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:
“I don’t know.”
“The Bible don’t say nothing about it. So it must be something you just make up in your mind, is that right?”
“The stories I write, I make up.”
“You ever thought about writing a cowboy story, or something that people like more to read?”
“I’m not cut out for it,” Arthur said. “I write the only kind of stories I’m able.” Redmon nodded. “Okay. The reason I ask, I always figured you were staying here till you made some big money with your writing and then you’d move on. If you did, I wouldn’t know what to do. My boy Cletus ain’t interested in this cafe and he ain’t settled enough in mind to run it. I figure Cletus is just about ready to join the armed service, only he don’t know it yet.”
“Cletus is a good boy. He’ll straighten out.”
“I thought maybe if he got married, but then I got to studying on these women he’s been running with. Ain’t none of them would be any help. The trouble was losing his mother when he was little. I didn’t have the furthest notion how to raise a youngun. So I reckon it’s going to have to be Uncle Sam finishes the job.” “You’re probably worrying about it too much.”
“Well, I’ve worried myself gray-headed. Unless it’s just natural age. ” He crushed his butt out in the littered plate. “Which was the other thing I was going to bring up. I don’t want this business to go down the rathole. Someday Cletus might grow into it. Right now he don’t want it, but later on he might. I want you to stay with me and help keep it going. Since I can’t pay you better wage money, I thought I’d offer you an interest in the place. That don’t mean much now, but when times lighten up it will. I can just about guarantee that.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Two percent to start with and then another percent every year till we get to ten. One of these days you’ll find it was a good deal.”
“But in order to get ten percent, I’d have to stay on another eight years.” “Yep.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“That’s all I want.” Redmon offered Arthur his hand. “I just want your word you’ll give it fair consideration.”
“Sure I will. The offer means a lot to me.” Arthur took Redmon’s hard, dry hand and shook it twice gently. His own hand was soft and pulpy from washing dishes and he was beginning to grow flabby about the waist.
In fact, his health was none so sound as he had assumed. He learned from his army physical examination in 1942 that his teeth were in need of immediate repair and that one of the doctors thought he detected a heart murmur but wasn’t sure. At any rate, Arthur Strakl was turned down for military service and rode in the bus back to Asheville with a group of other rejects who were rowdy and gloomy by turns. Then he took a westbound milk-stop bus to Cherry Cove, trudged through the lonesome hamlet dark at ten in the evening, went into his little hut, and fell asleep without undressing, only dropping his scuffed brown shoes by the bed.
When he woke next morning, he was still tired and all his skin felt grimy. He took off his shirt and pants and stumbled blindly to the tiny sink and ran water into a porcelain basin and bathed as quickly and thoroughly as he could. Then he placed a blue spatterware pot on his hot plate and set about making coffee.
It was only when he sat at his writing desk sipping at the strong unsugared coffee that he noticed how the big armoire standing against the opposite wall had changed. It was an ancient piece of work, this dim armoire, heavy oak boards stained dark. Inside were Arthur's other three white shirts and two pairs of pants and various socks and handkerchiefs—the respectable wardrobe of a penurious orphan bachelor. He always kept it neat and orderly, the way he kept all his few possessions, the way he kept his life. His life, like his little hut, was always prepared for visitation.
But now the visitation had occurred while he was absent. The doors of the armoire that had been stained almost chocolate were now blue on the right side and violet on the left. His Somewhere Doors had arrived. Arthur was so profoundly gratified that tears trickled down his cheeks and the back of his neck flushed red and warm.
They were not prepossessing. They were the same size and shape as the armoire doors always had been; only the color had changed. The surfaces were matte and cool to the touch when he placed his hand flat against them. But the texture of the surfaces was strange; the material didn't feel like wood or metal or plastic. More like glass with a subtle grain. He placed his ear directly against the blue door and waited a long time but could hear nothing. Still the old chest seemed to breathe silently and steadily, like a great distant creature asleep.
He began to take stock. The room seemed otherwise unchanged, except that his clothing and other belongings had been taken from the armoire and carefully folded and laid out on his one other chair and on his bookcase. But there was a sheet of paper in the typewriter with a sentence cleanly typed in capital letters.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR VALUABLE EFFORTS
It was unsigned.
“My valuable efforts,'' Arthur said. He rubbed his eyes, brushing away the wetness. “I wish I could see what was so valuable.”
He knew already that the presence of the Somewhere Doors would make an enormous difference, but he could not foresee what different shapes his life might take.
Now, though, he would have to choose. Before the doors arrived he had thought only vaguely about their contrasting possibilities; today the choice had become serious. Would he like to inhabit the golden utopian world that philosophers and visionaries over the centuries had guessed at? To immerse himself in the grandest productions of religious thought, scientific ingenuity, governmental peace, and aesthetic achievement of which human beings were capable? Or would he not rather live on the Garden Planet, the world brimful of pristine creation, the way our own must have been before Adam appeared? There as nowhere else he would be living in the very throb of the heart of existence, in the closest proximity to truth that his organism could endure.
He had been assured that neither world was noxious or dangerous, and he relied upon Francesca’s word.
He knew, though, that the choice would haunt him, sleeping and waking, until it was actually made, and he knew, too, that he would have to watch himself closely so that the balance of his daily existence was not disturbed. He would need to go on about his ordinary business as calmly and orderly as possible; only in this fashion could he make a wisely considered preference.
At this moment it came to him that there was a third choice. A third door, in effect: his own. He could choose to stay on the earth he knew and to go on with his life in Cherry Cove. Where before this obscure cranny of the universe had been a necessity, the haphazard lighting-down place of a kinless and disconnected man, now it assumed the dignity of election. He could choose to live here; he could choose to leave. He turned to look at the flimsy pine door of his little shack, warped and showing morning light at the jamb, and it seemed as strange to him and almost as inviting as the blue door and the violet.
When Cletus died at Anzio, the spirit of his father flickered violently and burned low. He was a man who rarely drank liquor, but during the months of February, March, and April of 1944, he was drunk almost every day. Arthur didn’t mind that; he knew the frenzy would wear off. But he worried about what would happen when Redmon came to himself again. He couldn’t think how the man might change.
After he stopped, it took another three weeks for him to dry out. He was sick the whole time, weak and shaking. Arthur ministered to him and gradually he began to eat normal meals and to drive his old Chevrolet pickup about and to tramp in the woods. One day he came into the cafe with a tinted photograph of Cletus under his arm, the one he’d gotten made with the boy in his uniform and overseas cap. When he climbed on a ladder to drive a nail and hang the picture on the wall behind the counter, Arthur knew that the old man had recovered and was going to make it.