Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  I couldn’t make sense of it. Not quite yet. I can only say what I thought: The only thing in Matt’s eyes, right that moment, was Matt.

  He didn’t move for a while. At no point did he grin. What he did do, finally, was step back and tap my locker with his long, white fingers.

  “What?” I whispered, barely breathing. “Open it?”

  Matt tapped again. I twirled the combination, fumbled it twice, finally got the door unlatched. Inside, my backpack and coat and books lay neatly re-stowed. Elbowing me—not hard—to one side, Matt ducked in, pulled everything out in a single pile, and dropped it on the floor beside him. Then he stuck out his hand in a slow, graceful movement—if not for his coat, and his muscles, and the fact that he was Matt Janus, he could have passed for a butler—and gestured me inside.

  For a long moment, we just looked at each other. Me, and the balrog of the abandoned mineshaft. My friend from years ago.

  I stepped into the locker. Matt shut the door, shoved it until it the click told him it was locked. The bell rang, and a buzz roared through the halls. From the breathing just outside, and the weight I could sense when I pushed my hands against the inside of the door, I could feel that Matt was still out there. Soon, there was silence.

  At one point, ten minutes or so into first period, with Matt still leaning on my locker, it occurred to me that nothing was over. That he was going to rip the door open now that we were alone and tear me to pieces.

  Except that he didn’t know the combination. Had put me—intentionally, or otherwise—in the one place in Silver City where he really couldn’t get at me.

  Somewhere in that whirl of thoughts, I realized I couldn’t hear his breathing anymore. That there was no one outside. I waited another few minutes, heard footsteps, shouted out. It took Mr. Kellaway four tries, with me repeating that he had to bump it after the “38,” to get the door open. When I stepped out, blinking, he exploded into laughter, shook his head, and walked away.

  There were terrified, stunned stares when I walked into bio a few minutes later. But there were cheers when I got to Spanish. I was shuttled to the front of the lunch line. I kept waiting for that blooming silence, the heavy footfall that would tell me the real consequences had come. But they didn’t come. If Matt was in the cafeteria, I never saw him.

  Somehow, slowly, P.E. and English crawled by. Fifteen minutes from the bell, I realized I was about to go walking, for the first time in two months, with Jill Redround. When we were good and high on the buttes, I was going to kiss her.

  The second the bell rang, I sprinted for my locker. I knew Matt might be waiting for me there. I no longer cared. I just wanted to be waiting when Jill showed up. I didn’t even notice the note taped to my door at first, because I was too busy scanning every passing face.

  The note was handwritten, on the yellow legal paper Jill always used.

  Gone to the Janus Tree. Matt begged me. I told him it was the last time. Call me tonight? Can’t wait to see you, Teddy. RoundRed.

  Dawn, I thought, my hands shaking so hard I tore the note in half. “The Dark Lord summoned me to the Janus Tree.” That’s what Robert had said. Pretty much the last thing he’d said, when he was my friend. The night he’d gone up the hill. Seen what he’d seen.

  Then I was hurling students aside, flying for the front door and out, cutting through the yards toward uptown and the road up the rocks to the Janus house.

  The sun still shone, but snow was flurrying in gray, gust-driven balls like tumbleweeds. Overhead, I could see the Virgin of the Great Divide through the drifts, blank and mysterious as a sphinx, some other culture’s monument. I was thinking of the vanished Incas, the village Mr. Janus had told us about. Indio Muerto. I could hear his voice. You’re telling me we can’t locate a single dead Indian, in their own village? Most of all, I was thinking of his crooked, decaying fingers stroking Jill Redround’s upper arm, inches from the swell of her breast.

  Everyone has to get old, he’d said. Everyone has to get old.

  Vanished. Where had they gone?

  When Robert had received his summons, Mr. Janus had barely got back from Chile. He must have hardly begun testing out what he’d learned in the village of dead Indians. He might not even have been positive it was working. Or what anyone else would make of the changes, if there’d even been any. Had he picked Robert because he was wacky, vulnerable, the kind of kid bullies always chose? Or because he thought—hoped—Robert was sensitive, and might confirm that something was indeed happening. To himself. To his son … .

  I understood long before I got there.

  Inside the Janus house, nothing moved. Nothing would, of course. Why had NO ONE asked whom Matt would be staying with, now that his father and mother were both gone? Because somehow, subconsciously, everyone else already knew, too. Not that anyone would say. And it was too much even to admit.

  Through the snow, in the red-yellow sun, I could see them on the hillside. Matt right under the tree, so that it seemed an extension of his spine, the dead branches to the right and the live ones on the left fanning open on either side of him like wings, the scaly bark so closely resembling his own blotchy, shedding skin. And Jill on her knees in front of him. Screaming.

  I’d gotten within ten feet before I realized even Matt hadn’t gotten that tall, couldn’t have, and finally noticed the wheelbarrow he was standing in.

  “What the fuck?” I screamed. And then, “Jill!”

  Matt kicked the wheelbarrow out from under himself so hard that it swung up and smacked Jill in the forehead. She fell back flat, still screaming, hands at her face and blood spurting into her eyes. So only I saw.

  I saw legs kicking. Not dancing, kicking. Not at the air, but at each other. I saw Matt’s right hand yanking at the noose, his left hand wrenching at the right, all but pulling it off its wrist. Then something in the rope slipped, Matt dropped another six inches, and the snap of his neck exploded off the rocks like gunshot.

  The ambulance and the hearse arrived together. I knew, even as I kissed her bloody forehead, that Jill was gone from me, too. Her mother moved her to Albuquerque for good three days later. I wrote her there. Sometimes, she wrote back. She never returned, and she never invited me down, and I’ve never gone.

  I can’t. Because every time I think of her or see her face, I see Matt’s face. In the noose, kicking and fighting for his life with his father, who’d slipped inside him. Or by my locker, at the moment he directed me into it, when he was just Matt, who’d flung a balrog off a cliff, having lost a battle to a boy who stored magic in a plastic light-saber in his backpack.

  The Bedroom Light

  JEFFREY FORD

  Jeffrey Ford’s most recent novel, The Girl in the Glass, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. His short novel, The Cosmology of the Wider World, was published in 2005 and his second collection of short stories, The Empire of Ice Cream, was published in 2006. He has recently had stories published in the anthology The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales and in the Datlow-edited issue of Subterranean magazine. He will also have a story in the forthcoming anthology The Starry Rift. Two of his stories were reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Nineteenth Annual Collection.

  Ford lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons. He teaches Literature and Writing at Brookdale Community College.

  They each decided, separately, that they wouldn’t discuss it that night. The autumn breeze sounded in the tree outside the open kitchen window and traveled all through the second-story apartment of the old Victorian house. It twirled the hanging plant over the sink, flapped the ancient magazine photo of Veronica Lake tacked to his office door, spun the clown mobile in the empty bedroom, and, beneath it, set the wicker rocker to life. In their bedroom it tilted the fabric shade of the antique floor lamp that stood in the corner by the front window. Allison looked at the reflection of them lying beneath the covers in the mirror set into the top of the armoire while Bill looked at their reflection in the glass of the hand-colored print, “Moon
Over Miami,” that hung on the wall above her. The huge gray cat, Mama, her belly skimming the floor, padded quietly into the room and snuck through the partially open door of the armoire.

  Bill rolled over to face Allison and ran his hand softly down the length of her arm. “Today, while I was writing,” he said, “I heard, coming up through the grate beneath my desk, Tana, getting yelled at by her mother.”

  “Demon seed?” said Allison.

  He laughed quietly. “Yeah.” He stopped rubbing her arm. “I got out of my chair, got down on the floor, and turned my ear to the grate.”

  She smiled.

  “So the mom’s telling Tana, ‘You’ll listen to me, I’m the mother. I’m in charge and you’ll do what I say.’ Then there was a pause, and I hear this voice. Man, this was like no kid’s voice, but it was Tana, and she says, ‘No, Mommy, I’m in charge and you will listen to me.’”

  “Get outa here,” Allison said and pushed him gently in the chest.

  “God’s honest truth. So then Cindy makes a feeble attempt to get back in power. ‘I’m the Mommy,’ she yells, but I could tell she meant to say it with more force, and it came out cracked and weak. And then there’s a pause, and Tana comes back with, ‘You’re wrong, Mommy. I am in charge and you will listen to me.’”

  “Creep show,” Allison said.

  “It got really quiet then, so I put my ear down closer. My head was on the damn floor. That’s when I heard Cindy weeping.”

  Allison gave a shiver, half fake, and handed Bill one of her pillows. He put it behind his head with the rest of his stack. “Did I tell you what Phil told me?” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “He told me that when he’s walking down the street and he sees her on one side of the road, he crosses over to the opposite side.”

  “I don’t blame him,” he said, laughing.

  “He told you about the dog, right?” she said, pulling the covers up over her shoulder.

  Bill shook his head.

  “He said the people who live in the apartment on the second floor next door—the young guy with the limp and his wife, Rhoda—they used to have a beagle that they kept on their porch all day while they were at work.”

  “Over here,” he said and pointed at the wall.

  “Yeah. They gave it water and food, the whole thing, and had a long leash attached to its collar. Anyway, one day Phil’s walking down to the Busy Bee to get coffee and cigarettes and he sees Tana standing under the porch, looking up at the dog. She was talking to it. Phil said that the dog was getting worked up, so he told Tana to leave it alone. She shot him a ‘don’t fuck with me’ stare. He was worried how it might look, him talking to the kid, so he went on his way. That afternoon the dog was discovered strangled, hanging by the leash off the second-story porch.”

  “He never told me that. Shit. And come to think about it, I never told you this … . I was sitting in my office just the other day, writing, and all of a sudden I feel something on my back, like it’s tingling. I turn around, and there she is, standing in the doorway to the office, holding Mama like a baby doll, just staring at me. I jumped out of my chair, and I said, like, ‘I didn’t hear you knock.’ I was a little scared, actually, so I asked her if she wanted a cookie. At first she didn’t say anything, but just looked at me with that … if I was writing a story about her I’d describe her face as dour—an old lady face minus the wrinkles … . Then, get this, she says in that low, flat voice, ‘Do you Lambada?’”

  “What the fuck?” Allison said and laughed. “She didn’t say that.”

  “No,” he said, “that’s what she said, she asked me if I Lambada. What the hell is it anyway? I told her no, and then she turned and split.”

  “Lambada, I think …” she said and broke out laughing again, “I think it’s some kind of South American Dance.”

  “What would have happened if I said yes?” he asked.

  “Lambada,” she whispered, shaking her head.

  “Phil’s got the right strategy with her,” he said.

  “But I don’t like her coming up here in the middle of the day uninvited,” said Allison.

  “I’ll have to start locking the door after you go to work,” said Bill.

  “This place … there’s something very … I don’t know.” She sighed. “Like you ever lean against a wall? It kind of gives like flesh,” she said.

  “That’s just the lathing … it’s separating away from the Sheetrock cause the place is so old. I know what you mean, though, with that egg shell smoothness and the pliancy when you touch it—spongy-weird.”

  “I’m talking there’s a sinister factor to this place. The oriental carpets, the lion’s paw tub, the old heavy furniture—the gravity of the past that was here when we moved in. I can’t put my finger on it. At first I thought it was quaint, but then I realized it didn’t stop there.”

  “Like melancholy?” he asked.

  “Yeah, exactly—a sadness.”

  “Just think about it. You’ve got Corky and Cindy down there, hitting the sauce and each other almost every night. They must have had to buy a whole new set of dishes after last weekend. Then you got the kid … nuff said there. What about next door, over here on this side, the guy who washes his underwear on the fucking clothesline with the hose? That guy’s also classically deranged.”

  “I forgot about him,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “let’s not forget about him. I watch him from the kitchen window. I can see right down through the tree branches and across the yard into his dining room. He sits there every night for hours, reading that big fat book.”

  “I’ve seen him down there,” she said. “Sometimes when I wake up at three a.m. and go into the kitchen for a glass of water, I notice him down there reading. Is it the Bible?”

  “Could be the fucking phone book for all I know.”

  “Cindy told me that when they got Tana that yippie little dog … Shotzy, Potzy … whatever, the kid was walking on that side of the house over by the old guy’s property, and he came out his back door, and yelled at her, ‘If I find your dog in my yard, I’ll kill it.’ Now, I know Tana’s demon seed and all, but she’s still a little kid … . Cindy didn’t tell Corky because she was afraid he’d cork off and kick the crap out of the old guy.”

  “What, instead of her for once? Hey, you never know, maybe the old man’s just trying to protect himself from Tana’s … animal magic.” said Bill. “You know, Cindy swears the kid brought a dead bird back to life. She just kind of slips that in in the middle of a ‘hey, the weather’s nice’ kind of conversation.”

  “Yeah, I’ve caught that tale,” said Allison. There was a pause. “But do you get my overall point here?” She opened her hands to illustrate the broadness of the concept. “Like we’re talking some kind of hovering, negative funk.”

  “Amorphous and pungent,” he said.

  “I’ve felt it ever since the first week we moved in here,” she said.

  “Does it have anything to do with the old woman who answered the door with her pants around her ankles?”

  “Olive Harker?” she said, “Corky’s illustrious mom?”

  “Remember, Olive hadda get shipped out for us to move in. Maybe she cursed the joint … you, know, put the Lambada on it.”

  “It wasn’t her so much,” said Allison. “I first felt it the day the cat pissed in the sugar bowl.”

  He stopped rubbing her forehead. “Right in front of me—between bites of French toast,” he said. “That cat sucks.”

  “Don’t talk about Mama that way,” she said.

  “It baahhhs like a lamb and eats flies. I hate it,” he said.

  “She’s good. Three whole weeks gone and she still came back, didn’t she? You shouldn’t have thrown her out.”

  “I didn’t throw her, I drop-kicked her. She made a perfect arc, right over the back fence. But the question is, or at least the point is, if I follow you, is how strange is it that she pissed right in the sugar bow
l—jumped up on the table, made a beeline for it, parked right over it, and pissed like there was no tomorrow?”

  “That’s what I’m getting at,” said Allison. “It fulfills no evolutionary need. It’s just grim.”

  “Maybe it’s us,” he said. “Maybe we’re haunting ourselves.”

  “I saw Corky digging a big hole out in the yard the other day,” she said. “His back’s full of ink—an angel being torn apart by demons … . I was more interested in the hole he was digging ’cause I haven’t heard any yipping out of Potzy for a few days.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m ready for him.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Last Thursday, when I went out garbage-picking and found Veronica’s picture, I brought back a busted-off rake handle. I wound duct tape around one end for a grip. It’s in the kitchen behind the door for when Corky gets shit-faced and starts up the stairs. Then I’m gonna grab that thing and beat his ass.”

  “Hey, do you remember that guy Keith back in college?” she asked.

  “McCurly, yeah,” he said. “He did the apple dance. What made you think of him?”

  She nodded. “Every time he flapped his arms the apple rolled off his head, remember?”

  “He danced to Steve Miller’s ‘Fly Like an Eagle,’” Bill said. “What a fuckin’ fruitcake. I remember Oshea telling me that he ended up working for the government.”

  “Well, remember that time he was telling us he was reading The Amityville Horror?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “McCurly said that one of the pieces of proof that the author used in the book to nail down his case that the house was really haunted was that they found an evil shit in the toilet bowl. Remember that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said to him, ‘What do you mean by an evil shit?’ And McCurley looked like he didn’t get your question.”

  “But what he eventually said was, ‘It was heinous.’ I asked him if he could explain that and he said, ‘Really gross.’”