Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  I’d noticed back in the hospital how all these people seemed to be hanging around near the spot where they’d died. As if they were anchored to it somehow, and unable to leave. Repeating actions that they’d once performed in the places where they’d once performed them, never straying too far.

  Did this mean that they were just mindless after-images? Photographs of past actions, fading slowly with time?

  No, seemed to be the answer to that one. Otherwise that girl would never have come over and led me to safety. The dead were aware. Of the living, if not of themselves.

  Grandma saw me and smiled. Then seemed to forget me again, and moved on.

  I stood at the edge of the pool and looked into the deep end. The level had fallen, but with a pumping-out rate of more than eighty gallons a minute, it should have fallen more.

  The waders were a size too large for me, but no matter. I’d manage. I took the long boat hook from the wall and climbed down the steps with it. The pole was about fifteen feet long and the double hook on the end was a small one, meant for snagging the cord on a life preserver to pull it over to safety. I moved gingerly down the sloping tile, and when I reached the water’s edge I went in up to my waist and then extended the hook down toward the drain cover.

  It shouldn’t have lifted as easily as it did. It should have been bolted down, but it wasn’t. I lost my purchase on it and the water pressure sucked it back into place again, but when I got the hook in for the second time I was able to pull it completely clear. The grille spun around in the water and settled with a muffled clank. I advanced a little farther and probed with the hook, down into the darkness of the uncovered drain.

  I’ve a theory, of sorts. I don’t think that ghosts are the people they were. They’re more like the husks of people, the stuff left behind that the dead don’t need. Shedding the earthly form like a reptile with its skin. It just doesn’t make sense to me that we move on into any kind of afterlife with every scrap of material baggage that this life has thrown our way. We all have that experience of looking at the body of someone we love and knowing in an instant that they’re no longer there. That they’ve dumped the body and flown.

  And yet with ghosts, an image of the physical body is exactly what we see. Even down to clothing. Where’s the sense in that? Where do you draw the line? Jewelry? Dandruff?

  My dad’s collection of useful-seeming timber?

  Down there in the drain, my hook met resistance. I pushed a bit harder and felt it yield. It was like pushing into soft wax. I turned the pole in my hands and tried to work the hook around, looking to see if I could get any purchase.

  So my theory is this: There’s a condition where you can see things that aren’t there to be seen, but which you’ve picked up with other senses. It’s called synaesthesia. You taste words, you feel colors as texture. It’s real to one sense, but manifests as another.

  I reckon there has to be an equivalent condition where we pick up on the presence of those shed husks with whatever primitive antenna we’ve forgotten we have, and something makes us render it as a visual experience. The presence is real. And we really see it. But we’re summoning the picture out of more subtle information.

  I heard the steam room door. Out came the Sheriff, spitting dust and cursing. “Bloody thing.”

  I didn’t look up. “What?”

  “Got a piece of shit in my eye.”

  “Should have worn the goggles.”

  I’m guessing it must be a brain thing. I had it in spades for a while, and as my injuries got better I lost it. Some people reckon they’re born with it. But usually you get it when your head’s in a state. You don’t have to fall off a wall like I did. Fear, loss, grief—anything that makes you susceptible will do it.

  The invisible, made visible. For as long as it lasts.

  I could feel something against the hook, so I renewed my grip on the pole and pulled. Nothing happened at first, but I kept up the pressure and then, slowly, I felt something beginning to slide. It was like drawing a cork. Steady pressure, steady pressure, and then out it came.

  It erupted out of the drain in a cloud of matter, which immediately swirled around and was sucked back into the hole like a genie into its bottle. I walked backwards out of the water, pulling the cargo on my hook like a sack of mussels up the beach.

  The Sheriff gawped, and forgot the splinter in his eye.

  “What the fuck is that?” he said.

  “I think it used to be a little lad,” I told him.

  And I was glad that I was out of the water by then, because he puked in it.

  They linger close to where they died.

  That was something I understood from very early on. I don’t know how long for and I don’t know why, but it’s what I’d observed.

  His name was Johnny Jaggs and he’d been missing for almost a year. They’d looked all over for him, but they hadn’t looked here. Why would they? Only members used the pool.

  But Jaggs and a couple of others had climbed over the fence on the barbecue terrace on a crowded summer’s day and once they were in, they hadn’t been challenged. Jaggs was the youngest, and the smallest. The others had brought him along because they thought he’d be small enough to get into the swimming pool drain and pick up the loose change they’d convinced themselves would be down there.

  They were wrong about the change, right about his size. Small enough to get in, but not strong enough to fight the current and get out again. Instead of raising the alarm when he didn’t resurface, they’d reacted in a way I recognized only too well.

  They’d run home and established alibis, and kept their silence as the search began.

  In the end it took a couple of child psychologists to get the full story out of them. As concerns had risen, the price of confession had quickly become too high until, after a while, they’d begun to believe in the tale as they told it.

  I’d pulled only a part of him out of the drain. The chlorinated water had done things to the flesh and they took the rest of him out in pieces, like a late abortion. He’d only partially blocked the pipe. The efficiency of the pumps had been reduced, but not enough to make anyone act. There’s a high turnover of staff in these places and it’s hard to get anyone to care.

  Our bosses took a hammering over our black-economy working setup, but not as much as they deserved. There was talk of nailing me and Peter for benefit fraud. I don’t know about Peter but I’m still waiting to hear.

  I didn’t tell anyone what had led me to the blockage. I let them think it was the slow rate at which the pool had been draining, and left it at that.

  Whatever haunts the pool and the steam room, I don’t believe that it’s little Johnny Jaggs himself. It’s something he left behind at the moment of his passing, the pattern of the form in which he walked in this world, a coat that he shucked off and let fall. It’s the same with all of them. Incomplete, discarded, abandoned. Left to hover, to wander, and eventually to fade. To be sensed and, when conditions are right, to be seen.

  But whatever they might be, whether or not they remember what they were, I do know that they see us too. They know when something’s not right, and they’ll try to get our attention. It seems to worry them. If there’s anything I can do to ease that worry, I won’t hesitate. I don’t care if it costs me a job, or gets me into trouble.

  When others ran or looked away, one of them was there for me.

  So what if they’re only the dead? I still owe them my life.

  The Forest

  LAIRD BARRON

  Laird Barron was born in Alaska, where he raised and trained huskies for many years. He migrated to the Pacific Northwest in the mid nineties and began to concentrate on writing poetry and fiction.

  His award-nominated work has appeared in SCI FICTION and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Year’s Best Fantasy 6, and Horror: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition.

  Barron currently resides in Olympia, Washin
gton, where he is working on a number of projects.

  After the drive had grown long and monotonous, Partridge shut his eyes and the woman was waiting. She wore a cold white mask similar to the mask Bengali woodcutters donned when they ventured into the mangrove forests along the coast. The tigers of the forest were stealthy. The tigers hated to be watched; they preferred to sneak up on prey from behind, so natives wore the masks on the backs of their heads as they gathered wood. Sometimes this kept the tigers from dragging them away.

  The woman in the cold white mask reached into a wooden box. She lifted a tarantula from the box and held it to her breast like a black carnation. The contrast was as magnificent as a stark Monet if Monet had painted watercolors of emaciated patricians and their pet spiders.

  Partridge sat on his high wooden chair and whimpered in animal terror. In the daydream, he was always very young and powerless. The woman tilted her head. She came near and extended the tarantula in her long gray hand. “For you,” she said. Sometimes she carried herself more like Father and said in a voice of gravel, “Here is the end of fear.” Sometimes the tarantula was a hissing cockroach of prehistoric girth, or a horned beetle. Sometimes it was a strange, dark flower. Sometimes it was an embryo uncurling to form a miniature adult human that grinned a monkey’s hateful grin.

  The woman offered him a black phone. The woman said, “Come say good-bye and good luck. Come quick!” Except the woman did not speak. Toshi’s breathless voice bled through the receiver. The woman in the cold white mask brightened then dimmed like a dying coal or a piece of metal coiling into itself.

  Partridge opened his eyes and rested his brow against window glass. He was alone with the driver. The bus trawled through a night forest. Black trees dripped with fog. The narrow black road crumbled from decades of neglect. Sometimes poor houses and fences stood among the weeds and the ferns and mutely suggested many more were lost in the dark. Wilderness had arisen to reclaim its possessions.

  Royals hunted in woods like these. He snapped on the overhead lamp and then opened his briefcase. Stags, wild boar, witches. Convicts. The briefcase was nearly empty. He had tossed in some traveler’s checks, a paperback novel, and his address book. No cell phone, although he left a note for his lawyer and a recorded message at Kyla’s place in Malibu warning them it might be a few days, perhaps a week; that there probably was not even phone service where he was going. Carry on, carry on. He had hopped a redeye jet to Boston and once there eschewed the convenience of renting a car or hiring a chauffeur and limo. He chose instead the relative anonymity of mass transit. The appeal of traveling incognito overwhelmed his normally staid sensibilities. Here was the first adventure he had undertaken in ages. The solitude presented an opportunity to compose his thoughts—his excuses, more likely.

  He’d cheerfully abandoned the usual host of unresolved items and potential brushfires that went with the territory—a possible trip to the Andes if a certain Famous Director’s film got green-lighted and if the Famous Director’s drunken assertion to assorted executive producers and hangers-on over barbecued ribs and flaming daiquiris at the Monarch Grille that Richard Jefferson Partridge was the only man for the job meant a blessed thing. There were several smaller opportunities, namely an L.A. documentary about a powerhouse high school basketball team that recently graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, unless the documentary guy, a Cannes Film Festival sweetheart, decided to try to bring down the Governor of California instead, as he had threatened to do time and again, a pet crusade of his with the elections coming that fall, and then the director would surely use his politically savvy compatriot, the cinematographer from France. He’d also been approached regarding a proposed documentary about prisoners and guards at San Quentin. Certainly there were other, lesser engagements he’d lost track of, these doubtless scribbled on memo pads in his home office.

  He knew he should hire a reliable secretary. He promised himself to do just that every year. It was hard. He missed Jean. She’d had a lazy eye and a droll wit; made bad coffee and kept sand-filled frogs and fake petunias on her desk. Jean left him for Universal Studios and then slammed into a reef in Maui learning to surf with her new boss. The idea of writing the want ad, of sorting the applications and conducting the interviews and finally letting the new person, the stranger, sit where Jean had sat and handle his papers, summoned a mosquito’s thrum in the bones behind Partridge’s ear.

  These details would surely keep despite what hysterics might come in the meanwhile. Better, much better, not to endure the buzzing and whining and the imprecations and demands that he return at once on pain of immediate career death, over a dicey relay.

  He had not packed a camera, either. He was on vacation. His mind would store what his eye could catch and that was all.

  The light was poor. Partridge held the address book close to his face. He had scribbled the directions from margin to margin and drawn a crude map with arrows and lopsided boxes and jotted the initials of the principals: Dr. Toshi Ryoko, Dr. Howard Campbell, Beasley, and Nadine. Of course, Nadine—she snapped her fingers and here he came at a loyal trot. There were no mileposts on the road to confirm the impression that his destination was near. The weight in his belly sufficed. It was a fat stone grown from a pebble.

  Partridge’s instincts did not fail him. A few minutes before dawn, the forest receded and they entered Warrenburgh. Warrenburgh was a loveless hamlet of crabbed New England shop fronts and angular plank and shingle houses with tall, thin doors and oily windows. Streetlights glowed along Main Street with black gaps like a broken pearl necklace. The street itself was buckled and rutted by poorly tarred cracks that caused sections to cohere as uneasily as interleaved ice floes. The sea loomed near and heavy and palpable beneath a layer of rolling gloom.

  Partridge did not like what little he glimpsed of the surroundings. Long ago, his friend Toshi had resided in New Mexico and Southern California, did his best work in Polynesia and the jungles of Central America. The doctor was a creature of warmth and light. Rolling Stone had characterized him as “a rock star among zoologists” and as the “Jacques Cousteau of the jungle,” the kind of man who hired mercenaries to guard him, performers to entertain his sun-drenched villa, and filmmakers to document his exploits. This temperate landscape, so cool and provincial, so removed from Partridge’s experience of all things Toshi, seemed to herald a host of unwelcome revelations.

  Beasley, longstanding attendant of the eccentric researcher, waited at the station. “Rich! At least you don’t look like the big asshole Variety says you are.” He nodded soberly and scooped Partridge up for a brief hug in his powerful arms. This was like being embraced by an earthmover. Beasley had played Australian rules football for a while after he left the Army and before he came to work for Toshi. His nose was squashed and his ears were cauliflowers. He was magnetic and striking as any character actor, nonetheless. “Hey, let me get that.” He set Partridge aside and grabbed the luggage the driver had dragged from the innards of the bus. He hoisted the suitcases into the bed of a ’56 Ford farm truck. The truck was museum quality. It was fire engine red with a dinky American flag on the antenna.

  They rumbled inland. Rusty light gradually exposed counterchanged shelves of empty fields and canted telephone poles strung together with thick dipping old-fashioned cables. Ducks pelted from a hollow in the road. The ducks spread themselves in a wavering pattern against the sky.

  “Been shooting?” Partridge indicated the .20 gauge softly clattering in the rack behind their heads.

  “When T isn’t looking. Yeah, I roam the marshes a bit. You?”

  “No.”

  “Yah?”

  “Not in ages. Things get in the way. Life, you know?”

  “Oh, well, we’ll go out one day this week. Bag a mallard or two. Raise the dust.”

  Partridge stared at the moving scenery. Toshi was disinterested in hunting and thought it generally a waste of energy. Nadine detested the sport without reserve. He tasted brackish water, metallic f
rom the canteen. The odor of gun oil and cigarette smoke was strong in the cab. The smell reminded him of hip waders, muddy clay banks, and gnats in their biting millions among the reeds. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Forget it, man.”

  They drove in silence until Beasley hooked left onto a dirt road that followed a ridge of brambles and oak trees. On the passenger side overgrown pastures dwindled into moiling vapors. The road was secured by a heavy iron gate with the usual complement of grimy warning signs. Beasley climbed out and unlocked the gate and swung it aside. Partridge realized that somehow this was the same ruggedly charismatic Beasley, plus a streak of gray in the beard and minus the springloaded tension and the whiskey musk. Beasley at peace was an enigma. Maybe he had quit the bottle for good this time around. The thought was not as comforting as it should have been. If this elemental truth—Beasley the chronic drunk, the lovable, but damaged brute—had ceased to hold, then what else lurked in the wings?

  When they had begun to jounce along the washboard lane, Partridge said, “Did T get sick? Somebody—think Frank Ledbetter—told me T had some heart problems. Angina.”

  “Frankie … I haven’t seen him since forever. He still working for Boeing?”

  “Lockheed Martin.”

  “Yah? Good ol’ L&M. Well, no business like war business,” Beasley said. “The old boy’s fine. Sure, things were in the shitter for a bit after New Guinea, but we all got over it. Water down the sluice.” Again, the knowing, sidelong glance. “Don’t worry so much. He misses you. Everybody does, man.”

  Toshi’s farm was more of a compound lumped in the torso of a great, irregular field. The road terminated in a hardpack lot bordered by a sprawl of sheds and shacks, gutted chicken coops, and labyrinthine hog pens fallen to ruin. The main house, a Queen Anne, dominated. The house was a full three stories of spires, gables, spinning iron weathercocks, and acres of slate tiles. A monster of a house, yet somehow hunched upon itself. It was brooding and squat and low as a brick and timber mausoleum. The detached garage seemed new. So too the tarp and plastic-sheeted nurseries, the electric fence that partitioned the back forty into quadrants, and the military drab shortwave antenna array crowning the A-frame barn. No private security forces were in evidence, no British mercenaries with submachine guns on shoulder slings, nor packs of sleek, bullet-headed attack dogs cruising the property. The golden age had obviously passed into twilight.