The Dark

by Ellen Datlow

  A stairway led away from the balcony where he stood and he started down it, passing empty rooms, crossing other balconies. Three floors below his starting point, he encountered a pretty black-haired woman leaning against the railing. Her pale blue eyes flicked toward him—they matched the background color of her flowered summer dress. Though she was young, no more than seventeen or eighteen, a long term of disappointment was written in her kittenish face.

  “I’m looking for a woman named Grace Broillard,” he said.

  “Good luck.”

  “You know her? Red hair, green eyes. About thirty.”

  She turned back to the crooked black distance. “Good-bye.”

  He was silent a moment. “Why won’t you help me?”

  “Help? That’s a concept I’m not familiar with.”

  He closed the distance between them, rested a hand next to hers on the railing.

  “I don’t want to talk,” she said. “I don’t want to share your pain. I don’t want to hear about your pitiful life. I’ve—”

  “I’d like to ask you some questions, that’s all.”

  “I’ve got my own pitiful life to think about. So fuck off.”

  He put his hand on her arm, and she looked up angrily, but anger faded, replaced by shock.

  “Shit, man!” She placed a hand on his chest as though to feel his heartbeat.

  “What?” he asked. “What is it?”

  “You’re alive.” This, voiced in an astonished whisper, reminded him of how Grace had behaved toward him on the beach that first day.

  “You didn’t notice at first? That I was alive?”

  “Un-uh.” She touched his hair. “You’re going to be very popular here … as long as you stay alive.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because of how you make me feel. I’m assuming the effect isn’t specific to me.” She smiled. “It’s okay if it is.”

  “What did you see that made you aware I was alive.”

  “I don’t know … nothing. I didn’t notice, I guess.”

  Shellane thought about the gray-haired man in the cell. He had ascribed the man’s delayed reaction to his presence to the fact of his being in pain; but that might not be the case.

  “Maybe you can help me,” she said. “And maybe I can help you find your friend. I bet the jerks have got her.”

  “The jerks?”

  “Do you even know where you are? The freaks, the creeps. The tall, geeky fucks.” She disengaged from him and retreated along the railing. “If you can’t find her, she’s probably with them.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “It’s how things work here. If you know someone from outside the house, you never stray far from them inside it. So if you can’t find her, she’s probably with the jerks.” She went back to staring out at the black tenements. “You’re not going to help me, are you?”

  Her shift in mood had the same abruptness as Grace’s withdrawals, the same switched-off quality, and he wondered if this was a condition of the place or if the people who gravitated here were all prone to similar behavior.

  “I don’t know if I can help,” he said. “But I need to find this woman before—”

  “Yeah, I know. Grace. The love of your life or some shit. Gotta find her.” She walked off several paces. “Keep going through the doors. You’ll hook up eventually.”

  “You want to come with me?” he asked. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if you want to come …”

  He eased up behind her, trying to see her face. She was weeping and appeared no longer to recognize that he was there.

  Shellane abandoned the stairs, passing through a number of rooms in quick succession, all traditional in their configuration. One contained several items of furniture, notably a dusty standing mirror in which he glimpsed a haggard, rumpled version of himself, and in three of them he found a single person, two women and a man. They treated him much as had the black-haired woman. They did not recognize immediately that he was alive, and once they did, they answered a few questions, asked for his help, then lost interest. Based on their reactions and what they told him, he constructed a hypothesis.

  Religious perspectives on the afterlife were, of course, inaccurate; but it might be that none were completely inaccurate. Perhaps the afterlife consisted of many planes, and these planes—or rather, a misapprehension of their nature—had inspired the rise of the various religions. Might it not be possible that one such plane had been appropriated by a sub-order of creatures whose power was slight, and who were capable of capturing a certain type of enfeebled soul? Perhaps they were themselves enfeebled. Creatures perceived as terrifying by the earthbound, but to those familiar with them, those whose fear was colored with contempt, they were jerks, creeps, geeks. The uglies. Metaphysical lowlifes. It seemed a ludicrous proposition until he compared it to the ludicrous propositions of the major religions. The salient difference between those propositions and his own was that his was based to a degree on personal observation.

  Beside each door were little clusters of wormy ridges in the wood, similar to the one he had found beside the second door he’d tried. He pushed at the ridges in sequence, two at a time, in various combinations, but all to no avail. Then he gave the knob of one door a quarter turn, not sufficient to disengage the lock, and the ridged seams beside the door pulsed as if a charge or a fluid were passing through them. He was elated to find that an orderly process was involved. There must be a sequence—many sequences—of constrictions that affected the doors, causing them to take you to different quarters of the house. Either he was not strong enough to manipulate the ridges or there was some other contributing factor that he did not understand.

  The last door he tried delivered him into a tunnel with walls of black boards. As with the fist that protruded from the exterior of the house, they had the irregular, roughened look of wood in a natural state, and this made it appear that he was walking along inside a huge hollow limb. Thin gaps between them glowed whitely, producing a dim light. The other portions of the house he had investigated—despite the people he’d encountered—had seemed sterile. Lifeless. Here, he sensed a vibe of animal presence and as he proceeded along the tunnel, he smelled a fecal odor and observed signs of rough occupancy. Gashes and indentations in the wood, boards that had been pried partly loose. Evidences, he thought, of rage or frustration, or of a vandal’s idiot frenzy. The tunnel wound downward at a steep angle for approximately forty feet, then straightened and narrowed to the point that he could nearly touch both walls at once; after a stretch of about sixty feet, it widened by half, and as he rounded a bend, he spotted Grace standing a few yards ahead, her back pressed against a wall. When he called out, she turned her head and stared at him in alarm. He saw that she was imprisoned by two bands of black wood encircling her waist and neck, leaving her arms free.

  “Roy!” She strained toward him, then slumped in her restraints as Shellane tugged at the restraining bands. There was no visible lock, no catch. They looked to have grown around her.

  “They’ll be back soon.” Grace tried to push him away. “You have to go! I’ll be all right! Just go!”

  He studied the wall beside her.

  “They’ll kill you!” Grace said.

  “Quiet. I’m working here.”

  Next to one end of the band encircling her waist was a single ridge, barely an inch long. Close by it, a board had been worked loose, leaving a half-inch aperture admitting a white radiance.

  “You can’t help me! This is just going to make things worse,” she said. “Please! I want you to leave now!”

  He unbuckled his belt, whipped it off and pried with the corner of the buckle at the loose board.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Trying to understand.”

  He managed to pry the board up sufficiently so that he could grip it with the tips of his fingers. He pulled it back farther and put an eye close to the gap he had made. A flash of white light, and he saw an unf
amiliar night sky. Too many stars and a glowing red cloud occupying its southern quadrant. Hovering at an unguessable distance between him and the cloud was a dark wormlike structure, and he had the impression he was looking at something of immense proportions.

  Another flash of light, then another, a third …

  In the intervals between flashes, he was afforded glimpses of completely different scenes. Vistas; landscapes; complicated interiors. Many he was unable to quantify—their geography was too vast and bewildering to be comprehensible; even those that he was able to comprehend possessed the quality of immensity. Endless reaches containing strange, cosmically proportioned structures. By the time he pressed the board back into place, he thought he understood the house. A sketchy understanding, but the basic picture was clear. The doors were programmed (he could think of no better term) to admit you to different areas of the house; but before you settled into the room to which you had been directed, you saw the place through which you transited … or perhaps another place that you might have transited to. A place removed from or possibly inclusive of the house. There was a great deal he was unsure of, but he knew one thing for certain—the doors could be reprogrammed.

  Grace continued to warn him away, but he refused to listen. Wishing it were sharper, he pushed the tongue of his belt buckle against the ridge beside her neck, denting it. He pushed harder, lodging the point in the dent and jamming it down with both hands. After nearly a minute’s sustained effort, the seam writhed and abruptly deflated; the bands holding Grace retracted without a sound, appearing to flow back into the boards behind her. She let out a gasp and staggered away from the wall.

  “The doors,” he said. “They can be adjusted … calibrated to take you away from the house. I’m not sure what this place is, but it embodies mechanical principles. Maybe …”

  Grace planted both hands on his chest and sent him reeling backward. “You’re not hearing me!”

  “Jesus, Grace! I’m trying to tell you how to escape!”

  She tried to shove him again, but he caught her hands.

  “You’re not hearing me,” he said angrily. “I’m trying to help you. The uglies … they manipulate the house. And they’re stupid, right? Everyone I’ve talked to says that. So if they can do it, chances are you can, too.”

  Grace twisted away from him. “You don’t know anything! You’ve only been here a little while. Most of us have been here for years!”

  “Goddamn it! Why don’t you take a second and listen to me?”

  “Do you want to die? ’Cause that’s what’s going to happen!”

  “Just listen and I’ll go.”

  “I heard what you told me! I’ll check the doors!”

  “And watch the uglies. Whenever you’re with them, watch what they do with the doors. I—”

  She hurled herself at him, clawing his face, punching his chest, screaming at him to leave, driving him backward; but then she broke off her assault and stared at something over his shoulder with fierce concentration. There was no sign of fear in her face; though fear, Shellane understood on turning, must be responsible for her intensity.

  Three of the uglies had come into view around a bend and were crouched as if in preparation for an attack, squeezed together by a narrowing of the walls. Two of them resembled the men imprisoned in the cells, but the third, the biggest, was identical to the man who had pursued Shellane through the woods. Severely deformed. Jagged orbits shadowing his eyes, a darkly crimson mouth visible behind a toothy jack-o’-lantern grimace. Shellane set himself for a fight. Despite Grace’s assertion that they were strong, they looked spindly and frail. He thought he could do some damage. But rather than charging at him, they began to whimper like a chorus of terrified children, gaspy and quavering. The one on the right lifted its head to the ceiling, as if seeking divine assistance, and let forth a feeble ululation. Urine dribbled down its leg. The others hid their eyes, but peeked at him, as if not daring to turn away from the source of their terror.

  They were afraid of him, Shellane realized. There was no other explanation. He took a step toward them—their whimpers rose in pitch and volume. Definitely afraid. He caught Grace’s hand, tried to pull her away. But she yanked her hand free and dropped to her knees.

  “Grace.” He kneeled beside her. “Come on! Get up!”

  She sank into a reclining position, her eyes averted, like a child who had been made aware of an inevitable punishment and sought refuge in collapse.

  The uglies still seemed afraid, but Grace’s surrender weakened Shellane’s will and he had little confidence that he could handle all three of them. Nevertheless, he gathered himself and ran at them, waving his arms, shouting, hoping to drive them off. They scuttled away, but when he stopped his advance, they, too, stopped, huddling together, plucking and clutching at one another like fretful monkeys. He took a second run at them. Once again they fell back, but not so far this time. A touch of curiosity showed in their crudely drawn faces. He turned to Grace and thought he saw in her a glint of hope, but she looked away, as if she were trying to hide it from him.

  A growl issued from behind him, bassy and articulated—a bleakly mechanical noise, like the idling of some beastly machine.

  Two lesser growls joined in guttural disharmony with the first, and he spun about, his hands in a defensive posture, knowing he would have to fight.

  But it was no fight.

  They covered the distance separating them from Shellane in a few shambling strides and leaped with their hands clawed, a wave of bony edges and blunt, powerful teeth that carried him down, enveloping him in their bitter stench. He managed to land a single punch, striking the chest of the tallest. Like hitting a hardwood wall. Then he was tossed, kicked, slammed, worried, bitten, scratched, and kicked again until he lost consciousness. When he waked, when he managed to unscramble his senses, he found he was being dragged by the feet. Head bumping, arms flopping. Grace screamed and he struggled to wrench free, but the hands gripping his ankles were irresistible. He twisted about and caught a glimpse of her being borne aloft, held by the collar of her jacket in one long-fingered gray hand. Bile flushed into his throat. The effortful grunting breath of the creature dragging him was the sound of panic. He summoned his reserves, focusing, trying to fortify a central place in his mind from which he could observe and judge what might be done.

  They came to a door. The creature released one of his ankles, and through slitted eyes, Shellane watched its free hand reach to the wall beside the door and press a forefinger in sequence against the raised seams clumped together there. The door opened and they were sucked inside. Flashing white lights disoriented Shellane and he thrashed about, kicking at his captor’s leg. The ugly bent to him, its insult of a mouth—wide enough to swallow a ham—widened further in a smile, its tongue dark and thick like a turtle’s. Beneath the ledges of its orbits, its eyes gleamed with a rotten sheen. It slashed at his face with its thumb, slicing his cheek with a thumbnail, and a warm wetness spread down over his jaw and neck. It tipped its head to one side and made a slurred, mocking noise. Then it seized him by the shirtfront and thrust him through the door, dangling him over a long drop. It looked as if something had come hurtling down from heaven or the heights or whatever place this was, something roughly circular—a meteorite, a boulder, Jehovah’s fist—and smashed everything in its path, creating a central shaft in the building roughly twenty feet in diameter. The shaft fell away into shadow, walled by a broken honeycomb of exposed rooms and splintered black boards. Before Shellane could grasp what was happening, the creature swung him as easily as he himself might swing a cat and slung him through the air. The ruin pinwheeled. The pull of gravity and death took him at the top of his arc. Turning sideways as he started to fall, he saw a gaping darkness rush up at him, and the next instant he slammed into something that drove wind from his chest and light from his brain. Only after regaining consciousness a second time did he realize that he had been thrown across the gap and that the uglies, bearing Grace wi
th them, had leaped across after him.

  They passed through another door. Shellane was too groggy to register much about the room beyond, but he caught sight of a hearth in which a roaring fire had been built, and though he was not the most reliable of witnesses at the moment, he would have sworn he saw tiny homunculi playing in the flames, hopping from log to log. Grace was speaking, her tone urgent, the words unintelligible, but he had the impression that she was pleading.

  Shellane’s head had cleared to a degree, though his vision seemed to be blurred; but as he was dragged through yet another room, he recognized that the indistinctness of the large, shadowy figure sitting cross-legged in a corner was due not to an impairment, but to the fact that its black substance was in a state of flux, a whirling filmy shell encasing a human form. At the next door, the tallest of the uglies again manipulated a patch of ridges in the wood, and while the knowledge would do him no good, Shellane felt satisfaction in having been right about the operation of the doors.

  The room into which the creature then dragged him was tiny, the ceiling so low that the uglies were forced to walk in a half crouch. It had a gabled roof and a shuttered window that extended up from the floor. Shellane was left to lie beside the window. One of the uglies threw the shutters open onto a foggy darkness and he saw a huge black fist jutting from the boards directly below. He was past fighting. His ribs ached, his left knee throbbed, and his mind worked sluggishly. Even when a rope was placed around his neck, he could not rouse himself, but only wondered how they were going to pass his body through the fist, a question answered when a second creature pressed a finger to a ridged patch beside the window and with terrible slowness, the fist uncurled as if to welcome him. Grace screamed. Shellane turned onto his back and spotted her at the door. Two of their captors were fondling her roughly, grabbing her breasts and buttocks. He started to tell her something, but forgot what he wanted to say. Then this became irrelevant as a foot nudged him out the window.