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

It was a good line; I laughed as hard as you did.

Well there in the upstairs bath, the armour was cracking. And Kimi wasn’t dead. But she wasn’t leaving either. She leaned against the vanity, arms crossed over her chest. She was wearing a short black skirt. Her shoulders, arms, and legs were bare. There were no visible bruises. No fish-hooks either. She studied me, maybe looking for the same things.

“You go for a swim?” she said finally. “You look like you went for a swim in the ocean.”

“Guilty.”

Her eyes flickered away a moment as she waved a hand. “Nobody’s guilty of taking a fucking swim. And it’s a good look for you.” Then she looked again, reassessing. “But you didn’t just go for a swim.”

“You were right. I took a fucking swim,” I said, and started to laugh, and she got it and laughed too.

“How’s your night going?” I asked. She made a little sneer with her lips — as if she was trying to fish a piece of food out of her teeth. Put her bare feet together on the slate tile floor, made a show of inspecting the nails.

“Len’s very tired,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh dear. That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not as bad as that.”

“If you say so.”

She looked at me. “Are you hitting on me, Tommy?”

I said I wasn’t.

“Then why the fuck are you still here?”

There was an answer to that question, but not one I could really articulate — not the way she was looking at me then. I wanted to talk to her about Lucy, about the eyes… I thought — hoped — that she would be able to help me parse the experience somehow. Or failing that, help me put it away, someplace quiet.

But her armour was cracked. She had nothing to offer me. And although I wouldn’t know for sure until a week later — she wasn’t leaving that night, she stayed the whole time — she was almost certainly planning her escape.

So I left her to it. “I’m very tired too,” I said, and stepped into the hall.

That one didn’t get a laugh. The bathroom door slid shut behind me, hitting the door-jamb hard enough to quiver in its track.

“You’re still thinking about her ,” said Kimi through the wood. “Well give it up, Tommy. It’s obvious to everybody. She’s done with you.”

Oh, don’t worry. I know you’re done with me. I’m done with you too.

I joined the conversation in the kitchen, or rather hovered at its edge. Dennis had stepped away, and now Emile was talking about Dubai, which was hardly a new topic for him. But the girls he and Prabh had brought were new. They hung on every word. I leaned against the stove, poured myself the dregs of a Chardonnay into a little plastic cup and swallowed the whole thing. Prabh found me a Malbec from Portugal and poured a refill.

“Yeah, you look like shit,” he said. “Bad night?”

“Not exactly bad,” I said. “Strange. Not exactly bad.”

Prabh nodded and turned back to his girl. She was very pretty, I had to hand it to him: tall, with streaked blond hair and a dancer’s body. Twenty-seven years old, no older. I’d turn back to her too.

So I kept drinking, and Prabh kept filling my cup, and after awhile, I’d moved from the periphery of the conversation to the juicy middle. And there, I asked as innocently as I could manage: “Any of you know Lucy?”

Shrugs all around. I showed a level hand to indicate her height. Another to show how long her hair was. “We don’t know her, Tom,” said Emile, and Prabh poured me another glass. “Maybe you want to sit down?” asked one of the girls.

It was an excellent suggestion. I made my way to the sectional in the living room with only a little help here and there, as necessary.

Really, I don’t think I made that much of a spectacle of myself. But I had had too much to drink and I’d had it all too quickly. I was speaking extemporaneously you might say. So I concluded it be best not to speak at all.

I fitted myself into the corner of the sectional. Dru and Ben a few feet to my left, made a point of staying engrossed in one another — and as soon as it was polite to do so, got up and found spots at the dining room table. And I was left to myself.

By this time it was well past midnight. You know how that is. It’s a time when you start asking questions about things that in the light of day you wouldn’t consider twice. It’s a time… well, we both know how it goes, in the dark hour.

I was left to myself.

I began to feel badly about leaving Lucy on the beach. I wondered if I might have handled things differently. I worried that I might have impregnated her, or caught a venereal disease. Briefly, I worried that some of those eyes might have migrated from her skin to mine — if I’d caught a case of leaping, burrowing and uniquely ocular crabs. If I closed my own eyes, would I see a thousand dim refractions of the room from the point of view of my belly?

The notion made me laugh — a little too loudly, I think. Dennis, reeking of weed and vodka cooler, just about turned on his heel at the sight of me and fled back to the deck. But it got me back wondering at the nature of Lucy’s peculiar disease, if that’s what it was. If not she, then who was looking out through those eyes? And so, in circles, went my thoughts.

The front door opened and closed once, twice, five times. Water ran in the kitchen sink. Lights dimmed in rooms not far from this one.

“Hey Tom. How you keeping?”

I looked up and blinked.

“Hey Len,” I said. “Haven’t seen you all night.”

He nodded. “I’ve been a rotten host.”

Len was wearing his kimono, that red one with the lotus-design. He’d lost a lot of weight — you couldn’t mistake it, the kimono hung so loose on him. His hair was coming back in, but it was still thin, downy. He sat down beside me.

“You met Lucille,” he said.

“How did you know?” I asked, but I didn’t need to; as I spoke, I saw Kimi over the breakfast bar in the kitchen, putting glasses into the dishwasher. She’d told him about our conversation in the washroom. He’d put it together.

“Yeah,” said Len, “you were on the beach. Two of you. Had yourself a time, didn’t you Tom?”

“We had ourselves a time.”

Len put a bony hand on my thigh, gave it a squeeze of surprising strength, and nodded.

“Now you’re drunk in my living room, when everybody else has had sense to get out. Too drunk to drive yourself, am I right?”

That was true.

“And you don’t have cab fare, do you?”

I didn’t have cab fare.

“You’re a fucking leech, Tom. You smell like a fucking leech.”

“It’s the ocean,” I said.

Kimi turned her back to us, lowered her head and raised her shoulder blades, like wings, as she ran water in the kitchen sink.

“Yeah, we know that’s not so,” said Len. “You smell of Lucy.” He licked his lips, and not looking up, Kimi called out, “that’s not nice, Len,” and Len chuckled and jacked a thumb in her direction and shrugged.

“Did she leave?” I asked. “Lucy I mean.”

“Miss her too now?” Did I miss her like you , he meant, obviously.

“I just didn’t see her leave.”

“What’d I just say? Everybody else had the sense to get out.”

A plate clattered loudly in the sink. Len shouted at Kimi to be fuckin’ careful with that. Then he coughed and turned an eye to me. His expression changed.