The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  She was coming down the hill from Roxborough with her arms out, the inverted image of a child playing at tightrope walker. Placing one foot ahead of the other with deliberate concentration, scanning the wire before her so cautiously that she was less than a block away when she saw me.

  She screamed.

  Then she was running straight at me. My back was to the transformer station – there was no place to flee. I shrank away as she stumbled to a halt.

  “It’s you!” she cried. “Oh God, Charlie, I knew you’d come back for me, I waited so long, but I never doubted you, never, we can…” She lunged forward as if to hug me. Our eyes met.

  All the joy in her died.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s not you.”

  I was fresh off the high-tension lines, still vibrating with energy and fear. My mind was a blaze of contradictions. I could remember almost nothing of my post-death existence. Fragments, bits of advice from the old dead, a horrifying confrontation with…something, some creature or phenomenon that had driven me to flee Manhattan. Whether it was this event or the fearsome voltage of that radiant highway that had scoured me of experience, I did not know. “It’s me,” I protested.

  “No, it’s not.” Her gaze was unflatteringly frank. “You’re not Charlie and you never were. You’re – just the sad remnant of what once was a man, and not a very good one at that.” She turned away. She was leaving me! In my confusion, I felt such a despair as I had never known before.

  “Please…” I said.

  She stopped.

  A long silence. Then what in a living woman would have been a sigh. “You’d think that I – well, never mind.” She offered her hand, and when I would not take it, simply said, “This way.”

  I followed her down Main Street, through the shallow canyon of the business district to a diner at the edge of town. It was across from Hubcap Heaven and an automotive junkyard bordered it on two sides. The diner was closed. We settled down on the ceiling.

  “That’s where the car ended up after I died,” she said, gesturing toward the junkyard. “It was right after I got the call about Charlie. I stayed up drinking and after a while it occurred to me that maybe they were wrong, they’d made some sort of horrible mistake and he wasn’t really dead, you know? Like maybe he was in a coma or something, some horrible kind of misdiagnosis, they’d gotten him confused with somebody else, who knows? Terrible things happen in hospitals. They make mistakes.

  “I decided I had to go and straighten things out. There wasn’t time to make coffee so I went to the medicine cabinet and gulped down a bunch of pills at random, figuring something among them would keep me awake. Then I jumped into the car and started off for Colorado.”

  “My God.”

  “I have no idea how fast I was going – everything was a blur when I crashed. At least I didn’t take anybody with me, thank the Lord. There was this one horrible moment of confusion and pain and rage and then I found myself lying on the floor of the car with my corpse just inches beneath me on the underside of the roof.” She was silent for a moment. “My first impulse was to crawl out the window. Lucky for me I didn’t.” Another pause. “It took me most of a night to work my way out of the yard. I had to go from wreck to wreck. There were these gaps to jump. It was a nightmare.”

  “I’m amazed you had the presence of mind to stay in the car.”

  “Dying sobers you up fast.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And without the slightest hesitation, she joined right in with me. It was a fine warm moment, the first I’d had since I didn’t know when. The two of us set each other off, laughing louder and louder, our merriment heterodyning until it filled every television screen for a mile around with snow.

  My defenses were down. She reached out and took my hand.

  Memory flooded me. It was her first date with Charlie. He was an electrician. The people next door were having the place rehabbed. She’d been working in the back yard and he struck up a conversation. Then he asked her out. They went to a disco in the Adam’s Mark over on City Line Avenue.

  She wasn’t eager to get involved with somebody just then. She was still recovering from a hellish affair with a married man who’d thought that since he wasn’t available for anything permanent, that made her his property. But when Charlie suggested they go out to the car for some coke – it was the Seventies – she’d said sure. He was going to put the moves on her sooner or later. Might as well get this settled early so they’d have more time for dancing.

  But after they’d done up the lines, Charlie had shocked her by taking her hands in his and kissing them. She worked for a Bucks County pottery in those days and her hands were rough and red. She was very sensitive about them.

  “Beautiful hands,” he murmured. “Such beautiful, beautiful hands.”

  “You’re making fun of me,” she protested, hurt.

  “No! These are hands that do things, and they’ve been shaped by the things they’ve done. The way stones in a stream are shaped by the water that passes over them. The way tools are shaped by their work. A hammer is beautiful, if it’s a good hammer, and your hands are too.”

  He could have been scamming her. But something in his voice, his manner, said no, he really meant it. She squeezed his hands and saw that they were beautiful too. Suddenly she was glad she hadn’t gone off the pill when she broke up with Daniel. She started to cry. Her date looked alarmed and baffled. But she couldn’t stop. All the tears she hadn’t cried in the past two years came pouring out of her, unstoppable.

  Charlie-boy she thought, you just got lucky.

  All this in an instant. I snatched my hands away, breaking contact. “Don’t do that!” I cried. “Don’t you ever touch me again!”

  With flat disdain, the Widow said, “It wasn’t pleasant for me either. But I had to see how much of your life you remember.”

  It was naive of me, but I was shocked to realize that the passage of memories had gone both ways. But before I could voice my outrage, she said, “There’s not much left of you. You’re only a fragment of a man, shreds and tatters, hardly anything. No wonder you’re so frightened. You’ve got what Charlie calls a low signal-to-noise ratio. What happened in New York City almost destroyed you.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to…”

  “Oh be still. You need to know this. Living is simple, you just keep going. But death is complex. It’s so hard to hang on and so easy to let go. The temptation is always there. Believe me, I know. There used to be five of us in Roxborough, and where are the others now? Two came through Manayunk last spring and camped out under the El for a season and they’re gone too. Holding it together is hard work. One day the stars start singing to you, and the next you begin to listen to them. A week later they start to make sense. You’re just reacting to events – that’s not good enough. If you mean to hold on, you’ve got to know why you’re doing it.”

  “So why are you?”

  “I’m waiting for Charlie,” she said simply.

  It occurred to me to wonder exactly how many years she had been waiting. Three? Fifteen? Just how long was it possible to hold on? Even in my confused and emotional state, though, I knew better than to ask. Deep inside, she must’ve known as well as I did that Charlie wasn’t coming. “My name’s Cobb,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  She hesitated and then, with an odd sidelong look, said, “I’m Charlie’s Widow. That’s all that matters.” It was all the name she ever gave, and Charlie’s Widow she was to me from then onward.

  I rolled onto my back on the tin ceiling and spread out my arms and legs, a phantom starfish among the bats. A fragment, she had called me, shreds and tatters. No wonder you’re so frightened! In all the months since I’d been washed into this backwater of the power grid, she’d never treated me with anything but a condescension bordering on contempt.

  So I went out into the storm after all.

  The rain was nothing. It passed right through me. But there were ion-heavy gusts of wind th
at threatened to knock me right off the lines, and the transformer outside the Widow’s house was burning a fierce actinic blue. It was a gusher of energy, a flare star brought to earth, dazzling. A bolt of lightning unzipped me, turned me inside out, and restored me before I had a chance to react.

  The Corpsegrinder was visible from the Roxy, but between the burning transformer and the creature’s metamorphosis, I was within a block of the monster before I understood exactly what it was I was seeing.

  It was feeding off the dying transformer, sucking in energy so greedily that it pulsed like a mosquito engorged with blood. Enormous plasma wings warped to either side, hot blue and transparent. They curved entirely around the Widow’s house in an unbroken and circular wall. At the resonance points they extruded less detailed versions of the Corpsegrinder itself, like sentinels, all facing the Widow.

  Surrounding her with a prickly ring of electricity and malice.

  I retreated a block, though the transformer fire apparently hid me from the Corpsegrinder, for it stayed where it was, eyelessly staring inward. Three times I circled the house from a distance, looking for a way in. An unguarded cable, a wrought-iron fence, any unbroken stretch of metal too high or too low for the Corpsegrinder to reach.

  Nothing.

  Finally, because there was no alternative, I entered the house across the street from the Widow’s, the one that was best shielded by the spouting and stuttering transformer. A power line took me into the attic crawl space. From there I scaled the electrical system down through the second and first floors and so to the basement. I had a brief glimpse of a man asleep on a couch before the television. The set was off but it still held a residual charge. It sat quiescent, smug, bloated with stolen energies. If the poor bastard on the couch could have seen what I saw, he’d’ve never turned on the TV again.

  In the basement I hand-over-handed myself from the washing machine to the main water inlet. Straddling the pipe, I summoned all my courage and plunged my head underground.

  It was black as pitch. I inched forward on the pipe in a kind of panic. I could see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing. All I could feel was the iron pipe beneath my hands. Just beyond the wall the pipe ended in a T-joint where it hooked into a branch line under the drive. I followed it to the street.

  It was awful: Like suffocation infinitely prolonged. Like being wrapped in black cloth. Like being drowned in ink. Like strangling noiselessly in the void between the stars.

  To distract myself, I thought about my old man.

  When my father was young, he navigated between cities by radio. Driving dark and usually empty highways, he’d twist the dial back and forth, back and forth, until he hit a station. Then he’d withdraw his hand and wait for the station ID. That would give him his rough location – that he was somewhere outside of Albany, say. A sudden signal coming in strong and then abruptly dissolving in groans and eerie whistles was a fluke of the ionosphere, impossibly distant and easily disregarded.

  One that faded in and immediately out meant he had grazed the edge of a station’s range. But then a signal would grow and strengthen as he penetrated its field, crescendo, fade, and collapse into static and silence. That left him north of Troy, let’s say, and making good time. He would begin the search for the next station.

  You could drive across the continent in this way, passed from hand to hand by local radio, and tuned in to the geography of the night.

  I went over that memory three times, polishing and refining it, before the branch line abruptly ended. One hand groped forward and closed upon nothing.

  I had reached the main conduit. For a panicked moment I had feared that it would be concrete or brick or even one of the cedar pipes the city laid down in the nineteenth century, remnants of which still linger here and there beneath the pavement. But by sheer blind luck, the system had been installed during that narrow window of time when the pipes were cast iron. I crawled along its underside first one way and then the other, searching for the branch line to the Widow’s. There was a lot of crap under the street. Several times I was blocked by gas lines or by the high-pressure pipes for the fire hydrants and had to awkwardly clamber around them.

  At last I found the line and began the painful journey out from the street again.

  When I emerged in the Widow’s basement, I was a nervous wreck. It came to me then that I could no longer remember my father’s name. A thing of rags and shreds indeed!

  I worked my way up the electrical system, searching every room and unintentionally spying on the family who had bought the house after the Widows death. In the kitchen a puffy man stood with his sleeves rolled up, elbow-deep in the sink, angrily washing dishes by candlelight. A woman who was surely his wife expressively smoked a cigarette at his stiff back, drawing in the smoke with bitter intensity and exhaling it in puffs of hatred. On the second floor a preadolescent girl clutched a tortoise-shell cat so tightly it struggled to escape, and cried into its fur. In the next room a younger boy sat on his bed in earphones, Walkman on his lap, staring sightlessly out the window at the burning transformer. No Widow on either floor.

  How, I wondered, could she have endured staying in this entropic oven of a blue-collar rowhouse, forever the voyeur at the banquet, watching the living squander what she had already spent? Her trace was everywhere, her presence elusive. I was beginning to think she’d despaired and given herself up to the sky when I found her in the attic, clutching the wire that led to the antenna. She looked up, silenced and amazed by my unexpected appearance.

  “Come on,” I said. “I know a way out.”

  Returning, however, I couldn’t retrace the route I’d taken in. It wasn’t so much the difficulty of navigating the twisting maze of pipes under the street, though that was bad enough, as the fact that the Widow wouldn’t hazard the passage unless I led her by the hand.

  “You don’t know how difficult this is for me,” I said.

  “It’s the only way I’d dare.” A nervous, humorless laugh. “I have such a lousy sense of direction.”

  So, steeling myself, I seized her hand and plunged through the wall.

  It took all my concentration to keep from sliding off the water pipes, I was so distracted by the violence of her thoughts. We crawled through a hundred memories, all of her married lover, all alike.

  Here’s one:

  Daniel snapped on the car radio. Sad music – something classical – flooded the car. “That’s bullshit, babe. You know how much I have invested in you?” He jabbed a blunt finger at her dress. “I could buy two good whores for what that thing cost.”

  Then why don’t you, she thought. Get back on your Metroliner and go home to New York City and your wife and your money and your two good whores. Aloud, reasonably, she said, “It’s over, Danny, can’t you see that?”

  “Look, babe. Let’s not argue here, okay? Not in the parking lot, with people walking by and everybody listening. Drive us to your place, we can sit down and talk it over like civilized human beings.”

  She clutched the wheel, staring straight ahead. “No. We’re going to settle this here and now.”

  “Christ.” One-handed he wrangled a pack of Kents from a jacket pocket and knocked out a cigarette. Put the end in his lips and drew it out. Punched the lighter. “So talk.”

  A wash of hopelessness swept over her. Married men were supposed to be easy to get rid of. That was the whole point. “Let me go, Danny,” she pleaded. Then, lying, “We can still be friends.”

  He made a disgusted noise.

  “I’ve tried, Danny, I really have. You don’t know how hard I’ve tried. But it’s just not working.”

  “All right, I’ve listened. Now let’s go.” Reaching over her, Daniel threw the gearshift into reverse. He stepped on her foot, mashing it down on the accelerator.

  The car leapt backwards. She shrieked and in a flurry of panic swung the wheel about and slammed on the brake with her free foot.

  With a jolt and a crunch, the car stopped. Ther
e was the tinkle of broken plastic. They’d hit a lime-green Hyundai.

  “Oh, that’s just perfect!” Daniel said. The lighter popped out. He lit his cigarette and then swung open the door. “I’ll check the damage.”

  Over her shoulder, she saw Daniel tug at his trousers’ knees as he crouched to examine the Hyundai. She had a sudden impulse to slew the car around and escape. Step on the gas and never look back. Watch his face, dismayed and dwindling, in the rear-view mirror. Eyes flooded with tears, she began quietly to laugh.

  Then Daniel was back. “It’s all right, let’s go.”

  “I heard something break.”

  “It was just a taillight, okay?” He gave her a funny look. “What the hell are you laughing about?”

  She shook her head hopelessly, unable to sort out the tears from the laughter. Then somehow they were on the Expressway, the car humming down the indistinct and warping road. She was driving but Daniel was still in control.

  We were completely lost now and had been for some time. I had taken what I was certain had to be a branch line and it had led nowhere. We’d been tracing its twisty passage for blocks. I stopped and pulled my hand away. I couldn’t concentrate. Not with the caustics and poisons of the Widow’s past churning through me. “Listen,” I said. “We’ve got to get something straight between us.”

  Her voice came out of nowhere, small and wary. “What?”

  How to say it? The horror of those memories lay not in their brutality but in their particularity. They nestled into empty spaces where memories of my own should have been. They were as familiar as old shoes. They fit.

  “If I could remember any of this crap,” I said, “I’d apologize. Hell, I can’t blame you for how you feel. Of course you’re angry. But it’s gone, can’t you see that, it’s over. You’ve got to let go. You can’t hold me accountable for things I can’t even remember, okay? All that shit happened decades ago. I was young. I’ve changed.” The absurdity of the thing swept over me. I’d have laughed if I’d been able. “I’m dead, for pity’s sake!”