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:
“Don’t you?” He spread his hands. “Can’t you feel it?”
“Actually, I don’t feel much.” I shrugged. “Excuse me, I’m going to go catch up on my reading.”
“Wait.” He grabbed my arm and I jumped. “I’m sorry,” he said, letting go almost immediately. “I suppose I’m wrong about there being no pleasure and pain. I’d forgotten about the pleasure of being able to talk to someone. Of sharing thoughts, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
I smiled. “Yeah. See you around.” I shook his hand again, more to confirm what I'd felt when he’d grabbed my arm than out of courtesy, and found I’d been right. His skin definitely felt cooler. Maybe he was the one who wasn’t dying and I had sucked whatever real life he had out of him.
Only the weird survive, I thought, and went upstairs.
No matter what happens, nothing happens. Jim was curled up on the bed, motionless. The silence in the room was darkening. Sleep canceled the breathing habit, if “sleep” it actually was. There were no dreams, nothing much like rest— more like being a machine that had been switched off. Another end-of-the-world absurdity.
At least I hadn’t walked in to find him slicing himself up with a razor, I thought, going over to the pile of books on the nightstand. Whatever had possessed me to think that I would wait out the end of the world by catching up with my reading had drained away with my ambition. If I touched any of the books now, it was just to shift them around. Sometimes, when I looked at the covers, the words on them didn’t always make sense right away, as if my ability to read was doing a slow fade along with everything else.
I didn’t touch the books now as I stretched out on the bed next to Jim. He still didn’t move. On the day—if “day” is the word for it—the world had ended, we’d be in this room, in this bed, lying side by side the way we were now. I am certain that we both came awake at the same moment, or came to might be a better way to put it. Went from unconscious to conscious was the way it felt, because I didn’t wake up the way I usually did, slowly, groggily, and wanting nothing more than to roll over and go back to sleep for several more hours. I had never woken up well, as if my body had always been fighting the busy life my mind had imposed on it. But that “day,” I was abruptly awake without transition, staring at the ceiling, and deep down I just knew.
There was no surprise in me, no regret, and no resistance. It was that certainty: Times up. More than something I knew, it was something I was. Over, finished, done, used up . . . but not quite gone, as a bottle is not gone though emptied of its contents. I thought of Jim Morrison singing “The End,” and felt some slight amusement that in the real end, it hadn't been anywhere near so dramatic. Just . . . times up.
And when I'd finally said, “Jim ...?'' he’d answered, “Uh-huh. I’ve got it, too.” And so had everyone else.
I raised up on one elbow and looked at him without thinking anything. After awhile, still not thinking anything, I pulled at his shirt and rolled him over.
Sex at the end of the world was as pointless as anything else, or as impossible as bleeding, depending on your point of view, I guess. The bodies didn’t function; the minds didn’t care. I felt some mild regret about that, and about the fact that all I could feel was mild regret.
But it was still possible to show affection—or to engage in pointless foreplay— and take a certain comfort in the contact. We hadn’t been much for that in this no-time winding-down. Maybe passion had only been some long, pleasant dream that had ended with everything else. I slipped my hand under Jim’s shirt.
His unmoving chest was cadaver-cold.
That’s it, I thought, now were dying for real. There was a fearful relief in the idea that I wouldn’t have to worry about him mutilating himself any further.
Jim’s eyes snapped open and he stared down at my hand still splayed on his stomach, as if it were some kind of alien, deformed starfish that had crawled out of the woodwork onto his torso.
“You’re warm,” he said, frowning.
And like that, I was lost in the memory of what it was to feel passion for another human being. What it was to want, emotions become physical reactions, flesh waking from calm to a level of response where the edge between pleasure and pain thinned to the wisp of a nerve ending.
I rolled off the bed and went into the bathroom. Behind me, I heard Jim rolling over again. Evidently he didn’t want to know about my sudden change in temperature if I didn’t want to tell him. A disposable razor sat abandoned on the counter near the sink. If I took it and ran my fingertip along the blade, would I see the blood well up in a bright, uneven bead? I didn’t want to know, either.
The exploding star was a fiery blue-white flower against the black sky. Its light fell on the upturned faces of the crowd on the promenade, turning them milky for a few moments before it faded.
“Better than fireworks,” I heard someone say.
“Ridiculous,” said someone else. “Some kind of trick. The stars are thousands and millions of light-years away from us. If we see them exploding now, it means the universe actually ended millions of years ago and we’re just now catching up with it.”
“Then no wonder we never made any contact with life on other planets,” said the first voice. “Doesn’t that make sense? If the universe has been unraveling for the last million years, all extraterrestrial life was gone by the time we got the technology to search for it.”
I looked around to see who was speaking and saw her immediately. The Ghost of Lifetimes Past was standing just outside the group, alone as usual, watching the people instead of the stars. She caught my eye before I could look away and put her fingertips to her mouth in a coy way, as if to stifle a discreet giggle. Then she turned and went up the promenade, tutu flouncing a little, as an orange starburst blossomed in the west.
If Jim had come out with me, I thought, weaving my way through the crowd, I probably wouldn’t have been doing something as stupid as following this obviously loony woman. But he had remained on the bed, unmoving, long after it had gotten dark, and I hadn’t disturbed him again. I had sat near the window with a book in my lap and told myself I was reading, not just staring until I got tired of seeing the same arrangement of words and turning a page, while I felt myself fade. It had been a very distinct sensation, what I might have felt if I had been awake when the world had ended.
The Ghost of Lifetimes Past didn’t look back once but I was sure she knew I was following her, just as I knew she had meant for me to follow her, all the way to the Kurhaus. Even from a distance, I could see that the lights were on. Another party; what was it about the end of the world that seemed to cry out for parties? Perhaps it was some kind of misplaced huddling instinct.
I passed a man sitting on a broken brick wall, boredly hammering four-inch nails into his chest. If we hung notes on them, I thought, and sent him strolling up and down the promenade, we could have a sort of postal service-cum-newspa-per. Hear ye, hear ye, the world is still dead. Or undead. Nondead. Universe still unemployed after quitting old job. Or was it, really?
The Ghost flounced across the rear courtyard of the Kurhaus without pausing, her ballet shoes going scritch-scritch on the pavement. Light spilled out from the tall windows, making giant, elongated lozenges of brightness on the stone. One level up, I could see people peering out the galleria windows at the sky. When the sun went, I thought suddenly, would we all finally go with it, or would it just leave us to watch cosmic fireworks in endless night?