Unknown, p.28
Unknown, page 28
She was reborn.
Perhaps it was only an illusion.
The old man bowed his head, there in the shadows. The jealousy, the regret were gone. In the end, his life with her had become only another skin that he must cast. He would have the peace that she might never have, and be glad of it. The young man would serve her, and she would be huntress once more, and dancer, a bright phantom gliding over the ballroom of the city, this city and others, and all the worlds of land and soul between.
Vasyelu Gorin stirred on the platform of his existence. He would depart now, or very soon; already he heard the murmur of the approaching train.
It would be simple, this time, not like the other time at all. To go willingly, everything achieved, in order. Knowing she was safe.
There was even a faint colour in her cheeks, a blooming. Or maybe, that was just a trick of the lamp.
The old man waited until they had risen to their feet, and walked together quietly into the salon, before he came from the shadows and began to climb the stairs, hearing the silence, their silence, like that of new lovers.
At the end of the stair, beyond the lamp, the dark was gentle, soft as the Vampire's hair. Vasyelu walked forward into the dark without misgiving, tenderly.
How he had loved her.
15 - Steve Rasnic Tem - Derelicts
Tey always seemed to find him, the derelicts. They always seemed to know just where to look. He'd go into a store to buy cigarettes or beer, and when he came out there'd be several of them gathered around, waiting for him. Washed out eyes and dark stubble, frayed collars and cuffs. Hands always outstretched, that look of hunger in the face. They seemed convinced he would give them something; they were sure of him.
They'd pass by far more likely prospects to hit on him. It was as if they had a network, passing the word around that he, the red-haired one, was the one to ask.
And yet he never gave them anything. He was polite enough about it, never rude, but still he never went into his pockets for them, never gave them money or offered to buy them food. He would walk past them, self-consciously holding his head erect. He would not be intimidated by them; they had no right to intimidate him. And yet they continued to approach him: individually, in couples, even small groups.
He lived in an old part of Denver, an odd mixture of housing developments, antique houses, abandoned buildings and vacant lots.
The shopping malls nearby were among the oldest in the city, every other store boarded up or rented out for warehouse space. Shops seemed to come and go, few lasting more than a couple of months.
"Coming Soon To This Location" signs were much in evidence, and were removed frequently, often before the neighborhood had even been told the nature of the new business.
Tatters of poster overlaying poster made ragged murals on nearly half the buildings. Stripped away with but partial success, each succeeding layer blended and weathered until they made Rorschach arrangements of color. He had never seen so many posters and handbills anywhere; where did they all come from? He had never seen anyone actually putting them up. Circus posters and campaign posters, handbills promoting the Socialist Workers' Party, advertising community meetings, block parties, year-old garage sales. Always asking you to join, to belong to something. They suggested excessive activity, but he knew there had been little such activity in some time.
Abandoned stores, boarded-up houses, overgrown lots (wasn't there some sort of ordinance governing those?), structures crumbling dangerously into the streets, trash-filled alleys… if he really thought about it the sense of desolation was nearly overwhelming.
Like a city in wartime, or a bad dream about the world after a nuclear attack. So few people out in the streets, especially this time of year.
It was too unpleasant.
And where did all the trash come from, or the wind-blown grit that stung your eyes? Sometimes he had the fantasy it was manufactured outside the city, brought in on trucks or dropped from planes.
The number of derelicts in the area increased, even as the apparent wealth declined. He couldn't understand it. He theorized enough: perhaps the police had driven them out of other areas, perhaps they were local hotel dwellers with Social Security money-not wanting handouts so much as to make contact. Perhaps they were a club. He watched closely for hidden handshakes and meaningful looks. They seemed so well organized; he couldn't believe it had happened by accident.
He'd changed jobs twice the past year. Staying too long in one office had always made him uncomfortable. Both his employers had been surprised; they'd insisted he talk out any problems he might be having with them personally. They said he was a valuable man. They said they couldn't get along without him. Their insistence made him anxious, and in both cases he cleaned out his desk immediately, canceling his two weeks' notice.
He hadn't seen his wife and two kids in over three years. Last thing he'd heard they'd moved to Chicago. He felt sad about that, but not enough to write, not enough to make contact. He knew he should, but he just couldn't force himself. His attitude nagged him; he was aware of how cold, how inhuman it must seem to others. But he didn't have it in him to tie himself to a wife and children. It was somehow… wrong, for him. As if he were committing some moral wrong-he felt it that strongly.
He left the grocery store with bags in the crooks of both arms.
Twice as much food as he needed, really, and he wasn't sure why he'd been so extravagant, except sometimes since he'd left his family he'd had a crazy urge to buy, to consume, to let the food spoil and then throw it out when it smelled too bad to tolerate. It released something in him to do that; it was relaxing.
They were waiting for him, a group of five or six, outside the grocery store. He couldn't get to his car without passing through them.
They had no right. They had no…
They wouldn't move. He strode closer and closer to their little group, and still they wouldn't budge. The tallest one turned slightly as he approached, the derelict opened his mouth wide, and expelled a long, slow and rancid breath into his face. A smell of ancient appetites, things dying in the cavern of the mouth. He veered away from them, and two old women raised ragged hands, grease staining them in streaks, or was it blood, and dirt caked over to seal their wounds? It was a slow, dirty dance as they moved ever so slightly with his own movements, seeming to follow him with their thoughts, their smells, their dirt, the sluggish cells of their bodies following in kind.
He couldn't bear the thought of having those filthy, tattered clothes touch him, those torn and grimy fingers. And the eyes… he couldn't see them. The eyelids so dark and greasy… the eyes seemed lost.
He slid past, and, incredibly, they didn't touch him. They slipped by like oil. Dark and silent. He'd never be able to wash them off if they touched him.
They followed him to the car, two steps behind the whole way. He got in, pulled out, and would have run them over if they hadn't suddenly slid aside like a dark and stained curtain.
Driving home he suddenly realized he'd been thinking about his parents.
Their faces had crept into his daydreaming, merely as additional faces in the crowd, and then they had stepped forward. When was the last time he had thought about them? He couldn't remember.
For a moment he couldn't remember what he had been thinking about them, and although that kind of lapse happened to him all the time he found it disconcerting. He knew it was something important.
Then with a shock he realized he'd been trying to remember the day of their. death, and the funeral that followed. What had he been doing?
He couldn't remember. He couldn't even remember their death-but it did happen, he was sure it happened-but he suddenly couldn't remember anything about it. Where it occurred, when it occurred… it was all a blank.
It was quite remarkable really the way the derelicts worked things.
Each derelict seemed assigned a specific streetcorner, but was ready to move, to regroup if it seemed necessary. There were always a few of them everywhere he went in the neighborhood: outside a movie theater, on the steps of the local branch library, sitting by the trees next to his bank, congregating in the parking lot of the insurance company where he worked. And it would always be a mixture of new and old faces. They must have squad leaders, he thought. He began noticing definite patterns. Many of the same faces showed up at his bank that also appeared at his grocery store, but none of those derelicts ever seemed to make an appearance at the library.
At the library they watched him return some long overdue books.
At the grocery store they caught him overspending again, buying much more food than he needed. At the theater he bought a ticket to an Xrated movie under their watchful gaze. At the laundromat he sorted shirts he'd let go much too long without washing, and they were there just past his left shoulder, on the other side of the window, lounging on the sidewalk.
He could have done all his shopping outside the neighborhood, but he didn't want to do that. It wasn't loyalty to local commerce so much as an interest in watching how things went in the neighborhood, how things occurred. Observing the life of the neighborhood had become a kind of hobby for him. He watched it go downhill; he studied its decay. He performed a kind of accounting on each building he saw, day after day.
He observed whether there were more tiles missing, more chips in the paint, more splits in the wood. He knew where all the broken windows were, and when a new one appeared. He saw the merchandise leave the shelves and noted the failure to reorder. He watched the weeds grow around the buildings and in the vacant lots.
On a Saturday he drove around the lake. There seemed more of the derelicts than he had ever seen before, hundreds of them, mixed in thoroughly with the usual Saturday lake crowd. Lounging about, picnicking, even playing basketball. Almost a convention of them. There were more of them than he had imagined, and he wondered if perhaps more of them were migrating here, to his neighborhood, from other parts of the city, or if it were just that large numbers of his neighbors were going over-their lives decaying as the neighborhood decayed.
He thought he saw his parents in the crowd, sunning themselves in tattered and greasy clothes with the other derelicts, and he spent some time driving around in that area, but he couldn't be sure, and he did not see them again.
On his way home that day he realized he didn't really know if his parents were alive or dead. He could not remember at all.
When he got home he sat out on the front porch a while. He realized he had been paying little attention to his own block of late.
The house across the street was boarded up, weeds covering the sidewalk, the flower beds, most of a tricycle. The house just north of his had its shades pulled, several windows broken, and a few weeks'worth of mail spilling out of the mail box. All up and down the street: dark and gray houses, empty driveways, a few cars abandoned on the street, their sides rusting, lights broken, windshields spiderwebbed with cracks. Trash and leaves covered the shallow curbs.
He wondered if it were possible. If he could be the last person living on his block.
He couldn't sleep that night. After dark he'd gone inside and sat on the couch, turning the radio up loud to fill the emptiness. He had things to do, he knew, but he could not remember what they were. He could not remember the names of his missing neighbors. He could not remember what was on TV that night. He could not remember if the mail had come. He could not remember if he had eaten. He repeated his own name over and over to himself, silently, his lips moving slightly. It made him feel better.
When he looked out his front window he thought he could see the tattered shadows on his porch, looking in on him, their eyes but slightly lighter in color than their soiled clothing. Varied shades of gray. But perhaps it was an effect of the lighting. He couldn't be sure, and he would not check.
The bright sun through his window woke him up early the next morning. He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling slightly startled with the morning.
Everything seemed much too bright somehow… full of glare. But it made him feel better this morning than he had in some time. As if there were energy in the brightness he could use.
He drove to work and noticed that even the neighborhood seemed brighter somehow, full of sun, and full of promise despite the condition of the streets and buildings. There were no derelicts in sight.
They did not stare out at him from streetcorners as they usually did.
Their absence made him vaguely uneasy, but he forced a smile.
He wasn't going to let them spoil this bright morning.
In the parking lot outside the insurance building was a welcoming committee to greet him. Bright and shiny faces, arms outstretched to shake his hand, pull him into the crowd. Hundreds of them. He searched their faces for deceit, but he found none there.
They waved at him with their torn fingers and tattered clothes, smiled with their unshaven, greasy jowls. The women with dark eyes beckoned, the stoic men with their oily hair and heavy smell gestured invitingly.
He recognized the lady who lived across the street from him, the man from two houses down.
He thought he saw his parents near the center of the crowd and slowly pushed into the mass of bodies, seeking them, wanting to talk to them.
It had been a long time. He wanted to tell them how he was doing, share his thoughts, ask for advice. He needed them now.
The mass of bodies moved rhythmically as he pushed to its center, seeing his father's face here, the back of his mother's head over there, just out of reach. He was feeling better now, more satisfied. He felt certain he would get his own streetcorner. Surely they owed him that?
16 - Eric Van Lustbader - In Darkness, Angels
If I had known then what I know now.
How those words echo on and on inside my mind, like a rubber ball bouncing down an endless staircase. As if they had a life of their own.
Which, I suppose, they do now.
I cannot sleep but is it any wonder? Outside, blue-white lightning forks like a giant's jagged claw and the thunder is so loud at times that I feel I must be trapped inside an immense bell, reverberations like memory unspooling in a reckless helix, making a mess at my feet.
If I had known then what I know now. And yet…
And yet I return again and again to that windswept evening when the ferry deposited me at the east end of the island. It had once been, so I had been told by the rather garrulous captain, a swansneck peninsula.
But over time, the water had gradually eaten away at the rocky soil until at last the land had succumbed to the ocean's cool tidal embrace, severing itself from the mainland a mile away.
Of course the captain had an entirely different version of what had transpired." It's them folks up there," he had said, jerking his sharp unshaven chin toward the castle high atop the island's central mount."
Didn't want no more interference from the other folks here abouts." He gave a short barking laugh and spat over the boat's side.
"Just as well, I say," he observed as he squinted heavily into the last of the dying sun's watery light." Them rocks were awfully sharp." He shook his head as if weighed down by the memory." Kids were always darin one another t'do their balancin act going across, down that long spit o land." He turned the wheel hard over and spuming water rushed up the bow of the ferry." Many's the night we'd come out with the searchlights, tryin to rescue some fool boy'd gone over."
For just a moment he swung us away from the island looming up on our starboard side, getting the most out of the crosswinds." Never found em, though. Not a one." He spat again." You go over the side around here, you're never seen again."
" The undertow," I offered.
He whipped his ruddy windburned face around, impaling me with one pale gray eye." Undertow, you say?" His laugh was harsh now and unpleasant ." You gotta lot t'learn up there at Fuego del Aire, boyo.
Oh, yes indeed!"
He left me on the quayside with no one around to mark my arrival. As the wide-beamed ferry tacked away, pushed by the strong sunset wind, I thought I saw the captain raise an arm in my direction.
I turned away from the sea. Great stands of pine, bristly and dark in the failing light, marched upward in majestic array toward the castle high above me. Their tops whipsawed, sending off an odd melancholy drone.
I felt utterly, irretrievably alone and for the first time since I had sent the letter I began to feel the queasy fluttering of reservations.
An odd kind of inner darkness had settled about my shoulders like a ,,mlture descending upon the flesh of the dead.
I took a deep breath and shook my head to clear it. The captain's stories were only words strung one after the other-all the legends just words and nothing more. Now I would see for myself After all, that was what I wanted.
The last of the sunset torched the upper spires so that for a moment they looked like bloody spears. Imagination, that's all it was. A writer's imagination. I clutched at my battered weekender and continued onward, puffing, for the way was steep. But I had arrived at just the right time of the day when the scorching sun was gone from the sky and night's deep chill had not yet settled over the land.
The air was rich with the scents of the sea, an agglomeration so fecund it took my breath away. Far off over the water, great gulls twisted and turned in lazy circles, skimming over the shining face of the ocean only to whirl high aloft, disappearing for long moments into the fleecy pink and yellow clouds.
From the outside, the castle seemed stupendous. It was immense, thrusting upward into the sky as if it were about to take off in flight.
It was constructed-obviously many years ago-from massive blocks of granite laced with iridescent chips of mica that shone like diamonds, rubies and sapphires in the evening's light.
A fairy tale castle it surely looked with its shooting turrets and sharply angled spires, horned and horrific. However, on closer inspection, I saw that it had been put together with nothing more fantastic than mortar.
