The Year's Best Horror Stories 12

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Marie stood in the kitchen, staring at the magnetic birds on the refrigerator door, and after a while Billy yelled in from the living room to tell her that Paul wanted some milk. She didn’t answer.

  Paul had been dead for three months.

  “Mom?”

  She looked around, trying to remember what she had come to the kitchen for.

  “Mom! Paul wants some milk. Can he have some?”

  It wasn’t a game anymore, and it was starting to worry her. Billy was old enough to understand death. He was old enough to know that Paul couldn’t be there in the living room, watching television. Billy was six.

  Paul, had he lived, would have been five.

  She turned, walking from the kitchen and feeling the awful stabbing pains in her back that the doctor said she would have the rest of her life. Marie was twenty-nine; the rest of her life—if she died of old age and not another accident—would be a long time. She wondered if she would ever come to regard pain as a normal thing.

  The living room was dark. She had tried opening the heavy blue drapes before breakfast, but Billy had wanted them closed. He had become an indoor child, preferring dark rooms to the world outside, preferring his dead brother’s company to that of living children. He sat alone, leaning on the couch’s arm, slouching with wonderful ease; it was amazing how his young body had recovered. His scars were gone. His broken bones were whole and straight. Looking at him, it was easy to forget that he, too, had been involved.

  An uneaten doughnut sat on the coffee table. She pointed to it. “Don’t you want that?”

  He shook his head. “I’m leaving it for Paul, but he won’t eat it without milk. He’s mad because you wouldn’t give him breakfast.”

  She looked at the television and asked, “What are you watching?”

  “Edge of Night. Paul wants to know if—”

  “Aren’t there any kids’ shows on?”

  “Yeah, but you put this one on. Remember? You put it on, then you went to the kitchen. Paul says—”

  “Well, let’s at least turn it down. I have a headache, and—”

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “What?”

  “Talking about other things when I talk about Paul.”

  “What would you like for lunch?”

  “Mom?”

  He looked near tears, and she almost gave in, almost turned to the empty spot beside Billy to say hello, almost went into the kitchen for milk. It would have been easy to play along. She knew. She had done it. And, sometimes, she had caught herself believing Paul was there ...

  “Mom?”

  She turned away, knowing that if the discussion continued it would go Billy’s way. And she couldn’t allow that. Last night Roger had come home early and caught the two of them talking to Paul. Roger had laid down the law then; he had told her it was no good pretending, no good for anyone.

  She looked back at the couch, back at her oldest child who was once again an only child, and she said, “Later I might want you to go to the store for me. We’re nearly out of butter.”

  Billy stared at the uneaten doughnut.

  Marie wondered if she was getting through.

  Later, when lunch was long gone and the empty afternoon became evening, Roger mixed a martini and asked about her day. She said it had been fine, and he took the chair across from her at the kitchen table. He no longer wore the neck brace, but she could see that his pain was no better. The doctor had been against his working full days, but Roger wasn’t one for taking orders. He would probably have two more martinis before dinner.

  The television was still on in the living room; Billy had spent the whole day in front of it, passively watching whatever Channel 4 threw at him. Now he was watching a Leave It to Beaver rerun. The sound was still too high. Roger looked over Marie’s shoulder toward the noise, and something in his look roused her.

  She realized dimly what was coming.

  “Marie,” he said, “why is the television on?”

  Beaver and Wally laughed.

  “Please, Roger, let the boy be.” She had met the man halfway. Surely that was enough.

  She looked away as he got up from the table. He moved into the living room. The television fell silent. “I don’t like you doing that,” he said, stepping back into the kitchen. “I don’t like you playing that set to an empty room.”

  She cried after that. And after that she tried telling him about the talk she and Billy had had that morning. But every time she began he asked her about dinner, or about sewing, or about Mrs. Burke up the street.

  After a while, when it seemed useless to insist, she put on her coat and went to the store for butter. It was five blocks. The walk was painful, but she didn’t want to drive. She no longer felt safe in cars.

  Roger stayed behind in the empty house. He mixed a second martini, wondering if he was getting through.

  AFTER-IMAGES by Malcolm Edwards

  It came as a surprise to learn that “After-Images” is Malcolm Edwards’ first published short story. Edwards is a well-known figure within British science fiction fandom; he has been working full-time in the science fiction field since 1976—as an editor first, then an academic, then a freelance writer. Currently Edwards is science fiction editor at Victor Gollancz Ltd. He was a contributing editor to The Science Fiction Encyclopedia and has written (mostly in collaboration) various other books—most recently The SF Book of Lists (with Maxim Jakubowski) and Realms of Fantasy (with Robert Holdstock). Until recently he was one of several editors jointly in charge of the excellent British New Wave magazine, Interzone.

  Born in London in 1949, Edwards has lived his entire life in that city, except for three years at King’s College, Cambridge. He has an M.A. in social anthropology, which he maintains he has “never put to any constructive use.” One hopes Malcolm Edwards will put his obvious abilities as a writer to greater use in future.

  After the events of the previous day Norton slept only fitfully, his dreams filled with grotesque images of Richard Carver, and he was grateful when his bedside clock showed him that it was nominally morning again. He always experienced difficulty sleeping in anything less than total darkness, so the unvarying sunlight, cutting through chinks in the curtains and striking across the floor, marking it with lines that might have been drawn by an incandescent knife, added to his restlessness. He had tried to draw the curtains as closely as possible, but they were cheap and of skimpy manufacture—a legacy from the previous owner of the flat, who for obvious reasons could not be bothered to take them with her when she moved—and even when, after much manoeuvring, they could be persuaded to meet along much of their length, narrow gaps would always appear at the top, near the pleating.

  Norton felt gripped by a lassitude born of futility, but as on the eight other mornings of this unexpected coda to his existence, fought off the feeling and slid wearily out of bed. After dressing quickly and without much thought, he pulled back the curtains to admit the brightness of the early-afternoon summer sun.

  The sun was exactly where it had been for the last eight days, poised a few degrees above the peaked roof of the terraced house across the road. It had been a stormy day, and a few minutes before everything had stopped a heavy shower had been sweeping across London; but the squall had passed and the sun had appeared—momentarily, one would have supposed—through a break in the cloud. The visible sky was still largely occupied by lowering, soot-coloured clouds, which enfolded the light and gave it the peculiar penetrating luminosity which presages a storm; but the sun sat in its patch of blue sky like an unblinking eye in the face of the heavens, and Norton and the others spent their last days and nights in a malign parody of the mythical, eternally sunlit English summer.

  Outside the heat was stale and oppressive and seemed to settle heavily in his temples. Drifts of rubbish, untended now for several weeks, gave off a ripe odour of decay and attracted buzzing platoons of flies. Marlborough Street, where Norton lived, was one of a patchwork of late-Victorian a
nd Edwardian terraces filling an unfashionable lacuna in the map of west London. At one end of the road was a slightly wider avenue which called itself a High Road on account of a bus route and a scattering of down-at-heel shops. Norton walked towards it, past houses which gave evidence of their owners’ hasty departure, doors and windows left open. The house across the road, which for three days had been the scene of an increasingly wild party held by most of the few teenagers remaining in the area, was now silent again. They had probably collapsed from exhaustion, or drugs, or both, Norton thought.

  At the corner Norton paused. To the north—his left—the street curved away sharply, lined on both sides by shabby three-storey houses with mock-Georgian facades. To the south it was straight, but about a hundred yards away was blocked off by the great baleful flickering wall of the interface, rising into the sky and curving back on itself like a surreal bubble. As always he was drawn to look at it, though his eyes resisted as if under autonomous control and tried to focus themselves elsewhere.

  It was impossible to say precisely what it looked like, for its surface seemed to be an absence of colour. When he closed his eyes it left swimming variegated after-images: protoplasmic shapes which crossed and intermingled and blended. When Norton forced himself to stare at it, his optic nerves attempted to deny its presence, warping together the flanking images of shopfronts so that the road seemed too narrow to a point.

  Norton suffered occasional migraine headaches and often experienced an analogous phenomenon as the prelude to an attack: he would find that parts of his field of vision had been excised, but that the edges of the blanks were somehow pulled together, so it was difficult to be sure something was missing. Just as then it was necessary sometimes to turn sideways and look obliquely to see an object sitting directly in front of him, so now, as he turned away, he could see the interface as a curving wall the colour of a bruise from which pinpricks of intense light occasionally escaped as if through faults in its fabric. Then, too, he could glimpse more clearly the three human images printed, as though by some sophisticated holographic process, upon the interface. In the centre of the road were the backs of Carver and himself as they disappeared beyond the interface, the images already starting to become fuzzy as the wavefront slowly advanced; to one side, slightly sharper, was the record of his lone re-emergence, his expression clearly pale and strained despite the heavy polarised goggles which covered half his face.

  Norton had been sitting the previous morning at a table outside the Cafe Hellenika, slowly drinking a tiny cup of Greek coffee. He had little enthusiasm for the sweet, muddy drink, but was unwilling as yet to move on to beer or wine.

  The cafe’s Greek Cypriot proprietor had reacted to the changed conditions in a manner which under other circumstances would have seemed quite enterprising. He had shifted all his tables and chairs out on to the pavement, leaving the cooler interior free for the perennial pool players and creating outside a passable imitation of a street cafe remembered from happier days in Athens or Nicosia. Many of the remaining local residents were of Greek origin, and the men gathered here, playing cards and chess, drinking cheap Demestica, and talking in sharp bursts which sounded dramatic however banal and ordinary the conversation. There was a timelessness to the scene which Norton found oddly apposite.

  He was staring into his coffee, thinking studiously about nothing, when a shadow fell across him and he simultaneously heard the chair next to his being scraped across the pavement. He looked up to see Carver easing himself into the seat. He was dressed bizarrely in a thickly padded white suit which looked as though it should belong to an astronaut or a polar explorer. He was carrying a pair of thick goggles which he placed on the formica surface of the table. He signalled the cafe owner to bring him a coffee.

  Norton didn’t want company, but he was intrigued despite himself. “What on Earth is that outfit?” he asked.

  “Explorer’s gear ... bloody hot, too,” said Carver, dragging the sleeve cumbersomely across his perspiring forehead.

  “What’s to explore, for God’s sake?”

  “The ... whatever you call it. The bubble. The interface. I’ve been into it.”

  Norton felt irritated. Carver seemed incapable of taking their situation seriously. He had attached himself to Norton four days ago as he sat getting drunk and had sought him out every day since, full of jokes of dubious merit and colourful stories of his life in some unspecified, but probably menial, branch of the diplomatic service. He was the sort of person Norton hated finding himself next to in a bar. Now he was obviously fantasizing.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’d be dead.”

  “Do I look dead?” Carver gestured at himself. His face, tanned and plump with eyes of a disconcertingly pure aquamarine, looked as healthy as ever.

  “It’s impossible,” Norton repeated.

  “Don’t you want to know what I found?”

  Losing patience, Norton shouted: “I know what you’d have found. You’d have found a fucking nuclear explosion. Don’t tell me you went for a stroll through that!”

  The cafe owner come up and slapped a cup on to the table in front of Carver, slopping the coffee into the saucer. Carver took a long slow sip of the dark liquid, looking at Norton expressionlessly over the rim of the cup as he did so. Norton subsided, feeling foolish.

  “But I did, Norton,” Carver finally said calmly. “I did.”

  Norton remained silent, stubbornly refusing to play his part in the choreography of the conversation, knowing that Carver would carry on without further prompting.

  “I didn’t just walk in,” Carver said, after a few seconds. “I’m not suicidal. I tried probing first, with a stick. I waggled it about a bit, pulled it out. It wasn’t damaged. That set me thinking. So I tried with a pet mouse of mine. No damage—except that its eyes were burned out, poor little sod. So I thought, all right, it’s very bright, but nothing more. What does that suggest?”

  Norton shrugged.

  “It suggested to me that the whole process is slowed down in there, that there’s a whole series of wavefronts—the light flash, the fireball, the blastwave—all expanding slowly, but all separate.”

  “It seems incredible.”

  “Well, the whole situation isn’t precisely normal, you know—”

  They were interrupted by a commotion at another table. There seemed to be some disagreement between two men over a hand of cards. One of them, a heavy-set middle-aged man wearing a greying string vest, through which his bodily hair sprouted abundantly, was standing and waving a handful of cards. The other, an older man, remained seated, banging his fist repeatedly on the table. Their voices rose in a fast, threatening gabble. Then the man in the vest threw the cards across the table with a furious jerk of his arm and stamped into the cafe. The other continued to talk loudly and aggrievedly to the onlookers, his words augmented by a complex mime of gesture.

  Norton was glad of the distraction. He couldn’t understand what Carver was getting at, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. “It’s amazing the way they carry on,” he said. “It’s as though nothing had happened, as though everything was normal.”

  “Very sensible of them. At least they’re consistent.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I am. The whole thing has been inevitable for years. We all knew that, but we tried to pretend otherwise even while we carried on preparing for it. We said that it wouldn’t happen, because so far it hadn’t happened—some logic! We buried our heads like ostriches and pretended as hard as we could. Now it’s here—it’s just down the road and we can see it coming and we know there’s no escape. But we knew that all along. If you tie yourself to a railway line you don’t have to wait until you can see the train coming before you start to think you’re in danger. So why not just carry on as usual?”

  “I didn’t know you felt like that.”

  “Of course you didn’t. As far as you’re concerned I’m just the old fool in the saloon bar. End of story.”

 
; Carver had a point, Norton supposed. If anyone had asked him whether there was going to be a nuclear war in his lifetime he would probably have said yes. If anyone had asked what he was doing about it he would have shrugged and said, well, what could you do? He had friends active in the various protest movements, but couldn’t help viewing their efforts as futile. Some of them would virtually admit as much sometimes, if pressed. The difference was that they couldn’t bear to sit still while some hope—however remote—remained, whereas he couldn’t be bothered with gestures which seemed extremely unlikely to produce results. He would rather watch TV or spend the evening in the pub.

  The other difficulty was that he couldn’t really picture it in his mind’s eye, couldn’t visualise London consumed by blast and fire, couldn’t imagine the millions of deaths, the survivors of the blast explosion dying in fallout shelters, the ensuing chaos and anarchy. And because he found it unimaginable, on some level he told himself it could never happen, not here, not to him.

  Being apathetic about politics—especially Middle-Eastern politics—he hadn’t even been properly aware of the crisis developing until it reached flashpoint, with Russian and American troops clashing outside Riyadh. Then there had been government announcements, states of emergency, panic. Despite advice to stay at home the great mass of the population had headed out of the cities; unconfirmed rumours filtered back of clashes with troops on roads commandeered for military use. A few had stayed behind: some dutifully obeying government instructions, some doubtless oblivious to the whole thing, some, like Norton, unable to imagine an aftermath they would want to live in.

  And then the sirens had sounded and he had sat waiting for the end; and they had stopped, and there was a silence which went on and on and on until Norton, like others, had gone into the streets and found himself in the middle of a situation far stranger than anything he could have imagined. The small urban island in which they stood—an irregular triangle no more than half a mile on a side—was bracketed by three virtually simultaneous groundburst explosions which had caused ... what? A local fracture in space-time? That was as good an explanation as any. Whatever the cause, the effect was to slow down subjective time in the locality by a factor of millions, reducing the spread of the detonations to a matter of a few yards every day, hemming them into their strange and fragile-seeming shells.