I looked in my glass, that fount of wisdom and possibility, and said, "It seems as sensible a proposition as any of the others I've ever heard."
I fancied she smiled to herself and do not know why I thought that; I know now I was wrong.
Her accent had thickened and distorted further when she said, "I rather hope that I have lived before. I could wish to think I may live again."
"To compensate for this life?" I said brutishly. I had not needed to be so obvious when already I had been given the implication on a salver.
"Yes. To compensate for this."
I downed all the wisdom and possibility left in my glass, swallowed an extra couple of times, and said, "Are you going to tell me why you wear a mask?"
As soon as I had said it, I grasped that I was drunk. Nor was it a pleasant drunkenness. I did not like the demanding tone I had taken with her, but I was angry at having allowed the game to go on for so long. I had no knowledge of the rules, or pretended I had not. And I could not stop myself. When she did not reply, I added on a note of ghastly banter, "Or shall I guess?"
She was still, seeming very composed. Had this scene been enacted before? Finally she said, "I would suppose you do guess it is to conceal something that I wear it."
"Something you imagine worth concealing, which, perhaps, isn't."
That was the stilted fanfare of bravado. I had braced myself, flushed with such stupid confidence.
"Why not," I said, and I grow cold when I remember how I spoke to her, "take the damn thing off. Take off the mask and drink a glass of wine with me."
A pause. Then, "No," she said.
Her voice was level and calm. There was neither eagerness nor fear in it.
"Go on," I said, the drunk not getting his way, aware (oh God) he could get it by the power of his intention alone, "please. You're an astounding woman. You're like this island. A fascinating mystery. But I've seen the island. Let me see you."
"No," she said.
I started to feel, even through the wine, that I had made an indecent suggestion to her, and this, along with the awful cliches I was bringing out, increased my anger and my discomfort.
"For heaven's sake," I said, "do you know what they call you on Daphaeu?"
"Yes."
"This is absurd. You're frightened—"
"No. I am not afraid."
"Afraid. Afraid to let me see. But maybe I can help you."
"No. You cannot help me."
"How can you be sure?"
She turned in her chair, and all the way to face me with the mask. Behind her, everywhere about her, the green marble dazzled.
"If you know," she said, "what I am called on Daphaeu, are you not uneasy as to what you may see?"
"Jesus. Mythology and superstition and ignorance. I assure you, I won't turn to stone."
"It is I," she said, "who have done that."
Something about the phrase, the way in which she said it, chilled me. I put down my glass and, in that instant, her hands went to the sides of the mask and her fingers worked at some complicated strap arrangement which her hair had covered.
"Good," I said, "good. I'm glad—"
But I faltered over it. The cold night sea seemed to fill my veins where the warm red wine had been. I had been heroic and sure and bold, the stuff of celluloid. But now that I had my way, with hardly any preliminary, what would I see? And then she drew the plastic away and I saw.
I sat there, and then I stood up. The reflex was violent, and the chair scraped over the marble with an unbearable noise. There are occasions, though rare, when the human mind grows blank of all thought. I had no thought as I looked at her. Even now, I can evoke those long, long empty seconds, that lapse of time. I recollect only the briefest confusion, when I believed she still played some kind of hideous game, that what I witnessed was a product of her decision and her will, a gesture—
After all, Pitos had done this very thing to illustrate and endorse his argument, produced this very expression, the eyes bursting from the head, the jaw rigidly outthrust, the tendons in the neck straining, the mouth in the grimace of a frozen, agonized scream, the teeth visible, the tongue slightly protruding. The gorgon's face on the jar or the oven. The face so ugly, so demented, so terrible, it could petrify.
The awful mouth writhed.
"You have seen," she said. Somehow the stretched and distorted lips brought out these words. There was even that nuance of humor I had heard before, the smile, although physically a smile would have been out of the question. "You have seen."
She picked up the mask again, gently, and put it on, easing the underpart of the plastic beneath her chin to hide the convulsed tendons in her throat. I stood there, motionless. Childishly I informed myself that now I comprehended the reason for her peculiar accent, which was caused, not by some exotic foreign extraction, but by the atrocious malformation of jaw, tongue, and lips, which somehow must be fought against for every sound she made.
I went on standing there, and now the mask was back in place.
"When I was very young," she said, "I suffered, without warning, from a form of fit or stroke. Various nerve centers were paralyzed. My father took me to the very best of surgeons, you may comfort yourself with that. Unfortunately, any effort to correct the damage entailed a penetration of my brain so uncompromisingly delicate that it was reckoned impossible, for it would surely render me an idiot. Since my senses, faculties, and intelligence were otherwise unaffected, it was decided not to risk this dire surgery, and my doctors resorted instead to alternative therapies, which, patently, were unsuccessful. As the months passed, my body adjusted to the unnatural physical tensions resulting from my facial paralysis. The pain of the rictus faded, or grew acceptable. I learned both how to eat, and how to converse, although the former activity is not attractive and I attend to it in private. The mask was made for me in Athens. I am quite fond of it. The man who designed it had worked a great many years in the theatre and could have made me a face of enormous beauty or character, but this seemed pointless, even wasteful."
There was a silence, and I realized her explanation was finished.
Not once had she stumbled. There was neither hurt nor madness in her inflection. There was something. . . at the time I missed it, though it came to me after. Then I knew only that she was far beyond my pity or my anguish, far away indeed from my terror.
"And now," she said, rising gracefully, "I will leave you to eat your meal in peace. Good night."
I wanted, or rather I felt impelled, to stay her with actions or sentences, but I was incapable of either. She walked out of the green marble room and left me there. It is a fact that for a considerable space of time I did not move.
I did not engage the swim back to Daphaeu that night; I judged myself too drunk and slept on the beach at the edge of the trees, where at sunrise the tidal water woke me with a strange low hissing. Green sea, green sunlight through leaves. I swam away and found my course through the warming ocean and fetched up, exhausted and swearing, bruising myself on Daphaeu's fangs that had not harmed me when I left her. I did not see Pitos anywhere about, and that evening I caught the boat which would take me to the mainland.
There is a curious thing which can happen with human beings. It is the ability to perform for days or weeks like balanced and cheerful automata, when some substrata, something upon which our codes or our hopes had firmly rested, has given way. Men who lose their wives or their God are quite capable of behaving in this manner for an indefinite season. After which the collapse is brilliant and total. Something of this sort had happened to me. Yet to fathom what I had lost, what she had deprived me of, is hard to say. I found its symptoms, but not the sickness which it was.
Medusa (I must call her that, she has no other name I know), struck by the extraordinary arrow of her misfortune, condemned to her relentless, uncanny, horrible isolation, her tragedy most deeply rooted in the fact that she was not a myth, not a fabulous and glamorous monster. . . . For it came to me one ni
ght in a bar in Corinth, to consider if the first Medusa might have been also such a victim, felled by some awesome fit, not petrifying but petrified, so appalling to the eyes and, more significantly, to the brooding aesthetic spirit that lives in man that she too was shunned and hated and slain by a murderer who would observe her only in a polished surface.
I spent some while in bars that summer. And later, much later, when the cold climate of the year's end closed the prospect of travel and adventure, I became afraid for myself, that dreadful writer's fear which has to do with the death of the idea, with the inertia of hand and heart and mind. Like one of the broken leaves, the summer's withered plants, I had dried. My block was sheer. I had expected a multitude of pages from the island, but instead I saw those unborn pages die on the horizon, where the beach met the sea.
And this, merely a record of marble, water, a plastic shell strapped across a woman's face, this is the last thing, it seems, which I shall commit to paper. Why? Perhaps only because she was to me such a lesson in the futility of things, the waiting fist of chance, the random despair we name the World.
And yet, now and then, I hear that voice of hers, I hear the way she spoke to me. I know now what I heard in her voice, which had neither pain nor shame in it, nor pleading, nor whining, nor even a hint of the tragedy—the Greek tragedy—of her life. And what I heard was not dignity either, or acceptance, or nobleness. It was contempt. She despised me. She despised all of us who live without her odds, who struggle with our small struggles, incomparable to hers. "Your Greek is very good," she said to me with the patronage of one who is multilingual. And in that same disdain she says over and over to me: "That you live is very good." Compared to her life, her existence, her multilingual endurance, what are my life or my ambitions worth? Or anything.
It did not occur immediately, but still it occurred. In its way, the myth is perfectly accurate. I see it in myself, scent it, taste it, like the onset of inescapable disease. What they say about the gorgon is true. She has turned me to stone.
Steve Rasnic Tem returns with another pure Shadows story, concerning an old theme done to a turn.
STONE HEAD by Steve Rasnic Tem
He woke up with a severe headache. A migraine, he thought in surprise. He thought he had finally escaped their daily torment years ago. The room was soot-black, bone-black. He wasn't sure if it was because there was no moon or if the migraine had addled his senses. He could recall headaches so bad he could not speak, hear, or think.
Someone was speaking his name.
Had he overslept? Was it dark outside? For some reason he thought perhaps it might be early morning, just past midnight, but he could not find the window shade, did not even know where to look. It could be dawn outside his room; it could be noon. The headache seemed to be slowly creeping through the tissues of his brain, turning his brain—his thoughts—into stone.
Someone was speaking his name.
He knew his wife was not with him, knew without even touching that she was absent from her place beside him in the bed. He was not sure if she actually no longer lived with him; he had intended to divorce her many times, over a span of years. But something had always stopped him. Had he finally gone through with it? She had intended to divorce him as well, from time to time. She was fed up with his coldness, his distance, his lack of deep affection, she had said. Had she finally left him?
He did not know. He could not remember.
Someone was speaking his name.
He imagined he could hear the voice, but for some reason thought perhaps he was merely thinking the words. But he could not picture the words. He could not remember his name.
Nor could he remember what he had been doing the previous day, the previous week, the month. He could not remember what he had been doing the past several years. He had not been happy, he thought. Perhaps that had been his condition. He felt that almost assuredly he had been alone.
Someone was speaking his name.
No, perhaps they were merely writing it. Yes, that was it! At last he could be sure of something! Someone was writing his name.
But why so loudly? Why was the process of writing his name so loud? Each stroke was a thundering inside his head. That was the source of his migraine—someone writing his name in this loud, pounding, thunderous way.
But yet, what had happened? He felt sure the previous day had been normal. He had gotten up, washed, dressed ... Or perhaps he had not dressed, perhaps he had stayed in bed that day to read. Perhaps he had stayed in bed every day for several years, reading, sleeping .. .
No, he told himself, yesterday had been a normal day. It must have been a normal day. But now someone was writing his name. So loudly it was giving him a headache. And so severe a headache, he could not see. Everything was black.
What had happened to all his children? He could not remember. He knew he had not seen any of them in a long time, such a long time that he had, in fact, forgotten how many children there had been. Ungrateful lot, all of them—of that he was sure. But he could not remember their faces, could not remember their names. His memory had turned to stone.
Someone was pounding his name.
Of that, too, he was sure. His head quaked with each beat, each metronomic slam of his name, his signature. He could not feel his hands—was it he himself doing the pounding? He had signed checks, letters, so many checks for ungrateful children, an unfaithful wife. A wonder he had not written his signature permanently into his desk, etched it in. Perhaps it was his own hand, making his own signature, beating it, pounding each stroke of his signature into the ancient wood.
Someone was beating his name.
Bam! Bam! Bam! But it wasn't quite wood, was it? The surface he could hear was not wood, not ancient wood, not hard wood. Maybe metal... his wife pounding on the motel bathroom door he'd locked himself behind. Nagging, nagging, pound, pound, pound. His son ... he had a son, working on that trashy car, pound, pound, pound. He thought his head would split. He could barely hear his own thoughts beneath the drumming.
Someone was cutting his name.
He could feel it on his arms, his thighs, his buttocks. The knife carving his initials. One of his daughters, painted to her wrists in his blood. Yes, yes, he knew the beat, beat, of her cutting, cut, cut, his initials, his initials. He tried to read his initials through his pain. But could not, could not...
Someone is chiseling his name.
. . . could not because it wasn't on his arms, his buttocks, at all. But beat, beat, beating into his forehead. His head again! Someone actually beating on his head, dulling his thinking, making it hard to live. He had no life! They didn't care!
Someone is chiseling his name. Someone is beating his name. Someone is chiseling his name.
His thoughts turn to stone. His memory turns to stone. There is no one. He has lost them all. He does not know how long ago they left. But there is no one. His thoughts are stone. His feelings are stone.
Someone is chiseling his name.
Into his forehead. Into his brain. At last he thinks he sees something: the name, his name, in front of him. On his forehead. His name is being written onto his forehead and yet he can see it, see up through his stone brain into his transparent forehead. Head stone. Where someone is chiseling his name. Someone is chiseling his name.
Someone is chiseling his name.
And the stonecutter is beautiful. The man has powerful arms. The stonecutter's chisel is silver, a sliver of moon.
Someone is chiseling his name.
As he sinks into the hole, as his arms grasp the sides of the hole and he begins to drift beneath the earth. As he looks into his forehead and sees his name being chiseled on the expanse of cool, white stone . . .
Someone is speaking his name.
Alan Ryan, editor of the massive anthology Perpetual Light and author of Panther! and The Kill, has worked as a teacher, theatrical publicist, and salesman at Macy's. Though he began as a writer of sf, he had moved almost exclusively into the realm of Dark Fant
asy, one of the few writers who can wield a bludgeon and a razor at the same time.
PIETA by Alan Ryan
FIORETTA'S father raised skinny goats and spindly cows and clamorous chickens on the dusty hillsides of the Abruzzi overlooking the Vasto and the Adriatic. From the front door of the house, Fioretta could look far out to the west and there, sparkling in the bright sunshine, was the deep and distant blue of the sea. Below, where the hills sloped down to the water's edge, were the gray-and white-plastered buildings of Vasto Marina and the hard white line of the beach. And all around were the hills, dotted, like her own, with farms. From the time she was a child old enough to think so and to say so, Fioretta had wanted nothing different for herself, but her father's brother, Zi' Carlo, was a priest and he would not have it so.
Una ragazza santa, he called her, a holy child, and often when he said it, especially when his brother's wine had flowed generously with the Sunday meal, his voice, heavy with piety, made it clear that he meant a child-saint.
When Fioretta was little, she would giggle and pull at Zi' Carlo's ear when he said this. Her laughter filled the house and seemed to mingle with the aromas of cooking and of animals to make the air brighter. She was happy. She was thrilled, like her father and mother and all others in her family, to have one of their own blood a priest. On Sundays, when Zi' Carlo came to dinner with his brother's family, her father always insisted that the two of them walk up and down in the roadway that led to the house. Her father knew what he was doing. The road wound in lazy loops up the side of the hill and anyone walking on it could be seen clearly from the valley below or from the hillsides opposite, the shimmering afternoon sun outlining their figures against the dusty yellow of the road. It was a good and proud thing to have a priest in the family, a priest of one's own blood.
On such occasions, Fioretta would walk with them, at Zi' Carlo's insistence, and her uncle would tell her colorful and wonderful tales of saints and martyrs. Fioretta would listen, wide-eyed, for Zi' Carlo was a marvelous storyteller. When finally her child's mind would grow tired, however, Zi' Carlo would send her on her way with a blessing—his knuckles, as he made the sign of the cross, were as knotted as those of his farmer-brother—and watch her run across the flower-dotted field to the house, bare elbows and heels flashing in the sun. Una ragazza santa, he would sigh.
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