Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

by Paula Guran

  Vasyelu Gorin stirred on the platform of his existence. He would depart now, or very soon; already he heard the murmur of the approaching train. It would be simple, this time, not like the other time at all. To go willingly, everything achieved, in order. Knowing she was safe.

  There was even a faint color in her cheeks, a blooming. Or maybe, that was just a trick of the lamp.

  The old man waited until they had risen to their feet, and walked together quietly into the salon, before he came from the shadows and began to climb the stairs, hearing the silence, their silence, like that of new lovers.

  At the head of the stair, beyond the lamp, the dark was gentle, soft as the Vampire’s hair. Vasyelu walked forward into the dark without misgiving, tenderly.

  How he had loved her.

  As long as she’d waited for this moment, she didn’t want to see what was inside.

  Land of the Lost

  Stewart O’Nan

  She was a cashier at a BI-LO in Perry whose marriage had long since broken up. Soon after that her two boys moved out of the house, leaving Ollie, her German shepherd, as her sole companion. From the beginning she followed the case in the paper and on TV, absorbing it like a mystery, discussing it with her coworkers and customers—so much so that her manager had to ask her to stop. Early on she visited the Web site and left messages of support in the guest book, from one mother to another, but after James Wade confessed that he’d buried the girl somewhere west of Kingsville, she began keeping a file. At night when she couldn’t sleep she sat up in bed and went over the transcripts and the mother’s map, convincing herself it was possible. She couldn’t believe a feeling so strong could be mistaken.

  She didn’t tell anyone what she was doing—she wasn’t stupid. The first time was the hardest because she felt foolish. In the privacy of her garage, while Ollie looked on, she stocked the trunk of her car with a shovel, a spade, a dry-cell flashlight, and a pair of work gloves. She opened the door and he leaped into the backseat, capering from window to window, frantic just to be going somewhere.

  “All right, calm down,” she said. “It’s not playtime.”

  Searching on foot took longer than she thought. They came across nothing more sinister than a rotting seagull, but she wasn’t disappointed. Bushwhacking through the overgrown no-man’s land behind the commercial strip on Route 302 was an adventure, and looking gave her a sense of accomplishment. They could cross this location off and move on to the next one.

  Later she added more serious gear like bolt cutters and a lightweight graphite walking stick recommended by professionals, whose Web sites she treated like the Bible. She religiously documented everything, taking videos of any ground they disturbed, writing up her field notes as soon as they got home.

  As fall came on she rearranged her shifts, working nights so she could take advantage of the daylight. In a couple of weeks the ground would be frozen and she’d have to shut down until spring. It was then, when she was feeling rushed, that she discovered a U-Store-It outside Mentor with a stockade fence and a dirt road running through the pines behind it. Across the raw lumber, kids had sprayed their illegible fluorescent-red names.

  She walked Ollie along the fence until he stopped, sniffing at a weedy mound. She pulled him away twice, and both times he came back to the same spot. “Good boy,” she said, giving him a treat, and looped his leash around a tree.

  She prodded the mound with her walking stick. The dirt was sandy and loose, and she went back to her car for the shovel.

  She dug her first hole deep, then shallow ones every three feet. She was out of shape, and had to dip her head and wipe her face on her shoulder. It was cool out, and when she stopped for a drink of water the sweat on her neck made her shiver. By the time she reached the middle of the fence, the sky was starting to get dark. At the four corners of the self-storage, high floodlights popped on, buzzing and drawing bugs, throwing weird shadows. She checked her cell phone—it was almost five. She needed to go home and get ready for work. Rather than leave the site unguarded overnight she decided to call the FBI.

  They told her it was too late in the day. They’d send someone out to talk to her tomorrow.

  When she complained to her older son, he asked how long she’d been doing this.

  The agent they sent asked the same question. He looked over her binders and the picture of the girl on the mantel and the big map tacked up in the kitchen.

  “I’m just trying to help,” she said. “If it was one of my kids, I’d want everybody to pitch in.”

  “I would too,” the agent said soothingly, as if it was common sense.

  The next day they took her out to the site in an unmarked Suburban to watch a backhoe dig a trench along the fence line. Agents in windbreakers and latex gloves sifted the dirt through metal screens, then spread it on tarps for the dogs. A project like this would have taken her weeks, and she was glad she’d called. She imagined the girl’s mother hearing the news. She didn’t care about getting the credit. It was enough to know the girl was finally home.

  They found nothing. Just dirt. Worms. It had all been a coincidence. As the agent said, there was graffiti on everything these days.

  Meaning she was crazy.

  Dropping her off, he thanked her. “I know your heart was in the right place.”

  Was it? She could admit that at least part of the reason she was searching for a stranger’s daughter was that no one else needed her. Just Ollie.

  She promised her sons to take a break after that. She took down the map and stored the picture in a drawer and watched the last weeks of fall pass.

  Honoring her pledge was easier in the winter. She used the time to rethink her strategy and stockpile supplies. Some sites recommended a pitchfork to turn the soil, others a pickax. On paper, again and again, she rearranged her trunk, as if she were traveling cross-country. She enrolled Ollie in an online course for sniffer dogs, practicing with scented rags in the backyard. He didn’t always get them right away, and stood looking at her as if she might give him a hint.

  “Do you want to pass or not?” she asked. “Or am I just wasting my time?”

  She kept an eye on the Web site, and cruised the chat groups for news. She was afraid one day the page would come up and say she’d been found, but month after month, nothing changed. It had been two and a half years. Besides the family, she might be the only person looking for her.

  In March the ground thawed and she tacked up the map. She’d turned her older boy’s room into a command center, emptying his desk and filling the drawers with her notebooks. On a brand-new corkboard she posted her schedule. Four days a week she’d search, weather permitting. She’d been too impatient in the fall, letting her emotions get the best of her. She’d actually expected to find the girl her first time out, as if she were psychic. She needed to be calm and methodical. If she was going to succeed, it would be because she knew how to work.

  Ollie just liked riding in the car and going for walks. He had his certificate, but the death scent made him sneeze. The smells that interested him came from other dogs, and he immediately covered them with his own, lifting his leg and making her wait. As spring turned to summer the only thing he’d discovered was a bee’s nest, provoking a swarm and earning him a bump on the nose. He would have stayed and tried to fight them if she hadn’t dragged him away.

  She made the mistake of telling her younger son, who told her older son, who called and said he thought they agreed she was going to stop.

  “I don’t see why you’re so upset,” she said.

  “I’m worried about you. Do you understand why?’ “No.”

  “That’s why,” he said.

  After that, every time he called, he made a point of asking how the search was going.

  She refused to lie.

  “The same,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  It meant she was ranging farther and farther west, devoting whole weeks to a single exit off the interstate, tromping
the buggy jungles behind truck stops and fireworks outlets, breaking ground by every stockade fence she came across, graffitied or not. Her knees creaked, her arms ached, and then at work she had to lean over the conveyor and lift a gallon of milk into someone’s cart, and she thought maybe he was right. She was too old to be doing this.

  There was always the possibility James Wade had been lying. As her map filled with pins, she tried not to let it bother her.

  In August, jumping a drainage ditch, she twisted her ankle and missed three weeks, ruining her schedule and giving her son a new excuse to badger her. To catch up she went out five days a week, but felt like she was rushing, cutting corners. The weather was mild, Indian summer lingering deep into October. If it held up (and the Weather Channel said there was a chance), she’d have a shot at finishing.

  One bright afternoon she was outside Fairport Harbor, behind a Ryder truck center, when Ollie stopped and lay down in a shallow trough filled with pine duff. He rested his head on his paws and flattened his ears back as if he were being punished. It wasn’t anything she’d taught him.

  “Come on, Ollie, get up.” She whistled and clapped, and still he didn’t budge.

  She had to coax him away with a treat and tie him to a tree, and even then he hunkered down, cowering.

  The Ryder place wasn’t a self-storage, and the fence, though heavily tagged, was chain link with green plastic slats, but she went to get the video camera anyway.

  The trough was tub-shaped, around five feet long, and sunk a few inches below the ground around it. She brushed away the leaves and pine needles and laid the pitchfork beside it for scale, narrating as she panned along the fence. “November third, 2008, 1:27 p.m.”

  When she’d gotten enough coverage, she set down the camera and took up the pitchfork. She dug into the very center of the trough, jabbing the prongs through the crust, pushing it deeper with her foot, pulling back on the handle so the ground cracked and broke around the tines. She stuck it in again, levering open a hole.

  Behind her Ollie whined.

  “Shush,” she said.

  The third time she dug down and yanked back, the pitchfork snagged on a swath of fabric.

  It was discolored with mud and stank of mildew, but was unmistakably a piece of green nylon, a wisp of white batting poking from a hole.

  She set aside the pitchfork, tossed away her gloves and tugged at the piece, pulling another couple inches through the dirt. It was the shell of a sleeping bag, she could see the thick seam of the zipper. With a finger she wiped at the crumbling mud, revealing rusty teeth.

  Thank God, she thought. What would Brian say now?

  As long as she’d waited for this moment, she didn’t want to see what was inside. The thing to do was stop and call someone, but after last year, she couldn’t. She knelt beside the hole, digging it free with her bare hands. This time she would make sure. Then everyone would know she wasn’t crazy.

  She mesmerized him—right from that first night. He sensed a portent in her casual appearance into his life, though a portent of what, he couldn’t say.

  Tallulah

  Charles de Lint

  Nothing is too wonderful to be true.

  —Michael Faraday

  For the longest time, I thought she was a ghost, but I know what she is now. She’s come to mean everything to me; like a lifeline, she keeps me connected to reality, to this place and this time, by her very capriciousness.

  I wish I’d never met her.

  That’s a lie, of course, but it comes easily to the tongue. It’s a way to pretend that the ache she left behind in my heart doesn’t hurt.

  She calls herself Tallulah, but I know who she really is. A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name. And connected to the complete person we call up in our mind with the alchemy of their name comes all the baggage of memory: times you were together, the music you listened to this morning or that night, conversation and jokes and private moments—all the good and bad times you’ve shared.

  Tally’s name conjures up more than just that for me. When the gris-gris of the memories that hold her stir in my mind, she guides me through the city’s night like a totem does a shaman through Dreamtime. Everything familiar is changed; what she shows me goes under the skin, right to the marrow of the bone. I see a building and I know not only its shape and form, but its history. I can hear its breathing, I can almost read its thoughts.

  It’s the same for a street or a park, an abandoned car or some secret garden hidden behind a wall, a late night cafe or an empty lot. Each one has its story, its secret history, and Tally taught me how to read each one of them. Where once I guessed at those stories, chasing rumors of them like they were errant fireflies, now I know.

  I’m not as good with people. Neither of us are. Tally, at least, has an excuse. But me. . . .

  I wish I’d never met her.

  My brother Geordie is a busker—a street musician. He plays his fiddle on street corners or along the queues in the theatre district and makes a kind of magic with his music that words just can’t describe. Listening to him play is like stepping into an old Irish or Scottish fairy tale. The slow airs call up haunted moors and lonely coastlines; the jigs and reels wake a fire in the soul that burns with the awesome wonder of bright stars on a cold night, or the familiar warmth of red coals glimmering in a friendly hearth.

  The funny thing is, he’s one of the most pragmatic people I know. For all the enchantment he can call up out of that old Hungarian fiddle of his, I’m the one with the fey streak in our family.

  As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary. I’ve got such an open mind that Geordie says I’ve got a hole in it, but I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. It’s not so much that I’m gullible—though I’ve been called that and less charitable things in my time; it’s more that I’m willing to just suspend my disbelief until whatever I’m considering has been thoroughly debunked to my satisfaction.

  I first started collecting oddities and curiosities as I heard about them when I was in my teens, filling page after page of spiral-bound notebooks with little notes and jottings—neat inky scratches on the paper, each entry opening worlds of possibility for me whenever I reread them. I liked things to do with the city the best because that seemed the last place in the world where the delicate wonders that are magic should exist.

  Truth to tell, a lot of what showed up in those notebooks leaned towards a darker side of the coin, but even that darkness had a light in it for me because it still stretched the realms of what was into a thousand variable what-might-be’s. That was the real magic for me: the possibility that we only have to draw aside a veil to find the world a far more strange and wondrous place than its mundaneness allowed it could be.

  It was my girlfriend back then—Katie Deren—who first convinced me to use my notebooks as the basis for stories. Katie was about as odd a bird as I was in those days. We’d sit around with the music of obscure groups like the Incredible String Band or Dr. Strangely Strange playing on the turntable and literally talk away whole nights about anything and everything. She had the strangest way of looking at things; everything had a soul for her, be it the majestic old oak tree that stood in her parents’ back yard, or the old black iron kettle that she kept filled with dried weeds on the sill of her bedroom window.

  We drifted apart, the way it happens with a lot of relationships at that age, but I kept the gift she’d woken in me: the stories.

  I never expected to become a writer, but then I had no real expectations whatsoever as to what I was going to be when I “grew up.” Sometimes I think I never did—grow up that is.

  But I did get older. And I found I could make a living with my stories. I called them urban legends—indepe
ndently of Jan Harold Brunvand, who also makes a living collecting them. But he approaches them as a folklorist, cataloguing and comparing them, while I retell them in stories that I sell to magazines and then recycle into book collections.

  I don’t feel we’re in any kind of competition with each other, but then I feel that way about all writers. There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the mean-spirited would consider there to be a competition at all. And Brunvand does such a wonderful job. The first time I read his The Vanishing Hitchhiker, I was completely smitten with his work and, like the hundreds of other correspondents Brunvand has, made a point of sending him items I thought he could use for his future books.

  But I never wrote to him about Tally.

  I do my writing at night—the later the better. I don’t work in a study or an office and I don’t use a typewriter or computer, at least not for my first drafts. What I like to do is go out into the night and just set up shop wherever it feels right: a park bench, the counter of some all-night diner, the stoop of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the doorway of a closed junk shop on Grasso Street.

  I still keep notebooks, but they’re hardcover ones now. I write my stories in them as well. And though the stories owe their existence to the urban legends that give them their quirky spin, what they’re really about is people: what makes them happy or sad. My themes are simple. They’re about love and loss, honor and the responsibilities of friendship. And wonder . . . always wonder. As complex as people are individually, their drives are universal.

  I’ve been told—so often I almost believe it myself—that I’ve got a real understanding of people. However strange the situations my characters find themselves in, the characters themselves seem very real to my readers. That makes me feel good, naturally enough, but I don’t understand it because I don’t feel that I know people very well at all.