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:
“Get up!” he cries.
Startled from their sleep, the ogrelettes rise like little serpents. They too catch the scent, and a thrill runs through them. They gather and sniff at each other like a pack of jackals, their eyes shining in the night. The Ogre places his big hands on them, bends over to catch the scent too, and they turn on him suddenly and bite his hand with their pointy little teeth. The Ogre growls.
The little boys have fled during this commotion, crawling into the darkness. They have found another pocket of warmth—now they’re in the Ogre’s big bed, snuggling and squeezing against one another; half-asleep, half-awake, they listen to the growling and hissing that comes from beyond the staircase.
The Ogre has withdrawn his bloody hand, and, retreating with a growl, he goes back to his room. The horde of ogresses follow him. They smell the wild odor in the bed where their father has lain down again, they mill around him, sniffing, and climb onto him with their little pointy teeth unsheathed and gleaming like razor blades.
The little boys had thrown themselves under the bed, and now they flee toward the other bedroom, slithering like little beasts. The ogresses and the Ogre race from one room to the other. The smell grows stronger all the time, they circle one another, their little teeth sink in farther and farther, the Ogre’s hands squeeze at random, blood flows, bones crack, the scent in the air baffles them, drives them mad, blinds them, the ogresses are upon their father like a pack, he shakes his enormous arms and bites to the right, to the left, crushes and tears. When the noise finally dies down and the little boys venture out again, there is nothing left but a mangled heap at the head of the stairs between the two rooms. They go downstairs and find themselves a place in the kitchen near the hearth, where a little bit of heat still lingers, and then, finally at peace, they fall asleep with the scent of the forest wafting over them through the open door.
When the wife returns, still debating with Thumbkin, she sees his six brothers lying there asleep.
“You see?” Thumbkin says. “Nothing happened.”
“You win,” the wife says. “Lie down beside them.”
Then she goes out on the doorstep as is her wont and sits there bolt upright. Her mind is compact as a stone, as though the world had just changed and there was no room yet for many murmuring thoughts. When Thumbkin and his brothers leave at dawn, she hardly moves. She remains alone in the house with the corpses she hasn’t yet seen.
The wife has the house to herself. The first few days, she comes and goes. When she thinks of the ogrelettes in their white nightgowns by the well, she weeps. When she thinks of their pointy teeth and the shreds that hung between their pink lips, her tears stop. And the Ogre? The memory of him leaves a black hole that swallows up thought. They are all under the earth now, and no one in the village complains about them anymore; in their dead-and-buried state they have become like everybody else, and now they can be forgotten. At the cemetery, the big tomb and the seven little ones lie there as submissively as all the others. People say the ogrelettes’ hair has grown up through the ground and become the hedge of spiky bushes against the wall at the back. For a long time the wife comes to straighten the thorns into a proper crown at the head of the tombs, but one day she no longer sees her children’s hair in them and leaves them to disorder.
The wife no longer vomits. Once, in town, she saw magazines with animals and whips and leather instruments and vampires. She came home, and ever since she has found herself laughing, suddenly laughing midway up the stairs, laughing at the thought of those magazines, at her memories, which insert themselves between the pages, making the printed images pale by comparison. In the middle of her kitchen, she raises her skirt and looks at her long white thighs, no longer bruised or cramped. She has sold the salting tubs, the mincers, the slaughtering pens; she has sold the guns, the hooks, and the big jugs saturated with indelible brown stains. Her garden is full of fruit and handsome green plants that grow in broad daylight, her stomach feels better, she has little to say. She receives newspapers, all the newspapers that come to the village—she reads incessantly. Massacres, carnage, killings, and crime; torture in basements, booby-trapped summer homes, deranged gunmen, explosions; and children, children burned, children gunned down like clay pigeons, raped, cut up, as well as children in uniforms with guns in their hands, and children in gangs with chains. The Ogre’s wife clips these articles and pastes them on big sheets of cardboard, which she puts up here and there around the house—it doesn’t matter where, since no one comes to visit— and now and again she comes to a stop before one of them and falls into a revery, an anxiety, an oblivion.
Days pass. One morning, the Ogre’s wife opens a cupboard and sees the Ogre’s big boots standing there. She turns around. Beyond the windows (which are almost always open now), beyond the garden, she can see the great forest drawn like a thick black line against the clear and empty sky. She comes back down as she used to long ago and sits on the kitchen doorstep. Night falls. The dim tangle of the forest twines firmly around her gaze, and when she drifts off, the branches, the twigs, the leaves enter her half-open eyes, and in the depths of her sleep a small noise begins casting about.
The following day, the wife returns to the cupboard, takes out the boots, and slides her feet into them. Being enchanted, the boots immediately settle against her skin, feel their way along her toes, her heels, her ankles, then find their marks and take on the shape of the feet of the Ogre’s wife.
She goes outside. With one step she is already at the other end of her garden, another step and she is at the edge of the forest. Then the Ogre’s wife takes a very deep breath, squares her timid shoulders, flexes her slim thighs, and suddenly she takes off in a great leap over the forest.
She is flying, flying over the forest in her seven-league boots. In the dim undergrowth, Thumbkin is wandering once again, followed by his six sniveling brothers, still tripping over roots, filled with the chimerical desire to find their parents and with a neurotic fear of wolves. Thumbkin lets them talk. He’s got other things to think about: once was enough to shatter his universe. Being deserted a second time, having to march again among these enormous black trunks, where each branch seems to snap beneath his skin like an unknown organ exploding, sending unheard-of sounds along his nerves—all this, instead of stamping Thumbkin into the soil of the forest, has freed him from it forever. He doesn't want to go back, but where can he go, and what should he do with the six whiners who are holding him back?
Thumbkin climbs a tree. He scans peaks and valleys, and then, in the misty distance, he notices a shape that seems to be flying toward him. His heart beats quickly, he waves wildly from his branch, he shouts and struggles. Oh, if only she will see him and come over, he will know how to hold her.
She has seen him, and in two strides she is beside him. He has grown, she has changed—they greet each other eagerly.
“I’m taking you with me,” she says.
“What about the others?” he asks, pointing at the six crybabies sitting in a circle at the foot of the tree.
The Ogre’s wife bends down, pushing aside two or three branches.
“It’s you I want, not them,” she says.
How she has changed, Thumbkin muses, and he admires her so much he’d like to jump into the pocket of her blouse right now and never leave it.
“They are my brothers,” he says reluctantly, “and they don’t know how to care for themselves.”
The Ogre’s wife takes a package out of her bag.