Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  Fortunately dinner was announced, so I was able to escape and find Maggie again and together we joined the throng heading towards the ballroom.

  “I can’t remember,” I said to her, “is Jonathan coming to this?”

  Maggie and Jonathan had met in their first year and started going out. They’d stayed together for a number of years, until a mutual acquaintance had lured Jonathan away from Maggie for a one-night stand that had turned into marriage, kids, the lot.

  “No,” Maggie answered, looking all around as she spoke, “this is not Jonathan’s scene at all.”

  I wanted to say that it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t mine possibly even more than it wasn’t Jonathan’s. But I kept quiet. My hand crept up to my neck as we shuffled towards the seating plan resting on an easel by the entrance to the ballroom.

  “No doubt we’ll be on a table at the back,” Maggie said, “with all the other people who booked at the last minute.”

  As we duly made our way towards the back of the ballroom, I had a look around. Two large video projection screens were each showing a series of stills, mugshots taken on enrollment. They were monochrome and the images had either become degraded or had been drenched with a sepia hue. There were probably two hundred, maybe three hundred people at the event; less than half of those would be partners, and possibly a not insignificant proportion of the partners would have been fellow students. I was trying to work out how long I might have to watch the parade of faces before Maggie’s might appear. I had seen photographs of Maggie—and Jonathan—from back then. I was confident I’d recognize her. It’s not as if the passage of twenty-five years actually makes you a different person. You just look a little older. Or a lot older.

  I saw a picture of the organizer, the woman who had appeared on the balcony to orchestrate group photographs. She’d been slimmer, but you could already see the confidence in her eyes. For her it seemed a short step from enrolling to sending out invitations for a twenty-five-year reunion. She already knew she was going to do it. Maybe not explicitly, but she knew herself very well, she knew what she was capable of.

  On the other screen I saw an early mugshot of the guy from the lift, Henrik, and he did indeed look a lot younger, but, again, the eyes were the same. That reticence, suspicion even.

  I looked away from the mugshots in order to be introduced to the people at our table. Through a combination of first impressions, whispered intel from Maggie, and the fruits of my own efforts at conversation, I gathered that they were a mixture of old friends of Maggie’s and former fellow students: a likeable psychologist whose husband had left her for another man; a guy in his early fifties who had given up medicine for web design, but whose ideas seemed mired in the 1990s; a woman who had trained as a GP, before taking time out to have kids and finally going back to do a day a week; another part-time GP and editor of medical journals and his wife, a teacher who called herself a freelance journalist on the strength of writing a column for her husband’s magazine about being married to a doctor.

  When I next looked towards the front of the ballroom, there was Maggie’s mugshot just fading from the screen on the left. I’d gathered now that the two screens were showing the same photographs, but out of synch. I saw the psychologist from our table. She was smiling at the camera, her eyes full of hope and expectation.

  I turned back to the table, where three Polish waitresses in black and white costumes had converged. Drinks were being ordered, but the choice appeared to be limited to red or white, as far as I could tell from my attempts at dialogue with the three Poles, who, in terms of their mental and practical preparedness, were still on the plane from Warsaw.

  “I’m going to the bar,” I told Maggie.

  I watched the faces fade in and fade out on the screens as I crossed the room. The last face I saw before the angle became too narrow to see anything at all made me come to an abrupt halt with a silly expression on my face.

  Because it was mine.

  I backtracked. The face that had looked a lot like mine twenty years earlier had gone and been replaced by that of Gordon, the man I had met in the reception hall. I looked at the other screen, but it would be a while before the shot came around again and I’d be able to see it and realize that the guy who looked like me didn’t look that much like me after all.

  I stood waiting for the bartender to pour me a pint of Guinness. He tried to make conversation. He was Greek, very friendly, and he didn’t have many customers, but I wasn’t up for it. I felt strange, dissociated from my surroundings. I palpated my neck.

  “Hello, Will,” said a voice.

  I turned around to see Henrik leaning on the bar. He asked the bartender for a Scotch. From the glassy look in his eyes I guessed he’d already had a couple.

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What?”

  “This. This place. This whole evening. The mugshots. I didn’t know they were going to do that. With that picture constantly flashing up on screen, it’s like there’s two of you. You now and you then. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I saw yours,” I said. “You’ve not changed a bit.”

  He gave a little laugh and knocked back his Scotch.

  “I’m going to head back,” I said.

  “Cheers.”

  Seated at the table with the starters arriving, I waited for a gap in the conversation and turned to Maggie.

  “What was going on with that whole lift thing?” I asked her.

  “I can’t explain it,” she said, her eyes shining. “We went up but then didn’t need to come down again. It’s this place. The rules are different here.”

  I could tell Maggie was having a good time; she wouldn’t normally come out with something like that. She’s a very rational person. Either being a doctor made her like that or she became a doctor because that was the kind of person she was. Bit of both probably.

  “Do you think it’s possible,” I said, “that we actually went down when we thought we were going up? After I got in?”

  “But then we’d have just got back where we started and that wasn’t the right floor. It’s just—” She stopped and her eyes widened and she sang the theme tune to The Twilight Zone. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that—perhaps ten years ago. I smiled and she leaned forward and I kissed her, then immediately she turned away and put her hand on the psychologist’s arm to impart some fascinating piece of gossip she’d just remembered.

  Thinking that it would be a while before the main course arrived, I got up from the table. On one of the big screens I recognized the sequence of mugshots that had preceded that of the guy who looked a bit like the younger me. When the face came up again, I studied it. Was he here, in the room? He would be four years older than me if he was Maggie’s contemporary. Would he have aged better?

  I thought of him as a version of me four years on, just as the second lobby I’d visited with the identical walnut table was a version of the one on the floor below. It was simply a floor higher. Separated in space rather than time.

  I wondered if I should get another pint, but remembered I hadn’t finished the last one.

  On a table next to the easel just outside the ballroom was a laptop. It was playing a slideshow of the pictures taken in the hotel’s reception hall. I picked out Maggie, smiling broadly and looking up at the camera just like everybody else. I saw the web designer and the boring gastroenterologist and even, standing on the edge of the group, Gordon, the man I had talked to briefly. I spotted Henrik and his wife, Caroline. There was the divorced psychologist, the tall man with the thinning hair who had known where he was going, there was the woman in taffeta and the man from the reception desk who had changed out of his jumbo cords and pastel polo shirt. And there, just to the left of centre, was I, my neck tendons straining with the effort of holding my head up to smile for the camera. Maybe I looked a little tired around the eyes, perhaps I appeared a tad heavier in the jowls, even slightly paunchier.

  I turned around and hea
ded back into the ballroom. I checked out the nearest tables, but there was no sign of anyone who looked a bit like me. I reached our table, but remained standing, scanning the room, running my eyes over every table in there. He wasn’t to be seen. I sat down, thanked the waitress for my main course and smiled at Maggie, who still looked like she was having a good time.

  “This is so weird,” she said quietly but emphatically.

  She didn’t know how weird.

  I pushed back my chair.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I won’t be long.”

  “How’s your neck?”

  I looked at her.

  “Are your glands still up?”

  “I’ve just got to...”

  My legs took me away from the table. I didn’t like it when she didn’t show concern, and I didn’t like it when she did. She couldn’t win, and neither could I. I prodded my neck as I crossed to the exit. I glanced at the group photo on the laptop, wondering, as I sometimes did, what was the point of a life like this, a life lived in constant fear of its ending. Wouldn’t it just be easier to cut short the wait?

  I fingered the keycard in my pocket with one hand and the raised gland in my neck with the other as I walked slowly and softly past the wonky chair and the scuffed cabinet. I stopped to straighten the print that was hanging askew. The glass doors gave on to the lift lobby. The walnut table looked bare. Sitting on the shiny velveteen sofa reading theIndependent was Gordon.

  “Hello, Will,” he said, turning the page.

  I had no doubt that if I were to go up a floor, there he would be again sitting on the sofa reading the same newspaper. And whichever floor I was on, our room would be three doors down on the left beyond the wood-paneled doors.

  I reached the door and slid the keycard into the slot. It flashed red. I tried again. Still red. I tried sliding it in very slowly and extracting it just as slowly. Still the red light flashed. I stood for a moment and listened to my breathing, which was fast and shallow. And then I heard a man’s voice. It was very close. I looked behind me to see if someone had left their door open. They’d left the ballroom to make a phone call and decided to do it in the privacy of their room. But the doors on the other side of the corridor were all shut and the corridor was empty. Sometimes, when I play five-aside football and we’re warming up while waiting to begin, I count the players to see if we’re all there. I count four and wonder who’s missing, and it takes me a few moments to realize I’ve failed to count myself. The frightening thing was that the corridor did genuinely feel empty, as if even I wasn’t there. I would try the card in the door one more time before going to report the fault. I shoved it into the slot, which pushed the door open half an inch with an audible click of the mechanism. I wondered if we’d left the door unlocked and what valuables might have been at risk. Then I heard the voice again, louder this time. It was coming from inside the room.

  In Freud’s essay on the Uncanny he spends twelve pages discussing the meaning of the word (in German, das Unheimliche, providing the adjective Unheimliche and its derivation. Key, as I understand it, is the sense of strangeness, unfamiliarity; yet at the same time something that is familiar can also be uncanny. So what could be more uncanny—familiar and unfamiliar at the same time—than the double or Doppelganger? It is a theme to which I have been attracted since I started writing (indeed before). So when invited to pick a Poe story, I didn’t have to think for very long. “William Wilson” is not my favorite Poe story and I didn’t get to read it until some years after my first encounter with the author, which was prompted by finding a lovely old Pan paperback edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination, that of course does not include “William Wilson.” But of all Poe’s work, this is the story closest to my heart for its treatment of the Doppelganger theme.

  I myself have a Doppelganger. Nicholas Royle does not resemble me physically, but like me he is a writer and a teacher of creative writing. His many books include The Uncanny (Manchester University Press). If you look us up on Amazon, which makes no distinction between us (why should it, although the British Library notes that Nick was born in 1957), his are the non-fiction titles, while mine are all fiction. I published a short story of Nick’s in one of my anthologies, while he writes about me in a chapter of The Uncanny called “The Double.” We have survived several meetings, even given readings together, and at some point hope to publish a jointly authored book.

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  * * * *

  Kaaron Warren’sshort story collectionThe Glass Woman,published by Prime Books, won the ACT Writing and Publishing Awards Fiction Prize in its Australian edition. She had a story reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: Twentieth Annual Collection, and has had stories in the anthologies The Worker’s Paradise and Paper Cities. She also has stories forthcoming in Futuristic Motherhood, 2012,and New Ceres. You can read Seeing Eye Dog on Amazon Shorts. Warren is an Australian who wrote this story while living in Fiji. You can reach her on her blog at: kaaronwarren.livejournal.com.

  * * * *

  The Tell

  By Kaaron Warren

  Through her hotel window, the men seemed to be crying. It was the rain, Siri thought, an illusion. But the image stayed with her as she prepared for her day of meetings. Three men, arm in arm, painted onto a car-park wall. Color lost to pollution; all three were gray. Siri squinted, squeezed her eyes. She felt a deep ache across her shoulders; she hadn’t been that tense, had she?

  * * * *

  The rain eased by the time of her final meeting, so Siri walked the two blocks to the Mutter Museum. She looked forward to this one, although she knew it wouldn’t have a positive outcome. The application itself interested her: it sought funding for a “Causes of Death” exhibit. Bullets removed from brains or hearts, knife tips from livers, poisoned kidneys and other damaged organs. The Mayor wouldn’t like it; he preferred the institutions to demonstrate Brotherly Love, not Murder Capital of America.

  Siri was led to a small room by the receptionist—two old armchairs pushed close together, flickering light—and told nothing.

  Not a good start, she thought.

  An old man came into the room, stared at her, then hunched into the other chair. Siri smiled at him, nodded a greeting. He shook his head in return. He jittered. Leg bouncing, knee jiggling, hand holding mug shaking so much he splashed coffee over the sides to burn his hands but he didn’t seem to notice. Liver spots on his hands, arms covered with white, wiry hair. His throat was wattled but his face was smooth, pink. It looked to Siri as if the top layer of his skin had peeled off, leaving an earlier self underneath. He was partially bald; his hair the same wiry white stuff on his arms.

  He looked worried; at his feet, a large brown paper bag. On his wrist: a hospital ID strip. Siri wondered: Why is it still there? Was he not released? Has he released himself against doctor’s orders? Why didn’t he cut it off? What sort of hospital was it and what sort of disorder does he have? What’s in the paper bag?

  Her mouth was dry because she had been staring at him, loose-jawed. She felt safe doing it; he seemed blind, incapable of focus.

  She saw such anxiety in him, such terror, her heart started to beat more quickly.

  He held his palm up to her: wait. It was crisscrossed with deep, clean lines and he held it up while he scrabbled in his bag.

  She didn’t want to see what he had but at the same time she did: a knife? A bomb? Some human tissue sample or souvenir of his last kill?

  A book placed on his knee then he delved again.

  He pulled out something the size of her outstretched hand, then stood and stepped forward to her. He held it out, nodding at her. She shook her head.

  “Take it,” he said. “It’s good.”

  “No. I’m okay.”

  He shook his head. She noticed he had no socks.

  “Here.” He shoved something into her hand. A heart.

  It was delicately woven, horsehair, she thought, each strand made up of t
en or so individual hairs. It was old, she could tell that by the gentle discoloration along the outside.

  It was the width of a paperback book and felt solid. When she tilted it to look at the base, she felt something heavy thump inside.

  “What is it?”

  He nodded, and it seemed to her that the anxiety lifted from him.

  “Will you sit with me on the train? I’ll tell you a story.” Her brother-in-law always warned her not to leave her Amtrak ticket in the clear pocket of her case.

  “You’re catching the same train?” she said, surprised.

  He winked at her. “A train is a good place to talk.”

  He was too old to be hitting on her. He didn’t seem the type to ever have hit on anybody; he seemed shy, nervous, and lonely. Did she want to spend three hours listening to the ramblings of an old man? She had a book to read, but it was dull, and the thud of the horsehair heart intrigued her.