Джон Адамс: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

Turning from the window, you regard the rest of the shadow-choked room: the bookshelves stuffed with volumes chosen for their bindings instead of their literary value, the fireplace sitting black behind an iron grate, the trophy heads of a rhino and a moose looming over a grand desk. Something—a rat, or perhaps something stranger—scratches in a corner. A pair of carved mahogany doors sit invitingly at the far end of the room, but you don’t head there right away; instead you move to the desk, which bears a single yellowed sheet of paper so carefully centered that it screams set decoration. The dust covering the desk is so thick that the paper itself is impossible to read at first, but you sweep away the detritus of years and read the words that have been left for you in ink as black as your purpose here: LEAVE US ALONE! It’s the first pathetic thing you’ve seen since your arrival, and it lets you know the tenants are frightened of you. You crumple the paper without a thought and drop it to the floor, wondering just how long it will take the dust to bury the useless warning forever.

A deadbolt seals the double doors, but it’s no challenge. You glide through the opening into a long gray hallway that seems to extend an infinite distance in both directions. The air is obscured with dust and vapor, but you can see that the walls extend at least as far as their vanishing points. There don’t seem to be any other doors or branching corridors as far as you can see. The floor is ceramic tile; the walls are lit by a series of torches sprouting eternal flame; the air echoes with the distant sound of daggers sharpening on whetstones. You stand outside the parlor, glancing first one way and then the other, admiring the impossibility of the choice you’ve just been offered. It’s infinity both ways. You could very easily commit to one direction, or the other, and spend hours or days or years trudging toward an imaginary destination, always wondering whether it was truly up ahead or instead receding further with every step. You could, but you won’t. It’s too easy a trick to fool the likes of you. You know that there’s no life to be found either way, and that in any situation where you’re offered two equally unacceptable options, the only true solution is to make a point of choosing neither.

So you stand still and listen, focusing past the sound of daggers to the even more distant sound of a young woman crying. It’s not close, but the acoustics of this house have protected the sound, funneled it down the corridor, and delivered it at this spot, where it’s just soft enough to be subliminal. You might have missed it. You could have been forgiven for missing it. But it’s there, and the closer you listen, the more you hear. You can tell that the tears are not new, that they have nothing to do with your presence in this house but have rather been flowing for almost as long as the house itself has stood; that the woman, though young, has suffered enough to feel ancient; that she knows she is heard and that it won’t make a difference; and, most importantly, most useful to you as a stranger struggling to make his way through this place, that she is swaddled in darkness. Darkness, you decide, is the way to her. Without taking a single step, you look around for a shadow and find one, a short stroll away, hiding between a pair of torches that have gone out. It is not an impenetrable darkness, but it is all the occupants have provided, so it will have to be enough. You make your way there, your bare feet splashing in puddles of stagnant damp. You take your time. You face the spot the light has abdicated. And you step inside.

The voice in the darkness is familiar, and hateful in its familiarity. “When I was seven years old I found a stray cat that had been wounded by some kind of wild animal. It was lying on its side in the road, with one eye gone and its guts opened up like a canvas sack. I could see intestines through the hole in its belly; there were already maggots hard at work at the insides there. I knew from the way that belly moved up and down that it was alive anyway. It didn’t have enough strength to cry, but it was alive, and in pain, and aware of everything that was happening to it. If I knelt close enough to its face I could make it see me through its one good eye: the one the animal that wounded it hadn’t gotten to. The other eye was flush against the ground, half in and half out of the cat’s juice: it was just an empty glass ball, like most cat eyes, not remotely expressive to speak of, but it was still enough of a window to look in and see what the beast was thinking, whether it wanted to live in agony or preferred instead to die in one sudden burst of pain by being hammered with the largest rock I could find. I saw something that wanted neither: that was as frightened of ending as it was of continuing. It hated me for being there. It hated me, thinking I was you.”

That seems to be the end of the story, for now.

You emerge from another shadow in a bedroom choked with pink tapestries. They hang limp as shrouds from a ceiling crisscrossed with spiderwebs, their erstwhile cloying brightness reduced by dust and age to a shade reminiscent of the flesh beneath peeled skin. The air smells like perfume, disease, and fear; there are scavengers too, which shriek and scurry for their hidden bolt-holes as soon as you, the enemy, move into the sickly gloom that the inhabitants of this place are willing to accept as light. One of them, a rat so drawn and skeletal that he might have been long dead anywhere else, shows more courage than his fellows. He doesn’t flee from you but charges, his long sharp teeth gleaming. You lift up one foot and stomp him flat even as he imagines himself about to enjoy meat stolen from your leg. The blow is flawless in its brutality. You come down with all your weight, breaking his spine, crushing his rib cage, making juice of all that sits inside. His last breath escapes in a pink mist. You step away, feeling no particular satisfaction and no particular pleasure, thinking only that you just removed the most minor of obstacles.

You move farther into the room, past a mammoth chest of drawers, past a looming wardrobe, past an ornate Victorian dollhouse that rotates on a desktop turntable to alternate the display between the gray-shingled exterior and an inner maze of miniature rooms where tiny clockwork figures in gowns and tuxedos move up and down halls on tracks that never intersect. You pause long enough to watch their progress and decide they’ve probably been playing out this meaningless charade for years: neither meeting each other nor establishing communication, nor accomplishing anything useful with their ersatz lives. They don’t even possess charm or entertainment value, which is the least one should expect from toys. For a moment this annoys you so much you consider dashing the entire mechanism to the floor with a sweep of your arm, but then you spot a little room on the fourth floor, where a lady doll in a puffy pink dress sits endlessly brushing her hair before a mirror with tiny flickering bulbs. The mirror she faces is small but real. There are words painted on it, in almost microscopic letters painted red to simulate the effect of lipstick on glass: LEAVE WHILE YOU CAN. This doesn’t even come close to unnerving you. It does, however, give the dollhouse a reprieve. You turn your back on it and move, with a slow and confident gait, toward the canopied four-poster bed and the woman lying there.

The bed is massive, decadent, luxurious, its bedspread so thick and so stuffed with velvety softness that it could probably serve as a mattress all by itself. It is also ancient. A thick, rotten must rises from the sheets. The dust is thick enough to make ridges when you sweep your hand across the fabric. It is human dust: the kind that comes from skin, flaking off in layers over long years of consistent habitation. It is dry and smells of sickness. The woman lying in the bed’s center smells that way too. She is leonine and ancient, her skin drawn transparent as parchment over knife-edge cheekbones. Her complexion resembles milk. Her hair is just as white, and so long it radiates beneath her to all four corners of the bed, some of it indistinguishable from the spiderwebs that have begun to form from bed to ceiling, shrouding the rot on her bed from the rot that affects the rest of the room. Her arms, lying flat at her sides, are swathed in something still shiny that might have qualified as sensuous once. Her hands, soft and unlined and much younger than the rest of her, are fists wrapped tightly around wrinkles in the sheets, though it’s impossible to tell whether she grabbed the material a long time before or only after you made your own unwanted appearance in this room. Her eyes are clouded. It is easy to see that she must have been extraordinarily beautiful, a long time ago, and that she has been imprisoned in this house so long that she might not have had any opportunity to revel in it. Even now she seems much younger than what must be her actual age: she may have shriveled, but there was never enough in her existence to crinkle those eyes, or line that forehead, or form the welcome marks left by a life filled with frowns or smiles or tears. She doesn’t look at you as you approach, but she does tremble . . . and when you close your cold hand around one matchstick wrist, she weeps. The tears that burst from her unseeing eyes leave straight-line tracks on a face buried by dust accumulation; she opens her mouth just wide enough to gasp, and she says, “I know you.”