Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  I broke into a run and James came to his knees, wearing a look of terror. He must have misapprehended my intentions—I cried out, seeking to reassure him. Doria, too, got to her knees and screamed as the beast, materializing from the dark, flowed over them, a furious smoke that hid them from view. I flung myself atop it, stabbing and slashing with the knife, but it was impervious to my attack, and, when it had done with them, it flung me aside as if I were nothing and dissipated on the night wind, leaving behind a bloody human wreckage. I did not linger over their bodies—they each bore a dozen wounds, any one of which might have been fatal, cruel gouges made by teeth hardened from the beast’s all but immaterial flesh, and I had no time to mourn. My mind was a flurry of red and black, a confusion of dim urges and fears, but I knew where the beast had gone. Molly. She would, I realized, have stayed by the rock for some minutes, but then, overcome by fright, she would have headed for the stairs leading up from the beach.

  I ran, unmindful of my safety. She was all I had left, all that remained of my shabby kingdom, and I ran myself breathless in hopes of saving her. I felt the beast’s sides heave, panting in its self-made shadow, and knew it to be near. She had started to climb the second tier of steps when I caught up to her. Seeing me, she sagged against the railing and said in a helpless voice, “Oh, no.”

  “It’ll be all right if you don’t run,” I told her.

  She said something I didn’t catch and then, “God! This isn’t happening.”

  I eased close, not wanting to alarm her with a sudden move, realizing I must be a sight, covered in blood, and that she, like James and Doria, may have misinterpreted my appearance.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said.

  “I saw you,” she said. “What you did to TK … .”

  “You can hardly see at all, you took so much acid and speed,” I said. “What you saw was me trying to protect TK. It was the beast killed him. But you’re going to be all right. It’s grateful to me for releasing it. At least it hasn’t tried to kill me yet. As long as it knows you’re with me, it won’t hurt you.”

  A flicker of belief showed in her face, but only a flicker.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Please don’t run! I understand you’re scared, but you don’t have to be scared of me.”

  “Okay.”

  I noticed a tension in her body and said, “Don’t!”

  She sprang up the steps.

  This time I made no attempt to intervene.

  I ran down the stair and out onto the beach, howling in grief and rage. I held my arms up to the jolly moon balanced on the peak of the prison rock, begging for blood to rain down and for everything to cease. I flung the knife into the ocean and fell on the sand and there I remained until the gulls made their first circling flights. When the sky had gone the deep holy blue of predawn, I went to the edge of the water and washed myself clean. I was almost empty, without purpose or direction. And then, glancing inland, I saw the beast gather itself into the form of a giant and go striding off over the hills, toward the mountains beyond. I was disappointed—I had hoped for the destruction of cities. The mountains were a place of rest, a country for old men. Yet I had no choice but to follow.

  It’s hard to be hopeful these days. I cling to life like an ant to a leaf blown along a storm drain, watching the world rip itself apart. I am old now, not so old as the decrepit old man we met on the beach that night, but old enough to value certain things I once perceived as foolish and unworthy. I don’t go out much, don’t have many friends. I live in a small mountain town with my family. My wife, a magical creature, though she would strenuously deny it … Each morning she walks out the door and vanishes. What she does with her days, I have no idea, but when she returns home of an evening, she brings with her otherworldly scents and I will discover scraps of paper in her purse on which are written the fragments of wicked spells. She hisses when I make love to her, she grunts in a language unknown to me and sometimes locks her teeth in the meat of my shoulder.

  I edit the town’s weekly paper, which I also founded. Each week I write a column citing some symptom of our cultural decay that is a predictor of doom and madness, columns that cause great amusement among my readership. They e-mail excerpts to friends in other towns and label me an eccentric, though lately, since I have won several regional prizes for journalism, they have been more respectful. Despite this, I know the prizes are awarded for my idiosyncratic style, that hardly anyone listens to me, that few believe in beasts, in apocalypse—they believe, instead, that they will pass through the black wall toward which we are all speeding, that it is permeable and may even form the gateway to a better life. Thus the paper no longer interests me, and for some time now I have devoted the bulk of my energies to my son, a sturdy eleven-year-old.

  I don’t entirely understand what the cycle of giants and children and beasts means in the scheme of things, but I suspect that my son will understand. Whereas my father’s training was haphazard, born of his intemperate nature, mine is carefully thought-out, scrupulously planned. I beat my son, I lock him away, I control his reading, I keep him friendless, but all apportioned so that these torments have formed a bond between us. I have told him that it is done to strengthen him, and he has accepted the pain as part of a crucial teaching. Day by day, he grows more stoic, more malleable, and I expect soon there will be no need for discipline. I have promised to give him a woman when he is twelve and he exerts himself toward that goal. I have promised other enticements as well, criminal pleasures such as may be enjoyed in the adjoining towns. Perhaps when he is a man, he will strike me down, but he will have a sound reason for doing so and not strike prematurely, as did I. In all ways, he will act with a greater circumspection.

  I tell him that the beast he frees will be more powerful than mine, that it will achieve terrible things, wonderful things. He is intrigued by the possibility, but not quite certain I have told him the truth. Last week, we were eating sundaes at the new Baskin-Robbins over in Ridgeview, a hang-out for junior high kids similar to those whom I have prepared him to dominate, and he asked for the hundredth time, at least, if I thought the beast was real.

  “Of course it was real,” I said.

  “Do you think it was real like, you know, different from you? Separate? Or do you think it just worked your arms and legs and made you do things?”

  “In here …” I tapped my chest. “I know it was separate. Not that it makes a difference.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  “Somewhere around. Taking a nap in the woods, maybe. Snoring and all covered with gray hair like your old man. It’s retired. Once a beast leaves you, it’s done its duty.”

  We had placemats that depicted, against a blue background, cartoon butterflies hovering around a banana split, and my son began jabbing out the butterflies’ startled round eyes with a ballpoint pen. “I don’t ever want my beast to leave,” he said moodily.

  “It’s bound to leave eventually. But if you keep up the good work …”

  “I will!”

  “ … it’ll be with you a long time.”

  The waitress, a pretty brunette with tattooed bracelets on her wrists, refilled my coffee. He stared at her and once she was back behind the counter, I asked, “Do you like that one?”

  He nodded, embarrassed. “Uh-huh!”

  “Tattoos are a clear signal.” I ruffled his hair, sparking a grin. “You’ve got a good eye.”

  We ate for a time, not saying much, and then he asked me to tell him about the man I’d met on the beach after my friends died.

  “You don’t need to hear that again,” I said, but I was pleased, because that part of my story went to the core of my teaching.

  “Come on, Dad!”

  “Okay.” I slurped my coffee. “I was at the water’s edge, I’d just finished washing off the blood when this man, a big man, came along the beach. He had a fancy fishing pole and big tackle box. He was planning to do some surf casting, I guess. He stopped beside me and
stared. And then he said, ‘That’s a lot of blood on you, son.’

  “‘Where you see blood?’ I asked.

  “‘All in your hair. On the side there.’

  “I touched my hair and my fingers came away gooey with blood. I knew right away I had to kill him. If I didn’t, he’d call the cops. But the beast was gone, I’d thrown away my knife, and the man was immense. I was scared, I wasn’t sure I had the strength or the will to do it. And then he asked whose blood it was, and I replied, ‘It’s mine.’ I wasn’t trying to lie my way out of trouble. The blood belonged to people like me, people the man wouldn’t spit on if they were dying of thirst, and I was speaking for them. I wasn’t telling a lie. That made me strong. I took him down and kicked him in the head until his skull broke. I had his brains on my shoes. I puked all over myself after, but I did what I had to.”

  He dribbled hot fudge onto his ice cream with the edge of his spoon. “I sorta don’t get it.”

  “You get the important parts,” I said. “What’s that I say when you don’t get all of something and you need to think about it more?”

  He sat up smartly, like a little soldier, and said, “Consider it a lesson!”

  Hushabye

  SIMON BESTWICK

  Simon Bestwick lives in the former Lancashire mining town of Swinton. His fiction has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Beneath the Ground and the award-winning Acquainted with the Night. His story collection, A Hazy Shade of Winter, was published in 2004 and was nominated for the Stoker Award, and the title story was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Eighteenth Annual Collection.

  Several of his radio plays were broadcast on radio in 2005 and 2006, and further scripts are in production or preparation. By day he works in an office; in the meantime, when not preparing a backlog of short stories, novellas, a novel for publication, writing new stories or scripts, or pursuing the delights of wine (well, real ale and single malt whiskey), women, and song, he tries, with limited success, to catch up on his sleep.

  He has a Web site at: http://www.geocities.com/sbestwick2002/.

  March started late that year, as if waiting for a cue it had missed. The conversion back to BST was scheduled for late in the month; the days stayed short, the nights dark, long, and cold. When snow fell it lay for days in a brittle crust, and every other morning all stone was patterned with frost.

  I was looking unsuccessfully for paying work that didn’t drive me crazy after a fortnight, and still living out of cardboard boxes in my friend Alan’s spare room. Although he’d said I could stay as long as I needed when I moved in, it’d been six months now and his patience had started to fray, all our little habits scraping at one another’s nerves.

  So I took to going for long walks around the area. I like walking, even in the cold night on treacherous pavements.

  I went down Bolton Road to the roundabout where it met Langworthy Road, then walked down Langworthy ’til I was opposite the abandoned shell of the Mecca bingo hall; I was on the corner of Brindleheath Road, which ran under a bridge, past the edge of the industrial estate and a couple of vacant lots and up onto the A6 next to Pendleton Church and near a Chinese takeaway. I decided to get some chow mein before heading back home.

  As I came out from under the bridge, I heard a child call out “No.”

  That was followed by a noise somewhere between a gasp and a cry, then silence. My skin prickled; I ran up the road.

  I saw them vanishing into the bushes at the edge of one of the vacant lots: a small girl, tiny in a red coat, and a figure that looked like a shadow walking at first, ’til I realized it was dressed in black, only the white of its face visible. Then they were gone into the dark. They hadn’t seen me.

  I pelted up the road and crashed through the bushes, shouting. They were white in the gloom, or at least the girl’s body and the man’s face were. Something silver, brighter than breath, glimmering like motes of powdered glass, was pouring from the girl’s opened mouth and into his. The man looked up. His face was long, pale: a thin blade of nose, one thick eyebrow a line across the top. The eyes looked black too.

  I kicked out at him, but he was already rolling away. He scrambled up and ran, vanishing into the shadows. I stood there, gasping for air; I couldn’t see him and on the uneven ground all I’d do was break an ankle. And there was the girl to think about.

  He’d worked fast; she lay with her clothes scattered about her, staring up at the night stars. For a moment I thought she was dead, but then I saw her breath. I took off my jacket and covered her; she flinched from my touch as if stung, whimpering like a hurt animal and curling up on her side. I couldn’t tell if it was the cold or the hate that made my fingers so clumsy as I dug out my mobile and dialed 112.

  The first assault on a local child had happened in Higher Broughton just before Christmas, in Albert Park. A six-year-old boy almost dead with hypothermia, his torn clothes scattered around him. There’d been more over the following months, the same pattern: police offering nothing but pleas for vigilance and information, the victims unwilling or unable to provide any leads.

  They took the girl to Hope Hospital and me down to the police station on the Crescent. I was interviewed for two hours by a pair of detectives. Poole, the Detective Sergeant, was the hardest to handle, spending the first hour treating me as a suspect. In the end, the Detective Constable, Hardiman, put a hand on his arm and led him outside. They left me with a paused tape and a stony-faced policewoman; I heard raised voices through the breezeblock wall.

  Hardiman took it from there. He was young, earnest, and sympathetic. Poole stayed silent, looking at the scarred desktop, light gleaming on his bald crown. He had a drinker’s lined, ruddy face. Hardiman’s was smooth and pale as fiberglass. I told him everything I’d seen, except whatever it was I’d seen passing from the girl’s mouth to her attacker’s. I didn’t want dismissing as a nutter.

  “You’ll have to excuse DS Poole,” Hardiman said later, as we watched the Identi-Kit picture take shape. “He’s got a kid of his own that age. Takes it personally.”

  “It’s okay,” I told him, meaning it. Normally I’m pretty scathing about heavy-handed policing, but having seen what had been done to the girl I’d’ve quite happily held Poole’s coat for him while he threw the offender down the stairs several times. As long as it was the right man.

  “It’s not,” said Hardiman. “My missus wants us to have kids, but …” he gestured at the picture to indicate all it represented. “You shouldn’t have to think of this when you’re thinking of a family.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re sure this is him?”

  I looked at the finished picture and nodded slowly. Hardiman rubbed his eyes and pushed his fingers through his sandy hair. “Okay,” he said. “Come on. I’ll drive you home. And I want to thank you. This is the first clue we’ve had of any kind.” He must’ve been tired, to let that one slip out.

  They had my details, of course, but I didn’t hear any more from them for over a fortnight. In the interim, I received bad news of a different kind: a friend of mine called Terry Browning died.

  He’d choked on his own puke, sat in his armchair by the window with an empty bottle of Lone Piper beside him on the floor. It happened in his flat on Langworthy Road, a scant hundred yards from where I’d heard the little girl cry out. The funeral was at St. John’s Church, in the Height, about a week later.

  He’d been a priest, but had left the church with a deep loss of faith the previous year; maybe they thought it was catching, as the only dog-collar in sight was the one who read the service, which didn’t mean anything to me or Terry’s brother, the only other mourner, and probably wouldn’t’ve to Terry any longer. I wasn’t even sure if it meant much to the priest, but it was hard to tell. The bitter wind tore his graveside oration to shreds, like gray confetti.

  Rob Browning and I went for a pint down at the Crescent afterwards, more to chase out the chill than anything else. W
e hardly said a dozen words to each other. He was smart and suited and had a southern accent; I knew he and Terry hadn’t been close. He stayed for one drink and then left; I ordered a double Jameson’s and raised the glass to the memory of a friend whose death I still felt a certain guilt for.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  I looked up to see DC Hardiman standing over me with a Britvic orange in his hand.

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “Didn’t make CID on my good looks.”

  I laughed. “Didn’t think so.”

  He flipped me the bird and sat. “Sorry about your mate.”

  “Thanks. Looks like we’re the only ones who are.”

  We sat in silence; I waited for him to probe about Terry but he didn’t. In the end it was me who started fishing. “How’s the investigation going?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing?”

  “Oh no. Something. But … there’s complications.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  He didn’t answer at first. “I looked you up on HOLMES. Quite the colorful character.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “You say what you think and kick up a stink when you reckon you have to.”

  “Fair assessment,” I had to admit.

  “And you don’t believe in keeping your trap shut or leaving things alone when not doing so would piss off certain people.”

  “People in high places, sort of thing?”

  He nodded.

  “Guilty, I suppose.” I took a swallow of whisky. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  He studied his glass, turning it this way and that like a faceted gem. “The evidence I’ve got … it’s taking me somewhere where shutting my trap and leaving things alone is pretty much what the doctor ordered.”