Julia continued to giggle through her fingers. “Ah, of course. How silly of me to get it perversed.”
The father, the mother, their daughter and her husband, the son-inlaw, watched horrified as Julia attempted, multiple times, to stifle her laughter only to rupture into further fits of something approaching hysteria. “I meant to say reversed,” she said between gulps for air. “My language is … not so good sometimes.” Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She waved her hands in front of her face, blurted out a quick “Excusez-moi” and fled through the door and down the dark hallway, in the general direction of her lover Louis-Ferdinand.
“What an awful woman,” the son-in-law said.
“Quite rude,” the daughter said.
The occasional sound of an old window slamming shut echoed through the long and empty hallways. These echoes drifted apart in time, the distant softness of their sounds correlating directly with their growing infrequency, before stopping altogether. The house buzzed with the raw tension of silence.
The father abruptly took to his feet. “Come on,” he announced, apparently addressing the entire room. “This must be some sort of trick—a test of courage or something. It’s part of the tour. If we don’t get on with it, we’re likely to sit here all night.”
“We really should find a restroom,” the daughter said.
“Are you not feeling well, my dear?” the mother asked, her voice icy. In response, her daughter merely pouted. She knew better than to solicit sympathy from her mother.
“I think we passed a restroom when we entered the house,” the son-in-law said, making his way to the door leading into the hallway. He turned the knob and found that it was locked. “It’s locked,” he said. He turned to the others. “They’ve locked us in. Doesn’t that violate the fire code?”
The mother pushed in the hidden door Louis-Ferdinand had used to sneak into the room. The door’s hinges creaked as the door slowly swung inward, revealing a dark passageway, their horrible noise attracting the reticent stares of her husband, her daughter and the son-in-law.
“We’ll have to go through here,” she said, taking time to relish the apparent discomfort of her family.
The father went first, ducking his head to fit through the archway— his wife, her daughter and the son-in-law followed—and as a group, they moved slowly, one step at a time, the father feeling ahead into the darkness with his hands. Soon enough, a dull light glowed in the distance, evidently showing where the passageway spilled into a larger, concrete room. Hissing and dripping pipes lined the walls, occasionally letting off great charges of steam, their serpentine circuits ornamented with grease-slicked valve-wheels and infinitely complex meters.
“They sure did do a good job preserving all this old plumbing,” the son-in-law said.
“Keep up the pace,” the father said. Although he was loath to admit it, he was feeling claustrophobic. His eyes played tricks on him: more than once he thought he saw a glowing red exit sign, only to watch its letters morph into incomprehensible shapes before disappearing altogether. Still, he pushed on, leading the way. His instincts paid off, as they often had throughout the course of his life, because the concrete and exposed plumbing eventually gave way to drywall and plywood flooring, the darkness replaced by strings of mining lights hung near the ceiling. The air suddenly became less stuffy. “It’s this way,” the father said. “I can smell fresh air.”
A small ramp led up to a flimsy cellar door, the distinctly blue tint of moonlight seeping through the break of its shutters. The father pushed through, half expecting the door to be padlocked from the outside, only to find that the shutters flipped over effortlessly.
They appeared to be in the courtyard at the center of the mansion. The moon—for it was quite full—illuminated a terribly overgrown and pungently rotting garden, a black gazebo choked with ivy and filled with broken down and rusted machinery. Three floors of windows enclosed the vegetation, much of which appeared Jurassic, overtaking the haphazard stone steps of the walkway, its paths forming something of a circle around a white stone fountain, its large bowl bone-dry, the headless statue of a nude woman rising from its center toward the sky, one of her breasts broken away.
Upon setting foot in the courtyard, the four guests split up, each exploring different corners of the garden. The father angled the glass of his wristwatch in the moonlight in order to make out the hours while the mother watched him judgingly from afar. The daughter inspected the statuary of the fountain while her husband, the son-in-law, was drawn to what appeared to be a long metal cylinder emerging from a wild tangle of broad-leaved plants. Indeed, upon pulling away great amounts of foliage, the son-in-law discovered, to his utmost surprise, that he’d uncovered an almost perfectly preserved battle tank, a Panzer III.
“I’ll be,” he said. “I guess this is what the Frenchman meant when he was talking about fortification, wouldn’t you say, Father?”
The father grunted in response, but he hadn’t actually heard his son-in-law’s question—in fact, he had mistakenly thought his son-in-law had asked him about fornication, which greatly annoyed him, reminding him of that insipid French girl’s giggles—for his attentions were fully engaged by the unbelievably strange behaviors of his wristwatch, whose second hand appeared to be spinning backward at a rate he couldn’t quite figure out, as if it were irregularly set against the standard, sixty-second minute. For that matter, the minute hand had disappeared altogether, having been replaced with what looked like an earwig pinned in the center of the watch face. The hour hand had turned upward, pointing him accusingly in the face.
Annoyed that his father had once again shirked his attempts at conversation, the son-in-law climbed on top of the tank and opened the hatch. He was tired of being ignored by his wife’s father, having spent year after year seeking his affections, made to feel invisible at family functions, like he was nothing. Where he had hoped there would be deep wells of feeling, there was nothing. The word sent a shudder through his body, nothing. He wanted to hide. He wanted to be unseen, and so the son-in-law climbed inside the tank and shut the hatch behind him.
Inside the tank, there was only darkness. The son-in-law reached above his head to try to find the hatch but there was only air above him. He reached out to his sides but felt nothing. For a brief moment, the son-in-law felt as if he were in free-fall, his guts queasy with weightlessness—but that couldn’t be possible. It wasn’t possible. In the blackness, the son-in-law thought he could make out the shape of a door. He made his way to it. It was an ordinary door. He opened it. Through the door there was another door, in the blackness, this one perhaps twice as far away as the first had been. The son-in-law stepped through the door and it disappeared behind him. Or at least he thought he had, but that couldn’t be possible. He had no choice but to continue forward. He made his way to the second door and opened it. In the distance he could just barely make out a third door, this one farther than the distance of the first two doors combined. He almost got lost trying to make his way to it, nearly giving into the temptation to turn around, to try and retrace his steps. Or had he turned around? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t see the door in the distance. There was nothing behind him. He didn’t know which way behind or in front was. He was lost in an infinite blackness. He tried to scream but his voice was too small to fill the impossible void which now engulfed him.
“Did you hear that?” the daughter said. “It sounded like a toilet flushing, I think.” There was no response. She looked around the courtyard and could see neither her father nor her mother, nor could she see any sign of a restroom. It occurred to her that maybe the sound she’d heard was some sort of a gurgle, perhaps water bubbling up from within the bowl of the fountain, or, and she was unwilling to think about this in any sort of detail, perhaps it was the unmentionable doings of her own digestive system.
In an effort to distract herself from her own bodily functions, the daughter once more focused her attentions on the fountain’s statue, th
inking how uncanny the resemblance was to her own physique. Of course, the daughter wasn’t missing one of her breasts, but that was beside the point. The proportions were almost identical. Doublechecking to make sure her mother or father weren’t watching her, the daughter quickly undid one of the buttons on her blouse and cupped each of her breasts in her hand, first one and then the other. It did feel as if one was smaller than the other, but that was normal. She repeated the same action, first cupping her right breast and then her left. This time, however, one breast felt significantly smaller than the other.
The daughter stepped into the bowl of the fountain in an effort to more closely inspect the statue. The white stone was badly worn by the weather, discolored in some places, chipped and flaking in others. She thought of her own skin and the stress she’d put it through today—the unhealthy foods, the smoke from the tractor pull—and became intensely fearful that her best days were now behind her. She wished that she could freeze herself in time forever, preserving her beauty for others to admire, and, while contemplating this, unknowingly climbed up onto the stone pedestal with the statue, wrapped her arms around it, and joined it, leaving her unreliable and mortal flesh behind.
At that very moment, it suddenly became clear to the daughter’s father that he wasn’t looking at his wristwatch at all; in fact he was looking at a compass, which would go a long way toward explaining the insect-shaped needle straining toward the other side of the courtyard. “We have to go this way,” he said, calling to his wife. “The signs are all pointing northward, or southward, whatever.”
The wife’s husband stumbled his way through the knee-deep vegetation without bothering to check whether or not his wife followed. He found a door, opened it, ran down a long hallway, nearly tumbled down a steep flight of stone stairs. The insect on his compass was buzzing wildly, its thorax glowing green, its spiracles flexing, telling him he was very nearly there. He made his way down the steps, carefully, one at a time, his hand on the iron railing, the endpoint of his descent lost in a swirling pool of inky shadows.
Now alone in the garden, the woman looked up into the sky and saw a rather sinister thunderhead rolling over the face of the moon. The night-time air suddenly grew quite cold and she began to shiver. Across the courtyard, she noticed that one of the first-floor windows had been left ajar—Louis-Ferdinand must have missed that one—and so she made her way to it, carefully climbing over its sill, shutting it quietly behind her before locking it in place.
She made her way down a hallway and up a flight of creaking stairs, occasional pulses of blue lightning beaming in through the windows, showing her the way, and then another flight of stairs, yet another, this one spiraling upward into what had to be some sort of steeple. In the room’s center, a chair set before a small screen.
She sat down. The screen was split into four smaller screens, each intermittently flipping between various nooks and crannies of the mansion—security footage.
Eventually, the small screen in the upper right hand corner showed what appeared to be a man resembling her husband. She instinctively reached forward and pressed the image with a single finger, enlarging it to fill the screen. Indeed it did appear to be a man who resembled her husband, in what appeared to be a wine cellar, a massive, floor-to-ceiling rack filled with bottles of indeterminate age, the cobble-stone ceiling over his head arched, a few massive wooden barrels on the other side of the room.
The man who resembled her husband seemed to drop something, getting down on his hands and knees and staring at something on the floor. He tracked nearly across the room for a while before standing, his back to the camera. Stepping out of the shadows just below the camera’s view, creeping up to the man who resembled her husband’s turned back, was a tall man wearing an elegant suit and top hat. The woman was unable to see clearly, but he appeared to be holding something before him with both hands. And then, in a flash, the man in the top hat lunged forward, throwing his arms up into the air, a tight string wrapped around each gloved hand. He wrapped the string around the man who resembled her husband’s neck and cinched it tight—just as the security footage cut out, the screen blank, showing only the woman’s own reflection, surprised, reflected in the light of a particularly intense bout of lighting.
She resented having to think of a grown man being weak, unable to care for himself. She turned to the window at her side, the sprawling view of the town below showing endless rows of other homes, their windows filled with husbands and wives, daughters and husbands, everyone lost and searching for something they would never find.
This was the woman’s greatest fear—the wondering. Were they all in it? Was it all an attempt to make her feel scared? It wouldn’t be the first time they’d excluded her from their fun. In fact, her daughter had a lifetime of stealing her husband’s attentions, perverting them into her own.
The coldness of the night seeped in through the old window, profoundly discomfiting. The woman looked down into street far below and saw a long, black car parked beneath the wind-swept leaves of a massive white oak tree. She waited, her heart aching with dread, hoping beyond her wildest dreams that she shouldn’t have to see her family get into that car and drive away, leaving her alone and cold and forgotten in this dark tower.
HELEN MARSHALL
The Way She is With Strangers
It was only after the papers were signed, the dissolution of the marriage arranged and witnessed, that Mercy Dwyer finally moved to the city. She had never lived in a city before. She had known only the sleepy village of Hindmoor Green in which she’d been raised, a place where no street needed a name because there were few enough that they could be recognised, like children: everyone knew what they were, everyone knew where they went, no question as to their identity had ever been raised and for all she expected from now until Judgement Day none ever would be. Hindmoor Green had been comprised of a small circle of buildings clustered around a post office, a one-pump petrol station, and the local pub. Beyond the village boundaries was the hazy sameness of rolling hills and ancient woodland. There were fields too, and pastures; but all of it was so similar that if you looked in one direction, you saw exactly the same view as if you had looked in the other entirely.
There was a legend, she had heard, that the universe had been created and destroyed three times: each time it had been built smaller than the last. Mercy believed it. Hindmoor Green was the smallest version of the universe she could imagine. It was complete. She knew its borders, and she respected them. But the city was, to her surprise, much, much smaller. To herself she called it New Manchester or sometimes New New Manchester. It was claustrophobic, folded up like a paper bird, wing touching breastbone touching foot touching beak. Once she dropped a penny from a bridge. She watched it flutter through the sky, turning end over end, winking. It crashed through her skylight, three miles to the north. She found it on the kitchen table like a gift, nestled amongst ribbons of scattered glass. She knew it by the date, by the tiny indent in the Queen’s chin her thumb had scratched. She didn’t wonder at this. She wondered only about the inevitable suicides. Every city had them. Bridges were portals not just to the next city over but to the next world. But what happened to the bodies? Were there families who woke to startled guests at the breakfast table? Mercy liked to imagine these unexpected meetings, how the children in their school clothes would welcome the visitor with joy or exasperation, cream or sugar with the coffee, eggs on toast. How much could be healed with such simple accommodations?
It was a kind thought, and Mercy thought it because she was a kind person. She had a kind face. In her childhood she had smiled often, and there were lines because of it now. Not deep lines, more like shallow cuts or old scar tissue. But it made people trust her immediately. The first time someone stopped her in the street she was a bit frightened. It was only that day she had moved into the townhouse terrace, and she was still learning her way. But it was a woman and her child, foreigners clearly, just as she was. The woman had sad eyes, sensible shoes
, and a smell like wood smoke. She wanted to know how to reach a particular street. “I’m sorry,” Mercy told her, “really, I don’t know. I’ve only just arrived myself.” The silence after this seemed to last an eternity. Mercy felt her heart breaking. She wanted to help. The boy was soft-looking, his flesh hadn’t sharpened into adulthood yet. He turned away from Mercy and stared down the street. It was getting dark, but the lamps hadn’t come on yet. The darkness pressed the cobblestones flat. She shivered. The boy was shivering too though he hadn’t noticed yet. “That way,” said Mercy, guessing desperately. The mother gave her a look—grateful but anxious. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then she tugged at the boy’s hand. They set off into the gloom.
*
Mercy had a daughter named Comfort who came to stay with her on weekends. Comfort was a sweet girl, eight years old, but almost nearly very grown up. She took the train from Hindmoor Green to the city by herself with no one but the conductor to watch out for her. Mercy had feared for her daughter the first time she made this trip alone, but lo and behold, when the train had pulled into the station, there was Comfort exactly where she should be. She was always full of questions after the trip. Mercy didn’t know many of the answers. Mostly she made things up. “How many stars are there in the sky?” Comfort would ask her. “Only twelve,” she would say, “but the sky is a mirror maze so it seems like there are many more.”
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 16