Майкл Суэнвик - Tales of Old Earth [A collection of short-stories]

The car leapt backwards. She shrieked and in a flurry of panic swung the wheel about and slammed on the brake with her free foot.

With a jolt and a crunch, the car stopped. There was the tinkle of broken plastic. They’d hit a lime-green Hyundai.

“Oh, that’s just perfect!” Daniel said. The lighter popped out. He lit his cigarette and then swung open the door. “I’ll check the damage.”

Over her shoulder, she saw Daniel tug at his trousers’ knees as he crouched to examine the Hyundai. She had a sudden impulse to slew the car around and escape. Step on the gas and never look back. Watch his face, dismayed and dwindling, in the rear-view mirror. Eyes flooded with tears, she began quietly to laugh.

Then Daniel was back. “It’s all right, let’s go.”

“I heard something break.”

“It was just a taillight, okay?” He gave her a funny look. “What the hell are you laughing about?”

She shook her head hopelessly, unable to sort out the tears from the laughter. Then somehow they were on the Expressway, the car humming down the indistinct and warping road. She was driving but Daniel was still in control.

We were completely lost now and had been for some time. I had taken what I was certain had to be a branch line and it had led nowhere. We’d been tracing its twisty passage for blocks. I stopped and pulled my hand away. I couldn’t concentrate. Not with the caustics and poisons of the Widow’s past churning through me. “Listen,” I said. “We’ve got to get something straight between us.”

Her voice came out of nowhere, small and wary. “What?”

How to say it? The horror of those memories lay not in their brutality but in their particularity. They nestled into empty spaces where memories of my own should have been. They were as familiar as old shoes. They fit .

“If I could remember any of this crap,” I said, “I’d apologize. Hell, I can’t blame you for how you feel. Of course you’re angry. But it’s gone, can’t you see that, it’s over. You’ve got to let go. You can’t hold me accountable for things I can’t even remember, okay? All that shit happened decades ago. I was young. I’ve changed.” The absurdity of the thing swept over me. I’d have laughed if I’d been able. “I’m dead, for pity’s sake!”

A long silence. Then, “So you’ve figured it out.”

“You’ve known all along,” I said bitterly. “Ever since I came off of the high-tension lines in Manayunk.”

She didn’t deny it. “I suppose I should be flattered that when you were in trouble you came to me,” she said in a way that indicated she was not.

“Why didn’t you tell me then? Why drag it out?”

“Danny—”

“Don’t call me that!”

“It’s your name. Daniel. Daniel Cobb.”

All the emotions I’d been holding back by sheer force of denial closed about me. I flung myself down and clutched the pipe tight, crushing myself against its unforgiving surface. Trapped in the friendless wastes of night, I weighed my fear of letting go against my fear of holding on.

“Cobb?”

I said nothing.

The Widow’s voice took on an edgy quality. “Cobb, we can’t stay here. You’ve got to lead me out. I don’t have the slightest idea which way to go. I’m lost without your help.”

I still could not speak.

“ Cobb !” She was close to panic. “I put my own feelings aside. Back in Manayunk. You needed help and I did what I could. Now it’s your turn.”

Silently, invisibly, I shook my head.

“God damn you, Danny,” she said furiously. “I won’t let you do this to me again! So you’re unhappy with what a jerk you were—that’s not my problem. You can’t redeem your manliness on me any more. I am not your fucking salvation. I am not some kind of cosmic last chance and it’s not my job to talk you down from the ledge.”

That stung. “I wasn’t asking you to,” I mumbled.

“So you’re still there! Take my hand and lead us out.”

I pulled myself together. “You’ll have to follow my voice, babe. Your memories are too intense for me.”

We resumed our slow progress. I was sick of crawling, sick of the dark, sick of this lightless horrid existence, disgusted to the pit of my soul with who and what I was. Was there no end to this labyrinth of pipes?

“Wait.” I’d brushed by something. Something metal buried in the earth.

“What is it?”

“I think it’s—” I groped about, trying to get a sense of the thing’s shape. “I think it’s a cast-iron gatepost. Here. Wait. Let me climb up and take a look.”

Relinquishing my grip on the pipe, I seized hold of the object and stuck my head out of the ground. I emerged at the gate of an iron fence framing the minuscule front yard of a house on Ripka Street. I could see again! It was so good to feel the clear breath of the world once more that I closed my eyes briefly to savor the sensation.

“How ironic,” Euphrosyne said.

“After being so heroic,” Thalia said.

“Overcoming his fears,” Aglaia said.

“Rescuing the fair maid from terror and durance vile,” Cleta said.

“Realizing at last who he is,” Phaenna said.

“Beginning that long and difficult road to recovery by finally getting in touch with his innermost feelings,” Auxo said.

Hegemone giggled.

“What?” I opened my eyes.

That was when the Corpsegrinder struck. It leapt upon me with stunning force, driving spear-long talons through my head and body. The talons were barbed so that they couldn’t be pulled free and they burned like molten metal. “Ahhhh, Cobb,” the Corpsegrinder crooned. “Now this is sweet .”

I screamed and it drank in those screams, so that only silence escaped into the outside world. I struggled and it made those struggles its own, leaving me to kick myself deeper and deeper into the drowning pools of its identity. With all my will I resisted. It was not enough. I experienced the languorous pleasure of surrender as that very will and resistance were sucked down into my attacker’s substance. The distinction between me and it weakened, strained, dissolved. I was transformed.

I was the Corpsegrinder now.

Manhattan is a virtual school for the dead. Enough people die there every day to keep any number of monsters fed. From the store of memories the Corpsegrinder had stolen from me, I recalled a quiet moment sitting cross-legged on the tin ceiling of a sleaze joint while table dancers entertained Japanese tourists on the floor above and a kobold instructed me on some of the finer points of survival. “The worst thing you can be hunted by,” he said, “is yourself.”

“Very aphoristic.”

“Fuck you. I used to be human too.”

“Sorry.”

“Apology accepted. Look, I told you about Salamanders. That’s a shitty way to go, but at least it’s final. When they’re done with you, nothing remains. But a Corpsegrinder is a parasite. It has no true identity of its own, so it constructs one from bits and pieces of everything that’s unpleasant within you. Your basic greeds and lusts. It gives you a particularly nasty sort of immortality. Remember that old cartoon? This hideous toad saying ‘Kiss me and live forever—you’ll be a toad, but you’ll live forever.’” He grimaced. “If you get the choice, go with the Salamander.”

“So what’s this business about hunting myself?”

“Sometimes a Corpsegrinder will rip you in two and let half escape. For a while.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. Maybe it likes to play with its food. Ever watch a cat torture a mouse? Maybe it thinks it’s fun.”

From a million miles away, I thought: So now I know what’s happened to me. I’d made quite a run of it, but now it was over. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the hoard of memories, glorious memories, into which I’d been dumped. I wallowed in them, picking out here a winter sunset and there the pain of a jellyfish sting when I was nine. So what if I was already beginning to dissolve? I was intoxicated, drunk, stoned with the raw stuff of experience. I was high on life.