Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

But he didn’t. They had grown up in neighboring towns in New York, though they only met years later, in DC. When the time came to choose allegiance to a place, she fled to Maine, with all those other writers and artists seeking a retreat into the past; he chose Northern California. He was a journalist, a staff writer for a glossy magazine that only came out four times a year, each issue costing as much as a bottle of decent sémillon. He interviewed scientists engaged in paradigm-breaking research, Nobel Prize-winning writers; poets who wrote on their own skin and had expensive addictions to drugs that subtly altered their personalities, the tenor of their words, so that each new book or online publication seemed to have been written by another person. Multiple Poets’ Disorder, Randall had tagged this, and the term stuck; he was the sort of writer who coined phrases. He had a curved mouth, beautiful long fingers. Each time he used a pen, she was surprised again to recall that he was left-handed. He collected incunabula – Ars oratoria , Jacobus Publicus’s disquisition on the art of memory; the Opera Philosophica of Seneca, containing the first written account of an earthquake; Pico della Mirandola’s Hetaplus – as well as manuscripts. His apartment was filled with quarter-sawn oaken barrister’s bookcases, glass fronts bright as mirrors, holding manuscript binders, typescripts, wads of foolscap bound in leather. By the window overlooking the Bay, a beautiful old mapchest of letters written by Neruda, Beckett, Asaré. There were signed broadsheets on the walls, and drawings, most of them inscribed to Randall. He was two years younger than she was. Like her, he had no children. In the years since his divorce, she had never heard him mention his former wife by name

The hotel room was small and stuffy. There was a wooden ceiling fan that turned slowly, barely stirring the white curtain that covered the single window. It overlooked an airshaft. Directly across was another old building, a window that showed a family sitting at a kitchen table, eating beneath a fluorescent bulb.

“Come here, Suzanne,” said Randall. “I have something for you.”

She turned. He was sitting on the bed – a nice bed, good mattress and expensive white linens and duvet – reaching for the leather mailbag he always carried to remove a flat parcel.

“Here,” he said. “For you.”

It was a book. With Randall it was always books. Or expensive tea: tiny, neon-colored foil packets that hissed when she opened them and exuded fragrances she could not describe, dried leaves that looked like mouse droppings, or flower petals, or fur; leaves that, once infused, tasted of old leather and made her dream of complicated sex.

“Thank you,” she said, unfolding the mauve tissue the book was wrapped in. Then, as she saw what it was, “Oh! Thank you!”

“Since you’re going back to Thera. Something to read on the plane.”

It was an oversized book in a slipcase: the classic edition of The Thera Frescoes , by Nicholas Spirotiadis, a volume that had been expensive when first published, twenty years earlier. Now it must be worth a fortune, with its glossy thick photographic paper and foldout pages depicting the larger murals. The slipcase art was a detail from the site’s most famous image, the painting known as “The Saffron Gatherers.” It showed the profile of a beautiful young woman dressed in elaborately-patterned tiered skirt and blouse, her head shaven save for a serpentine coil of dark hair, her brow tattooed. She wore hoop earrings and bracelets, two on her right hand, one on her left. Bell-like tassels hung from her sleeves. She was plucking the stigma from a crocus blossom. Her fingernails were painted red.

Suzanne had seen the original painting a decade ago, when it was easier for American researchers to gain access to the restored ruins and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. After two years of paperwork and bureaucratic wheedling, she had just received permission to return.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. It still took her breath away, how modern the girl looked, not just her clothes and jewelry and body art but her expression, lips parted, her gaze at once imploring and vacant: the 15-year-old who had inherited the earth,

“Well, don’t drop it in the tub.” Randall leaned over to kiss her head. “That was the only copy I could find on the net. It’s become a very scarce book.”

“Of course,” said Suzanne, and smiled.

“Claude is going to meet us for dinner. But not till seven. Come here—”

They lay in the dark room. His skin tasted of salt and bitter lemon; his hair against her thighs felt warm, liquid. She shut her eyes and imagined him beside her, his long limbs and rueful mouth; opened her eyes and there he was, now, sleeping. She held her hand above his chest and felt heat radiating from him, a scent like honey. She began to cry silently.

His hands. That big rumpled bed. In two days she would be gone, the room would be cleaned. There would be nothing to show she had ever been here at all.

They drove to an Afghan restaurant in North Beach. Randall’s car was older, a second-generation hybrid; even with the grants and tax breaks, a far more expensive vehicle than she or anyone she knew back east could ever afford. She had never gotten used to how quiet it was.

Outside, the sidewalks were filled with people, the early evening light silvery-blue and gold, like a sun shower. Couples arm-in-arm, children, groups of students waving their hands as they spoke on their cell phones, a skateboarder hustling to keep up with a pack of parkeurs .

“Everyone just seems so much more absorbed here,” she said. Even the panhandlers were antic.

“It’s the light. It makes everyone happy. Also the drugs they put in our drinking water.” She laughed, and he put his arm around her.

Claude was sitting in the restaurant when they arrived. He was a poet who had gained notoriety and then prominence in the late 1980s with the “Hyacinthus Elegies,” his response to the AIDS epidemic. Randall first interviewed him after Claude received his MacArthur Fellowship. They subsequently became good friends. On the wall of his flat, Randall had a handwritten copy of the second elegy, with one of the poet’s signature drawings of a hyacinth at the bottom.

“Suzanne!” He jumped up to embrace her, shook hands with Randall then beckoned them both to sit. “I ordered some wine. A good cab I heard about from someone at the gym.”

Suzanne adored Claude. The day before she left for Seattle, he’d sent flowers to her, a half-dozen delicate narcissus serotinus , with long white narrow petals and tiny yellow throats. Their sweet scent perfumed her entire small house. She’d emailed him profuse but also wistful thanks – they were such an extravagance, and so lovely; and she had to leave before she could enjoy them fully. He was a few years younger than she was, thin and muscular, his face and skull hairless save for a wispy black beard. He had lost his eyebrows during a round of chemo and had feathery lines, like antenna, tattooed in their place and threaded with gold beads. His chest and arms were heavily tattooed with stylized flowers, dolphins, octopi, the same iconography Suzanne had seen in Akrotiri and Crete; and also with the names of lovers and friends and colleagues who had died. Along the inside of his arms you could still see the stippled marks left by hypodermic needles – they looked like tiny black beads worked into the pattern of waves and swallows – and the faint white traces of an adolescent suicide attempt. His expression was gentle and melancholy, the face of a tired ascetic, or a benign Antonin Artaud.

“I should have brought the book!” Suzanne sat beside him, shaking her head in dismay. “This beautiful book that Randall gave me – Spirotiadis’ Thera book?”