When you lower your lips to her neck, she throws her head back. “Ah,” she says.
Her skin tears easily, onionskin paper under a quill pen.
She tenses briefly as you begin to drink, but makes no sound beyond a soft moan; and not for the first time you wonder if you have found something more than a victim here. Her hands still grip your shoulders and briefly your spirit soars as you try to make yourself think about sharing yourself, your everlasting life, with her.
But her blood is spicy and hot with the sharp odor of dust on hot metal and it has been days since you last fed. Before you are aware of what you are doing, her hands have released you and her arms have dropped limply. There is still plenty of blood, but it cools rapidly. For a moment you pause, bitterly chastising yourself for your lack of feeling, of restraint.
Then you return to feeding. You will have to start over again because of this, and it may be some time before you eat again. And what is the point of chastising yourself, anyway? You are out all night, you have no real friends, and you cannot maintain any kind of relationship. How does this make you any different from any other musician?
You let the body drop into a pile of empty boxes then pick up your guitar case. As you walk out of the alley, you brush your hair back behind one ear.
Geoff Yarrow is a man who aids you in a time of despair, but for Colin what begins as a way out of his madness and grief becomes harrowing path into something even deeper and stranger . . .
THE MOON WILL LOOK STRANGE
LYNDA E. RUCKER
They were draining the fish pond in the tiny walled garden outside his window. Colin awoke to the sound of their voices, Jimena, who owned the house with her husband Tomas, and that of Madih, the young Moroccan man who carried out repairs around the property. Colin flung open the wooden shutters and his first thought was that Samantha would be outraged—even at the savage age of six and a half she couldn’t bear to see any living thing suffer—and then he remembered, and wondered where such a cruel and unbidden thought had come from. Not for one moment, night or day, sleeping or awake, did he ever forget that she was dead. Not even in his dreams.
He shouted at them, “Why are you killing the fish? Does Tomas know what you’re doing?”
Jimena and Madih looked back at him, startled and uncomprehending. Colin backed away from the window and realized he was naked. He fumbled for a pair of shorts, fought with the heavy wooden door of his room and staggered out into the burning Granada sunshine.
“The fish!” he shouted again. He imagined them, the brilliant orange goldfish gasping and dying on the concrete floor of the pool. They gaped at him, then Jimena said something sharp to Madih and they turned around. “Que?” he said, mustering one of the only Spanish words that he knew. They ignored him, and it wasn’t as if he’d be able to understand them if they responded anyway. His will flagged along with his indignation, faded so completely that he lacked even the gumption to take his lunatic and half-dressed self back indoors. He stood there instead, under the burning sun, watching them kill the fish, and thought of Samantha.
He’d never meant to end up in Spain. That was an understatement, the punctuation to a whole long series of understatements, of things not meant to happen. After Ann left him he’d gone to the airport in a kind of fugue, thinking only to get away. He carried nothing with him save for his passport and wallet, and he paid cash for a one-way ticket to London. Just like that, and he felt like giggling with glee at how easy it all was. He supposed the purchase would see him flagged in a Homeland Security file somewhere, just the sort of thing he’d have railed against once, when he had time to feel outrage about anything besides what had been taken from him. As the green Oregon landscape fell away below him a sense of lightness seized him: he thought of his things, all the stuff you accumulate living a life, abandoned in the little apartment off Belmont Avenue that he and Ann and Samantha had shared, and of the bar at Luna filling up and him just not there, not pulling pints of Black Butte, not mixing shit like lemon drops for customers as high-maintenance as their drink orders. He thought of other places where he would not be, like he was shuffling a series of snapshots: he would not be at the Mount Tabor Pub, or flipping through stacks of vinyl at Music Millennium, or at the dinosaur display at the science museum with Samantha. He imagined rubbing each image out as he thought it. He was a man with no past now.
At Heathrow the noise and lights had hurt his ears. He slept for a while in an arrivals lounge and then spoke to an Easy Jet agent who said she could get him on a cheap flight to Granada right away if he got himself over to Stansted immediately. His flight was only about two-thirds full, so he was able to ensconce himself in the back far from the mirth and drunkenness of the holidaymakers claiming the rest of the seats. He knew next to nothing about Spain, except that if he could manage to make it to the tip he could catch a ferry to Morocco, where he could disappear. Like Burroughs or Bowles, lost in Marrakesh, or even deeper into Africa, where tourists never trod. It wasn’t so easy as it once was to vanish off the face of the earth, but he felt certain he could do it there.
But first things first: he needed sleep. He took a bus into the city and got off at the top of a narrow walled cobblestone street. The flight of stairs to his left led straight into the past: a maze of walled, whitewashed streets, ancient and defiant, where the last of the Moors fled as their world vanished around them, in the shadow of the magnificent Alhambra Palace just across the canyon, an implacable yet ghostly reminder of what was, what might have been and what would never be. A fitting place for him to disappear in as well, in the soothing, dizzying, exotic maze the bus driver had called the Albaicin. A scrawny graffitied cat, scrawled in various stages of distress at this turn and that, wore a legend reminding him that FUMAR MATA and that much he could figure out because he’d seen it on a crumpled cigarette pack—smoking kills. Or not, he reasoned. Samantha hadn’t been a smoker, after all. At six, she’d not had time to pick up the habit. He rounded a corner and saw the poor feline hanging from a chalk noose. The white walls crumbled round boarded up windows, and he dodged dog shit smeared on cobblestones. He couldn’t understand the words scrawled on walls but images of the Pope as devil, and of Che Guevara, did the speaking for him. He followed a trail of Arabic script. Was he already in Morocco? He reeled, feverish, as the sun climbed. He did not know what he ought to do. A child’s laughter mocked him round corners but when he tried to follow no one was there.
At last he came upon a massive wooden door with a sign above: he couldn’t read what it said but someone had plastered a Lonely Planet sticker on an upstairs window. He hammered at the door for a long time, until a stooped Spanish man he later came to know as Tomas appeared. Colin managed to stammer out a request for a room, which Tomas fortunately understood. Colin pressed his remaining euros into Tomas’s hand and followed him through the doorway, and then another, and into the walled garden. In the room off the goldfish pond he eased his sweaty body between thick white sheets. When he woke it was dark and he was starving. He didn’t know where he was, and he thought, I’ve done something insane. For one instant panic rose like bile in the back of his throat and then, his heart still hammering, he laughed. Why not do something insane, when fate had dealt him such an insane turn in the first place? Colin glanced at his wristwatch and saw he’d slept, not for the day, but the day and the night and the next day, and now it was night again. He stumbled out of his room and the moon hung high above him and he heard Yarrow’s voice: You will know, he said, you will know because the moon will look strange.
Colin finally went inside and brewed strong black coffee, two cups in the dark before opening the windows again and peering out at the fish pond carnage. They had a large trash can, filled with water, and were scooping the fish out in nets. Not killing them after all, then. They were merely cleaning the pond, which was green with algae and might have been bottomless for all you could see beneath the surface. He briefly considered feeling foolish but concluded it was a waste of
his time. Jimena and Madih thought he was a lunatic anyway. And who was he to say they were wrong?
He donned a shirt that didn’t smell too bad and headed out without another word to them. Once again he’d slept much of the day away, and the sun was low in the sky when he slipped into a bar off the Plaza Larga, where he stood at the counter, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and gobbling up free plates of tapas. The alcohol didn’t do much, just numbed his senses enough to make it bearable. Clearly the harder stuff was easy enough to come by: he needed only to look at the wasted, furtive desperate faces of some passersby, of squatters from the abandoned Romany caves up in the hills, to be certain. But he was afraid of getting trapped here. He ought to get a move on in fact, tomorrow or next day at the latest—so he kept telling himself. He imagined someone would come for him—and by someone he meant Ann and her family—tipped off by a trail of debit card deductions from a rapidly shrinking account.
But no one did. Still, this wasn’t even close to the oblivion he’d dreamed. He had once seen a program on television about nomads in the Moroccan desert. He wouldn’t need euros or his debit card and no one would think to look for him there. His thoughts spiraled down like this, as they always did when he drank at the bar off the Plaza Larga. Other bars inspired other types of thoughts, and all were good enough for what he really needed, which was not to think about why he couldn’t seem to get up in the morning and stick out his thumb and hitch a ride farther south. Because he thought Samantha might be lost somewhere in the Albaicin, and that was crazy, and yet he wasn’t leaving if there was any possibility that he could be right. Yarrow had never said how he would know, except for the part about the moon. But Colin knew it was her. It wasn’t only seeing: he’d glimpsed her in his peripheral vision, sure, rounding corners—the heel of her yellow sandals, a flash of the blue T-shirt she’d got down at Newport the last time the three of them went whale watching, the one she loved so much they’d buried her in it. He could smell her, too. Sometimes he could hear her, the soft songs she’d whisper under her breath when she played by herself or was otherwise occupied and unaware of anyone’s attention on her. Any time after dusk was a good time for her, and so he liked to be good and drunk by the time dusk rolled around. Because while thinking of her made him realize what people really meant when they said dumb meaningless things like “He loved her more than life itself,” because he knew the sound and the smell of her was the result of some miracle he’d brought about with the help of Geoff Yarrow, he was afraid of her as well, afraid of what he and Yarrow had done.
He was pretty sure that after it happened, he and Ann wouldn’t have survived as a couple anyway. He found he couldn’t bear to look at her and see his own grief reflected. The first time he’d slept with someone he met at a club, not telling her about Samantha, not telling her where he worked or even his name, he felt he had turned into someone else, and from that moment on he started to think about disappearing. When he came home the next morning Ann was dressing for work and did not even bother to ask where he’d been. It seemed stupid to him that they still did things like going to work, or grocery shopping, but they did, because what was the alternative? He wanted to find out.
Sleeping with nameless women he met in clubs hadn’t torn them apart, though. Yarrow took care of that. The night Ann came home unexpectedly had done him in. When she walked into the bathroom and saw the viscera cooling in the tub. She freaked out like he’d just slaughtered somebody there, even though anybody could see it was just small animal parts. She said she didn’t care. Said she was leaving.
“I only wanted to bring her back to us,” he pleaded. “Yarrow and me, we were doing some—magick,” the k at the end of the word like an unfamiliar aftertaste. Yarrow always called it that: magick. Colin was sure that once Ann understood that she wouldn’t be mad any longer. “You’re sick.” That was all she would say. That, and “Yarrow’s sick too. I hate you both.” She was frightened but wouldn’t let him touch her. Later, of course, he realized she’d been right. It always went wrong in stories, after all, like that one, about the monkey’s paw. He went to see Yarrow, to tell him to stop the experiments, that he’d changed his mind. The experiments had increasingly frightened him, anyway, even as they’d seem to embolden Yarrow. What had begun as a way out of his madness had come to seem like a harrowing path into something deeper. The last thing they’d done, the thing with the live rats that left the mess in the tub, had left him feeling sick and shaken for days.
Yarrow laughed, yellow teeth clacking behind thin lips, and said, “Too late, brother. It was always too late.”
Yarrow said it wouldn’t be like he was thinking. Not some dripping horror out of those old fifties comics. He said that bringing her back involved rending the very fabric of time and space. He said it casually, like he was talking about having another cup of coffee. It was the kind of thing Ann would have laughed at in different circumstances. She had no patience for metaphysical flights of fancy, for New Age speculation. Not that Yarrow embodied the daffy benevolence of a New Age guru. Yarrow was bad. Ann had said so the first time they’d met him, years ago, at a show at Berbati’s. Colin couldn’t remember the band that played but he remembered Yarrow sidling up to them and striking up a conversation and how Ann excused herself and didn’t come back until Yarrow had gotten bored and moved on. “If I were a dog I could’ve smelled it on him,” she said. “I’d growl at him if he walked into the room.” Colin wondered how to tell her he’d given Yarrow their number and planned to hang out with him the next day. Yarrow had a great collection of ’60s psychedelia on vinyl, he’d said, stuff you couldn’t find anywhere nowadays, and they’d talked about Fantagraphics comics and Feral House books. Yarrow said he knew a guy that used to write for them. He was cool; Colin couldn’t understand why Ann was being so weird about it all. Recently he’d looked back on the encounter and thought, did he deliberately pick us out? Was he planning to use us? Did he foresee it, or worse, did he make it happen? Did my talking to Yarrow that night lead to everything that followed, to Samantha’s conception and birth and her running in front of the car? To the culmination of Yarrow’s great experiment, at his expense, at the expense of them all. He’d considered the incident over and over, how Samantha’s hand had slipped from his, how he’d let his attention wander for just a moment or two. Ann never said she blamed him. She never said much of anything, really. It would have been easier; he could have grown indignant and defended himself, convincing himself in the process that he was blameless.
Colin remembered how Yarrow had grinned at him the night he went to him following the bathtub debacle, those yellow teeth, the thin face and thin fingers and thin body racked by coughing fits only interrupted when he spoke or drew another drag off the hand-rolled cigarette that perpetually dangled from one hand. “I’m dying, too, you know,” he said. “Not in that we’re-all-dying bullshit way, but soon. Within a year, the doctor says. Think anybody’ll care enough to bring me back?” Colin didn’t answer. Not for the first time he wondered how old Yarrow might be: forty, or sixty, or more, or less. He had an agelessness about him that made him seem immortal. And, Colin thought: he looks just like a wolf. A lanky, starving, vicious wolf. He’s going to eat me alive. Now. Colin said, “Help me.”
Some tourists at the other end of the bar were talking to him. It took him a while to realize it. He wondered how they’d known he spoke English, but everywhere he went people seemed to know he didn’t belong there. They moved down toward him with their drinks and soon the five of them were talking louder and louder and shrieking with unfunny laughter. One of the women was especially attractive, with a strong profile that reminded him of Ann. He thought about trying to sleep with her but then pictured himself as he looked at that moment: seedy and drunk, alcohol and nicotine seeping from his pores. Maybe seedy and drunk was her type—you never knew—but he somehow doubted it. She and her friends were all American college students on a semester abroad and he saw in a flash his role in their story of
this night. He was the weird and dissolute old guy, well past thirty, maybe even thirty-five. Once he realized this he started to play it up. Apparently seedy and drunk was her type. He couldn’t remember what he’d said or done to close the deal or what path they took to the place where she was staying but somehow he was in her bed, she was under him and his cock felt harder than it ever had before and she was making noises that he guessed were pleasure, and then he came like all his life was pouring out of him into her. She was saying something but he couldn’t hear her above the roaring in his ears. All at once it was a wolf’s face he saw beneath him, and the grin stretching across yellowed teeth belonged to Yarrow. Yet her voice, not Yarrow’s, reached him, and before he could understand he started telling her “sorry, sorry,” because he figured he’d done something wrong, and she said it again, “You’re hurting me.”
“God, I’m sorry,” he said again, and rolled off her. “It’s okay,” she said. She was waiting for him to say something else, he could tell, but he couldn’t. She said, “God, that was fantastic” and when he didn’t reply she flounced over onto one side. He felt bad, but lay quietly until it sounded like she’d stopped faking being asleep and really was, and he slipped out of her narrow bed and into the adjoining room. A clock blinked in a corner; it was not even midnight yet, though it felt very late indeed. He had a moment of panic fumbling with the unfamiliar lock, but saw the keys on a nearby table, and he let himself out.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 53
