II
In the second hour after death, the man finds himself with his musician friends playing a concert in a public park. A crowd has gathered, some standing, others kneeling or sitting on benches. The trumpet is hot and golden in the man’s hands. With each breath he blows into his trumpet, he feels the surge of an unidentifiable emotion and a detail from his past appears in his mind. The man feels as if he were filling up with Life, each breath enhancing him rather than maintaining him. He remembers his name - the round, generous vowels of it - but resists the urge to shout it out. A name is a good foundation on which to build. The members of the audience are cheerful smudges compared to the clear, sharp lines of his friends as they move in time-honoured synchronicity with their instruments. Their names, too, pop into his head - each a tiny explosion of pleasure. Soon, he swims in a sea of names: mother, father, brother, daughter, postman, baker, bartender, butcher, shopkeeper … he smiles the radiant smile of a man who has recalled his life and found it good. This is the pinnacle of the second hour, although not all are so lucky. To some, the knowledge of identity seems to be escaping through their pores, each exhaled thought just another casualty of the emptying. The man, however, is not so truthful with himself. He smells the honeysuckle, tastes the pipe smoke from a passer-by, hears the tiny bells of an anklet tinkling through a pause in the music and does not wonder why these sensations are dull, muffled. His friends’ faces are so near and sharp. Why should he worry about the rest? The blur of the world shouldn’t be his concern. The instruments that seem so cruel, all honed edges, the metal reflecting at odd angles to create horrible disfigurements of his face? Why, it is just a trick of the shadows. The quickness of his breath? Why, it is just the aftermath of musical epiphany. The fluttering of his eyelids. The sudden pallor. The smudge of green that he wipes with irritation from his cheek .. . When the concert ends and the crowds disperse under the threat of night, the man is quick to nod and laugh and join in one last ragged musical salute. An invitation down narrow streets to a cafe for a drink elicits a desperate gratitude - he slaps the backs of his friends, nods furiously, already beginning to lose the names again: pennies fallen through a hole in a shirt pocket. On the way to the cafe, he notices how strangely the city now speaks to him, in the voices of innuendo and suggestion, all surfaces unknown, all buildings crooked or deformed or worse. The sidewalk vendors are ciphers. The passers-by count for less than shadows; he cannot look at them directly, his gaze a repulsing magnet. He clutches his trumpet, knuckles white. He would like to play it, bring the jovial wide vowels of his name once more into focus, but he cannot. The names of his friends fast receding, his laughter becomes by turns forced, nervous, sad, and then brittle. When they reach the cafe, the man looks around the beer-strewn table at his friends and wonders how he fell in with such amiable strangers. They call him by a name he barely remembers. The sky fills with a darkness that consists of the weight of all the thoughts that have left him. The man wraps his jacket tight. The streetlamps are cold yellow eyes peering in through the window. The conversations at the table tighten around the man in layers, each sentence less and less to do with him. Now he cannot look at them. Now they run away to the edge of his vision like a trickle of blood from a wound. The man’s last image of his dead wife leaves him, his daughter’s memory lost in the same moment. Even the dead do not want to die. Stricken, face animated by fear, he stands and announces that he must leave, he must depart, he must go home, although thoughts of the grainy apartment floor leave a dread like ice in his bowels .. . this, then, is the last defiant act of the second hour: to state a determination to take action, even though you will never take that action. The world has become a mere construct - a hollow reed created that you might breathe. You may hear echoes of a strange and sibilant music, coursing like an undercurrent through inanimate objects. This music may bring tears to your eyes. It may not. Regardless, you are now entering the third hour of death.
III
In the third hour after death, all other memories having been emptied and extinguished, the repressed memory of lifelessness returns, although the man denies the truth of it. Denies the sting of splinters against his face, the taste of sawdust, the comfort of the cool floorboards. He thinks it is a bad dream and mutters to himself that he will just walk a little longer to clear up the headaches pulsing through his head. The man still holds his trumpet. Every few steps, he stops to look at it. He is trying to remember what he once used it for. The third hour can last for a very long time. After a while, staring at his trumpet, an unquenchable sadness rises over him until he is engulfed in a sorrow so deep it must be borne because nothing better lies beyond it. It is the sorrow of lost details; the darkness of it hints at the echoes of memories now gone. Indirectly, the man can sense what grieves him, but die very glittering reflection of its passage is enough to blind him. To him, it feels as if the natural world has made him sad, for he has wandered into a park and the sky far above through the branches seethes with the light of a restless moon. If the man could only see his way to the centre of a single memory and hold it in his mind, he might understand what has happened to him. Instead, from the edge of his attention, the absence of mother, father, wife, daughter, leaves only outlines. It is too much to bear. It must be borne … In some cases, recognition may take the form of violent acts - one last convulsion against the inevitable. But not in the man’s case. In him, the sorrow only deepens, for he has begun to suspect the truth. The man wanders through gardens and courtyards, through tree-lined neighbourhoods and along city-tamed streams, all touched equally by the blank expanse of night. He is without thought except to avoid thought, without purpose except to avoid purpose. He does not tire - nothing without will can ever tire -and as he walks, he begins to touch what he passes. He runs his hands through the scruffy tops of bushes. He rubs his face against the trunk of a tree. He follows the line of a sidewalk crack with his finger. As the night progresses, a tightness enters his face, a self-aware phosphorescence. When he leans down to float his hand through a fountain pool, his face wavers in the water like a green-tinged second moon. Passers-by run away or cross the street at his approach. He has no opinion on this; it does not upset or amuse him. He is rapidly becoming Other: Otherwhere, Otherflesh. His trumpet? Long ago fallen from a distracted grasp . .. Eventually, the trailing hand will find something of more than usual interest. For the man, this occurs when he sits down on a wooden bench and the touch of the grain on his palm brings a familiarity welling up through his fingertips. He runs his arms across the wood. He strokes the wood, trying to form a memory from before the sorrow. He lies down on the bench and presses his face against the grain .. . until he sees his apartment room and the blood pooling in the foreground of his vision and knows that he is dead. Then the man sits up, his receding sorrow replaced by nothing. Tendrils of fungi rise from their hiding places inside his body. The man waits as they curl across his face, his torso, his arms, his legs. And he sees the night for possibly the first time ever. And he sees them coming out from the holes in the night. But he does not flinch. He does not run. He no longer even tries to breathe. He no longer tries to be anything other than what he is. For this is the last phase of the third hour of death. After the third hour, you will never be unhappy again. You will never know pain. You will never have to endure the sting of an unkind word. Every muscle, every sinew, every bone, every blood vessel in your body will relax to let in the darkness. When they come for you, as they surely will, you will finally understand, under the cool weavings of the tendrils, what a good thing this can be. You will finally understand that there is no fourth hour after death. And you will marvel that the world could be so still, so silent, so clear.
Jeff VanderMeer has had work appear in ten languages in seventeen countries, in such anthologies and magazines as Dark Voices 5, Dark Terrors, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Seven, Nebula Awards 30, Infinity Plus: The Anthology, Asimov’s SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Interzone and The Third Alternative
. His hook, City of Saints & Madmen, garnered praise from many critics and ranked fourth on SF Site’s list of the Top 10 Books of 2001. It was also a Locus recommended collection. Other recent volumes from the World Fantasy Award-winning author include the mass-market paperback Veniss Underground, also from Prime, and the non-fiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat? from Cosmos. He has also completed work as co-editor on two new projects: Leviathan 3 (Ministry of Whimsy/ Prime) and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (Chimeric), both released in 2002. VanderMeer also recently placed seventh on Locus Online’s controversial list of the top ten writers of fantasy/SF short fiction. Seven just happens to be his lucky number. ‘ “In the Hours after Death” is marginally set in Ambergris,’ he explains, ‘the imaginary city that I have written about for the last ten years. I wrote it after completing another Ambergris story, “The Cage”, which is very much about death. So, thinking about death late one night, as one sometimes does, I came across a story in an old Dedalus fiction collection - Austrian decadents, I think it was - that had the line “In the hour after death” in the first paragraph. I immediately closed the book without finishing the story and wrote the first draft of “In the Hours after Death”. In it I was, I suppose, creating a wake for “The Cage” and getting my mood and thoughts down on paper. Luckily, my story in no way resembles the decadent story that provided the starting point for it.’
<
Under My Skin
LES DANIELS
I
The six apes sat around the conference table while they waited for their meeting to be called to order. One of them began to scratch and grunt, but he slipped back into silence when the others stared him down. This was no time for clowning: there was money at stake. It was quiet in the boardroom - almost too quiet. Finally the tallest, sleekest and handsomest of the great primates shuffled to his feet and cleared his throat. He handed each of the others a thick sheaf of white paper as he began to speak.
‘This is the first meeting of The Gorilla Gang,’ he said, ‘but if we work together it will not be the last. You have been chosen because each one of you is an expert in his field. You are the best of your breed, gentlemen, and you deserve to be congratulated. I applaud you!’ He pounded his gigantic hands together as he looked around the room. His fur, with its beautiful tints of red and gold, seemed almost afire where it was touched by bars of sunlight streaming through the Venetian blinds. The boss looked like a leader, Jack admitted to himself, but that was probably nothing but the skin.
‘Gentlemen, I suggest we remove our heads.’ The boss reached for his massive, hairy cranium and yanked it upwards; his five followers acted in imitation. ‘Monkey see, monkey do,’ thought Jack with just a trace of rancour.
‘I appreciate the gesture of solidarity you made when you all agreed to arrive in full costume, and it’s good publicity too. The press boys got some swell photos,’ the group’s leader continued. ‘But now we’re on our own and these heads are just too darned hot. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s passed out from wearing one, especially when I had a dumb director who was trying to be a tough guy.’ There was laughter all around the table. ‘You’ve got to be able to breathe, am I right? Sure, smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.’
With his head off, the boss was just an ordinary guy named Bill Wilson. His hair was blond and his eyes were blue, and he probably thought he was good-looking enough to be an actor, Jack suspected, but not the kind of actor he had turned out to be. Like the rest of them, he was just a monkey man, with only the suit he owned standing between him and the unemployment line. Wilson had been lucky, though. When the war came he’d been rated 4-F, because of an old hip injury that he said helped him with his ape walk, and so while others like Jack were sweating in real jungles, actually fighting for their lives, Bill Wilson waltzed right into the best role any of them was ever likely to see.
The Gorilla Girl was what they call a sleeper, a picture that didn’t cost much but took in a lot at the box office. Some of the critics even liked it, because it wasn’t about the female monster they had expected, but about a beautiful girl who used the brute beast she’d raised from a chimp (people thought it worked that way) to take revenge on the men who’d killed her lover. It had been an easy performance for Wilson, Jack surmised. After all, how tough could it be to show affection for his co-star, an imported beauty with a fake name, fabulous hermans and a sultry style? Yet there had even been talk of an Oscar nomination for Wilson, although Jack suspected that was just a press agent’s dream. Still, when Wilson and What’s-Her-Name had died in each other’s arms, their bodies riddled with vigilante bullets, there wasn’t a dry seat in the house. The Gorilla Girl had made Bill Wilson the King of the Monkey Men, and that was that.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 31
