Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  Annabel takes me by the wrist and holds tight. “Ask if l can sleep over, all right?”

  But when I bring Annabel into the house, my mother stares at us like we are demons. “What have you girls been doing?”

  “Playing.”

  Annabel nods. “We rolled down the hill, but landed on some rocks.”

  “Can Annabel sleep over?”

  “No. You go home now, Annabel.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “You go to your room,” she says like she knows everything.

  Annabel wraps me in her arms and screams like a screech owl. My mother stands there stunned. I am impressed. When it seems like Annabel is winding down she turns to my mother, stares at her with slit eyes and says, “I bet you killed your daughter.”

  My mother’s hand comes down hard, printing Annabel’s face with pink fingers near the snake burn. Annabel turns to me, her arms outstretched.

  “Get out,” my mother says. “Don’t you dare come back here, you nasty child.”

  A dead leaf falls from Annabel’s hair. She is very scary looking. Why didn’t I ever notice that before? Besides, what she said to my mother feels too close. What if she ever said something like that about me? I turn away from her, walking through the fever rooms and up the stairs. I crawl into bed, and wait for forgiveness.

  When I wake up, the bedspread is streaked with dirt and broken grass. My body aches. My mother calls me down for dinner but I don’t go. Later, when the whole house is dark, I press against the window screen.

  The night smells heavy with scent of green. I take a deep breath. Stand there for a long while. Wishing on the distant angel. Then I go back to bed.

  By morning I have kissed her a thousand times, felt her bony flesh sear into mine. “Annabel.”

  “No,” my mother says. “She’s not a nice girl.”

  “Annabel,” I say again using her name like a stone.

  “No.”

  “Annabel.”

  “Anyone else.”

  “Annabel.”

  “No.”

  “Annabel,” I say with my burned lips.

  “Go to your room.”

  “No.”

  My mother assesses me, measuring my size and will against her own. We stare at each other. For a moment, equal. Then, she looks away.

  I am victorious. I walk out of the house, into the bright and frightening sun. Mrs. Wydinki is in her garden again, digging in the dirt, a furious expression on her face, thrusting small plants into the black soil. I step on all the cracks. Open the door to the tavern. The juke music is rough and sharp as a paper cut. The red lip woman sits there, grinning. My father rests, his face mashed against the bar.

  I walk up the rickety stairs, knock on the door.

  A voice calls from inside. “Who is it?”

  “Is Annabel home?”

  The voice comes out just as I am about to turn away. “Let yourself in.”

  I lift the mat and pick up the key. After all, what could happen? My own dad is right downstairs. I open the door. The stench is like the rotting fruit that sat too long on the kitchen table after Mazie died.

  She sits in a wheelchair on the wormy rug, her legs covered with a blanket.

  “Shut it, I can’t stand the noise.”

  I close the door. Annabel’s mother’s hair is long, dry as old corn stalk, and her face is as squashed as a November Jack O’ Lantern.

  “Is Annabel—”

  “Laurel? Right?”

  I nod. What is that sound? I glance at the closed bedroom door.

  She smiles a crack in her broken face. Pulls the blanket tight across her lap. “I wanted to get a good look at you.”

  A noise comes from the bedroom. Could be a mouse, I suppose. Or something terrible.

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time with our little arsonist. Her and her stories.”

  The rattling sound coming from the bedroom continues, slightly louder. Annabel’s mother eyes me. Though I just tamed my own mother, I decide that my best defense with this one is to act innocent. I smile, “Oh, yeah, Annabel tells great stories.”

  The mermaid presses her thin lips together. “She’s told stories about you as well.”

  It hits me in the heart like a threat but I pretend not to notice. “Is she here, ‘cause—”

  “Annabel is staying with her cousin now.”

  “She didn’t tell me that.”

  The mermaid sighs. “Well, you see, that’s how she is. Rude. And here I am stuck without any help. See this fucking carpet? I can’t move anywhere without getting stuck. Would you do me a favor and—”

  “I gotta go.”

  “But—”

  “Sorry,” I mumble as I turn to the door.

  “I just need—”

  “Sorry,” I say again, this time louder, for the sound in the bedroom, whoever, whatever it might be. I slam the door behind. Tumble down the stairs. Right to my dad. I pull him by the elbow, “Come on Pops.”

  “You go,” he slurs.

  “No.” The bartender stares at me with hooded eyes. The red lipped woman leers. “Come on,” I whisper, leaning close to my father’s ear and the stubbled hair of his smoky cheek. “You can’t stay here. These people are murderers.”

  My father pulls his shoulders back. Frowns.

  “Come.”

  He slides off the stool.

  “Hurry.”

  “Don’t go,” Red Lips says with her bloody mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” my father says, “I am needed at home.”

  When we walk into the sun he holds his hands in front of his face against the light.

  “Hurry,” I say.

  “Who’s dead?” he says.

  “You know. Mazie.”

  He stumbles over dandelions thrust through the cracked sidewalk. He shouts nonsense at Mrs. Wydinki who stops her violent gardening to stare at us. Even the blackbirds pecking the cross outside the church stop when we pass. He has trouble walking up the steps to our house. My mom stands in the kitchen wearing the cabbage apron. “So you decided to come back,” she says.

  My father bows his drunken head.

  I go to my hot room, and lay on my bed. “Annabel,” I whisper. “Annabel?”

  Later, when night beats like a purple heart she comes. “Remember?” she says but I don’t tell anyone her secret for fear that somehow, they will find out mine. By the time school starts, Annabel’s mom and stepdad are gone, and “Kingdom by the Sea” is shut down, the door nailed shut, windows boarded up. The sign swings on squeaky hinges and I am afraid to look at the mermaid’s eyes. Recently a city reporter came to town investigating a rumor of murder but hardly anyone remembered much about the skinny child with burns who only lived here for one summer. I thought of leaving an anonymous note under the hotel room door, but the reporter was gone before I could do anything about it. Just as well, for there is danger in the unearthing of ghosts.

  The years are like sea kelp. No one has guessed my secret, the dark hours of joy in which I burn. Night after night Annabel comes, begging. She never comments on the strangeness of my body, now turned into woman shape. All she asks, over and over again, is that I tell someone what was done to her. But the dead are as ignorant about life as the living are about death. I know it doesn’t seem like it would be that way, but it is. The night beats its purple heart when she rests her hot head against my breast and I know I should apologize, and I know I should make amends, but instead I find comfort in death, the way it keeps all my secrets and holds all my lies. Night after night I promise. They won’t get away with it, Annabel. You will be saved. Annabel. You will rest in peace. Annabel. I promise. I tell her, tomorrow. I tell her not to worry. I tell her to come closer, and she does.

  My best friend moved to Racine, Wisconsin after eighth grade. There, she made friends with a group of young people whose idea of entertainment was very different from the hard drinking notions of Fredonia’s small town and farm-raised youth. During one particularly mem
orable visit, my friend and I were chauffeured by her older brother in their father’s car. (I have no particular knowledge of cars so insert your own model here, but be sure to make it one that is appropriately middle class and fatherly.)

  My friend’s brother removed a long, cloth, snaky-looking leopard skin device which turned out to be a steering wheel cover. Once that was placed securely over the steering wheel, he hung some beads from the rearview mirror. This, we believed, transformed the car from a dadmobile to ours... the young, free, unfettered mobile.

  We drove around Racine, picking up various friends until finally we ended our version of Kerouac’s journey in someone’s basement rec room, furnished with old couches and the parents’ bar. There, we turned off the lights, lit some candles and read Poe out loud to each other. My friend said that it wasn’t as fun as the other times they did it, that it had lost its spontaneity and a good deal of its charm, but I thought it was wonderful.

  As I navigated my high school years, watching one friend sink into schizophrenia, my brother fall into the despair of addiction, my mother and siblings navigate the tenuous reality of my father’s mental illness, that simple night of reading Poe by candlelight with a group of kids my age helped me hold onto the belief in a world where literature exists as a source for renewal, no matter how odd its shape. I often describe how much of my work is about dealing with monsters, what I don’t say often enough is that sometimes it’s the monsters that will save you from those that will eat you alive.

  Given the opportunity to write an homage to Poe’s work, I knew right away I wanted to use one of his poems as the source of inspiration, and quickly narrowed it down to “Annabel Lee.” While working on the story a ghost appeared from my youth, so long ago now; swimming in a hot lake, at a crowded beach, I remembered making friends with her, this skinny girl who couldn’t get her cast wet. “How’d you break your arm?” I asked. “My dad did it,” she said.

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  * * * *

  Steve Rasnic Tem’s three-hundred-plus stories have garnered him numerous nominations and awards. Some recent work has appeared, or will appear, in Cemetery Dance, Dark Discoveries, Albedo One, Blurred Vision, Matter, Exotic Gothic, and in That Mysterious Door (Noreen Doyle, editor), an anthology of stories set in Maine. His latest novel, written in collaboration with wife Melanie Tem, isThe Man on the Ceiling(Wizards’ Discoveries), built around their award-winning novella of the same name. In the fall of 2009 Wizards’ Discoveries will be bringing out his novel Deadfall Hotel, with a full complement of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, zombies, and things which cannot be named.

  * * * *

  Shadow

  By Steve Rasnic Tem

  “I just wasn’t prepared for them, to have so much shadow enter my life.”

  The man in the video is your Uncle Mark, but you hardly recognize him. His face is puffy, unshaven, dirty. You recognize his weary voice only because of the resemblance to other male voices in your family. The poor sound quality emphasizes the weariness in his voice, in the world from which he speaks. This equipment is old—you haven’t watched television in years. At a certain point you found it too irritating to bear—the sounds it made actually hurt your brain. But you can’t remember exactly when that was. If the video player hadn’t already been hooked up to the television you would have been helpless to make it work. You are surrounded, in fact, by numerous appliances you never use and have forgotten how.

  You wonder how old he was when he made this recording. You’re not good with ages, especially where men are concerned, but you think he might have been ten years older than you are now, which would place him in his early fifties. You think you must have been eight or nine years old, just a little girl, when he died. Which means, what? You must try to keep yourself from being annoyed by all these numbers because you will no longer be able to sit here and watch this man and find out some things. What, exactly, those things will be and what use you will make of them you have no idea. You do not want to be annoyed—bad things happen when you are annoyed.

  Thirty years. It’s been more than thirty years since he made this recording. You wonder if he would be surprised by how different the world is now. From the look of his face you think not.

  His lighting is harsh, inexpert, overpowering. Why so much light? Then you notice how it is concentrated in the area immediately around him, as if he were enveloped in some brilliant bubble. The rest of the room is gloomy, hung with curtains, sheets, bedspreads. You think of sailing ships, although you have never actually seen one outside old magazines. Sheets and curtains shroud the furniture, smother the windows.

  He says nothing more for a while. He rearranges the lamps, moving them forward, in and out of the frame, burning your eyes so that you have to look away.

  “I won’t be seeing you again,” he says, finally. “And you won’t much care, if this is my niece and nephew watching this. But I do wish you well.”

  You are so disturbed by his mention of a “nephew” that you slap the Stop button on the player. His image is suddenly swallowed up by dark gray murk. You press the Rewind button, press Play again. “... my niece and nephew watching this.” You press Stop. You hope your uncle will not use Tommy’s name—it wouldn’t seem right. You yourself have not spoken Tommy’s name aloud in years. How long ago was it? You start counting on your fingers, but you don’t have enough. Fifteen years, perhaps sixteen, since Tommy’s suicide. You punch the Play button so hard the player slides back several inches on its shelf. The screen jitters to life.

  “Life is hard for all but a few of us—I think it is our business to wish each other well. It’s quite possible you are years away from me now. I’m sure those of your generation still have your dark nights of the soul, do you not? ‘Yea, though I walk,’ and all that? Do you still read the Bible? I hadn’t in years, before these last few days. Not that I’m a believer, I just felt a need to connect to the tormented.

  “My hope is that you have someone to hold onto when things go very badly. I suspect you’ll find much to doubt in my account, or it is possible things will have devolved even further than I imagined, and you’ll know what I’m speaking of all too well. You may be watching this from some terrible future.

  “And do you remember who I was? Does anyone?”

  You’re not sure if you will watch much more of this. You think you feel a vague sort of embarrassment for the man. You can’t remember the last time you felt embarrassment. If your uncle starts to weep, you know you will rip the tape out of the machine and throw it in the trash. So much for being remembered, Uncle Mark.

  You have never had any use for the sentimental. Watching this tape is a strange and disturbing exercise for you. Even that word—”nostalgia” is it?—sounds like some illness. You hate the touch of old things; you despise the smell. This house, the one in your uncle’s video, has passed to you, and you accepted only because you needed the roof over your head.

  When you first moved in it just seemed easier to pretend these old things weren’t here. You managed to throw everything out of your bedroom, sleeping on a pallet on the floor. Every few months since then you have steeled yourself in order to take boxes of these old things into the alley for disposal.

  That is how you found this video, at the bottom of a box in the living room closet, with your name and Tommy’s name and that date scrawled in shaky blue ballpoint pen on the label. You were curious, you have always been cursed with an annoying curiosity, and then when you saw that it was your Uncle Mark on the tape and realized that was the date of his death and your father’s death, or disappearance, you had this immediate and annoying curiosity. You wanted to hear what your Uncle Mark had to say.

  You were almost nine, you remember now. You were almost nine and you found out your Uncle Mark was dead, and your father had disappeared, presumed dead. You had a lousy ninth birthday—your mother couldn’t get you to even come out of your room.

  “So what news have you brought, Uncle Mark?” you whisper to hi
s sad, flickering face. “What news?”

  Shadows drift over his pale skin as he moves across the screen: at first so subtle they might be a veil of dust on the lens, then stark, black bands suggestive of bars or limbs. You have the impulse to get up and turn more of your own lights on, but you make yourself stay in your chair, because you’re nothing like your uncle, or any of those crazy old men in your family. You have been able to protect yourself. You have stayed alive.

  “It’s been...” he makes a sound that might have been intended as a laugh, but it fills his throat like a sob. “A hellish year. You remember your Aunt Trish, I hope. I just want you to know, for one thing, that she liked everybody, pretty much. And when they treated her less than honorably she either didn’t notice or she didn’t care. She was a generous woman, maybe too generous. I thought she was my life before she died. And now, I know. I haven’t been able to figure out if her mugger was from the neighborhood or not, but he very well could have been. I don’t know if he was black or brown or white. I’m no racist, understand, it doesn’t matter. But I would like to know. The police say he was probably young. They say he jumped a fence getting away. Like an animal, is the way that sounds to me. A throw-back. A walking piece of garbage. How do you handle garbage in your day? Do you keep it around until it starts to stink, or do you get rid of it?