. Especially the status and the career. And they sure hadn’t stopped the world from ending, no more than our being married would have.
But I was so certain of what Jim wanted to hear that I could practically feel the words arranging themselves in the air between us, just waiting for me to provide the voice. Well, dear, let’s just hunt up a cleric and get married right now. Add sound and stir till thickened. Then—
Then what? It wasn’t like we actually had a future anymore, together or singly. The ocean didn’t even have a horizon.
“I think we are married,” I said. “I think any two people seeing the world to its conclusion together are married in a way that didn’t exist until now. ”
It should have been the right thing to say. Instead, I sounded like a politician explaining how a tax increase wasn’t really a tax increase after all. After two decades, I could do better than some saccharine weasel words, end of the world or no.
Say it, then. The other thing, what he’s waiting for. What difference does it make? The question I had to answer first, maybe the question Jim was really asking.
The edges of the cuts he’d made in his hand moved against my skin. They felt like the gills of an underwater creature out of its element, seeking to be put back in.
No pain at all. No blood and no pain.
It’s not like I could hurt him, right?
Right. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel nothing. So we can go ahead now, do all those things that used to be so dangerous. Self-mutilation, bonding rituals, any old hazard at all.
Jim’s eyes were like glass.
"Better get into the lobby now if you want to see it. ”
It was the Ghost of Lifetimes Past; that was what Jim and I had been calling her. She stood a respectful distance from us, a painfully thin blond woman in a dirty white tutu and pink satin ballet shoes. The most jarring thing about her was not her silly outfit, or the way she kept popping up anywhere and everywhere, but that face—she had the deep creases of someone who had lived seventy very difficult years. Around the edge of her chin and jawbone, the skin had a peculiar strained look, as if it were being tightened and stretched somehow.
"The crucifixion,” she said, and gave a small, lilting giggle. “They’re probably going to take him down soon, so if you want a look, you’d better hurry.” Her gaze drifted past us and she moved off, as if she’d heard someone calling her.
“You in the mood for a crucifixion?” I said lightly. It was a relief to have anything as a distraction.
“Not if we can possibly avoid it.”
But there was no way we could. Pushing our way through the small crowd in the lobby, we couldn’t help seeing it. I vaguely recognized the man nailed directly to the wall—one of the erstwhile millionaires from the suites on the top floor. He was naked except for a wide silk scarf around his hips and a studded collar or belt cinched wrong side out around his head in lieu of a crown of thorns. No blood, of course, but he was doing his best to look as if he were in pain.
“God,” I whispered to Jim, “I hope it’s not a trend.”
He blew out a short, disgusted breath. “I’m going upstairs.”
Somehow, I had the feeling that it wasn’t really the crucifixion he was so disgusted with. I meant to follow him but suddenly I felt as nailed in place as the would-be Christ. Not that I had any real desire to stand there and stare at this freak show, but it held me all the same. All that Catholic schooling in my youth, I thought, finally catching up with me after all these years, activating a dormant taste for human sacrifice.
Ersatz-Christ looked around, gritting his teeth. “You’re supposed to mock me,” he said, the matter-of-fact tone more shocking than the spikes in his forearms. “It won’t work unless you mock me.”
“You’re a day late and a few quarts low,” someone in the crowd said. “It won’t work unless you shed blood, either.”
The crucified man winced. “Shit.”
There was a roar of laughter.
“For some reason, that never occurs to them. About the blood.”
I looked up at the man who had spoken. He smiled down at me, his angular face cheerfully apologetic. I couldn’t remember having seen him around before.
“This is the third one I’ve seen,” he said, jerking his head at the man on the wall. The straight black hair fell briefly over one eye and he tossed it back. “A grand gesture that ultimately means nothing. Don’t you find it rather annoying, people who suddenly make those grand risky gestures only after there isn’t a hope in the hell of it mattering? Banning the aerosol can after there’s already a hole in the ozone layer, seeking alternate sources of power after nuclear reactors have already gone into operation. It’s humanity’s fatal flaw—locking the barn after the horse has fled. The only creature in the universe who displays such behavior.”