Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“You’re suggesting we go down those stairs? Wasn’t not doing that one of our most sacred rules?”

“I believe we were given those rules in order to make sure we broke them.”

Sandrine considered this proposition for a moment, then nodded her head.

That’s my girl, he thought.

“You may be completely perverted, Ballard, but you’re pretty smart.” A discordant possibility occurred to her. “What if we catch sight of our extremely discreet servants?”

“Then we know for good and all if they’re little tribesmen who chirp like bobolinks or handsome South American yacht bums. But that won’t happen. They may, in fact they undoubtedly do, see us, but we’ll never catch sight of them. No matter how brilliantly we try to outwit them.”

“You think they watch us?”

“I’m sure that’s one of their main jobs.”

“Even when we’re in bed? Even when we… you know.”

“Especially then,” Ballard said.

“What do we think about that, Ballard? Do we love the whole idea, or does it make us sick? You first.”

“Neither one. We can’t do anything about it, so we might as well forget it. I think being able to watch us is one of the ways they’re paid — these tribes don’t have much use for money. And because they’re always there, they can step in and help us when we need it, at the end.”

“So it’s like love,” said Sandrine.

“Tough love, there at the finish. Let’s go over and try the staircase.”

“Hold on. When we were out on deck, you told me that you felt you were being watched, and that it was the first time you’d ever had that feeling.”

“Yes, that was different — I don’t feel the natives watching me, I just assume they’re doing it. It’s the only way to explain how they can stay out of sight all the time.”

As they moved across the dining room to the inner door, for the first time Sandrine noticed a curtain the color of a dark camel hair coat hanging up at the top of the room’s oval. Until that moment, she had taken it for a wall too small and oddly shaped to be covered with bookshelves. The curtain shifted a bit, she thought: a tiny ripple occurred in the fabric, as if it had been breathed upon.

There’s one of them now, she thought. I bet they have their own doors and their own staircases.

For a moment, she was disturbed by a vision of the yacht honeycombed with narrow passages and runways down which beetled small red-brown figures with matted black hair and faces like dull, heavy masks. Now and then the little figures paused to peer through chinks in the walls. It made her feel violated, a little, but at the same time immensely proud of the body that the unseen and silent attendants were privileged to gaze at. The thought of these mysterious little people watching what Ballard did to that body, and she to his, caused a thrill of deep feeling to course upward through her body.

“Stop daydreaming, Sandrine, and get over here.” Ballard held the door that led to the gray landing and the metal staircase.

“You go first,” she said, and Ballard moved through the frame while still holding the door. As soon as she was through, he stepped around her to grasp the gray metal rail and begin moving down the stairs.

“What makes you so sure the galley’s downstairs?”

“Galleys are always downstairs.”

“And why do you want to go there, again?”

“One: because they ordered us not to. Two: because I’m curious about what goes on in that kitchen. And three: I also want to get a look at the wine cellar. How can they keep giving us these amazing wines? Remember what we drank with lunch?”

“Some stupid red. It tasted good, though.”

“That stupid red was a ’55 Chateau Petrus. Two years older than you.”

Ballard led her down perhaps another dozen steps, arrived at a landing, and saw one more long staircase leading down to yet another landing.

“How far down can this galley be?” she asked.

“Good question.”

“This boat has a bottom, after all.”

“It has a hull, yes.”

“Shouldn’t we actually have gone past it by now? The bottom of the boat?”

“You’d think so. Okay, maybe this is it.”

The final stair ended at a gray landing that opened out into a narrow gray corridor leading to what appeared to be a large, empty room. Ballard looked down into the big space, and experienced a violent reluctance, a mental and physical refusal, to go down there and look further into the room: it was prohibited by an actual taboo. That room was not for him, it was none of his business, period. Chilled, he turned from the corridor and at last saw what was directly before him. What had appeared to be a high gray wall was divided in the middle and bore two brass panels at roughly chest height. The wall was a doorway.

“What do you want to do?” Sandrine asked.

Ballard placed a hand on one of the panels and pushed. The door swung open, revealing a white tile floor, metal racks filled with cast-iron pans, steel bowls, and other cooking implements. The light was a low, diffused dimness. Against the side wall, three sinks of varying sizes bulged downward beneath their faucets. He could see the inner edge of a long, shiny metal counter. Far back, a yellow propane tank clung to a range with six burners, two ovens, and a big griddle. A faint mewing, a tiny skritch skritch skritch came to him from the depths of the kitchen.

“Look, is there any chance…?” Sandrine whispered.

In a normal voice, Ballard said “No. They’re not in here right now, whoever they are. I don’t think they are, anyhow.”

“So does that mean we’re supposed to go inside?”

“How would I know?” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Maybe we’re not supposed to do anything, and we just decide one way or the other. But here we are, anyhow. I say we go in, right? If it feels wrong, smells wrong, whatever, we boogie on out.”

“You first,” she said.

Without opening the door any wider, Ballard slipped into the kitchen. Before he was all the way in, he reached back and grasped Sandrine’s wrist.

“Come along now.”

“You don’t have to drag me, I was right behind you. You bully.”

“I’m not a bully, I just don’t want to be in here by myself.”

“All bullies are cowards, too.”

She edged in behind him and glanced quickly from side to side. “I didn’t think you could have a kitchen like this on a yacht.”

“You can’t,” he said. “Look at that gas range. It must weigh a thousand pounds.”

She yanked her wrist out of his hand. “It’s hard to see in here, though. Why is the light so fucking weird?”

They were edging away from the door, Sandrine so close behind that Ballard could feel her breath on his neck.

“There aren’t any light fixtures, see? No overhead lights, either.”

He looked up and saw, far above, only a dim white-gray ceiling that stretched away a great distance on either side. Impossibly, the “galley” seemed much wider than the Blinding Light itself.

“I don’t like this,” he said.

“Me, neither.”

“We’re really not supposed to be here,” he said, thinking of that other vast room down at the end of the corridor, and said to himself, That’s what they call the “engine room”, we absolutely can’t even glance that way again, can’t can’t can’t, the “engines” would be way too much for us.

The mewing and skritching, which had momentarily fallen silent, started up again, and in the midst of what felt and tasted to him like panic, Ballard had a vision of a kitten trapped behind a piece of kitchen equipment. He stepped forward and leaned over to peer into the region beyond the long counter and beside the enormous range. Two funny striped cabinets about five feet tall stood there side by side.