“Tiny little guy,” said David. “Even for V.C., this guy’d be tiny.”
“He just looks tiny,” the second soldier said. “I know a guy saw Victor buried under more than a ton of dirt. Victor just digs his way out again. No broken bones, no nothing.”
Inexcusably slow, and I’d been told twice, but I had just figured out that Victor wasn’t short for V.C. “I’d better inoculate this Victor,” I said. “You think you could send him in?”
The men stared at me. “You don’t get it, do you?” said David.
“Victor don’t report,” the fourth man says.
“No CO.,” says the third man. “No unit.”
“He’s got the uniform,” the second man tells me. “So we don’t know if he’s special forces of some sort or if he’s AWOL down in the tunnels.”
“Victor lives in the tunnels,” said David. “Nobody up top has ever seen him.”
I tried to talk to one of the doctors about it. “Tunnel vision,” he told me. “We get a lot of that. Forget it.”
* * *
In May we got a report of more rats—some leashed, some in cages—in a tunnel near Ah Nhon Tay village in the Ho Bo Woods. But no one wanted to go in and get them, because these rats were alive. And somebody got the idea this was my job, and somebody else agreed. They would clear the tunnel of V.C. first, they promised me. So I volunteered.
Let me tell you about rats. Maybe they’re not responsible for the plague, but they’re still destructive to every kind of life-form and beneficial to none. They eat anything that lets them. They breed during all seasons. They kill their own kind; they can do it singly, but they can also organize and attack in hordes. The brown rat is currently embroiled in a war of extinction against the black rat. Most animals behave better than that.
I’m not afraid of rats. I read somewhere that about the turn of the century, a man in western Illinois heard a rustling in his fields one night. He got out of bed and went to the back door, and behind his house he saw a great mass of rats that stretched all the way to the horizon. I suppose this would have frightened me. All those naked tails in the moonlight. But I thought I could handle a few rats in cages, no problem.
It wasn’t hard to locate them. I was on my hands and knees, but using a flashlight. I thought there might be some loose rats, too, and that I ought to look at least; and I’d also heard that there was an abandoned V.C. hospital in the tunnel that I was curious about. So I left the cages and poked around in the tunnels a bit; and when I’d had enough, I started back to get the rats, and I hit a water trap. There hadn’t been a water trap before, so I knew I must have taken a wrong turn. I went back a bit, took another turn, and then another, and hit the water trap again. By now I was starting to panic. I couldn’t find anything I’d ever seen before except the damn water. I went back again, farther without turning, took a turn, hit the trap.
I must have tried seven, eight times. I no longer thought the tunnel was cold. I thought the V.C. had closed the door on my original route so that I wouldn’t find it again. I thought they were watching every move I made, pretty easy with me waving my flashlight about. I switched it off. I could hear them in the dark, their eyelids closing and opening, their hands tightening on their knives. I was sweating, head to toe, like I was ill, like I had the mysterious English sweating sickness or the Suette des Picards.
And I knew that to get back to the entrance, I had to go into the water. I sat and thought that through, and when I finished, I wasn’t the same man I’d been when I began the thought.
It would have been bad to have to crawl back through the tunnels with no light. To go into the water with no light, not knowing how much water there was, not knowing if one lungful of air would be enough or if there were underwater turns so you might get lost before you found air again, was something you’d have to be crazy to do. I had to do it, so I had to be crazy first. It wasn’t as hard as you might think. It took me only a minute.
I filled my lungs as full as I could. Emptied them once. Filled them again and dove in. Someone grabbed me by the ankle and hauled me back out. It frightened me so much I swallowed water so I came up coughing and kicking. The hand released me at once, and I lay there for a bit, dripping water and still sweating, too, feeling the part of the tunnel that was directly below my body turn to mud, while I tried to convince myself that no one was touching me.
Then I was crazy enough to turn my light on. Far down the tunnel, just within range of the light, knelt a little kid dressed in the uniform of the rats. I tried to get closer to him. He moved away, just the same amount I had moved, always just in the light. I followed him down one tunnel, around a turn, down another. Outside, the sun rose and set. We crawled for days. My right knee began to bleed.
“Talk to me,” I asked him. He didn’t.
Finally he stood up ahead of me. I could see the rat cages, and I knew where the entrance was behind him. And then he was gone. I tried to follow with my flashlight, but he’d jumped or something. He was just gone.
“Victor,” Rat Six told me when I finally came out. “Goddamn Victor.”
Maybe so. If Victor was the same little boy I put a net over in the high country in Yosemite.
* * *
When I came out, they told me less than three hours had passed. I didn’t believe them. I told them about Victor. Most of them didn’t believe me. Nobody outside the tunnels believed in Victor. “We just sent home one of the rats,” a doctor told me. “He emptied his whole gun into a tunnel. Claimed there were V.C. all around him, but that he got them. He shot every one. Only, when we went down to clean it up, there were no bodies. All his bullets were found in the walls.
“Tunnel vision. Everyone sees things. It’s the dark. Your eyes no longer impose any limit on the things you can see.”
I didn’t listen. I made demands right up the chain of command for records; recruitment, AWOLs, special projects. I wanted to talk to everyone who’d ever seen Victor. I wrote Clint to see what he remembered of the drive back from Yosemite. I wrote a thousand letters to Mercy Hospital, telling them I’d uncovered their little game. I demanded to speak with the red-haired doctor with glasses whose name I never knew. I wrote the Curry Company and suggested they conduct a private investigation into the supposed suicide of Sergeant Redburn. I asked the CIA what they had done with Paul’s parents. That part was paranoid. I was so unstrung I thought they’d killed his parents and given him to the coyote to raise him up for the tunnel wars. When I calmed down, I knew the CIA would never be so farsighted. I knew they’d just gotten lucky. I didn’t know what happened to the parents; still don’t.
There were so many crazy people in Vietnam, it could take them a long time to notice a new one, but I made a lot of noise. A team of three doctors talked to me for a total of seven hours. Then they said I was suffering from delayed guilt over the death of my little dog-boy, and that it surfaced, along with every other weak link in my personality, in the stress and the darkness of the tunnels. They sent me home. I missed the moon landing, because I was having a nice little time in a hospital of my own.
When I was finally and truly released, I went looking for Caroline Crosby. The Crosbys still lived in Palo Alto, but Caroline did not. She’d started college at Berkeley, but then she’d dropped out. Her parents hadn’t seen her for several months.
Her mother took me through their beautiful house and showed me Caroline’s old room. She had a canopy bed and her own bathroom. There was a mirror with old pictures of some boy on it. A throw rug with roses. There was a lot of pink. “We drive through the Haight every weekend,” Caroline’s mother said. “Just looking.” She was pale and controlled. “If you should see her, would you tell her to call?”
I would not. I made one attempt to return one little boy to his family, and look what happened. Either Sergeant Redburn jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of his investigation or he didn’t. Either Paul Becker died in Mercy Hospital or he was picked up by the military to be their special we
apon in a special war.
* * *
I’ve thought about it now for a couple of decades, and I’ve decided that, at least for Paul, once he’d escaped from the military, things didn’t work out so badly. He must have felt more at home in the tunnels under Cu Chi than he had under the bed in Mercy Hospital.
There is a darkness inside us all that is animal. Against some things—untreated or untreatable disease, for example, or old age—the darkness is all we are. Either we are strong enough animals or we are not. Such things pare everything that is not animal away from us. As animals, we have a physical value, but in moral terms we are neither good nor bad. Morality begins on the way back from the darkness.
The first two plagues were largely believed to be a punishment for man’s sinfulness. “So many died,” wrote Agnolo di Tura the Fat, who buried all five of his own children himself, “that all believed that it was the end of the world.” This being the case, you’d imagine the cessation of the plague must have been accompanied by outbreaks of charity and godliness. The truth was just the opposite. In 1349, in Erfurt, Germany, of the three thousand Jewish residents there, not one survived. This is a single instance of a barbarism so marked and so pervasive, it can be understood only as a form of mass insanity.
Here is what Procopius said: And after the plague had ceased, there was so much depravity and general licentiousness, that it seemed as though the disease had left only the most wicked.
When men are turned into animals, it’s hard for them to find their way back to themselves. When children are turned into animals, there’s no self to find. There’s never been a feral child who found his way out of the dark. Maybe there’s never been a feral child who wanted to.
You don’t believe I saw Paul in the tunnels at all. You think I’m crazy or, charitably, that I was crazy then, just for a little while. Maybe you think the CIA would never have killed a policeman or tried to use a little child in a black war even though the CIA has done everything else you’ve ever been told and refused to believe.
That’s O.K. I like your version just fine. Because if I made him up, and all the tunnel rats who ever saw him made him up, then he belongs to us, he marks us. Our vision, our Procopian phantom in the tunnels. Victor to take care of us in the dark.
* * *
Caroline came home without me. I read her wedding announcement in the paper more than twenty years ago. She married a Stanford chemist. There was a picture of her in her parents’ backyard with gardenias in her hair. She was twenty-five years old. She looked happy. I never did go talk to her.
So here’s a story for you, Caroline:
A small German town was much plagued by rats who ate the crops and the chickens, the ducks, the cloth and the seeds. Finally the citizens called in an exterminator. He was the best; he trapped and poisoned the rats. Within a month he had deprived the fleas of most of their hosts.
The fleas then bit the children of the town instead. Hundreds of children were taken with a strange dancing and raving disease. Their parents tried to control them, tried to keep them safe in their beds, but the moment their mothers’ backs were turned, the children ran into the streets and danced. The town was Erfurt. The year was 1237.
Most of the children danced themselves to death. But not all. A few of them recovered and lived to be grown-ups. They married and worked and had their own children. They lived reasonable and productive lives.
The only thing is that they still twitch sometimes. Just now and then. They can’t help it.
Stop me, Caroline, if you’ve heard this story before.
MARNIE
Ian R. MacLeod
If there’s anyone currently rivaling Greg Egan for the title of Hottest New Writer of the Nineties to date, it’s the author of the bittersweet story that follows, British writer Ian R. MacLeod. Like Egan, MacLeod also had extremely good years in 1990 and 1991, publishing a slew of strong stories in Interzone and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (with more in inventory at both markets), as well as impressive work in Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; several of those stories made the cut for one or another of the various “Best of the Year” anthologies—in fact, he appeared in three different anthologies with three different stories last year (one of them was “Past Magic,” in our Eighth Annual Collection). MacLeod is in his early thirties, and lives with his wife and baby daughter in the West Midlands of England. He has recently given up his day job to write full time, and is working on his first novel, tentatively titled Burying the Carnival. We’ll be hearing a lot more from him in the years ahead, too.
In “Marnie” he offers us a chilling look at a man grimly determined to follow the advice of that old adage, If At First You Don’t Succeed.…
I’d arranged things so that I woke up on an ordinary morning. It was November, the winter term. My bedroom curtains were veined with frost and sunlight. And, for a long time, I just lay there, breathing the strange, familiar smells of this house and this bed and my own sleepy body, until the radio alarm lit up with the last pip of the eight o’clock time signal. It was reassuring to find that nothing had really changed. It was just an ordinary morning. I had ordinary things to do.
I got up and went to the bathroom, finding my way unthinkingly. The memories and sensations were crowding in too quickly for me to react, but, for now, nothing mattered as long as my body knew what to do. Opening doors with just the right pressure, twisting on the shower taps to get the hot water running before stepping in. My skin felt distant as I soaped myself. The contours and textures seemed right, yet didn’t belong. I could sense my flesh, yet it was like touching a lover.
But even as I wondered at the strangeness of returning, the feeling was wearing off. The easy movement of my limbs began to seem natural. The full head of hair that I dried with smooth, strong hands that had reached automatically for the towel was no surprise. Age is relative, and one adjusts to its presence. And I reminded myself that I was, in any case, thirty-one—no longer quite young.
I wiped a space in the steamed-up mirror to shave. I recognized my face from the old, cold photographs. Here, moving and alive, I saw that the camera hadn’t lied. It was an ungenerous face, the eyes too close, the nose too large. Insincere when it smiled. Pained when it tried to look sincere. I’d never grown used to it, and, seeing it again, with the deepened knowledge of what age would do, made me wonder—just as I had done all those years back, just as I had always done—exactly what Marnie had seen in me.
The shaving foam was Tesco’s own, from the big store by the roundabout. The razor was a Bic. I marvelled at the Tightness of the period detail, the barcodes and the price stickers still on the side. It seemed almost a pity to use them, like ransacking a museum. Brut 33 aftershave in a green plastic bottle on the shelf over the sink. Had people still used that stuff in the late 1980s? I unscrewed the silver cap and splashed some on my chest and face, smiling faintly at the thought of the advert they used to run. It was all coming back to me now. All of it. The dark, sweet smell of the aftershave. The toothpaste and brush in a broken-handled Charles and Diana mug. And, beside that, sitting just as naturally on the shelf, was a small bottle of Elizabeth Arden cleanser. Everything about the bottle, the casual thought with which Marnie had doubtless left it for next time, the screw top jammed on at a typically careless angle, hit me hard. I reached out to hold the bottle, touching where her fingers had touched. This was real enough. There was nothing to grin at, point at. This wasn’t a museum.
Marnie, I thought. Marnie. Look again. She’s all around you. Long strands of her blonde hair in the plughole. A half box of Tampax in the cabinet by the sink. The lipstick remains of I love you written on the tiles above the bath showing up through the condensation even though some tidy insanity had made me wipe it off with white spirit. Marnie: the thought that had filled and haunted my whole life. Marnie. Marnie. Marnie.
I got dressed, finding my socks and underpants tucked neatly in the right drawer. Hello, old f
riends. Then cords, a warmish grey cotton shirt, and a loosely knotted woollen tie that was a concession to my position at the University. Looking at myself fully dressed in the long wardrobe mirror, I felt ticklish threads of the ridiculous pulling once again at my mind. That collar, those cords! And that tie. I hadn’t remembered looking quite as foolish as this. But memories change to suit the present.
I took breakfast listening to the plummy-voiced newscasters on Radio Four. I’d long forgotten the details, but nothing in the news came as a surprise, any more than it had been a surprise to find cartons of orange juice and milk waiting from yesterday in the fridge, or cartons of sugar-free muesli in the fitted cabinets, slit open and re-sealed neatly and precisely according to the instructions.
I was in two minds about whether to walk or drive to work. The walk was easy enough, but when I toured my house, touching and remembering all those old possessions, I spent longer in the garage than anywhere else, despite the winter chill. There, still looking clean and new, was my car, my pride and joy, the pinnacle of my overdraft. A Porsche: black and glossy as dark water. I’d forgotten just how proud I’d been of it, but that all came back as soon as I saw it and touched it and smelt it. After brooding at the wheel for some time, gazing at the slumbering dials, I decided it was better to be cautious on this first day. After all, I hadn’t driven anything remotely like it for twenty years.
After brushing my teeth, I pulled on a tweed jacket that would, if my life proceeded as it had before, be stolen from under my seat at a cinema in Southport two years later.
The chilly, sunlit air beyond my front door was full of the city. It was a short walk to campus. I lived … live in a close of small and expensive modern semis built as an infill in one of the huge gardens of the big older houses that still characterized this area around the University. Most of my neighbours were young, like me, professional and well-paid, like me, single or married or living together, but always childless. Like me.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 29