Yet somehow you will make your way to the stairs. The broad front staircase with the dark-cranberry carpeting, worn in the center from years of footsteps predating your own. Like a sleepwalker you grip the banister, to steady your climb.
Is it guilt drawing you upstairs? A sick, excited sense of what you will discover? What it is your duty, as my wife, to discover?
You will be smiling, a small fixed smile. Your eyes opened wide yet glassy as if unseeing. And your heart rapidly beating as the wings of a trapped bird.
If you faint… Must not faint! Blood is draining from your brain, almost you can feel darkness encroaching at the edges of your vision; and your vision is narrowing, like a tunnel.
At the top of the stairs you pause, to clear your head. Except you can’t seem to clear your head. Here, the smell is very strong. A smell confused with heat, shimmering waves of heat. You begin to gag, you feel nausea. Yet you can’t turn back, you must make your way to the bedroom at the end of the corridor.
Past the charming little turret-room with the bay window and cushioned window seat. The room you’d imagined might somehow have been yours, or a child’s room, but which proved to be impracticably small.
The door to the bedroom is shut. You press the flat of your hand against it feeling its heat. Even now thinking almost calmly No. I will not. I am strong enough to resist.
You dare to grasp the doorknob. Dare to open the door. Slowly.
How loud the buzzing is! A crackling sound like flame. And the rancid-rot smell, overwhelming as sound that is deafening, passing beyond your capacity to comprehend.
Something brushes against your face. Lips, eyes. You wave it away, panicked. “Daryll? Are you — here?”
For there is motion in the room. A plane of something shifting, fluid, alive and iridescent-glittering: yet not human.
In the master bedroom, too, venetian blinds have been drawn at every window. There’s the greeny undersea light. It takes you several seconds to realize that the room is covered in flies. The buzzing noise you’ve been hearing is flies. Thousands, millions? — flies covering the ceiling, the walls. And the carpet, which appears to be badly stained with something dark. And on the bed, a handsome four-poster bed that came with the house, a Victorian antique, there is a seething blanket of flies over a humanoid figure that seems to have partly melted into the bedclothes. Is this — who is this? The face, or what had been the face, is no longer recognizable. The skin has swollen to bursting like a burnt sausage and its hue is blackened and no longer does it have the texture of skin but of something pulpy, liquefied. Like the manic glittering flies that crawl over everything, this skin exudes a dark iridescence. The body has become a bloated balloon-body, fought over by masses of flies. Here and there, in crevices that had once been the mouth, the nostrils, the ears, there are writhing white patches, maggots like churning frenzied kernels of white rice. The throat of the humanoid figure seems to have been slashed. The bloodied steak knife lies close beside the figure, where it has been dropped. The figure’s arms, covered in flies, are outstretched on the bed as if quivering, about to lift in an embrace of welcome. Everywhere, dark, coagulated blood has soaked the figure’s clothing, the bedclothes, the bed, the carpet. The rot-smell is overwhelming. The carrion-smell. Yet you can’t seem to turn away. Whatever has drawn you here has not yet released you. The entire room is a crimson wound, a place of the most exquisite mystery, seething with its own inner, secret life. Your husband has not died, has not vanished but has been transmogrified into another dimension of being, observing you through a galaxy of tiny unblinking eyes: the buzzing is his voice, multiplied by millions. Flies brush against your face. Flies brush against your lips, your eyelashes. You wave them away, you step forward, to approach the figure on the bed. My valentine! My love.
Hero Time
by Andrew Klavan
Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Klavan
Art by Jason Eckhardt
Andrew Klavan is the recipient of two Edgar Allan Poe Awards for his crime novels, and two of his books have been made into feature films, including True Crime, directed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say a Word, which starred Michael Douglas. Stephen King has called Andrew Klavan “the most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich.” Mr. Klavan’s new book, Damnation Street, was released by Harcourt in 2006.
Every man, were he to tell his secret thoughts, would confess that he occasionally daydreams about rescuing a woman from danger. One autumn night, Danny Easton got his chance.
It was a Friday night, cool, clear, pleasant. He’d been out with his two best friends from the agency. They had burgers and beer and more beer and parted company around eleven. Danny decided to walk home — get some air, clear his head. He took the avenue along the western edge of the park.
He’d tramped along a few blocks beside the park wall when a girl of about seventeen crossed the avenue at the intersection ahead of him. She was pretty in a coarse kind of way and she had a nice figure. Danny slowed down a little so he could stay behind her, so he could enjoy the sway of her overcoat and the flash of her legs. That was why he was watching when she reached a gap in the wall and turned into the park.
It took Danny by surprise. The park was well lighted, but it could be dangerous at night. He wouldn’t have walked across it himself at that hour. As he watched the girl receding into the trees, he began to have a fantasy in which she was attacked by a rapist and he ran heroically to her aid.
Just then — as if his imagination had overflowed into reality — she actually was attacked. Two men scuttled out from behind some rocks. One of them grabbed the girl around the throat and dragged her off into the shadows under a cluster of plane trees. The other hunched after them into the dark.
It happened in a finger-snap and Danny’s world was suddenly all rush and heartbeat. He was over the wall. He was running tear-ass across the grass. His mind had shifted gears and was racing faster than events so that things seemed to be unfolding in slow motion. He seemed to have time to meditate on every detail.
He was screaming, “Hey! Hey! Let her go! Hey!” This was different from his fantasies. In his fantasies, he always fought the bad guys. In real life, he was hoping like crazy that his shouts would scare the bastards away. That would’ve been more than enough heroism to brag about at the office Monday morning.
As it turned out, when he reached the trees, the attackers seemed not to have heard his approach at all. They were both completely immersed in their business. One of them was holding a knife to the terrified girl’s throat while the other straddled her thrashing body, ripping open her overcoat, pushing her skirt up. They both glanced around, startled, as Danny burst onto the scene.
Still running, Danny let fly with a wild, sloppy roundhouse. It cracked the nearest attacker on the cheek and sent him stumbling to his hands and knees. The other one, the guy with the knife, opened his mouth as if he’d seen Jesus come. The girl slipped from his slackened grip and plopped awkwardly to the earth.
Danny wheeled and threw another big punch. He hit the knife-man in the side of the neck. The knife-man fell back and gagged but he held onto his knife and waved it in front of him, fending Danny off. The other attacker, meanwhile, was scrambling angrily to his feet, ready to launch himself at the man who’d hit him. Danny was a strong, healthy twenty-seven-year-old, but he was only average size and he’d never been in any kind of a physical fight before, not even in school. He suddenly realized that these guys not only could kill him, they would kill him, gladly. The first gibberings of the Little Clown of Fear began to make themselves heard in a corner of his mind.