Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (48 page)

Looking rebuffed and disgruntled, the groceryman runs out to his truck and brings in the carton of groceries ordered by the agency man for John. Formally, he asks John if he would like to add anything to next week’s order. John names a few items for the groceryman, out of politeness and to cover the embarrassment of the moment. The groceryman nods, thanks him coldly for the coffee, and leaves.

John sits at the table a moment longer, shaking his head grimly and ruefully. So much for the “mainstream of humanity,” so much for the “swim of life.” He has been sunk and drowned in a remarkable short time. One should really know how to swim, he tells himself, before one jumps into the river. He pushes the empty cup aside angrily and stands up. He should have known better. He has been a recluse too long. He has gone too far away from the world, and now it is no longer possible to find the way back. Nor is the world necessarily inclined to let him in, even if he knocks. He reaches the window in time to see the grocery truck drive away. He is filled with an odd sense of loss, and a stranger sense of relief. He is alone in the house again.

He makes a drink of brandy and moves to the rear window of the kitchen. He stands there for a long time, looking out over the lawn.

Outside, pounded by the rain, his discarded notebook has begun to turn into a lump of wet paper.

The weather worsens that evening. A storm rolls down from the mountains like a dark, fire-shot wave and breaks against the house with incredible fury. The rain is like a hose turned directly against the windows; the glass rattles and trembles in the frames with the force of it. Through the rivers of rain he can see the trees waving their branches, swaying and tossing and flailing horribly, like souls in agony, like demented armies of the night. Fire leapfrogs monstrously on the horizon, and the sky, when he can see it, is a lurid, luminescent indigo, torn across by intricate traceries of lightning and churned into froth by the beating arms of the trees. But there is no sound. He cannot hear the rain, he cannot hear the wind. When lightning turns the sky a searing blue-white, he can feel the house groan and reverberate around him as to a nearby buffeting explosion, but he cannot hear the thunder. He knows it must be there, the storm is right on top of him, lightning striking all around—but there is no sound. For a moment, he thinks that he has gone deaf, but he can hear his voice when he speaks aloud, he can hear the ring of a tapped fingernail against his brandy glass, he can hear sounds that
he
makes. But he cannot hear the storm. It is as if the storm is a phenomenon occurring inside the windowpane itself, a molecule-thin tempest, and someone has forgotten to turn the volume up. He wonders, desultorily, what would happen if he opened the window. Would the storm slide up into the molding with the pane, leaving only a quiet, cricket-filled country night beyond?

He does not open the window.

Things become vague for John, and he wanders around the house for an indeterminate period of time. At one point, he becomes gradually aware that he is sitting in the kitchen. It is daylight. There is a shaft of murky sunshine stabbing against one wall, and he can dimly remember watching it move glacier-slow across the room with the morning. He can remember little else. He knows that he has been on a monumental drunk, the first one in years. He feels shaky and stretched very thin, but he has no hangover. He is still wearing the clothes he put on the morning of the groceryman’s visit, and they are filthy, stiff and glossy with caked grime and dried sweat. Gingerly, he feels his chin; there is a thick growth of stubbly beard there. Three days? More? Has he bothered to eat? His fingernails are black with dirt.

Feeling a spasm of distaste, he goes upstairs to wash and change. It takes a long time; he is easily distracted, and he keeps forgetting what he is about. He has to fix what he is supposed to be doing very firmly in his mind, so that he can refer back to it when he forgets, finding the word
wash,
not understanding it, but, as memory trickles back in, slowly attaching a societal function to it. In this way the world is won. The water wakes him up a little bit, but he still finds it difficult to think. It doesn’t seem important.

He returns downstairs, washed and dressed. He knows that at this point he should wonder what to do next, although he does not so wonder, and emotionally has no desire to do anything. Nevertheless, he tackles it as an intellectual exercise. He finds it engraved in his mind that he should go outside, so he sets out to do so. It is a battle—twice he finds himself wandering aimlessly in some other part of the house, twice he consults his standing orders and heads back toward the door. The third time, he makes it outside. It is a quiet, overcast day, oppressively humid. He looks sadly at the pile of tools he has left on the stoop, consigned to rust, and at the ladder propped against the side of the house. The repairs will never be accomplished, he knows that now. He meanders across the lawn, sometimes stopping and standing mindlessly for long intervals, then remembering and moving on. He makes it onto the access road. It is another battle to continue walking, but the road helps him remember and keeps him from wandering off the track. At last, the aspen grove closes over his head, and the house is gone.

It is much cooler and less humid here, and there is a brisk, pleasant breeze. John’s mind begins to clear almost at once. The twinge of distaste he had felt returns as an overwhelming surge of revulsion. The realization that he has spent days wandering inside the house in a torpid, mindless stupor is disgusting. And in retrospect, it is terrifying. He would like to be able to blame it on the drink, but he knows that he cannot—the drink was an effect, not a cause.

The house is haunted, he tells himself, abruptly surrendering skepticism to an odd relief. It is a problem that can be dealt with—he will hold a séance, get an exorcist, follow whatever prescribed procedures there are for such a circumstance. If necessary, he will move and concede the house to the ghosts. But he is forced to realize, almost immediately, that he is deluding himself—that cannot be the answer. His friend and the friend’s wife have lived in the house for years; they raised their little boy there, and they moved not out of choice, but because of the necessity of business. They were not chased out by supernatural horror; they loved the house, and regretted leaving enough to hold onto the title of the land in case a change in fortune would someday enable them to return. It seems unlikely that the house can have become haunted and sinister during the brief interregnum between their occupancy and his.

No, the house is not haunted. It is he, John, who is haunted.

He has been walking for fifteen minutes now, and he has not yet come to the blacktop secondary road. That is impossible. The access road is only a hundred yards long at the very most, with no branches or turnoffs, and the grove it transfixes is a small one. Nevertheless, he is still in the forest, and he can see no sign of anything but leagues of trees in any direction he looks. He has not been walking in a daze; his keyed-up mood has kept him alert, and he has noted every step of the way. He has not passed the blacktop without noticing it, and he has not strayed off the path. The path just does not go to the blacktop road anymore. Apparently, it now leads somewhere else entirely. In his abstracted mood, he almost does not find this remarkable.

Strangeness has always followed John like some patient, indefatigable hunter: unhurried, at his heels, waiting for him to stop. Sometimes he has been able to hold it at bay for months, even for years—with school, with the routine of business, with the regimen imposed by his art. With constant, distracting motion. But eventually he will stop, and it catches him. And when it does, he begins to sink right out of the world.

The pose of the introspective artist had served him well for quite a while—he had been able to use the accepted, cultured “sensitivity” of the role to mask the raw, unpalatable sensitivity beneath, from the world and from himself. Until, in London, the layers of protective callus had been gradually sloughed away, leaving that sensitivity grinning and naked, and other people had become too much to bear, even Paul, even Marilyn—they with their great ugly stews of hate and fear and lust, their uninspired eminences and shrieking plummeting depths, their molten blasts of desire and anger and unbearable love. And he knew that they were no different from himself. He was appalled by the sad, dowdy chronicles of pain that they carried in their faces, written in lines and ridges and whorls, muscle and bone. They were so plain, so readable that he could stretch out a finger and touch and number every one of them: here a frustration of the heart, here a vanishment of a small hope, here the souring of a dream. Their lives were engraved on their flesh in braille, like the Name on the forehead of the Golem, and he could not stand to read them. They broke his heart, and he shut himself away from the sight of them. And he continued to sink.

In the last days of his affliction, an increasing weirdness had seeped into the world, settling like a film over ordinary things and altering them. He had walked the everyday streets of London and seen, superimposed over them, a vision of the Apocalypse. He had seen the sky darken at noon, heard the frantic frightened screaming of machines, saw the streets open to vomit up fire and death, watched buildings buckle and collapse in horrid cascades of brick and glass, listened to the screams of the dying and smelled the stink of burning meat, seen people crushed, buried, flayed to pieces, torn apart, going up in flames as easy as kindling—watched a great city kicked to flinders as if it was a house of cards, and put to the torch. And all the while the old ladies sold flowers along the Bayswater Road and in front of Marble Arch, in the thin, watery sunlight, unaware of the doom that was coming, the desolation that John watched with wide mad eyes—for it was already here for him, and he could see their bones jabbing and straining at their skins, eager to be out and free, and he could see how very thin a membrane of present time there was standing between them sunning in Hyde Park and the ragged piles of dust and ash they would eventually be. It was this horrifying vision, repeated continually, playing behind his eyes at night in slumber, that had driven him from London. But coming through Boston, and then again in Manhattan, it had been the same thing again, even more horrid and on a grander scale: the great skyscrapers shattering and falling like murdered gods, the whirlwinds of fire, dozens of miles of city fused into molten glass by some new atrocity of man.

Now he can feel the same noonday strangeness leaking into this country morning. Around him, the forest is touched by entropy, by a cold and foul breath of poison, and it dies. It strangles, it suffocates, it is blighted, and it dies. Everything dies: the trees, the grass, the bushes, the flowers, the smallest moss and lichen, the worms that tunnel the ground, the insects, the very bacteria in the soil. He can see it all withering, shriveling, blackening, rotting. A scythe of decay passes through the world, and when it has passed, everything is gone. Nothing lives, nothing at all. There is only sterile, lifeless soil, soon to be baked into mud by the sun, or swept away by the wind to reveal the pale and elemental rock.

What is this? John asks himself, aghast at this ultimate negation. He can accept the burning of London as a premonition, a presentiment of the coming war. Similarly, he can understand the destruction of Boston and New York—the U.S. involved in the conflict, the war spreading eventually to American shores; many have predicted just that. But
this,
the blighting and death of life itself, the withering of the world,
what is this?

The forest has changed, imperceptibly, around him. The deciduous trees are gone. It is now made up of red and white spruce and balsam fir, and the trees are shaggy, ancient giants. He is sure that there isn’t an unlogged climax forest within a hundred miles or more of here, if anywhere in the East at all, and certainly not a spruce woods this far to the south. Most of the familiar weeds and wildflowers are gone, leaving the woods noticeably drabber. He finds himself remembering that plants like Queen Anne’s lace, dandelion, and butter-and-eggs are European imports, and relatively recent, and then he spends a while wondering what he meant by that. He knows that he left the house walking north, and he can tell by the position of the sun that he has been walking steadily north ever since, for better than an hour, through this inexplicable forest. But when the forest begins at last to lighten, and when he notices—after the fact—that the woods have somehow slowly and imperceptibly changed back into a deciduous forest again, and when he breaks through the final fringe of trees and sees the house directly ahead of him, squatting like a spider, he is hardly surprised at all. He tells himself, with a strange, drugged philosophicality, that he couldn’t really expect to win that easily.

It doesn’t want to let him go.

The groceryman returns the next afternoon. For a while he sits out in front of the house in his truck and honks his horn, and then he goes up onto the porch and pounds on the door, and calls through his cupped hands. When he gets no answer, the groceryman goes cautiously inside, pausing to call and hullo every few feet. He goes through the kitchen and the writing room, and stops at the threshold of the living room. It is hot and stuffy here, and the groceryman is already uncomfortable at snooping around inside someone’s house without the resident’s permission—he will go no further. The groceryman calls one last time, loudly, thinking that the resident might be asleep upstairs. There is no answer; it is very silent inside the gloomy house. The groceryman feels uneasy and prickly, as if the air has eyes here, and those eyes are watching him, unblinkingly. He shrugs irritably, shakes his head, and goes back outside, muttering something under his breath. The groceryman unloads a large carton of groceries from his truck, and leaves it inside the enclosed porch, with a bill and a taciturn note pinned to it. As he gets ready to leave, he feels strange again, spooky, and chilled. Then he puts the truck in gear and leaves.