“Why are you always asking me this?” she asked. “What’s your problem? It’s like you’re obsessed. Do you want me out of your life or something? Do you want things back the way they were before we met? Is that it?”
“No, I . . . I just want to remember,” he said.
These conversations changed things between them. Or things were changing anyway, and the conversations were a symptom. There was no telling. But he felt he had started something and there was no going back. Just by noticing it, he had started it unraveling. It was as if, once she knew he had noticed the oddness, she started covering up the truth—as if she was afraid he might discover her secret. As long as he accepted the situation and went about his life without questioning it, everything was just fine. But he could no longer pretend to remember. It was driving him crazy. He was convinced she had done something, manipulated reality somehow, folded it around and inserted herself there in his life. Who was she, anyway? What was she? What sort of being had this ability to unravel and reweave the material of existence, working her way into it as if she had always been there?
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “I don’t appreciate it.”
“I just want to know how you did it,” he said. “I just want to know what you are.”
“God!” she said.
It occurred to him that what they were heading toward was the unmaking of what she had made in the first place. Past a certain point, it was inevitable. She would remove herself from his life. She would vanish as if she had never existed. First from the daily routine—she’d be gone from their home, gone from their bed, gone from the parties they had with their friends. Then she would absent herself from the photographs—first from whatever new ones he took, obviously, but then from the older ones as well. If he ever thought to go back through his files, he’d see nothing but photos of himself. When he asked his friends about her, they would look glum to see him filling the emptiness of his life with imaginary partners, and they’d say, “Who?”
Eventually he would have forgotten her completely, and all the evidence in the universe would indicate that she had never existed, and there would be no one to question it because he himself would have forgotten.
This was the way things were heading, and all because he had noticed. He wasn’t supposed to, he decided. He was supposed to have been oblivious, and just accept it. She must have done this before, but he was the first to have seen through it. Otherwise she would have done something different to make sure he remained unaware. She would have learned from prior mistakes, which meant he must be the first mistake. He was probably the only one who would see through her, because after this she would know what to do to remain undiscovered. In this way he felt privileged, special. He should feel fortunate that she had come to him, because it had allowed him to learn a very important truth about himself. From now on, even in his solitude, even when the memory of her had removed itself, he would own this bit of self-knowledge. He wouldn’t know how he had come by it, but he would cleave to it nonetheless. She had made him more whole, more truly himself. So there was a purpose to her being here after all.
Such were his thoughts on the last morning, as dawn crept into their bedroom, as the air grew bright and she grew dim, as the place where she was lying grew unlaid-in and the cats stretched out to fill it. But the thoughts were fleeting for he was already forgetting her, and he almost didn’t notice when, in the final moment, she woke and opened her eyes and turned and looked, but not at him, and said to no one but herself, “Why is this always happening to me?”
Before became one of the creators and lead writer on the Half-Life videogame series, Marc Laidlaw was an acclaimed writer of short stories and novels. His novel The 37th Mandala won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. A writer at Valve since 1997 (currently working on for the online game, Dota 2), his short fiction continues to appear in various magazines and anthologies.
We need souls. We have few left in our world. Come to us, across the Great Deeps. Restore our world. Become one with us . . .
WHEN DEATH WAKES ME TO MYSELF
John Shirley
“Someone’s broken into the house, doctor.”
Fyodor saw no fear in Leah’s gray eyes. But he’d never seen her afraid, and she’d worked closely with him in psychiatrics for almost eight years—ever since he’d finished his internship. She brushed auburn hair from her pale forehead, adjusted her glasses, and went on, “The window latch is broken in your office—and I think I heard someone moving around down in the basement.”
“Did you call the police?” Fyodor asked, glancing toward the basement door. His mouth felt dry.
They stood in the front hallway of the old house, by the open arch to the waiting room. “I did. I was about to call you, when you walked in.”
They didn’t speak for a long moment, both of them listening for the burglar. Wintry morning light angled through the bay windows of the waiting room, casting intricate shadows from the lace curtains across the braided rug. A dog barked down the street; a foghorn hooted. Just the sounds of Providence, Rhode
Island . . .
Then a peal of happy laughter rippled up through the hardwood floorboards. It cut short so abruptly he wondered if he’d really understood the sound. “That sound like laughter to you?”
“Yes.” She glanced at the window. “The police are in no hurry . . . ”
“You should wait out front, Leah.” He was thinking he should try to see to it that whoever this was, they weren’t setting a fire, vandalizing, doing serious damage to the house. He was negotiating to buy it, planning to expand it into a suite of offices with various health services—especially bad timing for vandalism. It was a big house, built in 1825, most of it not in use at the moment. The ground-floor den was ideal for receiving patients; the front living room had been converted into a waiting room.
Fyodor took a step through the archway, into the hall—and then the basement door burst open. A slender young man stood there, a few paces away, holding a bottle in his hand, toothy grin fading. “Oh! I seem to have lost all track of time. How indiscreet of me,” said the young man, in an accent that sounded Deep South. He wore a neat dark suit with a rather antiquated blazer, thin blue tie, starched white shirt, silver cufflinks, polished black
shoes. His fingernails were immaculately manicured, his straight black hair neatly combed back. Fyodor noted all this with a professional detachment, but also a little surprise—he’d expected the burglar to be scruffier, more like the sullen young men he sometimes counseled at Juvenile Detention. The young man’s dark brown eyes met his—the gaze was frank, the smile seemed genuine. Still, the strict neatness might place him in a recognizable spectrum of personality disorders.
“You seem lost,” Fyodor said—gesturing, with his hand at his side, for Leah to go outside. Foolish protective instinct—she was athletic, probably more formidable in a fight than he was. “In fact, young man, you seem to have lost your way right through one of our windows.”
“Ah, yes.” His mouth twitched. “But look what I found for you, Dr. Cheski!” He raised the dusty bottle in his hand. It was an old, unlabeled wine bottle. “I never used to drink. I wanted to take it up, starting with something old and fine. I want a new life. I desire to do things differently. Live! I bet you didn’t know there was any wine down there.”
Fyodor blinked. “Um . . . in fact . . . ” In fact he didn’t think there was any wine in the basement.
A siren wailed, grew louder—and cut short. Radio voices echoed, heavy boot-steps came up the walk, and the young man, sighing, put the bottle on the floor and walked past Fyodor to open the front door. He waved genially at the policemen.
“Gentlemen,” said the young man, “I believe you are here for me. I’m told that my name is Roman Carl Boxer.”
Carrying the dusty wine bottle, Fyodor descended the basement steps, wondering if this Roman Carl Boxer could have been a patient, someone he’d consulted on, at some point. The
face wasn’t familiar, but perhaps he’d been disheveled and heavily acned before. I’m told that my name is Roman Carl Boxer. Interesting way to put it.
The basement was a box of cracked concrete, smelling of mildew; a little water had leaked into a farther corner. A naked light bulb glowed in the cobwebbed ceiling, bright enough to throw stark shadows from what looked like rodent droppings, off to his left. To the right were his crates of old files, recently stored here—they seemed undisturbed. He saw no wine bottles. He could smell dirt and damp concrete. A few scuffs marked the dust coating the floor.
Fyodor started to turn back—it was not a pleasant place to be—but he decided to look more closely at the files. There was confidential patient information in those crates. If this kid had gotten into them . . .
He crossed to the files, confirmed they seemed undisturbed—then saw the hole in the floor, in the farther corner. A small shiny crowbar, the price sticker still on it, lay close beside the hole. His view of it had been blocked by the crates.
He crouched by the hole—almost two feet square—and saw that a trapdoor of concrete and wood had been removed to lean against the wall. He could make out a number of dark bottles, down inside it, in wooden slots. Wine bottles.
One slot was empty. The bottle he’d brought with him fit precisely in that slot.
A week later.
“Deal’s done,” Fyodor said, with some excitement, as he came into the waiting room. He took off his damp coat, hanging it up, sniffling, his nose stinging from the cold, wet wind. “I own the building! The bank and I do, anyway.”
“That’s great!” Leah said, the corners of her eyes crinkling with a prim smile. She was hanging a picture on the waiting room wall. It was a print of a Turner seascape: vague, harmless proto-Impressionism in gold and umber and subtle blues; a choice that suggested sophistication, and was soothing to psychiatric patients. Still, some patients were capable of feeling threatened by anything.
Leah stepped back from the painting, and nodded.
Fyodor thought it was hanging just slightly crooked, but he knew it would irritate her if he straightened it—though she’d only show the irritation as a faint flicker around her mouth. Surprising how well he’d gotten to know her, and, at the same time, how impersonal their relationship was. A professional distance was appropriate. But it didn’t feel appropriate somehow, with Leah . . .
“That police detective called,” she said, straightening the painting herself. “Asking if we’re going to come to the arraignment for that burglar.”
“I’m not inclined to press charges.”
“Really? They’ve let him out on bail, you know. He might com back.”
“I don’t want to start my new practice here by prosecuting the first mentally ill person I run into.” He went to the bay windows and looked out at the wet streets, the barren tree limbs of the gnarled, blackened elm in the front yard. Leafless tree limbs always made him think of nerve endings.
“He hasn’t actually been diagnosed . . . ”
“He was confused enough to climb in through a window, ignore everything of value, go down to the basement and dig about.”
“Did you have that wine looked at? The stuff he found downstairs?”
Fyodor nodded. “Hal checked it out. Italian wine, from the early twentieth century, shipped direct from some vineyard—and not improved with age. Gone quite vinegary, he told me.” How had Roman Boxer known the wine was there? It seemed to have been sealed up for decades.
Something else bothered him about the incident, something he couldn’t quite define, a feeling there was something he should recognize about Roman Boxer . . . just out of reach.
“Oh—you got approval for limited testing of SEQ10. The letter’s on your desk. There are some regulatory hoops but . . . ”
SEQ10. They’d been waiting almost a year. Things were coming together.
He turned to face Leah, feeling a sudden rush of warmth for her. It was good to have her on his team. She was always a bit prim, reserved, her wit dry, her feelings controlled. But sometimes . . .
“And,” she said a little reluctantly, going to the waiting room desk, “your mom called.”
She passed him the message. Please call. The Psycho Psych Tech is at it again.
His mother: the fly in the ointment, ranting about the psychiatric technician she imagined was persecuting her in the state hospital. But then she was the reason he’d gotten into psychiatry. Her mania, her fits of amnesia. His own analyst had suggested she was also some of the reason he tended to be rather reserved, wound tight—compensating for his mother’s flamboyance. She was flamboyant on the upswings, almost catatonic on the downswings—prone to amnesia. Firm self-control helped him deal with either extreme.
And her intervals of amnesia had prompted his interest in SEQ10.
The doorbell rang, and he went to his office to await the first patient of the day. But his first patient wasn’t the first person to arrive. Instead, Leah ushered in a small middle-aged woman with penciled eyebrows, dark red lipstick, a little too much rouge, her black hair tightly caught up in a bun. She wore a pink slicker, her rose-colored umbrella dripping on the carpet as she said, “I know I shouldn’t come without an appointment, Doctor Cheski . . . ” Her cadences tripped rapidly, her voice chirpy, the movements of her head, as she looked back and forth between Fyodor and Leah, seemed birdlike. “But he was so insistent—my son Roman. He said I had to see him here or not at all, and then he hung up on me. God knows he’s been a lot of trouble to you already. Has he gotten here yet?”
“Here? Today?” Fyodor looked at Leah. She shrugged and shook her head.
“He said he’d be upstairs . . . ”
There was a thump from the ceiling. Squeaking footsteps; brisk pacing, back and forth.
Leah put a hand to her mouth and laughed nervously. Quite uncharacteristic of her. “Oh my gosh, he’s broken into the house again.”
Roman’s mother looked back and forth between them. “Not again! I thought he’d made an appointment! He said he didn’t trust anyone else . . . He barely knows me, you see . . . ” Her lips trembled.
Leah’s brows knit. “Did you—give him up for adoption?”
Another thump came from above. They all looked at the ceiling. “No-o,” Mrs. Boxer said, slowly. “No, he . . . claims to not remember growing up with us. With his own family! I show him photographs—he says they’re ‘sort of familiar.’ But he says it’s like it didn’t happen to him. I don’t really understand what he means.” She sighed and went quickly on, “He just keeps wandering around Providence—looking for something . . . but he won’t say what.”
Fyodor knew he should call the police. But when Leah went to the phone, he said, “Wait, Leah.” Claims to not remember growing up with us. With his own family.
SEQ10 was a hypnotic drug for treating, among other things, hysterical amnesia.
Fyodor looked at Mrs. Boxer. She had some very high-quality jewelry; new pumps, sensible but elegant. A rather showy diamond bulked on her wedding ring. She had money, after all. She could pay for therapy. Insurance wouldn’t cover SEQ10.
Fyodor took a deep breath, and, wiping his clammy palms on his trousers, went up the stairs.
He found Roman in the guest room right over the office. Roman was sitting on the edge of the four-poster bed, nervously turning a glass of wine in both hands, around and around—he’d put the wine in a water tumbler from the upstairs bathroom.
“Brought your own wine this time, I see,” Fyodor said.
“Yes. A California Merlot. Still trying to learn how to drink.” Roman smiled apologetically. He wore the same suit as last time. Neat as a pin. “Strange sensation, alcohol.” After a moment he added, “Sorry about the door. No one was here when I came. I needed to get in.”
Fyodor grunted. He planned to rent the room out as an office, and now this guy was damaging it—the door to the outside stairs stood open, the wood about the lock splintered. There was a large screwdriver on
the bedside table.
“Why?” Fyodor asked. “I mean—why the urgency about getting in? Why not make an appointment?”
Roman swirled his wine. “I’m . . . looking for something here. I just—couldn’t wait. I don’t know why.”
It was an evening session, after Fyodor would normally have gone home. Roman’s mother had already had the broken door replaced and paid a large advance on the therapy. And Roman was more interesting than most of Fyodor’s patients.
Leaning back on the leather easy chair in Fyodor’s office,
Roman seemed bemused. Occasionally, he smoothed the lines of his jacket.
“Your mother gave me some background on you,” Fyodor said. “Maybe you can tell me what seems true or untrue to you.”
He read aloud from his notes.
Roman was twenty-one. An only child, he’d had night terrors until he was nine, with intermittent bedwetting. Father passed on when he was thirteen. They weren’t close. Roman had difficulty keeping friends but was likable, and elderly people loved him. He loved cats, but his mother made him stop adopting them after he accumulated four. One died, and he gave it an elaborate burial ritual. Good student in high school, at first, friends mostly with girls—but no girlfriends. Not terribly interested in sex. Bad last year in high school when some sort of Internet bullying took a more personal form. Reluctant to talk about it. Refused to attend the school. Finished with home schooling, GED. Two years of college, attendance quite patchy. Autodidact for the most part. Tendency to have unusual difficulty with cold weather. No close friends “except in books.”
“All that sound right to you, Roman?” Fyodor asked, getting his laptop into word processing mode.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 58
