Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  “Hey, stay with me.” I felt Loomis tapping me lightly first on one cheek and then the other. “I wasn’t trying to be cruel.” He ran a small ice cube back and forth across my forehead. “But you had to be told.”

  I started to cry, my tears mixing with the cold water running down from my forehead.

  “Shouldn’t have happened,” Loomis went on. “Wouldn’t have, but they just won’t talk about it in front of the kids. They tell you everything else— why we keep the traits secret, how to be careful around those poor souls who have the misfortune and/or bad judgment to marry one of us, how to cover if you say something you shouldn’t to an outsider. But not how I ‘accidentally’ broke a kid’s wrist playing football so he couldn’t go to the municipal swimming pool afterwards like he planned and drown. And he didn’t. He went straight home because he didn’t know his wrist was broken and he drowned in the bathtub. His parents were investigated for child abuse and his sister spent eight months in foster care.”

  “Stop,” I said. “Please.”

  “They were all so mad at me, the family was.” Loomis shook his head at the memory. “They claimed they weren’t, they told me it wasn’t really my fault because I didn’t know any better. Everyone kept telling me they weren’t upset with me even after the authorities found out I had broken the kid’s wrist and called me in for questioning. Along with Mom and Dad and Rita. Ambrose was a baby; they examined him for bruises.”

  “Stop,” I pleaded. “I mean it.”

  Loomis was talking over me again. “It all came out all right; there was no reason to be upset with me. They said and they said and they said. But after my mother searched my room and found my journal with everybody’s dates in it—then they got upset. Oh, they got furious with me. I said it was my mother’s fault for snooping and then telling the rest of the family about it but they weren’t having any of that. Writing down those dates—how could I have done such a thing? I stuck it out till I was sixteen and then I booked.”

  The silence hung in the air. I closed my eyes hoping that I’d pass out or something.

  “When you’re well enough to travel,” he said after a while, “you’ll come with me.”

  My eyes flew open.

  “Death is the one thing you never, ever eventry to mess with. Everything in the world—everything in the universe changes. But not that. Death is. If you went down to the deepest circle of hell and offered resurrection to everyone there, they’d all say no and mean it.”

  “That’s not where you live, is it?” I asked.

  Loomis chuckled. “Not even close.”

  “They won’t beg me to stay, will they? They all hate me now.”

  “They don’t hate you,” Loomis said, patting my hand again. “They love you as much as they ever did. They just don’t like you very much any more.”

  The nurse came in with my pain medication and I closed my eyes again.

  “Let me know when we leave.”

  When Ellen Datlow asked me to contribute to this anthology, I was honored but apprehensive. Pick a horror, any horror, and it’s very likely that Poe did it first. The fears of his time—rampant disease, maddening guilt, torture, being walled up or interred with no escape—may come in different wrappers now but they are still with us. And because Poe’s gift was his ability to keep the humanity of his characters foremost, he is still with us, too.

  He was also a poet, which makes him especially accomplished— very few writers are capable of both prose and poetry. The first of his poems to come to mind for most people is “The Raven” with its thumping meter and punctuation of “Nevermore.” There are others: “To Helen,” “The Conqueror Worm,” “The Haunted Palace,” and “Oh, Temporal Oh, Mores!,” to name a few.

  But the one that captured my imagination many years ago was “The City in the Sea.” The first few lines sucked me in:

  “Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

  In a strange city lying alone

  Far down within the dim West...”

  It has haunted me since I first read it and, although I seriously considered working from one of Poe’s stories, my thoughts kept wandering back to the place where

  “... from a proud tower in the town,

  Death looks gigantically down...”

  You may have noticed there is no actual tower in this story, nor is there any sea as such. But you don’t have to be in a real sea to be in over your head; you don’t even have to be near water to drown.

  In the end, we must all die. Death is not only the Great Equalizer but the Great Truth—true for all of us, no exceptions. Which is why

  “... Hell, rising from a thousand thrones

  Shall do it reverence.”

  <>

  * * * *

  Nicholas Royle, born in Manchester in 1963, is the author of five novels—Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut, and Antwerp—and two novellas—The Appetite and The Enigma of Departure. He has published over one hundred short stories’ and to date has one collection to his name: Mortality. Widely published as a journalist with regular appearances inTime Out and the Independent, he has also edited thirteen original anthologies. Since 2006 he has been teaching creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has won three British Fantasy Awards and the Bad Sex Prize once. His short story collection was shortlisted for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize.

  * * * *

  The Reunion

  By Nicholas Royale

  On arrival, we’d had to wait behind a man in jumbo cords and a pastel polo shirt who was giving the receptionist a hard time about some problem in his room, a missing towel or a faulty light, and we formed an immediate impression of him that was somewhat negative. It wasn’t long, however, before we realized he had a point.

  They didn’t have any record of our booking, despite having sent us an email of confirmation, which happily Maggie had printed out and brought along. So we had to fill in a form, holding up those who had arrived after us, and finally the giri behind the desk gave us a key card and a map. Yes, a map. It was a big hotel. A huge hotel. One of those places you get apparently in the middle of nowhere but actually no more than twenty miles from one or other dreary Midlands town. A former RAF training camp or stately home or converted mental asylum. This appeared to be all three, with not only west wings and east wings, but whole houses and vast halls tacked on to the main building. The room belatedly assigned to us was in one of the modern blocks. We walked along one edge of a grand, colonnaded reception hall, past a tuxedoed piano player, through a little anteroom dominated by two stags’ heads mounted on adjacent walls. We passed a bar with its shutter down, turned right into a wide corridor.

  The further we got from the main part of the hotel with its marble columns and wide, red-carpeted staircases, the shoddier and tattier everything became. There was an armchair in a corner that was missing a castor, a cabinet of drawers covered in scuff marks. I said to Maggie that it was like that scene in Jacob’s Ladder where Tim Robbins is wheeled down into the bowels of a hospital that turns into a vision of hell with crazy people banging their heads against the wall and gobbets of bloody flesh lying around on the floor.

  Maggie gave me her standard nod of impartial assent, the one kept for observations beyond her frame of reference. I realized, though, that if I was overly critical of the hotel, and therefore, by extension, of the evening itself, it could provoke a reaction. This was Maggie’s evening—a medical school reunion—and the fact that I had readily agreed to come along meant that if at any point I regretted my decision, it would not be fair to allow it to show. As we trailed past a rather tired series of framed prints of the hotel in its heyday, I felt the swollen glands in my neck. The prints on the wall were undated and there were no outward signs that would enable you to assign them to a particular period. They were like idealizations or artist’s impressions. One hung askew and I wanted to straighten it, but I sensed Maggie’s impatience to get to the room and so lef
t it.

  We pushed through a set of glass doors and found ourselves in a lobby area. There was a lift to our right, a corridor behind wood-paneled doors beyond that, and another corridor heading off from the far side of the lobby. An old-fashioned three-piece suite occupied the middle of the space. Facing the lift doors was a walnut table that had seen better days. On it was a folded copy of the Independent.

  It appeared that we had to go up two floors; I’m not very good at waiting around for lifts. Or buses. Or anything that you suspect might never come.

  “I’ll take the stairs,” I said, “and I’ll still get there before you.”

  I took Maggie’s bag in my spare hand and shouldered open the door to the stairs. I ran up one flight, barged through the equivalent door on the next floor and found myself in an identical lobby space. I pressed the call button and while wondering if the lift would ever arrive tried on a number of expressions. It was certainly taking its time, the lift. On a walnut table that was indistinguishable from the one on the floor below was another copy of theIndependentfolded in the same manner. I thought to myself it had been a waste of money my buying one that morning. When the lift arrived, the doors trundled open to reveal Maggie and a middle-aged couple, who looked as though they wanted to get out. She introduced them to me as Henrik and Caroline. I thought I could see a slightly guarded look in Henrik’s eyes as we swapped places; Caroline looked as if, like Maggie, she just wanted to get to their room. Henrik had been a contemporary, Maggie told me as the lift doors closed behind me and I turned to press the button. He’d seemed a lot older than me, but then Maggie is four years my senior and some men age worse than others.

  The interior of the lift was mirrored on three sides, which created a theoretically endless series of reflections in both side walls. I checked myself out. I wasn’t ageing too badly. My problems wereinside my head. I knew that. Maybe physiologically; certainly mentally.

  “You look beautiful,” Maggie said in a way that managed to be affectionate and mocking at the same time.

  When we finally got to our room, the third on the left beyond the wood-paneled doors, and managed to get the key card to flash green rather than red on the fifth attempt, we found we had one small towel between the two of us, no complimentary toiletries, and the shower produced either a trickle of boiling water or an icy torrent. I thought about helping Maggie out of her traveling clothes and suggesting we test out the mattress, but I sensed she wanted to get back downstairs for pre-dinner drinks as soon as possible. So while Maggie plugged in her hair-straighteners I stood to one side of the hot trickle in the shower cubicle pressing at my neck and trying to work out if the gland was bigger or smaller than the day before. I had mentioned it to Maggie and she had dismissed it. Ideally, this would have sufficed. Whereas the average person might think they had a cold coming on and the raised gland was their body’s natural way of fighting it, my thoughts turn to leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease.

  I leaned over the washbasin and wiped a swathe of condensation from the mirror so that I could see my reflection. I fancied that it was studying me rather than I it. If so, perhaps it felt sorry for me with my imaginary ailments and constant nagging anxiety. Or perhaps it just thought I was ridiculous. It wasn’t bothered by anything like that. It was free.

  Toweling myself dry, I returned to the bedroom, where Maggie was just stepping into her specially bought ball gown with its flatteringly high waist and gratifyingly plunging neckline. I slipped into my oversize dead man’s dinner jacket and a pair of highly polished shoes that were coming away from their soles. We left the room and headed back to the lifts. I suggested we walk down and Maggie acquiesced. She looked good in the ball gown and I thought she would prefer to watch the movement of the dress over her long legs than stand around waiting for the lift that might never arrive. I knew that was my preference. I pushed open the door to the stairwell and ushered Maggie through. As we walked down, a small party in tuxedos and ball gowns was coming up. They passed us and turned left. They were going in the right direction, but they were on the wrong level.

  “They’re going the wrong way,” I whispered to Maggie.

  But as I made the remark, I lost confidence in its content.

  “Are you going to the reunion?” I asked the disappearing party while they were still within earshot.

  “Yes,” they said.

  “It’s this way,” I said. “Down two flights. Unless you can get down at the other end?”

  “No, this is the way,” said a tall man with thinning hair and a perfectly fitting suit.

  “How can it be?” I said to Maggie.

  I pictured the two identical lobbies with their walnut tables and copies of the Independent. How had we gone wrong?

  Maggie had stopped. We exchanged puzzled looks. The people who knew where they were going headed off while we dithered on the stairs. Eventually, I thought we might as well follow them. When we got as far as we could go and hadn’t reached the main part of the hotel, and couldn’t find another stairwell, thenwe could come back. So Maggie and I walked down the corridor, which was as similar to the one down which we had walked to get to our room as it is possible to be without actually being the same corridor. There would be no way out at the far end, and even if there was it would only be a stairway and we’d have to descend two flights to get to where we wanted to be.

  Even the series of prints on the wall looked the same, one hanging askew. We passed a facsimile of the scuffed cabinet. I looked at the armchair in the corner. It sat unevenly due to a missing castor.

  We entered a wide corridor and turned left at the end of it, past a bar that still had its shutters down. Next there was the room with the stags’ heads, the piano player on the edge of the main reception hall (which was now heaving with well-dressed bodies) and we were back where we’d started, without having had to go down two floors. Maggie and I looked at each other in puzzlement and I just had time to start asking, “What the fuck—” when a tall woman in a taffeta ball gown swept past and dragged Maggie off to meet someone else she hadn’t seen for twenty years.

  They were giving out drinks. The choice was champagne or orange juice. I wandered off to a bar in an adjoining room where I waited behind a fat man who was ordering two turkey sandwiches. Back on the fringes of the main room where the welcome drinks were still being served, I stood with a pint of Guinness—the nearest I could get to something drinkable—and looked on. At the far side of the room I could see Maggie laughing generously at somebody’s joke, her head dropping forward so that her straightened hair fell in front of her face. I became aware of a tall, slim man with silver hair standing near to me. A picture of understated elegance in his own tailored suit and carefully polished shoes, he sipped at a glass of champagne.

  “It’s strange being an outsider at one of these events,” he said with an almost imperceptible turn of the head.

  “Very strange,” I agreed. “Will,” I added, offering him my hand.

  “Gordon,” he said with a warm smile.

  We raised our glasses to our lips and watched the increasingly animated crowd in the centre of the room.

  “Do you know?” he began, “I was reading in the paper today—just now, upstairs, in fact—that during the Cold War the East Germans used to pay Bulgarian border guards for every East German they shot trying to cross the frontier into the West. It’s almost unbelievable, isn’t it?” He tipped the last of his champagne into his mouth and swallowed. “I don’t know what made me think of that.”

  “Extraordinary,” I agreed.

  “I’m not sure I could kill anybody, even if ordered to do so.”

  “Not even for money?” I joked.

  “Especially not for money,” he said, turning to me. “Nice to meet you, Will. Excuse me.”

  As he walked away to look for his wife, I ticked myself off for my banal and unfunny joke.

  I became aware of my fingers probing inside the collar of my dress shirt. I wondered if this latest fixation o
n head and neck cancers would end up with another referral to a specialist. I remembered with a jolt the not-so-smooth progress of the endoscope up my nose and down past my ear.

  One of the organizers appeared up in the gallery with a photographer. Cupping her hands, the organizer announced a complicated sequence of group photographs. I took this as my cue to wander back to the bar and secure a second pint of Guinness. When I returned to the reception hall the photographer had finished. I looked for Maggie and saw her talking to a man with a paisley-patterned bowtie but when she lifted her head up to the light I saw it wasn’t Maggie at all. The direct light revealed deeper lines, a less youthful skin texture. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. This was Maggie, looking several years younger than the woman I’d thought was her. She introduced me to a well-meaning gastroenterologist from Peterborough and we had a conversation about five-a-side football. Despite both being regular players of the game, neither one of us was at all interested in what the other had to say.