She still loves me, too. She plays classical music for me, an art form I have become very fond of in my present state. Sometimes she speaks to me tenderly and caresses my stems and kisses my new buds, of which I am very proud. She has also been kind enough never to hold a mirror up to the dwindling remnants of my vision. In the early months, when I was paralysed by her potions, I was unable to speak; now, even if I wanted to, I could not, for my mouth has become some sort of polyp-fringed orifice, not unlike - I assume from the sensations - the lips of a Venus Fly Trap.
Since the time when I no longer needed to be drugged or restrained, I have, in fact, known only one moment of terror: the night when she came towards me, her still-beautiful hands sheathed in gardening gloves, holding a bright pair of pruning shears.
‘It’s time to transplant those lovely buds into The Garden,’ she said. ‘I’m not certain, but I suspect you’ll find the results interesting, something like being cloned and something like giving birth. I don’t think it will hurt.’
But it did, and the thick, matter-clotted scream I produced startled her so much that she dropped the shears after the second cutting, apologised and hurriedly administered some sort of aromatic anaesthetic, so that the rest of the procedure was indeed painless.
I can no longer be positive, but I think that scream was the last recognisable human sound I ever made.
Now, although I can no longer ‘see’, I am discovering a whole new spectrum of senses. She tells me that my buds have matured nicely, out in The Gardens, and her intuition was correct: I do feel a growing sense of communal awareness with all the living, flowering, beautiful species that she tends so lovingly.
I sense that Spring is coming. It’s a very pleasant sensation: a drowsy, slow, sensuous awakening - I would never have guessed that photosynthesis could feel so sexy.
I dream a lot, as the last of my formerly human senses atrophy into ghostly wisps. And in my dreams, I often seem to be floating through The Gardens, like one of those glorious fireflies whose golden arabesques lent true Magic to the first night when Virginia and I walked, hand in hand, through her world, when she first cast upon me the spell that would lure me into that world and bind me to her forever.
Even as I had wanted, from the first time she made love to me.
Yes, my dreams are often beautiful, and unbounded by any human measurement of Time.
I wonder what my flowers will look like in May, when the scent of honeysuckle is so very, very sweet.
William R. Trotter lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, fantasy writer Elizabeth Lustig, and the youngest of their three sons. Since 1987 he has been Senior Writer forPC Gamer Magazineand in that capacity has published more than a thousand reviews and columns about entertainment software. The author of thirteen published books, including Priest of Music: The Life and Times of Dimitri Mitropoulos, A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40 and the novel Winter Fire (currently being developed as a movie), his genre short fiction has appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Fantasy Book, Night Cry, Deathrealm and The Song of Cthulhu.About the preceding novella, he says: ‘I’ve always wanted to blend, as seamlessly as possible, the mood and style of good literary fiction with the conventions of the horror genre. “Honeysuckle” is the latest experiment in that quest. And yes, I did know Norman Mailer during the 1960s.’
<
* * * *
Final Departure
GAHAN WILSON
S’ki Tok paused in his thoughtful, careful study of the survivor’s diary in order to glance up at its author and when he saw that the poor fellow was staring at him apprehensively he twitched his lower facial tentacles gently in order to make the species mask he was wearing show the chap a reassuring smile.
It was, as he knew from personal experience, which he still clearly and painfully remembered, a very hard thing to see a total stranger perusing intimate, confessional things you had written with what seemed at the time to be the sure and certain knowledge they would never be read.
‘Please do not be concerned,’ the face mask translated from S’ki Tok’s original N’yaktanese. ‘What you have written here will only be read by the most scrupulously protective professionals, such as myself. It will never be generally disseminated in anything like its original form and it will - as the accumulated information of prior diaries previously studied have done - greatly aid in assisting other survivors who will be finding themselves undergoing the same difficult emotional and intellectual transitions and adaptations which you are presently suffering.’
The survivor rubbed the thick hair growth on his lower face thoughtfully, cleared his throat a time or two as it was still proving difficult for him to take up the long-abandoned habit of talking, and spoke in a whisper which had already become noticeably less rasping than it had been when he was first discovered.
‘I find it astounding that so many others have gone through what I’ve just experienced,’ he said at last. ‘I was certain I was undergoing something absolutely unique. It’s still very hard to imagine that it...well, that it. . .’
S’ki Tok took pity on the poor fellow’s groping for words. He opened and closed several lateral pincers, which caused the species suit to wave a consoling hand and shrug philosophically.
‘Believe me, in a very short period of time you will discover that the whole business has almost automatically become much easier to deal with,’ he said. ‘Not only will you find that your own psychological processes are amazingly capable of dealing with what now appears to be an ungraspable position, but you will be enormously aided by personal contact with the many other survivors who you will shortly meet. I can see that your brief acquaintance with me, as another survivor, has already helped you to manage the situation.’
‘Oh, it has!’ said the survivor most emphatically. ‘It truly has, and I do want you to understand that I really appreciate your being so helpful!’
He paused, obviously confused and flustered.
‘Still, it’s just that—’ he began, and then broke off to look up at S’ki Tok with a suddenly stricken expression. ‘You may think what I am going to say is terrible. I’m afraid you may even hate me for it!’
This time S’ki Tok caused his species suit to raise both hands in a gentle silencing gesture and the species mask to express the very tenderest of understanding smiles.
‘Forgive me if I seem presumptuous,’ he said, ‘but I imagine I know what are you trying to tell me. Would you please be tolerant enough to let me speculate aloud?’
The survivor looked at him silently for a moment and then slowly nodded.
‘Very well, then,’ S’ki Tok said, ‘I suspect you are thinking something very much along the lines of what I thought when, a long time ago, what has happened to you also happened to me.’
The survivor studied him intently, with burning eyes. He said nothing, but the clenching of his jaw and hands revealed his tension and suspense.
S’ki Tok, following the clear instructions of the declassification manual, let this vitally important moment stretch out a little longer before he spoke again.
‘Please do not take offence,’ he said, ‘and please do not think I am in any way expressing disapproval of you. What I am going to say is based entirely on what I myself went through during trials and tribulations almost identical to those you have so recendy experienced.’
The survivor swallowed violently. Sweat now beaded his brow. Both of these symptoms corresponded exactly to to those described in the species reactions subsection of the manual which was now scrolling helpfully in the interior of S’ki Tok’s mask.
Thus encouraged, S’ki Tok proceeded.
‘When I was found, as I found you,’ he said, ‘I, too, was astounded and amazed. I gaped at my visitor in absolute and complete bewilderment! I had never again expected to see such a sight! I found - and I am still embarrassed to have to confess this! - I was appalled to discover that I wanted to kill him!’
The survivor
groaned deeply, then lowered his head and buried his face behind his knees and folded arms. After a pause, moving very carefully, S’ki Tok’s suit reached out a hand and softly laid it on the poor fellow’s shoulder.
‘But I did not kill him,’ S’ki Tok said. ‘As you did not kill me.’
The survivor stiffened as his body squeezed in on itself.
‘I observed you reach for your weapon when you saw me and thought I did not see you,’ said S’ki Tok gently. ‘I saw you grip it hard. And then I saw you take your hand away from it, just as I took my hand away from my weapon that long, long time ago.’
Slowly, almost cell by cell it seemed, the survivor’s body began to relax.
‘You passed the test,’ said S’ki Tok, ‘and you passed it well. But now there has come another, the one that presently tortures you. It is a far subtler test and one which is almost more painful because it is - dare I say it? – humiliating!”
As the manual warned, there was a distinct returning of the tenseness. S’ki Tok pressed the suit’s hand on the fellow’s shoulder as reassuringly as he could.
‘Please do forgive me for using that word, but it is the only one that accurately applied to my condition, and that is why I suspect it may apply to yours.’
S’ki Tok leaned forward just a little to look more closely at his companion as the survivor raised his head from its hiding place in order to look back at him.
‘You are haunted by an awful wish, are you not?’ asked S’ki Tok.
The survivor blinked, gritted his teeth and nodded.
‘You secretly wish it was as it was before I turned up, do you not?’ asked S’ki Tok. ‘That it was finally all done with. That the whole thing was at last completed. Settled. Finished. You do not want to wish it, oh, I know that, I know that well - but you still can’t help wishing it.’
He took his hand from the poor fellow’s shoulder and sat back, his mask smiling down.
‘Do not worry,’ said S’ki Tok, ‘I had the exact same thought. We have all had the same thought, every one of us. And from personal experience I know it will go away. Believe me, for I speak the truth -it will go away.’
He studied the survivor’s face and was pleased to see it was slowly relaxing and that the eyes were losing some of their furtiveness.
S’ki Tok picked up the survivor’s precious diary and stood.
‘And now I think it is time we left and boarded the ship,’ he said, holding out the hand of the species suit.
After only a tiny pause the survivor took that hand and allowed himself to be helped to his feet.
‘Ah, wait, till you see the ship,’ said S’ki Tok. ‘It is huge. And astoundingly well-equipped. It has everything for every one of us!’
He gave a comforting little laugh, then he opened the crude door of the survivor’s hut and stepped outside.
‘Come along,’ said S’ki Tok.
And the last man alive on Earth obediently followed after.
Gahan Wilson was born in Evanston, Illinois, and now lives on Long Island. He is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award, and has been called ‘a national treasure’ by Erica Jong. His cartoons, which were once kindly described as ‘genuinely traumatic’, have appeared in a wide number of magazines, primarily Playboy, The New Yorker, Punch, Paris Match and National Lampoon, and something like twenty anthologies of them have been collected through the years, includingStill WeirdandGahan Wilson’s Even Weirder. The editor of such anthologies as First World Fantasy AwardsandGahan Wilson’s The Ultimate Haunted House (with Nancy A. Collins, and based on the CD-ROM game), he has also written several children’s books, a couple of mystery novels and an uncounted number of short stories, some of which were recently assembled in the collection The Cleft and Other Odd Tales, together with illustrations by the author. He writes a regular book review column for Realms of Fantasymagazine and is presently working on an animated special for television and a full-length animated film. About the preceding story he says: ‘One of the things that is most obviously going to happen when we come into contact with an intelligent entity from another world is that we will have a lot of difficulty understanding one another. Not only will both be alien to the extreme, but so will our respective languages, the equipment we use to translate them and our basic assumptions about existence which essentially formed them. This last will probably be the most importantly misleading because each of us is likely to assume that they are shared with each other which, of course, they won’t be.’
<
* * * *
Pelican Cay
DAVID CASE
Prologue
They left another load of supplies down on the rocks this morning. I haven’t bothered to pick them up yet, although I blinked out a message thanking them and letting them know I was still all right. There were three men in the boat. I think they were the same three as last time but they still appeared terrified. They kept looking up here and their faces were so white it seemed as if I’d turned the beam of the lamp onto them. They dropped the crates off - heaved them out, really - without ever touching the boat to shore. You’d think they’d know, by now, that I’m not infected. Still, I’m thankful for the supplies...they could just as well leave me, like the others.
I’ve been here two weeks now, in the lighthouse, and I’m getting much better at signalling with the big lamp and at receiving messages from the ships. They sent too fast, at first. But thank God for the light, there would be no way to communicate without it and it feels better to be in touch with the world, even if only by lamp - even if they won’t believe me.
I wonder if my paper knows I’m here; if they’ve tried to contact me? What a story! And how absurd to think of it that way, now ... as a newspaperman instead of...what I am. I wonder, too, what they’ll do about me when the others are all dead? I don’t think that will be too long now. I’ve been observing them through the glasses and they seem less furious, slower, weaker. They’re all very thin. I saw three of them eating a dead one, earlier. I don’t know if they killed him or not and I don’t know if they are beginning to regain human instincts...like feeding. But they didn’t seem ravenous or even very determined about it, they were just pulling ribbons of flesh off his bones and chewing them in a desultory manner, as if it were something they dimly recalled doing in the past.
A few of them are gathered on the docks now, not too near the water. They’re terrified of water. They seem to be looking out at the patrolling ships or maybe beyond, to the dim line of the Keys. I can see the Keys quite clearly from the tower. It really is a remarkable vista, the lone line of islands spanned by the bridges. It was just over two weeks ago that I drove along those linked islands. A long time. I think about it often, too, for I have a great deal of time to think and, terrible as it was, it is better than thinking of the future...
* * * *
I
United States Highway One begins in Fort Kent, Maine, at the borders of icy Canada, and ribbons all the way down the Eastern seaboard, spanning the islands in the tropical Gulf like concrete cartilage linking the spine of some coral sea beast. I’d followed that road from New York, spent the night in Miami and, in the early morning, with the bay on one hand and the straits on the other and the dew still sparkling on the tropical flowers, I motored slowly over the bridges. I had plenty of time and was enjoying the drive. I’d not been in the Keys for years and noticed the highway had developed in terms of human progress - at night, I feared, a neon holocaust threatened - but the morning mood was changeless. Like feathered boomerangs behind a screen of palm trees, the pelicans were banking and sliding sideways into the blue waters of the Straits of Florida. Behind the planing birds the sun climbed from the Atlantic and began its arc towards the Dry Tortugas and Mexico. A few early anglers were fishing from the bridges, not as efficiently as the pelicans; a shrimp boat parallelled my passage, high pronged masts distinctive, draped with net; a young couple wearing scuba gear basked on thrusting black rocks, drinkin
g wine from the bottle and laughing with white teeth. It was a pleasant trip on a pleasant morning. I figured my stay would be pleasant, too. If I got a story out of it, that was fine and, if I didn’t, that was fine, too. There are worse things than an expense account assignment in Florida, I thought.
And how wrong I was.
* * * *
The Mangrove Inn was built out over the water, the outdoor platform at the back raised on wooden stilts. A tourist was on the platform, having his picture taken beside a hanging shark. The shark looked mildly embarrassed. I parked the car and went into the bar. It was air-conditioned and traditional, with fish nets on the walls and starfish ashtrays. I was a bit early and didn’t think my contact was there yet, but as I moved to the bar the girl stood up from a dark corner booth and raised her eyebrows.
‘Mister Harland?’
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 64