Borderlands 3

by Thomas F. Monteleone (Ed. )

  Michela drew in her breath sharply. Perhaps the vision had been right. Perhaps Nathan was dead, Daniel had moved and they had reassigned the phone number. But it made no sense. Someone would have let her know.

  "Hello?"

  "I—Is this the Holbert residence?" Michela stammered.

  "Yes." The voice had become wary.

  "May I speak to Nathan, please?"

  "Nathan?"

  A shudder ran down Michela's back. Nathan was dead. He should have been squealing in the background, but instead she heard only the hum of the phone line.

  "Nathan is asleep."

  Asleep? This late on Christmas morning? "Could you wake him up, please?"

  "Who is this?"

  "His mother," Michela whispered

  "Who?"

  "His mother," Michela repeated. She spoke with a conviction she did not feel as if she were doubting her own right to the title.

  "He doesn't have a mother," the woman said, and from the shock in her voice, Michela could tell that the woman believed it. Suddenly the phone on the other end clattered to the floor and then someone picked it up.

  "Leave us alone," said Daniel.

  "Daniel, let me speak to Nathan."

  "No."

  Michela felt the old frustration beat at the edges of her stomach. She started to shake. Whenever she wanted to do something, Daniel stood in her way, telling her that it wasn't proper or that she couldn't or that she was incapable. "Please, Daniel. It's Christmas."

  "That's exactly why you shouldn't talk to him. I want him to get over you." The phone went dead. Michela stared at the empty receiver until it clicked and the dial tone returned. Slowly she hung up.

  Ghosts should be laid to rest.

  We're the true Ghosts of Christmas Present. We don't have chains to rattle like Marley, because we're still alive, still forging them...

  Ghosts should be laid to rest.

  She found herself in the bathroom with a razor blade clutched between her thumb and forefinger. Her left hand rested palm up on her knee and she realized she had been studying the veins, their blueness an outline for a new and personal type of artwork. The blade, cool, smooth and sharp, touched the base of her wrist.

  I want him to get over you.

  She finally understood what Daniel had said. She was Nathan's ghost. But he was also hers: the baby she had found out about three days after she had rented her own apartment ("You can't leave now," Daniel had said. "The child would grow up fatherless."); the fetus that had distorted her body, made it swell, pulled the skin across the belly so tight that she could almost hear a sound like rubber being stretched beyond its limits. Daniel loved her thick, heavy breasts and the stomach hiding another life. He spoke to the child, but he never spoke to her. They never talked about an abortion and he was the one who went and canceled the lease on her apartment.

  The razor blade slipped through her fingers and clattered onto the tile floor. She put her hand across her flat stomach, covering the scar a doctor had left with his razor as he pulled Nathan into the world.

  Nathan, the infant who didn't sleep, who spent the first three months of his life shrieking, who quieted for his father and his father only. Nathan the boy who once smashed an entire table full of dishes, who kicked a hole in his bedroom wall, who did everything he could to get Michela to notice him, to love him, and she couldn't because he was the one who trapped her there, who prevented her from walking away and starting over, from getting rid of Daniel who had stopped loving her a long time ago. On that morning, that hot August morning, when she turned around and saw Nathan holding a dead mouse, she had asked him to give it to her and when he said no, she had tried to take it, and instead she hit him and hitting him felt so good that she continued to hit him until she realized that he wasn't moving, he was laying there bleeding, maybe dying, and that Daniel would never forgive her and that a part of her didn't care...

  As she leaned over to pick up the razor blade, she noticed that it was raining. The drops were warm as they landed on the back of her hand. And then she realized that they weren't rain but tears. Tears as welcome as the first snow of the season. And she buried her face in her hands and sobbed for first snows, first loves, snow angels and dreams that had gone sour.

  ▼

  And his name shall be called

  Wonderful...

  ▼

  The fog was gone when she finally staggered out of the bathroom. The sun shone feebly through the clouds, giving a light so pale that it could barely be called sunlight. Michela pulled back the curtain and stared, realizing if she tried hard enough, she could see the ocean.

  She let the curtain fall, went back into the bathroom, pulled off her robe and stepped into the shower. The hot water invigorated her, warmed her. It was Christmas morning. She felt alive for the first time since she had arrived in Oregon. The man in the carriage had been wrong. She wasn't a ghost. Ghosts disappeared at dawn.

  Like Nathan. Nathan would survive without her until she found a way to deal with her anger and frustration. He had a woman, a mother perhaps, who spoke with the voice of Christmas Future. And he had Daniel who had always loved him more than anything else.

  Michela sighed and shut off the water. On her first Christmas alone, she would take a walk on the beach and then head over to a restaurant that was serving a Christmas brunch. She would eat a good meal, talk with people who were as alone as she was, and come home. Maybe she would make herself a hot buttered rum or maybe she wouldn't, but either way, she would toast the ghosts of Christmas and hope, that before the day was out, a few more would be laid to rest.

  The Ugly File by Ed Gorman

  Another repeat offender from Borderlands 1 ("The Man in the Long Black Sedan") is Ed Gorman. He lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and is best known as a tough-nosed mystery writer. However, he's also a fine anthologist with such titles as the wildly successful Stalkers and the wickedly delicious Dark Crimes to his credit. Oddly enough, he is probably least recognized as a short story writer, but I feel his short fiction is his real trump card. The story which follows is another excellent example of the economy, tension, and emotional punch that makes this guy The Real Stuff.

  The cold rain didn't improve the looks of the housing development, one of those sprawling valleys of pastel-colored tract houses that had sprung from the loins of greedy contractors right at the end of WWII, fresh as flowers during that exultant time but now dead and faded.

  I spent fifteen minutes trying to find the right address. Houses and streets formed a blinding maze of sameness.

  I got lucky by taking what I feared was a wrong turn. A few minutes later I pulled my new station wagon up to the curb, got out, tugged my hat and raincoat on snugly, and then started unloading.

  Usually Merle, my assistant, is on most shoots. He unloads and sets up all the lighting, unloads and sets up all the photographic umbrellas, and unloads and sets up all the electric sensors that trip the strobe lights. But Merle went on this kind of shoot once before and he said never again, "not even if you fire my ass." He was too good an assistant to give up, so now I did these particular jobs alone.

  My name is Roy Hubbard. I picked up my profession of photography in Nam, where I was on the staff of a captain whose greatest thrill was taking photos of bloody and dismembered bodies. He didn't care if the bodies belonged to us or them just as long as they had been somehow disfigured or dismembered.

  In an odd way, I suppose, being the captain's assistant prepared me for the client I was working for today, and had been working for, on and off, for the past two months. The best-paying client I've ever had, I should mention here. I don't want you to think that I take any special pleasure, or get any special kick, out of gigs like this. I don't. But when you've got a family to feed, and you live in a city with as many competing photography firms as this one has, you pretty much take what's offered you.

  The air smelled of wet dark earth turning from winter to spring. Another four or five weeks and you'd see cardina
ls and jays sitting on the blooming green branches of trees.

  The house was shabby even by the standards of the neighborhood, the brown grass littered with bright cheap forgotten plastic toys and empty Diet Pepsi cans and wild rain-sodden scraps of newspaper inserts. The small picture window to the right of the front door was taped lengthwise from some long ago crack, and the white siding ran with rust from the drain spouts. The front door was missing its top glass panel.

  I knocked, ducking beneath the slight overhang of the roof to escape the rain.

  The woman who answered was probably no older than twenty-five but her eyes and the sag of her shoulders said that her age should not be measured by calendar years alone.

  "Mrs. Cunningham?"

  "Hi," she said, and her tiny white hands fluttered about like doves. "I didn't get to clean the place up very good."

  "That's fine."

  "And the two oldest kids have the flu so they're still in their pajamas and—"

  "Everything'll be fine, Mrs. Cunningham." When you're a photographer who deals a lot with mothers and children, you have to learn a certain calm, doctorly manner.

  She opened the door and I went inside.

  The living room, and what I could see of the dining room, was basically a continuation of the front yard—a mine field of cheap toys everywhere and inexpensive furniture, of the sort you buy by the room instead of the piece, strewn with magazines and pieces of the newspaper and the odd piece of children's clothing.

  Over all was a sour smell, one part the rainsodden wood of the exterior house, one part the lunch she had just fixed, one part the house cleaning this place hadn't had in a good long while.

  The two kids with the flu, boy and girl respectively, were parked in a corner of the long, stained couch. Even from here I knew that one of them had diapers in need of changing. They showed no interest in me or my equipment. Out of dirty faces and dead blue eyes they watched one cartoon character beat another with a hammer on a TV whose sound dial was turned very near the top.

  "Cindy's in her room," Mrs. Cunningham explained.

  Her dark hair was in a pert little pony tail. The rest of her chunky self was packed into a faded blue sweat shirt and sweat pants. In high school she had probably been nice and trim. But high school was an eternity behind her now.

  I carried my gear and followed her down a short hallway. We passed two messy bedrooms and a bathroom and finally we came to a door that was closed.

  "Have you ever seen anybody like Cindy before?"

  "I guess not, Mrs. Cunningham."

  "Well, it's kind of shocking. Some people can't really look at her at all. They just sort of glance at her and look away real quick. You know?"

  "I'll be fine."

  "I mean, it doesn't offend me when people don't want to look at her. If she wasn't my daughter, I probably wouldn't want to look at her, either. Being perfectly honest, I mean."

  "I'm ready, Mrs Cunningham."

  She watched me a moment and said, "You have kids?"

  "Two little girls."

  "And they're both fine?"

  "We were lucky."

  For a moment, I thought she might cry. "You don't know how lucky, Mr. Cunningham."

  She opened the door and we went into the bedroom.

  It was a small room, painted a fresh, lively pink. The furnishings in here—the bassinet, the bureau, the rocking horse in the corner—were more expensive than the stuff in the rest of the house. And the smell was better. Johnson's Baby Oil and Johnson's Baby Powder are always pleasant on the nose. There was a reverence in the appointments of this room, as if the Cunninghams had consciously decided to let the yard and the rest of the house go to hell. But this room—

  Mrs. Cunningham led me over to the bassinet and then said, "Are you ready?"

  "I'll be fine, Mrs. Cunningham. Really."

  "Well," she said, "here you are then "

  I went over and peered into the bassinet. The first look is always rough. But I didn't want to upset the lady so I smiled down at her baby as if Cindy looked just like every other baby girl I'd ever seen.

  I even put my finger to the baby's belly and tickled her a little. "Hi, Cindy."

  After I had finished my first three or four assignments for this particular client, I went to the library one day and spent an hour or so reading about birth defects. The ones most of us are familiar with are clubfoots and cleft palates and harelips and things like that. The treatable problems, that is. From there you work up to spina bifida and cretinism. And from there—

  What I didn't know until that day in the library is that there are literally hundreds of ways in which infants can be deformed, right up to and including the genetic curse of The Elephant Man. As soon as I started running into words such as achondroplastic dwarfism and supernumerary chromosomes, I quit reading. I had no idea what those words meant.

  Nor did I have any idea of what exactly you would call Cindy's malformation. She had only one tiny arm and that was so short that her three fingers did not quite reach her rib cage. It put me in mind of a flipper on an otter. She had two legs but only one foot and only three digits on that. But her face was the most terrible part of it all, a tiny little slit of a mouth and virtually no nose and only one good eye. The other was almond-shaped and in the right position but the eyeball itself was the deep, startling color of blood.

  "We been tryin' to keep her at home here," Mrs. Cunningham said, "but she can be a lot of trouble. The other two kids make fun of her all the time and my husband can't sleep right because he keeps havin' these dreams of her smotherin' because she don't have much of a nose. And the neighbor kids are always tryin' to sneak in and get a look at her."

  All the time she talked, I kept staring down at poor Cindy. My reaction was always the same when I saw these children. I wanted to find out who was in charge of a universe that would permit something like this and then tear his fucking throat out.

  "You ready to start now?"

  "Ready," I said.

  She was nice enough to help me get my equipment set up. The pictures went quickly. I shot Cindy from several angles, including several straight-on. For some reason, that's the one the client seems to like best. Straight-on. So you can see everything.

  I used VPS large format professional film and a Pentax camera because what I was doing here was essentially making many portraits of Cindy, just the way I do when I make a portrait of an important community leader.

  Half an hour later, I was packed up and moving through Mrs. Cunningham's front door.

  "You tell that man—that Mr. Byerly who called—that we sure do appreciate that $2000 check he sent."

  "I'll be sure to tell him," I said, walking out into the rain.

  "You're gonna get wet."

  "I'll be fine. Goodbye, Mrs. Cunningham."

  ▼

  Back at the shop, I asked Merle if there had been any calls and he said nothing important. Then, "How'd it go?"

  "No problems," I said.

  "Another addition to the ugly file, huh?" Then he nodded to the three filing cabinets I'd bought years back at a government auction. The top drawer of the center cabinet contained the photos and negatives of all the deformed children I'd been shooting for Byerly.

  "I still don't think that's funny, Merle."

  "The ugly file?" He'd been calling it that for a couple weeks now and I'd warned him that I wasn't amused. I have one of those tempers that it's not smart to push on too hard or too long.

  "Uh-huh," I said.

  "If you can't laugh about it then you have to cry about it."

  "That's a cop-out. People always say that when they want to say something nasty and get away with it. I don't want you to call it that any more, you fucking understand me, Merle?"

  I could feel the anger coming. I guess I've got more of it than I know what to do with, especially after I've been around some poor goddamned kid like Cindy.

  "Hey, boss, lighten up. Shit, man, I won't say it any more, OK?"

/>   "I'm going to hold you to that."

  I took the film of Cindy into the dark room. It took six hours to process it all through the chemicals and get the good, clear proofs I wanted.

  At some point during the process, Merle knocked on the door and said, "I'm goin' home now, all right?"

  "See you tomorrow," I said through the closed door

  "Hey, I'm sorry I pissed you off. You know, about those pictures."

  "Forget about it, Merle. It's over. Everything's fine."

  "Thanks. See you tomorrow."

  "Right."

  When I came out of the dark room, the windows were filled with night. I put the proofs in a manilla envelope with my logo and return address on it and then went out the door and down the stairs to the parking lot and my station wagon.

  The night was like October now, raw and windy. I drove over to the freeway and took it straight out to Mannion Springs, the wealthiest of all the wealthy local suburbs.

  On sunny afternoons, Mary and I pack up the girls sometimes and drive through Mannion Springs and look at all the houses and daydream aloud of what it would be like to live in a place where you had honest-to-God maids and honest-to-God butlers the way some of these places do.

  I thought of Mary now, and how much I loved her, more the longer we were married, and suddenly I felt this terrible, almost oppressive loneliness, and then I thought of little Cindy in that bassinet this afternoon and I just wanted to start crying and I couldn't even tell you why for sure.

  The Byerly place is what they call a shingle Victorian. It had dormers of every kind and description—hipped, eyebrow and gabled. The place is huge but has far fewer windows than you'd expect to find in a house this size. You wonder if sunlight can ever get into it.

  I'd called Byerly before leaving the office. He was expecting me.

  I parked in the wide asphalt drive that swept around the grounds. By the time I reached the front porch, Byerly was in the arched doorway, dressed in a good dark suit.

  I walked right up to him and handed him the envelope with the photos in it.

  "Thank you," he said. "You'll send me a bill?"