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 doctor’s throat sounds dry. “My father’s memory.”
“Ah,” you say. “Yes, his reputation. Look, I’m not interested in spreading scandal and ruining anybody, dead or alive. All I want is the truth. About me. Who was my mother? Do I have a brother or a sister somewhere? Was I adopted?” “So much money.”
“What?” You clutch the phone harder.
“When my father closed the clinic and left Redwood Point, he had so much money. I was just a kid, but even I knew that he couldn’t have earned a small fortune merely delivering babies at a resort. And there were always so many babies.
I remember him walking up to the nursery every morning. And then it burned down. And the next thing, he closed the clinic and bought a mansion in San Francisco and never worked again.”
“The nursery? You mean like a plant nursery?”
“No. The building on the ridge above town. Big, with all kinds of chimneys and gables.”
“Victorian?”
“Yes. And that’s where the pregnant women lived.”
You shiver. Your chest feels encased with ice.
“My father always called it the nursery. I remember him smiling when he said it. Why pick on him?” the doctor asks. “All he did was deliver babies! And he did it well! And if someone paid him lots of money to put false information on birth certificates, which I don’t even know if he did ...”
“But you suspect.”
“Yes. God damn it, that’s what I suspect,” Dr. Adams admits. “But I can’t prove it, and I never asked. It’s the Gunthers you should blame! They ran the nursery! Anyway if the babies got loving parents, and if the adopting couples finally got the children they desperately wanted, what’s the harm? Who got hurt? Leave the past alone!”
For a moment, you have trouble speaking. “Thank you, Doctor. I appreciate your honesty. I have only one more question.”
“Get on with it. I want to finish this.”
“The Gunthers. The people who ran the nursery.”
“A husband and wife. I don’t recall their first names.”
“Have you any idea what happened to them?”
“After the nursery burned down? God only knows,” Dr. Adams says.
“And what about June Engle, the nurse who assisted your father?”
“You said you had only one more question.” The doctor breathes sharply.
“Never mind, I’ll answer if you promise to leave me alone. June Engle was born and raised in Redwood Point. When we moved away, she said she was staying behind. It could be she’s still there.”
“Could be. If she’s still alive.” Chilled again, you set down the phone.
The same as last night, a baby cries in the room next to yours. You pace and phone Rebecca. You’re as good as can be expected, you say. You don’t yet know when you’ll be home. You try to sleep. Apprehension jerks you awake.
The morning is overcast, as gray as your thoughts. After checking out of the motel, you follow the desk clerk’s directions to Cape Verde’s public library. A disturbing hour later, under a thickening gloomy sky, you drive back to Redwood Point.
From the highway along the cliff, the town looks even bleaker. You steer down the bumpy road, reach the ramshackle boarded-up hotel, and park your rented car. Through weeds that cling to your pant legs, you walk beyond the hotel’s once splendid porch, find eroded stone steps that angle up a slope, and climb to the barren ridge above the town.
Barren with one exception: the charred timbers and flame-scorched toppled walls of the peaked, gabled, Victorian structure that Dr. Adams Jr. had called the nursery. That word makes you feel as if an icy needle has pierced your heart. The clouds hang deeper, darker. A chill wind makes you hug your chest. The nursery. And in 1941 . . . you learned from old newspapers on microfilm at the Cape Verde library . . . thirteen women died here, burned to death, incinerated—their corpses grotesquely blackened and crisped—in a massive blaze, the cause of which the authorities were never able to determine.
Thirteen women. Exclusively women. You want to shout in outrage. And were they pregnant? And were there also . . . ? Sickened, imagining their screams of fright, their wails for help, their shrieks of indescribable agony, you sense so repressive an atmosphere about this ruin that you stumble back as if shoved. With wavering legs that you barely control, you manage your way down the unsteady stone slabs. Lurching through the clinging weeds below the slope, you stumble past the repulsive listing hotel to reach your car, where you lean against its hood and try not to vomit, sweating despite the increasingly bitter wind.
The nursery, you think.
Dear God.
The Redwood Bar is no different than when you left it. Chief Kitrick and his friends again play cards at the far right corner table. The haze of cigarette smoke again dims the light above them. The waiter stands behind the bar on your left, the antique nautical instruments gleaming on a shelf behind him. But your compulsion directs you toward the wrinkled, faded photographs on the wall to your right.
This time, you study them without innocence. You see a yellowed image of the peaked, gabled nursery. You narrow your gaze toward small details that you failed to give importance to the first time you saw these photographs. Several women, diminished because the cameraman took a long shot of the large Victorian building, sit on a lawn that’s bordered by flower gardens, their backs to a windowed brick wall of the . . . your mind balks ... the nursery.
Each of the women—young! so young!—holds an infant in her lap. The women smile so sweetly. Are they acting? Were they forced to smile?
Was one of those women your mother? Is one of those infants you? Mary Reilly, what desperation made you smile like that?
Behind you, Chief Kitrick’s husky voice says, “These days, not many tourists pay us a second visit. ”
“Yeah, I can’t get enough of Redwood Point.” Turning, you notice that Chief Kitrick—it isn’t yet five o’clock—holds a glass of beer. “You might say it haunts me.”
Chief Kitrick sips his beer. “I gather you didn’t find what you wanted at the courthouse.”
“Actually I learned more than I expected.” Your voice shakes. “Do you want to talk here or in your office?”
“It depends on what you want to talk about. ”
“The Gunthers.”
You pass through the squeaky gate in the office.
Chief Kitrick sits behind his desk. His face looks more flushed than it did two days ago. “The Gunthers? My, my. I haven’t heard that name in years. What about them?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? What about them? Tell me.”
Chief Kitrick shrugs. “There isn’t much to tell. I don’t remember them. I was just a toddler when they ... All I know is what I heard when I was growing up, and that’s not a lot. A husband and wife, they ran a boarding house.”
“The nursery.”
Chief Kitrick frowns. “I don’t believe I ever heard it called the nursery. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The Gunthers took in young women. Pregnant women. And after the babies were born, the Gunthers arranged to sell them to desperate Jewish couples who couldn’t have children of their own. Black market adoptions.”