Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  “It must be heating, or water in the pipes. Something like that,” he said at last.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “It’s an old building. Sometimes you just aren’t aware of it, but in quiet moments it can surprise you. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here. How well you think you know a place.”

  “You know this place well?”

  She sighed, and the sound flitted around the heights like a trapped bird. “Too well,” she said.

  His eyes were closed. He could almost imagine the thrill of proximity, the smell of her hair, her breath. “It would be nice to get to know you better,” he said, haltingly. “I could buy you a cup—”

  “I don’t think so,” she interrupted him. “It isn’t what I’m looking for.”

  He was confused and hurt by her instant rebuttal, and, further, the immediacy of his own dismissal. How had he misread their relationship? How could he self-destruct like this? Was he so lacking in confidence that he couldn’t even fantasize successfully? They conversed easily, she laughed at his jokes, he was interested in her. What harm could a cup of coffee bring? But he knew what he was doing. He was setting up defenses against the misery of rejection. All of his life had been a scuttling back from the word no. He had fended off fists and stones, one time a knife, but a voice turning him down, that one found his soft underbelly every time. Rehearsing the moment, though it pained him—even in make-believe—to be unable to swing a situation toward the positive, was the only way he could combat the threat.

  He resumed his patrol, walking close to the rail and looking down into the lower floor quadrant. Despite this failure, he was determined to pursue her.

  He thought he saw the twin gleam of eyes turned up toward him, and the sweep of a shadow, but he knew the building was empty. Each night he had to check the toilets, the exits and entrances, trigger the alarms that protected every threshold in or out of the place. Though he had only worked here a short time, he felt he was on the way to understanding the quirks of the building as well as he did his own home. He was a good security guard. Loners often were. Something to do with being more aware of personal space invasion. Something to do with preferring one’s own company.

  Suddenly it seemed that the hours weren’t moving as fast as they once had. There was little for him to do. The newspaper had been read, the crosswords and Sudoku completed. There was nothing left to eat in his bag and his flask of coffee had finally become tepid. His frustration had no release; what could he do but pace the same old route in his cheap serge uniform? Through the large ceiling window he again marveled at the talcum-powder stars. He thought he might have unleashed their secret; something was threatening, like the storm behind a wall of black cloud, but then it was gone; maddeningly, because the patterns remained, as well as his belief in his capacity to read them. He almost asked Rita if she could see what he was seeing, but he stubbornly stuck to his guns, no matter how much he needed some support about what was being played out far above him. He heard her voice, or his design for it, moving through his mind like a memory. He recognized the rhythms and melody of it, but not the words. It was as if he were hearing her speak through a gag. He almost asked her what was wrong, but he suspected at the last moment that her voice had come to him from a different source. His head burned with confusion; he wanted to shout out, ask what it was she wanted, but he couldn’t because of course she didn’t want anything. She wanted only what he decided for her.

  It isn’t what I’m looking for.

  What was she looking for? Why did she come to the museum and then leave every day as if she had the devil at her heels?

  At the end of his shift he stood outside for a long time, certain he could hear the pendulum beat of her shoes on the concrete, but she was nowhere; his suspicion, or need, had been infected by the soft noises occurring within the museum, those made by the wind, or the badly remembered weight of visitors on the floorboards and chairs. He tested the fire doors from the street but they did not give. Now the heels again, striking the floor as if she meant to open the ground with them. Suddenly he was convinced she was inside, had been all along. Somehow he had missed her during his closing time inspections. He returned to the front of the building and tried the main entrance. Locked, of course. He was a good security guard. Thorough. The museum managers, in their wisdom, had decreed after spending a lot of time and money on studies into criminal behavior, that the hours four until nine were the unlikeliest for a break-in. They were probably right, but it disgusted him that they watched the pennies where he was concerned. Topping his shift up until nine would hardly tip them into the red. But they could fall back on EU regulations, shift limits. It’s all for your good health, Mr. Garner. A fit guard is a happy guard. Angry, he stomped to Paco’s coffee shop, drank three cappuccini and scanned the previous day’s newspaper that he salvaged from a bin. Another hour. He felt older. He went back to the museum and the lights were on in one of the ground floor offices. He tapped on the glass and a shape squirmed into the elaborately textured square.

  “Who is it?”

  Garner could tell by the voice that it was Joyce, the cleaner. He asked her to let him in.

  He thanked her profusely, explaining that he had left his watch in the museum. “Funny, isn’t it?” he said, ascending the stairs and looking back down at her in the reception hall. “I lose my watch. In a room full of watches.”

  She didn’t find it amusing and, shaking her head, returned to her brushes and buckets.

  Garner retraced his steps quietly until he was standing by the main doors again, checking that Joyce had shut herself in the kitchen. Now he moved quickly to the ground floor exhibition entrance. He pushed lightly at the door, but it was locked. He rubbed his face. There must be some way of getting in. He couldn’t understand the force of his need. He wanted to believe that she was shut up inside the museum, that she had inadvertently become lost in the dark because she was trying to find him. And then he realized the only way he could get in, short of breaking the door down. He returned to the stairs and hurried up to the first floor. Beyond this, a STAFF ONLY sign hung from a rope barrier across a narrow set of steps leading to the museum roof. He deactivated the alarm and slammed the heel of his hand into the release bar. Outside he edged along the walkway between the railing overlooking a thirty-foot drop to the ground and the large sloping windows that hung over the timepieces. He was able to lever open one of them and slip inside. The beam of a torch yellowed the edge of one of the glass cases. What was going on? The beam did not waver. It had to be Frobisher, dropping by to do a check of the area for another superefficient clipboard report; nobody else had access to the building. Garner wondered if he should come clean to his superior, or go ahead with his plan and hope he didn’t get spotted. If Frobisher was here then Garner must find the girl before he did. Frobisher would think nothing of getting her prosecuted. There was something about that beam though, something about the way it did not move.

  Garner felt the first tremors of fear—minuscule, but relevant, like the tiny, shivering chip of quartz in a wristwatch. Something had happened here, in the time it had taken for him to clock off, drink a few cups of coffee, and break back in. He edged to the railing and peered into the darkness of the lower floor. Nobody walked down there, not anymore. He wondered if he had imagined her footfalls, but only for a second: he knew that he had not.

  He approached the torch from the rear, hoping to find Frobisher snoozing, but his superior was not there. He retrieved the torch and switched it off. A few feet away he found Frobisher’s jacket with its incandescent pips, cast on to the floor. That wasn’t like him. Frobisher wouldn’t hang his jacket on a hook unless there was a coat hanger to keep its shape. The complete lack of sound was distressing, occurring as it did within an environment where he usually felt so comfortable. The museum was suddenly an alien place to him. A feeling that was intensified when he vaulted the railings and dropped the ten feet into the exhibition hall on the ground floor. His unease was replaced for
a short time with unalloyed excitement. If she was here, then it was the closest he had ever been to the woman that intrigued him so much.

  But then: “Some of those stars up there died a thousand years before you were born,” she said. “The light you can see is ancient, of a thing that no longer exists. It might be a thousand years after you die that the light will wink out. Time comes into its own where concepts like that are concerned. It puts on its best frock and flirts with the camera. Minor elements, like you for instance, trouble time hardly at all.”

  She was not there, but it was her voice. It wasn’t his approximation either. This was not some honey-throated come-on. This was something halting and jagged, something trying to be heard in a wind tunnel. He felt it convulsing around his mind like a severed worm. He pressed his fingers against the metal plate in his head as if certain he would trace her features in it. A soft click: light flicked on upstairs. He looked around him but down here it was still too gloomy to see anything that might open Rita up to him. Nothing here but the ghosts of her footprints, the storm of her passage out of or into the museum. He didn’t know what he had expected to find. By this time he was half-crippled with fear anyway. He wanted to call up to whoever was upstairs—Frobisher, he hoped, back from the toilet or the tea room—but to do that was to give himself away and he feared what consequences that might bring. Because he knew Frobisher was dead. The jacket told him that. But one of the cabinets here also spoke of things gone awry. It was some way larger than any of the others. The lid had been pushed back, which surprised him as he had never seen any of his own cabinets opened for any reason. Inside it was a nineteenth-century operating table, complete with authentic tray of sawdust beneath to absorb spillages. He reached in and touched the worn wood with its collection of nicks from the amputation blades that had sawn into it over the years. His hand came away warm and wet. His eyes snagged on a placard referring to an operation that had been attempted on a female baby suffering from a terrible condition known as ectopia cordis, a congenital state in which the patient is born with the heart outside the body. The baby survived, the placard read, and led a relatively normal life until complications caused her eventual death, aged twenty-nine.

  Garner felt the skin on the back of his arms pucker. He knew then that Guillame Angiers did not exist, that he was a construct, a secret formed between them, a way for her to connect with the thoughts and fears in his mind. A way for her to sample the flavor of who he was.

  Tentatively he climbed on to one of the display cabinets. He had to leap to catch hold of the railing surrounding the gallery above and pulled himself up as quickly as his unfit body would allow.

  She said, “One man’s museum is another’s prison. You worry so much about your place in the world to the point where it consumes you. But you never once consider the possibility that there was never a place for you to begin with.”

  Frantically, Garner stalked between the display cabinets, searching for something he didn’t have a name for. The clocks and watches all seemed different now that the lights were on. Up ahead he saw shadows surge across the pale carpet, then recede into the relative murk against the wall, where the pendulum clocks were aligned. He was thinking of waking each day, looking down, and seeing the thing that kept you alive, that fueled love. An obsession for life became inseparable from a fascination with the organ that drove it. You were human but you were not. Every second, every beat, was a reminder of the grave. The skin was always peeled back. You were your own horror mask.

  He heard the smash of broken glass. The lid of the cabinet had been shattered. At first he thought it must be due to something having fallen from the ceiling, but even as he approached he knew this was merely wishful.

  Something had been added to the collection.

  It was beautiful and awful in equal measure. A silver skull watch, blood spattered and glistening. A Latin phrase was inscribed into the metal. He could just make it out despite the splashes of red: ultima forsan. Next to it, another kind of timepiece had been crudely mashed into the broken display cabinet. Like the others, this one had also stopped ticking, but could never be fixed to do so again.

  The hole in her chest roared wetly with air as she filled her lungs. He could only glance at her, at the twitching fist of meat that clung to her chest, beating so violently he thought it must tear itself away. His panic and fear were heavy things, they dragged his gaze to the floor. Something that might once have been Frobisher lay ransacked there.

  She said, “It’s later than you think.”

  Stilled Life

  PAT CADIGAN

  Pat Cadigan has twice won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year. She lives in gritty, urban North London with her husband, the original Chris Fowler, and her son, (Silent) Rob.

  Although primarily known as a science fiction writer (she’s one of the original cyberpunks) she also writes fantasy and horror stories, which have been collected in Patterns, Dirty Work, and Home by the Sea.

  Her novel, Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine, will appear Real Soon.

  When the weather gets warm, the human statues come out in droves. In Covent Garden, especially. As you leave the tube station, turn right to go down to the covered piazza called the Apple Market and you’ll see them every ten feet on either side. Young women and men painted white or silver or gold or even black, head to foot, clothes and all, standing on a stool or a box or an overturned bucket, holding impossibly still in some marvelous pose. Besides making a little money, a lot of them are hoping to get spotted by one of those agencies that provide entertainment for corporate parties or celebrity bashes. Either could be lucrative, but Sophie was hoping more for the latter than the former. Corporate parties were good steady gigs, but even just one celebrity bash could make you a star. Sophie wanted stardom and she didn’t bother hiding it.

  Sophie was like that—unconditionally, sometimes brutally honest. Personally, I’ve always thought that excessive honesty was vastly overrated, so exactly how we became friends is a mystery to me. We had very little in common—she was London-born-and-bred, I was a U.S. ex-pat; she was in her late twenties, I was caught in the headlights of my oncoming fifties; she was a beauty, a classic English rose with fair hair, luminous eyes, and porcelain skin … I was caught in the headlights of my oncoming fifties—go figure. Call it a chick thing—sisterhood is powerful.

  Whatever our bond was, it was strong enough that we could accept each other even if we didn’t always understand each other. I mean, I wouldn’t have tried the human statue thing on the street even in my early twenties, and God knows I’d tried plenty back then. But I didn’t mind helping her out with her paint and her costume and props when we both had the same day off from Fresh 4 U.

  That was how we met—she’d been working at the health food store for almost a year when I was hired. We bonded among the organic produce and fair-trade chocolate when we weren’t standing at adjacent cash registers and ringing up the lunchtime rush of health-conscious office workers hoping that the antioxidants in the salads could counter the cumulative effects of twenty cigarettes a day. Some of them were also hoping to attract Sophie’s attention, but she made it clear to all of them she wasn’t interested.

  “That kind of distraction would only interfere with the stillness,” she told me once, as I was helping her into her alabaster goddess getup. This was a Grecian-style gown that she had bleached, starched, painted, and varnished to the point where it actually could have stood up without her. How she tolerated it next to her skin I couldn’t imagine. She claimed that coating herself with several layers of greasepaint made it bearable; I didn’t even like to touch the thing. The wig was even worse.

  “If you say so,” I replied.

  She chuckled and handed me a tube of clown white so I could touch up her back. “I don’t expect you to understand, Lee. You’re not a statue.”

  Neither are you, I wanted to tell her, but I made myself shut up. Saying something like that to her just be
fore she went into her act would screw her up completely and ruin the whole day—spoil her stillness. Ironic, I thought, that someone who worked as a statue could be so easily psyched out.

  Besides the alabaster goddess, Sophie had two other personae: the bronze Amazon and the silver lady. The bronze Amazon wore more paint than clothing so she only came out in very warm weather, and only when Sophie was feeling particularly good about her body. The silver lady was, to my uncultured, American philistine’s eye, a cross between a hood ornament and a second-place athletic trophy, which makes it sound a lot tackier than it looked. There was nothing tacky about the silver lady just as there was nothing sleazy about the bronze Amazon. I just couldn’t take any of it as seriously as Sophie or her fellow statues and their helpers.

  Chalk it up to my age. To me, the whole human-statue thing is the twenty-first-century version of street mimes. It was less strenuous, and it didn’t involve someone in whiteface following you down the street making fun of the way you walked, which definitely counted in its favor. But anything done for pocket change was a paying-your-dues thing, not a vocational calling.

  I did try talking to Sophie about her plans for the future; she was rather vague about everything. I supposed that only made sense. I mean, working as a human statue didn’t suggest a specific next step, not like singing or dancing or riding a unicycle while juggling chainsaws.

  “I have a pretty good singing voice,” Sophie said when I finally managed to pin her down. We were restocking organic greens in the produce section. “But it’s nothing special—one of a million, not one in a million, and I’m not limber enough to be a real dancer. I’m not coordinated enough to even look at a unicycle. Hell, it took me most of a week just to learn how to ride a regular bike. And chainsaw juggling is so last century.”