Mrs Hartsock stepped onto the porch with them and unburdened herself as if they were paid confessors. “I divorced Bradley’s father seven years ago. He was never home much, and when he was, well, he was an abuser.”
“What sort?” Renata asked. “Physical?”
“That depended. He never hurt the boy, though. All that stuff in there – he makes models for movies, theatres, and Halloween festivals. When I told him by telephone that Bradley was – uh, terminally sick, he sent that hideous junk and had these guys who work for him come install it, just to cheer the boy up, and—” She began to cry.
Renata embraced her. “Does Bradley like it, all that stuff? Does it cheer him up?”
“I don’t know. He says so. But it may scare him. He’d rather his daddy came to see him, I think, but he won’t say that for fear of hurting my feelings. It wouldn’t – hurt my feelings, I mean – it would just scare me too.”
“Has he threatened you?” Renata asked. “I mean, since your divorce.”
“Not so I could ever convince anybody of it. But he’s always liked to hurt me, and I can’t help thinking that all this” – she waved one hand vaguely – “is all part of his plan to do that and to spread the hurt as far as possible.”
Renata carried Q.T. to The Pile and set the ape gently on the shelf of a flimsy, lopsided bookcase.
“Don’t fetch him back,” she told Roger. “Or I’ll kick you out and get daddy to back me a hundred per cent.” This was at once a joke and not a joke. It gave Roger all the incentive he needed to obey, for his otherwise sweet sister ruthlessly carried out even her most extravagant threats.
“All that work,” Roger said looking at the gorilla doll.
“You replaced a battery,” Renata said, “maybe two. Don’t pretend it was this big deal. Now maybe somebody sane can enjoy it.”
“Until they’re driven bazooka,” Roger said.
“Just don’t bring it back.”
He didn’t. And Q.T. – under a wholly different name, if under any name at all – vanished from The Pile into the townhouse of another resident.
In fact, Nigel Rabe appropriated it and set it up on a chest-of-drawers against the inner wall of Renata’s office. Whenever he or Lydia played it, Renata ground her teeth in chagrin and frustration.
At length, she knocked on Nigel and Lydia’s door and offered fifteen dollars for the doll. Its “Macarena” binges irritated her even more than did their weekend bluegrass jams, because the doll sounded off on nights when she studied. Faced with her complaint, Nigel declined Renata’s money but returned the doll to The Pile himself. A friend indeed was Nigel. And, by returning it to The Pile, he side-stepped the punishments, deliberate or accidental, that possessing the thing often inflicted.
Thereafter the doll began making the rounds of those Fidelity Plaza residents who visited The Pile. Kathi Stole took the singing and swaying ape after Nigel and Lydia, but put it back on The Pile when her two kids began fighting over it like piranhas flensing a baby pig. The next time it appeared, however, several people expressed interest in it, and Mr Curtis, who didn’t care at all about the ape, became the comptroller of this item, the guy who decided who could have it. He inaugurated the ritual of handing a small piece of red string to whomever he deemed its next legitimate inheritor.
After Kathi Stole unloaded the gorilla, Mr Curtis wandered into the crowd hanging out around The Pile like flea-market vultures and gave this red string to Creed Harvin, a political-science grad student. Creed took the toy home and promptly broke two knuckles thrusting them into a doorjamb while doing the hand motions that accompany “The Macarena”. (It was dark, and Harvin was drunk.)
After Harvin, Bill Wilkes in Building J received the red string and of course the doll. The next morning, after he and his wife had hosted an intimate soirée at which the little ape did his repetitive stuff, a city trash truck rear-ended their Audi in the parking lot, and Bill Wilkes immediately returned the ape to The Pile.
Then D-K. Smith, the campus cop, slipped Mr Curtis (whom no one suspected of bribe-ability) a ten for the red string and put the doll in a window of his townhouse as a symbol of defiance against the rumour that the toy precipitated misfortune on its owners. But working security the next day, he got into an argument with a middle-aged man, who insisted on entering an athletic dormitory without proper ID, and wound up handcuffing the troublemaker. Later that afternoon, at the insistence of the offended man (an alumnus and a high-level donor), Smith was summarily fired, with no chance of appeal. With his rent paid through the month, Smith carried Bonzo – formerly Q.T. – out to The Pile and slung the ape into a discarded baby carriage.
Mr Curtis was visiting relatives in Macon and so could neither pass the red string along to the doll’s next hapless soul nor accept another bribe. And although Roger could not imagine too many residents vying for the doll now, he saw two other persons waiting for the ape when Smith jettisoned it, both bachelors, a bartender and a dry-waller, and they reached for it simultaneously, knocking the pram over and rolling in the ambient litter to establish ownership. In fact, they grunted and grappled barbarously. Finally, one wrestler yanked the doll away from his rival, rolled through the detritus on the edge of The Pile, gained his feet, and took off along one fenced side of the swimming pool. The other man, slimmer and swifter, pursued with blood in his eyes.
Roger trotted down his own porch steps to keep both in view and marvelled as first the larger man leapt the chain-link fence and then the slimmer gracefully took the same hurdle. It was late afternoon, and cool, but a small group of residents had gathered at the farther end of the pool beside the bathhouse; and, near the diving board in front of these people, the slimmer man caught the tail of his rival’s shirt and spun him about so that he bounced off the board’s butt end, flailed for balance without releasing his prize, and fell with a huge splash into the leaf-mottled water. The pursuer then jumped on the board and began pushing down on the bigger man’s head with one wet shoe, apparently doing all in his power to drown the guy.
“Hey!” Roger opened the gate to the pool and burst through to the diving board. Two people seated before the bathhouse – a burly man and a woman in a floral dress and a loose beige sweater – hurried to help Roger drag the assailant from the board. A siren on a light pole, a siren used for fire drills and tornado warnings, started to keen, and the man in the water sank beneath churning ripples as the doll went down with him.
Fully clothed, Roger plunged in after both. He had no coherent plan for saving either and so much fierce headache-inducing noise in his head that he despaired of ever hearing anything else again.
Renata knelt beside the supine, spread-eagled bartender with a nursing student from their building, a matter-of-fact young woman who said, “This poor dude is gone.” D-K. Smith, the sacked campus cop, held the elbow of the unresisting dry-waller who had just shoe-dunked the drowned man to a depth impossible to rise from. Although the Fidelity Plaza siren had stopped wailing a short while ago, the sirens on, first, an ambulance and, then, two city squad cars had superseded it.
The ambulance left with the bartender; one of the squad cars, with the dry-waller. Two policemen stayed to take statements from the on-site witnesses.
They began with Roger, who’d seen far more than he cared to admit, and moved on to D-K. Smith, the student nurse, Renata, and the group at poolside. The woman who had helped Roger halt the dry-waller’s assault on the bartender (too late to prevent his death) turned out to be Edie Hartsock.
When this fact penetrated Roger’s brain – as he stood on the slick concrete dripping like a spaniel in a cloudburst – he realized that the frail, wheelchair-bound figure at a round metal table in front of the bathhouse was Brad, drastically transfigured. Or was it? Could it possibly be?
Roger squelched over to this mysterious personage.
The man in the wheelchair squinted up at him out of a piggy grey eye in a deep-dug socket. He had a few thin wisps of hair across his skull and skin
like wax-laminated tissue paper. He smelled of greasy menthol and stale pee.
“Are you Brad Hartsock?”
The codger blinked once and then blinked again. “Who’d you think I was?” he cackled faintly. “Methuselah?”
Roger found he was clutching the sodden simian doll over which the barkeep and the dry-waller had fought. Despite Brad’s screaming fit earlier in the week, he felt that he should give it to the “kid” as a wonky pool-party favour, a charm against early oblivion. Apparently, Renata telepathically parsed his intentions.
“Roger!” she shouted. “Roger, don’t you do it!”
But Q.T., or Bonzo, or Little King Kong, fell from Roger’s hands into Bradley’s plaid-blanketed lap. Brad gawped at the doll.
Then he opened his mouth, which continued slack. No scream issued from it – no scream, no word, no whimper, no breath.
It was rumoured that Edie Hartsock had a small closed-coffin family funeral for her son in her home town. No one from Fidelity Plaza received an invitation to this event, and when Mrs Hartsock returned a week or ten days later, she cloistered herself in her townhouse like a nun in a convent. Some residents speculated that she had had the gorilla doll buried with Brad, whereas others argued that she had weighted it with used flashlight batteries or old tractor lug nuts and spitefully committed it to an alligator hole in the swamp near her birthplace. These speculations were so outlandish, though, that Roger could not easily imagine what had prompted them.
A few evenings after Mrs Hartsock’s return, Renata saw a crowd gathered at The Pile in the twilight. She called Roger to her side on the porch. “There’s something new out there. Do you want to see what it is?”
“I don’t know.” Despite their satisfaction with a couple of salvaged items (their garden table and an elegant little medicine cabinet), Roger had grown wary of The Pile.
“Come on,” Renata said. “It might be worth it to look.”
So they went to look. People parted for them – people gawking but not speaking, people stunned into a near-trancelike state.
The Maharis siblings moved gingerly through them to a point where each felt like a supplicant in the presence of some august, or richly uncanny, superluminary – for they beheld in the lee of one cardboard-filled Dumpster a plaid Laz-E-Boy in which sat a pale white figure reminiscent of Bradley Hartsock before the advent of his virulent variety of progeria. This effigy wore a powder-blue T-shirt, multi-pocketed grey shorts, and some of the prettiest Italian sandals Roger had ever seen. Had the figure had any nerve endings, it would have been cold – but, given Brad’s death after fast-forward progeria, it existed only as a detailed manikin, not a living being, and Roger and his sister gaped at the real-looking humanoid artefact in bewilderment and awe.
D-K. Smith handed Roger a lace-bearing sign.
The sign’s legend read TAKE ME HOME. Its obverse read CHAIR AND ITS OCCUPANTS NOT TO BE SEPARATED.
“The Brad-thing was wearing this sign,” D-K. told the Maharises.
“‘Occupants’?” Renata said. “Why is that word plural?”
Loretta Crider stepped up and showed them the worrisome little “Macarena” ape. “This was in the Bradley-thing’s lap,” she said. “It freaked D-K. out, so I just picked it up and held it.”
“Right,” D-K. said. “Thanks. I’m leaving this spooky bullshit with you all. Take care, okay? I mean it: take care.”
And he left them all standing there at The Pile.
Well, why not? There were laws against child abandonment, but none that Roger knew of against effigy abandonment.
After a while, Loretta Crider said, “Mrs Hartsock’s disappeared. Her townhouse is empty, flat-out empty. Who knows where she or all her stuff’s gone? It’s a mystery, is what it is.”
She set the ape doll back in the lap of the Bradley-thing, and the remainder of the uneasy onlookers dispersed to their own places.
After a longer while, Roger said, “Renata, I could make something with this Laz-E-Boy and this creepy Bradley-thing.”
“What, for God’s sake?”
“I don’t know – a sort of found-art installation, maybe.”
Renata crossed her arms. Her face had grown lavender in the darkness.
No moon shone. The pool lights cut off. A wind rose.
Roger could feel the night, the month, and in fact the year itself all going deeply and dreadfully bazooka.
For my son Jamie, on whose notes this story is based.
TANITH LEE
* * *
Under Fog
IN 2009 TANITH LEE was the recipient of the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention and, coincidentally, announced as one of the Guests of Honour at the 2010 event, to be held in Brighton, England.
In a writing career that has spanned nearly four decades, she has worked in many genres for both adults and children. She has won the British Fantasy Award and two World Fantasy Awards, as well as being a Nebula Award nominee.
In the US, Wildside Press has issued two volumes of The Selected Stories of Tanith Lee: Tempting the Gods and Hunting the Shadows, while Norilana Books is reprinting her entire “Tales from the Flat Earth” series plus two new volumes. She recently completed a contemporary novel, Ivorian, and is currently working on a new fantasy novel, The Court of the Crow, along with several short stories for various markets.
About the following story, the author explains: “This really just sprang from the name of the original anthology in which the story appeared: Subterfuge.
“In Latin, subter means beneath (under), of course. And my dyslectic reader’s eye can happily render fuge as fog. A sort of pun, then.
“The narrator and all other characters, including the noble Iron, arrived immediately, since the nature of the story grew at once from the image of deeds enacted under fog cover.”
Oh burning God,
Each of our crimes is numbered upon
The nacre of your eternal carapace,
Like scars upon the endless sky.
—“Prayer of the Damned”
(found scratched behind the altar
in the ruined church at Hampp)
WE LURED THEM IN. It was how we lived, at Hampp. After all, the means had been put into our grip, and we had never been given much else.
It is a rocky ugly place, the village, though worse now. Just above the sea behind the cliff-line, and the cliffs are dark as sharks, but eaten away beneath to a whitish-green that sometimes, in the sunlight, luridly shines. The drop is what? Three hundred feet or more. There was the old church standing there once, but as the cliff crumbled through the years, bits and then all the church fell down on the stones below, mingling with them. You can still, I should think, now and then find part of the pitted face of a rough-carved gargoyle or angel staring up at you from deep in the shale, or a bit of its broken wing. The graveyard had gone, of course, too. The graves came open as the cliff gave way, and there had been bodies strewn along the shore, or what was left of them, all bones, until the sea swam in and out and washed them away. Always a place, this, for the fallen then, and the discarded dead.
By the days of my boyhood, the new church was right back behind the village, uphill for safety. The new church had been there for 200 years. But we, the folk of Hampp, we had been there since before the Domesday Book. And sometimes I used to wonder if they did it then too, our forebears, seeing how the tide ran and the rocks and the cliff-line. Maybe they did. It seemed to be in our blood. Until now. Until that night of the fog.
My first time, I was about nine years. It had gone on before, that goes without saying, and I had known it did, but not properly what it was or meant. My nine-year-old self had memories of sitting by our winter fire, and the storm raging outside, and then a shout from the watch, or some other man banging on our door: “Stir up, Jom. One’s there.” And father would rise with a grunt, somewhere between annoyance and strange eagerness. And when he was gone out into the wind and rain, I must have asked why and Ma would say, “Don’
t you fret, Haro. It’s just the Night Work they’re to.”
But later, maybe even next day, useful things would have come into our house, and to all the impoverished houses up and down the cranky village street. Casks of wine or even rum, a bolt of cloth, perhaps, or a box of good china; once a sewing machine, and more than once a whole side of beef. And other stuff came that we threw on the fire, papers and books, and a broken doll one time, and another a ripped little dress that might have been for a doll, but was not.
On the evening I was nine and a storm was brewing, I knew I might be in on the Work, but after I thought not and slept. The Work was what we all called it, you see. The Work, or the Night Work, although every so often it had happened by day, when the weather was very bad. Still, Night Work, even so.
My father said, “Get up Haro.” It was the middle of the night and I in bed. And behind the curtain in my parents’ bed, my mother was already moving and awake. My father was dressed. “What is it, Da?” I whispered. “Only the usual,” said my father, “but you’re of an age now. It’s time you saw and played your part.”
So I scrambled out and pulled on my outdoor clothes over the underthings I slept in. I was, like my father, between two emotions, but mine were different. With me that first time, they were excitement, and fear. Truly fear, like as when we boys played see-a-ghost in the churchyard at dusk. But in this case still not even really knowing why, or of what.
Out on the cliff the gale was blowing fit to crack the world. There were lanterns, but muffled blind, as they had to be, which I had heard of but not yet properly seen.
Leant against the wind, we stared out into the lash of the rain. “Do you spot it, Jom?”
“Oh ah. I sees it.”
But I craned and could not see, only the ocean itself roughing and spurging, gushing up in great belches and tirades, like boiling milk that was mostly black. But there was something there, was there? Oh yes, could I just make it out? Something like three thin trees massed with cloud and all torn and rolling yet caught together.
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