The Apex Book of World SF

by Mahvesh Murad

  Nicola opened his eyes and looked up. The old lady, smiling, had walked up to a stove with a kettle boiling on it. The plastic whistle (it sounds like a cock, not just any old bird, listen carefully, you waning wanker, you human waste, you bottom feeder, it’s a cock, Jesus) was emitting that obtuse hiss. Nicola realized that when he entered the room there was no stove, no kettle boiling. But there they were now, yes, and tea was ready.

  “I’ve made you some nice strong black tea—it’ll perk you up!” The old lady’s shadow sprawled out contortedly.

  “But where are we? I can’t…I can’t really remember, and…”

  The old lady laughed, shrugging slowly. She turned sideways to look at him. “Don’t bother yourself about it. It’s the heat, this terrible heat—it’s scrambling your brains. You’re in my home—Villa Bartoli.”

  “We’re from Elite Maintenance,” said Nicola slowly, more to himself than to his host. “We were just meant to fix the main…well, something.”

  “Of course, my dear,” said the old lady as she brought a black enamel tray with a teapot, two teacups, and a plate of cookies to the table. “You went to the greenhouse—that’s where the pipes are but it’s even hotter there—I did tell you to take a break. This house is very large and (may Hell regurgitate you, you bastard sodomite) old; my husband Alfonso designed it—he was an eccentric architect, may God bless him, and it’s quite easy to get lost amidst.”

  “What?” said Nicola, bringing a hand to his forehead. He felt feverish—that fiery fever from before that cooked his senses.

  “I said if you wanted to try one of these butter cookies—I made them myself in my wood oven,” she said, handing him a cookie.

  Nicola took it and started to chew. The taste multiplied a thousandfold. A sweet, toffee-like taste; the dough was chewy and melted in his mouth.

  But there was that sheet of paper in his pocket—the sheet with those words on it. He was starting to remember now and his throat burned so much it hurt.

  “Drink up, have some tea—it’s black tea and it will make you feel better,” said the old lady, as if she had read his mind. She got back to her knitting, smiling all the time, and lifted her long metal needle, studying its tip.

  Nicola seized the china cup. His hands were shaking. The old lady stood again and walked up holding her long knitting needle. “Drink up, drink up.”

  Nicola took a deep breath and brought the cup to his lips. The hot steam filled his nose—an intense, sweet fragrance of blossoms.

  Polaroid: the four of them walking up to the porch of that very house—a house that seemed to have been abandoned for years, its windows barred shut, the grass unkempt, the sun choking everything in a metal vice. In the terse heat, a dog barked from far away, a suffused, rhythmic bark, as if he were in the midst of a dream. Around them a desert of rotten, dark yellow wheat. The world seemed to end there.

  Nicola’s lips touched the cup and he sipped the tea. It was delicious. He’d never tasted anything as good. The old lady stroked her knitting needle. “Do you feel better now?” she inquired.

  Nicola put the cup back down on the table. “I’m such a fool, Madam. The heat just got went to my head. I must’ve wandered about looking for the bathroom and then sss ss sss…”

  His throat snapped shut like a trap. Fiery fangs gouged at his carotid and vomit burst up his throat, a morbid mix of stomach acid and blood, a purplish slop erupting from his nose and mouth as he shot up and staggered back. Tears welled in his eyes. He gasped and flapped his hands blindly, grasping at the lace tablecloth, pulling it and upsetting everything—the teapot, the cups, and the cookies. Twitching convulsively, he saw the old lady smile and come toward him, her arms spread open, as if to embrace him. Her face was sick greasepaint, a hybrid accumulation of maliciousness and distorted craving, her torso tapering sickly into a toothless mouth that clicked and clicked like castanets.

  Nicola backed toward the door and it opened behind him. He collapsed in the hallway and a gust of rancid stench covered the taste of blood and vomit in his mouth; it was the old lady croaking and clawing at his vest. Nicola was quick enough to wriggle his arm free and get out of the room, and he slammed the door shut. The old lady was imprisoned again in her room, and the door remained shut.

  Nicola crawled along the carpet and felt a second stomach spasm more violent than the first. The tea was tainted. He knew he was done for—he realized it with the last flickers of consciousness leaving him. There were the others. The other guys on the team. He had to resist for them. He had to resist a few more seconds.

  He took his sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, staining it with his blood. He took his pen from his coat pocket—the pen with “Elite Maintenance” etched onto it—and, as he lay in a heap on the crimson carpet winding through the endless maze of hallways defaced by dead ends, dusty mirrors, stairs to nowhere, that abandoned and endless house that corrupted reality, its architectural entrails rent by inhuman pangs, he wrote something, and as he wrote, behind him, beyond the ground glass of the white wood door, a shadow moved, a small diaphanous shadow.

  There were two left. Lying in the greenhouse, wearing their Elite Maintenance overalls, in opposite corners, every now and then they glanced at each other but didn’t have the nerve to utter a word. They had clearly heard the choked sobs and wheezes of Nicola. He hadn’t made it. And now there were two left.

  The short one knew his name was Marco. That much he could remember. They had come here with a task and, from the papers strewn on the floor, he could see it had something to do with the pipe works. Of course—the greenhouse. The human rampart in this nightmarish hell. The stop-over, the last refuge. Things here worked more or less normally—time and space were not the demented distortions of some obscure power reigning over the abandoned mansion. Here, everything was still and there was no smell of mold—two important factors. But the third…well, the third was that the old lady couldn’t get in here.

  That wasn’t all. The normality of this niche—a four-by-six-meter patio some grotesque sense of humor had dubbed a “greenhouse”—a vertical concrete duct, scorching under the perpendicular sun up there, and ornate with creepers like huge macrophages chewing on their grey guest, this normality was represented also by the regular functioning of the memory. Marco remembered. In gusts, with wrenched thoughts like a rag drenched in black scum, but something was there, for God’s sake. Something was there. But out there, outside the greenhouse, passing through one of the two wooden doors, you went back into the house, into that perverse, multiform maze of halls and dead ends and secret rooms and barred doors and impossibly high windows, closed off by rusty steel lattices, and that—that was the old lady’s realm.

  He could remember the cycle path filling up with cyclists when they came in, along the road, beyond the weeds. That was the last vision in Marco’s mind. The cyclists with their glitzy outfits and their reptilian helmets, catching sight of them as they arrived on the house’s porch. Then it all became confused—a phosphoric fog possessed his mind. Dark, heavy hallways, with scarlet carpets, arabesqued wallpaper with dizzying patterns, small windows like portholes, closed off by intertwining lattices, and the old lady coming to the door to welcome them in—the old lady. Smiling, genial, petite. She led them to those roomless hallways and there something changed, something inside them broke. The four men looked at each other dumfounded, astounded, unable to recognize each other, or even recall what they were doing there. The only reason they hadn’t questioned anything had been the old lady’s calm, persuasive voice—a chirping voice that calmed them, cajoled them, but concealed under its warm modulation an age-old secret, an invisible mask, beneath that nice-old-lady voice Marco could distinctly remember a different plane of reality, a deviated din, a miasma of raucous, underground voices.

  She had led them into a room—the only one that seemed to make any sense, with a hint of normality (but the bodies of dead children hide and crawl behind that arabesqued wallpaper, you polymorph bas
tard, the bodies of dead children are oozing out of that wallpaper), she’d had them sit around her knitting table, she had served them cookies, buttery greasy cookies (guess what they’re made of, you sick dog, think beyond the wallpaper), she had made some black tea and, while they looked at each other, without saying a word, like freshly reanimated corpses, like overdosed opium junkies, their eyes languid, glimmering, begging for mutual help but unable to do anything but mechanically reach out for a cookie, bring it to their mouths, chew on a morsel, swallow slowly, and then start begging again; well, the old lady came back to them, she approached Mastorna, the foreman, and emptied on his head the entire content of the teapot—a liter of boiling black jasmine tea.

  In the greenhouse, Marco crawled on the floor of the dusty patio, covered with tiny dried-out leaves from that morbid and ever-present creeper, and he remembered what happened after, in flashes of memory. Mastorna didn’t even manage to scream. He just sat there, with the boiling water eating away at his bald head, with a sound of sizzling oil; it dripped down his ears and on his face and his look was one of petrified devastation, cookie-crumbs still in his mouth, and at that point they had all stood like weird puppets, trying to overcome the oblivion that surrounded them (like that shitty creeper, but in their souls), each of them moved by their own feeble instinct of survival, they had walked out the door, the first, Nicola, the second was Lotfi, the Egyptian guy, and he was the third. Marco had turned around before leaving the room and saw its true form.

  It wasn’t a little living room with antique furniture—none of that. It was a cube with impossible corners, with a multitude of impossible corners, it was like the inside of a wooden prism, its furniture writhing like living creatures as they bent and twisted following those skewed slants, and the old lady was the same as always but she was also something else, something that didn’t show itself, hiding within the folds of reality, slithering between those folds as quick as a scolopendra, barely more than a wild smirk and that look in her eye, and Marco knew that Mastorna was the old lady’s meal, and he knew he’d end up in pieces behind the room’s wallpaper, he’d end up like…

  “Marco,” mumbled Lotfi as he pushed himself up on his elbows. With a superhuman effort the Egyptian guy tried to get up; he got on all fours, then to his feet, clutching at the creepers and tearing them away. “She got Nicola.”

  “Yes,” said Marco, and it was quite an effort. He tried to get up, too. This place dragged you into an abyss of delirium. They had to fight back. They had to resist.

  “Which of us is next?” he asked the Egyptian.

  Lotfi turned his back to him. Then he took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. He drew out two cigarettes. He broke one. Then he clenched them, with the filter poking out. The two filters looked the same. He turned around and held out his fist.

  Marco walked up to Lotfi and pinched one of the filters. He pulled. It was the long cigarette. Lotfi slit his eyes and a wicked gleam flashed through them. It was the gleam that strikes men right when their own personal world is threatened by other men—it was the natural predisposition to ferocious hatred that dwells within the heart of every man when he must share what is his, what he has exhaustively built up in his own miserable little life, brick after brick, through pain and tragedy, with unrelenting willpower, with—more often—fortune and misfortune; that sense of wretchedness so strong that one’s own little things, material or immaterial, just cannot be shared with or offered to another person; they must in fact be defended at the cost of bloodshed, because altruism leads to violence, to the unacceptability of the other’s existence. The other is the enemy.

  Marco sensed this and realized that Lotfi would never accept the outcome of the lottery. They had done the same draw the first time and Nicola had pulled the shortest straw. Nicola had to leave the greenhouse and look for an exit, for help. The very same gleam had flashed through Nicola’s eyes too, but Marco and Lotfi would have surely overpowered him.

  Now they were one against one and Lotfi was trying to figure out, in those instants, if he could get the better of Marco and if it was worth it. Marco anticipated his move. “We could both go.”

  Lotfi’s gaze concealed what he was about to do. “That’s a good idea.”

  The two men seized the notepad and tore out a page each. They both wrote something—Lotfi in Arabic, Marco in Italian— they folded their respective sheets and pocketed them. They went to one of the two doors. Lotfi opened it. A dark, red hallway awaited them, just like all the others. “And what do we do when we find the old lady?”

  Marco took the pen from his Elite Maintenance waistcoat. “I’ll stab her in the throat with this.”

  Lotfi gave him an empty look. “Let’s move it,” he said.

  When Mastorna had met that gruesome end a few hours (or days?) ago, they had rushed into the hallway to escape. The old lady was right behind them. She wasn’t fast enough, though. Being outside that room, for some sick reason, became an exertion—she could move, but it taxed her. They moved slowly but still managed to distance her; still, they could sense that she was there, always one step behind them, always waiting around the next corner; no matter how far they got away, she was always on their tails. It was a silent escape and ended only when they reached the greenhouse. They locked themselves in, barricading themselves, and tried to talk, to understand. Their memories were hazy but in that patio things cleared up some. Maybe it was the open sky up there. It cleansed them somehow. Even if everything was distorted, even if they felt completely drunk, with the same nauseous feeling, the same reeling gait, the same babbled words of a drunkard, even though their thoughts were convulsive, intertwined, they managed to figure something out. They were imprisoned in that impossible nightmare. And the old lady was its kingpin.

  Then someone had knocked on the door. Marco could remember it, as he and Lotfi walked through the house’s corridors in Indian file, among antique furniture, the silent but sick witness of their journey. Marco did his best to concentrate, to remain lucid, to remember. Not to forget.

  Yes, because that was the problem. The man who had knocked on the door a few hours before was Mastorna. Horribly disfigured and almost lifeless, he had come to them. And he couldn’t remember the old lady. Those hallways, those rooms obliterated one’s memory. Only in the patio, in the greenhouse, did something come back. But leaving that place meant cleaning the slate, forgetting where they were, and thus forgetting about the danger. Forgetting about the old lady.

  Mastorna had died soon after and they had had to toss him out of the door opposite to where he had come from. And they had come up with a plan. They had to get out; they would pull straws and one of them would search for a way out and alert the others. But what if he ran into the old lady? He wouldn’t remember who she was—that murdering whore—so they decided that whoever left the greenhouse would carry a sheet of paper with something written on it so as to remember and remain alert.

  Nicola had pulled the shortest straw but things hadn’t gone according to plan. They had heard his screams. The old lady had caught him, just as she had Mastorna.

  And now—and now Marco and Lotfi, oblivious to what had happened, looked at each other dumbfounded, not knowing what to do or where to go, through places like the squares of a sadistic game of snakes and ladders. Marco fished a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. The writing was familiar. His own? It bore the following words, in shivering handwriting:

  THE OLD LADY IS A FUCKING MURDERER!

  DON’T TRUST HER!

  KILL HER BEFORE SHE KILLS YOU!

  As he read and wondered who he was, what he was doing there with that delirious piece of paper; the man there with him, a man with olive skin and north-African features, stopped him and pointed to a fork in the hallway. To one side, a dead end. To the other, a door, a white door with ground-glass windows.

  In a daze, the men drew closer and noticed some blood on the carpet, on the walls, and frantic handprints. Someone had been
dragged into the room. Someone, still alive and clawing at the door with blood-soaked hands, but his resistance had been in vain. And right outside the door, a dirty crumpled piece of paper. The dark-skinned man took it and spread it out. Marco regarded him like an alien. He felt like throwing up. He craned his neck and read, feeling far, far away from everything, feeling lost in a nightmare. He was dreaming. Yes, it had to be that—it was a dream, a nightmare, albeit real, tangible.

  The sheet bore these blood-smeared words:

  WATCH OUT!

  THE OLD LADY’S HIDING IN THIS ROOM!

  And just below, underlined over and over again:

  KEEP OUT!

  The two men stared at each other. Marco gestured to keep quiet (Did he know him? He thought he did, but who the hell was he?) and pointed toward the room. The man understood and gestured to wait. He hunkered down to peek through the keyhole and see what was hidden on the other side. Marco found this quite smart, despite the hallucinating context.

  “See anything?” Marco whispered. “Let me see, too!”

  The man gestured to him to wait. “Hang on!” he whispered. “I can’t…”

  Lotfi! His name was Lotfi! He knew him. Of course he knew him. He was a maintenance team colleague who…

  Lotfi let out a bestial cry—a cry that shattered the unnatural silence of that nightmare labyrinth—and flew back as if he was being pulled by invisible strings. His hands were over his face. He appeared in front of Marco, who barely managed to scream.