Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Billy thinks that Nelson’s lucky. When we find him, he wants to make a wish. Me, I’m here to ask Nelson a question. An important one. Here, where he’s buried, I hope I’ll get the answer good and strong.

Thinking about it makes me hopeful but edgy. So I drop Billy’s arm and stroll forward like I know what I’m doing. Right ahead is a massive stone bowl, big enough to sit in. Nelson’s bathtub? I’m grinning at the thought, and I peek in, and it’s half full of green water and dirt and twigs and feathers. A pigeon clatters over, and I look up—and my mouth drops open. The roof ’s all circles and arches, picked out in gold paint and fancy colors….So this is what they thought of Nelson, this is what they done for him….

“Charlie!”

I pull up, swearing, on the very edge of a hole in the floor. A made hole, perfectly round, over a meter across. Farther on there’s another, and another. For fuck’s sake, this floor ain’t solid at all, it’s built over cellars or something, and if Billy hadn’t yelled, I’d’ve fallen through. I go cold all over. It’s all black down there.

And Billy looks about to burst into tears.

“Billy-boy, you saved me!” I hook him around the neck and tousle his hair. He manages a sick grin. I feel sick myself. Chrissakes, what kinda place has holes in the floor like this?

Then I figure it out. The holes are there to light the cellars below. Maybe once they had grids over them, or thick glass. But it’s shook me up. Don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting to nearly die. I get a bad thought. What if this is one of them places that’s, you know, guarded ? Where there’s a curse if you disturb the dead? What if Nelson’s magical house is full of traps?

We shuffle along past the sooty rings of old fires, past heaps of garbage, past a great black gateway guarded by statchoos of angels with smoke-stained wings. The more I look around, the creepier I feel. In every corner there’s marble statchoos of people dying—dropping off horses’ backs, fainting and falling, laying down on their deathbeds. You’d think they was marking tombs, but there ain’t no room for graves in this hollow floor. I take a squint at the lettering cut in the platforms under ’em. They’re all monuments to dead soldiers. Maybe a mighty battle was fought here once—and lost.

Suddenly the walls rise like cliffs. The roof overhead jistabout disappears. “High, Charlie!” Billy gasps. “High as the sky!” He’s right. I’m giddy just looking. We’re standing under the dome we saw from outside, so huge and hollow you could fit the whole sky into it. Way, way up, there’s a curving row of windows with a ledge running around.

“Let’s go up,” Billy says, eyes aglow. I wanta get up there too, there must be stairs. I tug open a door in the wall, and there they are, a spiral flight leading up….

But we won’t find Nelson up there, will we? You don’t bury people in the ceiling. You bury ’em in the ground. In the cellars.

And right on cue, I see an open doorway with steps leading down. In the arch above it, three skulls are carved in the stone.

“Come on!” I say to Billy, and I pull out my cell and click the light. A thin beam streaks out, painting a bluish glare on a flight of steps leading downwards. Billy hangs back.

“Nelson’s there,” he says, pointing up at the dome. “Upstairs.”

“No, Billy, he ain’t. We can go up there later if you like. This way first.”

“S’dark.”

“Use your cell,” I say, and he pulls it out and turns it on and flashes it down the steps. Then he clicks it off and shakes his head.

“Billy, you gotta come with me. I can’t leave you alone.”

People always think Billy’s younger’n me, but he’s nineteen, two years older. He’s shorter than me, and shy, and if you don’t know him it ain’t easy to tell what he’s saying. But he’s not stupid. He just thinks different. And when he makes up his mind about something, you can’t shake it. Like that rabbit of his. He got it off a market stall selling live animals for meat, chickens mostly, but other things too. It’s a monster, a whopping white rabbit he calls Bunny. Bad-tempered as hell. It scratches and bites, and it shits little brown droppings all over the house. Morris and me is always grumbling about it, and Billy knows, but he don’t care what we think. He loves it.

He’s got that stubborn look on his face right now, scowling, tongue pushing out between his lips. I say, “If you don’t come, you won’t get to see where Nelson is. An’ you won’t get to make your wish.”

“Don’t care.”

“How can you say that when we’ve come all this way?” My voice rises. “Chrissakes, Billy!”

That was too loud. Pigeons clatter up and there’s a gusty sweep and rattle as they swirl overhead. The echoes keep coming, like footsteps tapping toward us, and voices whispering, and my hair rises. I hate the feeling of all this space around us, full of shadows where anything could hide. I keep thinking the statchoos’ll move. I feel we’re being watched, yet I look around and behind us and don’t see nothing. It’s only the birds…I hope.

“Come on ,” I hiss.

“No,” says Billy, and I’m mad with him, but it’s no good showing it. Billy won’t come. He don’t like the dark. And I wanted this to be a good time together….“All right,” I tell him. “Stay right here . Don’t move. I’ll be as fast as I can.”

I run down the steps, counting under my breath. Thirteen down, then a turn, then a lot more. It’s clammy cold, and there’s a rank, rotten stink. Thirty-three, thirty-four—then the light from the cell flashes off black water at the bottom. I might’ve expected it. Even above the tide line, cellars don’t always drain out.

I prod the water with my toe and it don’t seem all that deep, so I step in and swear as it overtops my boots. I’m standing in an arched passage, and I can see by the stains on the walls that the water level sometimes comes much higher than this. Now what? Billy’s waiting, an’ I really shouldn’t have left him. I’ve gotta be quick.

Which way?

To the left it’s pitch black. To the right there’s a grayish glimmer, so I try that way first, and the light comes through a hole in the floor above, like the one I nearly fell through. The tunnel widens into dark spaces. I hurry along, past more white statchoos, pale and horrible in the dusk. The light off the ripples travels over them, and their faces flicker like life, and I catch my breath hard. Then the passage ends in a wall.

I slosh back past the bottom of the steps and try the other way, the dark way. Pretty soon I come to another choice—straight on or turn right, but it ain’t really a choice at all coz the way ahead is barred by rusted metal gates. I’ll hafta to go right…but it’s gnawing at me that Billy’s on his own, I ought to get back to him, how long have I been down here?

But I’ll never get this chance again. And maybe Nelson’s real close, maybe just around the corner. It’s worth a look. I don’t know if I’m fooling myself, but I’ve got a feeling about it—like a whisper in the dark, like feeling the heat of a fire with your eyes shut. Whether it’s real or not, I go wading into the water anyway.

The floor slopes down gradual, ankle deep, knee deep, thigh deep, and the walls is slimed with green, and there’s black lumps of stuff floating that I try not to look at.

The passage opens into a chamber. I stab the light about, and it flashes off a bunch of white pillars sticking up outta the water. In the middle of them is a stone platform, like an island, and on the platform is a black marble coffin. Big but not giant-sized. On top of that, there’s a golden pillow with a crown.