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:
After that she was asked to sing a lot though she always said she couldn’t do it often. “Keep them wanting more,” she told me, “and keep them guessing.” Sometimes she would come down with a phony cold just when she’d said she would sing and the auditorium was already filled with people who’d come just to hear her.
But something stranger than love . . . more than love began to happen between my sister and the mite. Or, rather, the mite was the same, but my sister’s relationship with it changed. That first performance she’d pricked it too hard. A whitish fluid had come out of it, dripped down one side and dried there, making the yellow fur matted . . . less attractive. She felt guilty about that and said so. “I’m such a butcher,” she said, and she seemed to be trying to make up for it by finding special foods that it might like. She even brought it caviar, which it wouldn’t touch. And she wanted punishment. Sometimes she would ask it to sting her. “Go ahead,” she’d say. “I deserve it. And you have a right to do it and I don’t care if you do, I’ll love you just the same. Matt, Matt, Matt, Matty,” she said, and it occurred to me perhaps it was a name she’d made out of mite. She had called it sometimes Mite, Mite, and now had made it clearly male with Matt. “My Matt,” she said, “all mine.” I was out of it completely except as watcher and listener. Its song had not suffered from the wounding. It just had more difficulty moving itself about. My sister had tried to wash the white stuff off, but that had only smeared it around even more, so that the mite was now an ugly, dull creature with, here and there, one or two yellow hairs that stuck out. “Sting me,” my sister said, “bite me. I deserve it.”
Now she would lie on her bed with her blouse pulled up and let it crawl on her stomach. It moved with difficulty, but it always moved, except now and then when it seemed to sit contentedly on her belly button. “I don’t deserve you,” she’d say. “I don’t deserve one like you.” And sometimes she’d say, “Take me. I’m yours,” spread-eagled on her bed and laughing as though it were a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. Sometimes she’d say, “You love me. Do you really? Don’t you? Do you?” or, “Tell me what love is. Is it always small things that once could fly? Is it small things that sting?”
I sat there watching. She hardly seemed to notice me but I knew it was important that I be there. Even though beneath contempt, I was the observer she needed. I saw how she let it crawl up under her blouse or down her neck and inside her bra, how she giggled at its tickle or lay, serious, looking at the ceiling.
In the cricket cage she’d placed a velvet cushion and she’d hung the cage over her bed by a golden-yellow cord.
“I’m your only friend,” she’d say. “I’m your keeper, I’m your jailer, I’m your everything, I’m your nothing, ” and then she’d carefully place the mite in its cage and I would know it was time for me to leave.
At school she became known as an artist with a great future and she walked around as though it were true, that she was an artist, that she could dress differently from anyone else, that she was privileged and perhaps a little mad. “I live for my art,” she’d say, “and only for that.” She stopped doing her homework and said it was because she practiced her music for hours every day.
I told her she might be found out. “Can you live with this secret forever?”
“Not to sing is to die,” she said and it was as though she had forgotten it wasn’t she who sang. “I will die,” she said, “if I can’t sing.”
“What if it dies or stops singing? It might. It’s not that healthy by the looks of it.”
“Why are you asking me this? Why do you want to hurt me?”
“I’m scared of what’s happening.”
“Love always scares people who don’t know anything about it, and art does too. I’ll always be this ... in the middle of the song in the middle of my life. In the middle. No end and no beginning. I had a dream of such a shining rain, such silver, such glow, as if I were on the moon, or I were a moon myself. Do you know what it’s like to be a moon? I was a moon.”
But I knew that she was frightened too ... of herself and of her love, and I thought that if I weren’t there she’d not be this way, that I was the audience she played to, that without me she’d not believe in her drama. Without me there’d be no truth to it. That night ... the night I thought of this, I stayed away from our evening of music. I went back to my nature books and, it was true, she did need me. She brought me back with a bribe of chocolate. I even think her sexual dreams, as she ignored me and stared at the ceiling, were of no pleasure to her without me there to be ignored. I did come back, but I wasn’t sure how long I would keep doing it.
And she was, in her way, nice to me then. To show her gratefulness, she bought me a little book on bees. The next night she threw it at me while I sat, again, in her chair and she lay on her bed. “It’s nothing,” she said, “but you might like it.”
“I do,” I said, “I really do,” because I knew she needed me to say it and I did like it.
“I’m going to give a program all my own,” she told me then. “It’s at school, but it’s for everybody in town and they’re charging for it and I’m to get a hundred dollars even though it’s a benefit for band uniforms. It’s already beginning and I haven’t even tried. I just sat here and didn’t do my homework and everything’s beginning to come true just as I’ve always wanted it to.”
I began to feel even more frightened thinking of her giving a whole program. We’d never had the mite sing more than about forty minutes at a time at the very most. “Well, I won’t be there,” I said. I had never challenged her directly before, but now I said, “And I won’t let you do this, but if I can’t stop you, I won’t be there.”
“Give me back that book,” she said.
I was sorry to lose it, but I gave it back. I would be sorrier to lose her. It was odd, but the higher she went with this artist business, and the higher she got in her own estimation, the more she, herself, seemed to me like the mite: torn wings, broken legs, sick, matted fur . . .
“It’s just like you,” she said. “This is my first really big moment and you want to take my pleasure in it from me.” But I knew that she knew it wasn’t at all like me. “You’re jealous,” she said, and I wondered, then, if that were true. I didn’t think I was but how can you judge yourself?
The mite inched along her desk as we spoke and I had in mind that I should squash it right then. Couldn’t she see the thing was in pain? And then I saw that clearly for the first time. It was in pain. Maybe the singing was all a pain song. I couldn’t stand it any longer, but she must have seen something in my face for she jumped up and pushed me out the door before I hardly knew myself what I was about to do . . . pushed me out the door and locked it.
I thought about it but there was no way that I could see how to stop her. I could tell everybody about the mite, but would they believe me? And wouldn’t they just go and have the concert anyway even if they knew it was the mite that sang? Maybe that would be an even greater draw. I had lost my chance to put the creature out of its misery. My sister wouldn’t let me near it again. Besides, I wasn’t sure if what she said wasn’t true, that she’d die if she couldn’t sing ... if she couldn’t, that is, be the artist she pretended to be.
She was going to call her program Moon Songs. There would be two songs with a ten-minute intermission between them. I decided I would be there, but that she wouldn’t know it. I would stand in a dark corner in the wings after she had already stepped on stage.