Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  His parents exchanged looks.

  David’s mother opened her mouth and closed it again, hesitantly, but his father waved a hand at her, sat up straighter in his chair and said flatly, “Sammy’s dead, David. They think he had some sort of seizure and drowned before they could pull him out. I’m sorry. But that’s the way it is.”

  “Marty!” David’s mother protested.

  “It’s part of life, Anna,” his father said. “He’s got to learn to face it. You can’t keep him wrapped up in cotton wool, for Christ’s sake!”

  “It’s all right,” David said quietly. “I knew he had to be. I just thought maybe . . . somehow . . .”

  There was a silence, and they looked at each other through it. “At any rate,” his father finally said, “we’re proud of you, David. The lifeguard told us you tried to save Sammy. You did the best you could, did it like a man, and you should be proud of that.” His voice was heavy and solemn. “You’re going to be upset for a while, sure—that’s only normal—but someday that fact’s going to make you feel a lot better about all this, believe me.”

  David could feel his lips trembling, but he was determined not to cry. Summoning all his will to keep his voice steady, he said, “Mom . . . Dad . . . if I . . . told you something—something that was really weird—would you believe me and not think I was going nuts again?”

  His parents gave him that uneasy, wall-eyed look again. His mother wet her lips, hesitantly began to speak, but his father cut her off. “Tell your tall tales later,” he said harshly. “It’s time for supper.”

  David sagged back against the door panels. They did think he was going nuts again, had probably been afraid of that ever since they heard he had run wildly away from the pool after Sammy drowned. He could smell the fear on them, a sudden bitter burnt reek, like scorched onions. His mother was still staring at him uneasily, her face pale, but his father was grating, “Come on, now, wash up for supper. Make it snappy!” He wasn’t going to let David be nuts, David realized; he was going to force everything to be “normal,” by the sheer power of his anger.

  “I’m not hungry,” David said hollowly. “I’d rather just lie down.” He walked quickly by his parents, hearing his father start to yell, hearing his mother intervene, hearing them start to quarrel again behind him. He didn’t seem to care anymore. He kept going, pulling himself upstairs, leaning his weight on the wrought-iron banister. He was bone-tired and his head throbbed.

  In his room, he listlessly peeled off his sweat-stiff clothes. His head was swimming with the need to sleep, but he paused before turning down the bedspread, grimaced and shot an uneasy glance at the window. Slowly, he crossed the room. Moving in jerks and starts, as though against his will, he lifted the edge of the curtain and looked out.

  There was a clown in the street below, standing with that terrible motionless patience in front of the house, staring up at David’s window.

  David was not even surprised. Of course the clowns would be there. They’d heard Sammy call his name. They’d found him. They knew where he lived now

  What was he going to do? He couldn’t stay inside all summer. Sooner or later, his parents would make him go out.

  And then the clowns would get him.

  David woke up with a start, his heart thudding.

  He pushed himself up on one elbow, blinking in the darkness, still foggy and confused with sleep. What had happened? What had wakened him?

  He glanced at the fold-up travel clock that used to be his dad’s; it sat on the desk, its numbers glowing. Almost midnight.

  Had there been a noise? There had been a noise, hadn’t there? He could almost remember it.

  He sat alone in the darkened room, still only half-awake, listening to the silence.

  Everything was silent. Unnaturally silent. He listened for familiar sounds; the air conditioner swooshing on, the hot-water tank rumbling, the refrigerator humming, the cuckoo clock chiming in the living room. Sometimes he could hear those sounds when he awakened in the middle of the night. But he couldn’t hear them now. The crickets weren’t even chirruping outside, nor was there any sound of passing traffic. There was only the sound of David’s own breathing, harsh and loud in his ears, as though he were underwater and breathing through scuba gear. Without knowing why, he felt the hair begin to rise on the back of his neck.

  The clowns were in the house.

  That hit him suddenly, with a rush of adrenalin, waking him all the way up in an eyeblink.

  He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. Somehow, he had thought that houses were safe, that the clowns could only be outside. But they were here. They were in the house. Perhaps they were here in the room, right now. Two of them, eight, a dozen. Forming a circle around the bed, staring at him in the darkness with their opaque and malevolent eyes.

  He burst from the bed and ran for the light switch, careening blindly through blackness, waiting for clutching hands to grab him in the dark. His foot struck something—a toy, a shoe—and sent it clattering away, the noise making him gasp and flinch. A misty ghost shape seemed to move before him, making vague, windy gestures, more sensed than seen. He ducked away, dodging blindly. Then his hand was on the light switch.

  The light came on like a bomb exploding, sudden and harsh and overwhelmingly bright. Black spots flashed before his eyes. As his vision re-adjusted, he jumped to see a face only inches from his own—stifling a scream when he realized that it was only his reflection in the dresser mirror. That had also been the moving, half-seen shape.

  There was no one in the room.

  Panting with fear, he slumped against the dresser. He’d instinctively thought that the light would help, but somehow it only made things worse. It picked out the eyes and the teeth of the demons in the magic posters on the walls, making them gleam sinisterly, and threw slowly moving monster shadows across the room from the dangling Tyrannosaurus mobile. The light was harsh and spiky, seeming to bounce and ricochet from every flat surface, hurting his eyes. The light wouldn’t save him from the clowns, wouldn’t keep them away, wouldn’t banish them to unreality, like bad-dream bogeymen—it would only help them find him.

  He was making a dry little gasping noise, like a cornered animal. He found himself across the room, crouching with his back to the wall. Almost without thinking, he had snatched up the silver letter-opener knife from his desk. Knife in hand, lips skinned back over his teeth in an animal snarl, he crouched against the wall and listened to the terrible silence that seemed to press in against his eardrums.

  They were coming for him.

  He imagined them moving with slow deliberation through the darkened living room downstairs, their eyes and their dead-white faces gleaming in the shadows, pausing at the foot of the stairs to look up toward his room and then, slowly, slowly—each movement as intense and stylized as the movements of a dance—beginning to climb . . . the stairs creaking under their weight . . . coming closer . . .

  David was crying now, almost without realizing that he was. His heart was thudding as if it would tear itself out of his chest, beating faster and faster as the pressure of fear built up inside him, shaking him, chuffing out, “Run, run, run! Don’t let them trap you in here! Run!”

  Before he had realized what he was doing, he had pulled open the door to his room and was in the long corridor outside.

  Away from the patch of light from his doorway, the corridor was deadly black and seemed to stretch endlessly away into distance. Slowly, step by step, he forced himself into the darkness, one hand on the corridor wall, one hand clutching the silver knife. Although he was certain that every shadow that loomed up before him would turn out to be a silently waiting clown, he didn’t even consider switching on the hallway light. Instinctively, he knew that the darkness would hide him. Make no noise, stay close to the wall. They might miss you in the dark. Knife in hand, he walked on down the hall, feeling his fingertips rasp along over wood and tile and wallpaper, his eyes strained wide. Into the darkness.

  His
body knew where he was going before he did. His parents’ room. He wasn’t sure if he wanted his parents to protect him or if he wanted to protect them from a menace they didn’t even know existed and couldn’t see, but through his haze of terror, all he could think of was getting to his parents’ room. If he could beat the clowns to the second floor, hide in his parents’ room, maybe they’d miss him; maybe they wouldn’t look for him there. Maybe he’d be safe there . . . safe . . . the way he used to feel when a thunderstorm would wake him and he’d run sobbing down the hall in the darkness to his parents’ room and his mother would take him in her arms.

  The staircase, opening up in a well of space and darkness, was more felt than seen. Shoulder against the wall, he felt his way down the stairs, lowering one foot at a time, like a man backing down a ladder. The well of darkness rose up around him and slowly swallowed him. Between floors, away from the weak, pearly light let in by the upstairs-landing window, the darkness was deep and smothering, the air full of suspended dust and the musty smell of old carpeting. Every time the stairs creaked under his feet, he froze, heart thumping, certain that a clown was about to loom up out of the inky blackness, as pale and terrible as a shark rising up through black midnight water.

  He imagined the clowns moving all around him in the darkness, swirling silently around him in some ghostly and enigmatic dance, unseen, their fingers not quite touching him as they brushed by like moth wings in the dark . . . the bushy fright wigs puffed out around their heads like sinister nimbi . . . the ghostly white faces, the dead-black costumes, the gleaming-white gloves reaching out through the darkness.

  He forced himself to keep going, fumbling his way down one more step, then another. He was clutching the silver knife so hard that his hand hurt, holding it up high near his chest, ready to strike out with it.

  The darkness seemed to open up before him. The second-floor landing. He felt his way out onto it, sliding his feet flat along the floor, like an ice skater. His parents’ room was only a few steps away now. Was that a noise from the floor below, the faintest of sounds, as if someone or something were slowly climbing up the stairs?

  His fingers touched wood. The door to his parents’ room. Trying not to make even the slightest sound, he opened the door, eased inside, closed the door behind him and slowly threw the bolt.

  He turned around. The room was dark, except for the hazy moonlight coming in the window through the half-opened curtains; but after the deeper darkness of the hall outside, that was light enough for him to be able to see. He could make out bulky shapes under the night-grey sheets, and, and as he watched, one of the shapes moved slightly, changing positions.

  They were there! He felt hope open hot and molten inside him, and he choked back a sob. He would crawl into bed between them as he had when he was a very little boy, awakened by nightmares . . . he would nestle warmly between them . . . he would be safe.

  “Mom?” he said softly. “Dad?” He crossed the room to stand beside the bed. “Mom?” he whispered. Silence. He reached out hesitantly, feeling a flicker of dread even as he moved, and slowly pulled the sheet down on one side—

  And there was the clown, staring up at him with those terrible, opaque, expressionless blue eyes, smiling his unchanging painted smile.

  David plunged the knife down, feeling it bite into the spongy resistance of muscle and flesh. Yet even as the blow struck home, he felt cold, strong hands, white-gloved hands, close over his shoulders from behind.

  Touring

  Introduction to Touring

  Because they live in the full glare of the public eye, because their real-life excesses are so legendary, it’s very hard to write satisfactory stories about rock stars. It’s even harder to write about dead rock stars; one slip, and you open a vein of sticky sentiment that gushes all over the place. Harder still, then, to write about three dead rock stars, especially in a three-way collaboration.

  These guys—Dozois, Dann, Swanwick—are they crazy or what?

  Dissecting a collaboration is a delicate, difficult task. A passage that so obviously possesses the trademark style of one author turns out to be a riff on that style by another; ideas bounce back and forth until no one knows who started the game. But I’m willing to stick out my neck and hazard that of the three dead rock stars in “Touring,” Janis Joplin is mostly Michael Swanwick’s (who has written about her in his solo short story, “The Feast of Saint Janis”), and by default Elvis is mostly Jack Dann’s, because the opening of “Touring,” told from the point of view of Buddy Holly, is pure Dozois.

  The theme and course of the story is set with vivid immediacy from the blatant untruth of the first sentence. The four-seater Beechwood Bonanza airplane in which Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper died, when it crashed in an Iowa field in a snowstorm on February 2nd 1959, safely delivers them to their next gig in Moorhead, Minnesota: right from the start, we’re in the Twilight Zone. Holly took the plane because he was exhausted, and couldn’t stand the idea of riding the tour bus, and he’s exhausted here—the whole world is leached by his exhaustion. He feels “stale and curiously depressed;” the lobby of the hotel to which Blemings, the concert promoter, delivers him is “inhabited only by a few tired-looking rubber plants”; the town is the “sleepiest, deadest damn town” he has ever been in. The universal fatigue, conveyed in prose that itself is far from exhausted, is that of any tour: the endless travel; the shabby hotels; the difficulty of performing mundane tasks—doing your laundry, trying to contact your wife—in unfamiliar surroundings.

  It’s easy to mistake all this for the bleakness of a highly pessimistic world-view, but as in many of his solo stories, Dozois and his collaborators are setting us up for a glimpse of redemption that shines more strongly because of its gloomy setting, in a story which is itself a set up.

  Our three authors are playing a more subtle game than resurrecting corpses to make the ultimate fantasy band. For the benefit of the sinister Blemings, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley are sharing a bill in what might be an antechamber of Heaven or Hell, or a detailed virtual reality, or something else entirely. Elvis’s petulant outrage and Janis’s exuberance are no match for Blemings; only Holly’s calm acceptance guides them towards a kind of victory—the victory that must be won afresh every night, on every tour.

  We know, as they do not, that all three stars died iconic deaths. Janis Joplin’s death, from an overdose of heroin at the age of 27 in 1970, was (with Jim Morrison’s and Jimi Hendrix’s) a sign of just how rotten the hedonism of the sixties had become. Elvis, dying from an overdose at 42, was for many already dead—he died when he went into the army, and was afterwards turned by bad movies and Las Vegas into a bloated, zombified parody of his old self. Buddy Holly thinks at first he’s a Presley impersonator; for most of “Touring,” he wraps himself in the tattered cloak of his legend.

  And Buddy Holly’s death was the most tragic of all: it marked the end of the kind of rock ‘n’ roll he was already leaving behind after disbanding the Crickets; it left, like the assassination of JFK, an abiding sense of unfulfilled promise. Both Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley died when rock ‘n’ roll was becoming corporatised, mannered, reduced to a set of rules; Buddy Holly’s death was all the more shocking because he was an artist at the top of his form in a genre that was still defining itself.

  Buddy and Elvis and Janice: they’re cultural plutonium. Icons with a long half-life, still giving off a potent glow, hard to handle, and highly dangerous. “Touring” is so heavily saturated in radioactive iconography that, like the fabulous goony bird, it’s a surprise that it flies at all. That it flies so well and so true is a tribute to the harmony sustained by its three authors.

  Paul McAuley

  Touring

  by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann,

  and Michael Swanwick

  The four-seater Beechcraft Bonanza dropped from a grey sky to the cheerless winter runways of Fargo Airport. Tires touched pavement, screeched, and the single-engine plane taxied
to a halt. It was seven o’clock in the morning, February 3, 1959.

  Buddy Holly duckwalked down the wing and hopped to the ground. It had been a long and grueling flight; his bones ached, his eyes were gritty behind the large, plastic-framed glasses, and he felt stale and curiously depressed. Overnight bag in one hand, laundry sack in the other, he stood beside Ritchie Valens for a moment, looking for their contact. White steam curled from their nostrils. Brown grass poked out of an old layer of snow beside the runway. Somewhere a dog barked, flat and far away.

  Behind the hurricane fence edging the field, a stocky man waved both hands overhead. Valens nodded, and Holly hefted his bags. Behind them, J. P. Richardson grunted as he leaped down from the plane.

  They walked towards the man across the tarmac, their feet crunching over patches of dirty ice.

  “Jack Blemings,” the man rasped as he came up to meet them. “I manage the dancehall and the hotel in Moorhead.” Thin mustache, thin lips, cheeks going to jowl—Holly had met this man a thousand times before: the stogie in his mouth was inevitable; the sporty plaid hat nearly so. Blemings stuck out a hand and Holly shuffled his bags awkwardly, trying to free his own hand. “Real pleased to meet you, Buddy,” Blemings said. His hand was soggy and boneless. “Real pleased to meet a real artist.”

  He gestured them into a showroom-new ‘59 Cadillac. It dipped on its springs as Richardson gingerly collapsed into the back seat. Starting the engine, Blemings leaned over the seat for more introductions. Richardson was blowing his nose, but hastily transferred the silk handkerchief into his other hand so that they could shake. His delighted-to-meet-you expression lasted as long as the handshake, then the animation went out of him, and his face slumped back into lines of dull fatigue.