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:
The Ogre’s wife remembers. She was walking alone, sadly bent beneath her load— she has forgotten what the load was, but she knows she had been carrying it since childhood. It was winter, her feet sank into the ruts—what the ruts were from she can’t recall either, but they had always been there. The snow began to fall, the little girl could no longer see the path. She stopped walking and started to pray. Almost immediately, a shape appeared against the blurred backdrop of the horizon, a completely white shape that flew over the hills and came toward her through the falling snow. “It’s an angel,” she told herself. “My prayers have been answered.” When the angel reached her, she saw he was very large, with two intense eyes in a face covered with small ice crystals. He took her hand and looked at her closely.
“You’re freezing,” he said in his strange, otherworldly voice.
“I’m cold,” the little girl murmured.
“Doesn’t your blood flow in your veins?” the angel asked.
“My father says I have the blood of a turnip.”
“The blood of a what?”
“A turnip,” the girl said, taking heart.
She could hear the amazement in the angel’s voice. “He feels sorry for me,” she said to herself, and she who had never felt like anything at all suddenly felt very small, which was an enormous change and almost made her dizzy, but also gave her a will she’d never known.
“You’re pale, is your blood pale too?”
“My father says I have the complexion of a rutabaga.”
“A rutabaga?” the angel said, with revulsion.
“Yes,” said the girl.
“You have skinny fingers.”
“I’m nothing but skin and bones.”
“Nothing but bones?” the angel said.
“No,” said the little girl.
“And you're flat,” the angel said, pulling back a flap of her thin coat.
“As flat as an endive leaf. ”
“And I can see through your skin.”
“Like the skin of an onion.”
“An onion?” the angel said, with increasing horror.
“That’s what everyone says,” the girl assured him, now making things up.
She could tell exactly what touched the angel, and she was ready to run through her father’s whole garden if she had to, to keep him interested in her. Because he must be interested in her to ask so many questions. She was so thrilled by this that a little color finally came into her cheeks and her eyes began to shine. The angel, who had the delicacy of his kind, noticed this.
“Of course, your looks aren’t that awful, are they?” he said, looking at her closely. “Only no one would want to eat you up, of course,” he added in the same pensive tone.
The girl went up to him and timidly touched his big, snow-covered boots. “Take me to heaven,” she said.
“What?” said the angel.
“I’d like to go to heaven with you,” the little girl said, pressing up against him and looking him straight in the eye.
“There isn’t much to you,” said the angel, thunderstruck, “but you’ve got brass.”
“I’d do anything for you,” the girl said, more and more taken with the fact that she had startled an angel, and such a big angel at that.
“In that case . . . ,” the angel said, hesitating.
“Oh please, won’t you?” the little girl said, with her arms around his boots.
“It isn’t done,” the angel said.
“You’ve got the power,” the girl said.
“True,” the angel said.
“And besides,” she said, “no one will see us.”
And, in fact, the thick snow falling around them had covered the path. It lay heavily on the drooping branches of the trees and filled the air; there wasn’t a sound, not a soul.
“Since you can fly,” the girl said, “there won’t be any footprints.”
“True,” the angel said, looking at his boots.
“And I don’t weigh much,” she added.
“But,” the angel asked, “are you strong?”
So that’s it, the little girl mused. He thinks I’m afraid to leave this earth, where everything is so heavy and where everyone makes fun of me. He thinks I’ll scream and struggle and make trouble for him in heaven.
“Very strong,” she answered, jumping onto his back and wrapping her arms firmly around his neck.
The angel flew over hills, forests, streams. Sometimes he dropped down and brushed the ground for a moment with the toe of his boot, then he quickly rose again and the little girl closed her eyes to avoid getting dizzy. The angel’s broad head protected her, but she could hear the wind whipping around the sides. She was drunk with speed and height, her head seemed filled with a substance lighter than snow. When night fell, they stopped at the edge of a wood.
“Are we there?” the girl asked. Her body felt weightless to her, she felt nothing beneath her fingers, saw nothing around her but a transparent blackness and white highlights.
“No,” he said, “but I know a shack nearby.”
At the shack the angel squeezed her very tight, wrapped her in his warmth, penetrated her with his strength. Everything was the way she had heard it described by people of the faith, even when she didn’t recognize each thing for what it was at first, and it was her great effort to recognize so much that was new that finally put her to sleep.
"Wake up,” said a hard voice the next morning.
The little girl woke with a start, and it wasn’t like coming into a beautiful dream, but like leaving a terrible battle that had covered her in bruises. The angel’s wings were no longer white, nor was his face or his flying boots. He was a big man in a black coat, with tousled hair, a beard, and very big, gaping shoes that gave off a terrible rotting smell.
He’s the devil, the girl thought, and I’m being punished.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, trembling.
“What?” the devil said.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“I said I wouldn’t eat you, didn’t I?” said the devil.
“Well, then, what are you going to do to me?”
“Nothing I didn’t already do last night. ”
“Last night?” she said.
She looked down at her legs, her stockings, and her skirt, and saw they were spotted with blood.
“Let’s go,” the devil said, and threw her over his shoulder like a sack.
The snow vanished; it got warm. Cautiously looking down, she suddenly saw an enormous well full of moving water, with a multitude of naked bodies around the rim, strewn this way and that beneath the burning sun. “This is hell,” she said to herself, feeling the harsh glow of the colors against her face. She could already feel her skin cooking. When they touched down, the sand was burning hot; all around, the bodies were stuck to it and charred, like on a grill. “Even the water is boiling,” she said to herself, and when the devil pushed her in she was already nearly dead with fear and exhaustion.
The water didn’t burn her. It was fresh and not very deep, and when you stopped being afraid to look at it, it had the blue of real stained-glass windows. It wasn’t boiling, but the little waves came lapping against her legs like minnows in a stream. The devil had moved off; now he had turned into a fish and was slicing through the water with big strokes of his fins. “Is he leaving?” she asked herself, astonished. She looked behind her, but her anxious gaze couldn’t get beyond two little girls leaning over side by side on the damp strip of beach, busily digging a canal. The devil was coming back; in his hand he held a potbellied fish with black whiskers and red scales.