Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  How comforting, I thought, but didn’t say at that first consultation, because when I glanced at Lizzie, she looked more than comforted. She looked hungry, perched on the edge of her chair with her head half over Dr Seger’s desk, so pale, thin, and hard, like a starved pigeon being teased with crumbs. I wanted to grab her hand. I wanted to weep.

  As it turns out, Dr Seger may have been right. Or maybe we got lucky this time. Because that’s the thing about miscarriage: three thousand years of human medical science, and no one knows any fucking thing at all. It just happens, people say, like a bruise, or a cold. And it does, I suppose. Just happen, I mean. But not like a cold. Like dying. Because that’s what it is.

  So for ten days, Dr Seger had us drop tetracyclene tablets down our throats like depth-charges, blasting everything living inside us out. And on that day in DC - we were visiting my cousin, the first time I’d managed to coax Lizzie anywhere near extended family since all this started - we’d gone to the Holocaust Museum, searching for anything strong enough to take our minds off our hunger, our desperate hope that we were scoured, healthy, clean. But it didn’t work. So we went to the Smithsonian. And three people from the front of the ticket line, Lizzie suddenly grabbed my hand and I looked at her, and it was the old Lizzie, or the ghost of her, eyes flashing under their black rims, smile instantaneous, shockingly bright.

  ‘Dairy,’ she said. ‘Right this second.’

  It took me a breath to adjust. I hadn’t seen my wife this way in a long, long while and as I stared, the smile slipped on her face. With a visible effort, she pinned it back in place. ‘Jake. Come on.’

  We paid admission, went racing past sculptures and animal dioramas and parchment documents to the cafes, where we stared at yoghurt in plastic containers - but we didn’t dare eat yoghurt - and cups of tapioca that winked, in our fevered state, like the iced-over surfaces of Canadian lakes. But none of that was what we wanted. We needed a cheddar wheel, a lasagna we could scrape free of pasta and tomatoes so we could drape our tongues in strings of crusted mozzarella. What we settled for, finally, was four giant bags of generic cheese puffs from a 7-11. We sat together on the edge of a fountain and stuffed each other’s mouths like babies, like lovers.

  It wasn’t enough. The hunger didn’t abate in either of us. Sometimes I think it hasn’t since.

  God, it was glorious, though. Lizzie’s lips around my orange-stained fingers, that soft, gorgeous crunch as each individual puff popped apart in our mouths, dusting our teeth and throats while spray from the fountain brushed our faces and we dreamed separate, still-hopeful dreams of children.

  And that, in the end, is why I have to, you see. My two Sams. My lost, loved ones. Because maybe it’s true. It doesn’t seem like it could be, but maybe it is. Maybe, mostly, it just happens. And then, for most couples, it just stops happening one day. And afterwards - if only because there isn’t time - you start to forget. Not what happened. Not what was lost. But what the loss meant, or at least what it felt like. I’ve come to believe that time alone will not swallow grief or heal a marriage. But perhaps filled time …

  In my pocket, my fingers close over the silver key and I take a deep breath of the damp in the air, which is mostly just Sutro Heights damp now that we’re outside. We have always loved it here, Lizzie and I. In spite of everything, we can’t bring ourselves to flee. ‘Let me show you,’ I say, trying not to plead. I’ve taken too long, I think. They’ve got bored. They’ll go back in the house. I lift the ancient, rusted padlock on our garage door, tilt it so I can see the slot in the moonlight and slide the key home.

  It has been months since I’ve been out here - we use the garage for storage, not for our old Nova - and I’ve forgotten how heavy the salt-saturated wooden door is. It comes up with a creak, slides over my head and rocks unsteadily in its runners. How, I’m thinking, did I first realise that the presence in my room was my first, unborn child? The smell, I guess, like an unripe lemon, fresh and sour all at once. Lizzie’s smell. Or maybe it was the song springing unbidden, over and over, to my lips. ‘When I awoke dear. I was mistaken.’ Those things, and the fact that now, these last times, there seem to be two of them.

  The first thing I see, once my eyes adjust, is my grandfather glaring out of his portrait at me. I can even remember the man who painted it; he lived next door to my family when I was little and Lizzie lived down the block. My grandfather called him ‘Dolly’, I don’t know why. Or maybe Dali. I don’t think so, though.

  Certainly, there’s nothing surreal about the portrait. Just my grandfather, his hair thread-thin and wild on his head like a spiderweb swinging free, his lips flat, crushed together, his ridiculous lumpy potato of a body under his perpetually half-zipped judge’s robes. And there are his eyes, one blue, one green, which he once told me allowed him to see 3-D, before I knew that everyone could. A children’s rights activist before there was a name for such things, a three-time candidate for a state bench seat and three-time loser, he’d made an enemy of his daughter, my mother, by wanting a son so badly. And he’d made a disciple out of me by saving Lizzie’s life: turning her father in to the cops, then making sure that he got thrown in jail, then forcing both him and his whole family into counselling, getting him work when he got out, checking in on him every single night, no matter what, for six years, until Lizzie was away and free. Until eight months ago, on the day Dr Seger confirmed that we were pregnant for the third time, his portrait hung beside the Pinocchio clock on the living room wall. Now it lives here. One more casualty.

  ‘Your namesake,’ I say to the air, my two ghosts. But I can’t take my eyes off my grandfather. Tonight is the end for him, too, I realise. The real end, where the ripples his life created in the world glide silently to stillness. Could you have seen them, I want to ask, with those 3-D eyes that saw so much? Could you have saved them? Could you have thought of another, better way? Because mine is going to hurt. ‘His name was Nathan, really. But he called us “Sam”. Your mother and me, we were both “Sam”. That’s why …’

  That’s why Lizzie let me win that argument, I realise. Not because she’d let go of the idea that the first one had to have a name, was a specific, living creature, a child of ours. But because she’d rationalised. Sam was to be the name, male or female. So whatever the first child had been, the second would be the other. Would have been. You see, Lizzie, I think to the air, wanting to punch the walls of the garage, scream to the cliffs, break down in tears. You think I don’t know. But I do.

  If we survive this night, and our baby is still with us in the morning, and we get to meet him someday soon, he will not be named Sam. He will not be Nathan, either. My grandfather would have wanted Sam.

  ‘Goodbye, Grandpa,’ I whisper, and force myself towards the back of the garage. There’s no point in drawing this out, surely. Nothing to be gained. But at the door to the meat-freezer, the one the game-hunter who rented our place before us used to store wax-paper packets of venison and elk, I suddenly stop.

  I can feel them. They’re still here. They have not gone back to Lizzie. They are not hunched near her navel, whispering their terrible, soundless whispers. That’s how I imagine it happening, only it doesn’t feel like imagining. And it isn’t all terrible. I swear I heard it happen to the second Sam. The first Sam would wait, watching me, hovering near the new life in Lizzie like a hummingbird near nectar, then darting forward when I was through singing, or in between breaths, and singing a different sort of song, of a whole other world, parallel to ours, free of terrors or at least this terror, the one that just plain living breeds in everything alive. Maybe that world we’re all born dreaming really does exist, but the only way to it is through a trapdoor in the womb. Maybe it’s better where my children are. God, I want it to be better.

  ‘You’re by the notebooks,’ I say, and I almost smile, and my hand slides volitionlessly from the handle of the freezer door, and I stagger towards the boxes stacked up, haphazard, along the back wall. The top one on the nearest stack is
open slightly, its cardboard damp and reeking when I peel the flaps all the way back.

  There they are. The plain, perfect-bound school composition notebooks Lizzie bought as diaries, to chronicle the lives of her first two children in the 270 or so days before we were to know them. ‘I can’t look in those,’ I say aloud, but I can’t help myself. I lift the top one from the box, place it on my lap, sit down. It’s my imagination, surely, that weight on my knees, as though something else has just slid down against me. Like a child, to look at a photo album. Tell me, Daddy, about the world without me in it. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed. I want to explain. That first notebook, the other one, is almost half my writing, not just Lizzie’s. But this one … I was away, Sam, on a selling trip, for almost a month. And when I came back … I couldn’t. Not right away. I couldn’t even watch your mom doing it. And two weeks later …

  ‘The day you were born,’ I murmur, as though it was a lullaby. Goodnight moon. ‘We went to the redwoods, with the Giraffes.’ Whatever it is, that weight on me, shifts a little. Settles. ‘That isn’t really their name, Sam. Their name is Girard. Giraffe is what you would have called them, though. They would have made you. They’re so tall. So funny. They would have put you on their shoulders to touch EXIT signs and ceiling tiles. They would have dropped you upside down from way up high and made you scream.’ Goodnight nobody. That terrifying, stupid, blank page near the end of that book. What’s it doing there, anyway?

  ‘This was December, freezing cold, but the sun was out. We stopped at a gas station on our way to the woods, and I went to get Bugles, because that’s what Giraffes eat, the ones we know, anyway. Your mom went to the restroom. She was in there a long time. And when she came out, she just looked at me. And I knew.’

  My fingers have pushed the notebook open, pulled the pages apart. They’re damp, too. Half of them are ruined, the words, in multicoloured inks, like pressed flowers on the pages, smeared out of shape, though their meaning remains clear.

  ‘I waited. I stared at your mother. She stared at me. Joseph - Mr Giraffe - came in to see what was taking so long. Your mom just kept on staring. So I said, “Couldn’t find the Bugles.” Then I grabbed two bags of them, turned away, and paid. And your mom got in the van beside me, and the Giraffes put on their bouncy, happy, Giraffe music, and we kept going.

  ‘When we got to the woods, we found them practically empty, and there was this smell, even though the trees were dead. It wasn’t like spring. You couldn’t smell pollen, or see buds, just sunlight and bare branches and this mist floating up, catching on the branches and forming shapes like the ghosts of leaves. I tried to hold your mother’s hand, and she let me at first, and then she didn’t. She disappeared into the mist. The Giraffes had to go find her in the end, when it was time to go home. It was almost dark as we got in the van, and none of us were speaking. I was the last one in. And all I could think, as I took my last breath of that air, was, Can you see this? Did you see the trees, my sweet son, daughter or son, on your way out of the world?

  Helpless, now, I drop my head, bury it in the wet air as though there were a child’s hair there, and my mouth is moving, chanting the words in the notebook on my lap. I only read them once, on the night Lizzie wrote them, when she finally rolled over, with no tantrum, no more tears, nothing left, closed the book against her chest and went to sleep. But I remember them, still. There’s a sketch, first, what looks like an acorn with a dent in the top. Next to it Lizzie has scrawled, ‘You. Little rice-bean.’ On the day before it died. Then there’s the list, like a rosary: ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I don’t get to know you. I’m so sorry for wishing this was over, now, for wanting the bleeding to stop. I’m so sorry that I will never have the chance to be your mother. I’m so sorry you will never have the chance to be in our family. I’m so sorry that you are gone.’

  I recite the next page, too, without even turning to it. The I-don’t-wants: ‘a D & C; a phone call from someone who doesn’t know, to ask how I’m feeling; a phone call from someone who does, to ask how I am; to forget this, ever; to forget you.’

  And then, at the bottom of the page: ‘I love fog. I love seals. I love the ghosts of Sutro Heights. I love my mother, even though. I love Jake. I love having known you. I love having known you. I love having known you.’

  With one long, shuddering breath, as though I’m trying to slip out from under a sleeping cat, I straighten my legs, lay the notebook to sleep in its box, tuck the flaps around it and stand. It’s time. Not past time, just time. I return to the freezer, flip the heavy white lid.

  The thing is, even after I looked in here, the same day I brought my grandfather out and wound up poking around the garage, lifting boxtops, touching old, unused bicycles and cross-country skis, I would never have realised. If she’d done the wrapping in wax paper, laid it in the bottom of the freezer, I would have assumed it was meat, and I would have left it there. But Lizzie is Lizzie, and instead of wax paper, she’d used red and blue construction paper from her classroom, folded the paper into perfect squares with perfect corners, and put a single star on each of them. So I lifted them out, just as I’m doing now.

  They’re so cold, cradled against me. The red package. The blue one. So light. The most astounding thing about the wrapping, really, is that she managed it all. How do you get paper and tape around nothing and get it to hold its shape? From another nearby box, I lift a gold and green blanket. I had it on my bottom bunk when I was a kid. The first time Lizzie lay on my bed - without me in it, she was just lying there - she wrapped herself in this. I spread it on the cold cement floor, and gently lay the packages down.

  In Hebrew, the word for miscarriage translates, literally, as something dropped. It’s no more accurate a term than any of the others humans have generated for the whole, apparently incomprehensible, process of reproduction, right down to ‘conception’. Is that what we do? Conceive? Do we literally dream our children? Is it possible that miscarriage, finally, is just waking up to the reality of the world a few months too soon?

  Gently, with the tip of my thumbnail, I slit the top of the red package, fold it open. It comes apart like origami, so perfect, arching hack against the blanket. I slit the blue package, pull back its flaps. Widening the opening. One last parody of birth.

  How did she do it, I wonder? The first time, we were home, she was in the bathroom. She had me bring Ziplock baggies, ice. For testing, she said. They’ll need it for testing. But they’d taken it for testing. How had she got it back? And the second one had happened - finished happening in a gas station bathroom somewhere between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Muir Woods. And she’d said nothing, asked for nothing. ‘Where did she keep you?’ I murmur, staring down at the formless, red-grey spatters, the bunched-up tissue that might have been tendon one day, skin one day. Sam, one day. In the red package, there is more, a hump of frozen something with strings of red spiralling out from it, sticking to the paper, like the rays of an imploding sun. In the blue package, there are some red dots, a few strands of filament. Virtually nothing at all.

  The song comes, and the tears with them. You’ll never know. Dear. How much I love you. Please don’t take. Please don’t take. I think of my wife upstairs in our life, sleeping with her arms around her child. The one that won’t be Sam, but just might live.

  The matches slide from my pocket. Pulling one out of the little book is like ripping a blade of grass from the ground. I scrape it to life, and its tiny light warms my hand, floods the room, flickering as it sucks the oxygen out of the damp. Will this work? How do I know? For all I know, I am imagining it all. The miscarriages were bad luck, hormone deficiencies, a virus in the blood, and the grief that got in me was at least as awful as what got in Lizzie, it just lay dormant longer. And now it has made me crazy.

  But if it is better where you are, my Sams. And if you’re here to tell the new one about it, to call him out. ..

  ‘The other night, dear,’ I find myself saying, and then I’m singing it, like a Shabba
t blessing, a Hanukkah song, something you offer to the emptiness of a darkened house to keep the dark and the emptiness back one more week, one more day. ‘As I lay sleeping. I dreamed I held you. In my arms.’

  I lower the match to the red paper, to the blue, and as my children melt, become dream, once more, I swear I hear them sing to me.

  for both of you

  Glen Hirshberg lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. His novelette, ‘Mr Dark’s Carnival’, which was first printed in Ash-Tree Press’s Shadows and Silence and later appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Honor: Fourteenth Annual Collection, was nominated for both the International Horror Guild Award and the World Fantasy Award. A second novelette, ‘Struwwelpeter’, appeared originally on SciFi.Com and has been selected for both The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Thirteen. His latest-novelette, ‘Dancing Men’, will appear in Tor’s 2003 anthology, The Dark, and his first novel, The Snowman’s Children, is published in the United States by Carroll & Graf. Currently he is putting the final touches to a collection of ghost stories and working on a new novel. About ‘The Two Sams’, he admits: ‘This is probably the most personal story I have put to paper, and therefore, hopefully, the most self-explanatory. Most of my ghost stories originally were conceived to be told to my students, but I have only tried reading this aloud once. Never again…’

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  In the Hours after Death

  JEFF VANDERMEER

  I

  In the first hour after death, the room is so still that every sound holds a terrible clarity, like the tap of a knife against glass. The soft pad of shoes as someone walks away and closes the door is profoundly solid -each short footstep weighted, distinct. The body lies against the floor, the sightless eyes staring down into the wood as if some answer has been buried in the grain. The back of the head is mottled by the shadows of the trees that sway outside the open window. The trickle of red from the scalp that winds its way down the cheek, to puddle next to the clenched hand, is as harmless now, leached of threat, as if it were coloured water. The man’s features have become slack, his mouth parted slightly, his expression surprised. The wrinkles on his forehead form ridges of superfluous worry. His trumpet lies a few feet away … From outside the window, the coolness of the day brings the green-gold scent of lilacs and crawling vines. The rustle of leaves. The deepening of light. A hint of blue through the trees. After a time, a mouse, fur ragged and one eye milky-white, sidles across the floor, sits on its haunches in front of the body and sniffs the air. The mouse circles the man. It explores the hidden pockets of the man’s grey suit, trembles atop the shoes, nibbles at the laces, sticks its nose into a pant cuff. A metallic sound, faint and chaotic, rises through the window. The mouse stands unsteadily on its hind legs and sniffs the air again, then scurries back to its hole underneath the table. The sound intensifies, as of many instruments lurching together in drunken surprise. Perhaps the noise startled the mouse, or perhaps the mouse was frightened by some changed aspect of the man himself. The man’s chin has begun to sprout tendrils of dark green fungi that mimic the texture of hair, curling and twisting across the man’s face while the music comes ever closer. The tendrils move in concert. The clash of sounds has more unity than raw cacophony, yet no coherence. It seems as if several people tuning their instruments have begun to play their own separate, unsynchronised melodies. Somewhere in the welter of pompous horns and trumpets, a violin whines dimly. The tendrils of fungi wander in lazy attempts to colonise the blood. The music rollicks along, by turns melancholy and defiant. The man hears nothing, of course; the blood has begun to crust across his forehead. The smell of the room has become foetid, damp. The shadows have grown darker. The table in the corner - upon which lies a half-eaten sandwich - casts an ominous shade of purple. Eventually the music reaches a crescendo beneath the window. It has a questioning nature, as if the people playing the instruments are looking at one another, asking each other what to do next. The man’s face moves a little from the vibration. His fungi beard is smiling. In a different light, he might almost look alive, intently staring at the floorboards, into the apartments below. Bells toll dimly from the Religious Quarter, announcing dinner prayers. The afternoon is almost gone. The room feels colder as the light begins to leave it. The music becomes less hesitant. Within minutes, the music is clanking up the stairs, towards the apartment. The music sounds as if it is running. It is running. The tendrils, in a race with the music, have spread further, faster, covering all of the man’s face with a dark green mask. As if misinterpreting their success, they do not spread out over the rest of his body, but instead build on the mask, until it juts hideously from the face. The door begins to buckle before a blaring of horns, a torrid stitching of violins. Someone puts a key into the lock and turns the doorknob. The door opens. The music enters in all its chaotic glory. The man lies perfectly still on the floor beside the almost dry puddle of blood. A forest of legs and shoes surround him. The music becomes a dirge, haunted by the ghost of some strange fluted instrument. The musicians circle the body, their distress flowing through their music, their long straight shadows playing across the man’s body. But for a tinge of green, the man’s face has regained its form. The fungus has disappeared. Who could have known this would happen? Only the dead man, who had been looking into the grain as if some mystery lay there. The dead man lurches to his feet and picks up his trumpet. Smiles. Takes his hat from the table and places it on his head, over the blood. Wets his lips. He puts the trumpet to his mouth as all the other instruments become silent. He begins to blow, the tone clear yet discordant, his own music but not in tune. The faces of his friends come into focus, surround him, buzzing with words. His friends laugh. They hug him, tell him how glad they are it was all a joke; they had heard the most terrible things; please, do not scare them that way again. They did not know whether to play for a funeral or a rumourless resurrection. Unable to decide, they had played for both at once. He laughs, pats the nearest on die back. Play, he says. But he is not part of them. Play, he implores. But he is not one of them. And they play -marching out the door with him, they play. He is no longer one of them. When the door closes, the room is as empty as before, although the stairs echo with music. Over time, the sound fades. It fades until it is not even the memory of a sound, and then not even that. Nothing moves in the room. The man has been returned to himself. This is the first hour of death in the city of Ambergris. You may not rest for long. You may, in a sense, become yourself again. Worst of all, you may remember every detail, but be unable to do anything about it.