Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  “They said he evidently didn’t mean to kill her. God knows she didn’t mean to die. Her heart was good, but it was weak. She had a heart attack, and even though there were a dozen people less than twenty yards away, she died. I can’t tell you the number of times she’d get so scared on some ride at the amusement park, unable to breathe. Still, she wanted me to take her, said it was fun. Well, I stopped taking her; I was scared of what might happen. I didn’t deserve her, but I knew the treasure I had in her. That made me angry and cold sometimes, which I guess frightened her even more. Isn’t that a big joke? Being scared of what might happen; that’s what I’d call living a life. Maybe it’s different in your time and place.”

  He is making you uncomfortable. You resist the impulse to strike the screen. He is making you think of your father. He is making you think of Tommy, and you can barely control your annoyance. Only the living care about such things. The shadows don’t care.

  Your uncle is up on his feet, prowling like a bear trapped in a small space. You know the feeling. Some people do not belong inside walls. But sometimes they have no choice if they want to protect themselves. Every time his pacing brings him near the camera the image shudders. “I don’t pretend I will be able to explain myself,” he begins, his voice deeply hoarse, threaded with brittleness. “So many things happen in a life that you cannot understand, but I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve always disliked people.” Your uncle stops himself, staring at you, then looks around the room with a vague, stupid expression, as if he’s not sure where or when he is. “We’re just a bad fit, I think, people and me.”

  He stares into the lens, so close he’s distorted into a thin version of himself, looking a great deal, in fact, like your father. You remember your father reaching down to stroke your face, how gentle he could be for such a tall man, for someone with such large, rough hands, and even though you do not value gentleness, you do not mind this memory. You try to remember what he smelled like, and you remember him crying, and you also remember him angry and out of control.

  “I’m sure there are good people out there, trapped by their circumstances.” He leans closer, his eye so large that you imagine you can see yourself reflected in his iris. “But I want you to know that predators watch these streets. They hang out near the back alleys and the parks and the unlit intersections of our cities. They wait there for the weak or the old or the foolish, the ones straggling behind the herd. Then when they see the opportunity they pick them off one by one. For them it isn’t an issue of morality—they have a need and they fill that need as best they know how. You almost have to admire that quality in them.”

  He reaches forward then, his rough, stained palms framing each side of the picture, and you draw back, surprised by the feeling that he is trying to strangle you, not you personally, but any of the children that came after. You think this is the kind of person who could kill his own family.

  Then your view of him swings, a sudden blur of color as he has apparently detached the camera from its stand, and now it is airborne, shaky and handheld, and he is moving about the house at random, speaking to you, hardly aware of the camera now so it records great jittery expanses of water-stained ceiling, a garbage-strewn floor, rotting leftovers on tables and chairs, scattered across the rug like vomit, smearing the already filthy walls. Then as he continues his speech you can detect the slight deterioration in the image, the corruption of color, which gives a certain hysterical quality to his confession.

  “I have sensed this shift in the world for a long time now, even before your aunt’s death. The signs are there; you just have to know what you’re looking for. Often when I would go out I would watch people, when they did not know I was looking. I would stand at the corners of buildings, at the edges of things. Sometimes I would just stand under a window, very still, and bear witness. It was quite subtle at first, but I began to detect a certain aggressiveness in the way people held themselves. There was an aura ofillness, for lack of a better term, in the way they interacted. A fevered look in the eyes, a gray cast to the face, an agitation in the fingers, a stumble in the gait. They watched one another, apparently without recognition. I became convinced that a kind of isolation of the soul had occurred in vast numbers of the population. A cataclysmic psychic event, I think. It affected everything. Even the architecture, the nature of the sky, the stars spinning overhead changed.

  “If I’m overreacting, then so is the world. Because shadow has come into it, you see. The knowledge of it. That no-man’s land between living and dying, when you are neither, you just are. And you have no hope for better. You look into the mirror, and all you can see is that corpse you will one day be, and there is no fix for it. Your obsessive consciousness of the past and fear of the future have let shadow in, and there is little you can do once that tide has turned.

  “That shadow has always been here, but there seemed to be a balance, don’t you think? We had become complacent with the conviction that we could protect ourselves. But a gradual, subtle change has taken place. The tide has reversed itself, the meat has turned, the hourglass has tumbled over.”

  Your Uncle Mark is crazy, of course. Was crazy. You know the signs. Tommy was that way, near the end.You could be that way. Locked up in this house, seeing no one. The only person he allowed in that last year was your father. Your missing father, all those years ago. At least that was the story you heard. People lie, of course, but you think that story was probably true.

  This is still his house. Crazy Uncle Mark. His crazy house. So much of his stuff is still here. You can hardly bear to touch it.

  He is leaning over, the camera dizzy with shuffling walls, rug, that ugly ceiling, remounting the camera so it is now aimed like a gun at the front door. “Your father helped me secure this house. No, let me be completely truthful. Your father secured this house from the threats closing in around us—I have little skill in matters mechanical, electrical, in plumbing, in carpentry. At first he saw no need, but toward the end, I think he was beginning to see things my way. If only he had come around sooner.”

  Now he has your undivided attention. Your father and toward the end and if only. Magical words, the doors to the secrets unlocking. You push your chair up closer to the television, your eyes aching from the shifting lights and darks. Your uncle comes up over you, making further adjustments to the camera. The zoom level changes; he blurs out to white and then walking away from you he is back in focus. Standing at the large wooden front door now, he gestures at its detail brought so close to you by the zoom.

  “Your father did exquisite work. I asked him to make the strongest door he could make, one that a tank would have a problem getting through, and he made me this work of art.”

  You glance at the heavy but rather plain door there currently. You’d like to believe that your father’s door was so wonderfully made, so universally admired, that he sold it, that it could even be hanging in a museum somewhere. Yours is a family of dreamers.

  “He put a contented face on one side, counterpoint to the threatening face on the other side. It’s a wonderful door, but he hung it with the wrong side facing out. He was always so careful, I have no idea how he could have made a mistake like this. I would have had him correct it, but we ran out of time.”

  Out of time. You are waiting for him to tell you more, but he has stopped talking, and now the camera is jerking forward, so that you imagine he must have gone back and around and is now moving the tripod closer so that you can see your father’s work in greater detail. Your Uncle Mark really wants you to see this door.

  The face covers the entire center, probably five feet from top of head to tip of chin. Approximately two feet wide. Long and narrow. The eyes are squeezed to slits, but still you can see the deep, shadowed holes gouged out for the pupils hiding under the lids. The mouth is a sneer, exposing teeth carved so aggressively they look like giant, jagged splinters wedged just behind the wrinkled lips. The ears are narrow and pulled back close to the head like those of an angry ani
mal. At first you think the mottled background of the door is just its natural roughness, but when your uncle drags a floor lamp closer you can see that the remainder of the door around the face is completely carved with shallow reliefs of faces just beginning to emerge from the wood, showing an eye, or a mouth, the top of a nose, the side of a chin. The impression is of people floating up from the depths of dark, liquid wood, the moment of their initial emergence painstakingly recorded.

  You cannot believe your uncle doesn’t see it. That ishis face on the door! The likeness is unmistakable! Distorted, certainly, mutated, but obvious. It doesn’t surprise you at all. You don’t have to see the face on the other side to know how it must have looked: your Uncle Mark on one of his better days, hair combed, smiling, the image he’d want the outside world to see.

  “This door wasn’t the only fortification he made for me. The windows all around are double-barred, deep anchored in hard-cured concrete. He even extended the foundation out another foot, in case anyone tries to dig their way in.”

  He looks at you as if he wants to send an apology across the years. “I miss him tremendously—he had been good company since your Aunt Trish’s death. I really wish he had stayed.

  “Six months ago I locked myself up inside this house. Windows shut, curtains closed. They deliver my food, but I never see them, I just know when they’re gone, and when everything looks clear I go out and drag it all inside. You can do this so easily nowadays.

  “Your father worked on this house for months. Certainly he thought I was over-reacting at first. Then for a long time he said nothing, just showed up, worked, and left here before dark. He never liked being here after dark. The last few months, however, there was a change. We talked about many things. We talked about the world, history, politics. We talked about the family, how we had always been with each other. He talked about you, his children, and your future. We talked until after dark, until long after dark, until he felt compelled to sleep here, because he was uncomfortable going out to his truck after dark, winding his way down that long walk to the bottom of the hill where he had to park, finding his way through all those layers of shadow. Those times we often talked most of the night, both of us reluctant to go to bed. We talked and talked, and still I think I got very little sense of how he really felt about things.

  “He has not been back for over a month. I don’t believe that has been intentional. I burn the lights all night long. I drink. Sometimes I drink too much. I imagine what it is like outside. And I try to imagine solutions for myself, to fix myself, without much luck.

  “Maybe in the future you will understand better. You will know what I’m talking about. Maybe in the future you won’t think me crazy. It is almost dark now, I don’t know how much we’ll be able to see, but I think you will have a better understanding if we look outside. I don’t know what I can show you, but I can show you something.”

  He walks unsteadily up to you, above you, and out of focus, blurred fingers shaking into some kind of gauzy representation of a spirit abandoning its body, and with a great deal of fiddling and wildly swinging views of the ceiling, his hands, his pale, sweating face, the floor, he removes the camera from its mount and suddenly it’s as if you are stumbling drunken down the hall, dizzy with the multiplying views of skewed ceilings, tilting walls, the crashes as objects fall, glass breaking, furniture exploding out of nowhere and just as suddenly disappearing. You are hugged tightly to his chest, enveloped by his filthy clothes, in darkness and then glimmers of light, food stains on cloth, and you imagine you can smell his stench. Suddenly you are staring at his feet, and you can hear keys going into multiple locks, the clang and snap of metal. This requires some time, allowing you to examine his feet at your leisure: the mismatched, filthy socks, one bloody toe emerging from a tear. Then you are outside, some kind of porch roof below you, a vertiginous display of aerial views of the ground, trees, sidewalk. It all stops and you are looking into the gleam of his sweaty face, surrounded by the dark silhouette of trees appearing like some massive hair-do above his shining forehead, or his over-stimulated nerves that have pushed their way out of his skull and into the sky. The camera waves unsteadily across the streetlights and traffic below, as if this is what he wanted you to see, as if it were evidence of anything, and you are staring up into his dark, wet nostrils, his eyes like pale tumors mounted high up on his face, and from the sharp angle of limb you see that he is holding the camera at arm’s-length to speak to you.

  You are disoriented as he shakes the camera, pans it too rapidly. You’re not sure if he’s even trying to show you anything. Street lights smear across the surfaces of the gray buildings. Passing cars ripple, then melt into the pavement. Here and there angry faces run together, burning like frantic candles. Your eyes weep from the strain of watching.

  “I don’t know how much you can see, but I have this telephoto lens,” he says, and then his image falls sideways. You’re covered in darkness, the muffled noise of his hand working metal against metal. You catch a glimpse of his face as if at the end of a long tunnel, then a distant view of figures moving, crossing in front of each other, fires in oil drums, blurred. Everything is closer, in focus so sharply it’s as if you’d taken something to clear your head and it just kicked in.

  You see not exactly a gathering, more a random passing in close proximity, of shabby figures, male and female, although the two are difficult to distinguish, hunched and leaning, weary, dumb.

  Your uncle’s voice begins to narrate, like in one of those nature films you saw as a girl, a hint of desperation, as if from a teacher who knows his student is too stupid to understand. “I see more of them every day. Some are homeless; most I think live somewhere else, but have nothing to do. Nothing satisfies them, nothing speaks to their hearts. Maybe they had a job and one day they forgot why they were journeying every day to this place. Or they were returning to their homes after a long day at work and lost their way. No matter how much they thought about it, they could not remember the place where they had lived.”

  The camera slowly pans, Here and there you can see a face more clearly: blank, rough-hewn, the lips moving silently but the eyes disengaged, painted on. You do not see what your uncle is seeing. To you they’re all pretty much the same. Human debris. The “no one special.” You assume they have been here since humanity began. And they will be here at the end, the last human beings alive before the rats and the roaches take over. People who have been eaten by their own shadows.

  The camera swings back to his face for just an instant—softly blurred, his image losing form as his voice builds. “You can see it, can’t you? What I’ve been hiding from? This disease? They all look so normal, really, from a certain angle, or at least, harmless.” Then the camera is back on the crowd, the bustling figures, the hot, uncomfortable faces. “Sometimes I think they can smell my fear.”

  You realize these people are closer to the house than you had thought. You see them milling like insects seeking safe haven but having forgotten what a safe haven would even look like.

  “And there are others out there, I think. You read about them in the papers, or in those terrible supermarket paperbacks. They could be young or old, but they don’t think like normal people. They don’t have the same loyalties. Other people to them are no better than vermin. They are shadow. They act, vaguely, like you. But they are not you. They want to care, but caring is beyond them. They are not you—and there is no cure for that.

  “What do you say to someone like that? Do you say ‘please don’t hurt me?’ They see someone like my wife having a heart attack, and they do nothing. It begins in childhood, I think—you can’t always tell, but these children are not like the others. I suspect it develops at different rates. For some it never reaches its final stages. Maybe it’s like cancer, you know? For others, they reach a certain age, a critical point occurs, and they become exceedingly dangerous—mad dogs who need to be put out of their misery. There are more and more of them every year. Before you know it the
y will fill the cities, then the towns. Before you know it they will be wandering the countryside, like in one of those terrible horror films.

  “I saw on the news the other day, they were talking about the economic situation, the job situation, the credit situation. They were talking about how close so many of us are to homelessness. Only a paycheck or two away. Your father was concerned about this. He loved you; he wanted you to have everything. But what if he lost everything?

  “For myself, I wondered, if we are all that close to homelessness, to living on the streets, maybe we are close to this new illness as well, this plague of malaise.”