Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  The smell of the alcohol the human was pouring reached her from the kitchen. She swallowed more tap water, filling the hollow spaces inside her, squinching her eyes against the following, welcome pain.

  She straightened and turned off the tap, then checked her nails to see if the white crescents of soap had gotten loose. They gave her hands the appearance of a careful manicure. She stuffed them into her pockets as she walked down the hall.

  As Tamara came down the hall, she saw Gretchen bent over the breakfast bar in the kitchen, a strip of pale skin revealed between her shirt and the band of her jeans. The male stumped about the kitchen on elbow crutches, which he had produced when Gretchen and Tamara helped him into his car. The wheelchair was because he couldn’t shoot pool with something in his hands, he said.

  Tamara had been all for eating him in the parking lot, but Gretchen had thought it better to wait. For privacy, and leisure, in which to enjoy their first good meal in days.

  Tamara cleared her throat. And Gretchen jumped a little—guiltily? Tamara flinched in silent sympathy. We cannot live like this. We just cannot.

  It was an effort to think we, and that almost moved her to tears. It was an effort, too, to remember divinity. To remember certainty. To remember what it had been like to be clean.

  hungry, she said, and felt Gretchen stretch inside her skin. Gretchen grinned and ran her tongue over her teeth, and together they moved forward. Soon there would be blood and sinew, bone and flesh—and if not an end to thirst and hunger, sweet surcease, for as long as the dining lasted.

  The air was cool and full of rich smells. Tamara’s feet were springy on the floor. One more step forward. One more.

  Over the spit of bacon, without turning, the male said, “I’d reconsider that if I were you.”

  Gretchen checked, and Tamara hesitated a half-step later. She hissed between her teeth as the male lifted bacon from the grease with tongs, set it on a paper napkin, and turned off the heat under the pan. Only then did he turn, leaning heavily on his elbow crutches.

  tamara? Gretchen said, and Tamara’s breath almost sliced her; the name struck her like a cue ball. Sisters did not need names. Not between sisters. Names were a human-thing, part of the lie.

  She bit blood from her cheek as Gretchen said, again, tamara?!

  The human male said, “He won’t take you back, you know. You can starve yourself to the bone, starve yourself until you’re blades, starve yourselves until your human hearts stop—and he will never forgive you. Time does not offer second chances. History does not give do-overs. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to be entropy’s angels again. The only kind of angel you can ever be from now on is fallen.”

  That whine. That was her. Or was it Gretchen?

  The male—not a human male, no, she’d been fooled by his disguise, but she knew from his words that he must be an angel too, of some one of the dark Gods or another—continued. “Or you can learn to live in the world.”

  She should have stepped forward, rent him with her nails, shredded with her teeth. But she could taste it already, the grease of his flesh, the fat and the soil. She drove her nails into her own palms again. Gretchen crouched beside her. “You’re not the Master’s. You are not a Hound.”

  “No,” the male said, leaning on his crutches so they squeaked on the linoleum. “I was born to the Father of Frogs. But I belong to myself now. Like you.”

  “You failed. You fell.”

  “I climbed, my angels.”

  And that explained why he smelled of sea air and not sour maggoty meat. Unlike Tamara, who could feel her own flesh rotting on the bones when she breathed too deep.

  Filthy. Greasy. Everything was dirt. Tamara sobbed and licked blood from her nails, tasting the soap, stronger than ever. Some of it was her own blood. She wished that some of it was the watery blood of this smiling monster.

  “I won’t be dirty. I won’t be hungry,” Gretchen said, her hands bridged on the tile, one knee dropped. Her voice rose. “I won’t be dirty forever. I won’t.”

  The male’s face was soft. Compassionate. Sickening. He tilted his head. “You’ll be dirty,” he said, pitiless as the Master, “or you’ll be dead. Being hungry is being human. Can they bear more than you?”

  Gretchen recoiled. Tamara thrust her thumb into her mouth, sucked the clean moon crescent of soap onto her tongue. She swallowed, hard, and again, and again, sucking each finger clean, feeling the soap reach her stomach, acid and alcohol hissing around it.

  The male would not stop talking. She didn’t think he’d stop if she jammed her fingers in her ears. “And that’s the human condition. None of us can get clean. The world is sticky.

  “And we don’t have to like it.

  “But you can’t be an angel anymore. So you’re going to have to learn to talk to each other.”

  you can’t know that

  Tamara didn’t know if she’d said it, or Gretchen. Gretchen, from the lift of her shoulders, the upward glance, did not know either. The sound was dim, broken.

  “I know,” Pinky said, and held out one ugly hand, with its filed thick nails and its bulging knuckles. The webs that stretched between the fingers were vestigial, greenish, vascular along the underside of the membrane. He spread them wide. “I used to be a terrible angel too.”

  The soap, the words, the dirt, the blood. Something was coming back up. Something. Tamara went to her knees beside Gretchen, smacked down on the slate floor (so smooth, so hard, so planar). She retched. A thin stream of frothy bile trickled between her gritted teeth. She heard Gretchen whine.

  And then someone was there, holding her, stroking her hair, pushing the flat feathered strands out of her eyes, his sleek aluminum props splayed out on either side. “Shh,” said the monster, the fallen angel, the inhuman man. “Shhh,” he said, and held her head as she bent down again and vomited soap and liquor on what had been a scrubbed floor, her belly clenched around cramping agony. “We don’t eat soap,” he said, and petted her until she stopped choking. “We don’t eat soap. Silly angel.”

  She lifted her head, when she could, when the yellow slaver no longer dripped down her jowls. Pinky Gilman leaned over her, his wattled throat soft, tender, so close to her aching jaws. She lifted her head and saw her sister staring back at her.

  A held breath. A quick shake of the head. Sharp silence, so hard that it might have ricocheted.

  And Tamara, looking at Gretchen, heard the answer not because she knew it, but because she would once have known.

  The Uninvited

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  Christopher Fowler is the multi-award-winning author of twenty-six novels and collections of short stories. He is currently writing the Bryant & May mysteries. His latest novel is White Corridor and his new story collection is entitled Old Devil Moon.

  His short story “The Master Builder” was made into a CBS movie starring Tippi Hedren and Marg Helgenberger, and his Left Hand Drive won the London Short Film Festival’s award for Best British Short Film.

  Fowler has also written the critically acclaimed graphic novel Menz Insana and currently writes for the national press and the BBC. He lives in King’s Cross, London.

  The elaborate silvered gates stood wide apart, ready to accept guests. You couldn’t arrive on foot, of course; there was nowhere to walk, except in the drive or through the sprinkler-wet grass, and it would have looked foolish climbing toward the house in the headlights of arriving cars.

  Inside, the first thing I saw was an avenue of rustling palms, their slender trunks wound with twinkling blue and white lights, like giant candy sticks. Two robotically handsome valets in gold and crimson jackets were parking the cars, mostly sparkling black Mercedes, Daimlers, Volvos. The staircase was flanked by six teenaged waitresses in tiny red Santa outfits tentatively dispensing delicate flutes of champagne. A floodlit house, oblong, low and very white, was arranged on two levels between banked bottle green lawns. I could hear muted laughter, murmuring, a delicate presence of guests
. I saw silhouettes passing before the rippled phosphorescence of a pool with translucent globes pacing its perimeter. There was no sign of our host, but on the patio a butler, chef, bartenders, and waiters were arranged behind banks of lurid, fleshy lobster tails and carrot batons.

  There was a muffled beat in the air, the music designed to create ambience without being recognizable; Beatles’ songs rescored for a jazz trio. It was the end of the sixties, the age of Aquarius. Smokey Robinson and Dionne Warwick were on the charts, but there were no black people there that night except me.

  In Los Angeles, parties aren’t about letting your hair down and having fun. They’re for networking, appraising, bargaining, being seen, and ticked from a list. There were two kinds of guests roaming the house that night, ones who would have been noticed by their absence, and others who had been invited merely to fill up dead space. It goes without saying that I was in the latter group. Only Sidney Poitier would have made it into the former.

  It was the home of Cary Dell, a slow-witted middleweight studio executive at MGM, and I remember seeing plenty of almost-familiar faces; Jacqueline Bisset, Victoria Vetri, Ralph Meeker, a couple of casting directors, some black-suited agents lurking together in a corner, fish-eyeing everyone else. The important people were seated in a semicircular sunken lounge, lost among oversized purple cushions. The area was so exclusive that it might as well have had velvet ropes around it. Everyone else worked hard at keeping the conversation balloon-light and airborne, but couldn’t resist glancing over to the pit to see what was going on at the real center of the party.

  There was another kind of guest there that night. Dell had invited some beautiful young girls. No one unsavory—they weren’t hookers—just absurdly perfect, with slender waists and basalt eyes. They stood together tapping frosted pink nails on the sides of their martini glasses, flicking their hair, looking about, waiting for someone to talk to them.

  Parties like this took place all over the Hollywood hills; the old school still arrived in tuxedos and floor-length gowns, but studios had lately rediscovered the youth movie, and were shamelessly courting the same antiestablishment students they had ridiculed five years earlier. I had made a couple of very bad exploitation flicks, usually cast as the kind of comic sidekick whose only purpose was his amusing blackness. Back in those days I believed in visibility at any cost, and always took the work.

  I had a feeling I’d been added to the guest list by Dell’s secretary in order to make up numbers and provide him with a sheen of coolness, because I wore fringed brown leather trousers and had my hair in an Afro, and hadn’t entirely lost my Harlem jive. He sure hadn’t invited me for my conversation; we’d barely spoken more than two words to each other. If we had, Dell would have realized I came from a middle-class family.

  I remember it was a cool night toward the end of November. The wind had dropped, and there were scents of patchouli and hashish in the air. The party was loosening up a little, the music rising in volume and tempo. Some of the beautiful girls were desultorily dancing together on a circular white rug in the lounge. I had been to a few of these parties and they always followed the same form, peaking at ten-thirty, with the guests calling for their cars soon after. People drank and drove more in those days, of course, but nobody of any importance stayed late because the studios began work at 4:00 A.M.

  I was starting to think about leaving before undergoing the embarrassment of waiting for my battered Mustang to be brought around front, when there was a commotion of raised voices out on the patio, and I saw someone go into the pool fully dressed, a gaunt middle-aged man in a black suit. It was difficult to find out what had happened, because everyone was crowding around the water’s edge. All I know is, when they pulled him out of the chlorine a minute later, he was dead. I read in the LA Times next day that he’d twisted his neck hitting the concrete lip as he went in, and had died within seconds. He was granted a brief obituary in Variety because he’d featured in a lame Disney film called Monkeys, Go Home. I remember thinking that the press reports were being uncharacteristically cautious about the death. I guess nobody wanted to risk implying that Dell had been keeping a disorderly house, and there was no suggestion of it being anything other than an unfortunate accident. Dell was a big player in a union town.

  As I drove back to the valley that night, passing above the crystalline grid of the city, I passed one of the beautiful girls walking alone along the side of the road with her shoes in her hand, thumbing a ride, and knew she’d come here from the Midwest, leaving all her friends and family behind just so she could be hired as eye-candy to stand around at parties. I remember thinking how nobody would miss her if she disappeared. I felt sad about it, but I didn’t stop for her. Black men didn’t stop to pick up white girls back then; you didn’t want a situation to develop.

  The work dried up for a couple of months, but on a storm-heavy night in February I was invited to another studio party, this time a more low-key affair in Silverlake, where single palms crested the orange sky on the brows of hills, and Hispanic families sat in their doorways watching their kids play ball. You can tell poorer neighborhoods by the amount of cabling they carry above their houses, and this area had plenty. I pulled over by an empty lot and was still map-reading under the street lamp when I heard the dull thump of music start up behind me, and realized the party was being held in a converted brownstone loft—they were pretty much a novelty back then—so I parked and made my way to the top floor.

  The building’s exterior may have been shabby, but the inside was Cartier class. The whole top floor had been stripped back to brickwork and turned into one big, open space, because the owner was a photographer who used it as his studio. He handled on-set shoots for Paramount, and had coincidentally taken my headshots a couple of years earlier. It was good to think he hadn’t forgotten me, and this event was a lot friendlier than the last. I recognized a couple of girls I’d auditioned with the month before, and we got to talking, then sharing a joint. The music was Hendrix—Electric Ladyland, I think. Pulmonary gel-colors spun out across the walls, and the conversation was louder, edgier, but it was still a pretty high-end layout.

  It was the photographer’s thirtieth birthday and he’d invited some pretty big names, but it was getting harder to tell the old money from the new, because everyone was dressed down in beads and kaftans. The new producers and actors were sprawled across canary-yellow beanbags in a narcoleptic fug, while the industry seniors stuck to martinis at the bar. I was having a pretty good time with my lady friends when I saw them again.

  Perhaps because nobody had noticed me at Dell’s house, I noticed everything, and now I recognized the new arrivals as they came in. There were four of them, two girls and two men, all in late teens to mid-twenties, and I distinctly recalled them from Dell’s Christmas party because they’d stood together in a tight group, as though they didn’t know anyone else. They were laughing together and watching everyone, as though they were in on a private joke no one else could share.

  I admit I was a little stoned and feeling kind of tripped out, but there was something about them I found unsettling. I got the feeling they hadn’t been invited, and were there for some other purpose. They were as observant as agents. They stayed in the corner, watching and whispering, and I wanted to go up to them, to ask what they were doing, but the girls were distracting me and—you know how that goes.

  I left a few minutes after midnight, just as things were starting to heat up. I went with the girls back to their hotel. They needed a ride, and I needed the company. When I woke up the next morning, they had already vacated the room. There was only a lipstick-scrawled message from them on the bathroom mirror—plenty of kisses but no contact numbers. I picked up the industry dailies in the IHOP on Santa Monica, and there on page five found a report of the party I’d attended the night before. Some high-society singer I’d vaguely recalled seeing drunkenly arguing with his girlfriend had fallen down the stairs as he left the party, gone all the way from the apartmen
t door to the landing below. He was expected to recover but might have sustained brain damage. Fans were waiting outside his hospital room with flowers.

  Two parties, two accidents—it happens. There were studio parties all over town every night of the week, but it felt weird that I’d been at both of them. You had to be invited, of course, but there wasn’t the strict door policy that there is now. No security guards with headsets, sometimes not even a checklist. People came and went, and it was hard to tell if anyone was gate crashing; the hosts generally assumed you wouldn’t dare. They were insulated from the world. I remember attending a shindig in Brentwood where the toilet overflowed through the dining room, and everyone acted like there was nothing wrong because they assumed the maids would clear it up. Hollywood’s like that.

  Maybe you can see a pattern emerging in this story, but at the time I failed to spot it. I was too preoccupied; with auditions, with my career, with having a good time. The town felt different then, footloose and slightly lost, caught between classic old-time moviemaking and the rising counterculture. They needed to cater to the new generation of rootless teens who were growing impatient with the world they’d been handed. The producers wanted to make renegade art statements but didn’t know how, and they couldn’t entirely surrender the movies of the past. People forget that Hello Dolly! came out the same year as Easy Rider.

  Strange times. In Vietnam, Lt. William Calley’s platoon of U.S. soldiers slaughtered five hundred unarmed Vietnamese, mainly women and children, at My Lai. Many of us had buddies over there, and heard stories of old women thrown down wells with grenades tossed in after them. Those who were left behind felt powerless, but there was an anger growing that seeped between the cracks in our daily lives, upsetting the rhythm of the city, the state, and eventually the whole nation. I’d never seen demonstrations on the streets of LA before now, and I’d heard the same thing was happening in Washington, Chicago, even in Denver.