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:
I’m running from the cold but I might as well run from myself. I’m going to be frozen right into the mountain like all the other women from now back to the beginning of the universe, women dancing in a slow circle around the dying fire. I’m running through the tunnel that becomes—
The tunnel beneath the sea. I’m riding the bullet train, crossing to Hokkaido island, to the Japan no one knows, the Japan of wide open spaces and desolate snowy peaks and spanking-new cities that have no souls. I’m staring out as the train shrieks, staring at the concrete cavern. I see Molly Danzig’s eyes and I wonder if they’re real, I wonder if Aki has plucked them from the corpse and buried them in the snow woman’s face.
The frozen woman shakes her head. Her eyes are deep circles drawn in blood. “No, ate, no, ate,” I whisper.
Be still, my son, my grandfather says to the bear who rears up over the pavilion of frozen women. My grandfather gives me honey from a wooden spoon. He puts his pipe back in his mouth and blows smoke rings at the bear, who growls a little and then slinks, cowed, back into the snowy forest.
Circles. Circles. I’m running in circles. There’s no way out. The tunnel has twisted back on itself. I will turn to snow.
Molly Danzig’s card: an apartment building a few blocks west of the Sapporo Brewery. It was about a fifteen-minute ride on the subway from my ryokan. The air was permeated with the smell of hops. Snow piled against a Coke machine with those slender Japanese Coke cans. At the corner, a robocop directed traffic. Its metal arms were heaped with snow. The first time I’d seen one of those things I’d thought it must be a joke; my Tokyo guide told me, self-importantly, that they’d had them for twenty years.
The afternoon was gray. The sky and the apartment building were the same dead shade, gray gray gray.
I took the elevator to the tenth floor. I don’t know what I expected to find. I told myself, Hey, sister, you’re a reporter, maybe there is a gag order on this story now but it won’t last out the week. I had my little Sure Shot in my purse just in case.
The halclass="underline" shag carpet, dull modern art by the elevator. This apartment building could be anywhere. The color scheme was nouveau “Miami Vice.” I followed the apartment numbers down the corridor. Hers, 17A, should be at the end. There it was with the door ajar. An old man in overalls was painting the door.
Painting out the apartment number. Painting out Molly's name. A brushstroke could obliterate a life.
I pushed my way past him into the apartment. I’d had a notion of what Molly’s place would look like. Molly was always laughing so I imagined there’d be outrageous posters or funky furniture. She loved to talk about men—I don’t—so I imagined some huge and blatant phallic statue standing in the middle of the room. It wasn’t like that at all. It was utterly still.
The windows were wide open. It was chillier here than outside. A wind was sighing through the living room and the tatami floor was peppered with snow. No furniture. No Chippendales pinups on the walls. The wind picked up a little. Snowflakes flecked my face.
The kitchen: two bowls of cold tea on the counter. The stove was still lit. I turned it off. A half-eaten piece of sushi lay in a blue-and-white plate. I took a few snapshots. I wondered if the police had come by to dust the tea bowls for prints.
I heard a sound. At first I thought it must be the wind. The wind blew harder now and behind the sighing I could hear someone humming. A woman.
I stepped into the living room. Snow seeped through my sneakers. I was shivering. It was a contralto voice, eerie, erotic. I could hear water dripping, too. It came from behind a shoji screen door. A bedroom, I supposed.
I knew I was going to have to go in. I steeled myself and slid the shoji open.
Snowflakes whirled. The wind was really howling here. Through a picture window I could see the Sapporo Brewery and the grid of the city, regular as graph paper, and snowy mountains far beyond it. I smelled stale beer on the snow that settled on my cheeks.
The humming grew louder. A bathroom door was ajar. Water dripped.
“Molly?”
I could feel my heart pounding. I flung the bathroom door wide open.
“Why—Marie darlin’—I sure wasn’t expecting you.” Esmeralda looked up at me from the bathtub, soaping herself lazily.
“You knew who she was the whole time,” I said.
It s my business to know that, hon,” she said. “Not too many American citizens in Sapporo, as you might have noticed, but I keep tabs on ’em all. Hand me that washcloth? Pretty please?”
I did so numbly. Why had she asked me who the dead woman was if she already knew her? “You tricked me!”
In diplomacy school, Marie, they teach you to let the other person do all the talking. Oftentimes they end up digging their own grave that way.”
“But what are you doing here?”
“This is my apartment. Molly Danzig used to sublet. I’ve got a suite in the consulate I usually end up crashing out at, but the hot water in our building never works right.”
She reached for a towel and slid out of the tub. She steamed; she was firm and magnificent and had a way of looking fully clothed even when she was naked, I guessed it was her diplomatic comportment. The Lakota are a modest people. I was embarrassed.
“Believe me, this ain’t St. Louis. I mean, girl,” she said, reaching for the hair dryer, “here’s me, on a GS salary with perks up the wazoo, housing allowance, no mouths to feed ... but if it weren’t for all those receptions with all that free food, I’d be lining up at a fucking soup kitchen. Let’s forget this and just go shopping somewhere, Marie.”
“All right.” I couldn’t see where I could go with the story at this point. I had three or four pieces, but they didn’t seem to fit together maybe they didn't even belong in the same puzzle. Perhaps I just needed to spend a mindless afternoon buying souvenirs.
Esmeralda drove me to the Tanuki-koji arcade, a labyrinthine underground mall that starts somewhere in the middle of town and snakes over and under, taking in the train station and the basement of the Otani Prince. She parked in a loading zone (“Gaimusho tags, darlin’—they’re not going to tow any of us diplomats, no way!”) and although it was afternoon, we descended into a world of neon night.
When you’re confused and pushed to the limits of your endurance and you think you’re going to crack up, sometimes shopping is the only cure. I never went shopping when I was a kid. Yes, sometimes we’d take the pickup and lurch toward Belvedere or Wall, where at least you could watch the mechanical jackalopes for 25¢ or gaze at the eighty-foot fake dinosaur as it reared up from the knee-high snow. Shopping was a vice I learned from JAPs and WASPs in Berkeley. But I had learned well. I could shop with passion. So could Esmeralda. It was an hour or two before I realized that, for her as well as me, the ability to shop effusively was little more than a defense mechanism. As we warmed to each other a little, I could see that she spoke two different languages, with separate lexicons of gesture and facial expression; they were as different as English and Lakota were for my parents, except they were both English, and she could slide back and forth between them with ease.
We moved from corridor to corridor, past little noodle stands with their glass cases of plastic food in front, past I Love Kitty emporia and kimono rental stores and toy stores guarded by mechanical Godzillas, past vending machines that dispensed slender cans of Sapporo beer and iced coffee. People shuffled purposefully by. The concrete alleyways were slick with mush from above ground. Glaring neons blended into chiaroscuro.