The Mammoth Book of Terror (33 page)

He woke to absolute silence.

It seemed that he was blind. He passed his fingers over his eyes and felt a sticky crust covering the top half of his face, welding his eyelids shut. He scratched at his eyes with both hands,
and was relieved when the substance began to crumble away. He managed to get his eyes open and saw, as he had suspected, that it was dried blood.

He turned over on his side and tried to get to his feet. Sharp pains shot through his body, causing him to yell. From the sound of his voice, he knew he was enclosed in a small space. He
collapsed into a sitting position, and looked about him.

The circular, domed compartment had walls of smoothly worked bare rock. A pale illumination, falling from a number of narrow tunnels that led diagonally up and out, from positions about three
feet from the ground, showed him he was alone. Except for himself and a number of piles of the egg-like objects that were now familiar to him, resting in nests of rubbish, the room was empty. He
crawled about, trying to ignore the pain in his probably broken left arm, and inspected the nests. They were about two feet in diameter, and made of the shredded, entangled remains of the sort of
refuse he would have expected to find in a dustbin.

He touched some of the eggs. They looked slightly different from the ones he had seen previously. They were very warm. He felt them quiver slightly under his finger tips. Their shells were soft.
They had a peculiar, pleasantly spicy smell that made him feel hungry. His stomach growled, and he tried to remember when he had last eaten. He had no idea how long he had been underground but,
from the sharp, agonizing pangs in his belly, he’d been there some considerable time.

The eggs looked more and more appetising the longer he studied them. “If they taste anything like as good as they smell,” he thought, “they would be delicious.” He picked
up a handful and, with great difficulty, resisted trying to eat one.

He put five of them in the inside pocket of his torn and filthy jacket, and scrambled into one of the passages leading out.

They all pointed upwards.

Presumably, if he kept going, sooner or later, he would reach the surface.

The tunnels looped and twisted off in all directions. There were places where they forked and, when they did, he always chose the path that had the steepest gradient upwards. It didn’t
seem to matter as, round the first bend, he frequently found himself almost falling along a stretch that took him diagonally down again. The illumination in the passages was always up ahead;
somehow he could never discover its source. He was always blundering on towards the light.

From time to time he stopped to doze, then started awake and continued on. His mind was empty; his brain felt as raw as his hands. He was bleeding from dozens of small wounds. He was drenched in
the sweat of fever.

When he saw a clear, whiter light ahead, he stopped because it was hurting his eyes. He lay with his chin on the ground while his sight adjusted, and the awareness that what he was looking at
might be daylight gradually dawned upon him.

Strangely, he felt no elation. He felt resentment.

“About bloody time,” he thought.

He hesitated before completing the last stretch, unaccountably reluctant to get to the surface, now that he was almost there. Something about the quality of the light caused him some
trepidation; it was eerie, and not quite right.

It was like moonlight, but far too bright.

The topography of the landscape around him was recognizable, but was stripped of its familiar features. The shape of Combs Moss loomed unmistakably ahead of him, but the walls and fields along
its sides were gone. What remained looked like a hill of lead. Everywhere, as far as he could see, the land was smoothed off into planes of grey that gave an impression of impenetrable
solidity.

When he saw the dark line of trees and the porta-cabin where he had expected them to be, he felt a surge of wild hope.

The huge black van was parked between them! Its back was open. It was parked at an angle to his line of vision, so he could only see a little way inside it. He could see nothing there but
shadows.

He started to run towards the van. He hurt in every limb, and stumbled like a drunk with a wooden leg, but he had discovered a resource of determination and energy at the sight of the van. It
seemed to represent his last, best hope.

When he was about fifty yards from the vehicle a figure jumped to the ground out of the back and disappeared round the side farmost from him. Maurice shouted wordlessly and made frantic efforts
to run faster. He thought he heard a door slam. An engine started. The back of the van started to close automatically; a black door descended smoothly, slowly, and silently.

Maurice tried to scream. He was crying, and waving and flapping both his arms to get attention. His feet were getting heavier every step he took.

The van jerked once, then moved away. It accelerated. Maurice continued trying to run to catch it, but gave up when the vehicle vanished over the crest of a hill.

Finally exhausted, he fell to his knees.

He was facing the line of trees. They were almost leafless now, and he could see, perched on the branches, some of the things that he had not seen clearly before. They were busy at some task,
flittering about individually and in groups.

Perhaps they had seen him. One of them called out what could have been a chattering, imbecilic greeting.

A number of them ventured forward out of the trees. Moving in fits and starts, they came towards him, spreading out as they did so.

The closer they got, the worse they looked.

Maurice knew he could not move another step. Resigned, he sat and waited for them.

Remembering he was hungry, he pulled one of the eggs from his pocket and put it in his mouth. Keeping his gaze steadily on the creatures, who were almost upon him, he bit down hard on the
egg.

He was lying down, so he stood up.

He opened his eyes, and found he could see round in all directions at once.

But he could not see directly up or down.

He tried to touch himself, to find out what he was, but he had lost the use of his arms, if he still had any.

He was hungry, but there was nothing anywhere that looked like food. Then he realized he had no mouth.

He stretched his many legs experimentally. He discovered he could move easily across the crusted surface of the earth, with almost no effort.

He made a clattering sound by rattling parts of the top of his body.

He waited.

Then, feeling deeply anxious, he scuttled towards the line of trees to join the others of his kind.

“At least,” he thought, “I shan’t be alone.”

But, when he reached the trees, he realized they had been dead for a long time.

The place was deserted.

LISA TUTTLE WAS BORN
in Houston, Texas, but has lived in Britain since 1980. She worked as a journalist for five years on a daily newspaper in Austin
and was an early member of the Clarion SF Writer’s Workshop. She sold her first story in 1971 and won the John W. Campbell Award in 1974 for best new science fiction writer.

Her first book,
Windhaven
, was a 1981 collaboration with George R.R. Martin, since when she has written such novels as
Familiar Spirit, Gabriel: A Novel of Reincarnation, Lost Futures,
The Pillow Friend
and
The Mysteries.
A new novella,
My Death
, recently appeared from PS Publishing, and her short fiction has been collected in
A Nest of Nightmares, A
Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories, Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation
and
Ghosts & Other Lovers.
The latter volume, plus another collection entitled
My Pathology,
have recently been released as e-books.

Tuttle’s other works include the Young Adult novels
Snake Inside, Panther in Argyll and Love On-Line.
She is also the author of the non-fiction guides
Encyclopedia of Feminism,
Heroines: Women Inspired by Women
and
Mike Harrisons Dreamlands
, the erotic fantasy
Angela’s Rainbow
, and she has edited the acclaimed horror anthology by women,
Skin of
the Soul
, and the anthology of erotic ambiguity,
Crossing the Border.

“There’s not a lot I can say about this story,” admits the author. “I’m not myself a cat person, and never set out to write a cat fantasy, but a few years back I
realized that three friends of mine, all single women of a certain age who lived in New York City with their cats, had stopped complaining about their unsatisfactory sex-lives and the lack of
decent men, and seemed utterly content with their situation.

“As I speculated on possible reasons for the change, this story suggested itself. Of course, it is a total fiction, and you should not think for a moment that any of the characters or
events portrayed here have even the slightest basis in fact.

“But I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

It’s not surprising if you never understood how much I loved you when I took such care to disguise my deepest feelings. I was a woman with a past, after all. A woman of a certain age,
happiest living on my own (well, with a cat) and with plenty of lovers already notched into my belt.

I was pastforty when I metyou, and the easy-loving days of my youth, when the times between men were measured in days or weeks rather than months or years, were gone. I had been celibate for
more than six months when I metyou. I was feeling a little desperate, and I fell for you hard.

You probably won’t believe that, if you remember how hard I made you work to get me. Once I saw I’d caught your attention – the space between us seemed charged, remember?
– I became distant, ironic, cool. I treated you with a casualness that bordered on the insulting. I was so desperate to be wanted that I didn’t dare let you suspect. Nothing drives
people away more than neediness. And then, after we had become lovers, once you were well and truly caught, I guess it became a sort of habit, the way I was with you, as if you were an irritation
to me, as if I suffered you to make love to me now and again as a very great favor.

But our affair went on for nearly seven years. Think of it. And eventually, our positions became reversed. I was no longer the less-loving, the more-loved – that was you. You grew tired of
my undemanding presence, and called me less, or made excuses at the last minute to cancel a date. Did you really think I wouldn’t mind? That I might even be grateful to lose you? That it
wouldn’t nearly destroy me?

Well, as I said before, people change. I might have shrugged and cut my losses – dropped you before you could formalize our break – and bounced back in my thirties, but, pushing
fifty, the loss of you was the loss of the last of myyouth, practically the loss of life itself.

I was surprised by how hard it hit me. If I couldn’t win you back, I was going to have to learn some new way of living, to cope with my loss.

I thought about my friends. Over the years that once large throng of independent single women who had comprised the very core of my city, my emotional world, had been whittled away by marriage,
parenthood, defection to other parts of the country, and even death. Three remained, women I had been friends with for nearly thirty years, whom I saw regularly and thought of as “like
me”. Janet was an artist, Lecia was a writer and Hillary was a theatrical agent. We had similar emotional histories and similar lifestyles, in our small apartments with our cats, in love with
men who saw us in the time they could carve out from their real lives with their wives and children elsewhere. Over the years we had kept each other going, cheered and commiserated with each other,
staying loyal to a certain vision of life while the men, the cats, the jobs and other details changed.

Now that I thought about it, though, I realized that I alone of the sisterhood still had a lover. The other three were all “between men” – and had been for at least two years.
What’s more, they seemed content. In the old days, celibacy would have been a matter for complaint and commiseration. I couldn’t think of the last time we’d had a good moan about
the perfidy of men, or a plotting session devoted to fixing up someone with Mr Right. Bits of subliminal knowledge, memories of certain looks, words unspoken, hints, fell together in my mind. I
scented a conspiracy. They knew something that I didn’t. And I needed help.