Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 33

Somehow I fell asleep too. At dawn, Uncle Rob shook me awake. I got up stiffly, but I'd been dressed warmly enough that I was all right.

He couldn't bring himself to say anything, but the look in his eyes told me everything.

I didn't have to ask. I didn't have to search. Aunt Louise was gone, b.l.o.o.d.y bathrobe and all.

Of course any number of disappearances and murders had been attributed to the Fire Eggs in the past, as had so much else. "The Fire Egg ate my homework" was an old joke. "The Fire Egg ate Aunt Louise" didn't go over well with the authorities, so there was an investigation, which concluded, for lack of any real evidence, that, despite what the two of us claimed, Louise had wandered off in the night and died of exposure or her disease, and finding her body would only be a matter of time.

"I'll tell you what the f.u.c.king things are," said Uncle Rob. "They're pest-disposal units. They're roach motels. They're here to kill us, then to clean the place out to make room for somebody else.

Maybe the poison tastes good to the roach and it dies happy, but does it make any difference?"

"I don't know, Uncle. I really don't." The night before I was to leave, he went out on the lawn and lay down underneath one of the Fire Eggs and blew his brains out with a pistol. I heard the shot. I saw him lying there.

I just waited. I wanted to see what would happen. But I fell asleep again, or somehow failed to perceive the pa.s.sing of time, and when I came to myself again, he was gone. The pistol was left behind.

It was Aunt Louise who first named them Fire Eggs. Not everybody knows that. Uncle Rob used the term on his television show, and it caught on. He gave her credit, over and over again, but no one listened and the whole world believes he was the one who coined it.

That's what his obituaries said, too.

I think that we're wrong to wait for something to happen.

I think it's been happening all along.

The New Horla

ROBERT SHECKLEY.

Robert Sheckley first came to prominence in the 1950s as one of the leading writers in Galaxy, became a novelist in the 1960s, and still (but too infrequently) produces fiction today that is thought-provoking, memorable, and stylish. His reputation is based primarily on the quality of his quirky, subversive, satirical short fiction, a body of work admired by everyone from Kingsley Amis and J. G. Ballard to Harlan Ellison. As an ironic investigator of questions of ident.i.ty and of the nature of reality, he is a peer of Philip K. d.i.c.k and Kurt Vonnegut. In a recent interview on the web (www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/ robert.sheckley) this exchange took place: Delos: Why is there something, instead of there being nothing?

Sheckley: There isn't something. There's only nothing masquerading as something and looking very like Gerard Depardieu. That, by the way, is the real meaning of cybers.p.a.ce.

This story, from Fantasy & Science Fiction, where he published several stories in 2000, is anhommage to the great 19th Century French writer, Guy de Maupa.s.sant. Maupa.s.sant wrote the cla.s.sic story "The Horla," arguably an early proto-SF story, about an horrific invisible being, not long before Maupa.s.sant himself went mad. Here, a young man alone in a ski lodge meets an invisible alien/supernatural being but is more worried by mundane matters of business.

"How deep it is, this mystery of the Invisible. We cannot plump its depths with our wretched senses, with our eyes, which are incapable of perceiving things that are too small, things that are too big, things too far away, the inhabitants of a star-or the inhabitants of a drop of water...

And our ears deceive us, because they convey to us vibrations in the air in the form of sounds-they are like fairies performing this miracle of changing movement into sound, and through this transformation they give birth to music, turning into melody the silent rhythms of nature... And what of our sense of smell, inferior to that possessed by a dog... and our sense of taste, which can scarcely detect the age of a wine!

"Ah! If only we had other sense-organs to work other miracles for us, who can tell how many other things we should discover in the world around us?"

-"Le Horla," Guy de Maupa.s.sant The train ride from Concord up into the White Mountains was spectacular. The snows were deep, with the tops of the trees poking through like stubble on a dead man's cheek. We topped the range and came at last into Mountain Station. Here I got off, with my skis, my backpack, and my ski boots.

There was no one around to greet me. The little station house was empty, though not locked. I went inside and got on my ski boots, put my shoes into my backpack, came out and strapped on my skis.

Although I had told Edwin I'd ski down to his chalet without any difficulty, now that I was actually there the idea seemed less than brilliant. It was late in the day, after four P.M., and the sun was already lost in the white sky. We'd been held up almost an hour at Manchester, and hadn't made up the time across New England. I took the sketch map from an inner pocket, smoothed it out, oriented myself, went over the way I'd go once again.

It had all seemed perfectly straightforward when I'd arranged with Edwin to use his family's ski chalet for a few days. We had been roommates at Dartmouth and had remained friends afterward. He had often offered me the use of the chalet. This holiday I took him up on it.

Originally, I had meant to drive there, and Edwin had carefully laid out the route. But as it turned out, my car was back in the shop with miscellaneous electrical problems. With Edwin's help, I had worked out a different route. I would take the train to Mountain Station, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and then ski down to the lodge.

Edwin had been more than a little dubious. "Are you quite sure? I don't really recommend it."

"It's perfectly straightforward on the map," I told him. The chalet was only a thousand or so feet below Mountain Station, which stood at the top of Standish Pa.s.s in the White Mountains. It was a short run and there were no obstructions.

"You've made the run yourself, so you told me."

"Well, yes," Edwin said, "I have, but I'm acquainted with the area. For a first time..."

"From what you've described, there's nothing to it. Out of the station I face just west of north, with the spire of Stanley Church in sight just to my left, and it's a straight run down to the dogleg. Then I go left around the construction site and the chalet-white with green trim-is in sight."

"It's just never a good idea, skiing in the mountains alone," Edwin said.

"I'll take it easy," I a.s.sured him. "I'll snowplow all the way down." If only I had taken my own light-hearted promise seriously!

Orienting myself wasn't difficult. Just to the left of the small station house was a storage shed, painted black. Edwin had told me to use this as my takeoff point. I stood there in front of it for a moment, poised on my skis, checking out the slope. It was steep, but not too steep, a perfect white blanket untouched byany other skiers' marks. There was a dark clump of trees to the right, about a hundred yards down, and beyond that, just out of sight from here, was the construction site I needed to ski around. I checked my bindings, adjusted my pack, pulled down my goggles, and took off.

It was a beautiful day for a run. The sky was white, and there was an acc.u.mulation of dark clouds to the east, a promise of weather making up over toward the Atlantic Coast. My skis slid smoothly on the surface, not going too rapidly over the somewhat wet snow, then picking up speed as the incline steepened. I leaned into it, enjoying that exhilaration that the first run of the season brings. It was an easy slope and I was in perfect balance going down it.

After a few minutes I caught sight of the obstruction. It was a mound of building materials, covered in last night's fresh snow, with here and there a gleam of green canvas where the wind had blown away the cover. I was over too far to my right, and now I bent into a sharp turn that would take me below the building materials. The thrill of leaning into that first turn of the season caused me to cut it a little fine. I straightened out to give the mounded materials a sufficient berth, then crouched to build up speed.

Perhaps I wasn't paying sufficient attention to the terrain. But there was really nothing to see, since the fresh snow covered everything.

I knew I was in trouble when my skis started chattering on a series of long, slick, rounded objects just beneath the snow. They were like a corduroy road surface, only much higher.

Later I learned that I had crossed a pile of plastic pipes that had been unloaded only two or three days ago, and had been concealed by last night's snow. They had been set down at the lower edge of the construction, and I was going right over them.

All would still have been well if I hadn't been tucked into my turn. I went across those pipes at an angle. All I knew at the time was that I was crossing a hard, b.u.mpy, unstable surface and my skis were sliding out from under me. The pipes were concealed under an inch or so of fresh snow, and they were frosty and slick. But they hadn't been on the ground long enough to freeze to the ground, so they slid out from under me and I fell hard, my skis kicking into the air, and I was tumbling over them until at last I came to rest beyond the pipes, in soft snow.

It took me a while to pull myself together. It's important not to underestimate the shock of a sudden unexpected fall. For a while I felt as though the mountain had exploded under me. I was numb from head to toe, and it was not unpleasant. But I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that when this numbness wore off, I was likely to find myself in a sorry state. It had really been quite a fall.

While I was still numb and feeling no pain, I determined to get to the chalet. It was only a few hundred yards away, down the slope. I tried to get to my feet, and found that my right leg would not support me. I got halfway up and fell. Checking, I found that my right foot was twisted at an odd angle. I also noted various rips in my twill ski pants, and a slow welling of blood from what I took to be a wound in my shoulder, just above the shoulder blade, where the backpack hadn't protected me.

I was not at all cold. Nor was I in much pain. But I knew I was not in a good way, and that I needed to get to shelter as soon as possible. Above all, I had to get my ski boots off before the swelling started.

My first thought was to carry my skis and poles with me and limp down the slope to the chalet, whose roof I could make out at the edge of the fall line. This proved impossible. I was unable to stand up. Nor did I have my skis, as I had first imagined. They were somewhere back up on the slope. All I had was one pole, and my knapsack was still strapped to my back.

I hobbled and crawled downhill toward the chalet, through snow that became increasingly deep as I descended. I felt all right when I began, but soon began to experience a deep fatigue. The day had grown very dark, and heavy clouds were boiling up over Mount Adams. My left ankle was beginning to ache abominably. And I noticed that I was leaving quite a trail of blood behind me. I couldn't tell where on my person it came from-I was beginning to hurt in half a dozen places-and this seemed no time to stop and examine myself. I didn't even have a first aid kit in my knapsack.

The forerunners of the storm arrived just as I got to the chalet, on my feet now, or rather, on one foot, with the other raised, supporting myself by my remaining ski pole. Overhead were long dark streaky clouds, what the old Scandinavians called the storm's maidens-those long, thin wild clouds that come out in advance of the main body of wind, snow, and rain. The wind was whipping around my head whenI got to the chalet's front door and searched for the key under the log pile to the left. Edwin had been as good as his word. The key was right where he'd said it would be, under a bit of seasoned oak, and I got the door open and dragged myself inside.

It was a modern small ski chalet, bright birch and cedar. An A-frame with two guest rooms, a good-sized living room, bathroom and kitchen in the rear. I got my boots off and turned the power switch near the door. Even though it gave a satisfying click, it brought no power. Edwin had promised to have the electricity turned on by the time I got there, but apparently he had forgotten, or hadn't succeeded.

I was in better luck with the propane. The chalet ran on its own tank. I made sure the pilot was on, found the valve and turned it, and soon had the living room heaters going nicely. Then and only then did I feel secure enough to look to myself.

There was no telephone. I had known that beforehand. I wanted to get out of my ski clothes: My elasticized twill pants didn't want to stretch over my swollen ankle, and I decided not to press the issue. I could keep my pants on for a while. My clothing was torn up enough to make it no difficulty to find where I had been abraded.

The cuts and sc.r.a.pes on my sides and legs were painful but not serious, not even especially disabling.

It was my ankle that was the problem, that and a puncture wound beneath my right shoulder blade, made by a tree branch, perhaps. Touching it gently, I found it was as big as the small end of a pool cue, and it was oozing blood. Not in a great stream, but steadily.

For a long time I just lay on the living room carpet in the growing gleam of the early evening. I may have dozed for a little while. It was almost dark when I determined to pull myself together.

Negotiating the living room made it seem a very big place indeed. I was quite weak. I had the feeling that I had injured myself worse than I'd first thought. That deep gouge in my back wouldn't stop bleeding. Finally I gave all my attention to trying to do something about it.

I made a pad with a small pillow and bound it in place on my back with a sheet I found in one of the drawers under the picture window. That slowed the blood loss some, but it didn't stop it. Blood continued to leak out of me and whenever I moved the pillow slipped off. I began to wonder how many pints of blood I could lose without pa.s.sing out or going into shock. No matter what I did, the pillow wouldn't stay in place. I couldn't seem to get enough pressure on it, and finally discarded it.

The heaters soon took the chill off the chalet. I found two candles in the kitchen and brought them out to the living room. I put them in an ashtray and lighted them. By this small dancing light, I saw the shadows of evening gathering swiftly as the storm struck. There commenced a rattle of windows like the devil's own tattoo. That's the way my thoughts were trending. I was wounded and depressed and wallowing in my own feeling of stupidity, my embarra.s.sment over this stupid accident with the pipes. It made me feel incompetent. And I was worried about the wound in my back. The flow of blood was slow, but it was steady. How much could I lose before I was in trouble?

The wind began gusting up and driving tree branches against the windows. Those trees should have been cut back. I was sure it was only a matter of time before a branch broke through. There seemed nothing I could do about it. There were wooden shutters, but I'd have to go outside to get at them, and I doubted my present ability to do that. I just lay there on the floor beside the couch, and felt the hollowness in my stomach, because I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast early that morning in Hanfield Station. I lay there and waited to see if the window would hold.

It held, as it turned out. But something strange happened. There was a sharp crack and something came through the picture window. It didn't shatter it. It bored through it like a rifle bullet. But it was bigger than a rifle bullet, to judge by the starred hole it left behind. And unlike a rifle bullet, it didn't spend itself in the room. Like some sort of living thing, it buzzed and danced around the room.

I just cowered there on the floor watching it darting around and thinking to myself, "Well, this really is too much." I mean, not only had I been hurt, now I was being forced to take part in some sort of weird, perhaps supernatural matter. For what else could this thing be?

"Stop that," I told it irritably as it buzzed around my head. But if the thing, whatever it was, heard, it showed no signs of it. I don't know what it had been when it came through the window, but now it was a sphere about the size of a baseball, and sparkling with many colors. It was spinning furiously and dartingaround the room like a large angry hornet. It dodged around and slammed into a wall, and changed shape, going all misshapen for a moment, before popping out again into a sphere. I couldn't decide whether something was really happening or if I was having an hallucination. I was rooting for the hallucination, because the supernatural or the supernormal or whatever it was was exactly what I didn't want.

Does this seem over-emphatic to you? Consider my position. I am twenty-seven years old. A junior stockbroker in a well-known Boston company. I'm doing very well, thank you, through a combination of intelligence, steady nerve, rational a.s.sessment of the factors involved, and self-discipline. By self-discipline, I mean that I didn't spend much time asking myself why I was doing the work I was doing. I sensed that asking that could open up a nasty can of worms. Spiritually, stockbroker might be hard to justify. But I figured I'd get around to that later; in my fifties, maybe, when I'd retire rich and move with Janie to some warmer climate.

I guess I haven't mentioned Janie yet. Janie Sommers. We're engaged. I'm head over heels in love.

Not just with Janie, though she's extremely lovable, but with what Janie and I were planning to do with our lives.

It was going to be a good life, a rich life, filled with s.h.i.+ny cars and a swimming pool and a big house filled with excellent art objects. Janie's stipend from Vogue wouldn't bring that about. But her inheritance when she turned twenty-five would. Together, we could have everything we wanted. That may sound cra.s.s. But how could I not calculate our joint incomes, with a view to making life better for Janie as well as for me?

I really don't want to get into all this. But I thought I should explain why I was so dead set against visionary experience. It would commit me to something I wanted no part in. To giving up the delightful, worldly life I had planned and turning to disseminating the "truth" as I had conceived it.

Once I admitted to visionary experience, I knew I was a goner. I could hear myself bending my friends' ears: "Let me tell you what happened to me one strange night in New Hamps.h.i.+re...."

I wanted none of that.

And yet, the logic of visionary experience demands that you spread it around. Tell the world about it.

But that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do as I watched the glowing, spinning sphere dance around the room against all the laws of gravity and common sense, and I heard myself saying, "I don't want to be the subject of a National Public Radio hour on strange unexplained experiences, I want to do something I'm good at, stockbrokering, make a lot of money, live well."

The sphere took one more brush against the wall, dislodging Edwin's high school graduation certificate, and then it split in two, its halves fluttering to the floor. Something came out of it. Something small and smoky that grew in size and then solidified for a moment into a small body and staring face-staring at me-and then this thing, whatever it was, faded and became invisible and I had my hands full to control the seizures I was considering falling into. ("Yes, I saw it with my own eyes! It was not of this world!") I resisted the impulse of the true believer and looked at the sh.e.l.l the thing had come in. It drooped, it melted, and then it was gone, leaving behind only a trace of moisture on the rug.

I looked around the room. I saw the storm pouncing against the picture windows. Blown snow slanting past in hypnotic lines, accompanied by the wavering mutter of the wind. Inside the room, there was a profound darkness contrasting with the glaring white rectangle of the picture window. Although the room was in darkness, a few objects in it-the top of a ladder chair, the head of a plaster statue of some cla.s.sical deity-were still bathed in light. A Rembrandt effect. And the creature or whatever it was that came out of the sphere was nowhere to be seen. But that didn't mean that it was gone.

"You look for it in the kitchen," I told Janie. "I'll keep on checking here."

No, Janie wasn't there. But in some weird way, she was. I can't explain it. I can only report to you how it seemed to me at the time.

I checked the room again. Looking for the creature from the sphere. Looking for her. Funny how I'd already decided it was a she. Funny how I could sense her presence still in the room, watching me.Something watching me. The moment stretched out.... And dissolved in my sudden annoyance. I don't want her looking at me! How dare this invisible thing look at me?

What else was she intending? My mind had taken a curious turn. From judging an event as an hallucination to rejudging it as something real. And now I was really worried.

It had been so much more comfortable when I'd thought it was an hallucination. But I'd had to give up that comforting thought. Trying to force myself to believe I was hallucinating felt like a bad idea. It would make my judgments unreliable. It's madness to consider yourself unreliable. In a situation like that, who are you going to rely on?

I summed up what I thought I knew. I had the distinct feeling that the storm had plucked something invisible out of the air and hurled it through my picture window. The thing it had thrown was let's say a sort of very small s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. Inside the living room, the little s.h.i.+p had buzzed around like a deranged being. No doubt it was no longer working right. Finally it fell apart, and something came out.

That was as far as my thought took me at the time. I just knew that something uncanny was in the same room with me, watching me, and I had no idea what that invisible thing intended with me.

Since I had nothing to go on but my suppositions, I decided to give them free rein.

It seemed to me that this being had blundered into this room by accident, and now couldn't find her way out. I remembered the way the sphere had darted back and forth and b.u.mped into walls. I'd seen a robin do the same thing, trapped in an attic window that Janie had opened to air out, and dashed itself to death before we could shoo it out the window which it couldn't find.

I suspected it was going to attack me.

With a shudder I turned defensive. My hands were raised in boxer's position. My head slowly turned from one side of the room to another. Although I knew I could not see her, yet I thought I could sense her. And, with a little luck, do something about it before she did me a mischief.

It was an eerie time for me as I sat propped up against the couch, my ankle throbbing, the hole in my back oozing blood, the wind rattling the windows and the darkness engulfing everything as night came on.

I couldn't see the thing and therefore I saw it everywhere. It was the odd humpbacked shape on the mantel, the suspicious shadow on the rug, the triangle of greater darkness that peered out of closets and cubbyholes.

I caught a glimpse of it for a moment, then lost sight of it in the darkening living room. And then I felt something at my back, near my wound, felt something wet and sticky on my skin, I turned, and saw it. It was glued to my back. It seemed to be sucking my blood. I screamed and swatted at it, and it darted away and lost itself in a corner of the room.

Janie came out of the kitchen then. "Where is it?" I pointed. She went at it with a pillow, flailing, shouting, "Leave him alone, d.a.m.n you!" And she caught the thing one solid whack as it darted around, sending it cras.h.i.+ng to the floor. And then she was pounding at it with the pillow, and I had gotten off the couch and was stomping it with my good foot. I think we were both shouting then, or maybe screaming.

Or maybe it was just me, because of course Janie wasn't really there.

I guess I went a little off my head at that point. I started imagining Janie was there, and I was talking to her, telling her about this discovery I'd made, this Horla. Because that was what I was certain it was-a Horla, the uncanny creature described by Guy de Maupa.s.sant.

Janie was saying, "Look, Ed. None of this is happening. I want a normal life. We can have it all. The best. The summer house in Connecticut, the apartment in Manhattan, the beach bungalow in Mustique.

You're making money and I've got money coming to me. We can do this: But honey, we can't put any supernatural stuff in this. You can't go around telling people you had this visitation from another world.

Who's going to buy stocks from you if you do that? We don't want to be unreliable. People who've had visions are unreliable. Fanatical. You can't tell what they'll do. And our life is based on knowing very well what we can and will do. And what we will not do. Talking about our mystic experiences is one thing we won't do."

I've often thought about asking Janie if she was there that night. If she remembers any of it. If she cansay anything at all that might account for what I saw, or thought I saw. But of course, that's getting into pretty weird stuff, and Janie and I don't do that. The Horla is one of a number of things we don't talk about.

Janie is so pretty. And she makes such good sense. And I was in such agony as I sat there, listening to her. Because this thing had happened, the more she talked, the surer of it I became. I sensed that to repudiate it, pretend it never happened-well, that would be a pretty cra.s.s thing to do. If I did that, it would be difficult to live with myself.