She struck out against him even as he crashed into her, but in the course of their struggles dropped the knife. She was surprised to find him naked but for his bright red uniform of blood — at some point he had stripped away all pretension. His toenails felt like metal against her body, but his fingernails were so sharp she did not feel them at all when they slid beneath the surface of her skin.
He brought the edge of his hand down on her cheekbone, filling her vision with bright, blinding flashes of light. He grinned at her, and dipped his finger into the blood covering his face, and drew a bright red line across her neck.
She rose on to her knees and rolled, and he rolled with her, his teeth biting her ear as he whispered her name. They crashed into the door, closing it firmly on the hall and the little light it had provided.
A glint in the dark, a flat surface catching any available light. His hand was on it, and raising it high above her head.
The knife passed through her hand, nailing it to the door. She spat into his face and he pulled the knife out and thrust it at her again. The point passed through the surface of her right cheek. She stretched out her arms to ward off the blows: the blade bit at the fleshy areas of her palms, her fingers, releasing exclamations of blood. She jerked forward, catching him off-guard, jamming the webbing of her damaged hand into his throat. He fell back and she was on her feet again, slamming open the door and running back into the hall. She turned and scrambled up a pile of crates to a screened window, her hands leaving red prints on everything she touched.
Then he was behind her, pushing her face roughly into the large squares of wire mesh. She could feel the chequerboard pattern etching into her soft skin. Getting her feet beneath her, she pushed back against a crate launching them both backwards through the air. She could feel something breaking beneath her, something in the man’s body, as they slammed into the floor. But he simply groaned and said, ‘Darling.’
Across the hall there was the open door to a dingy bathroom. She crawled up off the man and scrambled through the door on her hands and knees, locking it behind her. She stood up. The bathroom was brightly lit by six huge incandescent bulbs mounted in the ceiling. Judging from the heat they gave off she imagined they had been burning for some time. Blood like red greasepaint smeared the fixtures. On the other side of the door a high-pitched man’s voice — imitating a woman — began chanting her name.
She screamed back at him, ‘What did I do? I’m a nice person!’ Then she laughed huskily, the laughter bringing bile up her raw throat.
A knife blade slipped through a crack in the door panel, moving back and forth first in a sawing motion, then a chiselling one. She grabbed a piece of broken pipe off the floor and started swinging at the blade, finally snapping it off. She released a strained whoop of victory. ‘What kind of lover would you be?’ she screamed through the door.
‘I loved you!’ the man shouted on the other side.
Jane collapsed into bleating laughter. The loud music faded from her head, exhausting her. ‘No one can make love to me,’ she said, finally, quietly. ‘I am too afraid of all these sharp edges.’
A thundering on the other side of the door, and then the door disintegrated in rage around her. Clouds of dust floated in brilliant crimson light.
Maxwell saw himself in the bathroom’s mirrored, bloodstained wall. Jane’s face floated at his knees, gazing up at his reflection in a way which resembled longing, but which he knew might be any emotion at all. He realized, now, that he could never know what Jane really felt about anything. With a scream he plunged the blade into his own belly. He looked down at what he had done to himself, examining the knife handle curiously, as if it were his umbilical cord suddenly reappeared after all these years.
He sank to his knees behind her, touching her torn shoulder with one hand.
‘I am too afraid,’ she said.
‘We’re all afraid,’ he said.
‘Am I going to die now?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he replied, gazing down at the blood seeping from his belly. She did not move away. He would always be thankful for that, as he closed his eyes, and in his long dream carried her back upstairs and into his bed.
Steve Rasnic Tem is the award-winning author of ‘The Rains’, published in the previous volume of Dark Terrors. His tales have appeared in numerous major horror anthologies, including The Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Forbidden Acts and MetaHorror. More recently his work has been published in Darkside, Palace Corbie, A Nightmare Dozen, and he has seven pieces in the anthology 365 Scary Stories. The inspiration for ‘Sharp Edges’ is succinct: ‘It came out of my love, and admiration for, the films of Dario Argento,’ says the author. ‘It was written under the influence of a driving Goblin soundtrack.’
This Is Your Life
(Repressed Memory Remix)
PAT CADIGAN
By the time she was on the flight back to Massachusetts, Renata had grown weary of condolences. You’re forty years old, your father dies. If you haven’t been close to him for most of your life, you’re not going to suddenly discover a deep well of emotion connected to him.
Of course, she had to remind herself, it wasn’t that way with a lot of people. A good many of her co-workers, for example, would not have had to fly to get home for a family funeral, and they’d have been pretty torn up about it. But that was how you felt when you lost someone who had been one of the mainstays of your life.
Her friend Vinnie had been nonplussed to know that she didn’t consider her father one of the mainstays of her own life. Brought up in a large extended Italian family, Vincenza Maria Fanucci was a curious mix of highly independent, uncompromising professional and Old World filial piety. Vinnie regarded her own father as a big kid ensconced in the body of a flawed minor deity who permeated, even now, the lives of his five children with his paternal. oh, hell, Renata didn’t even know what to call it. Paternal existence. Paternal paternity. Daddyish-ness. Staring down unseeing at the inflight magazine in her lap, Renata thought that she probably knew more of the substance of Vinnie’s father than she ever had of her own.
It wasn’t that her father hadn’t loved her, or that he had rejected her. She could remember times when she was little when her father had taken her to the movies or to the circus, or even just out to the playground on Saturday. Just her alone — in those days, her brother Jules had been only a baby. Her father had dutifully pushed her on the swings, spun the merry-go-round for her till she had got dizzy almost to the point of nausea, caught her at the bottom of the slide.
No, not just dutifully. That was unfair. He had been pleasant. She had even believed that he’d been having fun, but no child could believe that anyone wouldn’t have fun in a playground. Any more than, she supposed, any child — any very young child — could believe that she wasn’t the only thing of any real importance in her parents’ world.
Eventually, you’d know better. By then, however, you had usually achieved adolescence and if you gave that sort of thing any thought at all, it was probably more with satisfaction than anything else, maybe a fleeting sense of relief as you left the house to go meet friends. As Renata had always understood it, this was called flying the nest. Except some people worked out some kind of compromise, where they left but acceded to a kind of placeholder that marked a bit of territory that they would always belong to, rather than vice versa.