Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  At the appointed time the warehouse doors rattled and slid aside and a blond man in a paper suit emerged and beckoned them to ascend the ramp. He was large, nearly the girth of Andersen the Viking, and wore elbow length rubber gloves and black galoshes. A black balaclava covered the lower half of his face. The party filed up the gangway in pairs, Guzman and Fedor at the fore. Kenshi and Swayne were the next to last. Kenshi watched the others become swiftly dissolving shadows backlit as they were by a bank of humming fluorescent lamps. He thought of cattle and slaughter pens and fingered his passport in its wallet on a string around his neck. Swayne squeezed his arm.

  Once the group had entered, five more men, also clothed in paper suits and balaclavas, shut the heavy doors behind them with a clang that caused Kenshi’s flesh to twitch. He sickly noted these five wore machetes on their belts. Blood rushed to his head in a breaker of dizziness and nausea. The reek of alcohol sweat and body odor tickled his gorge. The flickering light washed over his companions, reflected in their black eyes, made their faces pale and strange and curiously lifeless, as if he’d been suddenly trapped with brilliantly sculpted automatons. He understood then that they too had spotted the machetes. Mouths hung open in moist exclamations of apprehension and dread and the inevitable thrill derived from the alchemy of these emotions. Yet another man, similarly garbed as his compatriots, wheeled forth a tripod mounted Panaflex motion picture camera and began shooting the scene.

  The floor creaked under their gathered weight. Insulating foam paneled the walls. Every window was covered in black plastic. There were two narrow openings at the far end of the entry area; red paint outlined the first opening, blue paint the second. The openings let into what appeared to be darkened spaces, their gloom reinforced by translucent curtains of thick plastic similar to the kind that compartmentalized meat lockers.

  “You will strip,” the blond man said in flat, accented English.

  Kenshi’s testicles retracted, although a calmness settled over his mind. He dimly acknowledged this as the animal recognition of its confinement in a trap and the inevitability of what must ultimately occur. Yet, one of this fractious group would argue, surely Walther the boor, or obstreperous Andersen, definitely and assuredly Swayne. But none protested, none resisted the command, all were docile. One of the anonymous men near the entrance took out his machete and held it casually at his waist. Wordlessly, avoiding eye contact with each other, Kenshi’s fellow travelers began to remove their clothes and arrange them neatly, or not so much, as the case might be, in piles on the floor. The blond instructed them to form columns and face the opposite wall. The entire affair possessed the quality of a lucid dream, a not-happening-in-the-real world sequence of events. Hendrika was crying, he noted before she turned away and presented him with her thin backside, a bony ridge of spine, spare haunches. She’d drained white.

  Kenshi stood between an oddly subdued Swayne and one of the Frenchmen. He was acutely anxious regarding his sagging breasts, the immensity of his scarred and stretched belly, his general flaccidity, and almost chuckled at the absurdity of it all.

  When the group had assembled with their backs to him, the blond man briskly explained the guests would be randomly approached and tapped on the shoulder. The designated guests would turn and proceed into the exhibit chambers by twos. Questions? None were forthcoming. After a lengthy pause it commenced. Beginning with Guzman and Fedor, each of them were gradually and steadily ushered out of sight with perhaps a minute between pairings. The plastic curtains swished and crackled with their passage. Kenshi waited his turn and stared at the curdled yellow foam on the walls.

  The tap on the shoulder came and he had sunk so far into himself it was only then he registered everyone else had gone. The group comprised an uneven number, so he was odd man out. Abruptly, techno music blared and snarled from hidden speakers, and beneath the eardrum-shattering syncopation, a shrill, screeching like the keening of a beast or the howl of a circular saw chewing wood.

  “Well, friend,” said the blond, raising his voice to overcome the music, “you may choose.”

  Kenshi found it difficult to walk a straight line. He staggered and pushed through the curtain of the blue door into darkness. There was a long corridor and at its end another sheet of plastic that let in pale light. He shoved aside the curtain and had a moment of sick vertigo upon realizing there were no stairs. He cried out and toppled, arms waving, and flopped the eight or so feet into a pit of gravel. His leg broke on impact, but he didn’t notice until later. The sun filled his vision with white. He thrashed in the gravel, dug furrows with elbows and heels and screamed soundlessly because the air had been driven from his lungs. A shadow leaned over him and brutally gripped his hair and clamped his face with what felt like a wet cloth. The cloth went into his nose, his mouth, choked him.

  The cloth tasted of death.

  * * * *

  Thanks to a series of tips, authorities found him three weeks later in the closet of an abandoned house on the fringes of Bangalore. Recreating events, and comparing these to the experiences of those others who were discovered at different locations but in similar circumstances, it was determined he’d been pacified with drugs unto a stupor. His leg was infected and he’d lost a terrible amount of weight. The doctors predicted scars, physical and otherwise.

  There’d been police interviews: FBI, CIA, NSA. Kenshi answered and answered and they eventually let him go, let him get to work blocking it, erasing it to the extent erasing it was possible. He avoided news reports, refused the sporadic interviews, made a concentrated effort to learn nothing of the aftermath, although he suspected scant evidence remained, anyway. He took a leave of absence and cocooned himself.

  Kenshi remembered nothing after the blue door and he was thankful.

  * * * *

  Months after their second and last reunion, Swayne rang him at home and asked if he wanted to meet for cocktails. Swayne was in New York for an auction, would be around over the weekend, and wondered if Kenshi was doing all right, if he was surviving. This was before Kenshi began to lie awake in the dark of each new evening, disconnected from the cold pulse of the world outside the womb of his apartment, his hotel room, the cabs of his endless stream of rental cars. He dreamed the same dream; a recurring nightmare of acid-filled barrels knocked like dominoes into a trench, the grumbling exertions of a red bulldozer pushing in the dirt.

  I’ve seen the tape, Swayne said through a blizzard of static.

  Kenshi said nothing. He breathed, in and out. Starless, the black ceiling swung above him, it rushed to and fro, in and out like the heartbeat of the black Atlantic tapping and slapping at old crumbling seawalls, not far from his own four thin walls.

  I’ve seen it, Swayne said. After another long pause, he said,Say something, Ken.

  What?

  It does exist. Van Iblis made sure copies were circulated to the press, but naturally the story was killed. Too awful, you know? I got one by post a few weeks ago. A reporter friend smuggled it out of a precinct in Canada. The goddamned obscenity is everywhere. And I didn’t have the balls to look. Yesterday, finally.

  That’s why you called. Kenshi trembled. He suddenly wanted to know. Dread nearly overwhelmed him. He considered hanging up, chopping off Swayne’s distorted voice. He thought he might vomit there, supine in bed, and drown.

  Yeah. We were the show. The red door people were the real show, I guess. God help us, Ken. Ever heard of a Palestinian hanging? Dangled from your wrists, cinder blocks tied to your ankles? That’s what the bastards started with. When they were done, while the people were still alive...”Swayne stopped there, or his next words were swallowed by the static surf.

  Of course, Van Iblis made a film. No need for Swayne to illuminate him on that score, to open him up again. Kenshi thought about the empty barrels near the trench. He thought about what Walther said to him behind the shed that day.

  I don’t even know why I picked blue, mate,Swayne said.

  He said to Swayne, Do
n’t ever fucking call me again. He disconnected and dropped the phone on the floor and waited for it to ring again. When it didn’t, he slipped into unconsciousness.

  One day his copy arrived in a plain envelope via anonymous sender. He put the disk on the sidewalk outside of his building and methodically crushed it under the heel of his wingtip. The doorman watched the whole episode and smiled indulgently, exactly as one does to placate the insane.

  Kenshi smiled in return and went into his apartment and ran a bath. He slashed his wrists with the broken edge of a credit card. Not deep enough; he bled everywhere and was forced to hire a service to steam the carpets. He never again wore short sleeve shirts.

  Nonetheless, he’d tried. There was comfort in trying.

  * * * *

  Kenshi returned to the Indian port town on company business a few years later. Models were being flown in from Mumbai and Kolkata for a photo shoot near the old monastery. The ladies wouldn’t arrive for another day and he had time to burn. He hired a taxi and went looking for the Van Iblis site.

  The field wasn’t difficult to find. Developers had drained the swamp and built a hotel on the site, as advertised. They’d hacked away nearby wilderness and plopped down high-rise condos, two restaurants, and a casino. The driver dropped him at the Ivory Tiger, a glitzy, towering edifice. The lobby was marble and brass and the staff a pleasant chocolate mahogany, all of whom dressed smartly, smiled perfectly white smiles, and spoke flawless English.

  He stayed in a tenth floor suite, kept the blinds drawn, the phone unplugged, the lights off. Lying naked across crisp, snow-cool sheets was to float disembodied through a great silent darkness. A handsome businessman, a fellow American, in fact, had bought him a white wine in the lounge; a sweet talker, that one, but Kenshi retired alone. He didn’t get many erections these days and those that came ended in humiliating fashion. Drifting through insoluble night was safer.

  In the morning, he ate breakfast and smoked a few cigarettes and had his first drink of the day. He was amazed how much he drank and how little effect it had on him anymore. After breakfast he walked around the hotel grounds, which were very much a garden, and stopped at the tennis courts. No one was playing; thunderclouds massed and the air smelled of rain. By his estimation, the tennis courts were near to, if not directly atop the old field. Drainage grates were embedded at regular intervals and he went to his knees and pressed the side of his head against one until the cold metal flattened his ear. He listened to water rushing through subterranean depths. Water fell through deep, hollow spaces and echoed, ever more faintly. And, perhaps, borne through yards of pipe and clay and gravel that hold, some say, fragments and frequencies of the past, drifted whispery strains of laughter, Victrola music.

  He caught himself speculating about who else went through the blue door, the exit to the world of the living, and smothered this line of conjecture with the bribe of more drinks at the bar, more sex from this day on, more whatever it might take to stifle such thoughts forever. He was happier thinking Hendrika went back to her weather job once the emotional trauma subsided, that Andersen the Viking was ever in pursuit of her dubious virtue, that the Frenchmen and the German photographer had returned to their busy, busy lives. And Rashid... .Blue door. Red door. They might be anywhere.

  The sky cracked and rain poured forth.

  Kenshi curled into a tight ball, chin to chest and closed his eyes. Swayne kissed his mouth and they were crushingly intertwined. Acid sluiced over them in a wave, then the lid clanged home over the rim of the barrel and closed them in.

  ‘Strappado” was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s oeuvre as a whole, but I credit the influence of that unholy duo “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death” in particular. Revelry, privilege, decadence, and deceit are prevalent in both Poe tales and, as in my story, the revelers are participants in their own destruction.

  Favorite bits of symmetry between “The Cask of Amontillado” and my piece: Fortunato’s inexorable descent into the catacombs (even as his animal brain protests) unto his eventual live burial, which corresponds with the seduction and betrayal of the thrill-seekers in “Strappado.” The clues in “The Cask of Amontillado” are blatant; were it not for Fortunato’s arrogance, his drunken stupor, it seems clear he would’ve escaped this most gruesome fate. He is paralyzed by disbelief and so perishes. I do not think any other piece of literature has ever so expertly provoked in me such a feeling of dread and revulsion; certainly, it remains a haunting tale.

  The influence of “The Masque of the Red Death“ is much different. Where “The Cask of Amontillado” has always struck me in a visceral, almost physical way, “The Masque of the Red Death” remains a much more visual proposition with its lush colors and descriptions and gothic symbolism. Prospero’s seven chambers, and, of course, the Red Death itself are powerfully compelling. Two rooms from the palace maze, the first, Blue, and the terminus, Red, are represented by the painted doors in “Strappado.” Life and Death respectively. “The Masque of the Red Death” always impressed me with one lesson among others: there is no safety in numbers. That makes it a tremendously effective horror story.

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  * * * *

  Sharyn McCrumbis a Southern writer, whose novelSt. Dale, considered the Canterbury Tales in a NASCAR setting, won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award as well as the AWA Book of the Year Award. Her most recent novelOnce Around the Track,again set in NASCAR, was a nominee for the 2007 Weatherford Award. She has been selected by The Library of Virginia as one of their honorees for the 2008 Virginia Women in History.

  McCrumb is best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains. Her novels includeNew York Timesbest-sellers She Walks These Hillsand The Rosewood Casket, and The Ballad of Frankie Silver, The Songcatcher,and Ghost Riders. A film of The Rosewood Casket is currently in production, directed by British Academy Award nominee Roberto Schaefer.

  McCrumb’s honors include the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature given by the East Tennessee Historical Society, AWA Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature Award, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Southern Literature, the Plattner Award for Short Story, and AWA’s Best Appalachian Novel. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and received her M.A. in English from Virginia Tech.

  McCrumb’s books have been translated into more than ten languages, and she was the first writer-in-residence at King College in Tennessee. In 2001 she served as fiction writer-in-residence at the WICE Conference in Paris, and in 2005 she was honored as the writer of the year at the annual literary celebration at Emory and Henry College. Sharyn McCrumb has lectured on her work at Oxford University, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Bonn, Germany, and at universities and libraries throughout the country.

  * * * *

  The Mountain House

  By Sharyn McCrumb

  A plaque, a photo, a cardboard likeness.Well, they will find none of those things here. Oh, they all exist, and I have them still, but they are packed away in the other house, buried with the life I have now escaped, as surely as Liam has escaped his.

  I cannot honestly say that Liam loved this mountain house. Perhaps he did, for all I know, but he was never here very much. I was trying to please him when I chose it, but he may have let me buy it as much for the tax advantages as to spend time in this place. “But you grew up in these hills,” I said once, as he looked down from our limestone terrace at the newly-landscaped ridges studded with what he called “stone and glass excrescences,” built by the other summer people. He shuddered a little. “I’m not from here,” he said. “Not from this place.”

  Well, naturally the area has changed since he was a raw-boned mountain boy. But at least it is close to heaven. One cannot argue with that.

  He did come from these mountains, long ago before I knew him. Back when he was not Liam, the exalted racing champion, but plain oldBilly, a north Georgia dirt track drive
r—before the fame and the money bronzed his life until the only mountains around him were barriers of handlers and managers, buffers between him and everything else. When I chose this stone and glass eyrie on a north Georgia cliff top, I thought I had found the best of both worlds for us: an elegant home in an exclusive enclave with other people from our social stratum, and all around us the enfolding hills he always said he missed so much. I don’t know what else he could have wanted.

  Sometimes I would stand outside under a blanket of stars and wonder if he might be up there, looking down on me in some form of heroic transfiguration. There must be scores of people out there who would believe that implicitly, but I was not one of them. Or else I fancied that he might be here beside me, if only I can turn around quickly enough. If there is a hereafter, he ought to spend it watching over me, instead of staying out there with them. Surely now that he’s dead, it can be my turn at last.

  The local people come by sometimes to deliver flowers (onhis birthday, never on mine, or on the anniversary of some memorable race he’d won). Sometimes they bring me letters from strangers that were put by mistake into their mailboxes. As I stand on the threshold, I can see them peering past me, down the hall, into the glass-walled great room, looking for the contrails of Liam’s fame: a model of the race car, a bronze plaque, a photo of him with a president or film star, a life-size cardboard effigy of Liam himself, taken a few weeks before his death—arms folded, staring into the camera with that bleak look I could never quite decipher. Now, though, I think I have worked out the meaning of that somber expression, so different from those first posed publicity pictures they took of him, back when he was just beginning the journey that has brought me here and him—nowhere.