by Ann
It was an awful responsibility. That night, late, the phone rang and he came awake to the reek of sulfur. It was on his hands and made his eyes sting when he wiped away tears. What had he been dreaming?
‘It’s me,’ said the raspy little voice, and that was when he realized why it sounded so odd. It was a dwarf voice; gruff with age and tribulation, not squeaky but still small. This was one of Arbus’s weird women.
‘So it is,’ he said. ‘But it’s the middle of the night.’
‘I thought you’d be more likely to come alone that way.’
‘What, now?’
‘Have you got a pencil?’
He thought of telling her he didn’t have the prints with him, but he found himself grabbing a pen and pad instead. He wrote down an address and agreed to meet her in half an hour. He was backing his car out of the driveway when he came fully awake and wondered what the fuck he was doing. Was this police procedure? He decided this didn’t have anything to do with the department. This was for the sake of something else – call it moonlighting, like his work in the darkroom. He had to have something in his life besides a job, didn’t he? Like Arbus, who’d shot models for a living and in her spare time went looking for freaks. Maybe she needed that, after overdosing on glamour all day. Maybe in his case, after the brutal repetitive ugliness of his day-to-day – dead junkies and hold-up victims who were a bit too slow (or low) with the cash – he needed something a little fantastic, something beautiful, like that silver glow he’d glimpsed on the surface of Arbus’s bath, like the first rays of a silver sun about to rise, a hint of imminent revelation. He saw clues to that light hanging over the marble crypts of Brooklyn which spread away beneath him as he took the bridge; it was more explicit on the waters of the East River, increasingly lovely and plentiful as crushed jewels scattered over the black tombs of the Manhattan skyline. Then he drove down into the tunnel where the glare of fluorescents rubbed his eyes raw, dispelling all magic except for the sense of humid evil evoked by the sight of so much seeping greenish tile lining the tunnel walls. In his mind, water continued to drip from a mirror long after blood had ceased dripping from her dangling arm.
The address the dwarf gave him wasn’t really an address. There were buildings on either side of it, in an alley, but the number itself did not exist. All he saw was a low wall of old brick topped by a spiked wrought-iron fence; an iron gate opened in the midst of it. Might have been a vacant lot behind that wall, anything. Shattered windows looked down from three sides, as if the rendezvous were nothing but the bottom of an airshaft choked with trash, castoffs. Not official business, no, but he was glad for his .38 and flashlight as he pushed through the gate into a cemetery.
He’d never seen the place before, not in years of patrolling the city on foot and in cars. He must have driven past – even down – this alley a hundred times and never noticed the wall and gate. As expected, it was full of trash; the old marble and granite headstones were shattered, chipped, vandalized, discolored. His shoes crunched through a fine covering of broken glass; it was like walking on the Coney Island shore, even down to the smell of urine. He flicked his flashlight over carved angels with brutalized faces and seared wings. Stubs of crosses with the arms snapped off appeared to give the finger to the living. Every beam he aimed into the tumble of graves sent off a hundred harsh new shadows. He couldn’t be sure where he’d looked and where he hadn’t.
He wiped off the lid of a relatively clean crypt and settled down to wait. With the flashlight off, his eyes adjusted quickly to the dark. His cigarette made the only human movement. So where was she? A dwarf could sneak around in here easier than a full-grown woman – but it would be hard to come soundlessly in all this glass. He laid the envelope of prints on the stone beside him and smoked three cigarettes before a shadow came out of nowhere. He jumped down from his seat and instantly lost sight of her among the stones.
‘Who’s there?’ he said.
She came forward again. ‘No names, Inspector. Of course, I already know yours.’
As he’d guessed, she was small as a child, her face a gray blur of blended shadows. He knew she wouldn’t appreciate any light leaping on her.
Her hand darted out to the tombstone surface and stole away the envelope holding his prints. She slid them into her hand and made a frantic gesture for his flashlight. She turned away from him, crouched over and laid the prints on the ground. Shielding the light with her body, she switched it on.
He heard her gasp, then further sounds of pleasure. He tried to make out details he might use later to recognize her under other circumstances, but her silhouette was as empty as a doorway into a starless sky, with only little wisps of reflected light peeking through her spiky hair like bursts of solar flares. He grew impatient listening to her. She sounded like a starving animal wolfing down a huge meal.
‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘you’ve seen enough.’ As he stepped toward her, she shut off the light and jumped back. The prints lay on the ground between them like a dozen stray windows into a glossier world. He had the feeling that if he stepped on one he might fall into it – fall into that bathtub full of radiant blood. He could almost see the glare of the flash shining from the time-frozen surface. Even in black and white, it had a reddish tint.
‘Come on, you said a trade. Let’s have your dozen.’
She didn’t move. He could tell she was measuring him, reading his character in a way he’d never experienced before, eating him up with the dark sunken pits in her face. He made a grab for his flashlight, wanting superstitiously to shine a beam into those hollows and fill them in with eyes.
She backed away, being small enough that an edge of crypt shadow neatly swallowed half of her. Another stupid move and the rest would disappear. Without the light he felt more helpless than if she’d taken his gun. He held his ground, stooping to gather his prints.
‘I showed you mine,’ he said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. ‘You’re the one who talked about trust.’
‘Mine didn’t come out,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the roll was fogged, all twelve negs burned black, pure white prints. Nothing on them.
I thought I could bring them with me, but it didn’t work.’
‘Wait a minute. You telling me there’s no trade?’ Now he was pissed, and ready to make a grab at her. She was little, she could elude him. He’d have to be fast. ‘Well fuck I’m giving you my prints.’
‘I saw them, that’s enough. They came out good. You’re a fine photographer. I can tell how much work you put into them. And I…appreciate that.’
That was it for Brovnik. Her whole story of being an accomplice, nothing but a lie to get a look at private records. This was suddenly more than personal; he would make it official, too.
He hurled the prints at her. They curled off in twelve different arcs, like a blossom opening around him as he leapt to cut her off.
She gasped, spinning away, and found herself trapped in a corner where a tall family mausoleum backed up against the brick of the surrounding buildings, below a high row of broken windows. Nowhere for her to go.
He stooped for the flashlight, which she’d dropped. ‘All right, lady,’ he said, and switched it on.
The light caught her for a glancing instant, and that was all it took – all he got for his pains and for his memories. He saw that her skin was shimmery black, her short-cropped hair silvery gray, and the very centers of her eyes, brilliant white. Then she shrank to nothing and disappeared, like a little woman-shaped balloon deflating instantaneously to the size of a speck of lichen on the marble tomb, then even smaller, gone. The beam hit nothing but the chipped brick wall and a slab of marble with some cryptic gang hieroglyphs streaking the side.
He backed up, swinging the beam to and fro, up and down, looking for the crack she’d slid away through, the secret door that had opened to swallow her up, the rabbit hole, anything. Nothing. None of those things would explain what he’
d seen, anyway.
In the time he’d had to look at her, really look – and it was an almost subliminal impression – he’d seen that she wasn’t any dwarf. She had none of the characteristic squashed features, no stubby fingers or any of that. For her size, she was perfectly proportioned – like a normal grown woman who had shrunk in the wash. This remained true as she vanished: All proportions stayed constant as if she were zooming backward down a tunnel with her eyes fixed on his, until she blinked out. The last thing he remembered was her faintly wounded look, and her color…that shifting silvery black like nothing he’d ever seen in a person – though tantalizingly familiar.
Brovnik hunted through the cemetery till the sun came up, but he didn’t find anything except his twelve dented, scratched prints. He shoved them in a crypt to rot and hurried back to his car. In the strong morning sunlight it was just barely possible to not think of her consciously. But somewhere inside, his mind kept going over the details; the cop inside him wouldn’t quit.
It was his day off. After a few hours spent futilely trying to sleep, he went into the lab, fished out the negatives of the Arbus suicide, and studied them on the lightboard. The hair looked similar to what he’d seen in the flashlight beam – an odd shiny gray, cropped short. The skin was the same shade of silvery black that no negro’s skin had ever been. But that didn’t mean it was her. The face might have proved something, but he was spared the sight of her piercing white pupils staring out of his negatives because she’d slid face down in the tub. Still, when he looked at the spiky hair, he felt a chill he hoped wasn’t wholly based on recognition.
The next few days passed with excruciating slowness as he waited for the sense of shock to move through his system and into the past so he could get on with a life of ordinary things. He had time off coming to him, and he took it. He went to the Catskills with an Instamatic camera and took color snaps of waterfalls and old bridges and empty inner tubes bobbing down the Esopus River. He didn’t take any pictures of people. He met a woman in a restaurant bar who spent the night at his cabin; in the morning she was gone but he felt reassured because she had vanished in the usual way, while his eyes were closed. When he got back to the city after a week, he thought he’d put it all behind him; he thought he was refreshed.
His first night back on duty, a man shot his wife through the temples, cut the throats of his two-, three-, and four-year-olds, strangled the family Doberman (not necessarily in that order), and sentenced himself to life as a vegetable by badly misjudging the trajectory of his final bullet. The photography posed a number of technical problems for Brovnik, due to the cramped conditions, but he was working them out in a cool professional way when he happened to look through the open window onto the dark fire escape and saw the four of them standing there. Five, if you counted the dog. A tall silvery white woman, three little ones, and a four-legged mass of silver mist. Silvery white, with sharp white pupils, all looking at him as if he owed them something. It didn’t make sense to him at first (and this was how his mind worked, hooked on little bits of logic he hoped might help him understand the larger problem) that they should all be silvery white, when the shrinking woman in the cemetery had been so inky black.
‘What the fuck are you doing, Bravo? There’s no pulse in that arm.’ He looked down in horror and saw that he had been posing a limp arm – adjusting the dead to make a better picture.
He backed off and drew the camera defensively to his eye, aiming it at the mother’s splattered skull. For the first time he noticed that she was black. The children were black as well. So was the Doberman. All black.
Lowering the camera, he saw five white negatives watching him.
What did she do to me? he wondered.
‘Bravo? What is it?’
He didn’t answer the other cops. He knew he wouldn’t ever be able to answer their questions. He forced his way to the window and showed his camera to the watchers outside, let them witness him opening the back and exposing the film. He yanked out a yard of it, unspooling the celluloid, letting it go ribboning into the night with all the latent images burned out, never to be seen, sparing them his camera’s bite of immortality.
As the woman in the graves had done, they shrank away to nothing. Five new stars burned briefly in the night, a bit too low to top the horizon, then blinked out.
‘Brovnik, what the fuck is wrong?’ Heavy steps came toward him.
‘I have to get out,’ he said, stepping through the window. Questioning cries followed him all the way down the fire escape to the street, where he walked away quickly from the lights of the squad cars, his camera tugging like a bloodhound on the trail of everything that had ever eluded him.
The Country Doctor
Steven Utley
Steven Utley (1948–) is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy. Early on, Utley belonged to what would become the famous Turkey City Writers’ Workshop, which also included Bruce Sterling and Lisa Tuttle (the latter also included in this volume). A Nebula Award finalist, Utley has frequently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog. He is best known for his Silurian Tales, which chronicle the misadventures of a group of scientists sent back to the Paleozoic era. Collections include Beasts of Love (2005). ‘The Country Doctor’ is a bit of a departure for Utley, despite its archaeological bent: a creepy weird tale reminiscent of the work of Michael Shea.
Gardner was drowning, and strangers were laying hands on the bones of my fore-bears. I felt obligated to see that liberties weren’t taken with my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and other good, God-fearing ladies, so I put the business on auto pilot and made the drive as if on auto pilot myself.
I viewed the visit as a familial duty, not a sentimental journey. I hadn’t been back to Gardner in twenty-five years. I’d always told myself that, with my grandparents dead and their house taken over by obscure cousins-removed, there was nothing to come back for. Soon there would be nothing to come back to. The dam was completed, the waters were rising. Gardner was drowning.
Once in the town, however, I couldn’t simply drive to the cemetery. It wouldn’t have taken two minutes. Wherever you were in a place the size of Gardner, you weren’t far from anywhere else, and now, especially, everything was smaller and closer together than it had seemed when I was a kid. But I found that I had to drive down my grandparents’ old street, had to stop in front of what had been their house. I sat with the motor running and stared disconsolately. Throughout my childhood, though I moved wherever the military took my father, my grandparents’ house, a big, warm clapboard pile, had remained the center of the world, the universe – home. My earliest memories were of being in that house, surrounded by relatives, loved, safe. Now it sat waiting for the water. My grandfather had been a carpenter, among other things; I could see his shed in back. There had been a vegetable patch back there, too. My grandmother had shelled a lot of peas and snapped a lot of beans from it.
The other houses on the block had once been features of a familiar landscape. Now, curtainless windows gave most of them a look of stupid surprise. One was carefully boarded up, as if the owners fully intended to return. The house next to it looked agape and miserable. Paint hung from it in strips. The owners must have stopped bothering with upkeep when they heard about the dam; finally, they’d just walked away. All but one of the lawns on the block were overgrown. A handful of people still remained, the die-hard element, determined to hold out until the water lapped over their doorsteps, and to keep their yards looking nice in the meantime.
It was three blocks to the cemetery, long blocks for someone dragging an orthopedic shoe. Nevertheless, I told myself. Nevertheless. I turned off the motor, got out of the car. The sun was at its zenith. There was no wind. A male chorus of cicadae sang of love’s delights to prospective mates. The day felt and sounded exactly like all the summer days I’d spent in Gardner in my childhood. I put my hands in my pockets and started walking, slowly, stunned by the force of the m
emories crowding in on me. I remembered how my grandmother used to sit in a metal porch chair and, as she put it, have herself a little talk with Jesus while she snapped those beans. Sometimes she sang gospel songs. She only ever sang the melodies, but I had been to enough revival meetings to know the words to whatever she sang. Sometimes, hearing her, I’d stop my playing and sing the words while she hummed.…
My eyes began to sting. Gardner was drowning.
Around the corner had lived Blanche, who was my grandmother’s age and whose relation to me was, then and now, unclear. Someone lived there still – a green station wagon with a dinged-up fender sat in the driveway, and there were curtains in the windows – but Blanche herself was long dead, killed in an automobile accident. I’d liked her a lot. One summer, she had given me the empty coffee can in which I buried my grandmother’s dead parakeet Petey. I knew exactly where I’d scooped out Petey’s grave and wondered what I might find if I were to open it now. Nothing, probably – at most, a few crumbling shards of coffee-can rust. Tiny little bones dissolve in no time. On the next block was the crumbling brick shell of Cobb’s Corner Market, where I’d sometimes spent my entire weekly stipend, twenty-five cents, on comic books and a Coke. Dime comic books and nickel soft drinks – it had been that long ago, and it was all about to pass forever from sight and memory.
Drowning, drowning.…
More vehicles were parked by the cemetery than there were in the whole town. I saw many opened graves – it could have been the day after Resurrection Day. At least a dozen people wearing old clothes were working among the headstones.
I knew in a very broad way what these archeologists were supposed to be doing here, and I did see individuals sifting dirt through screens or duck-walking around exhumed coffins with tape measures in their hands, but what I mostly saw looked like just a lot of hot, dirty shovel work with nothing scientific about it.
