Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (34 page)

“How’d you pry that out of Riddick?”

“Didn’t.” Sussmann smiled wanly. “Heard about that Athens one from the driver of the tow truck that hauled it back—that one bumped into a signpost, hard enough to break its radiator. Ben, Riddick can’t keep me in the dark. I’ve got more stringers than he has.”

“What d’you think it is?”

Sussmann’s expression fused over and became opaque. He shook his head.

In the parlor, Carol, Everett’s wife Amy—an ample, grey woman, rather like somebody’s archetypical aunt but possessed of a very canny mind—and Sussmann, the inveterate bachelor, occupied themselves by playing with Chris. Chris was two, very quick and bright, and very excited by all the company. He’d just learned how to blow kisses, and was now practicing enthusiastically with the adults. Everett, meanwhile, was prowling around examining the stereo equipment that filled one wall. “You install this yourself?” he asked, when Jacobs came up to hand him a beer.

“Not only installed it,” Jacobs said, “I built it all myself, from scratch. Tinkered up most of the junk in this house. Take the beah ‘fore it gets hot.”

“Damn fine work,” Everett muttered, absently accepting the beer. “Better’n my own setup, I purely b’lieve, and that set me back a right sma’t piece of change. Jesus Christ, Ben—I didn’t know you could do quality work like that. What the hell you doing stagnating out here in the sticks, fixing people’s radios and washing machines, f’chrissake? Y’that good, you ought to be down in Boston, New York mebbe, making some real money.”

Jacobs shook his head. “Hate the cities, big cities like that. C’n’t stand to live in them at all.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I lived in New York for a while, seven—eight yeahs back, ‘fore settling in Skowhegan again. It was terrible theah, even back then, and it’s worse now. People down theah dying on their feet, walking around dead without anybody to tell ‘em to lie down and get buried decent.”

“We’re dying here too, Ben,” Everett said. “We’re just doing it slower, is all.”

Jacobs shrugged. “Mebbe so,” he said. “’Scuse me.” He walked back to the kitchen, began to scrape the dishes and stack them in the sink. His hands had started to tremble again.

When he returned to the parlor, after putting Chris to bed, he found that conversation had almost died. Everett and Sussmann were arguing halfheartedly about the Factory, each knowing that he’d never convince the other. It was a pointless discussion, and Jacobs did not join it. He poured himself a glass of beer and sat down. Amy hardly noticed him; her usually pleasant face was stern and angry. Carol found an opportunity to throw him a sympathetic wink while tossing her long hair back over her shoulder, but her face was flushed too, and her lips were thin. The evening had started off well, but it had soured somehow; everyone felt it. Jacobs began to clean his pipe, using a tiny knife to scrape the bowl. A siren went by outside, wailing eerily away into distance. An ambulance, it sounded like, or the fire-rescue truck again—more melancholy and mournful, less predatory than the siren of a police cruiser. “. . . brew viruses . . .” Everett was saying, and then Jacobs lost him, as if Everett were being pulled further and further away by some odd, local perversion of gravity, his voice thinning into inaudibility. Jacobs couldn’t hear him at all now. Which was strange, as the parlor was only a few yards wide. Another siren. There were a lot of them tonight; they sounded like the souls of the dead, looking for home in the darkness, unable to find light and life. Jacobs found himself thinking about the time he’d toured Vienna, during “recuperative leave” in Europe, after hospitalization in ‘Nam. There was a tour of the catacombs under the Cathedral, and he’d taken it, limping painfully along on his crutch, the wet, porous stone of the tunnel roof closing down until it almost touched the top of his head. They came to a place where an opening had been cut through the hard, grey rock, enabling the tourists to come up one by one and look into the burial pit on the other side, while the guide lectured calmly in alternating English and German. When you stuck your head through the opening, you looked out at a solid wall of human bones. Skulls, arm and leg bones, rib cages, pelvises, all mixed in helter-skelter and packed solid, layer after uncountable layer of them. The wall of bones rose up sheer out of the darkness, passed through the fan of light cast by a naked bulb at eye-level, and continued to rise—it was impossible to see the top, no matter how you craned your neck and squinted. This wall had been built by the Black Death, a haphazard but grandiose architect. The Black Death had eaten these people up and spat out their remains, as casual and careless as a picnicker gnawing chicken bones. When the meal was over, the people who were still alive had dug a huge pit under the Cathedral and shoveled the victims in by the hundreds of thousands. Strangers in life, they mingled in death, cheek by jowl, belly to backbone, except that after a while there were no cheeks or jowls. The backbones remained: yellow, ancient and brittle. So did the skulls—upright, upside down, on their sides, all grinning blankly at the tourists.

The doorbell rang.

It was Dave Lucas. He looked like one of the skulls Jacobs had been thinking about—his face was grey and gaunt, the skin drawn tightly across his bones; it looked as if he’d been dusted with powdered lime. Shocked, Jacobs stepped aside. Lucas nodded to him shortly and walked by into the parlor without speaking. “. . . stuff about the Factory is news,” Sussmann was saying, doggedly, “and more interesting than anything else that happens up here. It sells papers—” He stopped talking abruptly when Lucas entered the room. All conversation stopped. Everyone gaped at the old game warden, horrified. Unsteadily Lucas let himself down into a stuffed chair, and gave them a thin attempt at a smile. “Can I have a beah?” he said. “Or a drink?”

“Scotch?”

“That’ll be fine,” Lucas said mechanically.

Jacobs went to get it for him. When he returned with the drink, Lucas was determinedly making small talk and flashing his new dead smile. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to say anything about what had happened to him. Lucas was an old-fashioned Yankee gentleman to the core, and Jacobs—who had a strong touch of that in his own upbringing—suspected why he was keeping silent. So did Amy. After the requisite few minutes of polite conversation, Amy asked if she could see the new paintings that Carol was working on. Carol exchanged a quick, comprehending glance with her, and nodded. Grim-faced, both women left the room—they knew that this was going to be bad. When the women were out of sight, Lucas said, “Can I have another drink, Ben?” and held out his empty glass. Jacobs refilled it wordlessly. Lucas had never been a drinking man.

“Give,” Jacobs said, handing Lucas his glass. “What happened?”

Lucas sipped his drink. He still looked ghastly, but a little color was seeping back into his face. “A’n’t felt this shaky since I was in the a’my, back in Korea,” he said. He shook his head heavily. “I swear to Christ, I don’t understand what’s got into people in these pa’ts. Used t’be decent folk out heah, Christian folk.” He set his drink aside, and braced himself up visibly. His face hardened. “Never mind that. Things change, I guess, c’n’t stop ‘em no way.” He turned toward Jacobs. “Remember that nighthunter I was after. Well we got ‘im, went out with Steve Girard, Rick Barlow, few other boys, and nabbed him real neat—city boy, no woods sense at all. Well, we were coming back around the end of the pond, down the lumber road, when we heard this big commotion coming from the Gibson place, shouts, a woman screaming her head off, like that. So we cut across the back of their field and went over to see what was going on. House was wide open, and what we walked into—” He stopped; little sickly beads of sweat had appeared all over his face. “You remember the McInerney case down in Boston four–five yeahs back? The one there was such a stink about? Well, it was like that. They had a whatchamacallit there, a coven—the Gibsons, the Sewells, the Bradshaws, about seven others, all local people, all hopped out of their minds, all dressed up in black robes, and—blood, painted all over their faces. God, I—No, never mind. They had a baby there, and a kind of an altar they’d dummied up, and a pentagram. Somebody’d killed the baby, slit its throat, and they’d hung it up to bleed like a hog. Into cups. When we got there, they’d just cut its heart out, and they were starting in on dismembering it. Hell—they were tearing it apart, never mind that ‘dismembering’ shit. They were so frenzied-blind they hardly noticed us come in. Mrs. Bradshaw hadn’t been able to take it, she’d cracked completely and was sitting in a corner screaming her lungs out, with Mr. Sewell trying to shut her up. They were the only two that even tried to run. The boys hung Gibson and Bradshaw and Sewell, and stomped Ed Patterson to death—I just couldn’t stop ‘em. It was all I could do to keep ‘em from killing the other ones. I shot Steve Girard in the arm, trying to stop ‘em, but they took the gun away, and almost strung me up too. My God, Ben, I’ve known Steve Girard a’most ten yeahs. I’ve known Gibson and Sewell all my life.” He stared at them appealingly, blind with despair. “What’s happened to people up heah?”

No one said a word.

Not in these pa’ts,
Jacobs mimicked himself bitterly.
There are decent limits.

Jacobs found that he was holding the pipe-cleaning knife like a weapon. He’d cut his finger on it, and a drop of blood was oozing slowly along the blade. This kind of thing—the Satanism, the ritual murders, the sadism—was what had driven him away from the city. He’d thought it was different in the country, that people were better. But it wasn’t, and they weren’t. It was bottled up better out here, was all. But it had been coming for years, and they had blinded themselves to it and done nothing, and now it was too late. He could feel it in himself, something long repressed and denied, the reaction to years of frustration and ugliness and fear, to watching the world dying without hope. That part of him had listened to Lucas’ story with appreciation, almost with glee. It stirred strongly in him, a monster turning over in ancient mud, down inside, thousands of feet down, thousands of years down. He could see it spreading through the faces of the others in the room, a stain, a spider shadow of contamination. Its presence was suffocating: the chalky, musty smell of old brittle death, somehow leaking through from the burial pit in Vienna. Bone dust—he almost choked on it, it was so thick here in his pleasant parlor in the country.

And then the room was filled with sound and flashing, bloody light.

Jacobs floundered for a moment, unable to understand what was happening. He swam up from his chair, baffled, moving with dreamlike slowness. He stared in helpless confusion at the leaping red shadows. His head hurt.

“An ambulance!” Carol shouted, appearing in the parlor archway with Amy. “We saw it from the upstairs window—”

“It’s right out front,” Sussmann said.

They ran for the door. Jacobs followed them more slowly. Then the cold outside air slapped him, and he woke up a little. The ambulance was parked across the street, in front of the senior citizens’ complex. The corpsmen were hurrying up the stairs of one of the institutional, cinderblock buildings, carrying a stretcher. They disappeared inside. Amy slapped her bare arms to keep off the cold. “Heart attack, mebbe,” she said. Everett shrugged. Another siren slashed through the night, getting closer. While they watched, a police cruiser pulled up next to the ambulance, and Riddick got out. Riddick saw the group in front of Jacobs’ house, and stared at them with undisguised hatred, as if he would like to arrest them and hold them responsible for whatever had happened in the retirement village. Then he went inside too. He looked haggard as he turned to go, exhausted, hagridden by the suspicion that he’d finally been handed something he couldn’t settle with a session in the soundproofed back room at the sheriff’s office.

They waited. Jacobs slowly became aware that Sussmann was talking to him, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. Sussmann’s mouth opened and closed. It wasn’t important anyway. He’d never noticed before how unpleasant Sussmann’s voice was, how rasping and shrill. Sussmann was ugly too, shockingly ugly. He boiled with contamination and decay—he was a sack of putrescence. He was an abomination.

Dave Lucas was standing off to one side, his hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, his face blank. He watched the excitement next door without expression, without interest. Everett turned and said something that Jacobs could not hear. Like Sussmann’s, Everett’s lips moved without sound. He had moved closer to Amy. They glanced uneasily around. They were abominations too.

Jacobs stood with his arm around Carol; he didn’t remember putting it there—it was seeking company on its own. He felt her shiver, and clutched her more tightly in response, directed by some small, distanced, horrified part of himself that was still rational—he knew it would do no good. There was a thing in the air tonight that was impossible to warm yourself against. It hated warmth, it swallowed it and buried it in ice. It was a wedge, driving them apart, isolating them all. He curled his hand around the back of Carol’s neck. Something was pulsing through him in waves, building higher and stronger. He could feel Carol’s pulse beating under her skin, under his fingers, so very close to the surface.

Across the street, a group of old people had gathered around the ambulance. They shuffled in the cold, hawking and spitting, clutching overcoats and nightgowns more tightly around them. The corpsmen reappeared, edging carefully down the stairs with the stretcher. The sheet was pulled up all the way, but it looked curiously flat and caved-in—if there was a body under there, it must have collapsed, crumbled like dust or ash. The crowd of old people parted to let the stretcher crew pass, then re-formed again, flowing like a heavy, sluggish liquid. Their faces were like leather or horn: hard, dead, dry, worn smooth. And
tired.
Intolerably, burdensomely tired. Their eyes glittered in their shriveled faces as they watched the stretcher go by. They looked uneasy and afraid, and yet there was an anticipation in their faces, an impatience, almost an envy, as they looked on death. Silence blossomed from a tiny seed in each of them, a total, primordial silence, from the time before there were words. It grew, consumed them, and merged to form a greater silence that spread out through the night in widening ripples.