by Неизвестный
The door swung open at her touch. She passed through another doorway, where the room was engulfed, as was the four-poster bed in the centre. As she drew nearer, she saw the boy and his sister there, looking for all the world as though they slept peacefully.
The boy’s eyes snapped open. “You’re not a kid,” he said again. “It’s only kids who can come here. Why are you here? Who are you? What’s wrong with you?” His face had turned dark, and angry.
Agnes tried to speak, to tell them something, but when she opened her mouth, smoke wafted out instead of words.
Eleven bid goodbye now …
Agnes is ten years old. Someone has just told her that after you’re dead, your nails and hair keep growing. For some reason, Agnes has understood this to mean that if she removes her nails and hair, she will never, ever die. She trims her nails too close to the quick but cannot yet bring herself to go any further; she has already chopped her hair close against her scalp when her mother comes across her sobbing at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Later her mother will take her for her first-ever hair appointment at a beauty shop downtown, where a girl will valiantly try and fail to make sense of the butchery Agnes has inflicted upon her own locks.
Agnes is sixty-one years old. Someone has just told her it’s always cold where the dead sleep, even the dead who have burned to death. Who would tell her such a thing? Maybe it was a thing she dreamed. In this gloaming, in this dying of the day, the burned house is burning down and the dead are dying all the time. Soon, dying is all the dead know how to do. But this time is different. And time is different here. This time is sirens; someone has seen the flames leaping from the burned house, and called the emergency numbers. But the fire will be fought from the outside. No one will risk themselves racing into the burned house, because they imagine there will be no one inside to save.
Twelve you’re here instead …
“One thing,” said her brother. They had said their goodbyes already. Agnes had one hand on the front doorknob; she was ready to drop the phone on the counter and head out on her run. “One thing,” he said again. “Don’t go near the burned house. Or the place where it used to be, at least.”
Agnes said, “Why on earth would I do that?” “Just don’t.”
Thirteen now you’re dead …
Agnes Swithin dreams in flames. Yellows, oranges blues and reds, blazing, writhing, birthing sparks that flare into new and bigger fires, blackened wood and charred flesh and all transformed, gone to cinder, gone to ash.
She can see shapes of people gathering, lining the sidewalk outside. She will run to them. She is a good runner, and she will join them easily. She leaps to her feet, but something is holding her back. They have her by the arms, the girl and her brother, and when she looks at them their faces are not the smooth unblemished faces of childhood, but burned and ravaged horrors. Surely she can shake them free; she will tear their arms from their sockets if she has to. She staggers forth and she can hear the murmur going up from the crowd. “Someone’s in the fire.”
She tries to call out to them, to tell them yes, someone is in the fire, it’s Agnes Swithin, the biology teacher from the high school. They will know her. They will save her. She can even see some of their faces, some she recognizes: students, and parents of students, some of whom she taught as well. And yet the two are still tugging at her, and all of them are weeping. A large burning chunk of the second-story roof plummets before her, throwing up more flames and black, choking smoke and cutting off the rest of the world. The faces, the crowd itself, are lost to her now. Now she clutches the hands that restrain her. They are all she has, and she holds on tight. They whisper as they draw her deeper, telling of a house with a thousand and more rooms, of corridors you could walk forever and a day, telling of things born of fire, born of infernos, born of boredom, born of loss. The house is still burning, they are passing into secret and febrile places, and outside the burned and burning house, the late winter dusk is falling, falling into night.
LAVIE TIDHAR
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Z—
LAVIE TIDHAR IS the World Fantasy Awardwinning author of Osama (2011), as well as The Violent Century (2013) and A Man Lies Dreaming (2014). He also won the 2012 British Fantasy Award for best novella (for “Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God”). He edited the three Apex Book of World SF anthologies, and his comics mini-series, Adler, is forthcoming from Titan Comics.
“It occurred to me at some point that I wanted to write a zombie story without any zombies,” reveals Tidhar. “I’ve never been sure what they’re meant to represent – the breakdown of social order? The evils of consumerism? The end of a relationship? Or maybe they just lurch about for fun. I don’t know.
“But I like the idea of Raymond Carver being caught in the middle of a zombie outbreak. I suspect he might have enjoyed himself – more than people in his stories usually do anyway.”
“DON’T.”
She turned her head from him and looked away. She looked at the wall. He said, “Lenore …”
“And don’t call me that no more.”
Silence between them. He couldn’t break it. She looked at the wall. The white paint was chipping at the bottom. A fly, very slowly, traversed it, like a mountaineer on a sheer wall of ice.
After a while he got up and shuffled to the kitchen. She heard the refrigerator door open and close. She heard the sound of his eating. She looked at the wall.
We were sitting over coffee, watching the crowds. You were having affogato. I was having an Americano. Our choices spoke for themselves. “No point watching your weight any more, is there?” you said. You waved your hand at the hordes outside. “Look at them.”
I did. There was nothing else to do but drink coffee and watch them. “Sometimes I think it’s the end of the world, or something,” you said.
“It is the end of the world,” I said.
You sighed, and shook your head, and your black hair fell down to your shoulders. “You’re so immature,” you said.
I could have said a lot of things at that point. I didn’t. After a time I put my hand across the table and, after a little while longer, yours met mine and we held hands, briefly.
“I need to pee,” you said. “Will you walk me to the bathroom? I’m afraid.”
“They don’t mean any harm,” I said, and you nodded and said, “I know. They’re just … they’re not like us any more. Maybe they never were.”
Still, neither of us made to get up. We sat and drank our coffee and watched the crowds outside. After a while you started to hum. I can no longer remember the song. I find it hard to picture your face, I mean, really see it. Only parts – the laughter lines, the way your earlobe curved. The rest of you is gone.
Sometimes I wake up at night and it is dark, and there is no sound outside, and I try to remember the music, but I can’t. The notes are all gone.
*
She was going through the kid’s things. The kid’s room, with its posters on the walls and its small-sized writing desk. Little notes to herself, everywhere. A T-shirt thrown carelessly on the chair with a single giant letter, slashed across the soft material in dark paint: Z.
The room was messy. Weird Japanese cartoon figures on the walls, pale Goth girls in black gazing soulfully from their posters, sci-fi paperbacks with dog-ears and ’60s psychedelic art. You raised a weird kid, she thought. She felt strangely proud.
Notes the kid left to herself. Learn to use an Uzi.
Check expiry date of tinned foods – question mark and a circle outlining it.
How to hot-wire a car – Internet?
Always be alert.
She looked around the room. She sat down on the kid’s bed. A photo in a frame, on the desk, the kid and her, smiling for the camera. A note pinned to the frame, too, and she plucked it off and looked at it. In neat but childish handwriting it said, If Mother becomes one of them, shoot her too. Promise. A little heart drawn next to it. She put it down again and looked at hers
elf and the kid in the frame, looking happy, even if it was only for that one moment, even if it was only for the camera.
It is raining. It seems to have been raining more and more, and the sky is black with streaks of startling blue. The grave had been dug and the coffin lowered and now it was being covered again, with earth.
“I stopped going to funerals, you know. It felt as if the dead never stayed in the ground, after a while. I’d picture them shambling out in the dead of night, tearing out the coffin, digging their way up to the surface. It used to horrify me, the thought of all that dirt under their nails. They’d follow me home. They’d lay siege to my apartment. I only have a small apartment. Two rooms. I share it with my cat, Mozart. He’d hiss when he’d sense them coming. I guess you could say I’m a hoarder. I keep things. I find it hard to throw anything away. I keep imagining, if it happens, when it happens, I’ll be prepared. Don’t you get the feeling most people aren’t really alive? That inside, deep inside they’d already died, they’re just not showing it outwards yet? They walk the streets just like you or I do, they shop, they press the button for the elevator to go up, or down, or to stop. But they’re dead.
“I stopped going to funerals. After a while they don’t get buried any more, I guess. What’s the use? They just shamble around, with dead eyes, and look for food. I never leave my apartment any more. I have everything I need, and Mozart keeps me company. Mainly, I watch. From my window I can see the whole world, at least the only part of it that matters. At night I imagine fires. Everything we have is so perishable. I imagine a big bonfire, a primal bonfire of the sort I imagine Vikings lit up, in the winter, after looting and setting fire to a whole village. I imagine books, postcards, notebooks, tapes, cassettes, chair legs, hair, toenail clippings, newspapers, car wheels, plastic bags, traffic signs, all going, going, going up in smoke and fire and the fire roars, it sings, and I watch it with Mozart by my side, there on the windowsill, and we listen to music. Something soothing, I guess. Classical. Do you think—”
But she only shakes her head, the hint of a smile touching one corner of her mouth, and says, “It’s different when there are birds, don’t you think? To listen to them, when the sun rises – it reminds you of everything that had gone before.”
And he has a mental image when she says that, so strong that it makes him hold on to her; of a small and silent bird, a common sparrow, maybe, or a robin or a finch, and it is still, and cold. It is small enough to fit in his palm, and he holds it, and somehow the feel of it, the stillness of it, fills him with dread. And he leaves his apartment, his cat, his books and records, and he goes down the stairs, counting as he goes, like a child against the dark, one, two, three, four until he reaches the ground. And he walks towards the fire and the cold silent bird is in his hand.
“But you can’t kill all the birds,” she says, with that hint of a smile, with the confidence of youth. And it makes him wish he could hold her still, could stay, holding on to her, forever. She looks at him, as if puzzled, then pulls gently away. “Will I see you again?” he says.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s raining.”
A sea of black umbrellas opens, and they walk away from the grave, through the silent tombs, and the rain falls down and turns the ground to mud.
HALLI VILLEGAS
Fishfly Season
HALLI VILLEGAS IS the author of three collections of poetry: Red Promises, In the Silence Absence Makes and The Human Cannonball. Her book of ghost stories, The Hair Wreath and Other Stories, was published in 2010 by ChiZine Publications. She was the co-editor of the anthologies Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing and In The Dark: Tales of the Supernatural.
Her genre work has appeared in anthologies that include Chilling Tales 2, The White Collar Anthology, Bad Seed, Incubus and Girls Who Bite Back. She has just finished her first novel, which has paranormal investigators, serial killers and mermaids in it.
“This story is a ‘love letter’ to the town I grew up in,” Villegas explains. “A place of façades and falseness that haunts my writing. As a child I had a pathological fear of fishflies, which seem to symbolize everything about my home town – mindless life and death.
“Even though I say I have outgrown my fear of them, I haven’t really outgrown my fears of anything.”
THE BEDROOM WAS stifling. The ceiling fan’s soft sucking sound as it moved through the humid air only intensified her discomfort. Of course he was asleep beside her, not much kept him awake. He hadn’t wanted to put the air conditioning on yet, saying it was too expensive, that the nights were still cool enough for sleeping with windows open, that the fan would regulate the temperature. So here she was lying awake in their new home, a perfect centre entrance Georgian, hating him.
They moved in a month ago and Marisol still didn’t believe it was real. They had left behind a small bungalow in the city for this gracious home in a beautiful suburb along a lake, twenty minutes away from the city’s centre. The place where the rich used to have their summer cottages, where executives from the car companies that drove the city’s economy had their mansions on the cul-de-sacs and leafy streets, where the executive’s lawyers lived two doors away in mock Tudors and homes with French doors.
It wasn’t a new suburb, like those terrible bedroom communities with the tiny yards and every house a replica of the next; this was old money, old Wasp wealth cocooning itself here. Each house different, each lawn perfect, two shopping areas, the Hill and the Village, with coffee shops and dress shops, hardware stores and the Village Market grocery store.
Marisol was drifting now, floating in a sort of heat-induced stupor, watching as the soft black shadows in the corners of the bedroom deepened and shifted, resolving themselves into a woman who walked towards the bed. A wide hairband held her hair back, and she wore a bright pink and green sleeveless shift, a strand of pearls around her neck. She skirted around the end of the bed and glanced once at Marisol whose eyelids were getting heavier, closing almost, and Marisol saw that the woman’s blue eyes were nothing but glass beads and that she hated Marisol.
The next morning Marisol woke up to Neil singing in the shower. The white hydrangeas and pink bows on the wallpaper danced in the sunlight, the pale-blue check curtains billowing softly with an early morning breeze. Both had been in the house when they moved in. Marisol had ditched the Guatemalan rugs and mismatching thrift-store finds painted in bright colours that she had decorated their bungalow with and embraced the Sister Parish style of decorating that their new home seemed to expect. The furniture from Neil’s parents’ estate had helped, their four-poster bed, the sunroom wicker, the chintz-covered sofas all fit perfectly. Like the furniture, Neil belonged here. He had grown up in this suburb, and had always wanted to return.
“Once a Grand Beach man,” he had said, “always a Grand Beach man.”
Small droplets of water fell on her cheeks. For a moment Marisol wondered if she was crying, but it was Neil, fresh from the shower, shaking his wet blond hair over her like a dog.
She reached out for him but he moved away smiling with his perfect white teeth.
“Get up lazybones, get up. Today we’ll run some errands in the Village, and drive by the lake, have lunch in the park. Sound good?”
Marisol smiled and nodded. She got out of bed and walked to the bathroom. On the way there, buried in the soft pile of the rug, something hard bit into the ball of her foot. She bent down and felt for the object. She picked it up holding it on the palm of her hand. It was a small blue glass bead.
The Village was very clean, there was no graffiti, no garbage. Each storefront had period details to make it look like an American colonial town. As Marisol and Neil got out of the car, a chattering group of teen girls, long legs, tan, clean sheets of blonde hair, tiny cut-off shorts and polo shirts, brushed by them. The girls were eating ice cream, their little pink tongues licking and darting, their gleaming teeth nipping at the cones. They stared at Neil for a moment, at his blond handso
meness and then swayed on. Marisol felt very small and dark, a blotch on the bright place they had come to. While she stared after the girls, she felt something land on her arm. She looked down at her arm and saw an insect she had never seen before. It had a mealworm like body, with two beady eyes and transparent wings that stood straight up. Marisol brushed at it with her hand, but it clung to her. She shook her arm, but still the thing hung on, staring at her with its caviar eyes.
“Neil, get this thing off me. It’s stuck, it’s laying an egg or something.” Marisol’s voice rose. She never had liked bugs, and though she wanted to be adult about it, this thing unnerved her. “Is it sucking my blood? What the hell is it?”
Neil held her arm still and easily plucked the creature off her by its wings. He tossed it into the air and it fluttered a few feet away and landed on the window of a car.
“Haven’t you ever seen a fishfly before Marisol?” Neil asked smiling at her.
“They hatch their eggs on water, so Grand Beach gets a big swarm of them around this time of year. One is nothing. Wait till they all hatch. Some years they are so thick on the ground your car skids, and they cover the windows of the stores until you can’t see in.”
“Jesus Neil, that’s horrible.” Marisol rubbed her arm where the fishfly had landed. “‘Like some biblical plague.”
“Actually we’re happy to see them that heavy. It means that the lake is healthy.” He put his arm around Marisol. “They don’t have mouths and they die after one day and one night. They just want to mate, they’re not interested in you.” He hugged Marisol to him. “Let’s go get that drill so I can put up your bookshelves. I’ll protect you from the vicious fishflies.”
The hardware store had a sickening rubbery smell, oily. But it was very light and open, the front filled with displays of garden ornaments, backyard barbecues, nylon flags with watermelons or baskets of flowers embroidered on them. There were aisles of cooking ware, glasses, ice-tea jugs. It was only at the far back of the store that it started to look like a real hardware store, with displays of tools, coils of garden hose, and boxes of nails and screws.