Джон Адамс: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

Falling takes longer than it should. The mechanisms that transform the house every instant reinvent this shaft every instant, inducing the floor not far below to recede and recede and recede even as you tumble farther and farther. He speaks to you all the way down. “I know murderers,” he says. “I have seen the look in their eyes as they drove knives into innocent hearts.” So have you. “I know dying.” So do you. “I have held their hands as they fought for one more breath of air. I know bereft. I have seen the world as they see it, when everyone they love is dead. I know traumatized. I have shared their madness as they stumbled uncomprehending through fields of mute corpses. I have shared the pain of unknown others as they were drowned, strangled, shot, exsanguinated, eaten alive by tumors, and crushed alive by heavy weights. I have borne that stone weight in my lungs as I bobbed, weakened and desperate, through floodwaters too violent to permit the survival of a swimming man. I have felt teeth rip through my flesh. I have felt my own flesh turn against me with illness. I have tasted all your shapes vicariously through the experiences of others. I have considered the final passage required of all people, good and evil, wise and stupid, rich and poor, young and old, deserving and not . . . and I have made myself the sworn enemy of the one who escorts them. All I ever wanted to do was defy you. All you ever had to do was stay out. This could have been my refuge. Why didn’t you take my warnings? Why didn’t you just leave me here to wait until I decided I was ready to take your hand? Is it pride, you son of a bitch? Is that what drives you now?”

All of this is so familiar to you that you are relieved to strike bottom, on a soft spongy surface that does little to ameliorate a touchdown at terminal velocity that would have powdered the bones of a human being. It causes you no pain or inconvenience at all: just annoyance that there’s still, after all this, even more terrain to travel: a gray corridor leading to a vague light at the far end. There’s no way of telling, of course, not in this house, where everything changes with every step you take, but even so, you believe that the one you seek waits for you not far in that direction. You have heard pleading before. You have heard rationalizations before. You have heard excuses before. You have heard countless voices in countless languages wheezing your name, cursing your existence, and bargaining for special treatment in your eyes. You have heard the articulate and inarticulate alike offer arguments in favor of special dispensation. Many appealed to fairness. It is not a language you speak, and even if it were, there would still be little chance of you speaking it now, not after you have had to undergo such hardship, such inconvenience, just to claim a life you should have been able to take years ago. Today you will wear your most terrible face.

At the end of the hall you find him. He sits slumped on a marble throne in a chamber with more dust than air. He is as old as any human being you have ever seen, even older than the damned woman upstairs; his skin is a thin veneer of nigh-transparent tissue barely covering his crackled and brittle bones. His eyes are filmy yellow globes, so dry from years of blindness that they don’t even glisten the way living eyes should. When he inhales, it’s with the resentful wheeze of lungs that have had more than their share of dust and ashes; when he exhales, his breath bears the stench of organs gone rotten inside. When you draw close, the withered cords of his neck draw that mummified face up to greet yours, and his parchment cheeks tighten, revealing a full set of teeth not white but black from rot. It’s a smile every bit as corrupt as yours, and now that you’re upon him you greet it with a skeletal grin of your very own. Were he able to see you, he would lose his mind. But he is blind, and when he speaks, his voice is not even a whisper. “You came. I defied you so long that you came. You ignored all the warnings and you came. You walked past all the warning signs, and you came. You ignored the temptations I offered, and you came. You are the Reaper and you are inevitable. So take me.”

You oblige. You lay hands on his shoulders and you breathe in, swallowing the intangible vapors that separate dead meat from living tissue. It tastes horrible, like any meat gone bad: a lot like it always tastes when you should have come sooner, only worse, because your arrival has never been this much past due. Inhaling, you know at once how many years he’s been decrepit, how many years his withered pump has kept beating only because you were never there to stop it—how many years since he felt joy, or hope, or anything that would have given his stupid, finite existence a point. You know that only his bitterness and his hatred for you have sustained him, and that it has never been enough, that though historically few mortal lives have ever been worth living, his, in its single-minded wait for your arrival, has been even more empty than most. Considering how much inconvenience he’s caused you, you should feel a little satisfaction at that. But as you take the last of him and his empty shell sags, you feel only the ghost of a feeling that those who live and breathe would have no difficulty recognizing as unease. Because the one emotion that dominates the architect’s mind, in this the last moment of his life, is triumph. He thinks he’s won. But it isn’t until he slumps, revealing the object that sits on the table behind him, that you understand why.

It’s a pitcher plant: a living lure of sweet and sickly smell designed to attract flies, which once inside cannot make their way back to the exit. You look inside and see a dozen separate flies trapped at the bottom. They’re all as ancient as the ancient man you just claimed, but they’re all alive, all damned, because until this moment you were never here to take them; and if you left at this moment, without doing what it has always been your duty to do, they would remain here, forever twitching as the years became centuries and the centuries became eons, withholding that one moment of merciful release that only you can provide. They are not capable of thought, and they cannot spend their eternal imprisonment remembering how easily they were baited. They can only buzz with impotent fury. You tap the plant with the edge of a fingertip, and all the days of its extended lifetime return in a rush: it curls at the edges, dries, turns black, crumbles to dust. The flies inside stop buzzing, stop moving, rot, fall apart, and disappear. In an instant there is no plant, no flies. There is just an empty tabletop, bearing nothing but the empty space where the plant had stood: an empty space that resonates with a message as clear to you as any words could ever be.

The fear that engulfs you then is volcanic, all-encompassing: the kind of dread you have caused in so many. Your breath cannot catch in your throat, because you have no breath. Your heart cannot race in your chest, because you have no heart. Your spine cannot curdle with terror, because you have no spine. But you feel the fear anyway: the sudden realization that you have spent this day like any other dumb animal, lured by the illusion of prey into cramped and fatal places.

You race back down the hall, in a single graceful swoop uncontaminated by any actual footsteps. You burst into the black room at the bottom of the shaft you descended not long ago. A dark place then, it’s already growing darker. The mechanisms that kept this house in motion, that rearranged walls and kept corridors and rooms illuminated when necessary, have begun to shut down, stopping every gear, closing every door, turning off every machine, extinguishing every light. It is already too dark for men to see, which inconveniences you not at all, as you are not a man. But barriers have slid into place, in the shaft above, blocking the path back to the rooms above. And though you have always been talented at slipping past solid walls, you already sense that if you started to climb this shaft and made your way past the first of the obstructions that stand between you and the outer world, then all you would have to expect from now on is a series of additional barriers and obstacles and tricks intent on no goal more noble than standing between you and everything that still lives. It’s enough to stagger even a presence who has never been lost, who has never needed instruction, who has always been able to find his way.