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

She looked at him. The lamplight from the other room reflected from her irises, giving them a creamy whiteness that looked warm and soft, incongruous in her torn face, like saucers of milk left out after the end of the world. “Why?”

The question shamed him.

“Because I love you, Katie. Jesus Christ. You’re my wife. I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said, and like pressing her cheek into his hand, this response seemed an automatic action. A programmed response. He ignored this, though, and chose to accept what she said as truth — perhaps because this was the first time she’d said it to him since the suicide, when her body had stopped behaving in the way it was meant to and conformed to a new logic, a biology he did not recognize and could not understand and that made a mystery of her again. It had been so long since she’d been a mystery to him. He knew every detail of her life, every dull complaint and every stillborn dream, and she knew his; but now he knew nothing. Every nerve ending in his body was turned in her direction, like flowers bending to the sun.

Or perhaps he only accepted it because the light was soft, and it exalted her.

His free hand found her breast. She did not react in any way. He squeezed it gently in his hand, his thumb rolling over her nipple, still soft under her shirt. She allowed all of this, but her face was empty. He pulled away from her. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

He rose and, taking her hand, moved to help her to her feet. She resisted.

“Katie, come on. Let’s go to bed.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But don’t you…” He took her hand and pressed it against his cock, stiff under in his pants. “Can you feel that? Can you feel what you do to me?”

“I don’t want to go upstairs. The light will come in in the morning. I want to sleep in the cellar.”

He released her hand, and it dropped to her side. He thought for a minute. The cellar was used for storage and was in a chaotic state. But there was room for a mattress down there, and tomorrow he could move things around, make some arrangements, and make it livable. It did not occur to him to argue with her. This was part of the mystery, and it excited him. He was like a high school boy with a mad new crush, prepared to go to any length.

“Okay,” he said. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll make it nice for you.”

He left her sitting in the dark, his heart pounding, red and strong.

He fucked her with the ardor one brings to a new lover, sliding into the surprising coolness of her, tangling his fingers into her hair and biting her neck, her chin, her ears. He wanted to devour her, to breathe her like oxygen. He hadn’t been so hard in years; his body moved like a piston and he felt he could go on for hours. He slid his arms beneath her and held her shoulders from behind as he powered into her, the mattress silent beneath them, the darkness of the cellar as gentle and welcoming as a mother’s heart. At first she wrapped her legs around his back, put her arms over his shoulders, but by the time he finished she had abandoned the pretense and simply lay still beneath him, one eye focused on the underbeams of the ceiling, one eye peering into the black.

Afterwards he lay beside her, staring up at the underside of his house. The cellar was cold and stank of mildew. The piled clutter of a long and settled life loomed around them in mounted stacks, tall black shadows that gazed down upon them like some alien congress. The mattress beneath them came from their own bed; he’d resolved to sleep down here with her, if this was where she wanted to be. Three candles were gathered in a little group by their heads, not because he thought it would be romantic — though he felt that it was — but because he had no idea where the outlets were down here to set up a lamp, and he didn’t want to risk upsetting her by turning on the bare bulb in the ceiling. The candlelight didn’t seem to bother her at all, though; maybe it was just the sun.

He turned his head on the pillow to look at her and ran his hand along the length of her body. It was cool to the touch, cool inside and out.

“This other light doesn’t bother you, does it, babe?”

She turned her head too, slowly, and looked at him. Her wounds cast garish shadows across her face in the candlelight. “Hm?”

“The light?”

“… Oh, I know you,” she said, something like relief in her voice. “You’re the man who left me in the water.”

Something cold flowed through his body. “What?”

She settled back against the mattress, closing her eyes and pulling the sheet up to her chin. She seemed very content. “I couldn’t remember you for a minute, but then I did.”

“Do you remember that night?”

“What night?”

“… You said I’m the man who left you in the water.”

“I looked up and I saw you. I was scared of something. I thought you were going to help, but then you went away. What was I scared of? Do you know?”

He shook his head, but her eyes were closed and she couldn’t see him. “No,” he said at last.

“I wish I could remember.”

She climbed off the mattress, leaving the man to sleep. He snored loudly, and this made her think of machines again. His was a clumsy one, loud and rattling, and its inefficiency irritated her. It was corpulent and heavy, uncared for, and breaking down. She decided at that moment that she would not let it touch her again.

She slipped her nightgown on over her head and walked upstairs. Cautiously, she opened the door at the top and peered into the ground floor of the house. It was welcomingly dark. Crossing the living room floor and parting the curtains, she saw that night had fallen.

Within moments she was outside, walking briskly along the sidewalk, crackling with an energy she hadn’t felt in as long as she could remember. The houses on either side of the street were high-shouldered monsters, their windows as black and silent as the sky above her. The yawn of space opened just beneath the surface of her thoughts with a gorgeous silence. She wanted to sink into it, but she couldn’t figure out how. Each darkened building held the promise of tombs, and she had to remind herself that she could not go inside them because people lived there, those churning, squirting biologies, and that the quietude she sought would not be there.

She remembered a place she could go, though. She quickened her pace, her nightgown — the one she had worn that night, when the man had left her in the water, now clean and white — almost ephemeral in the chilly air and trailing behind her like a ghostly film. The narrow suburban road crested a hill a few hundred feet ahead, and beyond it breached a low dome of light. The city, burning light against the darkness.

Something lay on the sidewalk in front of her, and she slowed as she approached. It was a robin, its middle torn open, its guts eaten away. A curtain of ants flowed inside it, and lead away from it in a meandering trail into the grass. She picked it up and cradled it close to her face. The ants seethed, spreading through its feathers, over her hand, down her arm. She ignored them.

The bird’s eyes were glassy and black, like tiny onyx stones. Its beak was open and in it she could see the soft red muscle of its tongue. Something moved and glistened in the back of its throat.

She continued on, holding the robin at her side. She didn’t feel the ants crawling up her arm, onto her neck, into her hair. The bird was a miracle of beauty.

The suburbs stopped at the highway, like an island against the sea. She turned east, the city lights brighter now at her right, and continued walking. The sidewalk roughened as she continued along, broken in places, seasoned with stones and broken glass. She was oblivious to it all. Traffic was light but not incidental, and the rush of cars blowing by lifted her hair and flattened the nightgown against her body. Someone leaned on the horn as he drove past, whooping through an open window.