Modern classics of fanta.., p.80
Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 80
“She’s probably up at the house waiting for us,” I said.
His head shook very slowly right and left, eyes slit, as if the movement gave him pain. “We better look for her down here.”
We looked.
We ranged the creek, splashing its length down, searching its length up, bending to peer into shallow pools, poking into deep cuts under banks matted with blackberry that left delicate dots and lines of blood etched on our skin, moving with the sound of water, waiting for laughter and her voice, seeing sunlight unsteady on the shallows, the sudden panicked dart of a crawdad, the shapes of leaves against the late afternoon light, the sudden animal scuttle through underbrush that brought us erect, taut with expectation.
Nothing and no one.
And finally, Ted standing bent in a calm pool, head strained forward, regarding the pebbled bottom, his face anguished.
I saw his right leg swing. He kicked the water savagely, three times. Kick, kick, kick.
“Give her back!” he shouted. “Let her go!”
* * * *
When evening came, we returned to the open area where the easel stood. I squatted down beside Ted in the dusk. Neither of us spoke. We waited together, listening to water mutter among the stones. The creek, dim in the larger dark, stretched hugely away.
He said in a small clear voice, “You needn’t stay.”
“I will.”
“Taking care of the stupid younger brother.”
I said, “You shouldn’t do this all alone.”
“How else can you do anything?”
Limbs stirred against a vague sky.
After a long pause, he said in a rapid monotone, “I’ve always seen them. They didn’t particularly care about me. I don’t know why. In Ohio, in that lake, when I was way underwater down in the mud, they came looking. Watching me drown. They didn’t care. Their way. Not malicious. Just indifferent. When you came down, they scattered. It was dark but I saw them somehow or other. You never did. You were just as indifferent as they were. Only it was different with you. You always kind of looked right through me. You never saw me either, you know. You really didn’t care. I figured that out. I carried that all alone—you, and seeing the People—and that was pretty bad later, when nobody else saw them. How I wanted you to see them. But you never did.”
It was work to keep my voice level. “I couldn’t see. I don’t have the gift.”
“Gift! Lord protect us from such ill-considered gifts. The People must be all over, you know. Everywhere. A completely unidentified species. Millions of them. All the free water. Think how they swarm in the Mississippi. Think of the Nile.”
His voice lifted, stumbling with intensity.
“Millions. And I’m the only one to see. I’m a lunatic in a special way. Oh, my God, you don’t know how horrible it is to know that. And now this with Barb. How do I deal with this? She’s out mere. She’s…”
Sound shut off. The flutter of leaves, frog sound, the rasp of small night creatures, creek sound. All stopped, as if a key had been turned.
Ted’s fingers chewed into my arm.
“Listen,” he barked. “Listen.”
Silence pressed against us with physical force.
He demanded savagely, “You hear that?”
“What?”
“For God’s sake,” he said, “for God’s sake, that’s her voice.”
He leaped up and plunged toward the creek.
I called, “Wait for me.”
“No. No, don’t you come. Please. If you come, they’ll never let me see her.”
“Ted, I don’t want to have to drag you out.”
“You won’t have to. I promise you.”
He strode quickly away into the creek, the beam of his flashlight bobbing ahead of him. As he moved off through the shallow creek water, the sound of splashing abruptly faded and became remote. It was as if he passed through some sound-absorbent medium. He moved a few feet off and sounded a hundred yards away. Then there was no sound at all. I watched him slip downstream like the shadow of a ghost. The enveloping silence made me feel vaguely sick.
I knelt on the stones, calculating how long to wait before following. The soundlessness made it hard to judge. He would be able to hear me following a long way behind and that he would count as betrayal.
I was intensely aware that we had come to one of those points where your actions, in a very brief time, can permanently alter the way you regard each other. It’s easy to fumble. It requires such care. You have to handle yourself with the delicacy of a surgeon cutting along a nerve.
While I crouched, coldly disturbed, watching the intermittent glimmer of his light, I became aware of my own voice.
It whispered, “He hears. I don’t. Same thing.”
At first I didn’t register the meaning of that. Then I felt a light shock of understanding as it made sense.
Sensitives, the pair of us.
We sensed the same thing in different ways. It was two sides of the same experience. Where he heard the calling voice, I heard silence.
Either way it meant the same thing. It meant that the People had come, the flowing, watching People of Happyjack Creek.
No sooner had I repeated that over to myself a couple of times, trying to understand by repetition, than I realized I could no longer see Ted’s light. It was time to follow. But when I started to move, I could not. The thought of stepping into that water and perhaps putting my foot on one of the People turned my muscles to mush.
So there I huddled, completely amazed at myself, grinding my fingers together, while Ted sloshed downstream, the light jittering ahead of him, listening to Barbara’s voice calling from God knows where, saying God knows what.
Shame dragged me erect. I forced myself up into a silence as thick as felt slabs, my back flinching horribly at the darkness behind. I took a tentative step forward, feeling cold water flooding into my shoes, and the darkness came down on me, a thousand tons of it. With no warning at all, it became the way it had been under that Ohio lake, my legs sunk in icy mud and no air.
The fear pours up through you, stunning the nerves and penetrating the muscles. If you run, it runs with you. But you don’t dare run. Running creates its own pursuit. It is one of the rules that you must face fear at once, head-on. You clamp your teeth and stand and look at it and endure.
I switched off the flashlight and let night come down.
When the light went out, I almost fell over. Panic bent me. It was pretty bad. I felt that I was standing on a tongue in an open mouth. I felt the creek banks behind stir and concentrate, preparing to close on me in one whispering rush, vine, stone, dirt, and water clamping shut.
All this, I suppose, was direct attack by the People. I suppose. I don’t know. I do know there were some terrible moments and I resisted them, body stiff and eyes shut, because you have to resist. I endured.
Tire way you endure, you get through one second. When that is over, you get through the next one. And so the seconds go. No matter how bad it is, you hang on one second more, because if you run, you know you will remember running later and then the shame will come and that will be worse than standing, enduring, with the mouth around you and the banks moving behind.
After a long while I got my shoulders back and my head up, although it was terror to move. You come back to yourself a sensation at a time. First, cold water in the shoes. Next, the smell of night leaves. After that, the shirt plastered against your back, the feel of clenched fingers.
I got my eyes open.
Gray sky showed behind blurred limbs. Beyond them hung a dusting of stars.
The ferocity of the night had softened. I saw that the darkness was streaked by variations of light, gray, black, pale silver. I could make out clumps of bushes and the intricate interweaving of limbs. These were familiar, ordinary, natural shapes, the way they had always been.
Finally I punched on the light and, concentrating hard, began to move. My body felt wooden and uncontrollable. It seemed to take a year to go fifty feet.
As I blundered slowly downstream through that nasty silence, a small glow flickered behind foliage far down the creek. It wavered like a trace of moonlight, then went out. I could imagine that a flashlight had been waved briefly, the beam crossing overhead limbs. I could think of no reason for that, and anxiety pressed me forward like the push of a hand.
The creek bent sharply right around bushy shallows. My light grazed cliffs to the left, black water at their base. White and brown rock chunks littered the stream. From the right bank, a muddy bed of gravel tongued into the creek. On the tongue lay Ted’s flashlight pointing its beam serenely across the water.
He lay on the far side of the gravel, stretched out in a shallow pool.
My light touched his pale body. He had thrown off his clothing and lay with lifted head, staring into the water.
As my light came on him, a thick ripple seemed to rise close to his face and rolled away from him across the shallows. It might have marked the passage of a large fish or muskrat.
Darting forward, I jabbed my light at the ripple. But there was only water, inches deep, quite transparent. It concealed nothing and contained nothing.
The ripple slipped smoothly to the far shore and flattened away.
As it did so, sound returned. It was like being struck from all sides at once. Water rustled and night creatures cried and I heard the rasp of my own breathing. The sounding world pulsed all around, as terrifying as the silence.
I flopped down in the water beside Ted. He turned his head slowly, bringing his face into the glare of the flashlight. It was a still, blank face, smoothed of hope.
“They came,” he said. “But they didn’t want me.”
Reaching down, I set my arm across his frigid shoulders.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I tried to go to them. But there wasn’t any way.”
His voice was low and calm, without excitement, without cadence, the voice of a stone figure speaking with a kind of precise indifference.
I gripped his shoulders hard. It was as if a door in me had opened that I had never realized was closed. He was valuable and of enormous worth. I felt amazement that this extraordinary person was my brother.
He remained motionless under my arm.
“There is no use waiting,” he said in that uninflected voice.
I looked down sharply at him then and saw what the People had taken. There was no warmth in him. His passionless eyes remained fixed on me and they found nothing to judge, neither guilt nor virtue. He was stripped of both. The processes of his life, I saw, proceeded without such human ambiguities.
“We’ll wait a little bit,” I said to him, through my shock.
We waited. But the People did not return.
We never saw Barbara again, either.
* * * *
JOHN CROWLEY
Missolonghi 1824
One of the most acclaimed and respected authors of our day, John Crowley is perhaps best known for his fat and fanciful novel about the sometimes dangerous interactions between Faërie and our own everyday world, Little, Big, which won the prestigious World Fantasy Award. His other novels include Beasts, The Deep, Engine Summer, AEgypt, and a collection, Novelty. His most recent books are Antiquities, a collection, and a new novel, Love and Sleep. His short fiction has appeared in Omni, Asimov s Science Fiction, Elsewhere, Shadows, and Whispers. He lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts.
Crowley doesn’t write many short stories, but when he does, they are usually worth waiting for—as is the subtle and lyrical story that follows, in which a man of the smugly rational nineteenth-century “modern” world has a curious and unsettling encounter with a survivor of Ancient Times. …
* * * *
The English milord took his hands from the boy’s shoulders, discomfited but unembarrassed. “No?” he said. “No. Very well, I see, I see; you must forgive me then…”
The boy, desperate not to have offended the Englishman, clutched at the milord’s tartan cloak and spoke in a rush of Romaic, shaking his head and near tears.
“No, no, my dear,” the milord said. “It’s not at all your fault; you have swept me into an impropriety. I misunderstood your kindness, that is all, and it is you who must forgive me.”
He went, with his odd off-kilter and halting walk, to his couch, and reclined there. The boy stood erect in the middle of the room, and (switching to Italian) began a long speech about his deep love and respect for the noble lord, who was as dear as life itself to him. The noble lord watched him in wonder, smiling. Then he held out a hand to him: “Oh, no more, no more. You see it is just such sentiments as those that misled me. Really, I swear to you, I misunderstood and it shan’t happen again. Only you mustn’t stand there preaching at me, don’t; come sit by me at least. Come.”
The boy, knowing that a dignified coldness was often the safest demeanor to adopt when offers like the milord’s were made to him, came and stood beside his employer, hands behind his back.
“Well,” the milord said, himself adopting a more serious mien. “I’ll tell you what. If you will not stand there like a stick, if you will put back on your usual face—sit, won’t you?—then … then what shall I do? I shall tell you a story.”
Immediately the boy melted. He sat, or squatted, near his master—not on the couch, but on a rag of carpet on the floor near it. “A story,” he said. “A story of what, of what?”
“Of what, of what,” said the Englishman. He felt the familiar night pains beginning within, everywhere and nowhere. “If you will just trim the lamp,” he said, “and open a jar of that Hollands gin there, and pour me a cup with some limonata, and then put a stick on the fire—then we will have ‘of what, of what.’“
The small compound was dark now, though not quiet; in the courtyard could still be heard the snort and stamp of horses arriving, the talk of his Suliote soldiers and the petitioners and hangers-on around the cookfires there, talk that could turn to insults, quarrels, riot, or dissolve in laughter. Insofar as he could, the noble foreign lord on whom all of them depended had banished them from this room: here, he had his couch, and the table where he wrote—masses of correspondence, on gold-edged crested paper to impress, or on plain paper to explain (endless the explanations, the cajolings, the reconcilings these Greeks demanded of him); and another pile of papers, messy large sheets much marked over, stanzas of a poem it had lately been hard for him to remember he was writing. Also on the table amid the papers, not so incongruous as they would once have struck him, were a gilt dress-sword, a fantastical crested helmet in the Grecian style, and a Manton’s pistol.
He sipped the gin the boy had brought him, and said: “Very well. A story.” The boy knelt again on his carpet, dark eyes turned up, eager as a hound: and the poet saw in his face that hunger for tales (what boy his age in England would show it, what public-school boy or even carter’s or ploughman’s lad would show it?), the same eagerness that must have been in the faces gathered around the fire by which Homer spoke. He felt almost abashed by the boy’s open face: he could tell him anything, and be believed.
“Now this would have happened,” he said, “I should think, in the year of your birth, or very near; and it happened not a great distance from this place, down in the Morea, in a district that was once called, by your own ancestors a long time ago, Arcadia.”
“Arcadia,” the boy said in Romaic.
“Yes. You’ve been there?”
He shook his head.
“Wild and strange it was to me then. I was very young, not so many years older than you are now, hard as it may be for you to imagine I was ever so. I was traveling, traveling because—well, I knew not why; for the sake of traveling, really, though that was hard to explain to the Turks, who do not travel for pleasure, you know, only for gain. I did discover why I traveled, though: that’s part of this story. And a part of the story of how I come to be here in this wretched marsh, with you, telling you of it.
“You see, in England, where the people are chiefly hypocrites, and thus easily scandalized, the offer that I just foolishly made to you, my dear, should it have become public knowledge, would have got both us, but chiefly me, in a deal of very hot water. When I was young there was a fellow hanged for doing such things, or rather for being caught at it. Our vices are whoring and drink, you see; other vices are sternly punished.
“And yet it was not that which drove me abroad; nor was it the ladies either—that would come later. No—I think it was the weather, above all.” He tugged the tartan more closely around him. “Now, this winter damp; this rain today, every day this week; these fogs. Imagine if they never stopped: summer and winter, the same, except that in winter it is…well, how am I to explain an English winter to you? I shall not try.
