She looks the other way, toward the front door. The light from the streetlamp gleams on a glass table, on brass pokers beside the fireplace. Violet feels a throb in her fingertips, and finds she has put her hand to her throat. Fear is a presence in the night, a palpable, living entity, and it pushes her back into the bedroom, away from the dark hall, the fragmented light, the emptiness of the house.
And then Violet thinks, it’s not fear. Fear is not the enemy.
Death is the enemy. It has always been the enemy.
Death has won too many of these battles over the years.
The monitor blinks and blinks. Her patient’s breathing grows ragged. Angels? Violet thinks. There are no angels here. There’s only me.
She takes another halting step backward, stops when she feels the cold metal of the bed against her legs.
“No,” she whispers.
The mote flits past the doorway, bigger this time, much bigger, and darker. It’s no moth. Its shadow stretches across the hall, threatens to slip inside the bedroom.
“No,” Violet says, her voice a little stronger. She pushes herself away from the bed, takes a step toward the door. “No! You can’t come in here!”
The shape swells, surges, filling the hall. It’s darker than dark, blacker than black. It ripples and sways, blocking the light from the streetlamp, the distant glow from the kitchen. It hangs for a long moment before it slips away, leaving Violet to stare at the empty doorway, her stomach crawling with fury.
“Damn you,” she cries. “No!” Her legs are trembling, but she takes another step forward. The flashing light from the monitor is reflected on the parquet of the hall floor, on and off, on and off. The black shape hovers near the ceiling, swelling and shrinking and swelling again. It seems to Violet that it’s shaking an amorphous fist at her.
“I’ve had enough of you,” she says, very low. “You can’t have her! I won’t give her up!”
The shape lowers, expands to fill the hall, to swim past the door.
When it withdraws, there is sound, an impossible sound, like the roar of wind through a tunnel. Violet’s vision blurs. Maybe the sound is in her head. Maybe she’s having an ischemic attack, a stroke, an MI. She tries to move forward, but her feet feel like lead, like she’s wading through mud, or wet cement. The roaring intensifies. The darkness flows across the doorway again.
A tendril of it, a slender, questing black tentacle, reaches inside the room.
Violet’s vision clears all at once. Everything sharpens, clarifies. Even the roar seems distinct, a discrete sound, almost, but not quite, familiar. Violet’s legs grow steady. Her heartbeat slows.
Another tendril explores the air of the bedroom, a seeking arm of shadow.
“Like some filthy octopus,” Violet says. Her voice sounds perfectly normal to her ears. She steps right into the doorway and finds that the air in the hall is icy cold, dank as some long-closed cellar.
She pays no attention to it. It is the way it is. She has spent many years trying to accept that things are what they are. People die, people in her care, people who are treasured, or despised, or forgotten the moment they’re gone, or grieved for past all endurance.
“Not this one, you greedy bastard,” she tells the phantom.
In answer, it quivers, waves of shadow, ombre depths shifting, swelling, shrinking. The roar grows louder and higher.
“No.”
The roaring becomes a screech, a terrible tinnitus that would have hurt her ears if it had been a physical sound.
None of this is physical. Violet understands that. It’s an ancient war, waged between determined spirits, fought with skills honed over millennia. And Violet refuses defeat.
She has lost track of time, but it doesn’t matter. The battle rages outside of time.
The darkness wells in the corridor, infinite and awful. It drowns even the faint flicker of the monitor’s lights. It floods the bedroom with the stench of decay.
Violet reaches the doorway. She braces her legs and stretches out her arms to grip the doorjamb with her hands. The tendrils lick at her, curl around her arms, her legs, lap at her stockinged feet in their aged Birkenstocks. Violet grins into the blackness. Her resistance is a light, a shining light that nothing can dim, a fire nothing can quench.
She laughs aloud, once, and lets her flame burn as high as it will go. It rises, spreads, bursts from her in a tremendous flash. She is consumed by it, but that doesn’t matter. The darkness is driven back, dispelled by her brilliance. She holds until the shadow dissipates like a fog under the morning sun.
When Violet’s strength evaporates, it empties her. She collapses in the doorway like a deflated balloon, her legs folding, her arms flung out.
The light in the hall comes on, and the paramedics and the parents are at the front door. Violet tries to speak to the them, to reassure them. To tell them she has won.
She is surprised when she finds she has no voice.
The paramedics hurry past her to the child’s bedside, the mother at their heels.
The father bends to lift Violet from the floor.
She watches from a distance, curious, as he carries her limp body to a couch and lays her gently down. Where is her breath? Her heartbeat? She has lost them.
The father shakes her shoulder, calls her name, but she doesn’t answer. She can’t answer. She isn’t there.
She is in the bedroom, watching her patient open her eyes, smile up at her mother.
“Mom,” the girl says, weakly, but clearly. “Mommy. There were angels.”
Out in print the same time as this anthology was a Fairwood story collection by Ray entitled Boarding Instructions. The collection includes the Talebones story “Take the Stairs,” but this anthology has “The Next Best Thing.” But it’s not the next best thing, of course, it’s one of my favorite Vukcevich stories. Hmmmm. there was that bug story in issue #5 called “Home Remedy,” too. Well, with Ray, you’re guaranteed to find “Best of” caliber fiction. Issue #13 featured a cover by Bob Hobbs, an artist I met who illustrated for the Hendees during the Figment days.
THE NEXT BEST THING
RAY VUKCEVICH
You’ve got to discipline your tattoos regularly. Otherwise, they get lazy or uppity — one or the other. I’d set aside the afternoon before Christmas for that purpose, and I was drinking beer and sneaking up on the screaming eagle under my left arm when someone tapped on my door. I put on my mild-mannered-account-executive persona, pulled on my pants and got into my bathrobe.
When I opened the door, I saw Deborah standing there looking good in jeans and western checked shirt, blond hair tied up in a pony tail. Yes, good but sad, too, since it had only been I forget how many days since Tim died.
“I need your help,” she said.
I groaned. This had to be about Tim’s last request. Everyone knew what he expected his friends to do should he be cruelly snatched away by Death.
“Come on, Deborah,” I said. “They’ll never let you have him.” I was already making up excuses, because I figured what she probably wanted was help stealing his body from the funeral home.
“Oh, that,” she said. “He’s already in the trunk of my car.”
I had met Deborah and Tim at a motivation seminar in Florida several years before. He was the cadaverous ex-astronaut (so the story went) and she was his sci-fi sweetie. Our two worlds were quite different but they seemed to complement one another pretty well. We became fast friends, a threesome, sometimes a foursome, usually a threesome, so when she looked at me with those deep brown eyes and said, come on I really really really do need you, I changed my clothes and we went.
Tim’s last wish had been that his remains be shot into space. I didn’t think there was much danger we’d be doing that this rainy afternoon.
Deborah drove well, if a little too fast, out of town and into the Oregon countryside on a road I knew led nowhere but farm country. What could she have in mind?
“The downside to death,” she said, “is
that it’s the last thing you’ll ever do.”
I waited for her to fill me in on the upside.
“The upside,” she said, “is that you do that one last thing forever.”
I thought she had it backwards, but I didn’t say so.
Deborah, Deborah.
I wondered how she’d gotten Tim’s long body into the trunk of her car. Weren’t dead people supposed to be stiff? She’d waltzed Tim out of the funeral home right under the noses of whoever was holding down the fort the day before Christmas. She was easy to underestimate. You might, for example, get stinking drunk one night when Tim was out of town and call her Debby, maybe even complain that Debby Does Diddly, but you’d only do it once.
She was a woman with edges so sharp, you even dream about them, you wake up bleeding.
“Will you pay attention?” she said. I realized she’d been talking to me for some time. “Here. We’re coming up on it now.”
Up ahead was a big white sign — billboard size. I couldn’t make it out. Words. A picture. We got closer. I still couldn’t make it out. We stopped. “You’ll have to open the gate,” she said.
I got out and looked up at the sign. It said, “Manvil The Magnificent! Big Breasted Birds.” The picture was a happy hayseed hooking a thumb over his shoulder at a grinning steroid turkey.
“Up here a ways,” she said when I got back in the car, “we’ll have to be very very quiet.”
“Why? Are we hunting wabbits?”
She rolled her eyes at me.
The road snaked through deep forest for a while, then I could see light ahead indicating we would soon be breaking into the open, but before we got there, Deborah turned off the main road. We slowly skirted the edge of the forest until she found what she was looking for. When we came out of the trees, there was a small hill, little more than a bump, in the middle of a field of what must have once been corn. On top of the hill was a smokestack.
Deborah turned off the engine. “The house,” she whispered, “is only a few hundred yards beyond the hill. We’ll need to be careful.”
I assumed she meant the house of the magnificent turkey farmer, Manvil. She got out of the car and closed the door carefully. Then she eased open the back door and nodded me over. “Help me unload.”
I helped her carry boxes and rope and things I couldn’t identify up the hill. Something about the smokestack pulled at my mind. I almost had it as I set down each load and turned to go back for another. When we’d unloaded everything and I was taking a moment near the top of the hill to catch my breath, the pieces fell into place.
That was no smokestack!
It was a big gun. A cannon, in fact, but hugely exaggerated like something you’d see in a circus.
“Now we wait for dark,” Deborah said. “Come on, let’s crawl up by the cannon and take a look at the house.”
We moved up on the circus cannon but dropped to our knees before we reached it. I could see it had once been painted red, white, and blue. Now it was rusting in a corn field. Near the top of the hill we got down on our bellies and crawled up and looked over.
In the meadow below there was a farm house, a red barn, and a white silo. Set away from those buildings were several sheds surrounded by chicken-wire fences. There were many turkeys in the pens, so many turkeys I wondered if Manvil the Magnificent had sold any at all this holiday season.
Everything was a lot closer than I’d expected.
Deborah scanned the scene through a pair of powerful binoculars.
“There’s something seriously wrong with those turkeys.” She handed me the binoculars.
I studied the turkeys. They did seem to be bigger and bustier than I remembered turkeys being, but I couldn’t see anything to worry about. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Are you blind?”She gave me a look. “They have arms. Obviously Manvil has reached back in time somehow and crossed his turkeys with their ancient ancestors. In his drive to minimize wing and maximize breast, he has turned them into creatures half modern table bird and half ancient dinosaur. T-rex would be my guess.”
I looked again. No arms. This was just another example of what happened when our two very different worlds touched but didn’t exactly mesh.
Or maybe she was just yanking my chain.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Arms.”
“Our window will be very small,” she said. “We’ll have to wait until it’s just dark enough that they won’t see us unless they’re looking right at us, but not so dark we can’t see what we’re doing.”
“How will we know?” I asked.
“Look,” she said. “You can see into the living room. When they turn on the Christmas tree, conditions should be optimal.”
I looked through the binoculars again. Yes, I could see the Christmas tree. And a woman in an apron. She seemed to be talking to someone I couldn’t see, probably a child down under the tree where the presents would be.
A man with a huge handlebar mustache came up behind the woman and put his hands on her shoulders. A moment later the Christmas tree lights came on, and a small girl poked her head up, smiling.
Deborah rolled over on her back. “Can you get him?” She didn’t look at me when she asked it. “I’ll prepare the cannon.”
“What do you know about cannons, Deborah?”
“I looked it up,” she said. “I know what to do.” She did look at me then, just looked, just waited. She’d already told me what she wanted me to do.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it. “Okay,” I said, “give me the car keys.”
I wrestled Tim out of the car. He didn’t really have much of a smell. They probably did something about that at the funeral home. Nevertheless, the thought of how he should smell threatened to make me vomit frogs. It was the idea of it. And maybe the waxy feel of his skin. He was wearing his dark suit and red power tie. I got him under the arms and dragged him up the hill.
Deborah had tied a block and tackle to the top of the cannon, and she looped the rope around Tim’s chest as soon as I put him down. She handed me the other end of the rope.
“You pull, I’ll guide,” she said.
I hoisted Tim up to the business end of the cannon. There was a moment of confusion as Deborah puzzled over the problem of actually getting him into the end of the gun. Finally, she shimmied up the barrel like a monkey and maneuvered him in head first. As she slid back down, the cannon leaned a little — maybe ten or twenty degrees from the perpendicular.
We observed a moment of silence looking at the cannon pointing out over the turkey farm. Tim’s feet in their black wing tips stuck out of the end. It would be dark soon.
“I guess we’re coming up on T minus something,” I said.
“Yes,” Deborah said. She walked back to the bottom of the cannon.
“All systems go?” I asked.
She gave me a thumbs up.
Then she did something to the cannon and there was a tremendous wompf.
Tim flew from the end of the cannon and over the turkey pens.
“Uh oh,” I said.
He’d been basically rolled into a ball when he left the end of the gun, but now his arms and legs unfurled, and he turned gracefully in the air just in time to splat face first into the big picture window of the farm house.
“Here comes Santa Claus,” I said.
Deborah sprang into action. She grabbed my arm. “Come on!”
“Circle the wagons, Mildred,” I babbled as she dragged me to the car. “The hippies are shooting dead people at us!”
So we were on the lam, I thought. Soon there’d be road blocks, troops, police barricades. They’d be grabbing everyone within fifty miles of the turkey farm. They’d pen us up in camps until it was time for questioning—barbed wire and spotlights crossing and recrossing the dusty exercise yards. They’d line us up and some mean-looking cop with a bullhorn would shout, “Okay, who did it? Somebody better speak up.”
He’d give us a moment to think it over. Then he’d turn loose th
e information-sniffing dogs, and there would be no way Deborah or I could hide the facts.
“Where are you going?” I shouted when I realized that she wasn’t fleeing the scene but was instead driving past the turkey pens and into the farmer’s front yard.
“Splashdown,” she said. “We’ll be in and out of there before they know what’s happening. Get ready.” She stood on the breaks, and the car swerved to a screaming stop. She was out of the car and running for the house before I could even get my door open.
I arrived just in time to hear her say, “Stand back! We’ve got to get him to a hospital!”
I stepped through the broken window. The Christmas tree had been hurled against the wall. Tim was still hugging it. Mrs. Manvil was on her knees holding on tight to the girl. You could see the family resemblance — wide eyes and slack astonished mouths. Manvil himself stood over them, but I couldn’t see his mouth under the big mustache.
I peeled Tim off the Christmas tree.
“We’ll notify the authorities,” Deborah said. “You folks just hang tight. What a thing to happen on Christmas Eve! Boy, the Lord sure does move in mysterious ways.”
I thought she sounded a little hysterical, but maybe that was part of her plan. I dragged Tim through the window and across the yard to the car. Deborah backed out after me making stay-back and keep-calm motions with both hands at the Manvils.
I slammed the trunk on Tim and ran around and jumped in the shotgun seat. Deborah peeled out.
She took a complicated route back to town.
I lost track.
When we passed the Dairy Queen, she said, “Mission accomplished.”
“Deborah, Deborah,” I said, “do you really believe we just shot Tim into space?”
“Sadly no,” she said, “but we did do the next best thing.”
“Meaning?”
“We shot him at space.”
Her grin made my heart ache.
We stopped by her place to get Tim a change of clothes. Then we drove back to the funeral home.
The Best of Talebones Page 12
