Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  * * * *

  Looking in the mirror two days later, spending an hour looking, feeling nauseous but looking anyway, unable not to look.

  The stitches across her forehead. Her shoulders. Her wrist. Her thigh.

  The stitches were so beautiful; neat and black, and as she looked at her naked self in the mirror, she imagined a dress with such stitches, a thin material, soft to the touch, held together with neat, black stitches.

  She took up a pencil, used the back of a letter to draw the design. When she was happy with it, she showered carefully and dressed, visions of clothes in her head; pants and skirts, girl’s dresses, boy’s t-shirts, a whole line of clothing.

  She fell asleep holding the heart. It seemed to pulse, although she knew that it was her own blood, her own beat.

  That night she dreamt of a shop, her clothes hanging on racks. The shop had red walls and gently beating background music. It had candy hearts to eat while you waited and she knew that the horsehair heart sat beneath the till.

  When she awoke, she drove into the garment district and wandered from outlet to outlet, fingering the material and letting her eyes draw in the colors. She knew what she wanted; plumage, bird color, flower color. Fabrics soft and alluring.

  In her dreams the pieces flew together, but in reality she cut the material too short, too crooked; she didn’t know enough about dressmaking.

  She slept full of dreams, awoke to try again, failure, failure.

  “You know, the Museum runs a costume design course,” Tony told her. He emailed her often; after she quit her job (who could work with all that fabric cottoning your thought process?) she’d helped him win his grant, so he took an interest in her. She’d asked him once about the old man, said, “He told me a strange story.”

  “Strange stories are the best kind. We haven’t seen him in here for a while. He gets locked up every now and then.”

  He signed her up for the design course. “Make me a waistcoat or something,” he said. “A vest.”

  So she learned the magic. Her fellow students envied her originality.

  The vest she made gave Tony a sense of thinness. Confidence. He stopped asking Siri out; already he felt better than her. Too good for her. He would get thin. Very, very thin.

  She found financial backing (no further training needed to figure out how to achieve that) and stitched and sewed her clothes. She sat in her own shop window dressed in loose flowing pants and, a fitted smooth top, her own design, and made her garments.

  Into a rainbow skirt she stitched a nightmare stench, a fear of death. Into a soft silk scarf she sewed blurred vision, so that the wearer could not see loved ones.

  She sold her clothes, dressed people in problems. She accepted the nightmares fatalistically; there is important work here. Each shirt I sell makes a difference.

  She sold dresses to make women garrulous, speak their inner thoughts. Shirts that caused heart pain, limb ache. She sold trousers that led people to act out their base desires, their very deep and hidden fantasies.

  All stitched neatly and carefully.

  * * * *

  One night, she had an odd, waking dream; old man Carney, the teller, leaping for joy on the track at the station. She dreamt that there was something he didn’t tell her; that if she died with the heart in her possession she would fall into a black, eternal pit. it was the power of the heart. There were times when the nightmares lost hold and she knew that she was in a different place because of the heart. She was devoted to it and all it meant, but the guilt, the guilt sometimes pushed through.

  The next morning, a couple came into her store. He was aggressive, sexually aggressive, grabbing Siri when his wife was in the changing room. Saying, “You look fat,” when his wife came out. Siri pulled on her own fingerless gloves, comfortable second skin. She reached out and placed a finger on the man’s chest, stopped his heart for a beat. A beat was long enough for him to see the end, feel regret, make ten wishes.

  “Be kind,” she said. His lips were blue. He would recover, but more slowly than a younger man. He nodded.

  He paid for his wife’s dress, (“Sexy,” he whispered to her) but would not look at Siri.

  “You should take these, too,” Siri said, handing the woman a pair of gloves.

  The man said, “She doesn’t wear gloves.” He tried to take them from his wife’s hands, but Siri stopped him.

  “She’ll wear these,” she said.

  * * * *

  Siri couldn’t sleep, that night, not even holding the horsehair heart. She turned on the television, the news, thinking briefly of her fiancé and his love for the empty words.

  People of power on TV, men and women, good and bad. Siri took up a notebook and began to make a list of all the people to whom, one day, she might choose to tell the story of Poe’s heart and pass on the gift of nightmares.

  “The Tell-Tale Heart” is my favorite Poe story because of the rising panic, the growing madness, the rhythm running through it.

  On a recent trip to Philadelphia, we visited a House Where Poe Lived, and I trod on a squeaky floorboard near his front door. I thought, “Is this where he imagined the body to be buried

  I learned that Poe had disappeared just before his death, and I wondered where he was for those three days.

  I also visited a flea market in New York, where the horsehair items made me feel ill. There was a butterfly hairclip wrapped tightly with discolored horsehair, and a small horsehair flywhisk, its ends split.

  I traveled from city to city via train, and watched people on the various long-distance rides.

  All of these elements helped me build “The Tell.”

  <>

  * * * *

  David Prillis the author of the cult novelsThe Unnatural, Serial Killer Days,and Second Coming Attractions, and the collection Dating Secrets of the Dead.“The Last Horror Show,” from the Dating Secretscollection, was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award. His short fiction has appeared inThe Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Subterranean, Cemetery Dance, and at Ellen Datlow’s late lamentedSCIFICTION web site. His story, “The Mask of ‘67,” was published in the 2007 World Fantasy Award-winning anthologySalon Fantastique,edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Another story, “Vivisepulture,” can be found inLogorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (John Klima, editor). He lives in a small town in the Minnesota north woods.

  * * * *

  The Heaven and Hell of

  Robert Flud

  By David Prill

  Before he met the farmer’s daughter, the traveling salesman ran into a fellow traveler at a drinking hole named Heaven and Hell in the sleepy corn-fed township of Swedenborg, Minnesota.

  “Bob Flud, encyclopedias,” said the traveling salesman, quaffing his suds.

  “Nicholas Klimm, Klimm’s Wonder Elixir,” said the other, wiping his sweaty bald pate with a magician-sized white handkerchief. “Cures everything from eczema to excessive nervous agitation.”

  “I have neither. Life is excessively swell if anything.”

  “Your complexion is perhaps a touch sallow.”

  “It’s the lighting in this Heaven and Hell.”

  “The thirst for knowledge, then, is present even in this rustic enclave.”

  “That’s what I’m about to find out. Just drove over from Watonwan County this morning. It’s been a slow week, but I’ve dreamed up some new pitches I’m going to throw.”

  “I wish you better fortune than I have experienced. Several districts have yet to be introduced to the Wonder Elixir, but thus far doors have been shut in my face with alarming regularity.”

  “This is all the Wonder Elixir I need,” said Flud, tipping back his glass with fervor.

  “And the knowledge of a thousand encyclopedias is contained within,” said Klimm, tapping his temple.

  They toasted. “Here’s to my thirst and your brains,” said Flud.

  “Indeed.”

  Flud drained his glass and set it
down on the bar. He peeled a bill from a roll, slapped it down by the empty glass, suds still sudsing deep within, and gave the proprietor a nod. “Save a stool for me in Heaven, bud. I’ll be needing it again.”

  “You got it.”

  Flud turned to his counterpart. “See you on the road, pal.”

  “I look forward to it, best wishes, etcetera.”

  “Likewise.”

  Bob Flud left Heaven and Hell, heading for his green DeSoto. It was a thirsty-looking street, the late summer sun unforgiving. He wished he had more time to drink and shoot the breeze, but Watonwan had been a wasteland, sales-wise, so he needed to make up for it here.

  Settling into the car, he spread the wrinkled road map across the dashboard. Pretty stark country, this Swedenborg Township. Miles of bean fields between here and the next collection of taverns they called a town. He was tempted to skip it and make for a more cosmopolitan destination like Mankato, but sometimes these out-of-the-way burgs produced surprises. He recalled a week last summer in northwestern Iowa when he had three hits in a row, one farm after the other, bang, bang, bang. Volume B, for Beautiful. Volume B, for Bank. A real Babe Ruth day. Afterwards he examined his sales technique in hopes of recapturing the magic, but he never could unearth what he had done differently on those calls.

  Maybe there was something special about me that day, he thought, wrestling the map into submission and starting the car. Maybe I was believable, or I just looked like a sad character who as good churchgoing folk they felt compelled to help. Or maybe my tongue was pure silver that day. Or they just got a good price for their corn at the co-op that week.

  Flud drove past a parched ball field where some kids were having a pickup game. He felt a melancholy twinge, for his own quickly fading youth, for the settled life he sometimes wished he led. Someday. It didn’t work out the first time, with Jean, but he was older now, more learned in the quirks of the world, more cautious with his heart. He didn’t mind his life. Previously he had been chained to a desk at an insurance agency, took six months before he could cut his way to freedom. He liked being on the move, meeting new people, seeing new things...

  Corn fields on both sides of the car now.

  Beans.

  Alfalfa.

  New things.

  Mankato, tomorrow, if he didn’t get a nibble today...

  * * * *

  His first two encyclopedia-bereft households were a miss and a miss. Talk about cold calls. These people must been raised at the North Pole. The next prospect wanted only volume T, for the article on tractors. Flud tried to politely explain to the gentleman farmer that sets couldn’t be split, but the fellow wouldn’t be budged from his position, even when presented with the sorrowful scenario of another family buying a set of encyclopedias that skipped from Skeleton to Universe.

  Flud was ready to skip from Swedenborg to the next bar down the road, but preached patience to himself. Every stop was a fresh opportunity, a chance to begin anew. Just do your job and keep your emotions out of it.

  * * * *

  The farm, from a distance, seemed like any other spread on this isolated country road. However, as he drew closer, it filled Flud with a deep sense of desolation. It looked abandoned. The crops were withered, the buildings in disrepair. Yet the fact that there were crops at all, and that cows grazed in a fallow pasture, meant that it was still a working farm.

  Even though the days still had some summer in them, the trees in the grove on the north side of the farmyard, left there to shelter the buildings from dangerous winter gales, were stripped bare, looking like they belonged in Halloween country.

  Flud slowed, his attention caught by a herd of sheep gathered in a tight group in a roadside field on the north end of the grove.

  Flud stopped. Although his window was partially open, he cranked it down the rest of the way.

  The sheep.

  Their mouths were opening, and closing.

  No sound was coming from them. Not a single bleat.

  Just mouths.

  Opening.

  And closing.

  It was a peculiar thing. Flud remembered a sales call he once made to a house in a large city. There was a dog in the fenced yard, a German Shepherd. It opened its mouth as if to bark, but there was no sound, just silence. A mouth opening, and closing. The owner said the dog was a nuisance barker, so he had its vocal chords cut.

  Prospects didn’t look good, admittedly. On the verge of not making the final turn that would take him to the farmyard, Flud reminded himself of that odd duck who lived in the roadside shack on the way to Butternut. Happened a couple years ago. Flud wasn’t even pitching; his radiator did the geyser bit and he just wanted to find a phone. The man in the shack babbled about baseball and the Apocalypse, but once Flud spilled about his business, the duck ordered two sets of encyclopedias, paid cash in advance.

  So yes, Flud made the turn, at the mailbox that said “Platzanweiser.”

  The driveway descended gradually off the main road, past the white farm house, then into a circle that looped around the farmyard, past the granary, barn, chicken coop, the stark empty branches of the grove hanging over the roof, the shuttered brooder house, and back to the farm house again.

  Flud parked in the shade at the bottom of the driveway, alongside a dying flower garden, the entrance to the circle. He gathered up his sample volumes, brochure packet, and order book, and left the car.

  The farmyard was silent. Not summer quiet. Not the quiet of peaceful, lazy hammock days. Silent. The silence of mouths opening, and closing. The silence of a barnyard occupied by mute chickens and tongue-tied hogs.

  Flud had seen dilapidated farms before, but this was different. The granary, workshop, corn crib, barn, the others, weren’t simply falling apart; they were decaying, like roadkill.

  The barn for instance, had lost most of its red luster. A pale greenish substance spiderwebbed across it now, mold or some other form of life that suggested decline. Most older barns sagged or caved in on themselves, but not this one. It seemed sturdy enough. It just looked... diseased.

  Flud proceeded to the farm house. Going along the ancient stone walk that led to the dwelling, he began to whistle, then just let the air out quietly, feeling like he was doing something wrong. The house bore signs of a more subtle decay. Hairline cracks around the unclean windows. A strange gathering of black mushroom-like growths at the base of the brick chimney. The sunlight didn’t seem to penetrate the interior of the house. It was twilight inside.

  A small weather-worn box hung on the door frame. A clock with a moving wooden hour hand, a doll-figure above the clock and the words “We’ll Be Back At...” A tiny knob on a miniature door. Flud opened it, recoiled slightly when a spider scooted away.

  He drove an image from his mind of a larger arachnid lurking behind the greater door. Knocked.

  Waited.

  Again.

  Flud turned and headed back into the farmyard. In cases like this he typically found the owner working in one of the out buildings, or busy in the fields.

  Sidestepping a grouping of cluckless chickens, Flud scoped out the coop, wiping the webs from the filthy windows, moving along to the chicken wire door. Wooden roosts in the middle of the floor occupied by molting, disordered hens, wooden nests on each side wall. A rooster strutting along the dirt floor, beak opening, and closing. How to wake up in the morning when the rooster does not crow? Then on to the barn. The side door was open. A meowless tomcat skittered between a stack of hay bales. Flud took a tentative step inside and called out, “Hello! Anybody home?” His voice sounded harsh, unwelcome, alien even to him.

  He wandered further down, to the hog house, where the dumb pigs jostled for a spot in the shadows alongside the tainted building, the only sound their heavy bristly bodies thumping down onto the cracked earth.

  The granary next, which sat alongside a narrow creek. Like the other structures, discolored and decrepit. He climbed the steps and reached for the latch that would enable him t
o slide the door open along its rollers, then saw that it was padlocked.

  “Get off my land.”

  Flud dropped his samples. It wasn’t so much the tone or content, but the fact that there was a voice on this voiceless plot of earth at all.

  He turned.

  And dropped his brochures and order book.

  A farmer, in blue overalls, work boots, faded green feed company cap. Across his eyes was a piece of glass. Not eyeglass. Red glass. A narrow band, not curved, held in place by baling wire.

  “Uh, excuse me, ah, Mr. Platzanweiser, isn’t it?” said Flud, coming down the steps and picking up his sample volumes and brochures from the parched grass. “Is the, uh, lady of the house in?”