Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  Her eyes were blank. Smooth, featureless silver, just like a statue’s.

  Slowly, incredibly, painfully slowly, one arm began to rise and her weight shifted again as she reached forward. Her fingers were still curled softly inward toward her palm, so she wasn’t really pointing in my direction, but for a few moments, I was sure she was going to. Instead, her arm went on rising and eventually stopped over her head, as if she meant to call down some power from heaven. Perhaps the silver lady was a goddess now.

  This was a different woman; it was so obvious. She was several inches taller than Sophie and at least twenty pounds heavier. It couldn’t have been Sophie.

  Except that I knew it was.

  It was practically dark by the time the silver lady broke and got down off the pedestal. In the whole time I had been watching her, I had barely moved myself. Now my legs hurt all the way up to my hips.

  But at least I felt a lot more sober—sober enough to keep Sophie and the creep manager in sight despite the distance and the flow of people between me and them. I watched as the creep wrapped her up in a silver-gray robe but then carried out what seemed to be an inspection of her body. He felt her up with both hands, through the robe and then under the robe, as if she were a race horse. Sophie submitted to it with no resistance that I could discern. Whatever he discovered apparently satisfied him. He put one arm around her shoulders and herded her away, talking intently while she hung on his every word.

  I didn’t make a decision to follow them—I just did it. They were so wrapped up in each other that they didn’t bother to watch where they were going much less look back to see me trailing several yards behind them. Some instinct seemed to be guiding them along the street, stepping up or down as necessary, while people moved aside to let them pass without actually noticing. At a quick glance, they might have passed for any newly smitten couple enjoying the high of a new relationship. But what I saw in Sophie’s face was an eaten-away-from-the-inside quality similar to terminal cancer patients, while the look in her creep manager’s eyes was more like gluttony than desire.

  They got into a black cab outside a theater on Drury Lane; I grabbed the one behind it, unsure how the driver would react when I told him to follow that cab. He gave me an arch look but he didn’t tell me to get out. I came up with a story about a sister with a large inheritance and a work-shy boyfriend I suspected was abusing her. It worked so perfectly I felt simultaneously relieved and ashamed.

  I felt a lot more ashamed when we finally came to a stop in some tangle of streets whose names I’d never heard of, just around the corner from where Sophie and the creep were getting out—the fare was three and a half pounds more than I had. I asked for the cab driver’s name and address so I could mail him the difference; he left me a couple of pound coins and drove away before I could even get his cab number.

  From behind the low brick wall surrounding the front yard of the house on the corner, I watched Sophie waiting on the sidewalk while the creep paid the cab driver. Or argued with him—I couldn’t really tell. Some kind of discussion was taking place; I didn’t hear any raised voices but there was something about the way the creep was leaning in toward the driver that made me think it wasn’t a friendly exchange. Maybe the creep was trying to beat his fare. Sophie remained motionless, not so much like a statue as just some inanimate object waiting to be picked up and carried away. Like a duffel bag. Finally, the creep stepped back and made an abrupt dismissing gesture with one hand, then turned to Sophie.

  It was like he flipped a switch turning her on; she came to life and stood at attention. He put his hands on her shoulders, swiveled her around and steered her up the sidewalk in my direction.

  I ducked down behind the wall quickly, almost cutting myself on the rough edge of a battered and bent metal sign screwed into the brick: FOXTAIL CLOSE. Staying low, I risked peeking around the corner again just in time to see the two of them climbing the front steps of a house almost directly across from where I was crouching.

  I hadn’t noticed the place before; if I had, I would have taken it for derelict. It was large and dark, set back from the row houses stretching down the block, on a patch of ground that didn’t really seem to belong with the rest of the street. Sophie and the creep went inside without turning on any lights. I waited but the house stayed dark.

  After a while, I pushed myself upright and shook out each leg until my knees stopped screaming. And now that I knew where she was living—or where the creep was keeping her, anyway—what did I think I was going to do next? Take down the address and send her a card?

  Abruptly, a big man came out of the shadows on the right side of the house. And I mean big, bouncer big, the kind of guy who handles “security” at a club. At first I thought the creep had seen me after all and had sent him out to settle my hash. But the man only stood on the sidewalk in front of the house. He was wearing a headset and holding a clipboard. He really was a bouncer, I realized, and he was on the job right now.

  I’d thought the creep had taken Sophie home but he’d actually taken her clubbing, at one of those secret, members-only, you’ve-got-to-be-invited-to-find-it places—

  No, she wasn’t clubbing, I realized; she was working. This was Sophie’s major nighttime gig. The creep had her working all day and then working all night. No wonder she looked like the wreck of the Hesperus.

  A cab pulled up at the curb and three people got out. The bouncer greeted them familiarly but looked them up on his clipboard all the same before directing them around the side of the house, where he had come from. The next cab arrived moments later; another was right behind it, and a third pulled up behind that one. The bouncer seemed to know everyone but made a point of checking his clipboard anyway. He sent them all around the side of the house into the shadows and they all went without hesitation. Most of them were well dressed; some were overly well dressed, and a few were more costumed than attired. I didn’t recognize any of them but that didn’t mean anything. Most celebrities aren’t actually that recognizable in person. If the Royal Family had arrived I couldn’t have been completely sure.

  Eventually, the cabs came less frequently and then tapered off altogether. I waited for the bouncer to tuck his clipboard under his arm and vanish into the shadows again but he stayed where he was. Someone must have been fashionably late.

  How late was it anyway? I had no idea. Late enough that I wasn’t really drunk anymore. Still impaired, though—bad judgment and no cab fare. Even if I could find a tube station, it would be closed by now.

  “Well? Are you just going to lurk there all night?”

  I looked over at the bouncer to see who he was talking to, already knowing that he was calling to me.

  “Come on, now. You came this far. Might as well come the rest of the way, yes?”

  I made myself move forward, stopping at the corner. “How long have you known I was here?”

  The bouncer laughed. “All along, luv. What do you think, we wouldn’t have good security?”

  I could run, I thought. Then I stepped off the curb and went over to him.

  “This way.” He tucked the clipboard under his arm.

  “Aren’t you going to check if I’m on the list?” I asked.

  “Don’t have to. Come along, now.”

  The party in the backyard had apparently been going on for some time. I sat in the chair where the big man had left me; it was next to the swimming pool, one of those silly, kidney-bean-shaped things, good only for getting your bathing suit wet rather than real swimming. It seemed to be much deeper than normal, however—even under the bright lights, I couldn’t make out the bottom. Or maybe the water was tinted dark. To discourage guests from getting rowdy and pushing each other in, perhaps? It didn’t seem to be that kind of crowd, I thought, watching the well-dressed people drift around chatting to each other and helping themselves to refreshments from a large round table.

  A nondescript man in a nondescript waiter outfit materialized in front of me with a plate of hors d�
�oeuvres. He held it out with a faint smile. I pushed myself up out of the chair and walked away. The food smelled impossibly good, the way it does when you suddenly realize you haven’t eaten all day, but I didn’t want to accept anything. I had it in my mind that if I did, it would be like accepting what had happened to Sophie, approving of it. They might have had my name on their list but I wasn’t at this party. Not the way all the rest of these people were. Whoever they were. The nameless posh, perhaps, what the toy soldier had called the rarefied elite, and this was how they lived, one party after another, day after day, night after night. Wasn’t there some old joke about people who would go to the opening of an envelope? I didn’t see any envelopes here. Maybe they were in the house.

  Or out in the garden.

  Something about a garden. Big house, big garden.

  I looked around but the lights were so bright and every one of them seemed to be shining right in my eyes.

  “Not lost, are you?”

  I knocked the creep’s hand off my shoulder. “Where’s the garden?”

  He smiled. “You think that’s where she is?”

  “If she isn’t, where is she? I want to talk to her.”

  “Okay, you got me.” A phony sheepish smile. “In the garden. But she won’t talk to you. She’s busy.”

  “When’s her break?”

  Now the creep acted surprised, as if I had asked him something completely absurd. “Her break? She doesn’t take one.”

  “You’ve got her working without a break?”

  “I said she was busy. I didn’t say she was working.”

  I wasn’t about to let him draw me into a word game. “Just tell me how to find her. If she’s too busy to talk to me, I want to hear it from her. To my face.”

  “Yeah. Your face.” He beckoned. “This way.”

  He led me around the pool and down some stone steps to another patio where even more people were sitting around eating finger foods and talking in low murmurs about who knows what. This area was bounded on one side by a tall hedge with a wooden door in it. He stopped in front of the door, turned around and started to say something. Ignoring him, I reached for the handle; he pushed me back with a strength I hadn’t suspected.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, raising his voice to address everyone there. “This is a little bit earlier than I had originally planned but I apparently underestimated the eagerness of some people—” he glanced at me “—to see what we’ve done with the reclaimed land. So without further delay, please follow me for your first look at the finished—”

  I ducked around him and pushed through the door.

  More bright lights hit me in the eyes along with the overpowering aroma of fresh flowers in massive quantities. The utter intense beauty of the smell was like being assaulted with bouquets.

  Behind me, people were ooh-ing and aah-ing and I could hear the creep telling them to watch out for patches of uneven ground.

  “Sophie?” I called hopefully.

  “ … statues are perfect,” a man said, going past on my left.

  I looked up. Yes, they were. And there were so many of them.

  Every ten feet, there was a different figure standing on a pedestal about five feet off the ground. Men and women, gold, silver, bronze, black, alabaster, even marble. Warriors, kings and queens, fairies, gods and goddesses, shamans, witches, aliens and animal hybrids—dog people, cat people, lion people, lizard-, snake-, and bird-people. Some nude, some nearly but not quite. All of them deeply still, completely wrapped in stillness.

  “Sophie!” I ran along the row of statues on my right, looking up at each female. “Sophie, answer me!” I was expecting the bouncer to tackle me at any moment but no one tried to stop me. No one even came near me—when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the creep and his party guests were staying up near the entrance. Giving the crazy woman a wide berth.

  I slowed to a stop next to a woman made up like Marie Antoinette in marble. “Sophie, dammit, answer me or I’ll start tearing things up! I swear I will, I’ll rip all these flowers up by their roots!”

  Nothing. I turned to see how the creep was taking this; he didn’t look too worried.

  “Sophie?” I started walking again, looking significantly at the flower beds on either side. This section was all tulips, every variety and color. “Sophie, I’m not kidding. I’ll tear this place apart, I really will.”

  I went another twenty feet before I stopped again. Just how big was this Goddamned yard anyway? Shading my eyes from the bright overhead lights, I tried to see where it ended. “Sophie?”

  The rest of the people at the party looked ridiculously far away now, as if I were seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope. I couldn’t hear the murmur of their voices or the music. I listened for traffic noises, the rustle of trees, any ambient night sounds, but there was nothing. It was completely still.

  “Sophie!” I bellowed her name at the top of my lungs. Still nothing.

  I turned to look at the nearest statue. A young man who might have been either Robin Hood or Peter Pan. “You, in the jaunty hat,” I called up to him. “Come down and help me out here or I’ll pull you down.”

  He didn’t twitch. I reached up and grabbed his ankles, intending to yank him off his perch. My hands closed around cold, hard stone. I let go with a yelp and staggered back, wiping my hands on my jeans. Great. I couldn’t tell the difference between a human statue and a real statue. The creep and his party guests were probably very impressed. I moved to the next statue: Zorro. I didn’t bother even touching him—the swirl of the whip was suspended in midair, like the lasso of the cowboy next to him.

  I crossed over to the other side of the garden where a bronze-colored matador stood with his face turned haughtily away from me. He held his cape low, the hem touching his feet. I put a hand on the cape. It was hard, cold, unyielding. Yet something about the set of his shoulders suggested he was human, not stone or metal. If only I could see his eyes, I thought.

  I looked back over my shoulder at the other statues.

  They had all moved, the matador, the cowboy, Zorro. Not much—barely noticeably—but I could tell.

  “Sophie?” Dread rose inside me like cold water as I moved farther down the row of statues, away from the house. “Sophie, I really need you to answer me now. Please.”

  A blank-eyed marble Cleopatra holding a snake to her breast stared through me.

  “Where is she?” I demanded.

  Next to her a chimney sweep was staring off to my right. I followed his gaze past a Victorian lady, past Oscar Wilde, a cricket player, a Madonna, a town crier, a jester, all the way down to the end of the garden.

  The bronze Amazon stood on a pedestal in front of another hedge with a door in it.

  She looked larger than life now, much larger—if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn she was seven feet tall, her perfectly sculpted muscles in flawless proportion.

  “In metal, it would weigh several hundred pounds,” said the creep, following me over to her.

  “‘It?’”

  He ambled around me to stand in front of the pedestal, planting one elbow next to Sophie’s foot. “And it’s almost ready for the next garden,” he added, glancing at the door.

  “Sophie, come down,” I begged.

  “She doesn’t hear you,” he said cheerfully. “Once they’re in the next garden, none of them hear anyone like you.”

  “But she’s not in the next garden yet,” I said, moving closer to her. “Sophie, you hear me, I know you do. Please, come down and let me take you out of here.”

  “Why should she? What can you offer her? Friendship in the monotony of a nothing job in a world where things ripen and then rot, to be discarded and forgotten.” He laughed nastily. “You can go now, she doesn’t care to listen to anything you have to say.”

  “That’s not true, is it, Sophie?” I put a hand on her cold leg. “Please come down. I’ll help you.”

  “Help her what?” The creep gave
me a shove that sent me back a few steps. “Help her rot and convince herself she’s happy about it? She’s a star, now, she’s my masterpiece and she’ll stand in the next garden forever, unmoved and perfect. Take your spoiled meat out of my sight. You’re not even mildly amusing anymore.” He went to shove me again but I dodged around him and threw my arms around Sophie’s pedestal.

  I don’t know whether it was the sight of the creep getting physical with me or just that the activity itself was a distraction, but she lost it.

  This time, the cracking was quite audible. It came from deep inside of her and it was the sound of pure breakage, what you hear when something shatters that cannot be mended. Her body shuddered and began to collapse inward like a deflating balloon. Except her skin didn’t hang on her now—there wasn’t enough substance for that. This was what a living mummy would look like: wizened, dried up, little more than a husk. She wavered, trying to lift her torso and pull her rounding shoulders back but the cracking grew louder and more intense,

  Suddenly the pedestal broke apart, dumping her down on the grass on her hands and knees in front of the creep.

  “What did you do?!” His voice was as inhumanly shrill as a siren. I wasn’t sure whether he was yelling at Sophie or me. “What the hell is this, you were better than that, you told me you were better than that, what did you do?!”

  Sophie reached one hand toward him; he stepped back, revolted.

  “Now you have to start all over!” he squealed.

  Sophie was nodding her head, trying to speak. I wanted to sweep her up in my arms and rush her away from him but I was afraid to touch her, afraid that she would crumble to dust in my hands.

  “Only I don’t have another pedestal, you stupid cow!” he went on. “Every spot is taken! You’ll have to wait! You’ll have to wait and you’ll never last that long!”