Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

They laughed.

  She touched his face as if to make him quiet, and said, “That’s the point. We paint the unknown with the Devil’s shit to make it make sense.”

  “Heavy,” said Bill. A few seconds passed in silence.

  “Right? …” she said.

  “That Amityville House was only like two towns over from where I grew up,” he told her. “New people were in there and it was all fixed up. I’d go out drinking with my friends all night. You know, the Callahans, and Wolfy, and Angelo, and Benny the Bear, and at the end of the night we’d have these cases of empty beer bottles in the car. So around that time the movie of the Amityville Horror came out. We went to see it and laughed our asses off—come on, Brolin? Steiger we’re talking. One of the things that cracked us up big time was the voice saying, ‘Get out. For god’s sake get the hell out.’ I don’t want to get into it now but Steiger and the flies … baby, well worth the price of admission. So we decided we’re gonna drive to the Amityville Horror House and scream, ‘Get the hell out,’ and throw our empties on the lawn.”

  “That’s retarded,” she said.

  “We did it, but then we kept doing it, and not just to the Amityville Horror House. Every time we did it, I’d crack like hell. It was so fucking stupid it made me laugh. Plus we were high as kites. We did it to people we knew and didn’t know and we did it a lot to the high school coaches we’d had for different sports. There was this one guy, though, we did it to the most—Coach Pinhead. Crew cut, face as smooth as an ass, goggly eyes, and his favorite joke was to say “How Long is a Chinaman.” He was a soccer coach, a real douche bag, but we swung by his house every weekend night for like three months, dropped the empties and yelled ‘Pinhead!!!’ before peeling out on his lawn. We called the whole thing a ‘Piercing Pinhead.’”

  “Could you imagine how pissed off you’d be today if some kids did that to you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know. But get this. I was talking to Mike Callahan about five years later. When he was working selling furniture and married to that rich girl. I saw him at my mother’s funeral. He told me that he found out later on that Pinhead died of pancreatic cancer. All that time we were doing the Piercing Pinheads, screaming in the middle of the night outside his house, tormenting him, the poor guy was in there, in his bedroom, dying by inches.”

  “That’s haunted,” said Allison.

  “Tell me about it,” he said and then rolled closer to kiss her.

  They kissed and then lay quiet, both listening to the sound of the leaves blowing outside. She began to doze off, but before her eyes closed all the way, she said, “Who’s getting the light?”

  “You,” said Bill.

  “Come on,” she said, “I’ve got an early shift tomorrow.”

  “Come on? I’ve gotten the damn light every night for the past two weeks.”

  “That’s ’cause it’s your job,” she said.

  “Fuck that,” he said but started to get up. Just then the light went out.

  She opened her eyes slightly, grinning. “Sometimes it pays to be haunted,” she said.

  Bill looked around the darkened room and said, as if to everywhere at once, “Thank you.”

  The light blinked on and then off.

  “Maybe the bulb’s loose,” he said.

  The light blinked repeatedly on and off and then died again.

  “That’s freaky,” she said, but freaky wasn’t going to stop her from falling asleep. Her eyes slowly closed and before he could kiss her again on the forehead, she was lightly snoring.

  Bill lay there in the dark, wide awake, thinking about their conversation and about the lamp. He thought about ghosts in Miami, beneath swaying palm trees, doing the Lambada by moonlight. Finally, he whispered, “Light, are you really haunted?”

  Nothing.

  A long time passed, and then he asked, “Are you Olive?”

  The light stayed off.

  “Are you Pinhead?”

  Just darkness.

  “Are you Tana?” he said. He waited for a sign, but nothing. Eventually he closed his eyes and thought about work. He worked at Nescron, a book store housed in the bottom floor of a block-long, four-story warehouse—timbers and stone—built in the 1800s. All used books. The owner, Stan, had started, decades earlier, in the scrap paper business and over time had amassed tons of old books. The upper three floors of the warehouse were packed with unopened boxes and crates from everywhere in the world. Bill’s job was to crawl in amid the piles of boxes, slit them open, and mine their cargo, picking out volumes for the Literature section in the store downstairs. Days would pass at work and he’d see no one. He’d penetrated so deeply into the morass of the third floor that sometimes he’d get scared, having the same feeling he’d had when he and Allison had gone to Montana three months earlier to recuperate and they were way up in the mountains and came upon a freshly killed and half-eaten antelope beside a water hole. Amidst the piles of books, he felt for the second time in his life that he was really “out there.”

  “I expect some day to find a pine box up on the third floor holding the corpse of Henry Miller,” he’d told Allison at dinner one night.

  “Who’s Henry Miller?” she’d asked.

  He’d found troves of classics and first editions and even signed volumes for the store down below, and Stan had praised his efforts at excavating the upper floors. As the months went on, Bill was making a neat little stack of goodies for himself, planning to shove them in a paper sack and spirit them home with him when he closed up some Monday night. An early edition of Longfellow’s translation of Dante; an actual illuminated manuscript with gold leaf; a signed, first edition of Call of the Wild; an 1885 edition of The Scarlet Letter, were just some of the treasures.

  Recently at work he’d begun to get an odd feeling when he was deep within the wilderness of books, not the usual fear of loneliness, but the opposite, that he was not alone. Twice in the last week, he’d thought he’d heard whispering, and once, the sudden quiet tumult of a distant avalanche of books. He’d asked down below in the store if anyone else was working the third floor, and he was told that he was the only one. Then, only the previous day, he couldn’t locate his cache of hoarded books. It was possible that he was disoriented, but in the very spot he’d thought they’d be, he instead found one tall slim volume. It was a book of fairy tales illustrated by an artist named Segur. The animals depicted in the illustrations walked upright with personality, and the children, in powder-blue snowscapes surrounded by Christmas mice, were pale, staring zombies. The colors were odd, slightly washed out, and the sizes of the creatures and people were haphazard.

  Without realizing it, Bill fell asleep and his thoughts of work melted into a dream of the writer Henry Miller. He woke suddenly a little while later to the sound of Allison’s voice, the room still in darkness. “Bill,” she said again and pushed his shoulder, “you awake?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I had a dream,” said Allison. “Oh my god …”

  “Sounds like a good one,” he said.

  “Maybe, maybe,” she said.

  He could tell she was waiting for him to ask what it was about. Finally he asked her, “So what happened?”

  She drew close to him and he put his arm around her. She whispered, “Lothianne.”

  “Lothianne?” said Bill.

  “A woman with three arms,” said Allison. “She had an arm coming out of the upper part of her back, and the hand on it had two thumbs instead of a pinky and a thumb, so it wouldn’t be either righty or lefty. The elbow only bent up and down, not side to side.”

  “Yow,” said Bill.

  “Her complexion was light blue, and her hair was dark and wild, but not long. And she wore this dress with an extra arm hole in the back. This dress was plain, like something out of the Dust Bowl, gray, and reached to the ankles, and I remembered my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Donnelly, the mean old bitch, having worn the exact one back in grade school when we spent a whole
year reading The Last Days of Pompeii.”

  “Did the three-arm woman look like your teacher?” asked Bill.

  “No, but she was stupid and mean like her. She had a dour face, familiar and frightening. Anyway, Lothianne wandered the woods with a pet jay that flew above her and sometimes perched in that tangled hair. I think she might have been a cannibal. She lived underground in like a woman-size rabbit warren.”

  “Charming,” he said.

  “I was a little girl and my sister and I were running hard toward this house in the distance, away from the woods, just in front of a wave of nighttime. I knew we had to reach the house before the darkness swept over us. The blue jay swooped down and, as I tried to catch my breath, it spit into my mouth. It tasted like fire and spread to my arms and legs. My running went dream slow, my legs dream heavy. My sister screamed toward the house. Then, like a rusty engine, I seized altogether and fell over.”

  “You know, in China, they eat Bird Spit Soup …” he said.

  “Shut up,” she said. “The next thing I know, I come to and Lothianne and me are on a raft, in a swiftly moving stream, tethered to a giant willow tree that’s growing right in the middle of the flow. Lothianne has a lantern in one hand, and in the other she’s holding the end of a long vine that’s tied in a noose around my neck. The moon’s out, shining through the willow whips and reflecting off the running water, and I’m so scared.

  “She says, ‘Time to practice drowning’ and kicks me in the back. I fall into the water. Under the surface I’m looking up and the moonlight allows me to see the stones and plants around me. There are speckled fish swimming by. Just before I’m out of air, she reels me in. This happens three times, and on the last time, when she reels me in, she vanishes, and I’m flying above the stream and surrounding hills and woods, and I’m watching things growing—huge plants like asparagus, sprouting leaves and twining and twirling and growing in the moonlight. Even in night, it was so perfectly clear.”

  “Jeez,” said Bill.

  Allison was silent for a while. Eventually she propped herself up on her elbow and said, “It was frightening but it struck me as a ‘creative’ dream ’cause of the end.”

  “A three-armed woman,” said Bill. “Rembrandt once did an etching of a three-armed woman having sex with a guy.”

  “I was wondering if the noose around my neck was symbolic of an umbilical cord … .”

  He stared at her. “Why?” he finally said.

  She was about to answer but the bedroom light blinked on and off, on and off, on and off, without stopping, like a strobe light, and from somewhere or everywhere in the room came the sound of low moaning.

  Bill threw the covers off, sat straight up, and said, “What the fuck?”

  Allison, wide-eyed, her glance darting here and there, said, “Bill …”

  The light show finally ended in darkness, but the sound grew louder, more strange, like a high-pitched growling that seemed to make the glass of the windows vibrate. She grabbed his shoulder and pointed to the armoire. He turned, and as he did, Mama the cat came bursting out of the standing closet, the door swinging wildly. She screeched and spun in incredibly fast circles on the rug next to the bed.

  “Jesus Christ,” yelled Bill, and lifted his feet, afraid the cat might claw him. “Get the fuck outta here!” he yelled at it.

  Mama took off out of the bedroom, still screeching. Allison jumped out of the bed and took off after the cat. Bill cautiously brought up the rear. They found Mama in the bathroom, on the floor next to the lion paw tub, writhing.

  “Look,” said Bill, peering over Allison’s shoulder, “she’s attacking her own ass. What the hell …”

  “Oh, man,” said Allison. “Check it out.” She pointed as Mama pulled this long furry lump out of herself with her teeth.”

  “That’s it for me,” he said, backing away from the bathroom doorway.

  “Bill, here comes another. It’s alive.”

  “Alive?” he said, sitting down on a chair in the kitchen. “I thought it was a mohair turd.”

  “No, you ass, she’s having a kitten. I never realized she was pregnant. Must be from the time you kicked her out.”

  Bill sat there staring at Allison’s figure illuminated by the bulb she’d switched on in the bathroom.

  “This is amazing, you should come see it,” she called over her shoulder to him.

  “I’ll pass,” he said. He turned then and looked through the open kitchen window, down across the yard toward the old man’s house. For the first time he could remember, his neighbor wasn’t there, reading the big book. The usual rectangle of light was now a dark empty space.

  Later, he found Allison sitting in the wicker rocker, beneath the clown mobile, in the otherwise empty bedroom. The light was on, and she rocked, slowly, a rolled up towel cradled in her arms. “Come see,” she said to him, smiling. “The first was stillborn, and this is the only other one, but it lived. It’s a little girl.”

  He didn’t want to, but she seemed so pleased. He took a step closer. She pulled back a corner of the towel, and there was a small, wet face with blue eyes.

  “We have to think of a name,” she said.

  The Suits at Auderlene

  TERRY DOWLING

  Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most awarded, acclaimed, and best-known writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His short stories have been published in the anthologies Dreaming Down Under, Centaurus, Gathering the Bones, and The Dark, and reprinted in several Year’s Best volumes. They are collected in Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach, Wormwood, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Blackwater Days, The Man Who Lost Red, Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, and, most recently, Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear.

  Dowling edited Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF, The Essential Ellison, and The Jack Vance Treasury. He is a musician, songwriter, and communications instructor with a doctorate in creative writing, and has been genre reviewer for The Weekend Australian for the past seventeen years.

  One hour with Gilly Nescombe in the bar of the Summerton Arms confirmed everything the truck driver had said about the meteorite.

  My article for Cosmos seemed more a reality than ever.

  Tracking it back, waxing lyrical and gesturing like a fool, I kept trying to impress on her the scale of it all.

  “You know how these things go, Gilly,” I said. “They just get larger and larger.” And off I went, telling her yet again how I would never have heard about Auderlene at all if it hadn’t been for a meteorite called the Pratican Star and a talkative truck driver who had insisted on an extra beer one evening at the Three Weeds Hotel in Rozelle and had mentioned it. And pushing it back still further, if I hadn’t been freelancing again and looking for a suitable follow-up article for Cosmos, I’d never have made the connection, seen the seed of a story when that long-hauler started telling me over drinks how a drunken farmer in Summerton out in the state’s southwest had told him about the old Auderlene place and the iron suits and that part of the town’s little secret.

  Sitting across from me in the bar, Gilly just smiled her engaging, lopsided smile and took it all in her stride. She was more than just one of those life-hardened rural women whose life seems forever at angles to your own. Close to my own age, late thirties, early forties, looking easy with herself in white blouse, denim skirt, white deck shoes, with hazel eyes and a smile that was too Ellen Barkin for my own good and kept growing wider as I tried, yet again, to convey the scale of what had brought me here.

  I managed to save it. This time I stopped midsentence, laughed out loud, and shook my head in wonder at it all. Trying the main town pub had been the obvious thing to do—but meeting Gilly like this! I wished her only sunny days.

  Yes, a sizeable nickel-iron meteorite had fallen to ground on the Pratican estate in Summerton one summer night back in 1904. No, it had never been displayed, never examined or written up, just as the truck driver had said his own Summerton local had insisted. No
w here was this very personable barmaid confirming that, yes, if it still existed, if it hadn’t been thrown away or melted down, there was a good chance it was still somewhere at the old Pratican place outside of town.

  Driving down from Sydney, the question had been whether it was worth the trouble of checking out at all. Science journalism, like any journalism, gets to be a subtle trap. So often you put together the article in your head long before the substance of it is in place, and sometimes the angle and how it catches the popular imagination is more important than the actual content.

  More specifically, in a world where science readers expected to be flooded with the latest word on bosons and the Higgs Field, the bone morphology of dinosaurs, or asteroid-strike extinction events, there was still room for a bit of scientific romance, a human interest piece with a regional twist. Whatever I wrote, the Pratican Star would be the heart of it—one of the largest unlogged meteorites ever to come down in Australia since European settlement.

  I’d done all the relevant searches. Most meteorites are octahedrites. From what Gilly had said, the Practican Star was the nickel-iron variety—an atax-ite, with extremely high traces of those two nickel-iron minerals kamacite and taenite. But more importantly, meteors large enough to survive impact and receive a name rarely dropped out of the picture like this. Short of being nonexistent or outright fakes, named meteorites in themselves were always newsworthy in one form or other, even when the name had been lost to all but local lore.

  That had done it. But now it was more than just having my byline under a two-thousand-word regional piece. Now, with any luck, it would be an intriguing small-town story of lost opportunities and a truth waiting to come out, full of hard facts rather than just hearsay with a bit of local color for padding.

  Which brought up questions of access, of course; but, again, Gilly was making that easy.

  “So, Nev, you can either stay here at the Arms or I can put you up at Sallen. Your choice and no offense taken.”

  “I don’t want to impose.”