Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  One of the men who had been upstairs was carrying a white sheet from one of the twins’ beds. Using surgical tape, he hung it against the wall. They propped Deborah and the children up in front of it.

  “Wake her up.”

  The thin man brought a capsule of smelling salts from his pocket and broke it under Deborah’s nose. She returned to full consciousness with a snap of her head. Two men grabbed Aaron by the hair and shoulders and dragged him to the wall, pushed him to his knees.

  The thin man stepped back, unfolded a small Polaroid camera, and took three pictures. He waited for them to develop and showed the handsome man. Another man produced a small Sony tape recorder and held the microphone near Aaron’s face.

  “Please read this,” said the handsome man, uncreasing a double-spaced sheet of typing. He held it ten inches in front of Aaron’s eyes.

  “No,” said Aaron, and braced for the blow. If he could change their agenda— gain time in any way.

  The handsome man nodded thoughtfully and turned away. “Kill one of the children,” he said softly. “Either one.”

  “No, wait, stop, please! I’ll do it!” Aaron was screaming. The thin man had set the silencer against Rebecca’s temple and had cocked the hammer of the automatic. He did not pause or look up at Aaron’s cries.

  “Just a second, please, Donald,” said the handsome man. He held the paper in front of Aaron’s face again and clicked on the recorder.

  “Uncle Saul, Deb and the kids and I are fine, but please do what they say . . .” began Aaron. He read the few paragraphs. It took less than a minute.

  “Very good, Aaron,” said the handsome man. Two men grabbed Aaron’s hair again and bent his head far back. Aaron gasped for breath against a tight throat and strained to see out of the corners of his eyes.

  The sheet was removed and carried out of sight. A man pulled a black plastic tarp out of his jacket pocket and unrolled it on the floor in front of Deborah. It was no larger than three by four feet and smelled like a cheap shower curtain.

  “Bring him over here,” said the handsome man and Aaron was dragged back to the piano stool. The second they released his hair, Aaron moved— his legs uncoiling like a spring, the top of his head striking the handsome man in the chin, turning, butting another in the belly, pulling away from the six hands grabbing at him, kicking at someone’s crotch, missing, and then going down, one man under him, two on top, hitting his right cheek again, hard, and not caring . . .

  “Let us start again,” said the handsome man quietly. He was fingering a cut on his chin and yawning, stretching the jaw muscles. Most of the bruise probably would be under the chin.

  “Who are you?” gasped Aaron as they dragged him upright and set him on the piano stool. Someone taped his ankles together.

  No one answered. The thin man moved Deborah forward until she was kneeling on the black plastic. Two men held six-inch lengths of thin wire, sharpened on one end, embedded in a taped wooden grip at the other. The room reeked of gas. The smell made Aaron want to vomit.

  “What are you going to do?” Aaron’s throat was so dry that the words were little better than clicks. Even as the handsome man answered, Aaron felt his mind skid like an automobile on black ice, felt his point of view shift so that he was looking down at all this, not accepting what would happen next but knowing what would happen, feeling— in his total inability to change one second of the past or future— the incredible, total unrelenting wave of helplessness that a hundred generations of Jews had felt before him, felt at the lip of the oven, felt at the door to the showers, felt while watching the flames rise from the old cities and while listening to the shouts of the goyim rise in ferocity and nearness. Uncle Saul knew, thought Aaron as he squeezed his eyes shut and willed his mind not to understand the words.

  “There will be a gas explosion,” said the handsome man. He had a patient voice— a teacher’s voice. “A fire. The bodies will be found in bed. Very badly burned. A very good coroner or medical examiner could tell that the persons had died shortly before the fire charred the bodies, but that will not be discovered. The wire goes in at the corner of the eye . . . directly into the brain. It leaves a very tiny hole, even on a body that has not been burned.” He spoke to the others. “I think we will have Mrs. Eshkol found in the upstairs hall . . . a child in each arm . . . almost successful in escaping the flames. Do the woman first. Then the twins.”

  Aaron struggled, cried out, kicked. Hands and arms held him in place. “Who are you?” he screamed.

  Surprisingly, the handsome man responded. “Who are we?” he said. “Why we’re no one. No one at all.” He moved out of the way so Aaron could have a better view of what the others were doing.

  Aaron made no protest when they finally came to him with the wire.

  EIGHTEEN

  Melanie

  Riding north on the bus, through the endless row house slums of Baltimore and the industrial cloaca of Wilmington, I was reminded of a line from the writings of St. Augustine: “The Devil hath established his cities in the North.”

  I had always hated the large northern cities: their reek of impersonal madness, their coal smoke gloom and grit, and the sense of hopelessness that seems to coat the filthy streets and the equally unclean inhabitants. I had always thought that the most visible aspect of Nina’s long betrayal had been her abandonment of the South for the cold canyons of New York. I had no intention of going as far north as New York.

  A sudden, brief flurry of snowflakes cut off the depressing view, and I returned my attention to the interior of the bus. The woman across the aisle from me glanced up from her book and gave me a sly smile, the third since we had left the Washington suburbs. I nodded and continued with my knitting. Already I suspected that the timid lady across from me— a woman who was probably in her early fifties but who generated an impression of spinsterish decrepitude twenty years beyond that— might well be part of the solution to my problem.

  To one of my problems.

  I was glad to be out of Washington. In my youth I had rather enjoyed that sleepy, southern-feeling city; even until the Second World War it had retained an air of relaxed confusion. But now that marble hive of a city made me think of a pretentious mausoleum filled with bustling, power-hungry insects.

  I glanced out at the snow flurries and for a second could not think of what day or month it was. The day came first— Thursday. We had spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights in a dreary motel some miles from the center of Washington. On Wednesday I had Vincent drive the Buick to the vicinity of the Capitol, abandon it, and walk back to the motel. The walk had taken him three hours, but Vincent did not complain. He would not be complaining in the future. On Tuesday night I had had him take care of necessary personal details, using simple sewing thread and a needle I had heated over a candle flame.

  The purchases I had made in a shopping mall that Wednesday morning— a few dresses, robe, underwear— were all the more depressing in contrast to the fine things that I had lost in Atlanta. I still had almost nine thousand dollars in my absurd straw tote bag. There was, of course, much more money available in safe-deposit boxes and savings accounts in Charleston, Minneapolis, New Delhi, and Toulon, but I had no intention of trying to retrieve those funds at this time. If Nina had known about my Atlanta account, she must know about the others.

  Nina is dead, I thought.

  But her Ability had been the strongest of us all. She had Used one of Willi’s cat’s-paws to destroy his plane even as she sat chatting with me. Her Ability was incredible, frightening. It might reach me even from the grave, grow in power even as Nina Drayton’s body rotted in its coffin. My heart began to race and I glanced over my shoulder at the faces visible in the dim rows of bus seats . . .

  Nina is dead.

  It was a Thursday, exactly one week before Christmas. That made it December 18. The Reunion had been on December 12. Eons separated those two dates. For the past two decades my life had suffered few outward changes beyond the necessary indul
gences I had allowed myself. Now everything had changed.

  “Excuse me,” said the woman across the aisle from me, “but I can’t help but admire what you are knitting there. Is it going to be a sweater for a grandchild?”

  I turned and gave the little woman the full radiance of my smile. When I was very young, before I discovered that there were many things that a young lady simply did not do, I used to go fishing with my father. It was that first nibble on the line, those first tentative tugs and tremors of the bobber that I found most exciting. It was at that instant, when the hook had not yet slammed home, that all the fisherman’s skills had to be brought to play.

  “Why, yes, it is,” I said. The thought of having a mewling grandchild somewhere actually nauseated me, but I had long since discovered both the therapeutic effects of knitting and the psychological camouflage it offered in public.

  “A grandson?”

  “Granddaughter,” I said and slipped into this woman’s mind. It was like stepping through an open door. There was no resistance. I was as careful and subtle as possible, sliding along mental corridors and passageways and through more open doors, never intrusive, until I found the plea sure center of her brain. Holding the image of petting a Persian cat, although I loathed cats, I stroked her, feeling the onrush of plea sure flow through her, and out of her like an unexpected gush of warm urine.

  “Oh,” she said, blushed, then blushed again at not knowing why she blushed. “A granddaughter, how wonderful.”

  I moderated the stroking, modulated it, coordinated it with each shy glance she gave me, increased it when she heard my voice. Some people strike us with this force naturally when we meet them. With young people it is called falling in love. With politicians it is called generating charisma.

  When it is handled by a master speaker who has a touch of the Ability, we tend to call the results mob hysteria. One of the frequently mentioned but rarely noted facts alluded to by contemporaries and associates of Adolf Hitler is that people felt good in his presence. A few weeks of the conditioning level I had just initiated with this woman would create an addiction much more potent than that caused by heroin. We love being in love because it is as close as humans can come to feeling this psychic addiction.

  After a moment or two of idle conversation, this lonely woman, who looked as much older than her true age as I look younger than mine, patted the seat next to her and said, blushing once again, “There is plenty of room over here. Would you care to join me so that we can continue our discussion without speaking so loudly?”

  “I would love to,” I said, and stuffed the yarn and needles into my tote bag. The knitting had served its purpose.

  Her name was Anne Bishop and she was returning to her home in Philadelphia after a lengthy and unsatisfactory visit in Washington with her younger sister’s family. Ten minutes of conversation told me everything I needed to know. The mental stroking would not have been necessary; this woman was dying to talk to someone.

  Anne had come from a well-thought-of and well-to-do Philadelphia family. A trust fund set up by her father remained her major source of income. She had never married. For thirty-two years this faded shade of a woman had looked after her brother Paul, a paraplegic slowly transforming into a quadriplegic through a progressive nerve disease. This past May, Paul had died, and Anne Bishop had not yet become attuned to a world in which she was not responsible for him. Her visit with her sister Elaine— the first such reunion in eight years— had been a sad affair; Anne impatient with Elaine’s loutish husband and ill-mannered children— the family obviously put off by the spinsterish habits of Auntie Anne.

  I knew Anne Bishop’s type well— I had even masqueraded as this sort of defeated female during my long hibernation from life. She was a satellite in search of a world around which to orbit. Any world would do as long as it did not require the cold, solitary ellipse of in dependence. Paraplegic brothers were a gift from God for such women; endless and single-minded devotion to a husband or child would have been an alternative, but caring for a failing brother offered so many more excuses for avoiding the other commitments and tangles and bothersome details of living. In their unflagging ser vice and selflessness, these women are invariably selfish monsters. In her modest, self-effacing, and loving comments about her dear departed brother, I sensed the perverse fetish of the bedpan and wheelchair, the sick self-indulgence of denying all else for thirty years in a sacrifice of young womanhood, adulthood, and parenthood to serve the odorous needs of a semi-ambulatory corpse. I knew Anne Bishop well: a practitioner of a sort of slow and masturbatory suicide. The thought makes me ashamed to be the same sex. Frequently when encountering these poor slugs, I am tempted to help them stick their hands and arms down their own throats until they choke on their own vomit and have done with it.

  “There, there. I understand,” I said and patted her arm as she shed tears over the telling of her travails. “I understand just how it is.”

  “You do understand,” said Anne. “It is so rare that one meets someone who can comprehend another’s grief. I feel we have much in common.”

  I nodded and looked at Anne Bishop. Fifty-two years old, she easily could have passed for seventy. She dressed well, but she was the type of hunched-over wallflower that could make any suit or gown wear like a frumpy house dress and sweater. Her hair was a faded brown, with a center part she had plowed in the same row for forty-five years, and her bangs hung in limp defeat. Her eyes were circled and darkened, made for weeping. Her mouth was thin and prim, not quite assertive enough to be called censorius but obviously rarely given to laughter. Her wrinkles all flowed downward; gravity’s verdict was etched deeply. Her mind had the skittish, hungry shallowness of a frightened squirrel.

  She was perfect.

  I told her my tale, using the name Beatrice Straughn since I still carried that identification. My husband had been a successful Savannah banker. His passing eight years earlier had left an estate to be mismanaged by my sister’s son . . . Todd . . . who, it seems, was able to lose all of my money as well as his before he and his graceless wife killed themselves this past autumn in a dramatic automobile accident, leaving me with funeral expenses, bad debts to pay off, and their son Vincent to take care of. My own son and his pregnant wife were in Okinawa, teaching in a mission school. Now I had sold the Savannah house, paid the last of Todd’s debts, and was venturing north to find a new life for my grandnephew and myself.

  The story was nonsense, but I helped Anne Bishop believe it with subtle strokes of plea sure punctuating each revelation.

  “Your nephew is very handsome,” said Anne.

  I smiled and glanced across the aisle to where Vincent was sitting. He wore the cheap white shirt, dark tie, blue windbreaker, creased slacks, and black shoes we had purchased at a Washington K-Mart. I had trimmed his hair a bit, but then decided on a whim to leave it long; now it was clean and neatly tied back in a pony tail. He stared without expression at the snow flurries and passing scenery. There was no way to change his chinless ferret’s face or the pustules of acne there. “Thank you,” I said. “He takes after his mother . . . God rest her soul.”

  “He is very quiet,” said Anne.

  I nodded and allowed tears to come to my eyes. “The accident . . .” I began and had to pause before I could go on. “The poor darling lost much of his tongue in the automobile accident. They tell me that he will never be able to speak again.”

  “My dear, my dear,” clucked Anne. “God’s Will is not for us to understand, only to bear.”

  We consoled each other as the bus hissed along on a stretch of elevated highway above the endless slums of South Philadelphia.

  Anne Bishop was pleased that we accepted her invitation to spend a few days with her.

  Downtown Philadelphia was crowded, noisy, and filthy. With Vincent carrying our bags, we walked to a subterranean train station and Anne purchased tickets on the Chestnut Hill local to Chelten Avenue. During the bus ride she had told me about her lovely ho
me in Germantown. Even though she had mentioned that the city had deteriorated in recent decades with the introduction of “undesirable elements,” I still had pictured the Germantown as a separate entity from the brick and iron sprawl of Philadelphia. It was not. The weak afternoon light out the train window illuminated row houses, crumbling brick factories, sagging landings, narrow streets littered with the metal corpses of abandoned automobiles, empty lots, and Negroes. Except for some of the train passengers and glimpses of white faces in the automobiles on the expressway that paralleled the tracks, the city seemed to be inhabited solely by Negroes. I sat exhausted and dispirited, staring out the greasy train window at Negro children running through empty lots, small black faces emerging from grimy parkas, Negro men ambling in their dull and threatening way down cold streets, broad Negro women pushing purloined shopping carts, glimpses of Negro faces through dark panes . . .

  I set my head against the cold window and resisted the urge to cry. My father had been right, in those last sunlit days before the Great War, when he prophesied that the country would rot away when the colored began to vote. They had reshaped a once great nation into the littered ruins of their own lazy despair.

  Nina would never find me here. My movements over the past few days had been random. Spending a week, or several weeks, with Anne— even if it meant descending into this pit of unemployed colored people— would add another element of randomness to an already random pattern.

  We disembarked at an urban station marked Chelten Avenue. The tracks ran between sheer concrete walls, the city loomed above. Suddenly frightened, too tired to climb the stairs to street level, I had us sit and rest several minutes on an uncomfortable bench the color of bile. A train roared past us, headed back to the center city. A group of colored teenagers bounded up the stairs, shouting obscenities and shoving each other and anyone who got in their way. I could hear street sounds in the distance. The wind was terribly cold. Snow flurries appeared from nowhere and pelted our cement waiting area. Vincent did not flinch or close his windbreaker.