And before him stood, heads bent as supplicants, dressed for some reason now in rough black hooded robes, recognizable only by their feet, were the two Germans, stood like children pleading for a promised present, “Even though we have been bad, we didn’t mean it and anyway it wasn’t our fault,” that message written in their every line even though she could not see their faces, nor in fact tear her eyes from his.
Slowly, slowly, as a snail laying its slime trail he spoke, indifferent as perfection, “What have we here? A clever girl? A clever, foolish girl? A girl who has not dared grow up? How sad she is, she makes us laugh.”
The laugh was horrible, choked and phlegmy somehow as if coming out of decaying rotting creatures in a mine, and ending even more horribly because even less appropriately to the firm, upstanding, military-looking figure, in a high pitched girlish giggle.
The whole courtyard seemed to darken, as if blackness spilled from him and overflowed steadily everywhere.
Dog, guide, Germans, the very air were silent ... waiting ... as if a huge storm must break.
Mariella, crushed as if an attempt at praising someone humbly or offering a small tawdry but months-saved-for gift had been rebuffed, waited too.
The figure looked at the guide lurking in the archway.
Just a look, but the guide slithered away into the shadows like a dog that knows it has done wrong, and punishment must come, but still by sufficient cringing hopes to somehow against hope save itself, all the while terror making the prospective punishment the more dreadful the more it is delayed.
The dog followed, snarling, panting, belly down, turning to cringe and show wide-mouthed defiance at one and the same time, a combination unreal as the schizophrenia of a hound trying at one and the same time to deter an intruder and play with a child, yet made horrible by the overall smell of fear in its very demeanor.
Both vanished into the passageway.
The figure looked the three foreigners over, as if inspecting cheap-jack rubbish on a marketstall.
Mariella found herself holding her breath—and, irrelevantly, longing for a smoke yet not daring to light one as if the match would somehow turn to lightning and consume her on the spot.
She wanted to ask Emico, “Who is he?” or ask direct, but dare not break the spell.
“You do not know who I am ... I am the Master ... that is all you need to know,” those words addressed directly to her.
Read in cold blood on a page she’d have thought them hysterically funny, such a claim, delivered so stiffly: not pompously, but with an utter certainty that was pomposity’s darker twin: would have reduced her to gales of mirth.
Here, and seeming to come straight from a penetration into her mind like cold rays from a lizard’s eye, or a hateful penetration of her body by Colin when she knew he merely wished to masturbate in her, hurried, perfunctory and thick-voiced in approach, it was overwhelming.
It seemed to blow open every door in her mind, leave all recesses open to the cold blast so that what the Master said next was imperishably written everywhere in her thoughts, all other concepts driven scurrying away before them like rats from a mill when the demolition men began their work.
“Yes, everything about you, in you, proves you do not really want to be changed into what you could be ... you cannot, as these others wish and will, if we or those I speak for can agree a price, a due, shed your false self to be reborn and come true ... there is no other you to be revealed, set free, because you are what you are already through and through ...” Each word crashing into her senses, true, true, true ...
“You are like a cracked cup waiting only always empty to be filled ... and only can you be filled with dust, and then only when you become dust ... you are so made one, so complete about the flaw to heal the flaw would only shatter you ... you can be ruined, broken, but not healed ...
“Now keep silence, speak no more till all is done ... there is here now no other part for you but to be witness of what is to be, and to be done.”
And turned from her as if she no longer existed, weighed in the balance and wanting ...
Her response half relief, that the hawk’s shadow had passed toward a fatter rabbit ...
Half longing to shriek out, “But I exist too and do not want to ... do to me what you must, destroy me, I will not be left out,” like a spoiled child when others are noticed, or, more precise, like the neglected child’s endless mute shape of long-ago stifled cry, as the favored brother and sister bask in the ray of parents’ attention, never guessing, the poor ignored one, that after all they too are frail and limits exist to the amount of attention they can spare from themselves and their own incompleteness, suffering, to offer any child, any stranger, interrupter, so prefer to offer one enough and one nothing than offer two meals each leading in their smallness only to malnutrition ...
All these thoughts, these forgivenesses passed through her brain—and the thought, too, that the Master, beginning now the movements, passes, raisings of smokes and killings of doves that began his business, that He, surely, at least of all those she had ever met should be full to overflowing, should not lack nor need to ration, set limit, to his terrible affection, that He at least should have time and destruction to spare for everyone ...
And then the changes that the proceedings were designed, it seemed, to breed, really began ...
And her mind darkened ... Her mouth filled with a longing to retch, like the evil green swill-taste of too much cheap local wine at the so-called tasting they had been taken to, one raw white, its newness a source of pride not shame, and thin lifeless ham, each forced on her in never ending stream while fellow passengers in their eighties tried to dance and sing and Colin shrieking, cursed her for spoiling the camera film by taking the film out “in daylight,” to see why it had jammed, which had seemed so natural to her at the time, and she had at last run out to be sick—and woken on the hotel bed thinking she was blind, only to find it was a power failure in the town ...
And all the waiters seemed more sardonic than usual, a hidden well of laughter at these English who could not hold their liquor, who all had that evening picked at food and snarled among themselves, even the most ebullient silenced ...
But even through Colin’s unending nit-picking about the spoiled film, raw in her mind had been that instant’s terror, the total blackness in which she’d stumbled to the sink to be sick again, no light on harbor or over roofs or sky, only utter black, and the vast relief, stumbled to door and wrenching it open to scream, to see far down the corridor the flicker of a candle in one of the chambermaid’s grasp, and know she had her sight, so that she could have kissed the woman.
Having of course no one to tell, afraid to show herself up to fellow tourists over such silly fear, old wives’ tale, folk belief, that bad alcohol blinded you ... and Colin too endlessly on about some amazing shot he’d reckoned he’d got of the whole town identically reflected upside down in the harbor, after hours waiting for perfect water conditions, stillness, tide, no boats, got up at down, too busy over this lamentation, enjoyed like most of his complaints, she was sure, as one more proof not just how she was the idiot, albatross, cross that held him back, the burden he must carry like Old Man of the Mountain on his back ...
And all this merged ... and was gone ... and like a flashback the real memory of revelation came only, desperately fought off as if it had been memory of rape, as she came to herself running wildly like steeplechaser over low walls, hedges, brush, all scratched and skin raw and torn to shreds.
And shreds like the skin she passed off to him as from a fall, wishing almost instead they were wild lovebites of some winged, some clawing being ... shreds too were the event, events, facts, legends, whatever they were, reshaping, shifting, twisting, as motes in eyes pressed onto a pillow seeking sleep or stopping tears ...
Shreds that came went came ... repeated ... interlocked ... randomly joined left conjoined again ... like couples in some porno magazines she’d found once in her husband�
�s private drawer at home, and looked at, sweating, legs heavy and faint as if up too fast in a lift ... and never dared ask him about, knowing somehow he’d make her feel small over her curiosity, her ignorance of his schemes, ideas, intellect, plans, even such twistings as those of girls with girls, men with dogs, girls with goats, men with fatter men, would be a part of his Plan, not mere vulgar gray-mac wanking pictures ...
And the shreds left in her mind, the shreds of these events, mingled, blew in her mind all the way home, Home ... like paper fragments twisting in the air above a bonfire went and came ... went and came ... the frame never clear and yet each fragment in its sharp as a knife as Time going by as children outgrowing her leaving only soil behind ... “How could someone as big as you come out of someone as small as her?” one of the kids had asked once after they’d been to see her mother, their grandmother ... somehow these memories too were much too large for the soil in which they grew and came and spewed and could only be vomited disordered out, no table was large enough, no acreage of thought, to put them into tidy rows and make them into sense ...
the evil green ... the wine at the tasting the hotel staff arranged ... white wine, yes but not white, raw, green, vomitous ... the evil green of the thorned land she ran through ... scrabbling, falling, ridden by fear as donkeys brayed contemptuous as if to say “Stop, wait, I’ll come, I’ll ride on you” ... child piggyback on mother growing weight ... thorns, thorns ... the prophet seemed to talk of the moon being a suburb of Earth and computers, though god knew how he knew what they were, thinking machines, these would come adopt his prophecies, they were better learners than her ... and she shrunk under the whiplash of his teaching words ...
shall we leave, avoid, evade, hide, cover as a grain of sand by a pearl the real memory of revelation, cried her mind ... shall we find the children, tell them a story, play with starfish till they break, haggle for grapes, buy a drink ... shall we get postcards, get cigarettes, see what the price of meat or Coke or an ice-cream is like compared to home, since that is the first thing the wives around the neighborhood will ask when we get back, after they get over their awe at us not being imprisoned eaten beaten by the Communists ... shall we forget snake skin of after shed, the brother whizzed down the well, his sister eaten, smooth silver silver of reptile, a river, a lightning flash of river ... a revelation, shall we forget it echoing across the bay, over the sign showing graphically stones falling off cliffs and slope one in five, echoing through the little streets of the town up the hill across the bay, over the water like a thunder of terror till dogs bark everywhere and even old black widow women leading donkeys and men asleep under their boats turn to look and Mariella’s mind realizes it is she who has cried, cried in relief scrabbling back onto the road at last after rock-fields, Jerusalem throne-thorn walls ... relief and greater fear that road, water, town, castle, too will turn and rend her, even hotel he turned and changed, even her husband have doubled his head, split into horns, grown three legs ... shouted and woke familiar echo in hope her own voice somehow thrown forward back around alleys town walls hills would exercise the half-remembered half-blurred terrors and then on knees by a fallen branch of fir tearing madly at a cyclamen rooted in the rock praying genuinely praying that no one knew the hollowing crying that still re-echoed among the streets was the cry of this “mad Englishwoman” herself and then even now pulling one by one stones away from the roots of the cyclamen, deeper deeper, tearing fingers, nails, spoiling her skin, determined madly age on age to get the plant out safe still flowering take it home a token tho she had to go down a yard to release it ... and at last did ... and with it clutched in an upturned fold of her blouse, clutched like a child this plant, feeling safe at last, safe though battered weary almost sexually overdrawn as if from a hysterectomy how a neighbor described it once, like the results of a night with too many men, she ran on ... ran on ...
mind a blur of half-buried church carved into ground ... of bar blind, eyeless, its only door barred by flies and crates of sticky bottles and jeering mumbling faces ... of shaved-head children playing soldiers and poking at some mangily huge white cat with sticks like bayonets ... of one tractor, once painted red, mumbling and grumbling like a beast among beasts ... of useless fearful villagers crossing themselves against some evil eye, pointing fingers at her as she ran by, longing to tell somebody her news as if it was a lucky win in a lottery or a change of Prime Minister or outbreak of war, but knowing no one could, would ever understand her ... not here ... not anywhere ... not even back at home where they thought they spoke her language and she thought she spoke theirs ...
rain ... light then busy then a constant scurrying ... and small blue butterflies, clouded, zooming round her as she briefly disordered sheltered ... horrible to have them here near her, like eyes, spies, of what was up there in the Castle ... watching eyes ... and yet it would have been more horrible to be here alone ...
Down, down the hill, the new road cut through old rock ... the red rawness, the blurred growth defiantly returning to close the wound.
Could see now, ahead, the dried up channel of Venetian harbor where kids played football with a punctured beachball, a torn net ... and wished instead of giving them the tiny plastic balls the ice-cream came in. after use, had bought them a real ball ... only her and husband would laugh ... no, worse, would say “You do what you like” in ways that made her feel worse still ... still more a fool ...
Behind her now miles, maybe, that tangle of blackthorn and rough pasture, that pre-Raphaelite dream land ...
Fragments of the talk from that year, that castle yard, that sick romantic place where magic was ugly as a slum yard full of girls grown up too quick spitting swollen contraceptives from their teeth into the grass, and laughing with yellow spiteful teeth among the broken bottles ...
Shreds like her torn skin she could not remember getting ...
“How long does the gift take to act?”
“No longer than an aspirin on an empty stomach, my foolish faithless modern children. No longer for you than for the least of these faithful peasants.”
Over the meeting, like angels, cherubs, over a mating far off flew bats, flies, maybe old jet planes, her son would have known if they were gnats, meteors, lightnings, what ... far off, anyway, black specks only, feeders on corpses ...
Back at the quay, the main waterfront of the town, and the lounging idlers, the black-cape crones, seemed another gauntlet ... the hotel at last, and even the receptionist with her odd misplaced tooth, as Mariella gasped her longing for the key to the room, feeling trapped as if in treacle at the final gate of peace, seemed to laugh like a wind out of some ultimate vacuum ...
She stumbled up to the room, and heedless of pains, threw herself face down on the bed, not even thinking an instant of cleaning herself up before her husband and children returned ... as if it was too late for such pretense, such shame, that this once at least they would have to, her husband, see her, as she really was ... a real being ... someone who could be scared, could need ... thoughts ago frightened her, fear of wrinkles, cancer biting between her legs in dreams, fatness, having to pass young drunks, teenagers at the bus stop as she went for her husband’s cigarettes ...
Surely, Mariella thought, her mind swept by waves of darkness like the onset of sleep, in turn each withdrawing to leave odd discoveries flotsam behind, surely she had a right to be afraid ... and for him to know, to notice ... if he wouldn’t give her pat, affection, caress, at least let him give her boot, stone, anything, not just well-intended indifference ... she was more surely than the background song on a juke-box in a pub you only notice when it’s turned off, a TV talking to itself unnoticed in corner ... a book to reread over and over, though even that he’d notice more ...
well, tonight, here, when they returned, let them see her torn, bleeding, afraid ... not fount of wisdom, healing, calm ... someone who needed them ... needed ... let’s see what they said then ... as she told them, told them it all, not even putting the frightening b
its, the obscene bits, into baby talk so the children wouldn’t be frightened ... her husband so full of theories, so enlightened as he thought, and daren’t even talk to his own children about sex, went out of the room if anything came on the television about it, in case they might ask him questions, or said, “Shush, I’m listening to this” ...
would he listen to this from her? Could she compete with his mind, his guidebook ... his notes ... would he listen as she told of the moment of granting of wishes ... the circle of obscene kisses ... no way of knowing, was she excited, frightened, face into flesh, brown smell of dung, dry blow of dust, and tongue into her too behind ... and the courtyard of the castle a farm, and they three animals in it, and the voice of the Masters calling them to be milked, slaughtered ... fed ...
The splitting of skins, a birth of real selves ... born, borne of this ... out of their shrunken selves into their ... what ... hopes, fears? she didn’t dare to decide, know ... the German boy a huge swift snake now, his sister a smooth white rat ... running to each other as lovers in a Hollywood musical ... snake eats rat, turns, looks at Mariella ... god, did she dare tell her husband how she longed for it, him, to come for her too ... it examined her, came nearer, nearer, bulging, coppery, glitter glorious as a window in York Cathedral ... picked up her flesh in a great coil, as she relaxed, slack against such lovely coolness, longing for the huge faceted thing to enter her, eat her from all directions, from within, without ...
Only it dropped her as if in contempt ... and she wept at such rejection ... and it swung swiftly as a bowstring bends and then releases over the low wall of the well and vanished downwards into darkness, fat, swollen, but so fluidly sweetly fine, no pregnant limping lump despite its huge meal, more a knife diving down entrails to split the world ...
The Year's Best Horror Stories 14 Page 31