Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

The closet door creaked. The foot of the bed sagged under a considerable weight. Mr. Wary said, “I thought we had an understanding.”

“What’s happening to me?” Franco stared at the nothingness between him and the ceiling. He dared not look at his visitor. When Mr. Wary didn’t answer, Franco said, “Why do you live in a shit hole? Why not a mansion, a yacht? Why aren’t you a potentate somewhere?”

“This is what you’ve done with your dwindling supply of earthly moments? I’m flattered. Not what one expects from the brute castes.”

“My dwindling supply …? You’re going to kill me. Eat my heart, or something.”

Mr. Wary chuckled. “I’d certainly eat your heart because I suspect your brain lacks nutrients. I’ve no designs on you, boy. Consider me an interested observer; no more, no less. As for my humble abode … I’ve lived in sea shanties and mud huts. I’ve lived in caves, and might again when the world ends one day soon.”

“So much for the simple life of dodging bullets and breaking people’s legs.”

“You realize these aren’t dreams? There is no such thing. These are visions. The membrane parts for you in slumber, absorbs you into the reality of the corona that limns the Dark. Goodbye. Don’t call on me again, if you please.” Mr. Wary’s weight lifted from the bed and the faint rustle of clothes hangers marked his departure from the room.

Franco shook, then slept. In his dreams that were not dreams, he was eaten alive, over and over and over …

Franco collapsed in a stupor for the better part of three days. On the fourth evening, as the sun dripped away, the fugue released him and he finally stirred from his rank sheets. The moon rose yellow as hell and eclipsed a third of the sky.

The sensation was of waking from a dream into a dream.

He loaded his small, nickel-plated automatic and tucked it in his waistband. He drove over to The Broadsword and parked on the street three blocks away. The brief walk in the luminous dark crystallized his thoughts, honed his purpose, if not his plan. No one else moved, no other cars. A light shone here and there, on the street, in a building. Somehow this only served to accentuate the otherworldliness of his surroundings and heightened his sense of isolation and dread.

Carol’s apartment was unlocked, the power off. She sat in the window, knees to chin, hair loose. Moonlight seeped around her silhouette. “There you are. Something is happening.”

Franco stood near her. He felt overheated and weak.

“Your arm’s gone green,” she said. “It stinks.”

He’d forgotten about the wound, the antibiotics. His jacket stuck to the dressing and tried to separate when he let his arm swing at his side. “Oh, I’ve got a fever. I wondered why I felt so bad.”

“You just noticed?” She sounded distant, distracted. “The moon is different tonight. Closer. I can feel it trying to drag the blood from my skin.”

“Yeah.”

“I sleep around the clock. Except it’s more like I don’t really sleep. More like being stoned. I dream about holes. Opening and closing. And caves and dollhouses.”

“Dollhouses?”

“Kinda. You know those replica cities architects make? Models? I dream I’m walking through model cities, except these are bigger. The tallest buildings are maybe a foot taller than me. I look in the windows and doll people scream and run off.”

“If that’s the worst, you’re doing all right.”

“No, it gets worse. I don’t want to talk about that. I’ve seen things that scared the living shit outta me. I’m losing it. The tendrils; I’ve seen them for real, while I’m awake.” She rested her head against the glass.

Franco gripped the pistol in his pocket. A tremor passed through the walls and floor. Bits of plaster dust trickled from the ceiling. Something happened to the stars, although Carol’s shoulder mostly blocked his view. The yellow illumination of the moon dimmed to red.

“We’re going into the dark,” Carol said. She’d cast aside the sunglasses. Her face was pale and indistinct.

He walked into the kitchenette and drank a glass of tap water. He removed the gun from his pocket and racked the slide. An object thumped in the other room. When he returned, she was gone and the front door hung ajar. The hallway stretched emptily, except for the red glow of the elevator at the far end awaiting him with its open mouth. The stairwell entrance was bricked over. Franco considered the gun. He boarded the elevator and pressed the button and descended.

Everything happened as it had happened in his serial nightmares. She was there in the lobby, gazing toward the vaulted ceiling, and he was too late. A wrinkled hand the size and length of a compact car snatched her up by the fleshy strands as a puppeteer might retrieve a fallen marionette and then blood was everywhere. Franco froze in place, his mind splintering as he registered the tendrils that snaked from his own shoulders and rose into darkness.

An impossibly tall figure lurched from the shadow of the ornate support column. A demonic caricature of an old man, his wizened head nearly scraping the domed ceiling, hunched toward Franco, skinny fingers reaching for him, lips twisting in anticipation. Franco recalled the de Goya painting of the titan Saturn who stuffed a man into his frightful maw and chewed with wide-eyed relish. He fell back, raising his arms in a feeble gesture of defense. The giant took the fistful of Franco’s strings, the erstwhile ethereal cords of his soul, and yanked him from his feet; grasped and lifted him and Franco had a long, agonizing moment to recognize his own face mirrored by the primordial aspect of the giant.

Even in pieces, eternally disgorging his innards and fluids, he remained cognizant of his agonies. He tumbled through endless darkness, his shrieks flickering in his wake.

He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long.

Moonlight illuminated the ruined plaza of the city on the mountainside. He did not recognize the configuration of the stars and this frightened and exhilarated him. During his eons sleep, trees had burst through cracks in paving stones. He squatted to sniff the leaves, to tear them with his old man’s snaggle teeth and relish the taste of bitter sap. His lover approached, as naked and ancient as himself, and laid her hand upon his shoulder. They embraced in silent communion as the sun ate through the moon and bathed the city in its hideous blood-red glare.

The couple’s shadows stretched long and dark over all the tiny houses and all the tiny works of men.

The airliner’s safety brochure was like every other I’d seen: laminated and perfect, showing a large jet afloat in calm water, the emergency chutes deployed with inflatable rafts at their ends awaiting the arrival of passengers after a perfect water landing.

“Those diagrams are terribly optimistic,” the woman in the seat beside me said, eyeing the brochure as our plane climbed away from Manila. She spoke masterful English, clipped with a Filipino accent. “Let’s hope we never have to test that theory.”

I turned to her, intrigued. We were seated in the coach section, two women, strangers, traveling alone to Los Angeles. I had the window seat; she was on the aisle. I’d flown a lot, and I knew the social rules for the small talk that goes on between strangers forced to sit side by side for hours on end. A discussion of the false promises illustrated in the safety brochure did not come close to qualifying under those rules.