The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  —No, Leslie’s dead under mysterious and messy circumstances. It got leaked to the press that the cops found evidence of foul play at her home. There was blood or something on her sheets. They say it dried in the shape of a person curled in the fetal position—somebody mentioned the flash shadows of victims in Hiroshima. This was deeper, as if the body had been pressed hard into the mattress. The only remains were her watch, her diaphragm, her fillings, for Christ’s sake, stuck to the coagulate that got left behind like afterbirth. Sure, it’s bullshit, urban legend fodder. There were some photos in the Gazette, some speculation among our sorry little circle of neurotics and manic depressives.

  —Very unpleasant but, fortunately, equally improbable.

  Danni shrugged.—Here’s the thing, though. Norma predicted everything. A month before she killed herself, she let me in on a secret. Her friend Leslie, the creepy lady, had been seeing Bobby. He visited her nightly, begged her to come away with him. And Leslie planned to.

  —Her husband, Dr. Green said.—The one who died in Alaska.

  —The same. Trust me, I laughed, a little nervously, at this news. I wasn’t sure whether to humor Norma or get the hell away from her. We were sitting in a classy restaurant, surrounded by execs in silk ties and Armani suits. Like I said, Norma was loaded. She married into a nice Sicilian family; her husband was in the import–export business, if you get my drift. Beat the hell out of her, though; definitely contributed to her low self-esteem. Right in the middle of our luncheon, between the lobster tails and the éclairs, she leaned over and confided this thing with Leslie and her deceased husband. The ghostly lover.

  Dr. Green passed Danni another cigarette. He lighted one of his own and studied her through the blue exhaust. Danni wondered if he wanted a drink as badly as she did.

  —How did you react to this information? Dr. Green said.

  —I stayed cool, feigned indifference. It wasn’t difficult; I was doped to the eyeballs most of the time. Norma claimed there exists a certain quality of grief, so utterly profound, so tragically pure, that it resounds and resonates above and below. A living, bleeding echo. It’s the key to a kind of limbo.

  —The Lagerstätte. Dr. Green licked his thumb and sorted through the papers in the brown folder.—As in the Burgess Shale, the La Brea Tar Pits. Were your friends amateur paleontologists?

  —Lagerstätten are ‘resting places’ in the Deutsch, and I think that’s what the women meant.

  —Fascinating choice of mythos.

  —People do whatever it takes to cope. Drugs, kamikaze sex, religion, anything. In naming, we seek to order the incomprehensible, yes?

  —True.

  —Norma pulled this weird piece of jagged gray rock from her purse. Not rock—a petrified bone shard. A fang or a long, wicked rib splinter. Supposedly human. I could tell it was old; it reminded me of all those fossils of trilobites I used to play with. It radiated an aura of antiquity, like it had survived a shift of deep geological time. Norma got it from Leslie and Leslie had gotten it from someone else; Norma claimed to have no idea who, although I suspect she was lying; there was definitely a certain slyness in her eyes. For all I know, it’s osmosis. She pricked her finger on the shard and gestured at the blood that oozed on her plate. Danni shivered and clenched her left hand.—The scene was surreal. Norma said: Grief is blood, Danni. Blood is the living path to everywhere. Blood opens the way. She said if I offered myself to the Lagerstätte, Virgil would come to me and take me into the house of dreams. But I wanted to know whether it would really be him and not…an imitation. She said, Does it matter? My skin crawled as if I were waking from a long sleep to something awful, something my primal self recognized and feared. Like fire.

  —You believe the bone was human.

  —I don’t know. Norma insisted I accept it as a gift from her and Leslie. I really didn’t want to, but the look on her face, it was intense.

  —Where did it come from? The bone.

  —The Lagerstätte.

  —Of course. What did you do?

  Danni looked down at her hands, the left with its jagged white scar in the meat and muscle of her palm, and deeper into the darkness of the earth.—The same as Leslie. I called them.

  —You called them. Virgil and Keith.

  —Yes. I didn’t plan to go through with it. I got drunk, and when I’m like that, my thoughts get kind of screwy. I don’t act in character.

  —Oh. Dr. Green thought that over.—When you say called, what exactly do you mean?

  She shrugged and flicked ashes into the ashtray. Even though Dr. Green had been there the morning they stitched the wound, she guarded the secret of its origin with a zeal bordering on pathological.

  Danni had brought the weird bone to the apartment. Once alone, she drank the better half of a bottle of Maker’s Mark and then sliced her palm and made a doorway in blood. She slathered a vertical seam, a demarcation between her existence and the abyss, in the plaster wall at the foot of her bed. She smeared Virgil’s and Keith’s initials and sent a little prayer into the night. In a small clay pot she’d bought at a market, she shredded her identification, her (mostly defunct) credit cards, her Social Security card, a lock of her hair, and burned the works with the tallow of a lamb. Then, in the smoke and shadows, she finished getting drunk off her ass and promptly blacked out.

  Merrill wasn’t happy; Danni had bled like the proverbial stuck pig, soaked through the sheets into the mattress. Merrill decided her friend had horribly botched another run for the Pearly Gates. She had brought Danni to the hospital for a bunch of stitches and introduced her to Dr. Green. Of course Danni didn’t admit another suicide attempt. She doubted her conducting a black-magic ritual would help matters, either. She said nothing, simply agreed to return for sessions with the good doctor. He was blandly pleasant, eminently nonthreatening. She didn’t think he could help, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to please Merrill and Merrill insisted on the visits.

  Back home, Merrill confiscated the bone, the ritual fetish, and threw it in the trash. Later, she tried like hell to scrub the stain. In the end she gave up and painted the whole room blue.

  A couple of days after that particular bit of excitement, Danni found the bone at the bottom of her sock drawer. It glistened with a cruel, lusterless intensity. Like the monkey’s paw it had returned, and that didn’t surprise her. She folded it into a kerchief and locked it in a jewelry box she’d kept since first grade.

  All these months gone by, Danni remained silent on the subject.

  Finally, Dr. Green sighed.—Is that when you began seeing Virgil in the faces of strangers? These doppelgängers? He smoked his cigarette with the joyless concentration of a prisoner facing a firing squad. It was obvious from his expression that the meter had rolled back to zero.

  —No, not right away. Nothing happened, Danni said.—Nothing ever does, at first.

  —No, I suppose not. Tell me about the vineyard. What happened there?

  —I…I got lost.

  —That’s where all this really begins, isn’t it? The fugue, perhaps other things.

  Danni gritted her teeth. She thought of elephants and graveyards. Dr. Green was right, in his own smug way. Six weeks after Danni sliced her hand, Merrill took her for a day trip to the beach. Merrill rented a convertible and made a picnic. It was nice; possibly the first time Danni felt human since the accident; the first time she’d wanted to do anything besides mope in the apartment and play depressing music.

  After some discussion, they chose Bolton Park, a lovely stretch of coastline way out past Kingwood. The area was foreign to Danni, so she bought a road map pamphlet at a gas station. The brochure listed a bunch of touristy places. Windsurfers and bird-watchers favored the area, but the guide warned of dangerous riptides. The women had no intention of swimming; they stayed near a cluster of great big rocks at the north end of the beach—below the cliff with the steps that led up to the posh houses, the summer homes of movie stars and advertising executives, the
beautiful people.

  On the way home, Danni asked if they might stop at Kirkston Vineyards. It was a hole-in-the-wall, only briefly listed in the guidebook. There were no pictures. They drove in circles for an hour tracking the place down—Kirkston was off the beaten path, a village of sorts. There was a gift shop and an inn, and a few antique houses. The winery was fairly large and charming in a rustic fashion, and that essentially summed up the entire place.

  Danni thought it was a cute setup; Merrill was bored stiff and did what she always did when she’d grown weary of a situation—she flirted like mad with one of the tour guides. Pretty soon, she disappeared with the guy on a private tour.

  There were twenty or thirty people in the tour group—a bunch of elderly folks who’d arrived on a bus and a few couples pretending they were in Europe. After Danni lost Merrill in the crowd, she went outside to explore until her friend surfaced again.

  Perhaps fifty yards from the winery steps, Virgil waited in the lengthening shadows of a cedar grove. That was the first of the phantoms. Too far away for positive identification, his face was a white smudge. He hesitated and regarded her over his shoulder before he ducked into the undergrowth. She knew it was impossible, knew that it was madness, or worse, and went after him anyway.

  Deeper into the grounds she encountered crumbled walls of a ruined garden hidden under a bower of willow trees and honeysuckle vines. She passed through a massive marble archway, so thick with sap it had blackened like a smokestack. Inside was a sunken area and a clogged fountain decorated with cherubs and gargoyles. There were scattered benches made of stone slabs, and piles of rubble overrun by creepers and moss. Water pooled throughout the garden, mostly covered by algae and scum; mosquito larvae squirmed beneath drowned leaves. Ridges of broken stone and mortar petrified in the slop and slime of that boggy soil and made waist-high calculi among the freestanding masonry.

  Her hand throbbed with a sudden, magnificent stab of pain. She hissed through her teeth. The freshly knitted pink slash, her Freudian scar, had split and blood seeped so copiously her head swam. She ripped the sleeve off her blouse and made a hasty tourniquet. A grim, sullen quiet drifted in, a blizzard of silence. The bees weren’t buzzing and the shadows in the trees waxed red and gold as the light decayed.

  Virgil stepped from behind stalagmites of fallen stone, maybe thirty feet away. She knew with every fiber of her being that this was a fake, a body double, and yet she wanted nothing more than to hurl herself into his arms. Up until that moment, she didn’t realize how much she’d missed him, how achingly final her loneliness had become.

  Her glance fell upon a gleaming wedge of stone where it thrust from the water like a dinosaur’s tooth, and as shapes within shapes became apparent, she understood this wasn’t a garden. It was a graveyard.

  Virgil opened his arms—

  —I’m not comfortable talking about this, Danni said.—Let’s move on.

  August 9, 2006

  Friday was karaoke night at the Candy Apple.

  In the golden days of her previous life, Danni had a battalion of friends and colleagues with whom to attend the various academic functions and cocktail socials as required by her professional affiliation with a famous East Coast university. Bar-hopping had seldom been the excursion of choice.

  Tonight, a continent and several light-years removed from such circumstances, she nursed an overly strong margarita while up on the stage a couple of drunken women with big hair and smeared makeup stumbled through that old Kenny Rogers standby, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” The fake redhead was a receptionist named Sheila, and her blond partner, Delores, a vice president of human resources. Both of them worked at Merrill’s literary magazine and they were partying off their second and third divorces, respectively.

  Danni wasn’t drunk, although mixing her medication with alcohol wasn’t helping matters; her nose had begun to tingle and her sensibilities were definitely sliding toward the nihilistic side. Also, she seemed to be hallucinating again. She’d spotted two Virgil look-alikes between walking through the door and her third margarita; that was a record, so far. She hadn’t noticed either of the men enter the lounge; they simply appeared.

  One of the mystery men sat among a group of happily chattering yuppie kids; he’d worn a sweater and parted his hair exactly like her husband used to before an important interview or presentation. The brow was wrong, though, and the smile way off. He established eye contact and his gaze made her prickle all over because this simulacrum was so very authentic; if not for the plastic sheen and the unwholesome smile, he was the man she’d looked at across the breakfast table for a dozen years. Eventually he stood and wandered away from his friends and disappeared through the front door into the night. None of the kids seemed to miss him.

  The second guy sat alone at the far end of the bar. He was much closer to the authentic thing; he had the nose, the jaw, even the loose way of draping his hands over his knees. However, this one was a bit too rawboned to pass as her Virgil; his teeth too large, his arms too long. He stared across the room, too-dark eyes fastened on her face, and she looked away and by the time she glanced up again he was gone.

  She checked to see if Merrill noticed the Virgil impersonators. Merrill blithely sipped her Corona and flirted with a couple of lawyer types at the adjoining table. The suits kept company with a voluptuous woman who was growing long in the tooth and had piled on enough compensatory eye shadow and lipstick to host her own talk show. The woman sulked and shot dangerous glares at Merrill. Merrill smirked coyly and touched the closer suit on the arm.

  Danni lighted a cigarette and tried to keep her expression neutral while her pulse fluttered and she scanned the room with the corners of her eyes like a trapped bird. Should she call Dr. Green in the morning? Was he even in the office on weekends? What color would the new pills be?

  Presently, the late-dinner and theater crowd arrived en masse and the lounge became packed. The temperature immediately shot up ten degrees and the resultant din of several dozen competing conversations drowned all but shouts. Merrill had recruited the lawyers (who turned out to be an insurance claims investigator and a CPA—Ned and Thomas, and their miffed associate Glenna, a court clerk—to join the group and migrate to another, hopefully more peaceful watering hole.

  They shambled through neon-washed night, a noisy, truncated herd of quasi-strangers, arms locked for purchase against the mist-slick sidewalks. Danni found herself squashed between Glenna and Ned the Investigator. Ned grasped her waist in a slack, yet vaguely proprietary fashion; his hand was soft with sweat, his paunchy face made more uncomely with livid blotches and the avaricious expression of a drowsy predator. His shirt reeked so powerfully of whiskey it might’ve been doused in the stuff.

  Merrill pulled them to a succession of bars and nightclubs and all-night bistros. Somebody handed Danni a beer as they milled in the vaulted entrance of an Irish pub and she drank it like tap water, not really tasting it, and her ears hurt and the evening rapidly devolved into a tangle of raucous music and smoke that reflected the fluorescent lights like coke-blacked miner’s lamps, and at last a cool, humid darkness shattered by headlights and the sulfurous orange glow of angry clouds.

  By her haphazard count, she glimpsed in excess of fifty incarnations of Virgil. Several at the tavern, solitary men mostly submerged in the recessed booths, observing her with stony diffidence through beer steins and shot glasses; a dozen more scattered along the boulevard, listless nomads whose eyes slid around, not quite touching anything. When a city bus grumbled past, every passenger’s head swiveled in unison beneath the repeating flare of dome lights. Every face pressed against the dirty windows belonged to him. Their lifelike masks bulged and contorted with inconsolable longing.

  Ned escorted her to his place, a warehouse apartment in a row of identical warehouses between the harbor and the railroad tracks. The building had been converted to a munitions factory during the Second World War, then housing in the latter 1960s. It stood bl
ack and gritty; its greasy windows sucked in the feeble illumination of the lonely beacons of passing boats and the occasional car.

  They took a clanking cargo elevator to the top, the penthouse as Ned laughingly referred to his apartment. The elevator was a box encased in grates that exposed the inner organs of the shaft and the dark tunnels of passing floors. It could’ve easily hoisted a baby grand piano. Danni pressed her cheek to vibrating metal and shut her eyes tight against vertigo and the canteen-like slosh of too many beers in her stomach.

  Ned’s apartment was sparsely furnished and remained mostly in gloom even after he turned on the floor lamp and went to fix nightcaps. Danni collapsed onto the corner of a couch abridging the shallow nimbus of light and stared raptly at her bone-white hand curled into the black leather. Neil Diamond crooned from velvet speakers. Ned said something about his record collection and, faintly, ice cracked from its tray and clinked in glass with the resonance of a tuning fork.

  Danni’s hand shivered as if it might double and divide. She was cold now, in the sticky hot apartment, and her thighs trembled. Ned slipped a drink into her hand and placed his own hand on her shoulder, splayed his soft fingers on her collar, traced her collarbone with his moist fingertip. Danni flinched and poured gin down her throat until Ned took the glass and began to nuzzle her ear, his teeth clicking against the pearl stud, his overheated breath like smoldering creosote and kerosene, and as he tugged at her blouse strap, she began to cry. Ned lurched above her and his hands were busy with his belt and pants, and these fell around his ankles and his loafers. He made a fist in a mass of her hair and yanked her face against his groin; his linen shirttails fell across Danni’s shoulders and he bulled himself into her gasping mouth. She gagged, overwhelmed by the ripeness of sweat and whiskey and urine, the rank humidity, the bruising insistence of him, and she convulsed, arms flailing in epileptic spasms, and vomited. Ned’s hips pumped for several seconds and then his brain caught up with current events and he cried out in dismay and disgust and nearly capsized the couch as he scrambled away from her and a caramel gush of half-digested cocktail shrimp and alcohol.