A Whisper of Blood

by Ellen Datlow

Where she hung her coat up, with the others near the door, a mimeographed paper on the bulletin board held the names for the altar flowers rotation. Sign-ups to chaperone the youth group’s Christmas party. A glossy leaflet, unfolded and tacked, with pledges for a mission in Belize. Her name wasn’t anywhere on the different pieces of paper. She didn’t belong to the church. They probably wouldn’t have wanted her, if they’d known. Known everything. She only came here for the weekly support group.

  There was a speaker tonight, a woman up at the front of the room, talking, one hand gesturing while the other touched the music stand the church gave them to use as a podium.

  She let the speaker’s words flutter past as she sat down in one of the metal folding chairs at the side of the room; halfway down the rows, so she only had to turn her head a bit to see who else had come tonight. She had already counted close to twenty-four. There were the usuals, the faces she saw every week. A couple, a man and a woman who always held hands while they sat and listened, who she assumed were married; they nodded and smiled at her, a fellow regular. At the end of the row was somebody she hadn’t seen before, a young man who sat hunched forward, the steam from a Styrofoam cup of coffee rising into his face. She could tell that he was just starting, that this was a new world for him; he didn’t look happy.

  None of them ever did, even when they smiled and spoke in their bright loud voices, when they said hello and hugged each other near the table with the coffee urn and the cookies on the paper plates.

  They had another word for why they were here, a word that made it sound like a disease, just a disease, something you could catch like a cold or even a broken arm. Instead of it being time itself, and old age, and the grey things their parents had become. Time curled outside the church, like a black dog waiting where the steps became the sidewalk, waiting to go home with them again. Where the ones who had known their names looked at them now with empty eyes and did not remember.

  She sat back in the folding chair, her hands folded in her lap. The woman at the front of the room had the same bright, relentless voice. She closed her eyes and listened to it.

  The woman had a message. There was always a message, it was why people came here. The woman told the people in the room that they had been chosen to receive a great blessing, one that most people weren’t strong enough for. A chance to show what love is. A few years of grief and pain and sadness and trouble, of diapering and spoon-feeding and talking cheerily to something that had your father or your mother’s face, but wasn’t them at all, not anymore. And then it would be over.

  That was a small price to pay, a small burden to carry. The woman told them that, the same thing they’d been told before. A few years to show their love. For these things that had been their parents. They’d be transfigured by the experience. Made into saints, the ones who’d shown their courage and steadfastness on that sad battlefield.

  She sat and listened to the woman talking. The woman didn’t know—none of them ever did—but she knew. What none of them ever would.

  She looked around at the others in the room, the couple holding hands, the young man staring into the dregs of his coffee. Her burden, her blessing, was greater than theirs, and so was her love. Even now, she felt sorry for them. They would be released someday. But not her. For them, there would be a few tears, and then their love, their small love, would be over.

  She kept her eyes closed, and let herself walk near the edge of sleep, of dreaming, in this warm place bound by winter. She smiled.

  She knew that love wasn’t over in a few sad years. Or in centuries. She knew that love never died. She knew that her love—real love, true love—was forever.

  Stories, when they work, if they work at all, are like lit matches dropped down a well. You don’t really see anything except, for a moment, how deep and dark the well is.

  I don’t know what this story means, other than that it’s a story about love and happiness. I don’t have much more to say about it, except…

  1. The words victim and victimizer are not easily defined. People who do have easy definitions for those words are lying to you, for reasons of their own; and

  2. Martyrdom is a seductive endeavor, but then, it should be.

  After that, there’s only silence.

  K.W. Jeter

  HOME BY THE SEA

  Pat Cadigan

  Cadigan has written at least two other terrific vampire stories—“My Brother’s Keeper” and “The Power and the Passion.” Like Jeter’s, this one packs a wallop and you won’t soon forget it.

  There was no horizon line out on the water.

  “Limbo ocean. Man, did we hate this when I was a commercial fisherman,” said a man sitting at the table to my left. “Worse than fog. You never knew where you were.”

  I sneaked a look at him and his companions. The genial voice came from a face you’d have expected to find on a wanted poster of a Middle Eastern terrorist, but the intonations were vaguely Germanic. The three American women with him were all of a type, possibly related. A very normal-looking group, with no unusual piercings or marks. I wondered how long they’d been in Scheveningen.

  I slumped down in my chair, closed my eyes, and lifted my face to where I thought the sun should be. It was so overcast, there wasn’t even a hot spot in the sky. Nonetheless, the promenade was crowded, people wandering up and down aimlessly, perhaps pretending, as I was, that they were on vacation. It was equally crowded at night, when everyone came to watch the stars go out.

  Of course we’re on vacation, a woman had said last night at another of the strange parties that kept congealing in ruined hotel lobbies and galleries. This had been one of the fancier places, ceilings in the stratosphere and lots of great, big ornate windows so we could look out anytime and see the stars die. It’s an enforced vacation. Actually, it’s the world that’s gone on vacation.

  No, that’s not it, someone else had said in an impeccable British accent. It always surprised me to hear one, though I don’t know why; England wasn’t that far away. What it is, is that the universe has quit its job.

  Best description yet, I’d decided. The universe has quit its job.

  “Hey, Jess.” I heard Jim plop down in the chair next to me. “Look what I found.”

  I opened my eyes. He was holding a fan of glossy postcards like a winning poker hand. Scheveningen and The Hague as they had been. I took them from him, looked carefully at each one. If you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought it had been a happy world, just from looking at these.

  “Where’d you find them?”

  “Up a ways,” he said, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder. He went up a ways a lot now, scavenging bits of this and that, bringing them to me as if they were small, priceless treasures. Perhaps they were—souvenirs of a lost civilization. Being of the why-bother school now, myself, I preferred to vegetate in a chair. “Kid with a whole pile of them. I traded him that can of beer I found.” He stroked his beard with splayed fingers. “Maybe he can trade it for something useful. And if he can’t, maybe he can fill a water pistol with it.”

  What would be useful, now that the universe had quit its job? I thought of making a list on the back of one of the postcards. Clothing. Shelter. Something to keep you occupied while you waited for the last star to go out—a jigsaw puzzle, perhaps. But Jim never showed up with one of those, and I wasn’t ambitious enough to go looking myself.

  My old hard-driving career persona would have viewed that with some irony. But now I could finally appreciate that being so driven could not have changed anything. Ultimately, you pounded your fist against the universe and then found you hadn’t made so much as a dent, let alone reshaped it. Oddly enough, that knowledge gave me peace.

  Peace seemed to have settled all around me. Holland, or at least this part of Holland, was quiet. All radio and TV communications seemed to be permanently disrupted—the rest of the world might have been burning, for all we knew, and we’d just happened to end up in a trouble-free zone. Sheerly by ac
cident, thanks to a special our travel agency had been running at the time. We joked about it: How did you happen to come to Holland? Oh, we had a coupon.

  A kid walked by with a boombox blaring an all-too-familiar song about the end of the world as we know it and feeling fine. The reaction from the people sitting at the tables was spontaneous and unanimous. They began throwing things at him, fragments of bricks, cups, cans, plastic bottles, whatever was handy, yelling in a multitude of languages for him to beat it.

  The kid laughed loudly, yelled an obscenity in Dutch, and ran away up the promenade, clutching his boombox to his front. Mission accomplished, the tourists had been cheesed off again. The man at the next table had half risen out of his chair and now sat down again, grinning sheepishly. “All I was gonna do was ask him where he found batteries that work. I’d really like to listen to my CD player.” He caught my eye and shrugged. “It’s not like I could hurt him, right?”

  Jim was paying no attention. He had his left hand on the table, palm up, studiously drawing the edge of one of the postcards across the pad below his thumb, making deep, slanted cuts.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “Fascinating. Really fascinating.” He traced each cut with a finger. “No pain, no pain at all. No blood and no pain. I just can’t get over that.”

  I looked toward the horizonless ocean. From where I was sitting, I had a clear view of the tower on the circular pier several hundred feet from the beach, and of the woman who had hanged herself from the railing near the top. Her nude body rotated in a leisurely way, testifying to the planet’s own continuing rotation. As I watched, she raised one arm and waved to someone on the shore.

  “Well,” I said, “what did you expect at the end of the world?”

  “You really shouldn’t deface yourself,” I said as we strolled back to the hotel where we were squatting. If you could really call it a hotel—there was no charge to stay there, no service, and no amenities. “I know it doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t heal, either. Now you’ve got permanent hash marks, and besides not being terribly attractive, they’ll probably catch on everything.”

  Jim sighed. “I know. I get bored.”

  “Right.” I laughed. “For the last twenty years, you’ve been telling me I should learn how to stop and smell the roses and now you’re the one who’s complaining about having nothing to do.”

  “After you’ve smelled a rose for long enough, it loses its scent. Then you have to find a different flower.”

  “Well, self-mutilation is different, I’ll give you that.” We passed a young guy dressed in leather with an irregular-shaped fragment of mirror embedded in his forehead. “Though maybe not as different as it used to be, since it seems to be catching on. What do you suppose he’s smelling?”

  Jim didn’t answer. We reached the circular drive that dead-ended the street in front of our hotel, which had gone from motorcycle parking lot to motorcycle graveyard. On impulse, I took Jim’s hand in my own as we crossed the drive. “I suppose it’s the nature of the end of time or whatever this is, and the world never was a terribly orderly place. But nothing makes sense anymore. Why do we still have day and night? Why does the earth keep turning?”

  “Winding down,” Jim said absently. “No reason why the whole thing should go at once.” He stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the hotel. “Listen.”

  There was a distant metallic crashing noise, heavy wheels on rails. “Just the trams running again. That’s something else—why does the power work in some places and not in others?”

  “What?” Jim blinked at me, then glanced in the general direction of the tram yard. “Oh, that. Not what I meant. Something I’ve been wondering lately”—there was a clatter as a tram went by on the cross street“—why we never got married.”

  Speaking of things that didn’t seem important anymore—it wasn’t the first time the subject had come up. We’d talked about it on and off through the years, but after eighteen years together, the matter had lost any urgency it might have had, if it had ever had any. Now, under a blank sky in front of a luxury hotel where the guests had become squatters, it seemed to be the least of the shadow-things my life had been full of, like status and career and material comforts. I could have been a primitive tribeswoman hoarding shiny stones for all the real difference those things had ever made. They’d given me nothing beyond some momentary delight; if anything, they’d actually taken more from me, in terms of the effort I’d had to put into acquiring them, caring for them, keeping them tidy and intact. Especially the status and the career. And they sure hadn’t stopped the world from ending, no more than our being married would have.

  But I was so certain of what Jim wanted to hear that I could practically feel the words arranging themselves in the air between us, just waiting for me to provide the voice. Well, dear, let’s just hunt up a cleric and get married right now. Add sound and stir till thickened. Then—

  Then what? It wasn’t like we actually had a future anymore, together or singly. The ocean didn’t even have a horizon.

  “I think we are married,” I said. “I think any two people seeing the world to its conclusion together are married in a way that didn’t exist until now.”

  It should have been the right thing to say. Instead, I sounded like a politician explaining how a tax increase wasn’t really a tax increase after all. After two decades, I could do better than some saccharine weasel words, end of the world or no.

  Say it, then. The other thing, what he’s waiting for. What difference does it make? The question I had to answer first, maybe the question Jim was really asking.

  The edges of the cuts he’d made in his hand moved against my skin. They felt like the gills of an underwater creature out of its element, seeking to be put back in.

  No pain at all. No blood and no pain.

  It’s not like I could hurt him, right?

  Right. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel nothing. So we can go ahead now, do all those things that used to be so dangerous. Self- mutilation, bonding rituals, any old hazard at all.

  Jim’s eyes were like glass.

  “Better get into the lobby now if you want to see it.”

  It was the Ghost of Lifetimes Past; that was what Jim and I had been calling her. She stood a respectful distance from us, a painfully thin blond woman in a dirty white tutu and pink satin ballet shoes. The most jarring thing about her was not her silly outfit, or the way she kept popping up anywhere and everywhere, but that face—she had the deep creases of someone who had lived seventy very difficult years. Around the edge of her chin and jawbone, the skin had a peculiar strained look, as if it were being tightened and stretched somehow.

  “The crucifixion,” she said, and gave a small, lilting giggle. “They’re probably going to take him down soon, so if you want a look, you’d better hurry.” Her gaze drifted past us and she moved off, as if she’d heard someone calling her.

  “You in the mood for a crucifixion?” I said lightly. It was a relief to have anything as a distraction.

  “Not if we can possibly avoid it.”

  But there was no way we could. Pushing our way through the small crowd in the lobby, we couldn’t help seeing it. I vaguely recognized the man nailed directly to the wall—one of the erstwhile millionaires from the suites on the top floor. He was naked except for a wide silk scarf around his hips and a studded collar or belt cinched wrong side out around his head in lieu of a crown of thorns. No blood, of course, but he was doing his best to look as if he were in pain.

  “God,” I whispered to Jim, “I hope it’s not a trend.”

  He blew out a short, disgusted breath. “I’m going upstairs.”

  Somehow, I had the feeling that it wasn’t really the crucifixion he was so disgusted with. I meant to follow him but suddenly I felt as nailed in place as the would-be Christ. Not that I had any real desire to stand there and stare at this freak show, but it held me all the same. All that Catholic sch
ooling in my youth, I thought, finally catching up with me after all these years, activating a dormant taste for human sacrifice.

  Ersatz-Christ looked around, gritting his teeth. “You’re supposed to mock me,” he said, the matter-of-fact tone more shocking than the spikes in his forearms. “It won’t work unless you mock me.”

  “You’re a day late and a few quarts low,” someone in the crowd said. “It won’t work unless you shed blood, either.”

  The crucified man winced. “Shit.”

  There was a roar of laughter.

  “For some reason, that never occurs to them. About the blood.”

  I looked up at the man who had spoken. He smiled down at me, his angular face cheerfully apologetic. I couldn’t remember having seen him around before.

  “This is the third one I’ve seen,” he said, jerking his head at the man on the wall. The straight black hair fell briefly over one eye and he tossed it back. “A grand gesture that ultimately means nothing. Don’t you find it rather annoying, people who suddenly make those grand risky gestures only after there isn’t a hope in the hell of it mattering? Banning the aerosol can after there’s already a hole in the ozone layer, seeking alternate sources of power after nuclear reactors have already gone into operation. It’s humanity’s fatal flaw—locking the barn after the horse has fled. The only creature in the universe who displays such behavior.”

  I couldn’t place his accent or, for that matter, determine if he actually had an accent—I was getting tone-deaf in that respect. He didn’t look American, but that meant nothing. All the Americans were getting a European cast as they adopted the local face.

  “The universe?” I said. “You must be exceptionally well traveled.”

  He laughed heartily, annoying ersatz-Christ and what sympathizers he had left. We moved out of the group, toward the unoccupied front desk. “The universe we know of, then. Which, for all intents and purposes, might as well be all the universe there is.”

  I shrugged. “There’s something wrong with that statement, but I’m no longer compulsive enough to pick out what it is. But it might be comforting to know that if there is a more intelligent species somewhere, its foibles are greater than ours, too.”