Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  No, the house is not haunted. It is he, John, who is haunted.

  He has been walking for fifteen minutes now, and he has not yet come to the blacktop secondary road. That is impossible. The access road is only a hundred yards long at the very most, with no branches or turnoffs, and the grove it transfixes is a small one. Nevertheless, he is still in the forest, and he can see no sign of anything but leagues of trees in any direction he looks. He has not been walking in a daze; his keyed-up mood has kept him alert, and he has noted every step of the way. He has not passed the blacktop without noticing it, and he has not strayed off the path. The path just does not go to the blacktop road anymore. Apparently, it now leads somewhere else entirely. In his abstracted mood, he almost does not find this remarkable.

  Strangeness has always followed John like some patient, indefatigable hunter: unhurried, at his heels, waiting for him to stop. Sometimes he has been able to hold it at bay for months, even for years—with school, with the routine of business, with the regimen imposed by his art. With constant, distracting motion. But eventually he will stop, and it catches him. And when it does, he begins to sink right out of the world.

  The pose of the introspective artist had served him well for quite a while—he had been able to use the accepted, cultured “sensitivity” of the role to mask the raw, unpalatable sensitivity beneath, from the world and from himself. Until, in London, the layers of protective callus had been gradually sloughed away, leaving that sensitivity grinning and naked, and other people had become too much to bear, even Paul, even Marilyn—they with their great ugly stews of hate and fear and lust, their uninspired eminences and shrieking plummeting depths, their molten blasts of desire and anger and unbearable love. And he knew that they were no different from himself. He was appalled by the sad, dowdy chronicles of pain that they carried in their faces, written in lines and ridges and whorls, muscle and bone. They were so plain, so readable that he could stretch out a finger and touch and number every one of them: here a frustration of the heart, here a vanishment of a small hope, here the souring of a dream. Their lives were engraved on their flesh in braille, like the Name on the forehead of the Golem, and he could not stand to read them. They broke his heart, and he shut himself away from the sight of them. And he continued to sink.

  In the last days of his affliction, an increasing weirdness had seeped into the world, settling like a film over ordinary things and altering them. He had walked the everyday streets of London and seen, superimposed over them, a vision of the Apocalypse. He had seen the sky darken at noon, heard the frantic frightened screaming of machines, saw the streets open to vomit up fire and death, watched buildings buckle and collapse in horrid cascades of brick and glass, listened to the screams of the dying and smelled the stink of burning meat, seen people crushed, buried, flayed to pieces, torn apart, going up in flames as easy as kindling—watched a great city kicked to flinders as if it was a house of cards, and put to the torch. And all the while the old ladies sold flowers along the Bayswater Road and in front of Marble Arch, in the thin, watery sunlight, unaware of the doom that was coming, the desolation that John watched with wide mad eyes—for it was already here for him, and he could see their bones jabbing and straining at their skins, eager to be out and free, and he could see how very thin a membrane of present time there was standing between them sunning in Hyde Park and the ragged piles of dust and ash they would eventually be. It was this horrifying vision, repeated continually, playing behind his eyes at night in slumber, that had driven him from London. But coming through Boston, and then again in Manhattan, it had been the same thing again, even more horrid and on a grander scale: the great skyscrapers shattering and falling like murdered gods, the whirlwinds of fire, dozens of miles of city fused into molten glass by some new atrocity of man.

  Now he can feel the same noonday strangeness leaking into this country morning. Around him, the forest is touched by entropy, by a cold and foul breath of poison, and it dies. It strangles, it suffocates, it is blighted, and it dies. Everything dies: the trees, the grass, the bushes, the flowers, the smallest moss and lichen, the worms that tunnel the ground, the insects, the very bacteria in the soil. He can see it all withering, shriveling, blackening, rotting. A scythe of decay passes through the world, and when it has passed, everything is gone. Nothing lives, nothing at all. There is only sterile, lifeless soil, soon to be baked into mud by the sun, or swept away by the wind to reveal the pale and elemental rock.

  What is this? John asks himself, aghast at this ultimate negation. He can accept the burning of London as a premonition, a presentiment of the coming war. Similarly, he can understand the destruction of Boston and New York—the U.S. involved in the conflict, the war spreading eventually to American shores; many have predicted just that. But this, the blighting and death of life itself, the withering of the world, what is this?

  The forest has changed, imperceptibly, around him. The deciduous trees are gone. It is now made up of red and white spruce and balsam fir, and the trees are shaggy, ancient giants. He is sure that there isn’t an unlogged climax forest within a hundred miles or more of here, if anywhere in the East at all, and certainly not a spruce woods this far to the south. Most of the familiar weeds and wildflowers are gone, leaving the woods noticeably drabber. He finds himself remembering that plants like Queen Anne’s lace, dandelion, and butter-and-eggs are European imports, and relatively recent, and then he spends a while wondering what he meant by that. He knows that he left the house walking north, and he can tell by the position of the sun that he has been walking steadily north ever since, for better than an hour, through this inexplicable forest. But when the forest begins at last to lighten, and when he notices—after the fact—that the woods have somehow slowly and imperceptibly changed back into a deciduous forest again, and when he breaks through the final fringe of trees and sees the house directly ahead of him, squatting like a spider, he is hardly surprised at all. He tells himself, with a strange, drugged philosophicality, that he couldn’t really expect to win that easily.

  It doesn’t want to let him go.

  The groceryman returns the next afternoon. For a while he sits out in front of the house in his truck and honks his horn, and then he goes up onto the porch and pounds on the door, and calls through his cupped hands. When he gets no answer, the groceryman goes cautiously inside, pausing to call and hullo every few feet. He goes through the kitchen and the writing room, and stops at the threshold of the living room. It is hot and stuffy here, and the groceryman is already uncomfortable at snooping around inside someone’s house without the resident’s permission—he will go no further. The groceryman calls one last time, loudly, thinking that the resident might be asleep upstairs. There is no answer; it is very silent inside the gloomy house. The groceryman feels uneasy and prickly, as if the air has eyes here, and those eyes are watching him, unblinkingly. He shrugs irritably, shakes his head, and goes back outside, muttering something under his breath. The groceryman unloads a large carton of groceries from his truck, and leaves it inside the enclosed porch, with a bill and a taciturn note pinned to it. As he gets ready to leave, he feels strange again, spooky, and chilled. Then he puts the truck in gear and leaves.

  John stands at the side of the road and watches the groceryman drive away. He answered the first honk of the truck horn, and he has followed the groceryman closely during the groceryman’s walk through the house, speaking to him—at first softly, irritated by the man’s rudeness, and then loudly, shouting in panic—and touching him, seizing him by the arm and trying to turn him around, at last grabbing him roughly by both shoulders and shaking him violently, making his head wobble and rattle like a jack-in-the-box. The man’s flesh is firm under John’s hands, but the groceryman does not notice him, and, save for a slight uneasiness of manner, does not even seem aware that he is being shaken and buffeted. His eyes look through John, not at him. He does not hear John’s voice, even when John screams hoarsely in his ear. Instead, the groceryman shrugs
and shakes his head, and goes back outside. John follows him out to the truck, shouting in anger and fear, but the groceryman doesn’t look around—he puts his truck in gear and leaves. John watches the groceryman drive away; John has become oddly calm, and there is a crooked, grim smile on his face.

  It seems that now he too is a ghost.

  The fog closes in again, and John wanders through the house forever. His mind is clear only occasionally, giving him brief, vivid glimpses of the world with no continuity, like a collection of unrelated snapshots: walking down the stairs, sitting in the overstuffed chair in the living room, looking through the glassed-in doors at the veranda. And then the clouds pile up again and bury him, and the world becomes an oozing myopia. He is swept along by hot, drugged currents of feeling, jazzed by goosed, scurrying emotions. He talks to the people. There are many of them here, bright, eclectic, brash, glittering and garish as a neon sign. Their voices are like the hot, sour blare of a trumpet just missing the high note. He talks to the people:

  He says, .

  Their laughter, gaudy, dazzling, brittle. And their eyes.

  , they say.

  He asks, ?

  Their eyes.

  , they say.

  and

  .

  and

  .

  He is sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor, leaning against the wall. He takes his head in his hands, squeezing the temples. He must think, he must think, but he cannot. And then they are there again, insistent and dazzling, and they say, _____________.

  But he is thinking, he comes to realize that. Somewhere, deep under the surface, sundered from his consciousness, his mind is working logically and well, working continually. And occasionally he is sane enough to be able to listen in on what it is thinking.

  He has a lucid interval. He comes back to his body from a great distance, and finds that he is sitting in the kitchen, and finds that he is thinking, calmly and rationally, that there are two, opposing forces acting upon him. One is the tendency to sink right out of the world, something that has affected him most of his life. But there is another force, opposing it, that has caught him at the narrow place and won’t let him sink all the way out, that is fighting to keep him anchored here. This—that he should stay, not sink—is somewhat similar to what they have been advocating, although it doesn’t translate into words; they definitely belong to the opposing force. Strangely enough, he feels an aversion for the opposing force, the one trying to anchor him to the world, although logically he should feel exactly the opposite. The opposing force is embodied in the house—it wants to keep him. It is also somehow allied with the breath of decay he felt shriveling the forest, although he doesn’t know on what basis he has made the connection. Perhaps it is entropy, he thinks. Ultimate zero, full stop, stasis. You might just as well call it the Devil, it would make little difference. And perhaps his vision is a true one, and the world is destined to die, die in every root and branch, die totally.

  Perhaps the world, life, the continuum, whatever you called it—perhaps it knew that it was going to die. Perhaps every continuum that was about to die sent out seeds, in an effort to perpetuate itself elsewhere. Perhaps that was what he was: a seed. And that was why he’d always kept slipping through the fabric of reality; that was the bias of the continuum acting upon him, a huge, insistent hand trying to push him through, to seed another shore. And it wouldn’t be just him, of course. There would be other seeds everywhere, seeds of everything: people, birds, animals, insects, perhaps even seeds of rocks and trees if the animists were correct. They would be slipping through all the time, vanishing from reality. Who would notice a blade of grass disappearing from a field, who would miss a single tree in a forest, or a bird or a fox, or a bumblebee, or a stone from a mountain? Who would miss him, really? How many people could vanish without anyone even noticing that they’d gone? Thousands, or millions? Or if it was noticed, what could anyone do other than to shrug their shoulders and forget about it? And the seeds would continue to sift through. Perhaps it had been going on for millennia. Perhaps that was how life had come to this world in the beginning, from another dying continuum: a slow seeding over millions of years—unicellular animals, mollusks, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals. And our continuum, knowing its own mortality, immediately beginning to seed in its turn, passing life on. And so it would go, from one level to another, like a stream gradually stairstepping down a many-terraced hill—the level “below” always a little out of phase, a little behind the level “above,” which would explain the virgin spruce forest, if he really had been there for a moment before the anchoring tug of the house had pulled him back. Perhaps when the stream finally got to the bottom of the hill they turned the whole shebang over and started all over again, like an hourglass. Or perhaps it formed a stagnant pool at the bottom and nothing ever moved again—level entropy. Or perhaps there wasn’t any bottom at all. Who knew how it had begun? If it had “begun.” Perhaps it had gone on and would go on forever, world without end. A human mind was not capable of even beginning to grasp the concept of “forever.” Why should a man comprehend the process any more than a dandelion seed whirling through the air, a wheat kernel planted deep in the blind black earth? It was enough to know merely that there was something going on.

  Perhaps there were many people there, perhaps not. Quite possibly it was no better a place than this earth, and problems and situations one was unable to deal with here one would probably still be unable to deal with there. It would not be Eden—it might even be very bad. Even worse than here, in another way. But it would be different. And without the bias of the continuum pushing on him anymore, never letting him stay in one place long enough to put down roots, perhaps some of the foregone conclusions, the inalterable conditions of his own life would also be different.

  Or perhaps not, but there was only one way he’d ever find out.

  He has always fought against the sinking process, peddling desperately to keep his head above the surface, afraid that he was sinking into madness. But what would happen if he let himself go, let go completely, for the first time in his life? Was it possible to sink through madness and out the other side?

  And then he is in the bedroom, lying on the bed, fully dressed. It is night. The cluster of dogwood leaves outside his window has turned into a demon. He can feel the pressure of its soulless, dead-black eyes, he can see the gleam of needle teeth in the dark fox muzzle. He can hear its hungry furnace snuffling as it smells his blood, through the glass. A full moon looms outside the window and forms a leprous alabaster halo for the shock-headed dogwood demon. John struggles to get up on one elbow. His mind is a muddy whirlpool of broken and chaotic thoughts. He knows that there is a strand of thought that he must hold on to, that is the one pertinent thing in an obscurity of distractions. Grimly, he tries to follow the thought through to its conclusion. Suddenly, it is daylight. A robin lands on the windowsill, stares curiously at John, eye to little bright eye, tosses his bill, and flies away. In an eyeblink, it is night again. The moon is in a different, lower quadrant of the window, and the demon looks much bigger—it has flattened its bulk against the pane, and he can hear its sharp diamond tongue probing abrasively against the glass, scritch, scritch, scritch, flickering in the moonlight. John tries to heave himself up to a sitting position, fails, and it is daylight. Harsh grey daylight, showing the thinness of his hands. Rain beats against the window. Dizzied, John squeezes his eyes tightly shut. He keeps them closed for a long time, feeling the shifting play of light and shadow against his eyelids. It is better this way, and easier to think. John laboriously traces the convolutions of the one proper thought, over and over, almost getting it right.

  He opens his eyes. It is night, a moonless night. The stars provide a lactescent, nacred light that sifts down softly through the room, filtering vision through fine cheesecloth. A woman is lying next to him in the big bed, naked, propped lazily on her elbow. She is slender, with short-cropped blonde hair,
and full breasts that look much bigger than they are against her sleek, long-muscled dancer’s body. The starlight burnishes some of her body to streaked, milky marble—her forehead, her cheek, the line of her arm and hip, the tops of her breasts—and mutes the rest into deep and secret velvet shadow: her legs, her belly, her eyes. She smiles at him, a flash of moist lips sliding back from pearl-wet teeth. The rest of the room is crowded with other shapes, male and female, pressing close against the bed. They are all fascinating, intriguing, tantalizing, mysterious, alluring, intensely interesting. Their glittereyes. They smile invitingly, with beckoning comradery.

  John closes his eyes.

  When he opens them again, after a long, stubborn time, it is still starlit night, but the room is empty. He struggles again to get up, and this time he succeeds. He sits on the side of the bed, feet on the floor, breathing heavily. There is a new tension in the air, a menace, a sense of something building tightly to a climax. The house is alive with sound. John can hear people or things running angrily back and forth downstairs, bumping into furniture, careening against the walls. He hears shouts, screams, wails, angry chittering howls. Something is banging and slobbering harshly against the window behind him. He will not turn his head to look. Let go, he tells himself, let go. Abruptly, all the noises stop, and it is totally silent. Alone in the terrifying silence, John sits and waits. Then, very far away, much lower than the bottom of the stairs could possibly be, John hears a footstep, and then another. Something is ascending the stairs, coming up from Hell. The footsteps are very heavy and ponderous; they shake the house at every step, and there is an unpleasant rasping quality to them, as if the feet are almost too heavy to lift. The footsteps have been coming up for miles, for years, for hundreds of years, and now they are close enough so that John can hear the massive, wheezing, steam-puffing, smithy-bellows breathing that goes with them, and the labored, ugly beating of a monstrous heart. The footsteps stop outside the door. Through the harsh reptile breathing, John can hear the scaly rutch of something infinitely hard pressing in against the door, scraping, digging up the wood like a gouge. Slowly, John gets up and walks toward the door, stopping after every step. He puts his fingers against the door-panel, feeling, behind the thin wood, the sluggish beating of the alien heart. He sees that the doorknob is turning, slowly, hesitantly, as if it is being fumbled at by enormous spatulate fingers. Let go, John tells himself, and he reaches out, briskly, and opens the door.