Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

He started to turn his head and I said, “Don’t look at me!”

  I laid a hand on his back—he was trembling—and told him to go. His trembling increased and I repeated my instruction. “Go now,” I said. “Or I won’t be responsible.”

  He took an unsteady step. I spanked his bony rear, setting him into a hobbling run; the others hooted and laughed.

  “Shut the hell up,” I said.

  They fell silent, except for James, who said, “Fuck you! Who made you God!”

  “I thought we cleared that up last month,” I said. “Those ribs heal all right? That tooth still giving you trouble?”

  I won the staredown and, to cover his shame, he bent to pick up the old man’s lamp.

  “Leave it,” I said. “It looks cool.”

  And it did, it made the pool appear sacred, green watery radiance streaming up.

  “Why were you bashing that old fart,” I asked.

  “We weren’t going to hurt him,” TK said.

  “You know how it goes. You start off fucking with somebody, just fooling around, and it gets out of control. Someone takes a bite and the feeding frenzy’s on.” I sat on the boulder, unmindful of dying anemones. “We’ve all got wicked tempers and it doesn’t take much to make us snap. That’s how we hurt ourselves. Right, James?”

  “I guess,” he mumbled.

  “Consider it a lesson,” I said. “Why waste your anger on someone whose pain can’t profit you? You have to conserve anger, nourish it. Like the beast. Imagine when it gets out, how strong it’ll be. All those years with no place to vent … except on itself. It’ll be strong enough to break the world. You need to be that strong.”

  Doria laughed nervously.

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  “Hey!” she said. “It’s just you talk so much shit, man, I can’t keep it straight.”

  “You have to think,” I said. “You have to decide what you need to survive and use your anger to take it.”

  They listened, but I detected boredom in their faces. They were too inured to my words to hear them. Of them all, only Molly displayed the wit to survive, and even she looked bored. I continued to lecture, hoping that sheer repetition would put the brake to their course of self-destruction. I told them to muzzle their whims, to devote themselves to strategies that would sustain them. And yet the more sense I made, the more certainly I lost them. They had begun to view me as they would another species. Soon I would be as irrelevant as the old man.

  After I stopped talking, Molly distributed the pills. She offered me none, knowing that I would abstain. Drugs brought me perilously close to the source of my rage. The others wandered off along the beach, but I remained seated on the boulder. The light from the pool made me feel like a wizard who had, by means of some occult process, opened a portal beneath his feet into a bright submarine continuum, and, having used up the pleasures of this world, was contemplating a dive into those uncharted waters. I pictured myself as a shadow raised against a greenish glow, a demonic figure in a Buddha’s pose.

  The battery lamp had fallen into a niche in the rocky bank and nearby rested an anemone that had the approximate size and oblong shape of a woman’s coin purse. It was a fancy thing, pale jade in color, beaded around its outline with what looked to be dark green florets. I was tempted to reach down and grab it, but feared it would be unpleasant to the touch or sting me with its acids. Best to imagine it in hand, I thought. Smooth and firm, a living stone. On the bottom, a crab no bigger than the joint of my thumb was negotiating a rise between two collapsed strands of kelp. I stared into that shallow depth with such intensity, it seemed I became a citizen of that savage, tranquil place.

  When I was fourteen I struck my father in the face, putting an end to a decade of torture both mental and physical. The blow raised a lump the size of a hen’s egg above his right eye, swelling up instantly, but had a more lasting effect on me. Frightened by what I had done, certain that he would call the police, I ran to Spetlow Hill and climbed the church tower (it was then under construction), and there I spent the night huddled under a tarpaulin, gazing out through a skeleton of masonry and steel at the tumbled roofs of the town and the listless ocean beyond. God knew me now, I thought. I had violated one of His taboos, no matter it had been in self-defense. His fierce eye had marked me. Yet when I recalled my father on his knees, clutching his injury, I felt a vicious satisfaction and joy. It was the best feeling I’d ever had and I wanted it again. I wanted to piss God off, I wanted another bloody victory. If I returned to home, I believed he/He would kill me, and so, after stealing clothes and some money, I fled to the city in search of that feeling. I never found it, but I found lesser feelings that sufficed. Amazing, how impotence itself can be rendered impotent by the sound of someone groaning in an alley or the impact of a boot on bone.

  For nearly four years, I brawled and bullied my way through life. Not that it was all a triumph. Many nights I made my bed in an abandoned factory or railroad yard, beaten and degraded, terrified by every indistinct sound, by the rats that nested there; but I became, at last, the king of my own rat’s nest. And now I felt the world pulling me away from childhood, from my hard-won sinecure. Even as I had lectured my brother and sister rats, recognizing they would suffer without my guidance, I was envious of their state. Seeing them at play on the beach, zooming about, falling to their knees, puking up the poisons they had swallowed, then vanishing into the dark, I felt love for them; but love was an emotion they did not respect and so, to honor their feelings, I dismissed them from my thoughts.

  The tide had gone out. I walked toward the rock, scrambled up the skirt of rough stone, and found a spot where I could sit. It smelled of ruin, like a drowned cathedral in which the vestments and candles and incense had rotted away. The waves broke against it less vigorously than before, but cold sprays still spattered me with shrapnel bursts and my face grew numb from this constant booming assault. And yet I felt secure, sheltered by its darkness, as I had felt when, after a beating, my father would lock me in a closet and forget me for the night or longer—I thought that the beast, even in its desperation, must feel similarly secure. I tried to isolate its scent from the greater smell of the rock, the stink of the silent birds in their black nests.

  Molly flitted past on the sand, pursued by another, less defined figure, both going out of view behind the rock. The sight gentled my thoughts, giving rise to a memory. I had stolen a car from the parking lot at the mall, punched through the glass and hotwired it, and the five of us tore out onto the interstate. Molly had called shotgun and, as I drove, she leaned out the window, shrieking, her hair flying, flashing her tits at the people in slower cars. She must have resembled a ship’s figurehead stuck on sideways and come to life, yet they looked at her with dull, unsurprised faces, as if every day of their lives they were blessed with such insane beauty, or else this was something their television sets had warned them against and thus they were prepared to put up a stolid front. I could have written songs about their stuporous response.

  Darkness closed down, a light rain fell, and once we turned off the interstate onto Highway 26 things grew quiet inside the car. James, sounding paranoid, asked where we were going, and Doria fired up a pipe, and TK was getting all film-geeky about a movie we had seen, pointing out flaws in its logic, saying that the metal tripods had been buried in the rock for millennia, withstanding a million tons of pressure, okay? So how come Tom Cruise could blow one up with a grenade?

  “Because he’s Tom Cruise, man,” said Doria, trying not to exhale. Talking caused her to hack up smoke. “Shit!” She handed the pipe up to me, nudging my shoulder, leaning so far forward that I could feel the bristle of her dreadlocks (she had since changed her hairstyle) on my neck.

  Molly snatched the pipe from her and that was good with me. I was high on crime and violence. Whenever a car rushed toward us, its headlights dazzled the raindrops decorating the windshield and it would seem I was driving into rings of fairy light; then darkness would swallow
the road, a curving two-lane slicing through a spruce forest, and I had to refocus in order to steer. I needed to come down a notch and I told Molly to look out for a place where I could buy beer, explaining that I was having some difficulty.

  “You can’t see?” She laughed merrily, delighted by the prospect of my blindness.

  “Want me to drive?” James asked. “I can drive.”

  “Fuck no!” I punched the gas, accelerating to shut him up. James could be a real pisser. His parents were religious zealots and that was most of his problem.

  Molly switched on the radio, found a station playing rock, and turned it high, putting an end to conversation. She rolled down her window and played with her tongue stud, popping it in and out between her lips like a little gemmy bubble.

  Twenty miles down the road we came to a convenience store with carvings for sale off to one side, gigantic things made out of stumps and fallen logs, animated by magic. It had stopped raining. Puddles like shiny black eyes dappled the gravel lot. I went inside, bought beer, stored it the car, all except a forty, which I cracked, and went over to where my friends stood, checking out a huge fir stump that some redneck necromancer had carved into a troll that kept walking into its cave house, casting a sour look back over his shoulder before shutting the door, then backing out and repeating the process.

  “Who do you think buys this crap?” I karate-kicked the troll in the side, not disrupting its course in the slightest, though its eyes flickered redly.

  “Nobody,” TK said.

  “I don’t know,” Molly said. “I think it’s cool.”

  “Molly thinks it’s cool!” Doria minced about, affecting the guise of a connoisseur. “It’s so … so relevant, so …”

  “It’s absolutely relevant,” I said. “The things going on today, the ancient magical shit that’s reappearing … like these sculptures, the beast. And the new stuff. The white buses, the people with machines inside them. The fucking mind control exerted by Chairman Channel Twenty-five. It’s all starting to come at once. Witches, mad science, stupid magic. All the things that were going to happen, that might have happened, are being crammed into our days. A sort of preapocalyptic meltdown. And it’s going to get weirder before it’s through.”

  They gaped at me, waiting for a punch line.

  “It’s still crap, though,” I said. “We don’t have to deal with it any different from anything else.”

  I set down my forty, unsheathed the hunting knife I kept strapped to my calf, and began hacking at the troll, slicing thick shavings from its bulging forehead, stabbing it until its eyes ceased to glow. The clerk yelled at us from the doorway. I started toward him, but James caught me from behind and wrestled me back.

  “Jesus! You’re a fucking wildman!” TK said as we piled into the car.

  “Did you see the guy’s face?” said Doria. “He was tripping!”

  I was breathing fast, light-headed, but I got the engine going and jammed it; we sprayed gravel past the front of the store and fishtailed onto the highway.

  “We should get off this road,” James said.

  I slowed, braked, and made a U-turn.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

  “I left my forty back there,” I told him.

  Molly rested her head on my shoulder and sang a la-la-la song.

  “Fucking wildman!” said TK happily.

  “You can consider it a lesson,” I said to James.

  “What’re you talking about?” he asked. “What kind of lesson?”

  “A lesson in risk management,” I said. “And in beer conservation.”

  A couple of hours after I had climbed onto the rock, I began to feel a vibration at my back—barely detectable, at first, and erratic, growing stronger and steadier. I thought it was the beating of my heart and ignored it; but then it stopped, starting up again a few minutes later, stronger this time, and occurring at such lengthy intervals I knew it could be no heart. I laid my head against the rock and listened. At length I managed to separate a faint thudding noise from the crunch of the waves.

  The beast was trying to break free—that much was clear—and it was making headway, for I had never heard that noise before. I wanted to be far from Droughans Beach should it succeed. But as I thought how to organize our flight, how to weld my drugged friends into an efficient force, I began to feel a kinship with the thing, a shared sense of purpose. We both hated the world and its people. Each morning they choked down another dose of everything’s-fine or whatever bland preachment they had been induced to swallow, and went forth to mindfucking jobs where they would make a paper sandwich of some poor bastard’s blood and bones; to fitness clubs where they believed they could perfect the unperfectable; to movies that persuaded them this death-in-life was preferable to an existence in which they dared to confront the truth of the human condition; and all the while a horrid tide was rising higher and higher, until one day, they would look out their windows to find streets choked with red water and corpses, and, mistaking the sight for normalcy, for another cold-meat Sunday with the living room dead, they would open their doors and drown.

  Here, now, was the antidote to all that.

  I had an epiphany—I pictured the beast sated with killing, the whole world in its belly, falling asleep on the sand, going into labor and dying midbirth, assaulted by giants come down from the hills where they had been hiding to rip the fetus out and lock it away in its prison rock, and I saw the process of civilization beginning again, the good and bad of it, leading ultimately to a moment such as this. I understood it was my duty to assist in the delivery of the new cycle on this primordial beach with magical light streaming up from the tide pool and no one to witness. I inched my way along the rock, stopping now and then to listen. The thudding grew louder and at last I found the crack the beast had made. It ran straight up the face—I could not see its end or judge how deep it went. I unsheathed my knife and reached with it into the crack, pried with the tip, with the edge, digging crumbles of stone from around a harder object. I was at it for the longest time. Someone called my name, but I continued to pry and dig.

  “Hey! What you doing?” Molly flung her arms about my neck from behind; when I offered no response, she said, “TK wanted me to go down on him.”

  I felt a flicker of annoyance. “Did you?”

  “No! I’m being more … like what you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  I withdrew the knife, reached into the crack with my hand, and touched something colder than the surrounding stone. A metal projection, I thought. Part of a bulky mechanism.

  “To respect myself,” Molly said. “I was trying to be more self-respectful. TK really wanted it, so I came to find you. So he’d leave me alone.” She turned my face toward hers and kissed me. “Let’s go up on the cliff again.”

  In the moonlight, her pupils were enormous and her expression flowed from seductive to deranged to stunned, reflecting the action of the drugs she had ingested.

  “Later.” I reinserted the knife into the crack and pried at the metal, felt it shift the slightest bit.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Listen,” I told her.

  She cocked an ear and said, “Listen to what?”

  “Try to tune out the sound of the waves. You can hear it.”

  She listened more attentively. “I think … maybe I hear something.”

  I encouraged her to put her ear to the crack.

  Again she listened. “I think … Yeah. It’s kind of a … a …”

  “A thudding.”

  “Yeah! I hear it!” She looked at me in alarm. “What the fuck?”

  “It’s trying to get out,” I said.

  She was bewildered for a second or two, then her eyes widened. “The beast, you mean? That can’t be … .”

  A rending noise broke from the crack and I pulled her back, edged away along the face of the rock, for now that my part in things was done, I was afraid to see the issue of my labor. Despite all
I felt about the world and its worth, I feared for my life and for Molly’s. And TK’s. He strolled into view, doubtless looking for Molly, and stood by the tide pool, staring down into the glowing water. He appeared to be picking his nose.

  The thudding grew louder, more insistent, and, as if in sympathy with such relentlessness, a wave detonated against the seaward end of the rock, showering us with spray. Molly’s shriek must have outvoiced the rush of water, for TK glanced toward us, and it was at that moment the beast broke free. I had expected a gush of blackness, the wall to shatter, slabs of stone to rain down, but all I saw was a dark shape eeling from the crack. It seemed a pipe had broken within the rock and was leaking oil. Yet as it continued to pour out, the beast gathered its substance into a more fearsome formlessness. It was fluid, it was living smoke, it was power adapted to the black medium in which it had been steeped. It boiled up into a cloud three times our height, and then condensed into a shape no bigger than a man’s. It seemed to turn to Molly and me, though it did not truly turn—it rearranged its parts, moving its front to its back and hanging a face on its inky turbulence, a parody of rage with shadowy fangs and eyes emerging from a storm-cloud chaos … then it went flowing over the broken ground toward TK. I sprang after it, shouting a warning, but I was a foot short, a split-second late. By the time I dropped to my knees beside him, the beast had condensed a portion of its substance into an edge and sliced him across the throat. He lay with his head in the water, his blood roiling out in a cloud that crimsoned the light cast by the submerged lamp.

  Grief, fear, and urgency were mixed in me. The beast had merged with the night. I could no longer see it, though I felt its presence along my spine. I shouted at Molly to stay where she was and jogged down the beach, peering left and right. The tide pool dwindled to an eerie chute of red light. The rock became a shadow and the giant’s jawbone was lost to sight. After I had gone, I’d estimate, a quarter-mile, I regretted having left Molly alone, but I decided to keep searching a while longer, and shortly afterward I spotted two figures lying together in the sand. Not sleeping, though. One waved an arm, as if describing the wide arc of his existence. It had to be James. Though restrained in my presence, whenever he thought himself unobserved he was given to dramatic gesture.