by Ellen Datlow
The shadow of the Janfia was being thrown down now all around me, on the floor, on the desk and the paper: the lacy foliage and the wide-stretched blooms.
And then, something else, a long finger of shadow, began to spill forward, across everything. What was it? No, I must not turn to see. Probably some freak arrangement of the leaves, or even some simple element of the room’s furniture, suddenly caught against the lifting moon.
My skin tingled. I sat as if turned to stone, watching the slow forward movement of the shadow which, after all, might also be that of a tall and slender man. Not a sound. The cicadas were silent. On the hills not a dog barked. And the villa was utterly dumb, empty of everything but me, and perhaps of this other thing, which itself was noiseless.
And all at once the Janfia tree gave a little whispering rustle. As if it laughed to itself. Only a breeze, of course only that, or some night insect, or a late flower unfolding …
A compound of fear and excitement held me rigid. My eyes were wide and I breathed in shallow gasps. I had ceased altogether to reason. I did not even feel. I waited. I waited in a type of delirium, for the touch of a cruel serene hand upon my neck—for truth to step at last from the shadow, with a naked blade.
And I shut my eyes, the better to experience whatever might come to me.
There was then what is known as a lacuna, a gap, something missing, and amiss. In this gap, gradually, as I sank from the heights back inside myself, I began after all to hear a sound.
It was a peculiar one. I could not make it out.
Since ordinary sense was, unwelcome, returning, I started vaguely to think, Oh, some animal, hunting. It had a kind of coughing, retching, whining quality, inimical and awesome, something which would have nothing to do with what basically it entailed—like the agonized female scream of the mating fox.
The noises went on for some time, driving me ever further and further back to proper awareness, until I opened my eyes, and stood up abruptly. I was cold, and felt rather sick. The scent of the Janfia tree was overpowering, nauseating, and nothing at all had happened. The shadows were all quite usual, and rounding on the window, I saw the last of the moon’s edge was in it, and the tree like a cutout of black-and-white papers. Nothing more.
I swore, childishly, in rage, at all things, and myself. It served me right; fool, fool, ever to expect anything. And that long shadow, what had that been? Well. It might have been anything. Why else had I shut my eyes but to aid the delusion, afraid if I continued to look I must be undeceived.
Something horrible had occurred. The night was full of the knowledge of that. Of my idiotic invitation to demons, and my failure, their refusal.
But I really had to get out of the room, the scent of the tree was making me ill at last. How could I ever have thought it pleasant?
I took the wine bottle, meaning to replace it in the refrigerator downstairs, and going out into the corridor, brought on the lights. Below, I hit the other switches rapidly, one after the other, flooding the villa with hard modern glare. So much for the moon. But the smell of the Janfia was more persistent, it seemed to cling to everything—I went out on to the western veranda, to get away from it, but even here on the other side of the house the fragrance hovered.
I was trying, very firmly, to be practical. I was trying to close the door, banish the element I had summoned, for though it had not come to me, yet somehow the night clamored with it, reeked of it. What was it? Only me, of course. My nerves were shot, and what did I do but essay stupid flirtations with the powers of the dark. Though they did not exist in their own right, they do exist inside every one of us. I had called my own demons. Let loose, they peopled the night.
All I could hope for now was to go in and make a gallon of coffee, and leaf through and through the silly magazines that lay about, and stave off sleep until the dawn came. But there was something wrong with the cypress tree. The moon, slipping over the roof now in pursuit of me, caught the cypress and showed what I thought was a broken bough.
That puzzled me. I was glad of the opportunity to go out between the bushes and take a prosaic look.
It was not any distance, and the moon came bright. All the night, all its essence, had concentrated in that spot, yet when I first looked, and first saw, my reaction was only startled astonishment. I rejected the evidence as superficial, which it was not, and looked about and found the tumbled kitchen stool, and then looked up again to be sure, quite certain, that it was Marta who hung there pendant and motionless, her engorged and terrible face twisted away from me. She had used a strong cord. And those unidentifiable sounds I had heard, I realized now, had been the noises Marta made, as she swung and kicked there, strangling to death.
The shock of what had happened was too much for Isabella, and made her unwell. She had been fond of the girl, and could not understand why Marta had not confided her troubles. Presumably her lover had thrown her over, and perhaps she was pregnant—Isabella could have helped, the girl could have had her baby under the shelter of a foreign umbrella of bank notes. But then it transpired Marta had not been pregnant, so there was no proper explanation. The woman who cooked said both she and the girl had been oppressed for days, in some way she could not or did not reveal. It was the season. And then, the girl was young and impressionable. She had gone mad. God would forgive her suicide.
I sat on the veranda of the other villa, my bags around me and a car due to arrive and take me to the town, and Alec and Isabella, both pale with convalescence, facing me over the white iron table.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Alec to Isabella. “It’s no use brooding over it. The way they are here, it’s always been a mystery to me.”Then, he went in, saying he felt the heat, but he would return to wave me off.
“And poor poor you,” said Isabella, close to tears. “I tell you to come here and rest, and this has to happen.”
I could not answer that I felt it was my fault. I could not confess that it seemed to me that I, invoking darkness, had conjured Marta’s death. I did not understand the process, only the result. Nor had I told Isabella that the Janfia tree seemed to have contracted its own terminal disease. The leaves and flowers had begun to rot away, and the scent had grown acid. My vibrations had done that. Or it was because the tree had been my focus, my burning-glass. That would reveal me then as my own enemy. That powerful thing which slowly destroyed me, that stalker with a knife, it was myself. And knowing it, naming it, rather than free me of it, could only give it greater power.
“Poor little Marta,” said Isabella. She surrendered and began to sob, which would be no use to Marta at all, or to herself, maybe.
Then the car, cheerful in red and white, came up the dusty road, tooting merrily to us. And the driver, heaving my luggage into the boot, cried out to us in joy, “What a beautiful day, ah, what a beautiful day!”
Invited to say something about the genesis or content of this story, I’m afraid that all I can say is that it was based in part on a dream. Perhaps, in the light of the material itself, this is more than enough.
Tanith Lee
A CHILD OF DARKNESS
Susan Casper
Sue has written several vampire stories, including one about a fat vampire. “A Child of Darkness” is a more serious study of a young girl so entranced by the myth of the vampire that she longs to be one, despite all evidence that there is no such creature.
The air is damp and tainted with the odors of tobacco, sweat, and urine. What light there is comes from a small bulb in the ceiling, its plastic cover green with ancient grime. Voices echo, re-echo along the concrete walls of the corridor until they sound like an old recording. It is Daria’s only contact with the world outside of her little cell and she is torn between a nervous desire to shut it all out, and a need to listen greedily.
Far away a woman begins to sing an old gospel song. Her voice is thin and slightly off key; it gives Daria a shiver. It makes my blood run cold, she thinks, then laughs bitterly at the idea. Hers is not the only
laughter. From somewhere in the depths comes the cackle of a mad woman—and then another voice joins in, slurred, unsteady, taunting. “That singin’ won’t help you none, bitch. God knows what you are. Whore of Babylon, that’s what you are.”
The singing stops. “What the hell do you know?” a Spanish accent replies.
“Ain’t what I know that counts, bitch. It’s what God knows. God knows you’re a sinner. He’s gonna get you, girl.”
The accent protests. She prays, sobs, moans, repents, accuses, but her anguished voice is softer, and weaker, and somehow more frightening than the others.
Suddenly, a shrill, soprano, scream cuts across all the other noises. “Oh, the pain. Oh my God, the pain. I’m dying. Somebody please … help me.”
“Hey, you, knock it off down there,” a cold male voice replies.
Daria can see nothing from her cell but the stained gray wall across the corridor which seems to go on forever, but she finds that if she presses herself into the corner, she can just make out the place where the hallway ends on one side. A guard is sitting there. He is eating a sandwich that he peels from a wax-paper bag as if it were a banana. A Styrofoam cup is perched on the floor by his side. Another cop comes by. She can see him briefly as he passes through her narrow channel of vision, but he must have stopped to talk, because the first man’s face splits into a grin and then she can see his lips move. His thumb points down her corridor and he begins to laugh.
Lousy bastard, she thinks.
The Kool-Aid looked a lot like wine in her mother’s good stemware. Especially when the light shone through it, making the liquid glow like rubies, or maybe the glorious seeds of an autumn pomegranate. She lifted the glass, pinky raised in a grotesque child’s parody, and delicately sipped the liquid. Wine must taste a lot like this, she thought, swirling the sugary drink in her mouth. This was what it would be like when she was a lady. She would pile her hair high atop her head in curls and wear deliciously tight dresses, her shoulders draped in mink. Just like Marilyn Monroe.
“Ha, ha, Dary’s drinking wi-ine. Dary’s drinking wi-ine,” Kevin sang as he raced back and forth across the kitchen floor.
“It’s not either wine,” she said, more embarrassed than frightened at being caught by her little brother.
“If it’s not wine then prove it,” he said, snatching the glass from her hand. He held it tightly in his fist, one pinky shooting straight out into the air, mocking her already exaggerated grip. He sipped it, then made a face, eyes bugged and whirling. “Ugh, it is wine,” he said, looking at her impishly. “I must be drunk.” He began to stagger about, flinging himself around the room. Daria saw it coming. She wanted to cry out and stop him, or at least to cover her eyes so that she couldn’t see the disaster, but it happened before she could do any of those things. Kevin tripped over the leg of a chair and went down in a crash of shattered crystal.
Her first thought was for the glass. That was one of the things that she hated herself for later. All she could think about was how it was Kevin’s fault that the glass was broken, but she would be the one who got the spanking for it. Especially the way he was howling. Then she saw the blood all over her brother’s arm. Already there was a small puddle on the floor. She knew that she should get a bandage, or call the emergency number that her mother always kept near the phone, or at the very least, run and get a neighbor, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t take her eyes off of the bright-red stain. It was not as if she had never seen blood before, but suddenly she was drawn to it as she had never been drawn to anything before. Without knowing what she was doing, she found herself walking toward her brother, taking his arm in her hands and pulling it slowly toward her face. And then she could taste the salt and copper taste as she sucked at her brother’s wound, filling a need that she hadn’t even known existed. It was a hunger so all-consuming that she could not be distracted even by Kevin’s fists flailing away at her back, or the sound of her mother’s scream when she entered the room.
Daria realizes that she has wedged her face too tightly between the bars and the cold metal is bruising her cheeks. She withdraws into the dimness. There is a metal shelf bolted to the wall. It has a raised edge running around its sides and was obviously designed to hold a mattress that is long since gone. There are cookie-sized holes in the metal, placed with no discernible pattern along its length. Words have been scratched into this cot frame with nail files, hair pins, paper clips—mostly names like Barbara and Mike, and Gloria S. There are many expletives and an occasional statement about the “pigs,” but no poems or limericks to occupy her attention for even a brief time. The metal itself is studded with rock-hard lumps of used chewing gum, wadded bits of paper and who knows what else. It is uncomfortable to sit on even without these things—too wide. Her skirt is too tight for her to sit cross-legged, and so if she sits back far enough to lean against the wall, the metal Up cuts sharply into the back of her calves. Already, there are bright-red welts on her legs, and so she lies on her side with her knees drawn up and her head pedestaled on her arm, the holes in the metal leaving rings along the length of her body. She pulls a crumpled package of cigarettes out of her pocket and stares at them longingly. Only three left. With a sigh, she puts them back. It is going to be a long night.
The doctor’s name was printed in thick black letters on the frosted glass. Who knew what horrors waited for her on the other side. She knew that she had promised her mother that she would behave, but it was all too much for her. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she tried to pull free from her mother’s grasp.
“No! Please. No, Mommy! I’ll be a good girl, I promise.”
Her mother grabbed her by both shoulders and stooped down until she could look into her daughter’s eyes. With trembling fingers she brushed the child’s hair. “Dary, honey, the doctor won’t hurt you. All he wants to do is have a little talk with you. That’s all. You can talk with the nice doctor, can’t you?”
Daria sniffed and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. She knew what kind of people went to see psychiatrists. Crazy people. And crazy people got “put away” in the nuthouse. She allowed her mother to lead her into the doctor’s office, a queen walking bravely to the gallows.
The waiting room was supposed to look inviting. One whole side was set up as a playroom, with a child-sized table and two little chairs, an open toybox with dolls and blocks spilling out of the top. A lady in starched white greeted them at the door and pointed Daria toward the corner, but she was not the least interested in playing. Instead, she hoisted herself onto a large wooden chair and sat there in perfect stillness, her hands folded across her lap. There she could hear some of the words that passed between her mother and the nurse. Their voices were hushed and they were quite far away, but she could hear enough to tell that her mother was ashamed to tell the white lady what Daria had done. She could hear the word “crazy” pass back and forth between them just as she had heard it pass between her father and her mother all the last week. And she could tell, even though she could only see the back of her head, that her mother was crying.
Suddenly, the door opened up behind the nurse’s desk and Daria’s mother disappeared through it. The nurse tried to talk to the sullen little girl, but Daria remained motionless, knowing that she would wait there forever, if necessary, but she would not move from that spot until her mother returned.
Then, like a miracle, her mother was back. Daria forgot all about her resolve to stay in the seat. She rushed to her mother’s side. She would go anywhere, even inside the doctor’s room if only her mother wouldn’t leave her again. When her mother opened the door to the doctor’s office and waved Daria through, the child went without hesitation, but then, her mother shut the door without following, and Daria was more frightened than ever.
“You must be Daria,” Doctor Wells said without moving from his desk. He reminded Daria of the stuffed walrus in the museum, and he smelled of tobacco and Sen-Sen and mustache wax. He smiled, and it was a pleasant smile.
“Your mother tells me that you’re very smart and that you like to do puzzles. I have a puzzle here that’s very hard. Would you like to try and do my puzzle?”
Daria nodded, but she did not move from her place near the door. Dr. Wells got up and walked over to a shelf and removed a large wooden puzzle. It was a cow. A three-dimensional puzzle. Daria had never seen anything like it before. He placed the puzzle on a little table that was a twin to the one in the waiting room and went back behind his desk.
“Well, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” he said after a minute, and then began to look through some papers on his desk, ignoring her. Soon, Daria’s curiosity got the better of her and she found herself standing at the table looking at the puzzle, taking it apart.
Daria had expected the doctor would talk to her, but he didn’t really seem interested in talking. He seemed content to watch her play with the puzzles and toys and he asked her very few questions. By the time she left his office, Daria had decided that she liked Dr. Wells very much.
She wakes slowly, unsure whether minutes or hours have passed. Her eyes are weeping from the cold of the metal where her head has been resting, and her muscles ache with stiffness. Her neck and chest, still covered with crusted blood that the arresting officers had refused to let her wash away, have begun to itch unmercifully. She sits up and realizes that her bladder is full. There is a toilet in the cell. It is a filthy affair with no seat, no paper, no sink, and no privacy from the eyes of the policemen who occasionally stroll up and down the corridor. She will live with the pain a while longer.
Suddenly, she realizes what it is that has woken her up. Silence. It is a silence as profound as the noise had been earlier. No singing, no taunting voices, nobody howling in pain. It is so quiet that she can hear the rustling newspaper of the guard at the end of the hall. She feels that she ought to be grateful not to have to listen to the racket, but instead, she finds the silence frightening.
