As he walked over, the stupid thought crossed his mind that he should have brought some grapes, maybe a couple of trashy magazines—all the crap he’d heard you normally gave to people you visited in hospital—but then, as he saw more clearly, he understood something of the nurse’s quiet horror, and the pointlessness of his visit.
The reason Doctor Penny Losovic didn’t quite seem to be in the bed was that, through the trussing of a steel spider’s web of wire and frame, she was hanging over it. What he saw made him think at first of trapped flies, and then of a scarecrow he’d once seen in a field as a kid back in Ohio. The farmers burned the fields come fall, and for some reason a scarecrow had been left. The thing had come back to him in his dreams, standing amid the charcoal with its blackened arms smoking, yet still outstretched as if reaching to grasp another’s invisible hand. It came back to him again now. From where he was standing, there wasn’t one inch of Doctor Penny Losovic’s body which the fire hadn’t seared.
“The suspension system is to try to minimize contact and encourage healing,” the nun murmured. “We try to leave the flesh to the air, and use a tincture of iodine. Normally, the doctors would try to put skin grafts on the very worst areas, only there’s no undamaged skin left to graft with. I’ve never seen such extensive burns—not on anyone living. She shouldn’t have got as far as this hospital… Let alone still be…”
Clark took a further step forward, and the dimensions of the room seemed to twist. As if he’d turned an invisible corner, he was suddenly conscious of a ticking and creaking as what remained of Penny Losovic stirred. The pulleys moved. The metal rods strained. Glimpses of caked and weeping flesh glittered and parted.
“She must be in the most intense pain.” The nurse’s voice now came from another world. “Of course, we give her doses of morphine. The strongest possible, and then more. Enough to… But she won’t die…”
With the creaking sound came the most extraordinary stench. A mixture of things rotted and roasted borne on a sense of unendurable yet continuing pain, it blocked his mouth and coated his tongue. If Hell had an aroma, this was it.
“Can you hear me?” He was surprised he’d spoken—his voice seemed to come from someone else—but the thing in its cocoon of wires seemed to twist. A head, or something which had once been a head, turned toward him with a sound of unpeeling flesh. The mouth was a ruined gape, and one of the eyes was a weeping crater, but the other stared across at him. With it came the murmur of a thousand voices.
What are you?
He knew he didn’t need to speak for the thing to understand. But he also knew, as he met that blood-threaded gaze, that there was no answer to his question—or not one that would allow him to leave this room sane.
He stepped back through the polluting layers of stench and pain, and found that he was standing once again in the odd dullness of a near-deserted ward.
Leaving the hospital, he drove out through Los Angeles. Soon, he was passing stretches of farmland between gray-blue glimpses of the Pacific, and the usual sense of relief came washing over him as he caught a last glimpse in the rearview of the grubby letters of that sign. The latest plan he’d heard about didn’t involve getting rid of the thing, or even cleaning it up and removing the Land part so that it simply said Hollywood. Some entrepreneur with more money than sense was talking of replacing the long-dead lamps with a newer kind of illumination. Fresh fencing and a large construction project would see those famous letters spelling themselves out across the city in the shimmering, ever-changing veils of a Bechmeir field. Then, as he passed the Culver City Kennel Club and the King’s Tropical Inn, he realized that something else had happened. For everything else he’d experienced by going into that hospital, the feel and smell of the actual place itself hadn’t bothered him.
The terrors and flashbacks he’d been having were also fading. Something which had been binding him to the past had snapped on the night of Penny Losovic’s weird experiment in Soundstage 1A, although he still didn’t know exactly what. But if there was anything that still bothered Clark, it was why the Thrasis entity had chosen to follow him, and then why his presence had trigged such a huge response from the thing within the cage. For he was nobody—right—and always had been? Or nearly always. That was how things were, and—and this to him was perhaps the best and most important part—the thought no longer hurt as much as it once had. So maybe that was how life in this new decade went. You waved goodbye to one set of ghosts, and said hello to the next.
The air improved as he headed away from the smog and bustle. He caught cow dung and the sweet aroma of orange groves. Then he hit the seafront Speedway and was met by Venice Beach’s sharper odors. Vanilla and candy and frying onions competed with ocean salt and all the sunwarmed bodies which crowded the main boardwalk. The Ferris wheel was turning and the gulls were screeching and boys were cruising in their cars and the girls were preening in their summer dresses. Then another, sourer smell hit him. He was just thinking that the reek of hydrogen sulphide from the oilfields was especially strong when he realized what had happened. He’d spent so much time away lately that his sense of smell was returning. Ice cream and dog mess. Sea wrack and sun cream. Oil burnoff and bar-room beer. To everyone who didn’t live here, this was exactly how Venice always smelled on a warm afternoon.
He found a space for his Ford a few yards further up from the Doge’s Apartments, and pushed through the swing doors out of the sun, and headed quickly for the stairs.
“Hey, hey…” It was already too late. Glory had spotted him, and was lumbering out of her cubbyhole with what was, for her, a fair impression of haste.
“Hi there, Glory.” He had to smile to see her, for all the news of the latest visit from the repo men she was likely to be bearing. “You’ve done a great job holding the fort lately—have I told you that? You really have…”
“I just take the phone.” She was frowning the way she always did as she held out her latest scrap of paper. “Like some bleedy fool when it ring ring ring.”
Her frown didn’t change noticeably when he took the paper and read it. Just a phone number, although it did look vaguely familiar. “Thanks, Glory. Is there, er, any kind of message to go with this?”
She let out an impressive huff and looked imploringly up at the flies which circled the ceiling. “Same message I get always, and from this same poor lady. She keep say she no trust her husband—he do things she not like.” Glory shrugged. “She just not know what them things be.”
Clark nodded. Sure, he remembered. It sounded like pretty much every message she’d ever given him.
“Men… !” Glory was far too genteel to spit, but the way she said that word was close to it. “You ring her, or not?”
“Sure, sure, Glory. I’ll ring her.”
“Now?”
“Okay. Right now.”
She stood and watched, arms folded across her impressive bosom and slippered foot tapping ominously, as he crossed the hallway.
He checked the number again, then lifted the communal phone’s receiver and fed in what change he had in his pockets.
The operator put him straight through.
About the Author
Ian R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His most recent novel, Wake Up and Dream, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series Playhouse Presents. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley.
Gillian Bowskill
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Ian R. MacLeod
Cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4804-2371-8
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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