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:
“Where are we?”
The boy’s voice—this one, the little boy whose mittened hand she held in her own—brought her back. They were both walking, his hand reaching up to hers, and the streetlights had come on in the growing dark.
“This isn’t my street. I don’t live here.”
“I know. It’s okay.” She didn’t know where they were. She was lost. The narrow, brick-fronted houses came up so close to the street, the bare trees making spider shadows on the sidewalk. Light spilled from the windows above them. She looked up and saw a human shape moving behind a steam-misted glass, someone making dinner in her kitchen. Or taking a shower, the hot water sluicing around the bare feet on white porcelain. The houses would be all warm inside, heated and sealed against the black winter. The people—maybe the couple she had seen walking before, on the other side of another street—they could go naked if they wanted. They were taking a shower together, the man standing behind her, nuzzling her wet neck, hands cupped under her breasts, the smell of soap and wet towels. The steaming water would still be raining on them when he’d lay her down, they’d curl together in the hard nest of the tub, she’d have to bring her knees up against her breasts, or he’d sit her on the edge, the shower curtain clinging wet to her back, and he’d stand in front of her, the way her father did but it wouldn’t be her father. She’d fill her mouth with him and he’d smell like soap and not that other sour smell of sweat and old dirt that scraped grey in her fingernails from his skin . . .
The boy pressed close to her side, and she squeezed his hand to tell him that it was all right. He was afraid of the dark and the street he’d never been on before. She was the grown-up, like his mother, and he clung to her now. The fist around her heart unclenched a little. Everything would be easier; she’d find their way home. To where her father was waiting, and she’d have the boy with her this time.
Bright and color rippled on the damp sidewalk ahead of them. The noise of traffic—they’d come out of the houses and dark lanes. She even knew where they were. She recognized the signs, a laundromat with free dry, an Italian restaurant with its menu taped to the window. She’d seen them from the bus she rode sometimes.
Over the heads of the people on the crowded street, she saw the big shape coming, even brighter inside, and heard the hissing of its brakes. Tugging the boy behind her, she hurried to the corner. He trotted obediently to keep up.
The house was as warm inside as other people’s houses were. She left the heat on all the time so her father wouldn’t get cold. She’d found him once curled up on the floor of the kitchen—the pilot light on the basement furnace had gone out, and ice had already formed on the inside of the windows. There’d been a pool of cold urine beneath him, and his skin felt loose and clammy. He’d stared over his shoulder, his mouth sagging open, while she’d rubbed him beneath the blankets of his bed, to warm him with her own palms.
Warm ... He had kissed her once—it was one of the things she couldn’t forget—when she had been a little girl and he had been as big as the night. His eyes had burned with the wild rigor of his hunt, the world’s dark he’d held in his iron hands. The kiss had tasted of salt, a warm thing. Long ago, and she still remembered.
She took off the boy’s jacket in the hallway. Her shoes and his small rubber boots made muddy stains on the thin carpet runner. Her knees were so stiff now that she couldn’t bend down; she had the boy stand up on the wooden bench against the wall, so she could work the jacket’s zipper and snaps.
“Where’s my mother?” Coming in to the house’s warmth from the cold street had made his nose run again. He sniffed wetly.
“She’ll be here in a minute.” She pushed the open jacket back from the boy’s shoulders. “Let’s get all ready for her, and then we can have that cake.”
The boy had just a T-shirt on underneath the jacket, and it was torn and dirty, with a yellow stain over some cartoon character’s face. The boy’s unwashed smell blossomed in the close hallway air, a smell of forgotten laundry and milk gone off. She wanted that to make her feel better. The boy’s mother was a bad mother. Not like that other boy’s mother, the one three or four times ago. She remembered standing by the greasy fire in the backyard, turning that boy’s clothing over in her hands, all of it clean-smelling, freshly washed. Inside the collar of the boy’s shirt, and in the waistband of the corduroy trousers, little initials had been hand-stitched, his initials. That was what she’d do if she’d had a child of her own; she would love him that much. Not like this poor ragged thing. Nobody loved this little boy, not really, and that made it all right. She’d told herself that before.
“What’s that?” He looked up toward the hallway’s ceiling.
She pulled his T-shirt up, exposing his pink round belly. His hair stood up— it was dirty, too—when she pulled the shirt off over his head.
“Nothing.” She smoothed his hair down with her palm. “It’s nothing.” She didn’t know if she’d heard anything or not. She’d heard all the house’s sounds for so long—they were all her father—that they were the same as silence to her. Or a great roaring hurricane that battered her into a corner, her arms over her head to try to protect herself. It was the same.
She dropped the T-shirt on top of the rubber boots, then unbuttoned the boy’s trousers and pulled them down. Dirty grey underwear, the elastic sagging loose. The little boys things (little . . . not like . . .) made the shape of a tiny fist inside the stained cotton. (Great roaring hurricane) (Arms over her head) She slipped the underpants down.
The boy wiggled. He rubbed his mouth and nose with the back of his hand, smearing the shiny snot around. “What’re you doing?”
“Oh, you’re so cold.” She looked into his dull eyes, away from the little naked parts. “You’re freezing. Wouldn’t a nice hot bath . . . wouldn’t that be nice? Yes. Then you’d be all toasty warm, and I’d wrap you up in a great big fluffy towel. That’d be lovely. You don’t want to catch cold, do you?”
He sniffled. “Cake.”
“Then you’d have your cake. All you want.”
His face screwed up red and ugly. “No. I want it now!” His shout bounced against the walls. The underpants were a grey rag around his ankles, and his hand a fist now, squeezing against the corner of his mouth.
She slapped him. There was no one to see them. The boy’s eyes went round, and he made a gulping, swallowing noise inside his throat. But he stopped crying. The fist around her heart tightened, because she knew this was something he was already used to.
“Come on.” She could hear her own voice, tight and angry, the way her father’s had been when it still had words. She tugged the underpants away from the boy’s feet. “Stop being stupid.”
She led him, his hand locked inside hers, up the stairs. Suddenly, halfway up, he started tugging, trying to pull his hand away.
“Stop it!” She knelt down and grabbed his bare shoulders, clenching them tight. “Stop it!” She shook him, so that his head snapped back and forth.
His face was wet with tears, and his eyes looked up. He cringed away from something up there, rather than from her. Between her own panting breaths, she heard her father moving around.
“It’s nothing!” Her voice screamed raw from her throat. “Don’t be stupid!”
She jerked at his arm, but he wouldn’t move; he cowered into the angle of the stairs. He howled when she slapped him, then cried openmouthed as she kept on hitting him, the marks of her hand jumping up red on his shoulder blades and ribs.