Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  Chris himself is, of course, completely unaffected by the disease, and the medics are astonished by how efficacious their treatments are in expelling the virus from his bloodstream.

  7

  Three days after the disaster of 9/11, Chris walks on his own two feet out of the wreckage of the Twin Towers. His latest girlfriend, Jennifer, is less lucky.

  A pity. I liked her.

  8

  No one is ever able to ascertain the identity of the organization that planted a bomb aboard flight 063 from New York to Paris, leading to the deaths soon after takeoff of all 271 passengers and crew aboard the aircraft, but the government uses the event as an excuse to go off and blitz some obscure Middle Eastern nation that most of us couldn’t before have found on the map. Thousands die on both sides, although the vast majority of the casualties are comfortably foreign, dusky-skinned, and thereby anonymous.

  Chris and I watch the news bulletins about the war on television together. Although the airline records are insistent that he boarded the plane, and although some of his personal belongings have been found among the debris scattered across Long Island Sound, in point of fact Chris changed his mind at the last moment, for reasons unspecified, and never showed up for the flight. I know this to be so, for he was here at home on the fateful morning in question, even though I cannot recall him being so. If the feds knew he was still alive, they would undoubtedly have some probing questions to ask of him.

  He is speaking now, I think to me, although he seems to be addressing the screen. I have too many thoughts of my own to be willing to let his intrude upon them. Even the scattered phrases that dart in slyly to pierce my mind’s shell are distraction enough. “I do feel things, you know, Dad?” and “I can’t help the way I’m made—you and Mom did that” and “Whatever my body needs to do to survive, it does” and “I wish we could speak to each other more, Dad” and “I wish I could think you were listening.”

  Gadfly thoughts. Reflexively I swat them away.

  Time passes.

  He falls silent.

  The evening crawls onward.

  I glance frequently sidelong at Chris’s eyes, glittering with reflected light from the moving images on the television screen, and realize from the relaxed way he slumps on the couch that it has never crossed his mind to do some requisite counting.

  9

  But I have been counting his lives.

  I am in the garage. Chris has gone to bed a half-hour ago or more, and I will give him another hour to make sure he is sound asleep. I have written a letter of explanation and left it sealed in an innocuous white envelope in the middle of the kitchen table, so that it cannot fail to be discovered in the morning. I have checked that the little diesel tank of the chain saw is full, and that the motor is completely functional. I have checked that the horrible little revolver I bought yesterday is loaded, and that the mechanism functions smoothly. In theory the revolver should be enough on its own, but people have been known to recover from supposedly lethal gunshot wounds, even from multiple bullets in the brain, and I anyway am not certain enough of my own competence in ensuring that the shots I fire will be fatal. The chain saw will, I hope, guarantee the efficacy of my efforts.

  The revolver should be enough for myself, afterwards.

  I have nothing to do for the next hour or so except remember Alice, and Honey, and Marian, and Andrea, and Jennifer.

  And Harry.

  Dick.

  Bill.

  People I have loved, or some of them people I have simply liked.

  All of them are gone now. All of them have been outlived.

  I bought a pack of cigarettes as well as a revolver yesterday. I haven’t smoked since high school, having been permanently frightened away from the weed by all the reports on the health dangers. No need now for such fears. I tap one out and light it, then pour myself another single-malt scotch, reminding myself that I must take care to remain sober enough to perform this night’s task successfully.

  Before he went to bed, Chris stopped at the bottom of the stairs and for once looked me straight in the eye. “I’m not the only one who’s survived, Dad,” he said. “There are dozens of different ways people can learn to survive things. You’re a survivor too, in your own way.”

  I didn’t understand him.

  His gaze dropped, and he turned away.

  Now I sit on the workbench I’ve never thought to work on and enjoy a perfect calm as I watch the clouds of my gray cigarette smoke swirl, dissipate, and very swiftly die.

  Ghorla

  MARK SAMUELS

  Mark Samuels is the author of two collections, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales and Black Altars. His third collection of short stories is provisionally titled Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes, and is scheduled to be published by Midnight House in 2008. He has been nominated twice for the British Fantasy Award.

  For more information, his Web site can be found at www.mark-samuels.net.

  My contention is that high-level sentience collapses in on itself near death

  in a manner akin to the demise of a massive star and that dying thoughts

  approach infinite duration. Postmortem, these thoughts, if driven by a will

  of sufficient power, can tumble over a synaptic event horizon and subsequently

  appear in another body with an almost exact genetic identity. Such

  “heirs” are subject to the invasion of their minds by ideas and emotions

  that originate with the dead. The living are simply vehicles for a series of

  disturbing and broken alien responses that we take to be our own personalities.

  I now believe that the majority of thoughts we think actually come

  from the “ghost shells” of ancestors in varying states of psychical decay.

  They are the products of disintegrating remains, frightful masks that have

  not been shed. Afterlife geography is seen in the UHF frequencies between

  TV channels, consisting of immense steppes of static. It is a projection in

  time, comprised of antimatter and populated by the dead.

  —Julius Ghorla, Black Holes (1983)

  The 9:35 A.M. bus approached Crawborough railway station. It was a wet, miserable morning in late October. The rain had not ceased for three days and the weather forecasts predicted another week more of it. All the holidaymakers were long gone from this stretch of the Yorkshire coast; no more backpackers, elderly couples, or dirty weekenders used the bus service to ferry them north. Most of the time, except during school-run hours, the bus was empty save for one or two lone shoppers ferrying their heavy bags back from the supermarket to home. Even they usually traveled only as far as four or five stops.

  The driver of the bus, one Bill Jones, was confident he would not have to take on any passengers for this service from Crawborough to Banwick. The incessant rain seemed to have forced everyone off the streets. This pleased him quite a bit because it meant he could enjoy the luxury of smoking whilst he drove, instead of waiting until he reached the depot at Banwick, well over an hour away. There would be no one to comment, or worse—report—on his flouting the bus company’s regulations.

  But as he pulled into the turn near the railway station, he was disgruntled to see a lone figure waiting underneath the bus shelter ahead. The prospective passenger had a large suitcase with him, two plastic carrier-bags, and a wicker basket for carrying a small dog or large cat.

  When he pulled up alongside the shelter and opened the doors, Jones saw that the man was glancing accusingly at a fob watch he’d produced from the left pocket of his shabby beige mackintosh.

  The man immediately struck Jones as being a difficult passenger. He tut-tutted loudly as he put away his watch as if to insinuate that the bus was running late. Moreover, his appearance and demeanor gave the overall impression that he fancied himself an eccentric. This did not endear him to Jones, who regarded any person even remotely out of the ordinary as highly suspicious; perhaps ev
en of having come up from London. The passenger wore a black porkpie hat and sported a polka-dotted bow tie. He looked to be in his middle fifties. His thin face was a network of worry lines, as if he had analyzed all the problems of the world and come to no solution for them. His complexion was sallow, like candlewax, particularly around his cheeks. He had a long, aquiline nose, beady little eyes, and a small chin as smooth as a billiard ball.

  The passenger began to haul his luggage up into the bus and crammed it in the storage space just in front of the seats on the lefthand side of the aisle. Jones noticed that the two carrier bags were stuffed full of paperback books. They smelled musty with age. When the passenger turned back to collect the wicker basket, which had been left until last, Jones called out in a flash of spiteful inspiration:

  “Hurry along there, you’re holding up the bus.”

  The man glared back coolly and then, with an air of studied irony, began to look around him, making it perfectly aware that he knew he was the only passenger boarding at this stop.

  “My good fellow,” he replied in a wearied tone, “kindly refrain from being objectionable.” His was the type of voice passed down by generations of BBC broadcasters until regional accents were finally ushered in.

  After he’d paid his fare, the passenger, whose name was Arthur Staines, carried the wicker basket with him to a seat close to the back of the bus. He wanted to be as far away as possible from the oafish driver. From inside the basket there came a long meowing noise and Staines lifted the lid to allow his cat Edgar to examine their surroundings. The creature, a fat and bad-tempered beast with mangy black fur, poked its head out and looked around with evident distaste. The cat lay a paw against the edge of the basket and dug its claws into the side. Staines feared that it might, at any moment, waddle forward and attempt to attack the driver, so he persuaded Edgar to settle down again before it was too late.

  Edgar was Staines’s sole companion. The two had been together for over ten years. Once the cat had reached maturity it decided not only that it preferred never to be left alone but also that it was no longer prepared to walk anywhere at all. Occasionally it would drag itself from one side of a room to another in order to eat or defecate, but its great bulk now meant that even this concession was haphazard.

  Outside the rain lashed across the landscape of rolling fields and hills. Staines gazed absently at the deluge, more interested in the streams of water coursing down the glass of the bus windows than in the vistas cloaked by the low gray clouds. The vehicle crept along narrow roads between towns and along the sides of valleys, throwing up gigantic splashes as it motored through puddles and pools that had formed on the route.

  He took a map from the breast pocket of his shabby mackintosh, unfolded it, and spread it out across his knees. His destination was an old fishing village called Scarsdale Bay, not far south from Banwick. Staines had carefully circled the coastal town on the map.

  For some time he had been engaged upon research concerned with an obscure author who had made the village his home during his latter years. This writer, Julius Ghorla (1930–1985), had scraped a living writing pulp novels. Staines planned to make Ghorla the exclusive subject of the next installment (the third) of his limited-circulation periodical Proceedings of the Dead Authors’ Society.

  Staines was one of those obsessive bibliophiles who are unable to take any interest in fiction unless its creator had long been in the tomb. Had Ghorla been alive and still writing it is certain that Staines would have thought his work insignificant. Moreover, Staines even ignored prestigious dead authors, reserving his praise for those sufficiently obscure to have escaped critical attention almost altogether. It was as if by championing those writers who had been unfairly overlooked, and who were safely dead, he might thereby obtain for himself some measure of the reputation they had been denied. Vanity had turned him into a ghoul of letters. Ghorla’s books had appeared only during the boom in cheap glue-bound paperbacks, never seeing print in hardcover, and issued solely by Eclipse Publications Ltd, an imprint of a disreputable firm whose catalog otherwise consisted of risqué or “spicy” novels.

  Staines calculated that it could not be more than a forty-five-minute journey from Crawborough to Scarsdale Bay, despite the tortuous route that this particular local bus service followed. He had traveled all over the country in search of recondite literary discoveries, indulging his own predilections, although he made his actual, meager living from what little freelance journalism he could sell to local newspapers and the likes of specialist glossy monthly magazines such as Paranormal and UFO Times.

  Julius Ghorla had been a favorite writer of his ever since he’d stumbled across a tattered paperback copy of the author’s best known (inasmuch as “best known” is applicable) and final work back in 1984. The book was Ghorla’s episodic novel Black Holes, a series of short stories joined together to form a reasonably lengthy opus of some 50,000 words. These stories were concerned with the interior experiences of the dying brains of several characters. Ghorla had come up with the intriguing idea that consciousness slows down at the point of death to a degree whereby interior time bears no relation to the passage of time in external reality.

  Edgar began to meow again. The cat was in a state of agitation and showed his displeasure by rocking back and forth inside his wicker basket. Staines was momentarily at a loss to account for the cause, until he caught a faint whiff of what appeared to be cigarette smoke. He looked up toward the front of the bus and saw a wispy curl of blue tobacco vapor float out of the driver’s cabin.

  Staines was not especially puritanical when it came to smoking, but the effect it had on Edgar was not to be ignored. He got up from his seat and wandered forward, hoping to catch the driver in the act. However, by the time he was staring through the glass partition at him, there was no trace of the offending cigarette. The driver’s window was slightly open and it looked as if he had managed to flick the butt outside moments before Staines’s investigation.

  “Have you been smoking in here?” Staines said, whilst tapping on the partition.

  “What?” he responded, as if he didn’t understand the question. There were telltale traces of ash on the sleeve of his uniform.

  “I shall report you,” Staines continued, “you have greatly upset my cat with your thoughtlessness.”

  “If you don’t get back in your seat and shut up,” the driver replied, raising his voice, “I’ll throw you and your bloody cat off the bus.”

  Staines took a quick look at the still-raging downpour outside. It really would not do to have to walk the seven or so miles remaining before they reached Scarsdale Bay, especially in this foul weather. He doubted that Edgar would survive such a trauma. Loud caterwauling emanated from within the wicker basket. Doubtless Edgar wondered where Staines had gone.

  At the top of Scarsdale Bay, Staines stepped down from the bus and joined the luggage he’d deposited on the pavement. He heard the driver mutter something obscene as the doors closed.

  The rain had eased and was now no more than persistent drizzle. Staines looked back and forth along the deserted lane until he spotted a sign indicating that Scarsdale Bay town center was to his right, down a turning. As yet he could not see his destination but supposed it could only be a few minutes walk downhill. He tied the carrier bags of books around the outside of his suitcase. It had a retractable handle and little wheels at the base so that he could haul it along after him relatively easily. In his other hand he carried the basket containing Edgar. Mercifully the cat seemed to have fallen asleep after the excitement of the bus journey.

  Once he’d turned the corner he had his first sight of Scarsdale Bay. It was situated on the side of a steep cliff and he saw a jumbled panorama of red-tiled rooftops and chimney stacks. Cottages jostled one another over the warren of tiny and narrow stairways and lanes. It had doubtless been a haven for smugglers a few centuries ago. Staines made his way down the central street, Ormsley Parade, passing a series of overhanging upper stories
, dilapidated arches, and little flights of steps for pedestrians that were designed to break up the extremely steep gradient. Really, thought Staines, this curious little place might have been designed by an admirer of the artist Piranesi. It was certainly a fitting town for Julius Ghorla to have chosen as a retreat in order to pen his outré series of tales.

  A sea wall had been erected in the 1950s near the bottom of the village to prevent any more of the fishermen’s cottages being washed away by waves during storms. Ormsley Parade wound all the way to the very bottom of the cliff. During high tide the waves lapped halfway up the cobbled and seaweed-coated steps leading to the beach. When the sea was rough Staines could easily imagine that it spilled over the steps and into the Parade in a foaming torrent.

  The hotel in which Staines had booked a room loomed large to his left. It was the sole guest house in Scarsdale Bay. Although most of the cottages here were let out to tourists during the summer season, such an expense was beyond his limited means. This hotel, called Shadwell Vistas, was very cheap, especially at this time of year, and he anticipated that he was unlikely to be bothered by any other guests. He paused outside the building, looking up at the timbered mock-Tudor structure with its bull’s-eye windows, and then made his way inside to the reception area via a set of paneled double doors.

  He crossed a threadbare carpet. The room had a sofa, a few chairs, and some black and white photographs in frames by way of decoration. They depicted scenes of Scarsdale Bay taken during Victorian times. From another room close by he heard a discordant conversation punctuated by bursts of static that sounded as if it were coming from a television set. There was no one manning the reception desk and so Staines rang the bell to signal his presence. A miserable-looking man in his early sixties emerged from a back office. He’d doubtless been engrossed in watching the television that Staines had heard. He was bald with a thin Orwellian mustache, and wore an undone waistcoat with check trousers. Staines noticed that he wasn’t wearing any shoes, or even socks.