Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  Doubtless I must have been an odd sight to any observer; a grinning middle-aged woman with thin limbs, scrambling wildly along the shoreline. The fact is that I did not care. I was in the grip of a wild exultation. Part of me was unsure whether I was simply overcome with a sense of relief at having survived operating on myself.

  There was a natural ledge set in the cliff face ahead of me. It was easily reached by clambering over some boulders and proved to be the perfect vantage point. I settled down on the rough surface, using my raincoat as a cushion on which to sit. I fairly tore the headscarf off me and my fingers worked on the sutures. I cut them away with tiny scissors and eagerly unpicked the strands with my long painted fingernails. Then I pulled back the V-shaped flap of skin. As I did so I closed my old eyes in order to see the world purely through my new one.

  The light was so intense, so white, and yet so cold, that I screamed with shock. It seemed that the surface of my brain was freezing over.

  A moment before, the sea was a foaming expanse of gently rolling waves. The next it was a solid white mass of ice stretching to the horizon, like that of the Arctic wastes or the surface of some frozen moon at the edge of the solar system. I now opened my old eyes too but my overall sight remained unaffected as if, with the dominant contribution of my Third Eye to the other two, I saw a new dimension for the first time. Only when I covered my forehead with my palm did the sea again become liquid and its waves break upon the shore beneath me.

  And the sky! Before it had been dull, cloaked with low gray clouds, oppressive, and trapping the sticky heat beneath its leaden folds. Now it was crystalline blue, clear and vivid, a sheen of gaseous frost beneath abysmal outer space. Starlight shone straight through the chill and thin atmosphere, even now in the daytime.

  Far away, at the limit of my vision, there was a great wall of ice. It looked like a frozen continent visible at the horizon’s edge. Was it just my imagination or did it advance closer, albeit almost imperceptibly, as I gazed across the expanse separating it from the shoreline? Its motion was like that of the minute hand of a clock; so gradual that it exists on the borderland of optical illusion and reality.

  I pulled down the V-shaped flap of skin, closing my Third Eye, and covering the self-inflicted wound from view with my headscarf. The world was no longer encased in ice. It was once again a typical miserable English summer’s day. But I could feel the presence of my Third Eye in the socket I had created. The orb turned and rolled wildly beneath the thin layer of flesh on my forehead that covered it.

  It was suddenly vital that I return to my dwelling and gather together my thoughts. They were racing through my brain with such rapidity as to be maddening. Ideas jostled for precedence in my mind, but I could scarcely make sense of them. They were haphazard and dreamlike, beyond the scope of my ability to render into words. These concepts were more like patterns or designs than a linear sequence of fictional events. In one of these flashes of inspiration I had the notion I might delineate the horror of an ice crystal in the decay of its symmetry or participate in the madness of a reflection produced by a shattered mirror.

  Snowflakes continuously dance around me, like the static between TV channels. This is the beginning of a new Ice Age.

  The dying sun casts shadows across the frozen beach as it sets behind the seafront trees and buildings. The ice is streaked with darkness. I think of the reflection of my own face I’d once seen in a shop window: an empty shell of a face, like that of a mannequin left out in the rain, cheap mascara dribbling from its lifeless eyes.

  My Third Eye is invariably uncovered. I wonder if my two original eyes might atrophy in response to the dominance of my third eye. Perhaps they will begin to wither away, dissolving in the sockets, like mollusks that have had salt sprinkled on them. Eyes are the windows of the soul, but the Third Eye is a doorway, through which my brother’s thoughts come and go. It is his eye. It is green—mine are both blue. What other physical features possessed by Julius might transfer to me?

  Staines looked up from the notes resting on his lap. He felt a sense of dull sickness in the pit of his stomach. The old woman must have gone mad immediately after the death of her brother. Their relationship seemed to have been abnormal, possibly even incestuous. He wondered if they’d made some bizarre suicide pact that Claudia had failed to honor.

  The sea rolled back and forth in the near distance beyond the muddle of moon-drenched rooftops. Above the waves, across the night sky, thousands of stars stood out in the blackness. He wondered if he might see one of them suddenly blink out of existence as he watched, collapsing in itself like one of the dying minds Ghorla had described. He had no idea how long stars took to perish but suspected that their life span dwarfed that of a man’s into insignificance. The thought of time reminded him that he’d no idea how late it was now and he took his fob watch out of his mackintosh pocket. It was eight-thirty precisely.

  He’d missed dinner at the hotel and realized he’d have to make a meal of Swedish meatballs from a can. But if it was good enough for Edgar it was good enough for him too. He picked up the basket (containing the still-slumbering cat) plus his bag of paperbacks and hurriedly made his way to the hotel through the crazily angled passageways of Scarsdale Bay. He didn’t wish to be late for his appointment with Claudia Ghorla at 9:00 P.M.

  Only upon opening the basket when back in the hotel room did Staines discover that Edgar was dead. The cat was curled up; its body rigid and cold, its eyes open and staring sightlessly up at him. He couldn’t bear to remove the dead animal and sat down on the edge of the bed, trying to decide just what to do next. Eventually, Staines resolved to go downstairs into the hotel’s lounge bar and drink himself into a stupor. He could deal with the disposal of Edgar’s body in the morning. He had quite forgotten about his appointment with Miss Ghorla.

  Just then someone knocked at the door to Staines’s room. He opened the door and standing on the threshold was Miss Ghorla. She was clad in a ratty blouse and skirt. Her face was solemn and, at this precise moment, she was the very last person Staines wanted to see. He was incapable of questioning her closely or paying much attention to her responses even should they reveal some insights into the life and work of her brother.

  “Mr. Browning directed me to your room,” she said. “I thought it best if we talked in private rather than downstairs where we might be overheard.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Ghorla, but I’ve had a shock, it’s my cat you see …” Waving aside his faltering objections the old lady wandered into the room and cast a glance over at the basket containing Edgar’s corpse.

  “I warned you to take better care of that poor creature,” she said in a low menacing voice.

  Staines felt a wave of annoyance rising up inside him at the sheer bloody cheek and lack of tact that the woman displayed. He was about to let loose with a stream of abuse when he noticed a trickle of blood making its way down the center of her forehead from her beehive wig.

  “I think you must have hit your head … .” Staines said.

  She ignored his remark and picked up the notebook jointly written by her and Julius that Staines had left on the bed.

  “Well,” she said, “now you know some of it. But not, as yet, of the process akin to hypnosis whereby a mind in a healthy body might also be induced to collapse in on itself … but I can show you. I’ve sometimes wondered whether transfer between radically dissimilar genetic material is possible.”

  Another trickle of blood ran down her forehead and around her nose, dribbling along her right, foundation-caked cheek. She raised an attenuated, veined hand and dipped her long fingers into the coiled mass of hair covering her forehead, unpicked some sutures, and parted her fringe.

  Eric Cooper set down his carpetbag in front of the reception desk in the Shadwell Vistas Hotel. He rang the bell in order to attract someone’s attention. Eventually the temporary manager saw fit to drag himself away from the static between channels that he’d been watching on television in the back room and a
ttend to the visitor.

  “Do you require a room, Sir?” Browning said. “We’ve plenty available.”

  Eric Cooper looked around disdainfully at the sorry-looking foyer and curled his lip at the thought. After he’d caught up with Staines he intended to have a wash and brush up at the luxury cottage (with full mod-cons) that was to be his base during his visit to Scarsdale Bay. It might suit Staines to stay here in this godforsaken flea pit, but not Cooper.

  “No,” he said, “I believe a friend—ah—colleague of mine is a guest here. His name’s Arthur Staines. I want to surprise him. Can you show me up to his room?”

  Browning smiled at the well-dressed visitor. Cooper was a tall man with round eyeglasses, immaculately dressed in a navy double-breasted pinstripe suit with a striped tie done up in a Windsor knot. The only blemish in his appearance was an ill-fitting wig that was a slightly different shade of gray-brown to the natural hair left on his head.

  “Very popular tonight,” said Browning, “is our Mr. Staines. He’s with a lady friend at this moment, one of our local celebrities.”

  “What?” Cooper responded. He had a sinking feeling of dread at what might be coming next.

  “Yes, Miss Ghorla. She went upstairs to see him about a half hour ago.” Cooper passed a ten-pound note across the desk.

  “Can you show me up straightaway? I’d like to see them both if it’s possible. Presumably you have a passkey.”

  If I can gain the element of surprise, thought Cooper, all might not yet be lost. Were he to arrive unannounced he might interrupt some conversation of import relating to Julius Ghorla that he might otherwise not hear.

  Browning covered the bank note with the palm of his hand, slid it toward himself and nodded.

  “Right away, Sir. Please follow me. It’s only on the first floor, not far.” When the two arrived at the door to Staines’s room, Browning knocked once perfunctorily and immediately unlocked it. He let Cooper enter by stepping aside and discreetly moving back just outside the doorway.

  The shabby little room was in semidarkness. Moreover, it was like walking into a huge freezer. The temperature within was some twenty or so degrees below zero. Cooper saw a dingy bed that looked fit only for the rubbish dump and was appalled by the sight of the most garish wallpaper he’d seen since the mid-1970s. It could even have been an authentic relic from that era. Then his attention was drawn to an armchair in the corner of the room, back amongst the shadows. A peculiar gurgling noise came from its occupant. At first Cooper thought it was a life-size dummy dressed in charity clothes, something left over from a stage show.

  But he realized it was actually a very old woman—or something much like one. For although it was clad in a blouse and skirt, the skirt was pulled back over its withered navel, its stockings and knickers were around its ankles, and it was stubbing out a cigarette on a burn-dotted left thigh. Just above the score of burns rested a flaccid penis. Its beehive wig was askew and in the center of its forehead was a bloody third eye that stared unblinkingly.

  Just before Cooper backed away in shock, a hitherto unseen figure crept out from around the side of the bed. It was Arthur Staines and the demented man was crawling on all fours like an animal, his breath like steam in the frigid air. A grotesque mewing bubbled in his throat.

  “Did the bad man hurt poor kitty? Now all’s well, now all’s made well again,” said the croaking voice of the figure in the chair.

  Cooper took a long backwards stride in the direction of the door behind him, but Mr. Browning had already taken the opportunity to quietly close it and draw shut the bolt on the outside.

  “We don’t like to see Miss Ghorla distressed, Sir,” said Browning, through the paneling, “so if you’d be kind enough to accommodate her it would be easier all round. It’s only what we’ve all had to get used to, here in Scarsdale Bay.”

  Face

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific and respected writers in the United States today. Oates has written fiction in almost every genre and medium. Her keen interest in the Gothic and in psychological horror has spurred her to write dark suspense novels under the name Rosamond Smith, to have written enough stories in the genre to have published five collections of dark fiction, the most recent, The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, and to edit American Gothic Tales. Oates’s short novel, Zombie, won the Bram Stoker Award, and she has been honored with a Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association.

  Her most recent novels are The Stolen Heart, Missing Mom, and Blood Mask. Oates has been living in Princeton, New Jersey, since 1978, where she teaches creative writing. She and her husband, Raymond J. Smith, run the small press and literary magazine Ontario Review.

  Stay away from her, they said. Don’t even look at her. Don’t let her see you.

  She was one hundred years old. Nobody could remember a time when she’d been younger. She had a thing growing out of her neck, swollen like a goiter and the bright color of a rooster’s erect comb. Stay away from her and don’t let her see you. But the children hid in the tall marsh grasses beside the lane to spy on her, excited and frightened, and they could hear the old woman speaking to herself in a language they couldn’t comprehend; maybe it was no language at all only just rapid muttered sounds punctuated by laughter, quarreling; you could see the thing pushing out of her neck, tight smooth shiny hot-looking skin of a texture different from her own raddled skin, like a balloon blown tight to bursting. It was the beginning of a face, maybe. Didn’t it have tiny indentations where the eyes would be, a hollow for the nose, a tiny pit of a mouth? First they’d seen it was the size of a peach, then the size of an apple, then the size of a melon forcing the old woman’s head to one side like she was laying her head on her shoulder.

  Her back was twisted, too. Her spine you could almost see through her dirt-stiffened clothes, like a bow. When she walked it was a crab-scuttling, you could hear her harsh quickened breathing.

  Through the mud puddles in the lane the children rode their bicycles, through the ragged corn fields the children ran, and in the straggly lilac that grew wild amid the ruins of the old cider mill they hid to peer at the old woman as the old woman passed by, and sometimes they dared to approach the old woman’s house that was a falling-down unpainted farmhouse at the end of the lane and they tried to look through the windows (but they could not, the blinds were always pulled down); and they stole tomatoes from the old woman’s weed-choked garden, and ate them unwashed, seeds and juice running down their chins; and sometimes they threw the tomatoes at one another shrieking with laughter. For the hell of it the boys trampled down the old woman’s pole beans, tore at the blue morning glories growing in the fence, and the pink sweetpeas; they threw dried clumps of mud at the squawking red chickens and the rat-tailed barn cats that hissed and bared their teeth. The old woman stumbled from the rear door of the house screaming at them, swearing at them, Get away! Get away! Damn devils get away! The old woman ran at them with a broom, a mop, an ax propped against the side of the house, threatened to call the sheriff, have them all put in jail, in hell, damn devils where they belonged was hell.

  If the shotgun wasn’t broke, the old woman said, she’d blow them to hell.

  The old woman lived in that house by herself, there’d been an old man who had died before any of the children could remember, except maybe the oldest could remember: a siren in the night, the sheriff’s car with its flashing red light like summer lightning wild and flashing through the darkened windows of the children’s house, and afterward the deputies asking questions of their parents, people talking of it for a long time: Why? Why’d he do it? The children were not supposed to know, the old man had killed himself with his own shotgun, which was a twelve-gauge double-barrel like all the men had; he’d blown most of his head off with the buckshot blast but it had been an accident, the old woman claimed, he hadn’t mean it, hadn’t been drinking or anyway had not been drinking much, only just hard c
ider not whiskey; he’d been trying to clean the gun that wasn’t firing right, needed oiling and polishing and there’d been a time, the old woman said, he’d just been back from the War and built this house and barns and he’d took such pride in his guns, the shotgun and a twenty-two Springfield rifle, but lately he’d been letting things go, had not been well, his broke hip, his broke ankle from the damn horse kicking him, and that sickness he had he’d thought was t.b. but only just bron-ki-tis kept him coughing and sick for a year, so he’d gotten tired and careless at the end, mean and foul-mouthed, yelling at the neighbors to get off his property when it wasn’t his property where they were—like the Quick family’s back pasture where the fences were falling down—the old man prowled the fields, his neighbors’ back lanes, close up behind their barns, his beard not trimmed like it used to be but a rat’s nest and stained around the mouth and his old coveralls stiff with dirt and carelessly buttoned or not buttoned at all; nobody wanted to accuse the old man of stealing from them, but sure he’d walk off with things where he found them if no one was around—hand saw, paint bucket, wheelbarrel left in the Pinchbecks’ pear orchard. Years ago when the children’s parents were just children themselves the old man had gotten into a feud with one of his neighbors and some time later the neighbor’s barn burned down. But it was never proved against him.

  One of their boys died of a burst appendix aged eleven, because the old man hadn’t wanted to call for a doctor, hadn’t wanted to pay. It was his pride, too, they didn’t have a telephone and he’d have had to ask a neighbor to call for him and God damn he wouldn’t lower himself to begging, nor would he let the old woman go begging either, the kid had a stomach ache that was all, some kind of flu you’d expect to pass away except it wasn’t flu but appendicitis so Calvin died. The children’s parents said afterward they’d have paid for the doctor for God’s sake letting a child die like that, worse than murder. The other children in that house were two boys and a girl and they’d been older and they moved away and no one knew where they were or even if they were still alive, it wasn’t a question you could ask of the old woman for no one spoke to the old woman, not for years.