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:
He replaced the magazine on top of the stack and paced the narrow strip of floor between his desk and the foot of his lumpy bed. He was too elated to sleep and, anyway, the night was nearly gone. A dim gray began to show in the window. He would go to his job at the Red Man Cafe red-eyed and nervous and in the afternoon a dull lassitude would creep over him and he would drink cup after cup of acid coffee until closing time. He was “chief cook and bottle washer,” as the owner, Farley Redmon, called him, and his hours were long and ill paid. But he earned his food and his rent for this little outbuilding that was formerly a tool shed—and he had a job and in this year of Our Lord 1936, he was grateful for it.
He would be grateful to light down anywhere he could find in order to write these stories that gave him no peace.
Arthur decided to walk out. The excitement of composition was still warm in him and the hour was inviting, cool and quiet. He pulled on his thinning blue wool sweater and peered out his window and, seeing no lights in any of the settlement windows, departed his room, taking care to turn off the little desk lamp with its green cardboard shade.
Cherry Cove was quiet, almost silent: no dogs barking, no radios in kitchens reporting farm prices, no clatter of breakfast cutlery. Everyone snug and warm and dreaming and, as he walked along the broad gravel road that led east, Arthur wondered whether any of their dreams might be as strange as the one he had just set down, in which the last survivor of a race of orchidaceous philosophers journeyed to the moon of its planet in order to send a signal to the cosmos, a message telling them that though the Kronori had died all but Lixor, he had one valuable secret to share with every other species everywhere.
Arthur smiled, assuring himself that the dreams of his neighbors would be stranger and more exciting and more urgent than his little tale. Then he set out at an easy walking pace for the Little Tennessee River two miles distant, the river that ran counter to all the others.
He was headed toward the peeling iron bridge. He had no particular purpose in mind, drawn only by that obscure impulse that leads us to the sound of running water as a source of comfort and refreshment. When he stood there at the railing, listening to the water twenty feet below rush away over the rocks—going the wrong way, for the Little Tennessee is a backwards river—his anxieties fell quiet and the utter lack of hope that characterized his days took on the aspect of courage rather than of fear. Arthur Strakl often felt that he stood on the abrupt edge of an ebony abyss, and that if he fell he would fall without crying out, without making a sound, and that no one on earth would remark his passing or remember that he had sojourned here. These considerations sometimes made him gloomy; at other times they strengthened his resolve, and did so now, with the completion of “The Marooned Aldebaran” fresh in his mind. He listened to the water and smelled its clean smell and watched where the river drew away into the forest of firs and oaks. On his right-hand side, just at the bridgehead, was a stand of slender trees with flowers beneath, and he glanced at it without really seeing it.
Then he became aware that he was not alone on the bridge. A woman stood beside him. He had not heard her approach, but he was not startled; her aspect was calm and easy. He was surprised to see that she was dressed in a white silk party frock with a wide square collar. She wore white pumps of patent leather and her dark hair was tied back with a broad ribbon of shiny white silk.
She was a beautiful woman, and when she spoke, it was with a quiet musical accent that was stranger than any other he had ever heard. “Are you Arthur Strakl?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am,” he said, though she was not his elder. She looked rather younger than Arthur’s thirty-five years.
“I’m glad,” she said, and said no more for such a long moment that he began to think the conversation had ended. Then she added, “To meet you. I’m glad to meet you.”
“I’m glad to meet you, too. You don’t live in Cherry Cove, do you?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve come a long way to find you.”
“Me?” He laughed. “Well now, that’s a little hard to believe.”
“Why is it hard to believe?”
Arthur noted that she spoke slowly and hesitantly, as if these words were foreign to her. “There’s no good reason for anyone to look for me. I don’t have a family or any close friends. No one knows who I am.”
“Are you not Arthur Strakl, the author?”
“I write a few odd stories. I never thought of calling myself an author.”
“But didn’t you write ‘In the Titanic Deeps,’ the story about sea dwellers in another galaxy?”
“Yes. My title was ‘Blind Oceans,’ but they changed it. That one was about the great worms that lived on the bottom of an ocean. They were suffering because they had the power to foresee centuries into the future and saw that nothing would change, that their destiny was fixed. Then one of their mathematicians devised a theory that admitted the possibility of the end of time, and this idea brought solace to them.”
“And then what happened?”
“Nothing,” he said. “That was it. . . . Well, their music changed.”
She turned upon him a superbly friendly smile. Dawn brightened over the river below them. “Yes,” she said. “Their music changed.”
“I’m amazed,” he said. “You can’t imagine. This is the first time I ever met somebody who has read one of my stories.”
“Oh, I’ve read many of your stories. I remember them all.”
“Well, I actually haven’t published all that many.”
“I remember your story about the beings you called ‘kindlers.’ They were incandescent blue nervous systems that lived on the surface of a faraway sun. I remember the planet you called Zephlar, where the wind streaming over a continent of telepathic grasses produced an unending silent musical fugue. I remember your city Alphega, which was an enormous machine that was writing a book; each word of the book was a living human citizen. I remember your story about the language you named Spranza, which communicated so efficiently that listeners experienced directly the objects and actions it spoke of. And the sentient river Luvulio that had become a religious zealot, and the single amber eye named Ull, which lay in a primordial sea waiting for the remainder of its organism to evolve, and the parasite that reproduced itself by causing allergies in its hosts. At the magnetic pole of a tropical planet grew a tree whose leaves were mirrors; there was a world where humanlike people communicated by differences in skin temperature. There was a plague virus that heightened the sense of taste to a painful degree.” “Good Lord,” Arthur said.
“So you see,” she said sweetly, “I have read your stories. They have afforded me”—she paused, as if waiting for the correct phrase to present itself—“a fine pleasure. Many fine pleasures.”
“Thank you for saying so,” Arthur said. “But I didn’t write all those stories. Somebody else must have written about the religious river and the alphabet city. And none of the magazines would take my story about the telepathic grasses. I don’t see how you could have heard about that one.”
“You have more admirers than you’re aware of,” she said. She smiled and turned away to watch the early light smear tree shadows on the river surface. “Sometimes the editors talk about your stories even when they don’t buy them. Sometimes they want to buy them and are afraid to. But word gets around.” “Well, you obviously know a great deal about this,” he said. “What do you do for a living? I mean, are you a literary agent?”