The Dark

by Ellen Datlow

  Wind crashed against Thespia, and now the building trembled. From the forest, branches of young trees were cast. They hit with ballistic force.

  “Better explain that,” I said to Julie. “Before thanking people, I like to know what the conversation’s about.” Oddly enough, my voice remained calm.

  “I’ve stored life in you,” Julie said. “You’re nothing but storage, and you, I don’t need.” He listened for Cat. “But at least you brought the woman.” Julie turned to look at Gabrielle. His lips were too bloated to curl, but scorn filled his voice. “This one has become a burden.”

  An ornamental suaveness had always been Julie’s trademark, but now it was replaced by something savage. He sat enthroned, too bloated to walk, and he sat beside a corpse. Color whirled crazily around us as, far across the room, Cat and a company of spirits cavorted. The spirits were now as substantial as when they were alive.

  “Betrayed.” Gabrielle’s voice seemed made of dust. It faded as a last rustle of her being departed.

  “Betrayed.” The word dwindled, and the mouth that had until then not moved, gaped. If Gabrielle was not free, at least she had been released.

  “You were always a milksop,” Julie told me, “thus useful. I control vitality here. I control life. If I invest in you, and keep you vital, I persuade myself that you’re insurance.”

  And finally, after nearly ninety years of life, I began to catch on.

  I made connections. Vitality was stored with us for use in keeping Julie alive. That was the reason for the Barrister’s decline. Julie was feeding on his capital.

  Poor fool. I finally understood, then understood something more. Cat was not scandalous. I was, or had been. I had played it safe, not knowing that poverty of spirit is defensive, but life isn’t. Poverty of spirit only shapes more poverty. Creation shapes the world.

  “I believe,” I told Julie, “that your policy just lapsed.” Beyond the mummified figure of Gabrielle, a ring of dancers circled a Maypole. Cat skipped nimble as a child.

  “Give way,” I told him. “The woman behind you has lived more in any five minutes of her life than you have in a hundred and forty years.”

  A sneer. And yet, the bloated figure above me moved uneasily. “Behind me?”

  “My mistake,” I told him. “You’re way behind. She does not give two snips about you.”

  “Soupçon, of breeze, a stir of air, and rises lordly wind.” Cat’s voice sounded like a child at play. Dancers began to flow around the room, and from the first crack in the walls of Julie’s bastion, there entered a movement of air. It was but a breath at first, but definitely a breach. Dancers pantomimed the wind, swooping, eddying, while laughter deepened.

  “She’ll care soon enough. What I can give, I can take away.” Julie watched the actors as they danced. “I took what I needed from them once, I’ll take again. You idiots have done a favor.”

  “Release the Barrister.”

  “Already done,” Julie told me. “There’s fatter game here.”

  “And a fatter hunter.” I thought myself mad to bait him. Then I thought that he was the one who was mad. For a century, he had run roughshod. Now, with a breeze ruffling that tentlike and transparent robe, he could not imagine his hazard.

  He was like a man trying to pick up a stone that he thought was a prop, an imitation made of paper, but instead, had turned out to be a real stone. He paused, perplexed. He concentrated, strained, and his eyes were portraits of fear.

  “What cruel revenge they are taking,” I said about Cat and her company. “It is the revenge of unimportance. They tell you that you were, and are, king of nothing, nothing more.” In defiance, I wet my finger and held it aloft to determine the direction of the breeze. “Observe as they create the wind, because you look your last.”

  I thought I could not care about Julie, and yet as his struggle began, I felt small sadness. “If you were truly evil, I would rejoice,” I told him. “But you’re only arrogant. What you do is evil, but to be truly evil … you’re not man enough.”

  Now the actors formed a cortege behind a casket borne on a donkey cart. They were costumed as clowns, and they cast flowers in the air; and flowers threw petals into the wind. A shower of petals blew toward us. Actors near the coffin sang a funereal song, although they smiled and their clown shoes flippity-flopped. At the end of the procession, like mischievous children, actors pranced.

  “The king is dead,” I told Julie, “and he was only king of a room that is about to disappear.”

  Fear, like none I have ever known, now lived on Julie’s face. I doubted not that fear lived more vibrantly than any other emotion Julie had ever felt. At first I thought he was trying to steal life, then realized he was in a struggle to hold onto what he had already stolen. “You could offer help,” he choked. “You owe.”

  “Nothing I can do.” I thought of a hundred years of theft and exploitation. I thought of our dying town and the murder of people and the murder of dreams. “Nothing I want to do. No one owes anything, not even simple courtesy.”

  “I’ll pay. I offer life.”

  I think he believed he spoke the truth. For all his many years he had fed, and fed. He had controlled. He could not then grasp that his control was gone.

  He began to wither. At first he only seemed to shrink, and for a moment, I did not understand that the lives and colors he had hoarded were escaping. The bloat decreased. In the distance, actors postured, declaimed, and their play was grimly comic.

  “A little life. Save a little.” The plea was to me, or to fate, or to some god unknown; and it was frantic.

  It was then I became cruel. “None,” I told him. “You’re not important enough for Hell, and so you simply disappear. You will not even be a bug, a mote, or any incarnation. Neither Earth nor Heaven will know you more.” I had no notion whether I spoke true, but it seemed true. Mine were the last words Julie heard before succumbing to fear.

  He did not shrink, but, like Forte, folded in on himself. As the bloat disappeared, and as blue eyes grew wild with insanity, Julie appeared as he had once been. His thin-legged, high-rumped form writhed on a throne now devoid of color; and as color departed, he screamed. He was momentarily young, and in torment.

  As he departed, he aged: faded hair, faded but tortured eyes, creases beginning, then deepening. His fingers grasped uncontrolled as he screamed. When dismemberment started its slow and bloody progress, I had seen enough.

  Cat took me by the arm. “At the very outside,” she told me. “We have ten minutes.” She tugged, and I was not loath to follow. My last memory of the place is of screams and the stench of decay.

  We moved quickly and without speaking. Cat’s band of actors accompanied us, and I could not for the moment believe that they were spirits. They trod the stairs, and the stairs drummed beneath their feet.

  Past dusty rooms, past fragile bones, while we were chased by wind that scoured hallways. We moved quickly, but slowed as we left the building and stepped into young forest that danced in the wind. I felt age begin to creep upon me. Life was not stolen, but the vitality Julie had invested was now leaving. Soon I would be weak and tottering.

  Cat stood beside me, sisterly and protective. Actors gathered about as we watched a consummation.

  Fire started in a hundred or a thousand places from small torches of light. Wind wrapped around the building. An actor’s voice muttered. “‘Blow winds, blow and crack your cheeks.’”

  “I mourn its passing,” Cat murmured to the actors, or possibly to me. “The theater couldn’t help who owned it.” Then she brightened. “But then, one does not need a building. The street is a stage.”

  It is a formidable sight to watch any large building burn. When the building is nigh the size of a castle, the sight inspires awe. The small torches of light appeared when lives trapped in that building flared in their escapes. Wind fanned the tiny fires, so that in only moments, the entire mansion alighted with flame. Wind flared around fourth floor, where if Julie st
ill existed, he lay in an immense crematory. Fire illumed clouds and mist flowing from the forest. Wind searched, expanded, and the burning of Thespia was like a dry stick dropped into a blast furnace.

  “Time to leave,” Cat whispered to me. “Good job you did in there.”

  I turned to her. In the fire-glow, her face seemed young as a girl’s, although age crept across her body. Her hands trembled. She smiled, happy as an excited child, and reached to touch my cheek. Beside her, spirits faded as they began to move into the forest. “I leave with them,” Cat said. “It’s where I belong. But you, I’ll miss.” And then she turned, walking slowly, and disappeared into the forest.

  There is little more to tell. I had enough remaining strength to leave the forest. Our town’s policeman found me trudging the road to town, and took me home. It was a week before I ventured out.

  It seemed that with the passing of Forte and Thespia, any fear that locals owned was gone. When I stepped back into our streets, the remaining mansions had been raided, with little of value recovered. The buildings stood stripped and bare. A constant wind guaranteed their passing. The story was over, but the record still needed to be made.

  The library is a cool, sometimes cold place, but I must close the record here. I want nothing of Julie, not even a notation, to enter my own rooms.

  I note the passing of the Barrister. He died in peace, and in a hospital bed. He was conscious and only a little ill, but his illness was not Julie. He was his own man.

  And I proudly note that I am mine. In nigh ninety years, I learned trade, and craft, and even artfulness; but never art. It took Cat to teach me. One need not regret lost years when one has learned great things.

  AFTERWORD

  My favorite ghost story is Peter Beagle’s Tamsin, which, besides being beautifully written, deals in most of the things I enjoy about fantastical writing. It has Good and Evil, plus lots of well-researched history, and the characters are near perfect. The good kids are innocent, but not dumb. The bad guy (Judge Jeffries) is the most scary kind of monster, one of those quiet, nasty types; and when punishing forces cruise the world, you can actually feel winds pick up.

  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 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 four collections of dark fiction, and to edit American Gothic Tales. Oates’s short novel Zombie won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in the Novel, and she has been honored with a Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association. Her most recent titles are Middle Age: A Romance and I’ll Take You There. She 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 The Ontario Review.

  SUBWAY

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  PLEASE LOVE ME my eyes beg. My need is so raw, I can’t blame you for looking quickly away.

  Not you, not you, and you—none of you I can blame. Only just love me, can’t you? Love me … .

  THAT SUNDAY NIGHT, desperate not to be late! I had to change trains at Times Square, and the subway was jammed, both trains were crowded, always I knew it would happen soon, my destiny would happen within the hour, except I had to be at the precise position, when he lifted his eyes to mine casual-seeming or by chance turned to face me. I must be there, or the precious moment would pass, and then, and then—so lonely! In that swarm of strangers departing a train, pushing onto the next train, pushing to the stairs, breathless and trying not to turn my ankle in my spike-heeled spaghetti-strap shoes, my hair that’s so sexy-black you’d suspect it must be dyed but my hair is not dyed, this is my natural color, and my skin white, exquisite moist-looking white like the face of a ceramic doll, and I’m wearing a black-suede mini-skirt and black diamond-patterned stockings (not pantyhose, but stockings, with a black-satin garter belt you can catch a glimpse of when I’m seated, when I cross my shapely legs in just the right way), and a white-lace see-through camisole with straps thin as threads, and beneath the camisole a black-satin C-cup bra that grips my breasts tight, lifting them in mute appeal. Please love me, please look at me, how can you look away? Here I am. My black hair I have ratted with a steel comb to three times its natural size, my mouth that’s small and hurt like a snail in its shell I have outlined in crimson, a high-gloss lipstick applied to the outside of the lips enlarging them so I’m smiling breathless making my way to the other side of the track being pushed against, collided with, rudely touched by—who?—sometimes I’m to blame, these damned high heels, catching the heel in a wad of chewed gum, absolutely disgusting, sometimes I let myself be brushed against, it’s an accident, or almost an accident, some leather-jacket swarthy-skinned guy swerving toward me staring at me chewing his mustache, hot dark-veiled eyes, I see him coming, headed in my direction, I can step aside if I make the effort, if I’m quick enough, but a strange lassitude comes over me, this one isn’t the one and yet!—sometimes the jolt hurts, the force of him colliding with me as he hurries past, doesn’t slow his pace or pause, doesn’t apologize of course, not even a murmur of greeting, the touch is like an electric shock, half-pleasurable, though meant to hurt. As if he knows, this stranger, he isn’t the one, not my destiny.

  That Sunday night, not late—not yet 10:00 P.M. And not so crowded as the previous nights, those wild weekend nights, but still plenty crowded at Times Square, you can be sure. And I was desperate hurrying to make the downtown train. Before the doors closed. Stumbling in my high-heeled shoes so if you saw me you might’ve thought there was something wrong with me, some strange glisten of excitement in my black-mascara eyes and panting crimson mouth, and maybe you’d have wanted to help me, offer me your seat at least. And maybe, just maybe I would have accepted.

  Always in the subway I think On this train, in this car is my destiny: who? Trembling with excitement. Anticipation! Contemplating through my lowered eyelashes the possibilities. Mostly men of course but (sometimes) women also. Young men, middle-aged men, occasionally even older men. Young women, with a certain sign. But not middle-aged, or older women. Never. I tried not even to look at them. Resented feeling sorry for them, their raddled faces and tired eyes. And sometimes in these eyes a look of hope, I despised. And sometimes out of loneliness one of these women might smile at me, move over inviting me to sit beside her, like hell I will sit beside some old bag like she’s my mother.

  On the train that night a woman of maybe forty-five took note of me as soon as I hurried into the car, out of breath and laughing to myself, my hair in my face. She was in some kind of green uniform, and ugly dirty-white nurse’s shoes they looked like, and her gray-brown hair flat against her head in a hairnet, staring at me disapproving I thought, prissy fish-mouth I tried not to look at, I hate that type of person observing me, judging me. Not to the hairnet woman was I pleading Look at me, love me! Hey: here I am.

  In the subway the trains move so fast you never can catch your breath. Outside the window that’s a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing walls of the tunnel, then the train slows for a station, and the doors open, and people lurch off, and new people lurch on, and you lift your eyes hopeful and yearning Who will be my destiny? Which one of you? At 34th Street a man came on, sat near me, I was flattered to think he chose that seat deliberately the way his eyes trailed over me, my crossed legs in the patterned black stockings, my mouth in almost a smile, like I am expecting to recognize someone, like a child I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised, I am not a cynical person by nature. He stared at me, and his mouth moved in a twitchy way you might interpret as a smile. He was in his late thirties maybe, pale coarse pitted skin but still good-looking in that battered way some men look, sandy hair crimped and wavy over his head and shaved up the sides you could see it was no wig, a
nd in his right ear lobe there was a glittering red stone I believed must be a ruby. The sign was he was wearing suede, like my skirt: sexy black jacket with chrome studs. He was wearing tight designer jeans, and ostrich-skin boots. On his wrist, a heavy I.D. bracelet. When he opened his mouth to smile, a gleaming tongue-ring winking at me. Like he knew me he said a name, maybe it was a name he’d invented at that moment or maybe it was a name known to him, he said this name, and I smiled at him in puzzlement saying no that isn’t my name, I am not that girl, and he asked which girl was I then, and I told him Rosellen, and he repeated: Ros-ellen and said it was a beautiful name for a beautiful girl. In his eyes I saw that he was impressed with me, and he began talking about himself in a rapid low voice so other people couldn’t hear, he said he was a lonely pilgrim searching for something he could not name, he’d been searching for all of his life, would I like to have coffee with him, would I like to have a drink with him, and all this time I was quietly observing him, through my eyelashes I was observing him, his eyes that were intelligent eyes though bloodshot and pouchy, and the truth came to me as if from a great distance No: he is not the one. So I told him politely I could not go with him. I told him politely I was meeting someone else. And he stared at me not so friendly now, his smile exposing his glittering tongue-ring not so friendly now, and he spoke to me in a soft crude voice not so friendly now, called me Ros-ellen like he didn’t think so much of my name now, or of me. Others passengers close enough to hear him pretended not to hear, the hairnet woman who’d been listening to our conversation pretended now not to hear, at the next stop the tongue-ring man lurched to his feet and exited and was gone; and I checked my makeup in my little gold mirror compact feeling like I had almost made a mistake … . He was a test. In your ignorance you might have chosen him.