by Ann
Mani will mutter to himself: Why, for heaven’s sake, does this mad woman refuse to die? She can’t see; she can hardly use her limbs; and yet she is determined not to die.
You will ask him what the matter is. Mani will reply, annoyed: Matter? Nothing very much. Years ago, she had fixed Jamini’s marriage with Niranjan, a distant nephew of hers. The last time he was here was about four years ago. He told her then he would marry Jamini as soon as he returned from abroad. Ever since then, she has been waiting.
But hasn’t Niranjan returned? You will ask.
Of course not! How can he return when he never went at all? He was lying; otherwise, the old hag wouldn’t let him go. Why should he marry this rag-picker’s daughter? Yes, he is married all right and rearing a family. But who is to tell her all this? She won’t believe you; and if she did, she would die of shock immediately thereafter. Who’s going to take the risk?
Does Jamini know about Niranjan? You will ask.
Oh yes. But she can’t speak about it to her. Well, let me go and get it over. Mani will turn to go.
Almost unaware of it yourself, you will also get up then and say: Just a moment. I will come with you.
You? With me? Mani will be very surprised.
Yes. Do you mind?
No, of course not, Mani will reply, a trifle taken aback. And, then, he will lead the way.
After you have climbed the dark, crumbling staircase, you will enter a room that looks like an underground vault. There is only one window, tightly shut. At first, everything will look indistinct. And then, as your eyes get used to the dark, you will see a large, decrepit wooden cot. On it you will notice a shriveled-up woman, wrapped in torn rags, lying still. Jamini stands beside her, like a statue.
At the sound of your footsteps, the bag of bones will slowly move. Niranjan? My child! You are back at last! You have come back to your poor wreck of an aunt! You know, I have been waiting, keeping death at bay, knowing that you will be here someday. You won’t slip away again like last time?
Mani will be about to say something but you will interrupt him by blurting out: No, I promise you I won’t.
You will not look up but you will feel the stunned silence in the room. You could not have looked up even if you wanted to, for your eyes are riveted to the sockets of her old, unseeing eyes. Two tongues of dark will emerge from the empty sockets and lick every inch of your body. To feel, to know. You will feel those moments falling like dew into the vast seas of time.
You will hear the old woman saying. My son, I knew you would come. That is why I am still in this house of the dead, counting the days. The sheer effort to speak will leave her panting. You will look up at Jamini. You will feel that somewhere behind the mask of her face, something was slowly melting away, and it will not be long before the foundation of a vow – a vow made up of endless despair, a vow taken against life and fate – will slowly give away.
She will speak again: I am sure Jamini will make you happy, my son. There is none like her, even though I, her mother, should say so. I am old and broken down, and often out of my senses. I try her beyond endurance. But does she ever protest? Not once. This graveyard of a place, where you will not find a man even if you search ten houses, is like me, more dead than alive. And yet, Jamini survives, and manages everything.
Even though you may want to, you will dare not lift your eyes should someone discover the tears that have welled there. The old woman will whisper: Promise me you will marry Jamini. If I do not have your promise, I will know no peace even in death.
Your voice will be heavy. You will softly mumble: I will not fail you. I promise.
And soon it will be late afternoon. The bullock cart will appear once again to take you back. One by one, the three of you will get inside. As you are about to leave, Jamini will look at you with those sorrowful eyes of hers and softly remark: You are forgetting your tackle.
You will smile and reply: Let it be. I missed the fish this time – but they won’t escape next time.
Jamini will not turn her eyes away. Her tired face will softly light up with a smile, tender and grateful. Like the white clouds of autumn, it will drift across your heart and fill you with a strange and beautiful warmth, an unexplained happiness.
The cart will amble on its way. You will not feel cramped this time; nor will the monotonous creak of the wheels bother you. Your friends will discuss how a hundred years ago, the scourge of malaria, like a relentless flood, carried off Telenapota and left it here, in this forgotten no-man’s land, just beside the frontier of the world of the living. You will not be listening; your mind will be drifting elsewhere. You will only listen to your own heartbeats echoing the words: I will come back, I will come back.
Even after you get back home to the city, with its hectic pace and harsh lights, the memory of Telenapota will shine bright in your mind like a star that is distant and yet very close. A few days will pass with petty problems, the usual traumas of the commonplace. And even if a slight mist begins to form in your mind, you will not be aware of it. Then, just as you have crossed the fences, prepared to go back to Telenapota, you will suddenly feel the shivering touch of the oncoming fever.
Soon the terrible headache and the temperatures will be on you and you will lie down under a lot of blankets, trying unsuccessfully to ward off the fever or at least come to terms with it. The thermometer will register 105 degrees Fahrenheit and the last thing you hear before passing out will be the doctor’s verdict. Malaria.
It will be many days before you are able to walk out of the house and bask in the sun, weak and exhausted by the long fever. Meanwhile, unknown to yourself, you mind will have undergone many changes, the inevitable transformations. Telenapota will become a vague, indistinct dream, like the memory of a star that has fallen. Was there ever such a place? You will not be sure. The face that was tired and serene. The eyes that were lost and lonely, hiding an unknown sorrow. Were they real? Or were they, like the shadows of Telenapota’s ruins, just another part of a phantom dream?
Telenapota, discovered for one brief moment, will be lost again in the timeless dark of the night.
Soft
F. Paul Wilson
F. Paul Wilson (1946–) is a popular American writer of science fiction and horror. In 1981, his epic horror novel The Keep became an international bestseller. In the 1990s, he wrote science fiction and medical thrillers. With Matthew J. Costello, Wilson created and scripted FTL Newsfeed, which ran daily on the Sci-Fi Channel from 1992–1996. Among Wilson’s best-known characters is the anti-hero Repairman Jack, an urban mercenary introduced in the 1984 bestseller, The Tomb. H. P. Lovecraft is a major influence on Wilson, who was introduced to his work by Donald Wollheim, both of whom are also included in this volume. ‘Soft’ (1984) has a surreal and disturbing quality typical of Wilson’s stories from this period.
I was lying on the floor watching TV and exercising what was left of my legs when the newscaster’s jaw collapsed. He was right in the middle of the usual plea for anybody who thought they were immune to come to Rockefeller Center when – pflumpf! – the bottom of his face went soft.
I burst out laughing.
‘Daddy!’ Judy said, shooting me a razor-blade look from her wheelchair.
I shut up.
She was right. Nothing funny about a man’s tongue wiggling around in the air snakelike while his lower jaw flopped down in front of his throat like a sack of Jell-O and his bottom teeth jutted at the screen crowns-on, rippling like a line of buoys on a bay. A year ago I would have gagged. But I’ve changed in ways other than physical since this mess began, and couldn’t help feeling good about one of those pretty-boy newsreaders going soft right in front of the camera. I almost wished I had a bigger screen so I could watch twenty-one color inches of the scene. He was barely visible on our five-inch black-and-white.
The room filled with white noise as the screen went blank. Someone must have taken a look at what was going out on the airwaves and pulled the plug. Not that many peop
le were watching anyway.
I flipped the set off to save the batteries. Batteries were as good as gold now. Better than gold. Who wanted gold nowadays?
I looked over at Judy and she was crying softly. Tears slid down her cheeks.
‘Hey, hon–’
‘I can’t help it, Daddy. I’m so scared!’
‘Don’t be, Jude. Don’t worry. Everything will work out, you’ll see. We’ve got this thing licked, you and me.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because it hasn’t progressed in weeks! It’s over for us – we’ve got immunity.’
She glanced down at her legs, then quickly away. ‘It’s already too late for me.’
I reached over and patted my dancer on the hand. ‘Never too late for you, shweetheart,’ I said in my best Bogart. That got a tiny smile out of her.
We sat there in the silence, each thinking our own thoughts. The newsreader had said the cause of the softness had been discovered: A virus, a freak mutation that disrupted the calcium matrix of bones.
Yeah. Sure. That’s what they said last year when the first cases cropped up in Boston. A virus. But they never isolated the virus, and the softness spread all over the world. So they began searching for ‘a subtle and elusive environmental toxin.’ They never pinned that one down either.
Now we were back to a virus again. Who cared? It didn’t matter. Judy and I had beat it. Whether we had formed the right antibodies or the right antitoxin was just a stupid academic question. The process had been arrested in us. Sure, it had done some damage, but it wasn’t doing any more, and that was the important thing. We’d never be the same, but we were going to live!
‘But that man,’ Judy said, nodding toward the TV. ‘He said they were looking for people in whom the disease had started and then stopped. That’s us, Dad. They said they need to examine people like us so they can find out how to fight it, maybe develop a serum against it. We should–’
‘Judy-Judy-Judy!’ I said in Cary Grantese to hide my annoyance. How many times did I have to go over this? ‘We’ve been through all this before. I told you: It’s too late for them. Too late for everybody but us immunes.’
I didn’t want to discuss it – Judy didn’t understand about those kinds of people, how you can’t deal with them.
‘I want you to take me down there,’ she said in the tone she used when she wanted to be stubborn. ‘If you don’t want to help, okay. But I do.’
‘No!’ I said that louder than I wanted to and she flinched. More softly: ‘I know those people. I worked all those years in the Health Department. They’d turn us into lab specimens. They’ll suck us dry and use our immunity to try and save themselves.’
‘But I want to help somebody! I don’t want us to be the last two people on earth!’
She began to cry again.
Judy was frustrated. I could understand that. She was unable to leave the apartment by herself and probably saw me at times as a dictator who had her at his mercy. And she was frightened, probably more frightened than I could imagine. She was only eighteen and everyone she had ever known in her life – including her mother – was dead.
I hoisted myself into the chair next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She was the only person in the world who mattered to me. That had been true even before the softness began.
‘We’re not alone. Take George, for example. And I’m sure there are plenty of other immunes around, hiding like us. When the weather warms up, we’ll find each other and start everything over new. But until then, we can’t allow the blood-suckers to drain off whatever it is we’ve got that protects us.’
She nodded without saying anything. I wondered if she was agreeing with me or just trying to shut me up.
‘Let’s eat,’ I said with a gusto I didn’t really feel.
‘Not hungry.’
‘Got to keep up your strength. We’ll have soup. How’s that sound?’
She smiled weakly. ‘Okay…soup.’
I forgot and almost tried to stand up. Old habits die hard. My lower legs were hanging over the edge of the chair like a pair of sand-filled dancer’s tights. I could twitch the muscles and see them ripple under the skin, but a muscle is pretty useless unless it’s attached to a bone, and the bones down there were gone.
I slipped off my chair to what was left of my knees and shuffled over to the stove. The feel of those limp and useless leg muscles squishing under me was repulsive but I was getting used to it.
It hit the kids and old people first, supposedly because their bones were a little soft to begin with, then moved on to the rest of us, starting at the bottom and working its way up – sort of like a Horatio Alger success story. At least that’s the way it worked in most people. There were exceptions, of course, like that newscaster. I had followed true to form: My left lower leg collapsed at the end of last month; my right went a few days later. It wasn’t a terrible shock. My feet had already gone soft so I knew the legs were next. Besides, I’d heard the sound.
The sound comes in the night when all is quiet. It starts a day or two before a bone goes. A soft sound, like someone gently crinkling cellophane inside your head. No one else can hear it. Only you. I think it comes from the bone itself – from millions of tiny fractures slowly interconnecting into a mosaic that eventually causes the bone to dissolve into mush. Like an on-rushing train far far away can be heard if you press your ear to the track, so the sound of each microfracture transmits from bone to bone until it reaches your middle ear.
I haven’t heard the sound in almost four weeks. I thought I did a couple of times and broke out in a cold, shaking sweat, but no more of my bones have gone. Neither have Judy’s. The average case goes from normal person to lump of jelly in three to four weeks. Sometimes it takes longer, but there’s always a steady progression. Nothing more has happened to me or Judy since last month.
Somehow, someway, we’re immune.
With my lower legs dragging behind me, I got to the counter of the kitchenette and kneed my way up the stepstool to where I could reach things. I filled a pot with water – at least the pressure was still up – and set it on the sterno stove. With gas and electricity long gone, sterno was a lifesaver.
While waiting for the water to boil I went to the window and looked out. The late afternoon March sky was full of dark gray clouds streaking to the east. Nothing moving on West Street one floor below but a few windblown leaves from God-knows-where. I glanced across at the windows of George’s apartment, looking for movement but finding none, then back down to the street below.
I hadn’t seen anybody but George on the street for ages, hadn’t seen or smelled smoke in well over two months. The last fires must have finally burned themselves out. The riots were one direct result of the viral theory. Half the city went up in the big riot last fall – half the city and an awful lot of people. Seems someone got the bright idea that if all the people going soft were put out of their misery and their bodies burned, the plague could be stopped, at least here in Manhattan. The few cops left couldn’t stop the mobs. In fact a lot of the city’s ex-cops had been in the mobs! Judy and I lost our apartment when our building went up. Luckily we hadn’t any signs of softness then. We got away with our lives and little else. ‘Water’s boiling, Dad,’ Judy said from across the room.
I turned and went back to the stove, not saying anything, still thinking about how fast our nice rent-stabilized apartment house had burned, taking everything we had with it.
Everything was gone…furniture and futures…gone. All my plans. Gone. Here I stood – if you could call it that – a man with a college education, a B.S. in biology, a secure city job, and what was left? No job. Hell – no city! I’d had it all planned for my dancer. She was going to make it so big. I’d hang onto my city job with all those civil service idiots in the Department of Health, putting up with their sniping and their backstabbing and their lousy office politics so I could keep all the fringe benefits and foot the bill while Judy pursued th
e dance. She was going to have it all! Now what? All her talent, all her potential…where was it going?
Going soft…
I poured the dry contents of the Lipton envelope into the boiling water and soon the odor of chicken noodle soup filled the room.
Which meant we’d have company soon.
I dragged the stepstool over to the door. Already I could hear their claws begin to scrape against the outer surface of the door, their tiny teeth begin to gnaw at its edges. I climbed up and peered through the hole I’d made last month at what had then been eye-level.
There they were. The landing was full of them. Gray and brown and dirty, with glinty little eyes and naked tails. Revulsion rippled down my skin. I watched their growing numbers every day now, every time I cooked something, but still hadn’t got used to them.
So I did Cagney for them: ‘Yooou diirty raaats!’ and turned to wink at Judy on the far side of the fold-out bed. Her expression remained grim.
Rats. They were taking over the city. They seemed to be immune to the softness and were traveling in packs that got bigger and bolder with each passing day. Which was why I’d chosen this building for us: Each apartment was boxed in with pre-stressed concrete block. No rats in the walls here.
I waited for the inevitable. Soon it happened: A number of them squealed, screeched, and thrashed as the crowding pushed them at each other’s throats, and then there was bedlam out there. I didn’t bother to watch any more. I saw it every day. The pack jumped on the wounded ones. Never failed. They were so hungry they’d eat anything, even each other. And while they were fighting among themselves they’d leave us in peace with our soup.
Soon I had the card table between us and we were sipping the yellow broth and those tiny noodles. I did a lot of mmm-gooding but got no response from Judy. Her eyes were fixed on the walkie-talkie on the end table.
‘How come we haven’t heard from him?’
Good question – one that had been bothering me for a couple of days now. Where was George? Usually he stopped by every other day or so to see if there was anything we needed. And if he didn’t stop by, he’d call us on the walkie-talkie. We had an arrangement between us that we’d both turn on our headsets every day at six p.m. just in case we needed to be in touch. I’d been calling over to George’s place across the street at six o’clock sharp for three days running now with no result.