Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  Their footsteps didn’t leave the porch until I’d twisted the lock shut. This was the first time I’d been allowed to stay home alone, more or less. Part of me felt very proud—my parents didn’t think of me as a child anymore—but the other part wished they still did.

  My cousin was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs when I turned around. Looking at me. Waiting.

  “Are you … hungry? You know … food. You want something to eat?” I pointed to my mouth, then my belly.

  She watched my hands and shook her head. “No.”

  It was going to be a long night.

  “Do you want me to read you a story? Buch, you know, book?” Zaideh was always correcting my Yiddish, so I pressed my hands together then opened them at the thumbs. “Book?”

  She shook her head.

  “Radio?”

  She just looked at me.

  This time I shook my head and walked into the front room. It took a few minutes for the old Philco to warm up, but by that time she must have figured out what I’d asked and followed me. I sat in Zaideh’s chair and she sat on the couch, tucked into one corner with her legs up tight against her belly, as the Pepsodent Show’s theme music filled the air.

  “Bob Hope,” I told her.

  She nodded. “Hope.”

  She fell asleep before the first commercial and stayed asleep when I got up to make tea after Bob Hope said good night. Zaideh always made honey tea after the program, and then we’d sit in the kitchen and tell each other the same jokes we’d just heard. I knew it wouldn’t be the same, but I made the tea anyway and was spooning honey into two cups when I heard voices in the front room.

  The kitchen clock showed only a few minutes after nine. My parents had come home earlier than usual, keeping their voices low so I wouldn’t hear them. I let the jar of honey thump against the countertop to let them know that I had. They hadn’t trusted me to watch my cousin after all.

  “Do you want tea?” I called out to them. “I’m just making—”

  But suddenly their voices got louder and I heard my mother scream.

  I thought it was my mother until I ran to the front room.

  The cups slip from my hands and bleed honey onto the floor as I stand and watch two skull-faced soldiers drag a woman with amber eyes across the room. The woman’s face is thin and her head is shaved, but I know her eyes … I know her. I have never seen her before but I know her. The woman looks at me and her hand reaches out even as one of the soldiers strikes her across the mouth. Blood spurts, gleaming in light from Zaideh’s reading lamp, and when she opens her mouth blood pours out with the words she screams: “Janna! Janna! Es fardrist mir! Janna … gedainkst. Gedainkst!”

  And I understand them.

  Janna. Janna, I’m sorry. Janna … remember. Remember.

  I make a sound, just a little sound when the front door opens, but it’s enough to wake her; and the moment my cousin’s eyes opened, the soldiers and the screaming woman melted into the air like mist. Zaideh came in, his face red from the cold.

  “Vos tut zich? I scared you?” Then he nodded when he saw the broken cups and oozing honey. “I scared you. Come … let’s clean this up before your mama comes home. Go get a rag and water.”

  Zaideh went to hang up his coat as my cousin got off the couch and slowly walked toward me. The broken china made soft sounds when she gathered the pieces in her hand.

  “Es fardrist mir,” she whispered—I’m sorry—as she held them out to me. “I can’t …”

  I ran from the room before she could finish. I didn’t want to know.

  I never wanted to know.

  But I didn’t have a choice.

  She got sick the first week of winter.

  “Just a little cold,” they said, “nothing to worry about.” But despite all the homemade tonics and teas my mother and aunts forced down her throat, my cousin’s cough deepened into a wet, gurgling bark that grew worse and worse until it finally brought up blood.

  I got back from school one afternoon just as the doctor was leaving. He smiled at me and patted my head, asked about my health and nodded without listening.

  My mother was in the front room, standing next to the cot Zaideh had slept on during my grandmother’s final illness. It was tucked into the corner nearest the fireplace, sheets and blankets at one end of the horsehair mattress, a blue-and-white striped pillow at the other. As I watched, my mother bent down and touched one of the blankets.

  “I should get new ones. These wouldn’t keep a dog warm.”

  “Mameh?”

  There were tears on her cheeks and in her eyes when she turned around … and I ran to her, frightened, my own eyes filling as I felt her arms close around me.

  “Mameh, what is it? What’s wrong? What happened?”

  For a moment she couldn’t answer, and then we sat on the edge of the cot and she told me. I was old enough to know, she said. Janna was very sick and would have to sleep down here until she got better.

  “She’ll be fine … all she needs is a little rest. You’ll see. Once she gets a little rest she’ll be—” The lie choked her.

  “Mameh?”

  My mother was quiet for a few minutes, then took a deep breath. “She’s not going to get better, Sarah. After what she’s been through, to live through all that … she’s not going to get better.”

  “What happened to her, mameh?

  My mother pulled me closer to her.

  “I don’t know.”

  We held each other until my father came home from work and carried Janna down to the cot.

  Later that night, when everyone was asleep, I found out what happened to her.

  At first I think it’s just a doll—one of her new dolls—that lays burning in the fireplace, but as I get closer I can see the blackened flesh curl away from the bones of a tiny hand and watch a perfect little face consumed. The child in the fire is no more than a baby.

  And it’s not alone.

  There are hundreds of them … babies, children, men and women, naked, stacked up like branches … like pieces of kindling waiting to tossed into the flames.

  Asleep on the cot, Janna whimpers and the sound of the fire gets louder, the smell of burning flesh stronger.

  And I know what’s happening … I finally know.

  She’s not just dreaming them, the bodies in the fire and the smell and the sounds, she’s doing what the amber-eyed woman told her to do … she’s remembering them.

  I can hear the crackle of the nightmare fire as I crawl into the cot next to her. Her body is hot, the flannel nightgown I outgrew three years ago soaked through with sweat. She groans when I wrap my arms around her, but doesn’t wake up, so the nightmare goes on and on.

  I whisper to her, soft and low, like the lullaby my mother sang to her that first night.

  “Janna, veizen. Show me.”

  Her body tenses against mine and the light from the nightmare fire changes into a bright white glare while she stands in the frigid air, shivering, holding tight to a hand almost blue with the cold. Mama’s hand. She looks up and Mama smiles, but her amber eyes are pale in the camp’s searchlights and she says something … but the light changes again and mama’s gone and in her place is a tunnel leading down to a brightly lit bathhouse. There are two soldiers standing near the door. One handing out towels, the other soap. Both are smiling. Both have skulls instead of faces. Both of them wave and …

  Another hand offers candy. Another hand tears off our clothes.

  Another hand.

  Another face.

  Another body.

  Another scream.

  Janna stopped dreaming an hour before dawn, and I stayed with her until her body was cold. I remember she was smiling. I remember all of it … every horror, every pain, every memory that had festered under her skin.

  She gave them to me to keep.

  Now it’s your turn.

  With thanks to Naomi Birns

  Bethany’s Wood

  PAUL FINCH
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  Paul Finch is a British ex-cop, now full-time writer, who works primarily in television and film, but who is no stranger to short story markets. His first collection, After Shocks, published in 2001, won the British Fantasy Award, while his short novel, Cape Wrath, made the final ballot for the Stoker awards in 2002. His short stories have been published in the anthologies Shadows Over Baker Street, A Walk on the Darkside, Quietly Now, Daikaiju! (Giant Monster Tales), and The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits.

  Finch regularly writes for The Bill, the popular British television crime series, while Spirit Trap, a teen horror movie, which he coscripted, was released to cinemas in 2005. He has just completed his first full-length novel, The Twisting Flesh, and is currently working on a movie adaptation of Cape Wrath.

  He lives in Lancashire, northern England, with his wife, Cathy, and his children, Eleanor and Harry.

  The eerie figures seen walking in Bethany’s Wood on Bloodybush Edge last Sunday may have a perfectly mundane explanation.

  Bestselling novelist Ariadne Jones, who owns the wood, and over three hundred acres of the surrounding pastureland, has admitted that the objects were almost certainly “mobile works of art” that she herself has erected in the densely-grown area of pine forest.

  The incident caused a minor sensation last weekend, when ramblers, who didn’t realize they’d entered private land, spotted what they later called “horrible shapes” moving among the trees. One rambler was so disturbed that he is alleged to have run three miles to the nearest pub, where he stammered out his story to an astonished taproom.

  In a statement issued through her agents, Beckwith-Blenkinsop, Miss Jones, the famously reclusive authoress, who actually lives on the estate but has never received guests there or been photographed, said:

  “I certainly apologize for any alarm I might have caused. The creation of these moving sculptures has been a project of mine for some time. It’s my intent to eventually put the display on show, but not at present as there is still a lot of work to be done. In respect of this, I request that members of the public who are interested be patient and do not come onto the estate uninvited. Bethany’s Wood is a carefully nurtured ecological environment, and even the most cautious trespassers could cause accidental damage.”

  —North Cheviot Gazette, Aug 29th 2005

  Terri sighed and put the printout down. It was now dog-eared and tacky from her pondering and fingering it all the way up from London. How Mark had found such an obscure item as an on-line issue of the North Cheviot Gazette—a free newspaper with a rural readership and subsequent minuscule circulation—she hadn’t yet discovered, but it was typical of him that he had.

  She looked at the paper again. She supposed she could understand why it had caught his attention, but really … was something as oblique as this genuinely worth a spur-of-the-moment three-hundred-mile drive? There was a thump from the direction of the pub; its rear door closing. Terri glanced out through the Range Rover’s front window. Mark was making his way across the car park, pulling on his waxed jacket. It was a cool day for early September, and the sky overhead was slate-gray and promising rain, as it always seemed to be doing in this desolate region. Terri was a Home Counties girl by origin, but well-traveled. In Europe, she’d been as close to the Arctic Circle as St. Petersburg; in North America she’d visited Vancouver. But never, even in those far more northern outposts, did she think she’d seen skies as routinely threatening as the ones that lowered over the north of England.

  “Any joy?” she asked, as he climbed into the car beside her.

  “Yeah.” He slid his key into the ignition. “We’re about three miles away.”

  “Thank God.”

  Getting to the Northumberland National Park had been easy enough. All they’d really had to do was travel north from London in a straight line, and stop just short of the Scottish border. But once there it became more difficult. They had their AA map book, which was so detailed as to indicate the presence of the spectacularly named Bloodybush Edge (an immense downward-sloping swathe of rugged and featureless wild country), but even on the local map they’d bought, there’d been no trace of Bethany’s Wood. As such, they’d had to wing it, stopping at farms and country pubs like this one, The High Riding, to ask directions. Now at last, they seemed to be getting somewhere.

  “I hope it’s worth all this, Mark,” Terri said as he started the car. She didn’t want to annoy him with superficial gripes, but if a point needed to be made, she never hesitated to make it.

  They drove out onto the narrow lane. Sweeps of tussocky, boulder-strewn grassland rolled away to either side, portions of it divided up by dry stonewalling. From this angle it looked flat, but that was deceptive. It actually undulated. Becks snaked across it, often concealed in swampy, low-lying valleys. Here and there, on raised ground, lonesome stands of fir made sentinel shapes against the rain-swollen clouds.

  “When we set out this morning I was ninety-five percent sure,” he eventually replied. “Now I’m ninety-nine percent.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’ve just spoken to the landlord in there. He reckons he’s actually seen these sculptures. He reckons they’re really, to use his own words … ‘shitty.’”

  “I see.”

  Her doubtful tone led him to explain further: “Well … that’s exactly what Zoe was into. She used to produce these metalwork figures.”

  “That were shitty?”

  “I know what he meant by that,” Mark added. “The stupid cow always thought she was avant-garde. These objects she made, they were like life-size re-creations from Picasso. You know, humanoid but distorted, impressionistic. Not true to life.”

  “Shitty.”

  “I thought they were shitty, yeah!”

  “Yes, but Mark, the difference is that you thought they were shitty because they’d been made by your mum’s girlfriend, and you hated her guts. This landlord chap might think they’re shitty because they’re a load of amateurish crap. You sure you’re not confusing the two?”

  Mark appeared to ponder this as he drove. Terri watched him furtively. He was a handsome, well-built guy, and his unruly, oil-black locks and square, frequently unshaven jaw gave him a rugged, masculine appeal that was quite at odds with the fact he was a vicar’s son. Of course, at the moment, he was pale, sallow-cheeked. The inner turmoil he currently had to deal with was proving hugely stressful.

  “Mark,” she said, more gently, “I’m only making sure that we aren’t still putting two and two together and coming up with five.”

  “Look at the rest of the evidence,” he replied. “The place is called Bethany’s Wood. My older sister is named Bethany.”

  “That could be a coincidence.”

  “This Ariadne Jones who says she put the figures up, and who no one’s ever seen … she’s a best-selling author. My mum was a best-selling author.”

  “Your mum was a romantic novelist. Ariadne Jones is famous for nonfiction, and concentrates mainly on New Age philosophies.”

  Mark shook his head. “Mum was starting to get into that stuff, especially when bloody Zoe came along.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t her bread and butter. Your mum was surely smart enough to stick to writing what she knew about?”

  “All right,” he said, “all right … they use the same literary agents.”

  “Beckwith-Blenkinsop probably have hundreds of top writers on their books.”

  He glanced at her. “Why are you giving me such a hard time, Terri? You know this is important to me.”

  “I know it is. I just don’t want you getting terribly disappointed.”

  “You mean I should accept that Mum’s dead?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “And I should ignore tantalizing clues that might suggest otherwise?”

  Terri considered. “I’m not sure they do suggest that.”

  “But if it was your mother wouldn’t you at least look into them?”

  A moment passed, then she nodded.
“Course I would. Which is why I’ve not tried to talk you out of coming. Which is why I’m here with you now, being supportive.”

  Mark drove on, visibly uptight. She understood why. He’d only uncovered this unlikely piece of evidence two days ago, and ever since then had been planning his journey north. By this morning he’d been like a cat on hot bricks. The trip itself, dragged out through five hours of infuriating Saturday traffic, had also taken its toll on him.

  As they cruised through the bleak but verdant border country, Terri thought about the strange family she was shortly to marry into. The Hagens were most famous at present for Anthony Hagen, Mark and Bethany’s father, an Anglican priest and outspoken traditionalist, who was soon to be inaugurated as Bishop of Woking. Diane Hagen, his late wife, had been renowned in her own right, but was better known now for the manner of her passing than for the numerous books she’d written: the car in which she and her young protégé, Zoe Wroxeter, had been traveling, was found in the River Avon, having apparently crashed through the barrier fence on the Clifton suspension bridge. No bodies were recovered, but it was generally held that neither woman could have survived such an accident. That was ten years ago, however, and now Mark himself was following his mother’s footsteps by making his name as a novelist, though in his case it was crime thrillers. He’d already had three published, to considerable acclaim, which wasn’t bad going for a twenty-three-year-old.

  And then all this business had started. He’d suddenly developed the conviction that his mother was still alive and living incognito somewhere. Terri knew that Mark had a tendency to obsess about things, but she didn’t think he was beyond the reach of common sense. She was certain that when, or if, he finally met this Ariadne Jones and saw for himself that she wasn’t his mother, he’d drop the whole thing.

  It would be easier if they’d gone through the correct channels, though Ariadne Jones had no form for granting interviews, and she definitely wouldn’t if by some unlikely chance she was Mark’s mother. That said, Terri still wasn’t happy with Mark’s determination to see the woman even if it meant “fucking forcing his way in.” As she’d explained to him, forcing your way onto private land was not generally a good idea; most people deemed it illegal. Mark’s response to that had been to remain ominously quiet.