The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

“There,” she said softly, furiously. “You’ve driven out my trade. Are you satisfied?”

  “They’ll be back,” the gunslinger said.

  “Not tonight they won’t.”

  “Who is he?” He gestured at the weed-eater.

  “Go—” She completed the command by describing an impossible act of masturbation.

  “I have to know,” the gunslinger said patiently. “He—”

  “He talked to you funny,” she said. “Nort never talked like that in his life.”

  “I’m looking for a man. You would know him.”

  She stared at him, the anger dying. It was replaced with speculation, then with a high, wet gleam that he had seen before. The rickety building ticked thoughtfully to itself. A dog barked brayingly, far away. The gunslinger waited. She saw his knowledge and the gleam was replaced by hopelessness, by a dumb need that had no mouth.

  “You know my price,” she said.

  He looked at her steadily. The scar would not show in the dark. Her body was lean enough so the desert and grit and grind hadn’t been able to sag everything. And she’d once been pretty, maybe even beautiful. Not that it mattered. It would not have mattered if the grave-beetles had nested in the arid blackness of her womb. It had all been written.

  Her hands came up to her face and there was still some juice left in her— enough to weep.

  “Don’t look! You don’t have to look at me so mean!”

  “I’m sorry,” the gunslinger said. “I didn’t mean to be mean.”

  “None of you mean it!” She cried at him.

  “Put out the lights.”

  She wept, hands at her face. He was glad she had her hands at her face. Not because of the scar but because it gave her back her maidenhood, if not head. The pin that held the strap of her dress glittered in the greasy light.

  “Put out the lights and lock up. Will he steal anything?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Then put out the lights.”

  She would not remove her hands until she was behind him and she doused the lamps one by one, turning down the wicks and then breathing the flames into extinction. Then she took his hand in the dark and it was warm. She led him upstairs. There was no light to hide their act.

  VI

  He made cigarettes in the dark, then lit them and passed one to her. The room held her scent, fresh lilac, pathetic. The smell of the desert had overlaid it, crippled it. It was like the smell of the sea. He realized he was afraid of the desert ahead.

  “His name is Nort,” she said. No harshness had been worn out of her voice. “Just Nort. He died.”

  The gunslinger waited.

  “He was touched by God.”

  The gunslinger said, “I have never seen Him.”

  “He was here ever since I can remember—Nort I mean, not God.” She laughed jaggedly into the dark. “He had a honeywagon for a while. Started to drink. Started to smell the grass. Then to smoke it. The kids started to follow him around and sic their dogs onto him. He wore old green pants that stank. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “He started to chew it. At the last he just sat in there and didn’t eat anything.

  He might have been a king, in his mind. The children might have been his jesters, and the dogs his princes.”

  “Yes.”

  “He died right in front of this place,” she said. “He came clumping down the boardwalk—his boots wouldn’t wear out, they were engineer boots—with the children and dogs behind him. He looked like wire clothes hangers all wrapped and twirled together. You could see all the lights of hell in his eyes, but he was grinning, just like the grins the children carve into their pumpkins on All Saints’ Eve. You could smell the dirt and the rot and the weed. It was running down from the corners of his mouth like green blood. I think he meant to come in and listen to Sheb play the piano. And right in front, he stopped and cocked his head. I could see him, and I thought he heard a coach, although there was none due. Then he puked, and it was black and full of blood. It went right through that grin like sewer water through a grate. The stink was enough to make you want to run mad. He raised up his arms and just threw over. That was all. He died with that grin on his face, in his own vomit.”

  She was trembling beside him. Outside, the wind kept up its steady whine, and somewhere far away a door was banging, like a sound heard in a dream. Mice ran in the walls. The gunslinger thought in the back of his mind that it was probably the only place in town prosperous enough to support mice. He put a hand on her belly and she started violently, then relaxed.

  “The man in black,” he said.

  “You have to have it, don’t you!”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you.” She grasped his hand in both of hers and told him.

  VII

  He came in the late afternoon of the day Nort died, and the wind was whooping up, pulling away the loose topsoil, sending sheets of grit and uprooted stalks of corn windmilling past. Kennerly had padlocked the livery, and the other few merchants had shuttered their windows and laid boards across the shutters. The sky was the yellow color of-old cheese and the clouds moved flyingly across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been.

  He came in a rickety rig with a rippling tarp tied across its bed. They watched him come, and old man Kennerly, lying by the window with a bottle in one hand and the loose, hot flesh of his second-eldest daughter’s left breast in the other, resolved not to be there if he should knock.

  But the man in black went by without hawing the bay that pulled his rig, and the spinning wheels spumed up dust that the wind clutched eagerly. He might have been a priest or a monk; he wore a black cassock that had been floured with dust, and a loose hood covered his head and obscured his features. It rippled and flapped. Beneath the garment’s hem, heavy buckled boots with square toes.

  He pulled up in front of Sheb’s and tethered the horse, which lowered its head and grunted at the ground. Around the back of the rig, he untied one flap, found a weathered saddlebag, threw it over his shoulder, and went in through the batwings.

  Alice watched him curiously, but no one else noticed his arrival. The rest were drunk as lords. Sheb was playing Methodist hymns ragtime, and the grizzled layabouts who had come in early to avoid the storm and to attend Nort’s wake had sung themselves hoarse. Sheb, drunk nearly to the point of senselessness, intoxicated and horny with his own continued existence, played with hectic, shuttlecock speed, fingers flying like looms.

  Voices screeched and hollered, never overcoming the wind but sometimes seeming to challenge it. In the corner Zachary had thrown Amy Feldon’s skirts over her head and was painting zodiac signs on her knees. A few other women circulated. A fervid glow seemed to be on all of them. The dull stormglow that filtered through the batwings seemed to mock them, however.

  Nort had been laid out on two tables in the center of the room. His boots made a mystical V. His mouth hung open in a slack grin, although someone had closed his eyes and put slugs on them. His hands had been folded on his chest with a sprig of devil-grass in them. He smelled like poison.

  The man in black pushed back his hood and came to the bar. Alice watched him, feeling trepidation mixed with the familiar want that hid within her. There was no religious symbol on him, although that meant nothing by itself.

  “Whiskey,” he said. His voice was soft and pleasant. “Good whiskey.”

  She reached under the counter and brought out a bottle of Star. She could have palmed off the local popskull on him as her best, but did not. She poured, and the man in black watched her. His eyes were large, luminous. The shadows were too thick to determine their color exactly. Her need intensified. The hollering and whooping went on behind, unabated. Sheb, the worthless gelding, was playing about the Christian Soldiers and somebody had persuaded Aunt Mill to sing. Her voice, warped and distorted, cut through the babble like a dull ax through a calf’s brain.

>   “Hey, Allie!”

  She went to serve, resentful of the stranger’s silence, resentful of his no-color eyes and her own restless groin. She was afraid of her needs. They were capricious and beyond her control. They might be the signal of the change, which would in turn signal the beginning of her old age—a condition which in Tull was usually as short and bitter as a winter sunset.

  She drew beer until the keg was empty, then broached another. She knew better than to ask Sheb; he would come willingly enough, like the dog he was, and would either chop off his own fingers or spume beer all over everything. The stranger’s eyes were on her as she went about it; she could feel them.

  “It’s busy,” he said when she returned. He had not touched his drink, merely rolled it between his palms to warm it.

  “Wake,” she said.

  “I noticed the departed.”

  “They’re bums,” she said with sudden hatred. “All bums.”

  “It excites them. He’s dead. They’re not.”

  “He was their butt when he was alive. It’s not right now. It’s...” She trailed off, not able to express what it was, or how it was obscene.

  “Weed-eater?”

  “Yes. What else did he have?” Her tone was accusing, but he did not drop his eyes, and she felt the blood rush to her face. “I’m sorry. Are you a priest? This must revolt you.”

  “I’m not and it doesn’t.” He knocked the whiskey back neatly and did not grimace. “Once more, please.”

  “I’ll have to see the color of your coin first. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be.”

  He put a rough silver coin on the counter, thick on one edge, thin on the other, and she said as she would say later: “I don’t have change for this.”

  He shook his head, dismissing it, and watched absently as she poured again.

  “Are you only passing through?” she asked.

  He did not reply for a long time, and she was about to repeat when he shook his head impatiently. “Don’t talk trivialities. You’re here with death.”

  She recoiled, hurt and amazed, her first thought being that he had lied about his holiness to test her.

  “You cared for him,” he said flatly. “Isn’t that true?”

  “Who? Nort?” She laughed, affecting annoyance to cover her confusion. “I think you better—”

  “You’re soft-hearted and a little afraid,” he went on, “and he was on the weed, looking out hell’s back door. And there he is, and they’ve even slammed the door now, and you don’t think they’ll open it until it’s time for you to walk through, isn’t it so?”

  “What are you, drunk?”

  “Mistuh Norton, he dead,” the man in black intoned sardonically. “Dead as anybody. Dead as you or anybody.”

  “Get out of my place.” She felt a trembling loathing spring up in her, but the warmth still radiated from her belly.

  “It’s all right,” he said softly. “It’s all right. Wait. Just wait.”

  The eyes were blue. She felt suddenly easy in her mind, as if she had taken a drug.

  “See?” he asked her. “Do you see?”

  She nodded dumbly and he laughed aloud—a fine, strong, untainted laugh that swung heads around. He whirled and faced them, suddenly made the center of attention by some unknown alchemy. Aunt Mill faltered and subsided, leaving a cracked high note bleeding on the air. Sheb struck a discord and halted. They looked at the stranger uneasily. Sand rattled against the sides of the building.

  The silence held, spun itself out. Her breath had clogged in her throat and she looked down and saw both hands pressed to her belly beneath the bar. They all looked at him and he looked at them. Then the laugh burst forth again, strong, rich, beyond denial. But there was no urge to laugh along with him.

  “I’ll show you a wonder!” he cried at them. But they only watched him, like obedient children taken to see a magician in whom they have grown too old to believe.

  The man in black sprang forward, and Aunt Mill drew away from him. He grinned fiercely and slapped her broad belly. A short, unwitting cackle was forced our of her, and the man in black threw back his head.

  “It’s better, isn’t it?”

  Aunt Mill cackled again, suddenly broke into cracked sobs, and fled blindly through the doors. The others watched her go silently. The storm was beginning; shadows followed each other, rising and falling on the giant white cyclorama of the sky. A man near the piano with a forgotten beer in one hand made a groaning, grinning sound.

  The man in black stood over Nort, grinning down at him. The wind howled and shrieked and thrummed. Something large struck the side of the building and bounced away. One of the men at the bar tore himself free and exited in looping, grotesque strides. Thunder racketed in sudden dry volleys.

  “All right,” the man in black grinned. “All right, here we go.”

  He began to spit into Nort’s face, aiming carefully. The spittle gleamed in the cut troughs of his forehead, pearled down the shaven beak of his nose.

  Under the bar, her hands worked faster.

  Sheb laughed, loon-like, and hunched over. He began to cough up phlegm, huge and sticky gobs of it, and let fly. The man in black roared approval and pounded him on the back. Sheb grinned, one gold tooth twinkling.

  Others fled. Others gathered in a loose ring around Nort. His face and the dewlapped rooster-wrinkles of his neck and upper chest gleamed with liquid— liquid so precious in this dry country. And suddenly it stopped, as if on signal. There was ragged, heavy breathing.

  The man in black suddenly lunged across the body, jackknifing over it in a smooth arc. It was pretty, like a flash of water. He caught himself on his hands, sprang to his feet in a twist, grinning, and went over again. One of the watchers forgot himself, began to applaud, and suddenly backed away, eyes cloudy with terror. He slobbered a hand across his mouth and made for the door.

  Nort twitched the third time the man in black went across.

  A sound went through the watchers—a grunt—and then they were silent. The man in black threw his head back and howled. His chest moved in a quick, shallow rhythm as he sucked air. He began to go back and forth at a faster clip, pouring over Nort’s body like water poured from one glass to another glass. The only sound in the room was the tearing rasp of his respiration and the rising pulse of the storm.

  Nort drew a deep, dry breath. His hands rattled and pounded aimlessly on the table. Sheb screeched and exited. One of the women followed him.

  The man in black went across once more, twice, thrice. The whole body was vibrating now, trembling and rapping and twitching. The smell of rot and excrement and decay billowed up in choking waves. His eyes opened.

  Alice felt her feet propelling her backward. She struck the mirror, making it shiver, and blind panic took over. She bolted like a steer.

  “I’ve given it to you,” the man in black called after her, panting. “Now you can sleep easy. Even that isn’t irreversible. Although it’s... so... goddamned... funny!” And he began to laugh again. The sound faded as she raced up the stairs, grunting and heaving, not stopping until the door to the three rooms above the bar was bolted.

  She began to giggle then, rocking back and forth on her haunches by the door. The sound rose to a keening wail that mixed with the wind.

  Downstairs, Nort wandered absently out into the storm to pull some weed. The man in black, now the only patron of the bar, watched him go, still grinning.

  When she forced herself to go back down that evening, carrying a lamp in one hand and a heavy stick of stovewood in the other, the man in black was gone, rig and all. But Nort was there, sitting at the table by the door as if he had never been away. The smell of the weed was on him, but not as heavily as she might have expected.

  He looked up at her and smiled tentatively. “Hello, Allie.”

  “Hello, Nort.” She put the stovewood down and began lighting the lamps, not turning her back to him.

  “I been touched by God,” he said pre
sently. “I ain’t going to die no more. He said so. It was a promise.”

  “How nice for you, Nort.” The spill she was holding dropped through her trembling fingers and she picked it up.

  “I’d like to stop chewing the grass,” he said. “I don’t enjoy it no more. It don’t seem right for a man touched by God to be chewing the weed.”

  “Then why don’t you stop?”

  Her exasperation startled her into looking at him as a man again, rather than an infernal miracle. What she saw was a rather sad-looking specimen only half-high, looking hangdog and ashamed. She could not be frightened by him anymore.

  “I shake,” he said. “And I want it. I can’t stop. Allie, you was always so good to me—” He began to weep. “I can’t even stop peeing myself.”

  She walked to the table and hesitated there, uncertain.

  “He could have made me not want it,” he said through the tears. “He could have done that if he could have made me be alive. I ain’t complaining... I don’t want to complain...” He stared around hauntedly and whispered, “He might strike me dead if I did.”

  “Maybe it’s a joke. He seemed to have quite a sense of humor.”

  Nort took his poke from where it dangled inside his shirt and brought out a handful of grass. Unthinkingly she knocked it away and then drew her hand back, horrified.

  “I can’t help it, Allie, I can’t—” and he made a crippled dive for the poke. She could have stopped him, but she made no effort. She went back to lighting the lamps, tired although the evening had barely begun. But nobody came in that night except old man Kennerly, who had missed everything. He did not seem particularly surprised to see Nort. He ordered beer, asked where Sheb was, and pawed her. The next day things were almost normal, although none of the children followed Nort. The day after that, the catcalls resumed. Life had gotten back on its own sweet keel. The uprooted corn was gathered together by the children, and a week after Nort’s resurrection, they burned it in the middle of the street. The fire was momentarily bright and most of the barflies stepped or staggered out to watch. They looked primitive. Their faces seemed to float between the flames and the ice-chip brilliance of the sky. Allie watched them and felt a pang of fleeting despair for the sad times of the world. Things had stretched apart. There was no glue at the center of things anymore. She had never seen the ocean, never would.