by Ann
The lizard broke off the tune in mid-bar, shoved me, till I flew into the corner, and chucked the viola d’amore after me – that clearly meant it was my turn to play. Then he clutched the woman in his embrace and started dancing a strange lizard’s tango with her. I was furious, but the fall had taken my breath away, so I wasn’t able to get up at once and jump on the lizard. The woman was half-dead with fear, the lizard dragged her round the room like a rag puppet, croaking a wordless song and leaning over her hapless body in eccentric figures. During one of these they fell on the carpet and with lascivious huffing the lizard started to assault the woman, sticking his maw into her neckline. I recovered myself, with a leap and a bound I went over and with the viola I hit the lizard on the head with all my strength.
When the musical instrument shattered on the lizard’s skull, a terrific bang was heard and the walls surrounding us collapsed. When the dust settled, I saw we were on wide plain, covered with yellow grass and low desiccated bushes. On one side of the distant horizon the plain descended to a harbour town, whose houses from a distance looked like little stones scattered round the curving bay. The only building on the empty plain was the National Museum. It stood some way off, the same size as in Prague, but all made of glass, through the glass walls you could see, flapping its mighty wings as it flew down the empty corridors, an Andean condor. The lizard staggered to its feet, clasping his head with both paws. He started to feel scared again and hid behind me, so that the woman wouldn’t see him. My courage also left me. The woman got up, shaking with fury, and angrily hissing: ‘You haven’t heard the last of this!’ I decided to back off, pushing the lizard in the rear, as he clung to my shirt and wept. But the woman let us alone, she went off towards the glass building; we could hear her muttering to herself: ‘You’ll pay for this, you blithering idiots’ and ‘It won’t do you a bit of good, being a protected species, and the other little sod’s also got it coming to him.’ Up the glass ramp, past the glass statues she went, reached the main doorway and entered. She could be seen going up the glass staircase, walking slowly along the corridors, the condor slowly wheeling round her, occasionally brushing a wing against her hair. Should I go after her? I was attracted by the cold glass and the condor’s sharp beak. Meanwhile the monitor lizard bit its teeth into some rope tied to the end of the bed. He turned his head and gave me a doggy look. I smiled sadly and lay down on the pale quilt. The lizard slowly walked off with the rope in his mouth the rope went taut and the bed started to move, it began bumping off along the plain. I lay on my back staring at the bright sky, sometimes I heard the cracking of a dry bush. After a while the lizard began to croon a little song, I didn’t understand it too well, I only caught the words:
At the end of the garden
in thorn thicket’s land
treasures are harboured
of Arabian sand.
You behold jewels’ spark
from silvery shrines
when up with the lark
you creep there betimes.
Towards evening we found ourselves on the edge of the harbour town. The lizard kept pulling with all his strength. First I rode through an estate of luxury villas whose walls shone white through the darkening foliage of their gardens. Then the bed rolled along the asphalt of broad and practically empty streets, where the red rays of the setting sun, penetrating through gaps between the houses, lit up large letters on facades of bare brick and struck sharp blinding flashes which bounced off the chrome of cars which passed us from time to time. Finally we plunged into the winding lanes of the old harbour quarter, which were sometimes so narrow that the bed grated on the walls; then the lizard always turned round, patiently pushed the bed back and took another route. I was moving along in close proximity to men and women sitting at tables in front of little pubs; they shook hands with me, without having to get up from their seats, and shouted something at me in an unknown tongue. A little black bird jumped up on the bed, rode for a while and then flew off. People stood up, patted the lizard on the shoulder like a horse, someone brought a jug and tried to make the lizard drink some wine, by sticking his head into the jug. The lizard fended them all off benevolently with his paw and went on calmly pulling his load. Soon the harbour appeared at the end of one of the lanes. The red sun on the horizon was already touching the surface of the sea; the harbour was empty, only a few children were chasing a ball across the wide asphalt expanse, their shadows flitted across the distant facades of lengthy administrative buildings, reddened in the light of the setting sun. At the other end of the harbour cranes were unloading goods from a large white ship.
The lizard halted only on reaching the pier. A chill blew in from the sea. Yachts bobbed on the waves and scraped gently, the water splashed and there was a smell of rotting. The lizard curled up on the ground in a ball and slept. I felt sleepy too, what luck, not having to rush about an unfamiliar town looking for a room for the night in unwelcoming hotels. I buried myself in the quilt. When I shut my eyes I could hear the quiet voices of abandoned boats, the splashing of waves, the distant call of children.
(Sea, harbour piers, large letters on facades, worn-through plush of hotel armchair backs, lights in drinks, marbles, smells of corridors, an unfamiliar animal walking in the gestures of hands, from unrepeatable and unnecessary encounters which we forget, yet whose poison ripens in the blood, there may perhaps be born a future home, unlooked-for asylum.)
In the morning the lizard climbed on to the bed. I grasped the rope in my hands and started slowly pulling the bed in the direction of Prague. I think some other animals jumped on to the bed on the way, because it got heavier and heavier, apart from that behind my back the hooting and yelling of several voices resounded and sounds of wild struggles. But I didn’t look back, I pulled the bed along empty highways, the mist rolling over them.
The Dark
Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler (1950–) is an American writer who has written science fiction, fantasy novels and stories that tend to work by way of ambiguity, misdirection, and deep characterization. Although she is best-known for her New York Times bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), also made into a movie, novels such as Sarah Canary (1991), The Sweetheart Season (1996), and Sister Noon (2001) cemented her reputation as a writer of the first rank. Story collections include Artificial Things (1986), Black Glass (1997), and What I Didn’t See (2010). Although Fowler rarely writes stories that could be called horror or weird, ‘The Dark’ is a powerful and topical exception.
In the summer of 1954, Anna and Richard Becker disappeared from Yosemite National Park along with Paul Becker, their three-year-old son. Their campsite was intact; two paper plates with half-eaten frankfurters remained on the picnic table, and a third frankfurter was in the trash. The rangers took several black-and-white photographs of the meal, which, when blown up to eight by ten, as part of the investigation, showed clearly the words love bites, carved into the wooden picnic table many years ago. There appeared to be some fresh scratches as well; the expert witness at the trial attributed them, with no great assurance, to raccoon.
The Beckers’ car was still backed into the campsite, a green De Soto with a spare key under the right bumper and half a tank of gas. Inside the tent, two sleeping bags had been zipped together marital style and laid on a large tarp. A smaller flannel bag was spread over an inflated pool raft. Toiletries included three toothbrushes; Ipana toothpaste, squeezed in the middle; Ivory soap; three washcloths; and one towel. The newspapers discreetly made no mention of Anna’s diaphragm, which remained powdered with talc, inside its pink shell, or of the fact that Paul apparently still took a bottle to bed with him.
Their nearest neighbor had seen nothing. He had been in his hammock, he said, listening to the game. Of course, the reception in Yosemite was lousy. At home he had a shortwave set; he said he had once pulled in Dover, clear as a bell. ‘You had to really concentrate to hear the game,’ he told the rangers. ‘You could’ve dropped the bomb. I wouldn’t
have noticed.’
Anna Becker’s mother, Edna, received a postcard postmarked a day earlier. ‘Seen the firefall,’ it said simply. ‘Home Wednesday. Love.’ Edna identified the bottle. ‘Oh yes, that’s Paul’s bokkie,’ she told the police. She dissolved into tears. ‘He never goes anywhere without it,’ she said.
In the spring of 1960, Mark Cooper and Manuel Rodriguez went on a fishing expedition in Yosemite. They set up a base camp in Tuolumne Meadows and went off to pursue steelhead. They were gone from camp approximately six hours, leaving their food and a six-pack of beer zipped inside their backpacks zipped inside their tent. When they returned, both beer and food were gone. Canine footprints circled the tent, but a small and mysterious handprint remained on the tent flap. ‘Raccoon,’ said the rangers who hadn’t seen it. The tent and packs were undamaged. Whatever had taken the food had worked the zippers. ‘Has to be raccoon.’
The last time Manuel had gone backpacking, he’d suspended his pack from a tree to protect it. A deer had stopped to investigate, and when Manuel shouted to warn it off the deer hooked the pack over its antlers in a panic, tearing the pack loose from the branch and carrying it away. Pack and antlers were so entangled, Manuel imagined the deer must have worn his provisions and clean shirts until antler-shedding season. He reported that incident to the rangers, too, but what could anyone do? He was reminded of it, guiltily, every time he read Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose to his four-year-old son.
Manuel and Mark arrived home three days early. Manuel’s wife said she’d been expecting him.
She emptied his pack. ‘Where’s the can opener?’ she asked.
‘It’s there somewhere,’ said Manuel.
‘It’s not,’ she said.
‘Check the shirt pocket.’
‘It’s not here.’ Manuel’s wife held the pack upside down and shook it. Dead leaves fell out. ‘How were you going to drink the beer?’ she asked.
In August of 1962, Caroline Crosby, a teenager from Palo Alto, accompanied her family on a forced march from Tuolumne Meadows to Vogelsang. She carried fourteen pounds in a pack with an aluminum frame – and her father said it was the lightest pack on the market, and she should be able to carry one-third her weight, so fourteen pounds was nothing, but her pack stabbed her continuously in one coin-sized spot just below her right shoulder, and it still hurt the next morning. Her boots left a blister on her right heel, and her pack straps had rubbed. Her father had bought her a mummy bag with no zipper so as to minimize its weight; it was stiflingly hot, and she sweated all night. She missed an overnight at Ann Watson’s house, where Ann showed them her sister’s Mark Eden bust developer, and her sister retaliated by freezing all their bras behind the twin-pops. She missed The Beverly Hillbillies.
Caroline’s father had quit smoking just for the duration of the trip, so as to spare himself the weight of cigarettes, and made continual comments about Nature, which were laudatory in content and increasingly abusive in tone. Caroline’s mother kept telling her to smile.
In the morning her father mixed half a cup of stream water into a packet of powdered eggs and cooked them over a Coleman stove. ‘Damn fine breakfast,’ he told Caroline intimidatingly as she stared in horror at her plate. ‘Out here in God’s own country. What else could you ask for?’ He turned to Caroline’s mother, who was still trying to get a pot of water to come to a boil. ‘Where’s the goddamn coffee?’ he asked. He went to the stream to brush his teeth with a toothbrush he had sawed the handle from in order to save the weight. Her mother told her to please make a little effort to be cheerful and not spoil the trip for everyone.
One week later she was in Letterman Hospital in San Francisco. The diagnosis was septicemic plague.
Which is finally where I come into the story. My name is Keith Harmon B.A. in history with a special emphasis on epidemics. I probably know as much as anyone about the plague of Athens. Typhus. Tarantism. Tsutsugamushi fever. It’s an odder historical specialty than it ought to be. More battles have been decided by disease than by generals – and if you don’t believe me, take a closer look at the Crusades or the fall of the Roman Empire or Napoleon’s Russian campaign.
My M.A. is in public administration. Vietnam veteran, too, but in 1962 I worked for the state of California as part of the plague-monitoring team. When Letterman’s reported a plague victim, Sacramento sent me down to talk to her.
Caroline had been moved to a private room. ‘You’re going to be fine,’ I told her. Of course, she was. We still lose people to the pneumonic plague, but the slower form is easily cured. The only tricky part is making the diagnosis.
‘I don’t feel well. I don’t like the food,’ she said. She pointed out Letterman’s Tuesday menu. ‘Hawaiian Delight. You know what that is? Green Jell-O with a canned pineapple ring on top. What’s delightful about that?’ She was feverish and lethargic. Her hair lay limply about her head, and she kept tangling it in her fingers as she talked. ‘I’m missing a lot of school.’ Impossible to tell if this last was a complaint or a boast. She raised her bed to a sitting position and spent most of the rest of the interview looking out the window, making it clear that a view of the Letterman parking lot was more arresting than a conversation with an old man like me. She seemed younger than fifteen. Of course, everyone in a hospital bed feels young. Helpless. ‘Will you ask them to let me wash and set my hair?’
I pulled a chair over to the bed. ‘I need to know if you’ve been anywhere unusual recently. We know about Yosemite. Anywhere else. Hiking out around the airport, for instance.’ The plague is endemic in the San Bruno Mountains by the San Francisco Airport. That particular species of flea doesn’t bite humans, though. Or so we’d always thought. ‘It’s kind of a romantic spot for some teenagers, isn’t it?’
I’ve seen some withering adolescent stares in my time, but this one was practiced. I still remember it. I may be sick, it said, but at least I’m not an idiot. ‘Out by the airport?’ she said. ‘Oh, right. Real romantic. The radio playing and those 727s overhead. Give me a break.’
‘Let’s talk about Yosemite, then.’
She softened a little. ‘In Palo Alto we go to the water temple,’ she informed me. ‘And, no, I haven’t been there, either. My parents made me go to Yosemite. And now I’ve got bubonic plague.’ Her tone was one of satisfaction. ‘I think it was the powdered eggs. They made me eat them. I’ve been sick ever since.’
‘Did you see any unusual wildlife there? Did you play with any squirrels?’
‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘I always play with squirrels. Birds sit on my fingers.’ She resumed the stare. ‘My parents didn’t tell you what I saw?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Figures.’ Caroline combed her fingers through her hair. ‘If I had a brush, I could at least rat it. Will you ask the doctors to bring me a brush?’
‘What did you see, Caroline?’
‘Nothing. According to my parents. No big deal.’ She looked out at the parking lot. ‘I saw a boy.’
She wouldn’t look at me, but she finished her story. I heard about the mummy bag and the overnight party she missed. I heard about the eggs. Apparently, the altercation over breakfast had escalated, culminating in Caroline’s refusal to accompany her parents on a brisk hike to Ireland Lake. She stayed behind, lying on top of her sleeping bag and reading the part of Green Mansions where Abel eats a fine meal of anteater flesh. ‘After the breakfast I had, my mouth was watering,’ she told me. Something made her look up suddenly from her book. She said it wasn’t a sound. She said it was a silence.
A naked boy dipped his hands into the stream and licked the water from his fingers. His fingernails curled toward his palms like claws. ‘Hey,’ Caroline told me she told him. She could see his penis and everything. The boy gave her a quick look and then backed away into the trees. She went back to her book.
She described him to her family when they returned. ‘Real dirty,’ she said. ‘Real hairy.’
‘You have a very superior attitude,
’ her mother noted. ‘It’s going to get you in trouble someday.’
‘Fine,’ said Caroline, feeling superior. ‘Don’t believe me.’ She made a vow never to tell her parents anything again. ‘And I never will,’ she told me. ‘Not if I have to eat powdered eggs until I die.’
At this time there started a plague. It appeared not in one part of the world only, not in one race of men only, and not in any particular season; but it spread over the entire earth, and afflicted all without mercy of both sexes and of every age. It began in Egypt, at Pelusium; thence it spread to Alexandria and to the rest of Egypt; then went to Palestine, and from there over the whole world…
In the second year, in the spring, it reached Byzantium and began in the following manner: To many there appeared phantoms in human form. Those who were so encountered, were struck by a blow from the phantom, and so contracted the disease. Others locked themselves into their houses. But then the phantoms appeared to them in dreams, or they heard voices that told them that they had been selected for death.
