Shadows 5

by Charles L. Grant (Ed. )

  Lucky the mail didn't drop through until I reached the bottom.

  Estrella looks at her feet, which are moving about in unknown ways. Her left big toe has worked its way into a hole in the carpet; she watches abstractly as the hole grows larger and another toe disappears inside.

  I'll consider the problem of the hedges some other time, she thinks, and reaches down to pick up the mail.

  The envelope is silky and slightly warm. She holds it to the light to read the address, which is rain-smudged —190 Black Mountain Road. As though tipped from the letter, images pour through her. (Blood, she thinks, blood rushes to my head when I bend down and causes this spontaneous recall.) She had asked to see it. The halls were a snaking maze of anonymous doors, each door with a nameplate. She memorized the color of each door, the location of the nameplate, whether the keyholes were peekable or not (most were not), times their inhabitants went in and came out. Only two doors were habitually unlocked, and they were closets. She could never, with only these scraps of information, piece together the secret of the place. "A little girl needn't be too curious about things that don't concern her."

  She lowers the letter from the light. Blue rivers of ink turn to black. Her back feels on the verge of slipping out. That is certain; that is real. She could bend over again and let it happen. That would be interesting and perhaps stop the rush of blood to her memory cells. She could lie there paralyzed, like brother after his accident, and be relieved of all responsibility. The envelope had lost its heat. But who would take care of Robert? Who knew how long the paralysis would last? The mind had a lot to do with recovery in these matters. She drops the envelope in a box on the desk marked: BUSINESS MAIL, father, ETC. She date-stamps the envelope, which lies on top of several others; must remember to mail in the deposits of the estate checks. She rolls down the top of the caramel-colored desk, decides against the search for the secret compartment. "You know this desk is very old and has lots of secrets. Aunt Mary showed me a special compartment, but it's as difficult to find as it is to open a Chinese puzzle box." Brother shouldn't have been driving so fast, and none of this would have happened.

  Estrella feels a shiver of satisfaction at having resisted the desire to search for the compartment. She recalls the one thunderous morning she considered tearing the desk apart; she smiles, licks her salty metallic-tasting lips, humming her way down the hall to the kitchen. The voice breaks into words every third step. My pitch, she thinks, gets better with age. It's a shame Mother didn't live to see the final flowering of my voice. I could not sing for anyone but Mother.

  She hesitates before the kitchen door, hearing a flutter, as though a bird has flown against a window. She waits for the shatter of glass, but nothing comes. Well, I have unfinished business elsewhere; and she shuffles back down the hall. Her numb cold hands explore the familiar patterns of the pressed leather—angel's faces, vines, roses. Nothing new there. Puckerings, like scars on the walls. As she reaches the desk, she stumbles out of her slippers, falls against a sharp edge. She pushes herself away. The desk rocks. She pushes it again; it rocks on four feet, steadies. She smiles.

  The impulse to search for the magic drawer rises in her. No, she tells herself as she pulls the rolltop up, then immediately back down, this desk is not mine. I have no right to search. See the big round belly of the desk, it is Father's desk, it is brother's; the desk could stand up and walk; it has four legs; it would split apart.

  A man stands before her in the space occupied moments before by the desk. He wears a three-piece suit, takes a step, wears a white lab coat. A blink of the eye, and 'he sags into a blue-and-white-checked hospital gown, open at the back; the checks are blue horses (she squints), tail to head, galloping around the gown. He collapses to the floor, dead from a pinprick at the lab, dead from contaminated blood. She stands by the bed as his hand falls limply against the metal frame; glassy-eyed, neutral, he leaves her for another. Brother comes and guides her away. He drives her to their house, nestled in swelling green lungs of earth; the great white house is mirrored many times in the distant complex of buildings that crawls down into the valley. Father's memory cells. They pass the iron gate, the guard dogs (flat black with eerie wet noses), and she stares off in longing at the white-tiled buildings, wondering what will happen now that he is gone.

  Robert puts her to bed, pats her head, later backs from the room. I will not search for the drawer, she thinks, and turns from the desk. Blood trickles from her hand; a crescent moon incision has been made by her thumbnail. The fences, the guard dogs, the final visitor; you all go to the same place, hanging red and blue from the end of his hook.

  The living room is dark, drapes pulled fast; the dull air contains the shape of her heavy wet sleeping. A line of antiseptic smell cuts the room; she ducks under it. Robert is calling. Later, later. She looks to the high dark ceiling and pauses; then collapses, weak and boneless, on the couch. Dreams flicker inside a mouth, blue as sky; she walks in. The child feels helpless, alone on the plane, closed in and yet lost; she wants to convey her panic to the other passengers, but they sit around a table, intently playing cards. She tries to break into the circle; finally, one of them turns to her. He is the man with no face. The plane crashes as she hurries back to her seat, and the metal shell falls away from her; she floats to the ground, landing in a boat in the center of a lake; the wreckage streams through the air like orange flowers thrown, and slides into the deep water. Later, she receives an award for having flown the farthest without a plane. She is a winged creature, with wings neatly pinned back for the ceremony. She accepts the award, thanks six people—three scientists (Father's friends); her father; her brother Robert; and the father of her child, whose name she cannot remember. Later, sitting by the fire, she remembers the man's name. But, as it is the same as several other male family members, she closes the book she is reading and goes to bed.

  She wakes up startled and, in the black room, a concentrated dark flies over her; she sits up, looks to the ceiling, eighteen feet above. Robert Jr.'s father. What has happened to her son's father? Her body curls with the effort of remembering, but she can call nothing to mind; instead, she pictures the bluish face of her son, lying between two pillows like a swollen vein. She had given birth to him at Black Mountain Hospital, in a quiet wing cleared out for her by her father. Patronizing nurses had tried to quiet her, but she would not be still. She would take him home and keep him alive in a special room. She could not give him up so easily, deformed and half-strangled but still her son.

  She pulls herself from the couch, trying to fight the impulse to go back upstairs, for she knows it is too soon.

  In the purple light at the base of the stairs she waits; the worn spot in the carpet is like a pool of tar. Her foot suspends over it, then she jumps and lands on the second step. The front door light accompanies her, even and forceful.

  She walks up the stairs, eyes closed, seeing a dark line moving like a steel bar across the flashing inner lights. I wonder who the shadow man is who paces in front of the gate? I wonder if someday I shall go out and see his face?

  But shadows do not have faces. She opens her eyes. Her own shadow lengthens before her on the stairs, curls around the upper bannister.

  She pushes open the metal door; a blue door of light opens across her, and she is another person; the downstairs Estrella is gone.

  The room is a tangle of machinery, wires, tubes—a jungle of another mind. She checks the console for his vital signs, finding them adequate, if a little low. Not enough time has passed since her last visit. There are several equivocal readings, but she discards them as muscle artifact (head movement) and erases them from the memory. She checks the leads, the emergency lock on his wrist.

  She bends forward like a praying mantis, her thumb depressing the switch that stops her beloved's blood flow into the life-saving machine.

  Hello Father, hello brother, hello son, she says to the room. Who will you be for me today?

  Soon he will get up and walk a
way, and I will be left here, unconstructed.

  She cradles the swollen head, startled by the heaviness; she weighs it in her palms and says, "This is you, this is real; see, it strains the muscles there, it has substance." Sick faces are both young and old; she cannot think who he is today.

  She stands back. I should let you die, Robert. I should.

  Ah, it is Robert, but which Robert?

  She disconnects the tube from the machine, puts it to her mouth, and releases the switch. She cranes her head forward; the crash of metal on metal roars in her ears; she swallows the warm blood that the machine pumps into her. Robert is still, bluish, eyes red and afraid; his head moves to the left from the midline, then back again; his paralyzed body fills the entire bed like rolls of cloth.

  She swallows one last time, replaces the tube. Robert's left hand falls over the edge, bangs the rail. "Something to say?" she asks. She ignores the livid hand hanging against the bed frame, turns to leave. In her stomach, a sea curls and whispers.

  But as she puts her hand through the doorway, she spins around to face him. "Son of a bitch," she says, completing the ritual and, half in shadow half in light, closes the door behind her.

  Marta Randall lives on the West Coast, has taken over the reins of the acclaimed sf anthology series New Dimensions and is the author of Islands, Journey, and Dangerous Games, as well as numerous short stories and novelettes. She works almost exclusively in the realm of science fiction, but when the occasion arises she can be persuaded to exercise her extraordinary writing talents elsewhere. As when she decides that the edge of a shadow doesn't have to be gentle, nor does it have to be soft.

  SINGLES by Marta Randall

  Janet Murphy wedged herself more deeply between the wall and the potted palm, holding her untouched glass of champagne before her. Beyond the plant's sparse, sun-starved fronds, bodies twitched and jerked to the beat of loud music. Pulsing multicolored lights barely lit the room; quick white strobes picked out an arm, a hip, a straining face, an opened mouth, a hand. Bosch, she thought. Bosch set to disco. The dense air reeked of cigarettes and cologne and the occasional tickle of dope. The room rang and shook. Janet wondered if she'd lose her hearing before she lost her mind. Cathy had talked her into this and now Cathy spun and stepped on the floor, her blond curls bouncing. A strobe transformed her pretty face, stretching it, caught, head back, hair twisting, the mouth cruelly open. Janet shuddered and looked away.

  "Come on," Cathy had said at dinner, grabbing Janet's hand as the dance was announced. "Just try it, just this once. You'll love it. All you have to do is relax and get into it. Really." She stood, tightening her grip.

  "But I don't like—" Janet said, and was herded into the ballroom with the other diners. Now she pressed against the wall, holding the champagne glass like a shield, and hoped that no one spotted her. To be here, assaulted by noise and stink and pulsing darkness, was bad enough; to be an active part of it far worse. A couple bumped into the wall on the far side of the palm and kissed passionately, too busy to notice her. The man put his hands between the woman's jeans-clad legs.

  "Margaret," he said, moaning.

  "Marilyn," she muttered, and put her arms around his waist.

  A palm frond poked Janet's back. She shrugged away from it and looked for a means of escape. The noise softened marginally.

  "Get down and boogie!" Evan Baker capered about the small stage and smiled hugely as the music surged. Skin-tight grey pants, burnt-orange shirt open to the belt buckle, jouncing profusion of gold chains, and that idiotic grin. Janet suspected him of being an android — nobody could be that consistently cheerful. She wondered if his cheeks ached at the end of the day and imagined him rubbing his face while the grin-wrinkles peeled off. He'd keep them taped to the side of his bathroom mirror, she decided, and put them on fresh each morning. Unless, of course, his wife did it for him. Janet's lips twitched.

  "Monica," said the man on the other side of the palm. Janet considered making a suicide dash toward the door and saw herself disappearing under a tangle of arms and legs. She emerged cautiously from the palm. Cathy had disappeared into the flashing darkness. Evan's wife Alice kept guard at the big wooden doors. The sequins on her halter flashed as she bounced in time to the music; she watched the room and its occupants with all the relaxed rapacity of a bird of prey. Janet looked away. The french doors leading to the patio were closer, but these too were guarded, this time by the unattached and horny. Janet thought with angry longing of the half-finished novel waiting in her cabin.

  "Marcie," the man said in an excess of passion.

  Janet dumped her champagne into the potted palm, squared her shoulders, and marched along the edge of the dance floor. A hand reached for her, fingers hard white, arm invisible. She skipped away and aimed for the french doors, starved for air, hunched her shoulders, tucked her head in, and charged. A large male body blocked the exit. She sidestepped and it moved directly into her path.

  "Gotta vomit," she yelled without slowing, and suddenly she was into the cool night outside. She ran across the concrete patio until the far rail slammed against her hips. She put her hands on it and leaned forward, breathing deeply, ignoring the footsteps coming after her.

  "Done yet?"

  She turned. Lanterns along the edge of the patio cast a pale yellow glow; the man looked vaguely familiar. Her back tensed.

  "Great exit," he said. "I've spent the past half hour edging toward the door and you rushed it just like a—like a linebacker." He smiled, offering his hand. "I'm Al Hamilton. You're Janet Murphy, aren't you? Cathy mentioned you this morning."

  "Oh. Yes." She shook his hand briefly and let it drop. "She pointed you out before dinner. You play tennis, right?"

  "I play at tennis," he demurred. "Cathy's something to keep up with. I danced a few with her and I'm exhausted. Disco isn't quite my style."

  Janet finally smiled. "Nor mine. I didn't expect to be rounded up and frog-marched in there." She glanced through the doors. "Any minute now they'll turn on the gas nozzles and it will all be over."

  He chuckled. "And we alone are left—can I buy you a drink to celebrate our escape? Please? If you hadn't come charging along, I'd still be back there. My God, all that bouncing flesh." He faked a shudder. "I'm not into bodies, as they say out here. I'm into minds. Look, just one drink. As thanks, okay?" He put his head to one side. "Unless they have the bar staked out, too."

  She bit her lip, remembering Cathy's injunction to relax, and nodded dubiously.

  "But just one. I want to be up early tomorrow."

  "To watch birds? Cathy told me about that." He walked beside her along the patio's edge. "She said she couldn't figure out why you were here."

  "I told her, she must have forgotten. It was a mistake." Tiny yellow lights bordered the flagstone path, a double track of sparks in the blackness. Janet put her hands in her pockets.

  "Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine," he offered.

  She shrugged. "I wanted someplace new to spend my vacation, and the ads for Silver Dunes talked about marshes and beaches and dunes. Good seabird-watching places. I just came a couple of years too late, I guess."

  "Too late?"

  "Cathy says the Bakers are new management here. There was some sort of unpleasantness ten years ago and the place closed down for a while, then it reopened as a sort of tattered resort and just kept going downhill. The Bakers bought the place a couple of years ago, renovated—this is their first season."

  "What sort of unpleasantness?" He had a pleasant voice.

  "A string of murders or something, some psychopath killed a lot of single women and dumped them in the marshes. I don't think they ever caught him." She frowned. "Gory stuff. Cathy was all ready to go into detail, but I didn't want to hear about it."

  "I don't blame you. Still, ten-year-old murders are hardly news, although that dreadful music is. You could leave."

  "Not really. They don't refund deposits and I don't have much mad money, on a secretary's salar
y. And I haven't seen the marshes yet." She paused. "And you?"

  He gestured widely, a swing more felt than seen in the darkness, but didn't try to touch her. "A mistake too, but a dumber one. I just moved to the city six months ago, and I knew San Francisco was a pretty place, but not how lonely it is. I'm not much of a joiner, the other folk at the office are married or attached, I don't feel comfortable in singles' bars, and I'm not gay. Out here, that seems to be a pretty hopeless combination. So I guess I thought that, maybe being around other singles for a couple of weeks, I'd find some, well, companionship. Someone to talk to. I didn't know I was signing up for compulsory hot tubs and mandatory disco."

  She laughed, relaxing. "Yes, I know. But with a little planning you can probably avoid the peacock-feather stuff."

  Light and voices spilled from the bar and over the umbrella-sheltered tables on the patio. Janet bit her lip again, unwilling to go inside.

  "Tell you what," Al said quickly. "I'll get us something and we can sit out here." He's not a maniac and I'm supposed to relax, she reminded herself firmly. "Fine. A gin and tonic."

  "Got it."

  She slid into a chair as he hurried away. The late-spring air was cool and smelled of the sea; beyond the faint thumps from the ballroom she heard the cry of a marsh owl. The patio lights were off; overhead a few stars glimmered from the dark branches of trees. Al pushed open the door with his shoulder and came across to her, holding a drink in each hand.

  "Met up with General Alice." She smiled and took her drink. "Had to pretend I had a hot date in the bushes. My God, do you think that woman owns the local contraceptive concession?"

  "No. She's probably just got a rather horizontal concept of happiness."

  Al laughed. He'd blend right in with the Montgomery Street troops, she thought. Light hair fashionably long, neatly dressed, clean shaven. But his smile was easy and his manner relaxed, and he did appear to have a brain. She decided that she approved of Cathy's taste in men and that made it all perfectly safe; if he was Cathy's, he was as unavailable as Janet herself. He put his glass down.