Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

Eunice drew breath to scream. She was struck on the side of the head by a man’s fist. She fell, half-conscious, lay on the carpet dazed and struggling to breathe and half-seeing a man’s figure, a shadowy hulking figure, at her bureau, yanking open drawers, throwing things onto the floor and muttering furiously to himself, an inexplicable violence in his very presence and Eunice understood. He will kill me, he will stomp me to death with no more conscience than he might stomp an insect to death, she crawled to retrieve the paper bag that lay close by, she had the knife in her hand and pushed herself to her feet and rushed at him, this man she believed she knew yet had never seen before, taller than she by several inches, heavy in the shoulders, dark-skinned, turning to her astonished as with a manic strength she brought the knife blade down hard against the back of his neck. There was an immediate eruption of blood, the man screamed, a high womanish shriek, he tried in his desperation to shield himself with his outspread fingers from the plunging blade, but Eunice did not weaken, Eunice brought the knife down against him again, and again, his throat, his face, his upper torso, as he threw himself from her, turning in agony from her she stabbed into the nape of his neck, the top of his spine—sobbing, panting, “You! you! you!” not knowing what she did, still less where the superhuman strength came from welling in her veins and muscles that allowed her to do it, except she must do it, it was time.

Hours later Eunice lifted her head, which throbbed with pain. There was something clotted in her vision. She smelled him, smelled it—Death?—that sweetish-sour, rotted odor—before she saw him. The body. The body he’d become.

She was in her bedroom. A man, a stranger, lay on the floor a few yards away. He was dead: clearly dead: the carpet was soaked with his blood, and there was a trail of blood, like an open artery, on an edge of the hardwood floor beside the wall. The man was a black man in his mid-thirties perhaps. He was wearing a dark nylon jacket, badly stained trousers, scuffed boots. He lay on the carpet on his side, in an attitude of childlike peace, or trust, his head lolling awkwardly on his shoulder, his bloodied mouth slack; he was looking away from Eunice through droopy, hooded eyes but she could see the curve of his thick nose, jaw, his wounded cheek—a stranger. It seemed clear that he’d been struck down in the act of yanking a drawer from her bureau; other drawers had been yanked out, and lay in a violent tumble of jewelry, lingerie, sweaters on the floor. The knife with its bloodied blade and handle lay on the carpet close by the body. You would think, seeing it there, that it belonged to the body.

Whose knife?—Eunice did not remember.

Except in a dream how she’d wielded it!—with what desperation, and passion.

There was a stillness here in this room that was the stillness of night. For now it was night. A dark tide rising about Eunice and the dead man both, gathering them in it, buoying them aloft. She would telephone the police, she would explain what she knew. I had to do it, I had no choice. She would not tell them what she knew also—that her life was over, her deepest life. Hers, and his.

On her feet now, swaying, unsteady, she went to her bed and took into her shaking hands the delicate, finely wrought thing fastened to the railing. The bird’s nest, the Indian souvenir, whatever it was, with its woven branches, its intricate interior web, its filmy speckled feathers that stirred with her breath as if stirring with their own mysterious life.

The dream-catcher. Grown so dry and brittle, it broke suddenly in her fingers. And fell in pieces to the floor.

As I sit here, the dream-catcher is on a windowsill about two feet from me, smaller than the dream-catcher of my story, but as intricately fashioned, and quite exquisite. It was given to me by a stranger—an attractive, androgynous, very exotic stranger—when I was signing books in a bookstore in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1993. People sometimes give me presents at such occasions, or mail things to me, but this object seems to have made an unusual impression on me, or on my psyche. I’m sure that, that night, in my hotel room, it caused me to dream unusually vivid dreams, since I remember walking in the middle of the night, and rapidly writing down ideas for stories; of these, two or three have found their way into actual stories, including “The Dream-Catcher,” though it must be said that dream-originated stories are, for me, the most difficult of all to render into prose. The dream-suggestion seems truly to come from a stranger, a source not inside me, and often I have no clue what it might mean; nor any coherent plot; I’m left with a powerful sense of emotion —but it’s abstract, mysterious.

I believe that the mysterious—the not-to-be-explained—is a key to our inner lives; to that part of our inner selves that has no sense of time past or time present or time future. We can contemplate and we can try to write about it, but we can never comprehend it. Always elusive, and tantalizing, it recedes before us like a desert mirage, and perhaps this very elusiveness is the subject about which we write, given finite dimensions.

Out of an actual dream-catcher, and a night, or nights, of dream fragments, the story “The Dream-Catcher” gradually emerged. I did not write the story for some time after the dreams, needing time to imagine a coherent structure for them, and an ostensible “theme.” The story bears a glancing resemblance, at least in my eyes, to a story of mine called, “The Doll,” written almost twenty years ago… a discovery I made some time after I’d written it.

What this might mean, I don’t know. And I assume I’m better off not knowing.

Since 1985, when she sold her first horror story to Dennis Etchison for his seminal anthology Cutting Edge , Roberta Lannes has contributed short stories for anthologies in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, some translated into Russian, Japanese, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Italian. She has also published numerous articles, interviews with fellow authors, and essays in the science fiction genre. Her collection The Mirror of the Night was published in 1997.

Lannes currently lives in Southern California. After thirty-eight years of teaching high school art and English, she retired and is now working on a young adult dark fantasy trilogy, a Japanese vampire novel, numerous short stories, and a story collection. Her digital artwork and photography has appeared in magazines, in website designs, on CD covers, iPhone app screens, and book covers. Visit her author website at www.robertalannes.com.

FRANK GARLAND KNELT BY a mound of soil, scooped a handful, and held it beneath his nose. He loved the smell of fresh, moist earth. It recalled a youth of camping trips with his father, playing in the mud with his older brother, and burying secret things. He chuckled. He hadn’t grown up much in thirty years. Here he was, still burying things that he didn’t want found. Before it was broken toys, uneaten food, and pieces of his mother’s jewelry. Now it was broken women.

Standing, he let the dirt fall into the depression, nearly full. He shoveled in the remaining loam and patted it down. There.

As he reached up to pluck a leafy bough for scrabbling the earth, he was distracted by a glint in the pearly gray sky. He broke off the limb and stepped into a small clearing.

Across the ravine, over the next ridge, a hang glider was falling. He knew the thermals off the granite quarry below often popped a glider up too fast for even the best aviator to recover. Light bounced off the white wings as they crumpled like origami. The pilot tumbled and the wings came open a moment. Frank saw that it wasn’t a guy wrapped in a polyester cocoon, but a woman dressed in flowing white. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes with his jacket sleeve. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered, “it’s an angel.”