by Anne Rice
Emma poured all ten bottles of alcohol onto Suzi. When she was done the girl was sitting in an inch-deep pool of the stuff, soaked with it. Emma figured that she needed to soak in it for a while, so she told Suzi to wait there for a while, and left her there.
She went into the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and lit a cigarette. It’d been two months since she’d smoked. The pack was very stale, but it was better than nothing. When the coffee was ready she poured herself a cup, opened this morning’s paper, and sat down to read.
She’d been reading for twenty minutes when she heard Suzi scream.
The sound made her want to curl up and die; if there was something else that could go wrong, she didn’t want to know about it. She didn’t want to cope with it. But there wasn’t any choice—she had to cope. Even doing nothing was a way of coping, when you thought about it. No matter what Emma felt, no matter how she felt, she was a mother. Before she even realized what she was doing she was in the bathroom beside Suzi.
“Mommy,” Suzi said, her voice so still and quiet that it gave Emma a chill. “I’m melting.”
She held out her right hand, and Emma saw that was just exactly what was happening. Suzi’s fingers looked like wet clay that someone had left sitting in warm water, they were too thin, and there was some sort of a milky fluid dripping from them.
Oh my God, a little voice inside Emma’s head whispered. OhmiGod-OhmiGod. She didn’t understand. What was happening? Alcohol didn’t make people dissolve. Was Suzi’s flesh so rotten that just getting it wet would make it slide away like mud?
She thought she was going to start screaming herself. She managed not to. In fact, it was almost as though she didn’t feel anything at all, just numb and weak and all cold inside. As if her soul had oozed away, or died. Her legs went all rubbery, and she felt her jaw go slack. She thought she was going to faint, but she wasn’t sure; she’d never fainted before.
Suzi looked up at her, and her shrunken little eyes were suddenly hard and mean and angry. She screamed again, and this time it sounded like rage, not fear. She stood up in the tub. Drippy slime drizzled down from her butt and thighs. “Mommy,” she screamed, and she launched herself at Emma. “Stupid, stupid, stupid Mommy!” She raised her fist up over her head and hit Emma square on the breast, and hard. Harder than Suzi’s father’d ever hit her, back when he was still around. Suzi brought her other fist down, just as hard, then pulled them back and hit her again, and again, and again. Emma couldn’t even move herself out of Suzi’s way. She didn’t have the spirit for it.
For a moment it didn’t even look like Suzi beating on her. It looked like some sort of a monster, a dead zombie-thing that any moment would reach into her chest, right through her flesh, and rip out her heart. And it would eat her bloody-dripping heart while it was still alive and beating, and Emma’s eyes would close, and she’d die.
“All your stupid fault, Mommy! All your stupid, stupid fault!” She grabbed Emma by the belt of her uniform skirt and shook her and shook her. Then she screamed and pushed Emma away, threw her against the wall. Emma’s head and back hit too hard against the rock-thick plaster wall, and she fell to the floor. She lay on her side, all slack and beaten, and stared at her daughter, watching her to see what she’d do next.
Suzi stared at her for three long beats like a fury from Hell, and for a moment Emma thought she really was going to die. But then something happened on Suzi’s face, like she’d suddenly realized what she was doing, and her legs fell out from under her and she started crying. It sounded like crying, anyway, and Emma thought there were tears, but it was hard to tell because of the drippy slime all over her.
Emma crawled over to her and put her arms around her and held her. One of her hands brushed up against the cancer in Suzi’s belly and again there was an electric throb, and she almost flinched away. She managed to stop herself, though, and moved her hand without making it seem like an overreaction. “It’s okay, baby. Mommy loves you.” Suzi’s little body heaved with her sobs, and when her back pressed against Emma’s breasts it made the bruises hurt. “Mommy loves you.”
Emma looked at Suzi’s hands, and saw that the flesh had all crumbled away from them. They were nothing but bones, like the skeleton one of the doctors at the hospital kept in his office.
“I want to die, Mommy.” Her voice was all quiet again.
Emma squeezed her, and held her a little tighter. I want to die, Mommy. It made her hurt a little inside, but she knew Suzi was right. Mama Estrella was right. It was wrong for a little girl to be alive after she was dead. Whether faith was right or not, it was wrong to stake a little girl’s soul on it.
“Baby, baby, baby, baby, I love my baby,” Emma cooed. Suzi was crying even harder now, and she’d begun to tremble in a way that wasn’t natural at all.
“You wait here, baby. I got to call Mama Estrella.” Emma lifted herself up off the floor, which made everything hurt all at once.
Emma went to the kitchen, lifted the telephone receiver, and dialed Mama’s number. While the phone rang she wandered back toward the bathroom. The cord was long enough that it didn’t have any trouble stretching that far. Even if it hadn’t really been long enough, though, Emma probably would have tried to make it reach; she wanted to look at Suzi, to watch her, to save as much memory of her as she could.
The girl lay on the bathroom floor, shaking. The tremor had gotten worse, much worse, in just the time it’d taken Emma to dial the phone. It seemed to get worse, too, while Emma watched.
Mama Estrella finally answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Mama?” Emma said, “I think maybe you better come up here.”
Mama Estrella didn’t say anything at all; the line was completely silent. The silence felt bitter and mean to Emma.
“I think maybe you were right, Mama. Right about Suzi, I mean.” Emma looked down at the floor and squeezed her eyes shut. She leaned back against the wall and tried to clear her head. “I think … maybe you better hurry. Something’s very wrong, something I don’t understand.”
Suzi made a little sound halfway between a gasp and a scream, and something went thunk on the floor. Emma didn’t have the heart to look up to see what had happened, but she started back toward the kitchen to hang up the phone.
“Mama, I got to go. Come here now, please?”
“Emma …” Mama Estrella started to say, but Emma didn’t hear her, she’d already hung up, and she was running back to the bathroom, where Suzi was.
Suzi was shivering and writhing on the bathroom floor. Her left arm, from the elbow down, lay on the floor not far from her. Was her flesh that corrupt? God in heaven, was the girl going to shake herself to shreds because of some kind of a nervous fit? Emma didn’t want to believe it, but she couldn’t ignore what she was seeing. She took Suzi in her arms and tilted her up off the floor.
“You’ve got to be still, honey,” Emma said. “You’re going to tremble yourself to death.”
Suzi nodded and gritted her teeth and for a moment she was pretty still. But it wasn’t anything she could control, not for long. Emma carried Suzi to her bedroom, and by the time she got there the girl was shaking just as bad as she had been.
There was a knock on the front door, but Emma didn’t pay any attention. If it was Mama she had her own key, and she’d use it. Emma sat down on the bed beside Suzi and stroked her hair.
After a moment Mama showed up in the bedroom doorway, carrying some kind of a woody-looking thing that burned with a real low flame and smoked something awful. It made so much smoke that Emma figured that it’d take maybe two or three minutes for it to make the air in the room impossible to breathe.
Mama Estrella went to the window and closed it, then drew down the shade.
“Water,” she said. “Bring me a kettle of hot water.”
“You want me to boil water?” There was smoke everywhere already: it was harsh and acrid and when a wisp of it caught in Emma’s eye it burned her like something caustic. A cloud of it drift
ed down toward Suzi, and she started wheezing and coughing. That frightened Emma; she hadn’t even heard the girl draw a breath, except to speak, in all the weeks since she’d died.
“No, there isn’t time. Just bring a kettle of hot water from the tap.”
Then Mama Estrella bent down to look at Suzi, and suddenly it was too late for hot water and magic and putting little girls to rest.
The thick smoke from the burning thing settled onto Suzi’s face, and Suzi began to gag. She took in a long wheezing-hacking breath, and for three long moments she choked on it, or maybe on the corruption of her own lungs. Then she began to cough, deep, throbbing, hacking coughs that shook her hard against the bed.
Mama Estrella pulled away from the bed. She looked shocked and frightened and unsure.
“Suzi, be still!” Emma shouted. It didn’t do any good.
Suzi sat up, trying to control herself. That only made things worse—the next cough sent her flying face-first onto the floor. She made an awful smacking sound when she hit; when she rolled over Emma saw that she’d broken her nose.
Suzi wheezed, sucking in air.
She’s breathing, Emma thought. Please, God, she’s breathing now and she’s going to be fine. Please.
But even as Emma thought it she knew that it wasn’t going to be so. The girl managed four wheezing breaths, and then she was coughing again, and much worse—Emma saw bits of the meat of her daughters lungs spatter on the hardwood floor.
She bent down and hugged Suzi, hugged her tight to make her still. “Be still, baby. Hold your breath for a moment and be still. Mommy loves you, Suzi.” But Suzi didn’t stop, she couldn’t stop, and the force of her wracking was so mean that her shoulders dug new bruises in Emma’s breast. When Suzi finally managed to still herself for a moment she looked up at Emma, her eyes full of desperation, and she said, “Mommy …”
And then she coughed again, so hard that her tiny body pounded into Emma’s breast, and her small, hard-boned chin slammed down onto Emma’s shoulder.
Slammed down so hard that the force of it tore free the flesh of Suzi’s neck.
And Suzi’s head tumbled down Emma’s back, and rolled across the floor.
Emma turned her head and watched it happen, and the sight filled her nightmares for the rest of her life. The tear began at the back of Suzi’s neck, where the bone of her skull met her spine. The skin there broke loose all at once, as though it had snapped, and the meat inside pulled away from itself in long loose strings. The cartilage of Suzi’s spine popped loose like an empty hose, and the veins and pipes in the front of her neck pulled away from her head like they weren’t even attached anymore.
Her head rolled over and over until it came to a stop against the leg of a chair. Suzi’s eyes blinked three times and then they closed forever.
Her body shook and clutched against Emma’s chest for a few more seconds, the way Emma always heard a chicken’s does when you take an axe to its neck. When the spasming got to be too much to bear, Emma let go and watched her daughter’s corpse shake itself to shreds on the bedroom floor. After a while the tumor-thing fell out of it, and everything was still.
Everything but the cancer. It quivered like gray, moldy-rotten pudding that you touched on a back shelf in the refrigerator because you’d forgotten it was there.
“Oh my God,” Mama Estrella said.
Emma felt scared and confused, and empty, too, like something important had torn out of her and there was nothing left inside but dead air.
But even if Emma was hollow inside, she couldn’t force her eye away from the cancer. Maybe it was morbid fascination, and maybe it was something else completely, but she knelt down and looked at it, watched it from so close she could almost taste it. There was something about it, something wrong. Even more wrong than it had been before.
“She’s dead, Emma. She’s dead forever.”
Emma shuddered, but still she couldn’t force herself away. The tumor began to still, but one of its ropy gray veins still pulsed. She reached down and touched it, and the whole gray mass began to throb again.
“What is it, Mama Estrella? Is it alive?”
“I don’t know, Emma. I don’t know what it is, but it’s dead.”
Then the spongy gray tissue at the tumor’s crest began to swell and bulge, to bulge so far that it stretched thin and finally split.
“Like an egg, Mama,” Emma said. “It almost looks like an egg when a chick is hatching. I’ve seen that on the television, and it looks just like this.”
Emma reached over toward the split, carefully, carefully, imagining some horrible monster would reach up out of the thing and tear her hand from her wrist. But there was no monster, only hard, leathery hide. She set the fingers of her other hand against the far lip of the opening and pried the split wide so that she could peek into it. But her head blocked what little light she could let in.
Small gurgling sounds came out of the darkness.
Emma crossed herself and mumbled a prayer too quiet for anyone else to hear.
And reached down, into her daughter’s cancer.
Before her hand was halfway in, she felt the touch of a tiny hand. It startled her so badly that she almost screamed. To hold it back she bit into her lip so hard that she tasted her own blood.
A baby’s hand.
Then a baby girl was crawling up out of the leathery gray shell, and Mama Estrella was praying out loud, and Emma felt herself crying with joy.
“I love you, Mommy,” the baby said. Its voice was Suzi’s voice, just as it’d been before her sickness.
Emma wanted to cry and cry and cry, but instead she lifted her baby Suzi out of the cancer that’d borne her, and she held her to her breast and loved her so hard that the moment felt like forever and ever.
LARGER THAN LIFE
LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS
GABE Drucker’s stomach began to pinch almost as soon as the daily rushes began rolling. By the time the reel ended he had full-blown abdominal cramps, and his mouth tasted like an old gym sock.
It sucked.
There just wasn’t any better way to say it; everything that had been shot so far sucked.
In the good old days, he’d have just thrown it all out and sacked the director and hired someone new with orders to reshoot it from scratch, but he couldn’t do that now. He couldn’t do any of it. The studio lawyers and accountants were watching him constantly, ready to pounce if he showed the slightest flicker of initiative, the faintest hint of going over the incredibly miserly, penny-pinching, impossible budget he’d been given, the first sign of violating the ghastly contracts he had reluctantly put his name on.
If only Yes Miss Maizie hadn’t flopped, he wouldn’t have agreed to any of it.
But Yes Miss Maizie had flopped. So had Scarlett III, and Way Down Yonder, and Into the Swamps, and Gabe Drucker knew that after four bombs in a row he was lucky to be working at all, that there were plenty of producers who were sweeping floors or flipping burgers at the commissary after fewer than four full-blown disasters.
So he couldn’t fire that loon of a director, or recast the film, or reshoot any of it. He had to somehow salvage this mess as it was. With five bombs in a row, he’d never work in films again. He had to save this flick.
Maybe it wasn’t really as bad as it looked, he told himself; maybe he was just seeing the worst. With that thought in mind, he turned to his assistant and asked, “What’d you think?”
Joan wrinkled her nose and waved a hand. “Stinks,” she said.
Gabe grimaced, as his stomach twisted again. “Care to be a bit more specific?” he asked.
Joan peered sideways at him. “You have to ask?”
“I have to ask,” Gabe confirmed. “So tell me, what’s good, what’s bad, why does it stink.”
Joan considered this. “The dialogue is crap,” she said. “Luke has it lit like a goddamn museum display, and nobody moved. Even your precious Angela Denham is stiff as a board—when you said she’d dried out, I f
igured you meant she’d stopped boozing. I didn’t realize she was petrified.”
“All right, that’s the bad news,” Gabe acknowledged. “What was good about it?”
Joan had to think much longer this time, but finally admitted, “Denham looks good, anyway. She’s still got the face—hell, maybe it’s the hard times, but she’s got more character up there than ever. The camera loves her—if she’d just show some signs of life.”
Gabe nodded, staring at the blank screen. Her assessment matched his own. If anything was going to save this picture—and his career—it was Angela Denham.
He hoped to God she really was off the booze and the drugs. After three years in the gutter she needed this film as much as he did—but was that lifeless expression she wore just because she was worn out, or was she up to her eyelids on ‘ludes?
Of course, if he tried to find out, she’d probably get pissed and quit—she’d done that on Roses for Mary four or five years ago, when she first started to slip; she’d just walked off the set when the director told her he wanted her sober next time. And she hadn’t come back, either.
He got out of his seat and stood up, joints creaking.
Maybe they could rewrite some of the dialogue, Joan and himself and some of the brighter crew members, and tell the writers that the actors had ad-libbed. And he could tell Luke he wanted more movement on screen, and to stop screwing up Bill’s lighting; if Luke didn’t like it, maybe he’d walk out, quit the film—Gabe hoped he would walk.
Just for Love was never going to be a cinematic masterpiece, Gabe knew that, but maybe, just maybe, it would earn out. Maybe Denham still had enough fans out there to put it in the black, and when it was over he could land another film, work his way back up.
Without Angela Denham, he’d be painting curbstones, or maybe taking his crazy brother up on that research job in Haiti….
“Mr. Drucker?”
He looked up; one of the gofers was standing in the door, looking very nervous. “What is it?” Gabe asked.
“It’s Ms. Denham, sir….”