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:
When he’s done, his mood sometimes softens for a few minutes, and the wife climbs up near his head and brushes aside his sweat-soaked locks.
“At least let me cook the flesh,” she says.
“I can’t,” he says.
“Why not?”
“I have to have it raw, otherwise ...”
“Otherwise?” the wife says.
“Otherwise my hunger is like a solid wall, a web of gray threads, parching illness, a constant grinding that drives me mad.”
“Yes,” the wife says.
“I need flesh that cries out. My hunger comes back in a rush, and I fill myself with what I need.”
“Yes,” the wife says.
“The wall opens, and everything that is parched and gray and grinding suddenly explodes, and I fill myself with what I need.”
The woman continues to smooth his matted curls, but she knows she mustn’t say a word, mustn’t look him in the eye, or the Ogre will rise in anger and she will see that look he has when he brings home the beasts.
This evening, though, he goes on talking.
“Even the beasts,” he says. “Their flesh is dull, they don’t understand me. They can’t share with me, they aren’t with me. Soon I’ll have to, I’ll have to—”
Horrified, the wife puts out the light. “Let’s go to sleep,” he says.
In the night, the open window, at first cloudy, little by little becomes clear. The great forest looms up beyond in the pale light. The wife carries the great forest in her eyes, which are always half-open, and as she sleeps the little noise that has been hovering about for some time, now near, now far, comes back more loudly. Twigs can be heard breaking, leaves being crumpled, brambles crunching; something small and very determined is casting about, trying to get out of that great forest, trying to get into her head.
The wife is dreaming. The street is empty, she is sitting alone on the edge of the sidewalk. A little girl comes down the street, very little, almost an infant. There is a fairly high wall running along the sidewalk, and on the other side of the wall, down below, the wife knows there is a ledge covered with weeds and wildflowers. The ledge isn’t very wide; there is nothing beyond it but sky, emptiness. Suddenly the little girl breaks away and jumps onto the wall. She has already thrown one leg over to the other side. The wife doesn’t understand why no one is rushing up, why she herself doesn’t budge. But she can’t take her eyes off what is happening. The child moves with the deftness of a serpent, the control of a well-trained predator, and suddenly, just as her whole body is about to go over, she raises her face. The wife is stunned by the girl’s expression. The child isn’t just playing, she knows what she is doing, her baby eyes are set and full of fury. Her glance goes right through the wife, as though she were nothing but a vague shape made of mist on the sidewalk, but she doesn’t know what feeling it fills her with. The face of that child on the wall, and that little leg sliding over! Then it’s done. The wife listens for the dull thud of the child’s fall onto the grassy ledge, but none comes, and she waits a long time, her heart repeating the same, pounding question: “But there was a ledge, wasn’t there? There was a ledge?”
She wakes up expecting the noise, fearing the emptiness in which the noise doesn’t come. And suddenly she hears a very soft snapping in front of the house. Her skin prickles. It is as though her dream has jumped tracks: the fall into the abyss beyond the ledge has happened, and now something—the remnants of the sound she didn’t hear—is gently scratching at the membrane of silence and darkness around the house, around her sleep.
Trembling, she goes down into the kitchen, crosses to the door, and opens it suddenly. On the doorstep there is only a very small boy, scantily clothed, his whole body trembling.
“I want to come in,” he says.
The woman looks at him, thunderstruck.
“I’m lost,” he says. “My brothers and I are cold. Let us in.”
“God help you,” the wife murmurs. “Don’t you know this is the Ogre’s house?” “The wolves will eat us too,” the little boy whispers. “Let us in.”
They debate it, the little boy numb with cold and the wife numb with fear. He won’t retreat toward the forest and she can’t retreat into her house. They walk in the garden, on the path, back and forth at the edge of the forest. The wife has never met such an obstinate and contentious person. She forgets her fear.
“The wolves mean death,” he says.
“The Ogre means death as well,” she says.
“The wolves mean a brute death, my screams will be lost in their rough fur, their jaws, their dirty black claws. There’s nothing more brutal than that, there's nothing more terrible than my screams drowning in brute flesh.”
The woman listens passionately. “How will it be different with the Ogre?” she asks, forgetting he’s her husband, forgetting he’s in her bed, forgetting he’s there, close by, in the house.
“His eyes will look at me, they will return my screams and add something to them. The Ogre will understand me, there will be two of us at my death, we will share something.”
“That’s odd,” the wife says. “The Ogre said that too.”
“You see?” he says. “It will be better than with the wolves.”
“It will be worse,” says the wife, who can’t understand where all these words are coming from. “You’ll want to ask him for mercy.”
“It’s you I’ll ask for mercy,” he says. “You’ll protect me, I know it.”
“I won’t be able to do anything,” the wife says, “and my heart will break with sadness. ”
“We’ve been abandoned,” he says. “I’ll think of you suffering for me and I’ll have that solace. With the wolves, all I’ll have is the pain and the brutishness.”
“You mean you want me to suffer?” the wife says.
“Maybe that’s what you need,” the little boy says. “How long have you been living here?”
“A long time,” the wife murmurs.
She sees the child in her dream just as its legs slide over the wall, its face turned toward her with those eyes full of something she doesn’t understand. She is seized with fury.
“Why have you come here?” she cries.
“Because of the wolves,” he says.
“But there aren’t any more wolves,” she cries.
“Why are you shouting?”
“Because you’re here,” the wife says.
“But I’m here because you’re here,” he says.
They walk faster and faster at the edge of the forest, coming and going rapidly. The wife is completely absorbed in this argument that rises and falls around them, looping and knotting and binding them so completely they don’t want to get loose. Caught up in their argument, they talk more and more loudly, so loudly that they hear nothing around them, nothing of what is going on at the same time across the garden, in the house.
Thumbkin’s six brothers had gone into the house. They were cold and they couldn’t stand waiting anymore; their little brother was palavering and not coming back. They went in and went upstairs one after the other. Drawn by the heat, they found the ogresses’ bedroom, and each one slipped into a bed without thinking, without even undressing, they were so tired and frozen.
In his bed, the Ogre is having a bad night. He has talked too much this night, and the words have muddled his brain like bad wine. He wakes in a storm cloud and immediately smells fresh flesh, very much alive and fragrant with the scent of the outdoors. He rises, reeling, and follows the smell to the ogresses’ bedroom. The boys hear the floor shaking as though trees were falling in the forest. They quickly slide under the beds and wait, holding their breath. The Ogre comes into the room and bends over his daughters; he smells the smell that is driving him mad in their sheets, on their skin.