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:
“Life. Whatever’s left. You’re alive and I’m one of the fading ones. I’ll make you fade, too.”
“That’s an interesting theory. Is that what you think happened?”
“Somehow you’re still really alive. Like the earth still turns, like there are still stars. Figures we wouldn’t all fade away at once, us people. Some of us would still be alive. Maybe as long as there are still stars, there’ll still be some people alive.” The sound of my laughter in the small room was harsh and ugly. “So romantic. As long as there are stars in the sky, that’s how long you’ll be here for me. Go away. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“And what will you do?” he asked. Go back to your bloodless room and your bloodless man, resume your bloodless wait to see what the end will be? It’s all nothing without the risk, isn’t it? When there’s nothing to lose, there’s really nothing at all. Isn’t that right?”
The lock snapped and the door swung open. He stood there holding on to either side of the doorway. The stark hunger in the angular features had made his face into a predator’s mask, intent, voracious, without mercy. I backed up a step, but there was nowhere to go.
He lunged at me and caught me under the arms, lifting me to eye level. “You silly cow,” he whispered, and his breath smelled like meat. I didn't get cooler, you just got warmer.”
He shoved me away. I hit the wall and slid down. The pain in my shoulders and back was exquisite, not really pain but pure sensation, the un-alive, undead nerve endings frenzied with it. I wanted him to do it again, I wanted him to hit me, or caress me, or cut me, or do anything that would make me feel. Pain or pleasure, whatever there was, I wanted to live through it, get lost in it, die of it, and, if I had to die of it, take him with me.
He stood over me with the barest of smiles. “Starting to understand now?”
I pushed myself up, my hands slipping and sticking on the tiled wall.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I think maybe you are. I think you’re definitely starting to get it.” He backed to the sink and slid a razor blade off the counter. “How about this?” He held the blade between two fingers, moving it back and forth so it caught the light. “Always good for a thrill. Your bloodless man understands that well enough already. Like so many others. Where do you think he goes when he takes his little walks up the promenade, what do you think he does when he leaves you to sit watching the hanging woman twist and turn on the end of her rope?” He laughed and popped the blade into his mouth, closing his eyes with ecstasy. Then he bared his teeth; the blood ran over his lower lip onto his chin and dripped down onto his chest.
“Come on,” he said, the razor blade showing between his teeth. “Come kiss me.”
I wasn’t sure that I leaped at him as much as the life in him pulled me by that hunger for sensation. He caught me easily, holding me away for a few teasing seconds before letting our bodies collide.
The feeling was an explosion that rushed outward from me, and as it did, I finally did understand, mostly that I hadn’t had it right at all, but it was too late to do anything about it. The only mercy he showed was to let the light go out again.
Or maybe that wasn’t mercy. Maybe that was only what happened when he drained it all out of me and back into himself, every bit of pain and pleasure and being alive.
He kept the razor blade between his teeth for the whole time. It went everywhere, but he never did kiss me.
The room was so quiet, I thought he’d left. I got up from where I’d been lying, half in and half out of the bathroom, thinking I’d find my clothes and go away now, wondering how long I’d be able to hide the damage from Jim—if damage it was, since I no longer felt anything—wondering if I would end up in the hospital, if there was already a bed with my name on it, or whether I’d be just another exotic for nightly sessions at the Kurhaus.
“Just one more thing,” he said quietly. I froze in the act of taking a step toward the bed. He was standing by the open window, looking out at the street.
What s the matter? I said. “Aren’t I dead enough yet?”
He laughed, and now it was a soft, almost compassionate sound, the predator pitying the prey. “I just want to show you something.”
He dragged me to the window and forced my head out. “See it anyway, this one time. A favor, because I’m so well pleased.” He pulled my head back to make me look up at the sky. A night sky, very flat, very black, featureless, without a cloud and with no stars, none at all.
“A magic lantern show, yes,” he said, as though I’d spoken. “We put the signs and wonders in the sky for you. So you wouldn’t see this. ”
He forced my head down, digging his fingers more deeply into my hair. Below, in the courtyard, people wandered among a random arrangement of cylindrical things without seeing them. They were pale things, silent, unmoving; long, ropy extensions stretched out from the base of each one, sinking into the pavement like cables, except even in the dim light, I could see how they pulsed.
While I watched, a split appeared in the nearest one. The creature that pushed its way out to stand and stretch itself in the courtyard was naked, vaguely femalelooking, but not quite human. It rubbed its hands over the surface of the cylinder, and then over itself. I pulled away. ’
You see, that s the other thing about your kind besides your tendency toward too little, too late,” he said conversationally as I dressed. If I tucked my shirt into my pants I could keep myself together a little better. “You miss things. You’re blind. All of you. Otherwise, you’d have seen us before now. We’ve always been here, waiting for our time with you. If even one of you had seen us, you might have escaped us. Perhaps even destroyed us. Instead, you all went on with your lives. And now we’re going on with them.” He paused, maybe waiting for me to say something. I didn’t even look at him as I wrapped my shirt around the ruin of my torso. “Don’t worry. What I just showed you, you’ll never see again. Perhaps by the time you get home, you’ll even have forgotten that you saw anything.
He turned back to the window. “See you around the promenade.”
“First time’s the worst. ”
The Ghost of Lifetimes Past fell into step beside me as I walked back along the promenade. She was definitely looking worse, wilted and eaten away. “After that,” she added, “it’s the natural order of things.”
“I don’t know you,” I said.
“I know you. We all know each other, after. Go home to your husband now and he’ll know you, too.”
“I’m not married.”
“Sure.” She smiled at me, her face breaking into a mass of lines and seams. “It could be worse, you know. They like to watch it waste me, they like to watch it creep through me and eat me alive. They pour life into us, they loan it to us, you could say, and then they take it back with a great deal of interest. And fascination. They feed on us, and we feed on them, but considering what they are, we’re actually feeding on ourselves. And maybe a time will come that will really be the end. After all, how long can we make ourselves last?”
She veered away suddenly, disappearing down a staircase that led to one of the abandoned restaurants closer to the waterline.
As I passed the tower, the hanging woman waved a greeting. There would be no horizon line on the ocean again today.
I had thought Jim would know as soon as he saw me, but I didn’t know what I expected him to do. He watched me from where he lay on the bed with his arms behind his head. Through the thin material of his shirt, I could see how he’d been split from below his collarbone down to his navel. It seems to be a favorite pattern of incision with them, or maybe they really have no imagination to speak of.