Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  “Can I help you, Sir?” The man said without enthusiasm.

  “I made a reservation by telephone. The name’s Arthur Staines.”

  The man appeared to consult a list that he kept beneath the desk.

  “Single room, staying for a week? Nonsmoking?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Thirty-five pounds a night was the figure I was quoted.”

  “I have the booking here, Mr. Staines. Quite correct. By the way, I’m Charles Browning, the acting manager here during the off-season. Anything I can do for you please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  Staines signed the register, was told breakfast was served between 7:00 A.M. and 9:00 A.M., and then was given a key with the number seven tagged onto it. Just as he began to climb the stairs with his luggage, the man came around the desk and caught him up. “Forgot to tell you, Mr. Staines,” Browning said, “there’s a letter here for you. It was delivered yesterday.”

  Staines looked bewildered. He wasn’t expecting any letter. Perhaps it was from a correspondent, one of those who shared his enthusiasm for Julius Ghorla’s work, with late information concerning the village. He stuffed the envelope into his pocket, nodded at Browning, and continued up the stairs. When he reached the landing on the first floor he noticed that all the doors had bolts on the outside in addition to the standard locks.

  Edgar was peering out of the basket and refused to leave it; he seemed decidedly unhappy about his surroundings. The hotel room was shabby and tiny. The mattress on the bed had been thinned by the weight of hundreds of guests. Staines imagined that someone deranged had chosen the wallpaper; it was a confused jumble of red whorls and spirals on a garish yellow background. He was glad it was so old that the colors had faded. When new it would have driven anyone mad.

  He’d unpacked his belongings and now turned his attention to the letter. His name and the address of the hotel had been typed on the envelope, so he had no clue as to the sender. Even the postmark was smudged, so its point of origin could not be determined.

  He tore open the envelope and recognized the handwriting at once; a numbing sense of dread rose up from his guts as he read the abrupt missive:

  Heard about your good fortune in discovering that Ghorla’s hitherto unknown sister is living in Scarsdale Bay. Will join you as quickly as possible. Do nothing until my arrival.

  Your friend

  Eric

  Staines crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it across the room. That blasted Eric Cooper! Always dogging his footsteps! Cooper, like Staines, was obsessed with Julius Ghorla and was conducting his own research into the writer’s life and work. By the weekend he, too, would be in Scarsdale Bay, pestering Staines to share what information he had gathered and then taking credit himself for what discoveries were previously made. Well, thought Staines, this particular act of treachery would not succeed. He had the head start and resolved to press his advantage. By tomorrow he was determined to find and interview Ghorla’s sister. Moreover, he would warn her in no uncertain terms to have nothing to do with Eric Cooper. By the time his adversary arrived he would be too late.

  Edgar purred from his basket. It seemed that he’d finally become accustomed to his surroundings and it was time to feed him his evening meal; three tins of Swedish meatballs in tomato sauce. He opened the cans with the Swiss Army knife that he always carried with him. The cat shied away at first sight of the implement, and became calm only when it was returned to Staines’s jacket pocket.

  Breakfast at the hotel consisted of a plateful of fried sausages, bacon, mushrooms, eggs, and bread. Staines managed to eat around a quarter of it washed down with greasy tea, and fed the rest to Edgar who was lurking in his basket underneath the table.

  The breakfast room was deserted except for Staines. He’d been right in assuming that there would be few, if any, other guests staying at the hotel. Mr. Browning appeared periodically to see whether Staines required anything further. Staines wondered whether the man did all the work in the hotel during the off-season. It seemed plausible.

  When Browning returned to take away the crockery and cutlery, Staines asked him whether he knew anything of a “Miss Ghorla” and where she lived. The town was so small and had so few permanent residents that it seemed inconceivable he would not know of her.

  “Oh yes.” Browning responded to Staines’s query with a wry smile, “I know about her. Everyone here does. She’s quite a local celebrity.”

  He said nothing more on the subject, but wrote down her address and directions to the place on a table napkin. Her cottage was located about three-quarters of the way up the cliff in a cul-de-sac.

  “One more thing,” Staines said, “why the bolts on the outside of the guest-room doors?”

  “Oh that,” Browning replied, “just a mistake. We never use them. They should have been fitted on the inside. Cowboy locksmiths—you know how it is. We haven’t got around to changing them yet.”

  Within twenty minutes of Staines finishing breakfast he was traversing the labyrinthine series of stairways, raised pavements, and house-to-house archways in search of the cottage. He finally found a cobbled little turning, terminating in a high brick wall, where her home was located.

  Staines knocked on the door three times and waited. In one hand he had a carrier-bag of books by her late brother, to prove his credentials as a scholar of his work, and in the other he carried the ubiquitous basket containing his cat. He’d covered the top of the basket with a sheet of plastic so that Edgar didn’t get wet. The rain, though less ferocious at times than yesterday, was nevertheless still persistent.

  The door finally swung open and the sight of one of the strangest women he had ever seen confronted Staines. The thing that struck him first was the uncanny Ghorla family resemblance. He recalled a photograph he’d once seen of Franz Kafka with his younger sister Ottla; the two might have been identical twins. The case of Julius and Claudia Ghorla was much the same. Yet the appearance of the woman was remarkable in itself; and this was the judgment of a man who prided himself on being regarded by others as an eccentric in his own dress. Claudia Ghorla wore a blond wig with a long fringe, a carefully sculpted coiffure in the 1950s beehive style. She could not have been any younger than seventy years of age. Her face was pinched and withered, and she wore an obscene amount of foundation, rouge, and lipstick. Her blue eyes, almost hooded by false lashes, peered at Staines with contemptuous disinterest. The woman was emaciated. The off-black velvet dress she wore hung from her skeletal body as if displayed on a clothes hanger in the window display of a rundown charity shop.

  She looked him up and down.

  “I don’t want to buy anything,” she said in a throaty voice, “now go away you awful little man.”

  Staines was taken aback at the idea anyone might mistake him for a traveling salesman or hawker of any description.

  “Madam,” he said, raising the cultivation of his accent several degrees by way of emphasis, “you misunderstand my motives in coming here.”

  “Nor,” she replied, adopting a tone of hauteur even more cutting than her last effort, “do I wish to be bothered by—ugh—journalists.”

  This second assault was harder to bear, since it possessed an element of truth. Nevertheless Staines tried to shrug it off. He had not come this far to fall at the last. Not with Eric Cooper coming up along the rails close behind him.

  Edgar let out a loud meow from inside the basket. He had endured quite enough of being outside in the damp air, alerting Staines to the fact.

  “What’s that you’ve got in there?” she said, her expression changing from one of stony hostility to one of interest.

  “It’s my cat Edgar. I take him with me wherever I go … .”

  “You drag a poor animal around in this foul weather? Bring him inside where it’s dry you wretched man, before you kill the helpless creature!”

  Staines had been trying unsuccessfully for over three hours to elicit information from Claudia Ghorla about her brother. The sticklike woman
fussed around Edgar, making the cat the center of her attention and practically ignoring whatever questions Staines asked that related directly to the author’s life and work. It was as if she’d forgotten all about the existence of her late brother.

  Staines sat in an armchair in her small drawing room, sipping at a cup of lukewarm tea. On the carpet were piled the paperback editions of Julius Ghorla’s fiction. They failed to arouse any curiosity in her. When advised that Staines was planning a special issue of his little periodical, Proceedings of the Dead Authors’ Society, in her brother’s honor, she’d taken the news with no more than a noncommittal shrug. She was fanatically neutral about it all. He mentioned how unscrupulous his rival, Eric Cooper, could be, but she took the news calmly. Even Staines’s claim that Cooper would rifle through drawers and cupboards in search of papers the moment her back was turned was met with nothing more than raised eyebrows.

  He’d managed, at least, to convince her that he was not a journalist in search of a story, simply an amateur scholar engaged on private research for a small group of devotees. If he had not achieved this immediate aim he had no doubt that Claudia Ghorla would have taken no notice of him at all, except perhaps to contact the nearest branch of the RSPCA and have him reported for possible cruelty to his cat.

  It had finally stopped raining and Staines suggested by way of a diversion that they might take a short walk while the weather was good.

  Although Staines was still anxious to turn the subject around to Claudia Ghorla’s brother, she persisted, instead, in discussing whatever came into her mind.

  They sat upon an old bench overlooking the bay. It commanded a magnificent view of the jumbled house and cottage rooftops, the tangled alleyways and bridges. The turbulent waves crashed up against the sea wall far below. It was high tide now and no trace of the weed-choked beach below could be seen. Behind the bench was the former cemetery, overrun by the expanse of woodland, its boundary walls mere ruins where exposed roots and twisted trunks had pushed their way through. The wind swept up from the bay and whistled past them.

  “Quite a pleasant spot. The beauty of nature errm … and all that sort of thing,” Staines remarked, looking behind and then in front of him, comparing the two aspects of the scene around them. He said it to be polite. Frankly he was very much of the view that the countryside was something green-colored that you traveled across in order to get from one city to another.

  “The modern world …” Miss Ghorla responded “ … I find its sentimentality for Nature pathetic. Mother Nature! As if it concerns itself with the welfare of human beings! Or, for that matter, with any other creatures. Nature is an idiot, a mindless force that fumbles across this black planet. And yet the stupid people worship it!”

  “It’s very inconvenient sometimes. Perhaps a little too wild … .” Staines mumbled.

  “When Nature acts in a way that is inimical to mankind, then we hear cries that hurricanes, floods, and droughts are somehow unnatural! During one decade society claims we are on the brink of a new ice age, during the next that global warming will finish us all off! All this is the consequence of our worshiping Nature! We think of it as a mother, and cannot bear the idea that it has no regard whatsoever for us. We fret and wail looking for signs of her displeasure, convincing ourselves that we have wronged her, as if she ever cared—or even noticed—our existence in the first place.”

  “I wonder if your brother shared your …” Staines said, before he was cut off yet again.

  “Plagues and cancer,” she spat, “aren’t these too a part of Nature? Yet we do not hesitate to try and eradicate them! Mother Nature is riddled with venereal disease!”

  Edgar began to meow from inside the large wicker basket that Staines had put down carefully next to the bench. The cat had also reached through the grill at the front and was clawing at the air in order to catch Staines’s attention. The feline appeared to have had enough of Miss Ghorla’s theories on mankind’s attitude to the natural world.

  The whole thing was a dead loss, thought Staines. The woman was useless to him. Let Eric Cooper see what he could do with her. Staines had endured enough of the old crone’s nonsense.

  “I really must be getting back to my hotel,” he said. “They serve dinner at six and I’m famished.”

  “For a journalist, you’ve been quite entertaining,” she replied. “Here, take this. Look it over and I’ll visit you this evening at your hotel around nine, once you’ve eaten. We can talk privately about my brother’s theories then. Perhaps even try some of them out in practice.”

  The old lady took a loose-leaf notebook from her handbag and passed it to the astonished Staines. He rifled through it as she got up, spoke a few more words, and then turned away to vanish into the warren of streets below them.

  “I’ve underlined some passages for your convenience that I think you’ll find of particular interest.”

  The notes related to Julius Ghorla’s episodic novel, Black Holes.

  Long after Claudia Ghorla had departed, Staines could still be found sitting on the bench. He was poring over the notebook in a state of total fascination. It was only once it had got dark and become difficult to read that he noticed night had come. Edgar had fallen asleep; he’d given up trying to attract Staines’s attention. Luckily the advent of a rising moon provided Staines with sufficient light to carry on reading the handwritten text without interruption. This might be his only chance to do so. The old lady was capricious and could well change her mind about providing him with further information later on.

  Staines was surprised to find that Claudia Ghorla had added the following entries of her own toward the end of the notebook, having scored out her brother’s own pages with a black marker pen.

  12th July 1985

  Well, it’s done. Last night I followed the instructions left by my late brother and drilled a hole in the front of my skull. It was an incredibly messy business. I really had no idea that there would be so much blood. The thick strip of bandage that I had wrapped around my head (just above my eyebrows) was soon soaked lipstick red.

  I had to cover the carpet in the bathroom with plastic sheeting. Mirrors were placed at precisely the correct angles around my head so that I could see the progress of the operation clearly. An injection of 2ccs of lidocaine in my forehead served as an anesthetic. I cut a V-shaped flap of skin, drew it back to expose the skull beneath, and proceeded to drill through bone and marrow. The noise and the vibration were terrible. The drilling went on for an hour. Often I had to stop in order to wash away the blood running down my face and into my eyes. I felt as if my head would split apart before I reached the surface of the brain and finally created the socket for my Third Eye.

  I knew the consequences of the operation going wrong; possible brain damage causing paralysis, idiocy, or blindness. But I had sworn to carry out my brother’s last wishes. Even though his attempt to do the same thing had ended in his destruction.

  My thighs are dotted with cigarette burns. Often, when I am smoking, I turn up my skirt and press the burning tip of my cigarette onto the cold white flesh there. The pain temporarily distracts me from the mental anguish I feel at my own helplessness. I am setting down this cheap autobiographical episode to prove to myself that any good liar can write convincingly. Now to await the changes that Julius predicted.

  14th July 1985

  What I still saw was the same thin, not unattractive woman with silvery, shoulder-length hair: a female version of my dead brother. Her body is almost emaciated and possessed of an awkward gait. Her skin is pale and unblemished, and her cheekbones elegantly distinct. Perhaps the lips are a trifle too thin, but the perfect regularity of the tiny teeth that they reveal more than makes up for any slight imperfection. Curved eyebrows arch above dazzling, glacial blue eyes.

  This morning that face is almost the same, except for the ugly, sutured wound in the middle of my forehead. I am somewhat afraid of what lies beneath that stitched flap of skin. And of what it will be able to see
if I remove that freshly made eyelid.

  20th July 1985

  Summertime in England: warm rain and leaden skies. A seaside town in the middle of July. Mercifully it is off the tourist routes and has nothing that would attract a holidaymaker. The beach is all shingles and pebbles, not sand, and miles from the nearest railway station or main road. The people here are unspeakably ordinary, and they blur into the background of the gray cliffs and the North Sea. There are no churches, piers, ancient monuments, or amusement arcades.

  In the afternoon I walked along the beach in the uncomfortable humidity. I wore my green silk headscarf to cover the V-shaped wound, and a half-length mackintosh. I expect that I should have also taken an umbrella. The skies, as usual, threatened rain. Despite the rubber grip of my plimsolls I once or twice slipped on the stones underfoot. They were still slippery, for the tide had only just turned, leaving foam and kelp in its wake. Mother often told me that my feet were too small in relation to my height, so it was scarcely surprising that I was destined to stumble through life (metaphorically as well as literally) rather than advance boldly.

  I wanted to find a deserted spot someway outside the town where the sea spray crashed up across the rocks, where I could be alone. Then and only then would I unveil my new Third Eye, gaze out across the ocean and see as I had never seen before.