The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 18

After the gap, I know that there’s only 52.2 seconds of video remaining before the starboard camera shuts down for good. Less than a minute, and I sit there on the floor of my hotel room, counting – one-one thousand, two-two thousand – and I don’t take my eyes off the screen.

The MBARI robotics tech is dead, the nervous man who sold me – and whoever else was buying – his black-market dub of the videotape. The story made the Channel 46 evening news last night and was second page in the Monterey Herald this morning. The coroner’s office is calling it a suicide. I don’t know what else they would call it. He was found hanging from the lowest limb of a sycamore tree, not far from the Moss Landing docks, both his wrists slashed nearly to the bone. He was wearing a necklace of Loligo squid strung on baling wire. A family member has told the press that he had a history of depression.

Twenty-three seconds to go.

Almost two miles down, Tiburon II is listing badly to starboard, and then the ROV bumps against one of the boulders and the lights stop flickering and seem to grow a little brighter. The vehicle appears to pause, as though considering its next move. The day he sold me the tape, the MBARI tech said that a part of the toolsled had wedged itself into the rubble. He told me it took the crew of the R/V Western Flyer more than two hours to maneuver the sub free. Two hours of total darkness at the bottom of the canyon, after the lights and the cameras died.

Eighteen seconds.

Sixteen.

This time it’ll be different, I think, like a child trying to wish away a beating. This time, I’ll see the trick of it, the secret interplay of light and shadow, the hows and whys of a simple optical illusion—

Twelve.

Ten.

And the first time, I thought that I was only seeing something carved into the stone or part of a broken sculpture. The gentle curve of a hip, the tapering line of a leg, the twin swellings of small breasts. A nipple the colour of granite.

Eight.

But there’s her face – and there’s no denying that it’s her face – Jacova Angevine, her face at the bottom the sea, turned up towards the surface, towards the sky and Heaven beyond the weight of all that black, black water.

Four.

I bite my lip so hard that I taste blood. It doesn’t taste so different from the ocean.

Two.

She opens her eyes, and they are not her eyes, but the eyes of some marine creature adapted to that perpetual night. The soulless eyes of an anglerfish or gulper eel, eyes like matching pools of ink, and something darts from her parted lips—

And then there’s only static, and I sit staring into the salt-and-pepper roar.

All the answers were here. Everything that you’re asking yourself . . . I offered all of it to you.

Later – an hour or only five minutes – I pressed EJECT and the cassette slid obediently from the VCR. I read the label, aloud, in case I’d read it wrong every single time before, in case the timestamp on the video might have been mistaken. But it was the same as always, the day before Jacova waited on the beach at Moss Landing for the supplicants of the Open Door of Night. The day before she led them into the sea. The day before she drowned.

VIII

I close my eyes.

And she’s here again, as though she never left.

She whispers something dirty in my ear, and her breath smells like sage and toothpaste.

The protestors are demanding that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) end its ongoing exploration of the submarine canyon immediately. The twenty-five mile long canyon, they claim, is a sacred site that is being desecrated by scientists. Jacova Angevine, former Berkeley professor and leader of the controversial Open Door of Night cult, compares the launching of the new submersible Tiburon II to the ransacking of the Egyptian pyramids by grave robbers. (San Francisco Chronicle)

I tell her that I have to go to New York, that I have to take this assignment, and she replies that maybe it’s for the best. I don’t ask her what she means; I can’t imagine that it’s important.

And she kisses me.

Later, when we’re done and I’m too exhausted to sleep, I lie awake, listening to the sea and the small, anxious sounds she makes in her dreams.

The bodies of fifty-three men and women, all of whom may have been part of a religious group known as the Open Door of Night, have been recovered following Wednesday’s drownings near Moss Landing, CA. Deputies have described the deaths as a mass suicide. The victims were all reported to be between twenty-two and thirty-six years old. Authorities fear that at least two dozen more may have died in the bizarre episode and recovery efforts continue along the coast of Monterey County. (CNN.com)

I close my eyes, and I’m in the old warehouse on Pierce Street again; Jacova’s voice thunders from the PA speakers mounted high on the walls around the cavernous room. I’m standing in the shadows all the way at the back, apart from the true believers, apart from the other reporters and photographers and camera men who have been invited here. Jacova leans into the microphone, angry and ecstatic and beautiful – terrible, I think – and that hideous carving is squatting there on its altar beside her. There are candles and smoldering incense and bouquets of dried seaweed, conch shells and dead fish, carefully arranged about the base of the statue.

“We can’t remember where it began,” she says, “where we began,” and they all seem to lean into her words like small boats pushing against a violent wind. “We can’t remember, of course we can’t remember, and they don’t want us to even try. They’re afraid, and in their fear they cling desperately to the darkness of their ignorance. They would have us do the same, and then we would never recall the garden nor the gate, would never look upon the faces of the great fathers and mothers who have returned to the deep.”

None of it seems the least bit real, not the ridiculous things that she’s saying, or all the people dressed in white, or the television crews. This scene is not even as substantial as a nightmare. It’s very hot in the warehouse, and I feel dizzy and sick and wonder if I can reach an exit before I vomit.

I close my eyes and I’m sitting in a bar in Brooklyn, watching them wade into the sea, and I’m thinking, Some son of a bitch is standing right there taping this and no one’s trying to stop them, no one’s lifting a goddamn finger.

I blink, and I’m sitting in an office in Manhattan, and the people who write my checks are asking me questions I can’t answer.

“Good god, you were fucking the woman, for Christ’s sake, and you’re sitting there telling me you had no idea whatsoever that she was planning this?”

“Come on. You had to have known something.”

“They all worshipped some sort of prehistoric fish god, that’s what I heard. No one’s going to buy that you didn’t see this coming—”

“People have a right to know. You still believe that, don’t you?”

Answers are scarce in the mass suicide of a California cult, but investigators are finding clues to the deaths by logging onto the Internet and Web sites run by the cult’s members. What they’re finding is a dark and confusing side of the Internet, a place where bizarre ideas and beliefs are exchanged and gain currency. Police said they have gathered a considerable amount of information on the background of the group, known as the Open Door of Night, but that it may be many weeks before the true nature of the group is finally understood. (CNN.com)

And my clumsy hands move uncertainly across her bare shoulders, my fingertips brushing the chaos of scar tissue there, and she smiles for me.

On my knees in an alley, my head spinning, and the night air stinks of puke and saltwater.

“Okay, so I first heard about this from a woman I interviewed who knew the family,” the man in the Radiohead T-shirt says. We’re sitting on the patio of a bar in Pacific Grove, and the sun is hot and glimmers white off the bay. His name isn’t important, and neither is the name of the bar. He’s a student from LA, writing a book about the Open Door of Night, and he got my e-mail address from someone in New York. He has bad teeth and smiles too much.

“This happened back in 76, the year before Jacova’s mother died. Her father, he’d take them down to the beach at Moss Landing two or three times every summer. He got a lot of his writing done out there. Anyway, apparently the kid was a great swimmer, like a duck to water, but her mother never let her to go very far out at that beach because there are these bad rip currents. Lots of people drown out there, surfers and shit.”

He pauses and takes a couple of swallow of beer, then wipes the sweat from his forehead.

“One day, her mother’s not watching and Jacova swims too far out and gets pulled down. By the time the lifeguards get her back to shore, she’s stopped breathing. The kid’s turning blue, but they keep up the mouth-to-mouth and CPR and she finally comes around. They get Jacova to the hospital up in Watsonville and the doctors say she’s fine, but they keep her for a few days anyhow, just for observation.”

“She drowned,” I say, staring at my own beer. I haven’t taken a single sip. Beads of condensation cling to the bottle and sparkle like diamonds.

“Technically, yeah. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart had stopped. But that’s not the fucked-up part. While she’s in Watsonville, she keeps telling her mother some crazy story about mermaids and sea monsters and demons, about these things trying to drag her down to the bottom of the sea and drown her and how it wasn’t an undertow at all. She’s terrified, convinced that they’re still after her, these monsters. Her mother wants to call in a shrink, but her father says no, fuck that, the kid’s just had a bad shock, she’ll be fine. Then, the second night she’s in the hospital, these two nurses turn up dead. A janitor found them in a closet just down the hall from Jacova’s room. And here’s the thing you’re not gonna believe, but I’ve seen the death certificates and the autopsy reports and I swear to you this is the God’s honest truth.”

Whatever’s coming next, I don’t want to hear it. I know that I don’t need to hear it. I turn my head and watch a sailboat out on the bay, bobbing about like a toy.

“They’d drowned, both of them. Their lungs were full of saltwater. Five miles from the goddamn ocean, but these two women drowned right there in a broom closet.”

“And you’re going to put this in your book?” I ask him, not taking my eyes of the bay and the little boat.

“Hell yeah,” he replies. “I am. It fucking happened, man, just like I said, and I can prove it.”

I close my eyes, shutting out the dazzling, bright day, and wish I’d never agreed to meet with him.

I close my eyes.

“Down there,” Jacova whispers, “you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”

We would be warm below the storm

In our little hideaway beneath the waves

I close my eyes. Oh, God, I’ve closed my eyes.

She wraps her strong, suntanned arms tightly around me and takes me down, down, down, like the lifeless body of a child caught in an undertow. And I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean. I would go with her, because, like a stone that has become an incarnation of mystery, she has drawn a circle around me.

DAVID MORRELL

They

DAVID MORRELL IS THE AUTHOR of First Blood, the award-winning novel in which Rambo was created. He holds a Ph.D in American literature from the Pennsylvania State University and was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa until he gave up his tenure to devote himself to a full-time writing career.

“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell has written numerous best-selling thrillers that include The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a highly rated NBC-TV mini-series), The Fifth Profession and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives).

His short stories have appeared in many of the major horror and fantasy anthologies and periodicals, including the Whispers, Shadows, Night Visions and Masters of Darkness series, as well as The Twilight Zone Magazine, The Dodd Mead Gallery of Horror, Psycho Paths, Prime Evil, Dark at Heart, MetaHorror, Revelations, 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense and Redshift.

Two of his novellas received Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association, while his non-supernatural horror novel The Totem, which reinvents the werewolf myth, was included in Horror: 100 Best Books. His Stoker Award-winning novel Creepers has been called “genre defining” because of its unusual combination of thriller and horror elements. Scavenger is his latest book.

“A lot of my fiction deals with struggling to keep one’s identity,” observes Morrell, “about the fear of walking down the wrong corridor and entering the wrong room, only to discover a dangerously different version of reality. Often, these themes are dramatised against large landscapes.

“Years ago, reading a history book about the settlement of the American West, I learned that in spring, as the ground thawed, snakes sometimes fell from the sod roofs of farmhouses, landing inside, startling the inhabitants. That image stayed with me, insisting to be used in a story. The original text didn’t specify what kind of snakes, but I knew they needed to be rattlesnakes, and I knew they’d appear at the beginning of the story, the prelude to something worse that the story’s pioneer family would encounter. But what would that further horror be?

“As the decades passed, the answer kept eluding me until a recent December when a snow storm hit the New Mexico valley where I live. Normally, I see mountains in every direction. But on that blizzard-swept evening, visibility was reduced to almost nothing. With a fireplace crackling next to me, I peered out my living-room window. As dusk made the snowfall seem thicker, I suddenly saw quick movement outside, a fleeting shadow, then another and another. At once, the movement was gone.

“Perhaps I’d only imagined it. Even so, the experience unnerved me, and at that instant, a complex chain of association inspired me to imagine the further horror that my pioneer family – and especially a brave little girl – would face.”

PAPA WAS CLEVER. In the spring, when the sod roof thawed and the snakes fell through, he hooked blankets to the ceiling and caught them. Usually, they were bull snakes, but sometimes, they were rattlers. They sounded like somebody shaking a package of seeds. Papa said they were still sleepy from hibernating, which was why he wasn’t worried about going near them. He made a sack out of each blanket and carried their squirming weight to the far edge of the pasture, where he dumped them into our creek. The snowmelt from the mountains made the water high and swift and took them away. Just to be safe, papa warned us never to go downstream past where he dumped them. Mama wanted to kill them, but papa said they were too sleepy to mean us harm and we shouldn’t kill what we didn’t need to.

The snakes dropped from the ceiling because papa dug the back of the cabin into a slope. He piled the dirt over the sod on the roof beams. It kept us cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and shielded us from the wind that shrieked through the valley during bad weather. In time, grass grew up there, but while the dirt was soft, snakes burrowed into it. We always heard them moving before they fell, so we had warning, and it wasn’t many, and it was only for a few weeks in the spring.

Papa was so clever, he made the best soap in the valley. Everybody knew how to make the soft kind. Pour water over wood ashes to dissolve the potash in them. Strain the water through a layer of straw to get rid of dirt. Add the potash water to boiling animal fat. Let the two of them cool and use the scummy stuff at the top. That was the soap. But we had an outcrop of salt on our property, and papa experimented by adding salt to the boiling water and fat. When the mixture cooled, it got hard. Papa also put sand in his soap, and everybody thought that was his secret, but they could never get their soap hard because his real secret was the salt, and he made us promise not to tell.

We had ten chickens, a horse, a cow, a sheep, a dog, and a cat. The dog was a collie. It and the cat showed up a day apart. We never knew where they came from. We planted lettuce, peas, carrots, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and squash. We had to build a solid fence around the garden to keep rabbits away. But birds kept trying to eat the seed, so papa traded his hard soap for sheets and tented them over the ground. The birds got discouraged. The rabbits that kept trying, papa shot them. He said they needed to be killed to save the garden and besides they made a good stew.

We were never hungry. Papa dug a root cellar under the cabin. It kept the carrots, potatoes, and squash through the winter. Mama made preserves of the peas and beans, using wax to seal the lids the way papa showed her. We even had an old apple tree that was there when we came, and mama made the best pies, and we stored the apples, too. All of us worked. Papa showed us what to do.

Hot summer nights, while he and mama taught us how to read from the Bible, we sometimes heard them howling in the hills. Yip, yip, yip, yip. Baying at the moon. God’s dogs, papa said. That’s what the Indians call them. Why? Judith asked. Because they’re practically invisible, papa said. Only God can see them.

What do they look like? Daniel asked. Silly, I said. If only God can see them, how can anybody know what they look like? Well, a couple of times people have seen them, papa said. They’re brown. They’ve got pointy ears and black tips on their tails.

How big are they? Judith asked, snuggling in his arms. A little bigger than Chester, papa said. Chester was our dog. They weigh about thirty pounds, papa said. They look a little like a dog, but you can tell them from a dog because they run with their tails down while a dog runs with its tail up.

Sure sounds like somebody got a good look at one, I said. Papa nodded. I saw one a long time ago, he said. Before I met your mother. I was alone at a campfire. It came out of the darkness and stared from the edge of the light. It must have smelled the rabbit I was cooking. After a while, it turned away. Just before it disappeared into the darkness, it looked over its shoulder, as if it blamed me for something.

Were you scared? Daniel asked. Time for you to go to sleep, mama said. She gave papa a look. No, papa said, I wasn’t scared.

The harvest moon was full. They howled in the hills for several hours.

The next year, the rains held off. The other farmers lost their wells and had to move on. But the drainage from the snow in the mountains kept water in our creek, enough for the garden. The aspens on the slopes had it hard, though. They got so dry, lightning sparked fires. At night, parts of the hills shimmered. Smoke drifted into the valley. Judith had trouble breathing.

At last, we had a storm. God’s mercy, mama said, watching the rain chase the smoke and put out the flames in the hills. The morning after the first hard freeze, Daniel ran into the cabin. His face was white. Papa, come quick, he said.

Our sheep lay in the middle of the pasture. Its neck was torn. Its stomach was chewed. Blood and chunks of wool lay everywhere. The other animals shivered, keeping a distance.

I saw the veins in papa’s neck pulse as he stared toward the hills. At night, we’ll fence the cow and the horse next to the cabin, he said. There’s meat on the carcass. Ruth, he told me, get the axe and the knife. Daniel and I need to butcher the sheep. Get the shears, he told mama. We’ll take the wool that’s left.

The morning after that, papa made us stay inside while he went outside to check the rest of the animals. He was gone quite awhile. Mama kept walking to the only window we had. I heard papa digging. When he came back, his face looked tight. The chickens, he said. They’re all killed. He turned toward mama. Heads and feathers. Nothing else left. Not enough meat for you even to make soup from. I buried it all. What about eggs? mama asked. No, he said.

That night, papa loaded his rifle, put on his coat, and went out to the shed beside where the horse and cow were fenced. Yip, yip, yip, yip. I stared at the ceiling and listened to them howl. But they were far away, their echo shifting from one part of the valley to another. When papa came inside the next morning, the breeze was cold. Snow dusted the ground. His eyes looked strained, but he sounded relieved. Seems they moved on, he said, putting his rifle on a shelf. We’ll trade soap for more chickens, mama told him, and gave him a cup of coffee.

By noon, it was colder. Clouds capped the mountains. Looks like an early winter, papa said. Thank God, mama said. As dry as it’s been, the mountains need moisture. The creek needs snowmelt, she said. At supper, we heard wood snapping outside, the horse whinnying. Papa dropped his fork and grabbed his rifle, which he hadn’t unloaded. Mama handed him a lantern. From the window, we watched his light jerk this way and that as papa rushed toward the corral next to the shed.

He kept running. He passed the fence. The light from the lantern got smaller until I couldn’t see it in the darkness. I listened to the wind. I flinched when I heard a shot. Then all I heard was the wind again. Snow was in the air. Mama whispered something as she stared through the window toward the night. I think she said, Please God. We waited. Ruth, get Daniel his coat and a lantern, mama told me. He needs to go out and see if papa wants help.

But Daniel didn’t need to. Look, Judith said, standing on tiptoes, pointing. Through the window, we saw a speck of light. It got bigger, moving with the wind and papa’s arm. Cold filled the room as he came in. Judith coughed. Papa locked the door and set down the lantern. Something scared the horse so bad it broke through the fence and tried to run off, he said. Tried? Daniel asked. Papa looked toward the window. Whatever scared the horse took it down. Didn’t get much to eat, though. When I shot, they ran into the dark.

They? I asked. No need to alarm the children, mama told him. But everybody has to know so you can all be careful, papa said. We’re already careful, mama said. Need to be even more, papa said. They, papa? I asked. I think I saw five, he said. Judith coughed. Five of what? Daniel asked. God’s dogs? Did they run with their tails down? Papa nodded again. But now they’re the Devil’s dogs, he said. I think I hit one. I found a trail of blood, but maybe it was the horse’s blood dripping from their mouths.

Nobody moved. Judith, get the axe and the knife, papa told me. Daniel and I need to butcher the horse before they come back. Butcher? Judith said. We’re going to eat horse meat? Daniel asked. It’s meat, papa said. When winter comes this early, we need all the food we can find.

With the dark around us, mama and I shivered and held lanterns that swung in the wind while papa and Daniel cut up the horse. Papa told us to keep staring toward the night, to watch in case they came back. He kept his rifle protected in a blanket beside him. Only Judith didn’t work. She shivered too much to hold a lantern in the blowing snow.

Look at the paw prints in the snow, Daniel said. I know, papa said. Not natural. I took my gaze away from the darkness and frowned at the prints. I’d never seen anything like them. They were like huge blobs of melted wax, none of them the same size, all big and grotesque and misshapen. Ruth, keep watching the night, papa warned me.

We put big chunks of horsemeat in burlap bags and carried them to the storage pit papa had dug next to the cabin. That’s where the meat from the sheep was. Papa set planks over the hole and put rocks on them. The cold will freeze the meat all winter, he said. At least, we won’t starve. But what about the cow? mama asked. We’ll put her in the shed at night, papa said.

In the cabin, we found Judith coughing in a chair by the fire. Even though the logs roared, she couldn’t get warm. Her face was red. Has anybody seen Chester? she asked. I thought a moment. I hadn’t seen the dog since the morning. And where’s the cat? Judith asked. I looked at the others, who frowned. Did they smell what was out there and run off? mama asked. They’d need to be awfully scared to do that, Daniel said. Maybe they didn’t run off, I thought.

Yip, yip, yip, yip. We turned toward snow blowing at the window and listened to the howls. They were close. I’ll make coffee and warm us up, mama said. Yip, yip, yip. The howls sounded closer. Papa stopped unbuttoning his coat. I’d better stay with the cow in the shed.

Dawn was only a few hours away. The morning light was grey from the clouds and the blowing snow. As Judith coughed, I peered through the frosted window and saw papa step from the shed, which was large enough to hold him, the cow, and bales of alfalfa stacked at one end. He looked pale. Stiff. His shoulders were hunched. It was the first time I thought of him as old. He peered around, ready with his rifle. Then he motioned for me to come out and start my chores and milk the cow.

The day was busy as we raced against the night. Daniel went with papa to the woods at the edge of the valley, rigged ropes to logs, and dragged them back for more firewood. They had the rifle. I washed clothes and helped make mutton stew while mama used snow water for a sponge bath to try to lower Judith’s fever.

The only smoke in the valley is from our chimney, papa said when he and Daniel got back. Through the window, I saw it snowing again, flakes hitting the pane. Mama turned from wiping Judith’s brow. I guess more people moved on than we thought, she said. Maybe that’s why those things are coming here. After the drought and the fires, there’s no game in the mountains. And all the other farms are deserted, papa said. There’s no other livestock in the valley.

After supper, Daniel put on his coat. He took the rifle off the shelf. You spent the last two nights in the shed, papa. Tonight, it’s my turn.

Yip, yip, yip, yip. In the dark, I listened to them. Judith kept coughing. Mama came in with tea from bark that papa said would lower her fever. Maybe we should have moved on, I heard mama say to herself.

Just before dawn, I jerked awake when I heard a shot.

I’m okay! Daniel yelled from the shed. The moon came out! I saw them coming! Five like you said! One was limping! Probably the one you shot, papa! I put a bullet into it! The others ran off!

In the morning, we all dressed warm, except for Judith, and went out to see what Daniel shot. The sky was cold blue. The sun glinted off the snow, making me squint. A breeze numbed my cheeks. We let the cow into the pen next to the shed and fed her. Then we walked a hundred yards, following more blobby, mis-shaped paw prints. We came to something in the snow. Fine shot, papa said. At night, with no sleep, at this distance. Daniel looked pleased. I had the moon to help me, but thank you, papa, he said.

The snow was red. The thing was brown with pointy ears and a black tip on its tail, just like papa described. Its sharp teeth were bared, as if it died snarling. The cold wind blew snow across the ground. Hard to tell, Daniel said, but that looks like a bullet wound in its right front leg. Probably my shot, papa said. And that’s your shot through its chest. That’s what brought it down.

The reason it was hard to tell is that the animal had been chewed on. Its stomach was gnawed open. Its left flank was raw. Damned things ate one of their own, papa said. That’s how hungry they are, mama said. I didn’t know they got this big, papa said. It was five feet from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail. Must have bred with something else.

But the mutilation isn’t just from being eaten, Daniel said. What happened to its paws, its ears, and the snout? From the fires in the mountains, papa said. I couldn’t make myself look at it any longer. Its paws had awful scars as if a fire had melted the pads. Its fur was singed. Its ears had ragged edges. Its snout was deformed from having been burned. This one got trapped up there in the flames, papa said.

Yip, yip, yip.

We turned toward the nearby hills. In daylight? papa asked. They’re howling in daylight? I never heard of that. Yip, yip, yip. They’re watching us, Daniel said. Yes, papa said. Ruth, get the knife so we can skin what’s left of it, he told me. Even if it’s scarred, we can use the pelt. There’s no point in wasting anything, including this. Plus, I want them to see what we do to them. I want to put the fear of God into them. Mama said, You talk as if they’re smart and can think. Oh, they’re smart, all right, papa said. When I was a kid, a trapper told me these things hunt in packs better than wolves.

That night, as Judith coughed, I used the knife to scrape the last of the meat from the pelt. Then I stretched it on a frame, the way papa taught me, and put it just close enough to the fire so it would dry without shrinking. Mama gave Judith more of the bark tea. Daniel sharpened the knife and the axe. As their metal scraped on the stone, I went to the window and looked toward the lamplight in the shed, where papa guarded the cow.

Judith died in the night. She kept coughing, and her chest heaved, and she couldn’t catch her breath. Her cheeks were scarlet, but she kept fighting to breathe. Then her lips got blue, and her face, and after two hours, she died. Mama held her, sobbing. Daniel kept looking at the floor. I stood at the window and stared at the dark of the shed.

A shadow ran between the cabin and the shed. Another shadow, dark against the snow on the ground. The howls were very close. I heard a shot, but mama didn’t react. She just kept sobbing. I’m all right! Papa yelled. They’re running away! But just in case, don’t open the door!

Then the night was silent, except for a rising wind and mama’s sobbing. We need to tell papa, I said. When it’s light, Daniel said. It won’t help Judith if we bring him in now. Mama started murmuring, In the valley of the shadow. I went over and took her hand. I’m sorry, mama, I said. Her eyes were red. Fear no evil, she murmured, holding Judith.

When papa came in at dawn, he stopped in the doorway and knew immediately what had happened. His face looked heavy. He closed the door and crossed the room. He knelt in front of mama, who was still holding Judith. Lord, give us strength, he said. Through the window, I saw more tracks in the snow. Papa sobbed. I wanted him to know I was brave. I’ll do my chores, papa, I said. I’ll take care of the cow.

My coat barely kept me warm as I milked the cow, then fed her in the pen. I took a pitchfork to the manure in the shed, throwing it in a pile at the side of the pen. Four brown specks watched from the rim of a hill.

Mama dressed Judith in her best clothes, her “church clothes”, mama called them, although we hadn’t see a church in two years. Papa set Judith on the kitchen table. We took turns reading from the Bible. About Job and Lazarus and Jesus on Easter morning. Except mama. She sobbed and couldn’t bring herself to read. Then papa and Daniel put on their coats and went to the shed, where they got the shovel and the pickaxe. They spent the rest of the day digging. I was reminded of when they buried my other brother and sister when we lived in another valley. This grave was in a nice spot near the apple tree. Judith would like that. Judith loved apples. The ground was frozen hard, and Daniel and papa were soaked with sweat when they came back to the cabin.

Daniel spent the night in the shed with the cow. Papa and I stayed up with mama as she held Judith’s hand. We prayed more. Eternal life, papa said. I expected to hear them howling, but there wasn’t any sound, not even a wind. Daniel came in at dawn. I’ve never seen him look so exhausted. I went out and took care of the cow.

Then we said our last prayers. Judith’s face was grey now. She seemed a little swollen. Papa carried her outside into the cold. The rest of us followed. Mama sobbed as Daniel and I guided her. When papa set Judith into the ground, mama murmured, Not even a coffin. Don’t have the wood, papa said. She’ll be so cold, mama said.

Papa and Daniel took turns shoveling dirt. Mama couldn’t bear to look. I took her back to the cabin. Papa carried stones from a fence he was making and put them on the grave. Daniel went to the shed. I heard hammering, and Daniel came out with two branches nailed to form a cross. Papa pounded it into the ground.

Papa stayed in the shed that night. At dawn, we heard him wailing. Daniel and I ran to the window. No! papa screamed. He charged toward the apple tree. No! he kept screaming. Daniel and I raced out to see what was wrong. Dirt was scattered over the snow. Rocks were shoved aside. The grave was empty. Papa’s voice broke. Fell asleep! No! Didn’t mean to fall asleep!

Eternal life, mama said. I didn’t hear her come up behind us. She wasn’t wearing boots or a coat. Judith has risen, she said. A swath in the snow went across a field and into the woods. Monstrous paw prints were on each side. The sons of bitches dragged her that way, papa said. I never heard him speak that way before. Daniel hurried to the cabin to put on his coat. He and papa followed the tracks. Risen, mama said. I helped her back to the cabin. From the window, I saw papa and Daniel disappear into the woods.

It snowed again. I stood at the window, straining to see. I leaned against the wall and must have dozed. The gust woke me. The door was open. Snow blew in. Papa! I cried. Daniel! Thank God, you’re back! You had me so worried! But no one came in. The wind blew more snow. Mama? I swung toward the chair by the fire. The chair was empty. Mama! I rushed to the open door and saw footprints going away. I grabbed my coat and hurried outside. The snow filled the footprints. I tugged the door shut. The quickly vanishing footprints led me toward the apple tree. They went past the apple tree. Then I couldn’t see them any longer in the gusting snow. Mama! I screamed. But the wind shoved the word back into my mouth.

The snow swirled thicker. The air got darker. I stumbled forward but didn’t know which direction to take. Then I realised that I didn’t know how to go back even if I found her. I couldn’t see the cabin. My tracks were almost full. I followed them as best I could. The wind seemed to push me to the ground. I thought I saw a low moving shadow. I struggled to my feet and ran, only to bang into the corral near the shed. But I knew where I was now and stumbled forward, whispering Thank God when I bumped into the cabin. Inside, I sank to the ground before the fire.

I woke in the dark and heard them. I heard the cow panicking. Then the only sound was the wind. In the morning, there was two feet of snow. It took me a long time to stamp through it to get to the shed. Somehow they got the latch open. The cow was all over the inside. Mostly blood, hide, and bones. Hooves. The head. Its eyes were wide with shock. I saw where the tracks went off in the snow in single file. The first one made it easier for the second, and the second made it easier for the third and fourth. Oh, they’re smart, all right, papa had said.

They’ll eat mama next, I thought. They’re probably already eaten papa and Daniel. When there’s nothing else left in the valley, they’ll come for me? For a moment, I couldn’t move. What am I going to do? I thought. What would papa do? Think like papa. I don’t need to go out, I realised. I could stack wood in the cabin. I could bring meat from the storage pit. I had carrots, squash, potatoes, and apples in the root cellar. I could stay inside all winter. I’d need water, but if I was careful and I opened the door real quick and scooped a pail of snow, I could close the door before they got me.

I dug my way down through the snow to the boards across the storage pit. Unlike the rocks on Judith’s grave, the ones on the boards were still there, maybe because they were heavier. I pried two parcels of horsemeat from the frozen pile. The rest was stuck together so solid, I couldn’t get at the lamb meat under it. I stacked the parcels in a corner of the cabin. I planned to stuff myself on it before it rotted. I carried tools from the shed – the shovel, the pickaxe, the hammer, and the pitchfork. I spent the day bringing in wood. I kept looking over my shoulder as I split logs. My arms ached. Too soon, it was dark. I went in, cut away a slice of thawing meat, and cooked it over the fire. It was tough and bitter, but I didn’t care. I ate it in a frenzy and fell asleep.

In the night, I needed to relieve myself. I used a pail in a corner. In the morning, the smell was so bad that I wanted to carry the pail outside and dump it. But it stormed in the night, and now there was three feet of snow. I was only a foot taller. Besides, I knew it wasn’t safe to go out. There were animal tracks in the snow. Across from the cabin, eyes glared from the shed’s open door. I was forced to relieve myself in the pail again, and the stench got worse. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it for a whole winter.

What would papa do? I thought. I got the pickaxe, went to a corner, and chopped the dirt floor. I got the shovel and scooped out the dirt. I kept chopping and scooping. My arms ached worse. But eventually I had a hole deep enough. I dumped the pail of waste into it, covered the waste with dirt, and still had plenty of space to dump more.

I heard scratching on the other side of the wall. They must have heard me digging and burrowed down through the snow to the bottom of the wall. I put my ear against the logs. I heard them out there trying to dig under. But clever papa had built the wall with two logs below ground to guard against flooding. I listened to them working to claw through the frozen ground. But it was too deep. They clawed and clawed, and at last I no longer heard them.

Again it snowed. In the morning, the drifts were close to the window sill. Deformed paws scraped glass. One of the things stared through the window, its dark eyes, scarred ears, and teeth-bared, misshaped snout making me think of the devil. In a rush, I closed the inside shutter. I was frightened and sickened, yes, but I also closed the shutter because the thing was so smart I didn’t want it to see what I was doing. I went to the shelf where papa kept the box of poison he used on prairie dogs. We need to kill them so our animals don’t break a leg in one of their holes, he said. I cut off a slab of horse meat, sliced it open, filled the cavity with poison, and squeezed the meat together. As I went toward the door, I heard wood creaking above me. I saw that the beams were bent from the weight of the snow and dirt.

Need to be quick, I thought. While the thing scratched at the window, I went over to the door. I lifted the latch as quiet as could be. Then I said a prayer, jerked the door open, hurled the meat over the top of the snow, and slammed the door shut. Or tried to. Some of the snow fell, blocking the door. Panicking, I scooped frantically at the snow. I heard one of them straining to run through the drifts toward the open door. My heart beat so fast, I thought I’d be sick as I scooped the rest of the snow away and slammed the door. Something banged against the top and growled.

I trembled. Then I opened the shutter. Sunlight off snow almost blinded me as I saw three of them fighting over the meat. They had burn scars all over them. One didn’t have a tail. Another didn’t have lips on the left side of its jaw. The fourth, the biggest, was the most deformed of them all. Its scars made it seem it had huge warts all over its snout. It glared from the door to the shed. When it snarled, the others stopped fighting and turned to it. With another snarl, it moved forward, its mashed paws finding purchase in the snow. It sniffed the meat and growled for the others to leave the meat alone. Two stepped back. But the one without a tail took its chance, bit into the slab, and ran off. At a distance, it gobbled the meat and sat contentedly. In a while, it squirmed. In a while longer, it writhed, vomited blood, and died. This took a long time.

Gathering clouds brought darkness swiftly. As snowy wind shrieked past the cabin, I cooked horsemeat, but not before I used papa’s soap to wash my hands. Make yourself clean, he often said. It’s the difference between us and animals. I pushed the blanket from the wall at the back of the cabin and went down the sloped floor to the root cellar, from where I brought back potatoes and carrots. I set them on a clean spot next to the fire. I listened to the shriek of the wind and the creak of the roof beams.

After a while, I had an idea. I filled a lantern with coal oil and lit it. Certain that the storm was too fierce for the things to be prowling out there, I went to the door. I had a moment’s doubt. Then I knew that papa would be proud of me for being so clever. Breathing quickly, I put on my coat, opened the door, closed it behind me, and crawled up through the snow to the top of the drift. The wind was so cold, it made my face feel burned. Shielding the lantern, I squirmed through the gusts. When I saw the dark outline of the shed, I hurled the lantern through the front door and raced toward the cabin. Glass broke. Behind me, flames whooshed as I slid down the trough I had made. I fumbled at the latch, shoved the door open, kicked fallen snow away, and slammed the door.

Outside, one of them wailed. So numb I didn’t feel the cabin’s warmth, I ran to the shutter, opened it, and saw the fiery shed. A thing raced from the door, its fur ablaze. Yelping in agony, it fled into the darkness. The flames on it got smaller in the distance as it raced away. The alfalfa in the shed ignited. The fire grew larger, the shed’s walls and roof collapsing, sparks erupting. Soon, the wind and the snow killed the blaze. I closed the shutter and went to the fireplace, where I discovered the potatoes and carrots were getting soft. The horsemeat tasted better as I got used to it. I dozed on a blanket near the hearth. Sometimes, the creak of the roof beams wakened me.

Then silence wakened me. I raised my head and saw cracks of sunlight through the boards of the shutter. It was the first quiet morning in several days. I went to the pit in the corner, relieved myself, shoveled dirt down, and washed my hands with papa’s soap. I nibbled on a piece of leftover potato, the skin crusty, the silence encouraging me that the fire had killed the remaining three. I went to the shutter, swung it open, and one of them charged through the window. The crash of glass, the rage in its eyes made me scream and stumble away, knocking against the table. The force of its attack carried it two-thirds through the window. Spit flying, it dangled, thrusting with its paws to get all the way through, and suddenly yelped, blood spurting, a shard of glass in its stomach holding it in place.

It squirmed, determined to reach me, the hate on its face giving it strength. Its snout had fresh blisters and burns. I grabbed the pitchfork. As the thing broke free from the window, landing on the floor, I charged with the pitchfork. A tine caught its throat. But the thing was as big as I was. Wrenching free, it snarled and lunged. I stabbed with the pitchfork, piercing one of its eyes. Twisting away, leaving a trail of blood, it braced itself, leapt, and caught the pitchfork straight in its chest. The force against the pitchfork’s handle knocked me down. The handle twisted this way and that as the thing snarled and writhed and bled.

A noise brought me to my feet. I staggered and barely reached the shutter in time to slam it shut before something crashed against it, almost breaking the shutter’s hinges. The thing out there growled like the devil’s creature it was. Hearing a scrape behind me, I turned and saw the thing on the floor struggling to stand despite the pitchfork in it. I stepped back as it tried to crawl. Its eyes were red with fury, dimming, going blank. I vomited.

For a time, I didn’t move. Then I went to the water pail, where I rinsed my mouth, spat into the fireplace, and drank. The water soothed my throat which was raw from screaming. Four dead, I thought. But I knew the last one was the smartest, and I decided it didn’t want me only for food now. I’d killed its companions. I’d destroyed its den. It hated me.

Without shelter, it’ll freeze out there, I thought. I seemed to hear papa say, No. It’ll dig a cave in the snow.

But if I don’t go out again, it’ll need to move somewhere else to find food, I thought. Again, I heard papa say, The stench of the decaying carcass will poison you. You’ll need to open the shutter to breathe. It’ll charge in.

No, I told papa. I can stand anything. The shutter stays closed.

I cooked more horsemeat. It tasted delicious. As shadows gathered beyond the cracks in the shutter, I decided that the thing on the floor was truly dead. I lit the lantern on the table, edged toward the carcass, and tugged the pitchfork from its chest.

The roof creaked. Be clever, I heard papa say. I pushed away the rug on the wall and hurried to take the axe and the knife down the ramp to the root cellar. I carried down a pail of water. I rushed back to get the lamp and the rest of the tools, but I never got that far. With a massive crack, the roof collapsed. The crush of dirt and snow sent me rolling down the ramp. My head struck something hard.

For a moment, colors swirled inside my mind. Then my vision cleared, and I saw that the top of the ramp was almost entirely blocked by wood, dirt, and snow. Dust made me cough, but as it settled, I saw a gap behind which flames rose. The collapsed roof had knocked the lamp over. The table was on fire.

The flames will suck the air from the cellar, I thought. I climbed to the top. Because the shovel was still in the cabin, I had to use my hands to push dirt into the gap. As the space got small, I saw the flames grow brighter. Smoke filled the opening. Frantic, I pushed dirt until the space was closed. Surrounded by darkness, I retreated to the bottom, sat, and tried to calm myself. My breathing echoed. I shivered.

Hunger woke me. I had no way of telling how long I’d slept. I was slumped against potatoes. My back ached. The cellar, which was about five feet wide and high had wood across the top to keep earth from falling. It smelled damp and like rotted leaves. Darkness continued to surround me. My hunger insisted. Papa used to say that raw carrots were bad for digestion. But it was either them or raw potatoes or squash, so after waiting as long as I could, I felt for a carrot and bit into it, its hardness making my teeth hurt. I didn’t choose the apples because they felt soft and wormy. I was afraid they would give me the runs. Continuing to shiver, I chewed until the piece of carrot was mush in my mouth. Only then did I swallow. I did that for a long time, hoping I wouldn’t get sick.

I tried to count the passing seconds, but my mind drifted in the stale air. For all I knew, it was now day outside. I needed to relieve myself but forced myself to wait. Finally, I crawled up the ramp. About to dig through the blockade of dirt and snow, I heard noises beyond it. Where the gap had been, dirt began to shift. Stomach tightening, I backed away.

At once, I saw a speck of daylight. A snout poked through, clustered with whorls and outcrops of scars and blisters. The thing growled. As the light widened and the head thrust into view, its ears merely nubs, I grabbed a potato, hurling it as hard as I could. It thudded off the creature’s snout. I threw a second potato and heard a snarl. The creature clawed to widen the hole, shoving its neck through as I grabbed the pail of water and threw its contents. Water splashed over the raging head but made no difference. Its eyes burned. I banged the empty pail against the head, but the creature was halfway through. The handle on the pail broke. The creature’s hind legs were almost free. I raised the axe but didn’t have room to swing, so I jabbed, but the thing kept coming, and abruptly it wailed.

It snapped its head to the side, staring wildly behind it. Its wail became a savage yelp as it whirled and bit at something. The fierce motion widened the hole, allowing it to turn and bite harder. Daylight blazed in. I heard a noise like someone shaking a package of seeds. As the creature spun, the snake came into view, flopping like a whip, rattling, its fangs buried in the creature’s haunch. The snake must have fallen when the roof collapsed. The heat of the fire wakened it. It kept its fangs sunk in as the creature whirled and yelped. The poison made the creature falter. Breathing heavily, it steadied itself, as if it knew it was dying and had to concentrate on unfinished business. It took a step toward me. It opened its mouth to bite. I shoved the axe handle between its jaws and leaned forward, thrusting the handle down its throat.

Choking, the creature thrashed. I struggled with the axe, pressing harder, feeling vibrations through the handle. Gagging, the thing frothed, wavered, slumped, trembled, and after a while lay still. Only then did the snake stop rattling. It released its fangs and dropped to the ground. Papa said, Its poison sacks are empty. For a while, it can’t hurt you. But I didn’t believe papa. As the snake slithered down the ramp, I pressed against the wall, trying to keep a distance. The snake crawled over the pile of squash and disappeared behind it.

I edged around the carcass, fearing that any moment it would spring to life. The cold air smelled sweet. Wary of other snakes, I stood among the dirt and snow and surveyed the wreckage. Clouds hovered. Knowing I needed shelter before the next storm, I saw that beams had fallen on an angle in front of the fireplace, forming a kind of lean-to. I found the pelt that papa had cut from the creature he and Daniel shot. I secured the pelt over a hole between beams. I tugged down the scorched blanket from the entrance to the root cellar and hooked it over another hole between beams. I found other blankets and did more of the same.

But there were still holes, and the blankets wouldn’t keep moisture out, so I clenched my teeth, went into the root cellar, found the knife, and skinned the creature. Damn you, I said all the time I cut away its pelt. I stuck it over other holes between beams. Then I skinned the carcass of the thing that had come through the window, and I crammed that pelt between beams. In time, I would look for the creature I had poisoned and use its pelt, but snow was falling, and I had to complete my shelter. A few embers glowed under charred wood in the fireplace. I layered kindling and logs and blew on the embers. I was almost out of breath before the kindling sparked and the logs began to burn.

As the snow thickened, I went down to the root cellar and carried as many potatoes and carrots as I could, all the time keeping a wary eye on the pile of squash. While a potato cooked next to the fire, I bit a chunk from a carrot. Papa was wrong that uncooked carrots would make me sick. Maybe papa was wrong about a lot of things. Darkness settled, but despite the falling snow, my shelter felt secure. Tomorrow, I planned to make it stronger. I chewed another carrot and watched the potato sizzle. I thought about papa, about the many valleys in which we lived and how he was never satisfied and we always had to move past every town. I thought of the brother and sister who were buried in one of those valleys. I thought about the bark tea papa gave Judith for her fever. Papa always told us how clever he was, but maybe he didn’t know as much as he thought about bark, and it made her sicker. Maybe papa wasn’t so clever when he and Daniel chased after the things that took Judith. Maybe he should have kept control and stayed home and mama wouldn’t be dead and he and Daniel wouldn’t be dead.

I think about that a lot. I sit in this tiny room and listen to motor cars rattling by outside. Eighty-eight years is a long time to remember back. You ask me what it was like living in the valley when I was twelve. The old days as you call them. For me, the young days, although I was never really young. Streets and houses and schools and churches are now where our farm was, where everyone died, where I spent the winter eating carrots, potatoes, and horsemeat. But never the squash. I never went near the squash. Damned stupid papa.

F. GWYNPLAINE MACINTYRE

The Clockwork Horror

F. GWYNPLAINE MACINTYRE IS A NATIVE of Perthshire, Scotland, but spent his formative years in the Outback as one of the thousands of “child migrants” who were expatriated from post-war Britain to rural Australia. He now divides his time between homes in New York City and in Gwynedd, North Wales.

Macintyre is the author of several novels (some of them published under pseudonyms) and dozens of science fiction, horror and mystery stories published in British and American periodicals. An artist as well as an author, he has illustrated number of his own works as well as some of Ron Goulart’s stories in Analog magazine.

He is currently working on the illustrations for his next science fiction novel, which has the intriguing title The Lesbian Man.

Although “The Clockwork Horror” is fiction, in writing the story Macintyre made a genuine addition to the known facts of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, as he reveals: “In 1836, while editing the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia, Poe published an essay titled ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’, describing his recent encounter with an Automaton – an ostensible mechanical man – that was capable of playing chess and even defeating most challengers.

“In his essay, Poe used observation and deduction to build a convincing case that the Automaton was a hoax, containing a human chess-player. Oddly, Poe’s essay does not reveal precisely when and where he witnessed the performance of Maelzel’s Automaton. His 1836 essay merely states that the machine was exhibited in Richmond ‘a few weeks ago’, giving neither a precise date nor an address for the exhibition.

“When I started the research for this story, I was astounded to discover that no existing biography of Edgar Allan Poe gave a date or a location for Poe’s encounter with Maelzel’s Automaton. Determined to solve this mystery, I went to Virginia in search of further clues. In the archives of the Richmond Enquirer – a newspaper of the 1830s, published twice-weekly – I discovered several contemporary references to the activities of ‘Edgar Poe’, denizen of Richmond.

“I also tracked down advertisements for Maelzel’s touring exhibition, verifying that the Chess-Player was exhibited in Richmond’s city museum from December 15th, 1835 through January 2nd, 1836. Somewhere within those eighteen days, the real Edgar Allan Poe encountered the authentic (fake) Automaton . . . although presumably not with the same results described in the story!”

JANUARY 6TH, 1836

RICHMOND! Unholy citadel, which both condemns me and exalts me! Grotesque city of the perverse, where black men’s bodies are sold at auction in Capitol Square, and white men’s souls are flung into the gutter. I am fettered to this Richmond: its destiny is enchained with my own, and both our fates are inescapable.

As my name opens no doors and purchases no ease, I render it for your inspection. I am Edgar A. Poe, latterly a native of Richmond, now returned once more within this city’s gates. True! I was not born here, and I have been known to call myself a Bostonian. Yet it is Richmond, the resplendent carbuncle on Virginia’s hindquarters, that holds the mortgage to my flesh. The city of Richmond holds the pawnbroker’s ticket upon which I have pledged my immortal soul . . . and I no longer dare to hope that this pledge may be redeemed.

My mother was English by birth, and my father a Baltimore scoundrel: Richmond held no claim upon the one nor the other. Still, it was Richmond where my parents conjoined in holy wedlock, although my father clearly saw fit not to honour the nuptial vows. My sainted mother was the ingenue Elizabeth Arnold. My alleged father was David Poe: son of the war hero General Poe who was quartermaster to Lafayette in the late War of Independence. Improvident actors, my mother and father were “starring” respectively as the heroine Sophia Woodbine and the scapegrace Villars in “The Blind Bargain” at the Haymarket Theatre, here in Richmond. I will show you their notices, if you like. The Easter weekend is always a slow season for actors, so between engagements – on Easter Monday, the seventh of April, 1806 – my father and mother got married in a Clay Street lodging-house.

My parents found no outlet for their thespian endeavours in Richmond, so they soon joined Alexander Placide’s touring company in Boston, where I had the dubious privilege to be born. My actress mother was renowned for her talent and beauty. My father, aggrieved that his own theatrick talents were vastily inferior, abandoned us in the spring of 1811, during a repertory season in Philadelphia. Finding no compassion there, my mother returned with me to Virginia’s capital, where she briefly won acclaim at the Richmond Theatre on Shockoe Hill at East Broad Street . . . in a tragedian role as Angela in “The Castle Spectre”, dancing a hornpipe while disguised as a boy in “The Curfew”, and displaying her musical skills as the ingenue Letitia Hardy in “The Belle’s Stratagem”.

Richmond murdered my mother. As she became too ill to travel with the departing troupe of actors, my mother Elizabeth Poe gained some meagre employment in the old Indian Queen tavern, at the northwest corner of Ninth and Grace Streets, engaged as the assistant to a Scots-born milliner. It was in this tavern’s cellar that my mother squandered her eyesight, stitching together the piecework of ladies’ shovel-bonnets by candelight. When I was scantly two years old – on Sunday morning, the eighth of December 1811 – my half-blind mother was carried off by an infectious fever, in the milliner’s room.

Yet this dark city was not finished with me. My godparents, John and Frances Allan, took me into their home in Richmond, in rooms at Thirteenth and East Main Streets, abovestairs from the counting-house of my foster father’s business: the merchant firm Ellis & Allan. My mother, meantime, was buried nearby, in an unmarked grave in the eastern section of St John’s Episcopal churchyard. It was in this very church that Patrick Henry uttered his famous words – “Give me liberty, or give me death!” – while neglecting to mention that he was a slaveholder. I have visited this churchyard often, yet I cannot know the sure location of my mother’s grave.

Richmond baptised me. Three days after my mother’s demise, with my own beliefs never consulted, I was conscripted into the Protestant faith in the Richmond home of Mr and Mrs John Richard. On this same day, rumours arrived of my father’s death in Baltimore.

By long tradition, the night after Christmas is when theatres are most profusely attended. Eighteen nights after my mother’s death – December twenty-sixth, 1811 – the Richmond Theatre was utterly destroyed in a fire of unexplained source, while an audience of six hundred souls beheld Placide & Green’s tragedians in a performance of “The Bleeding Nun”. Seventy-three persons died, including Virginia’s governor. The scene of my mother’s greatest triumphs was burnt to ashes.

Richmond was the place of my breeching: I refer to the ritual transition of early boyhood, when a lad is deemed at last mature enough to exchange his childish skirts for honest trousers. In the inexorable torrent of my helpless boyhood years, my adoptive parents the Allans compelled me to attend services with them at Monumental Church. By a perverse whim of the fates, this church had been erected on the very site of the burning ruins of the Richmond Theatre. Where the stage had once been consecrated to the gods of drama, now stood an altar. Where bright lamps illumined in calcium carbonate gleamings had once served as footlights, now the guttering tongues of candelabra stood sentry-post. Oh! Sacred reader! I implore you to imagine the stark outline of my thoughts in 1815, as a sensitive lad of six years, huddled in Pew #80 of the Monumental Church, and aware that on this same spot – adjacent in space, separated in time – my mother had once danced upon the stage, singing her popular tune “Nobody Coming to Marry Me”, scarcely a month before her tragic demise.

An exact fac-simile of the Richmond street directory could be transcribed from my life’s ordeals. At age eleven, I attended school in the upper room of Doctor Leroy’s store at Broad and Fifth Streets, where I learnt Ovid, Cicero and Xenophon. Aged thirteen, I played hoops and bandy in the gutters at Fourteenth Street and Tobacco Alley. After a quarrel with my foster father, I briefly lodged with his business partner Charles Ellis, in that gentleman’s house on the linden square, at the south side of Franklin Street between First and Second.

Richmond clutches to me still, like a suckling leech that will not relinquish its prey. I have lived elsewhere – Baltimore, West Point, South Carolina, even London – yet it is incessantly to Richmond that my blood returns, drawing me along as if by Mesmer’s animal magnetism.

In 1824 – when I was fifteen years of age – my paternal grandfather’s distinguished war record fetched me a place in the junior Morgan Riflemen, where I served as a member of the honour guard at Richmond’s Capitol Square, during the grand reception for the triumphal return of the Marquis de Lafayette. That noble Frenchman shook my hand before the vast assemblage, and in the presence of the throng he praised my grandfather whom I had never known: the war hero whose son was my cowardly father, the scoundrel who abandoned my mother.

I deem, then, that my credentials as a resident of Richmond are satisfactory. This city and I are in each other’s pocket. If I unbosom myself in these pages, it is Richmond’s dark soul as well as my own that gains the shrift of my confession.

Last summer, at twenty-six years of age and unable to sustain my mortal needs by the craft of my pen and inkwell, I took employment in a brickyard in West Fayette Street in Baltimore, at the firm of the partners Merryman & Young – although neither partner was a merry man, and most assuredly neither was young. During my unsupervised hours at the brickyard, while my employers thought me engaged in the urgent task of distinguishing one brick from another, I discreetly penned several poems and trifles which Mr Thomas Willis White of Richmond saw fit to publish in his Southern Literary Messenger. I make bold to say that my efforts were met with immoderate success. In October of last year, I returned to Richmond and took up my new position as chief reviewer, proof-reader and unofficial editor of the selfsame Southern Literary Messenger. I took lodgings at Mrs Yarrington’s boarding-house, at the corner of Twelfth and Bank Streets, fronting the south side of Capitol Square. Mrs Yarrington keeps a most abstemious household, where intoxicating liquors are entirely forbidden. I have pledged to forsake all bottle-companions while I am her boarder.

Now the Automaton arrives. On a recent Tuesday morning – December 15, 1835 – I was at my editorial desk, reloading my inkwell for a fresh assault upon the barbarian squadrons, when Mr White came to my stool with that day’s edition of the Richmond Enquirer. He thrust his forefinger at one portion of the newsprint, and challenged me: “What do you make of this, Eddy?”

In the extreme lower corner of the leftmost column of the front page, I discerned this tiny “squib” advertisement:MAELZEL’S CONFLAGRATION OF MOSCOW, &c., – Now exhibiting at the Museum. – Exhibition every evening. Doors open at a quarter before 7 o’clock. Exhibition to commence at half past seven o’clock precisely.

And so forth. “Might be a few agate lines’ worth of story here, Eddy,” said White. “Saddle up Shank’s mare this evening, and go fetch a look.”

The Museum of Richmond stands at Franklin and Eighteenth Streets. I arrived promptly that evening, just lacking the quarter-hour of seven. The price of admission was fifty cents: one-twentieth of my weekly stipend at the Messenger. I paid this usury, and entered the portals.

The museum is gas-fitted, so the rooms were well-lighted. Most of the permanent exhibits are devoted to Richmond’s history, especially this city’s ordeals in the two British wars. In a glass bell-jar, a ragged headdress of turkey-cock’s feathers summarised the advanced civilisation of Virginia’s aboriginal inhabitants. A few keepsakes of Europe, China, and the slave-coast of Dahomey are exhibited as well.

The momentary chief attraction proved to be a sequence of tableaux and dioramas, crafted by one Johann Nepomuk Maelzel of Vienna, and now touring America. These images depicted the bloodied events of September 1812, when Russia’s capital city was put to the firebrands to thwart its capture by Bonaparte’s advancing legions. The singular architecturings of Moscow – Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and so forth – were displayed here in exquisite miniature.

The front seats of the Museum’s auditorium were reserved for children and their wet-nurses, although I have no notion as to why suckling babes would show interest in the atrocities of Bonaparte’s hordes. I took care to seat myself out of pabulum’s range, in the third row. A sheet of linen, as white and blank as foolscap, had been stretched upon the rear wall.

From behind a claret-coloured velvet curtain, Professor Maelzel stepped forth. He bowed, introducing himself to our assemblage and proclaiming his credentials. Speaking in stiff Teutonic accents, he announced himself as the inventor of the metronome and the panharmonicon, and vouched that he had been Beethoven’s teacher. Now there was a strong odour of the new-fashioned paraffin oil, as one of the professor’s attendants lighted a magic-lantern. The gas-jets were snuffed, and then the evening’s revels commenced.

The audience gasped in astonishment as the room erupted in flames. Then, of a sudden, their cries transmuted into applause as it was discerned that this was a conjuror’s illusion. By some ingenious means of projecting and amplification, Professor Maelzel had enlarged the image of a single candle-flame, and was projecting this upon the white screen confronting us. A further stage-effect made it appear that these flames were within the miniature buildings of Maezel’s simulacrum, rather than behind them . . . so that indeed it seemed as if the city of Moscow, represented in miniature, was engulfed in fire. I perceived that mirrors were involved in the illusion: flames are by nature asymmetrical in shape, and I saw at once that a certain asymmetry in the conflagration on the left side of the screen was precisely reversed, mirror-wise, in the conflagration to our right side.

In the darkness, a sound: Doom! Doom! An unseen war-drum began its mournful tattoo. (I had noticed a boy with a tom-tom lurking in the hall at my arrival.) There was a clangour of unseen bells. (I had noticed a second boy in the hallway as well.) To the steady impulse of the tocsin’s throb, a sudden phalanx of homun-culoids arose, and commenced marching through the burning streets of Moscow. They wore the dark blue uniforms of Bonaparte’s army. These soldiers, I observed, were some ingenious regiment of man-nikins: an army of automata, if you will, compelled by mainsprings and levers to parade in unison across the row of dioramas. A few other homunculi, dressed as Cossack peasants, emerged from the burning buildings and attempted to flee. The advancing rank of soldiers raised their miniature muskets and fired at these targets. There was a sharp sudden report, not precisely matching the instant of the gunfire. (No doubt due to a tardiness by the drummer-boy in the vestibule.) The miniature peasants fell. Behind them, the buildings of Moscow collapsed and were consumed in the flames.

In the flame-lit auditorium around me, the good citizens of Richmond applauded Moscow’s death . . . for one city’s tragedy is ever another city’s entertainment.

In the seat at my left-hand side, a waistcoated gentleman nudged me. “This isn’t in it, you know,” he declared. “I’ve only come for the afterpiece, but that’s a better show than this. Maelzel’s brought his Chess-Player.”

As the gentleman pronounced this phrase, it seemed to be typeset with its own capitalisations in the boldface font of his voice: MAELZEL’S CHESS-PLAYER. I nodded my comprehension. “A chess-master, you mean?” I asked.

“Well . . . some say it, and others suspect as much. Stay after with me, and see it yourself.”

By now the principal audience had begun to disperse, for the burning of Moscow was completed. All the peasants had been slaughtered, and – as there would be no further atrocities – the entertainment was ended. A few cognoscenti lingered for the promised afterpiece, and I placed myself in the front row as the gas-jets were relighted. I observed two stagehands packing up the wreckage of Moscow: the miniature buildings had been cleverly designed to collapse at a chosen moment, to give the illusion of destruction by fire. These effects and the dioramas were now hustled away, as from behind the velvet curtain two men trundled forth a peculiar oblong box.

The thing was set on wheels, and these of such a height that a gap of several inches transpired between the auditorium’s floor and the underside of the box. The box itself was carpentered of dark wood, three feet six inches in length, two feet four inches in depth, and two feet six inches in height. I will lay wager to those admeasurements. To be sure of them, I visually compared the proportions of the oblong box against the breadth and height of one of Maelzel’s attendants. Afterwards, I took care to pass closely by this man, comparing his stature to my own. I am five feet eight inches tall – my height has not changed since my West Point days – and so by this ruse I divined the oblong box’s dimensions. In the front of the cabinet were four cupboard panels with brass fittings: three tall vertical doors, and a long horizontal drawer beneath.

The peculiar feature of the oblong box was a large excrescence of irregular shape, rising from the cabinet’s rear portion. I could not discern this thing properly, for it was draped in a shroud of red sailcloth.

Professor Maelzel greeted the surviving remnants of the audience, and thanked us for awaiting the afterpiece. “Before we inspect the Chess-Player,” he said, “let us consider its cabinet.” He rapped the top and sides of the oblong box, proclaiming these to be made of stoutest maple. By their soundings, I believed him.

A liveried attendant brought forth a small table, placing this between the cabinet and the audience, and to one side. A single candlestick was placed on this. A second attendant was affixing six more candlesticks to the top of the Chess-Player’s cabinet: three either side, with an unlighted beeswax candle in each.

“Behold the Automaton,” said Herr Professor Maelzel. With a flourish, he whisked away the shroud.

Once more, the audience gasped. Seated on the rear portion of the oblong box was a replica of a man. This was garbed in the likeness of a Turk, sitting cross-legged, with a large turban atop his counterfeit head, and a high plume rising from the turban. The turban and plume made it difficult – intentionally, I suspect – to reckon the figure’s height, but my previous stratagem made clear that the Automaton was slightly larger than a typical man. The counterfeit Turk was dressed in a long coat of unknown cloth, in Oriental design. At its waist was a cummerbund, or sash, of some darkly-coloured fabric. It was beardless, yet the wooden face displayed thick black mustachios. Its eyes stared forth into the auditorium, lifeless and blind.

The Automaton’s gloved hands were extended. The left hand brandished a long Turkish smoking-pipe. On the topmost surface of the cabinet was a chessboard.

Two attendants seized the upper corners of the cabinet, and trundled it around so that the audience could view its hindquarters. The rear side of the Turk was somewhat more crudely fashioned than the front portions. The cabinet’s wheels, I repeat, were of sufficient diameter to raise the cabinet well clear of the floor, so there could be no suspicion of any human confederate entering or leaving the Automaton’s box by means of a trap-door underneath.

“There is naturally much curiosity,” said Herr Maelzel, “as to the clockwork mechanisms of the Automaton. These were crafted by Baron von Kempelen of Presbourg in 1769, and I have improved their design.” By now the cabinet had completed its ambulation, and once more the Turk confronted the audience. “It will be observed,” Maelzel resumed, “that both the cabinet, and the Automaton itself, are entirely filled with clockworks.”

From his swallow-tail coat, Maelzel took a ring of keys. As an attendant lighted a taper, Maelzel with much ceremony unlocked the leftmost of the cupboard’s three doors. He opened this fully. In the gaslight, and by the dint of one small candle, I beheld a mass of gears, pinions, levers and half-seen enginery. Leaving the cupboard door open, Maelzel went to the cabinet’s rear and unlocked another panel. Stooping, he held the burning candle behind the unlocked panel, so that its glowing flame penetrated entirely through the cupboard’s interior to the seated audience in front. Holding the candle quite near, Maelzel reached with his other hand into the cabinet and gripped one of the levers. He worked this back and forth, all the while propounding a lecture upon the history of the Automaton. The shifting lever in its turn rotated gears, which moved wheels, which turned pinions. I heard a clacketing noise, as the gears engaged at their tasks. I observed that the space between these mechanisms was too small to admit of any occupant much larger than a well-nourished rat.

Maelzel closed the rear panel, locked it, and came back to the front with his candle. The leftmost cupboard door beneath the Automaton was still wide open. Now Maelzel unlocked the long slender drawer at the base of the cabinet. Two attendants flung this drawer open to its full length. Within the drawer were a small green cushion, one chessboard, and four sets of chessmen: two white sets, two black. These were fixed in a framework to support them perpendicularly. I could not anticipate why so many chessmen were required for a single game.

As Maelzel continued his lecture, he gently placed the cushion beneath the left-hand elbow of the Automaton. At the same time, he removed the long tobacco-pipe from the Automaton’s left hand, and placed this pipe carefully in the drawer beneath the cabinet. “Is there any lady or gentleman here,” Maelzel asked, “who is a superlative player of chess?”

I made ready to volunteer, but the waistcoated gentleman anticipated me. “I am Mr Clarence Hall, proprietor of the Barque bookshop in Grace Street,” he announced. “I am known throughout Virginia as an honest man and a tolerable chess-gamer. Perhaps I will serve.” As he spoke, Mr Hall indicated a trinket on his watch-fob: the sign of the Freemason’s compass. “There is a term, long used in the Masonic craft, which I have lately heard applied to chess-players of superior skill,” Mr. Hall resumed. “Some of my opponents are pleased to call me a grandmaster.”

A footman collected the chessboard and two sets of chessmen: one white, one black. As Maelzel gave sign, this board and chessmen were set up in regulation manner at the table to one side, where Mr Hall took a chair. An attendant lighted the candle at this table, some slight distance from the Automaton.

Surely, in any chess-match, the two antagonists ought to sit at the same board?

The leftmost of the three cupboard doors beneath the Automaton was still wide open. Maelzel now unlocked its two brethren, throwing these wide as well. The rightmost and the central door opened into a single compartment. This contained no enginery at all, save for two steel quadrants of uncertain utility. Beneath these, in the floor of the cabinet, was a pedestal about eight inches square, and covered in dark cloth. Such a pedestal might have served as an admirable stool for a human tenant. I could see no reason for its presence in a clockwork mechanism.

Maelzel’s attendants now whirled the Automaton around once more, so that again its rear portions were afforded to us. All three of the front cupboard doors were still open. Maelzel unlocked another panel at the rear – not the one he had previously opened, which was now locked – and again we had a view of unknown gears and pinions. Again, the business with the candle was repeated, so that the light of the flame pierced the entire cabinet from front to back – or the other way, as the cabinet was now reversed – and again the light of the candle gave token that there was no hiding-space within for even a modest homunculus.

The wooden figure of the Turk was slightly larger than man-sized. Maelzel now lifted the Turk’s coat, to reveal the replication’s nether portions. A door about ten inches square was in the loins of the figure, and a smaller door in the left thigh. I perceived that the Turk’s cummerbund was not genuine, for it did not truly encircle the Automaton’s waist in the manner of such garments. The edges of the sash terminated at either side of the figure, so that the Turk’s cummerbund was merely a false ornamentation on the front half of the likeness.

Unlocking and opening the doors within the Automaton, Professor Maelzel permitted the spectators to view what lurked within. I beheld a network of cogs, mainsprings, and enginery: all dormant and still. Maelzel rapped the upper portions of the figure, producing a solid heavy sounding with no rumours of hollowness.

Maelzel now closed and locked all the apertures, and the cabinet was trundled once more to its previous position, with the eyes of the Turk gazing outward, confronting the spectators. An attendant had set up the remaining chessmen on the board in front of the cross-legged Turk, with the black pieces facing the Automaton.

I have mentioned six candles upon the Automaton’s board. These a footman now hastened to light, with a taper. No two of these six candles were of a like height. They varied in stature by as much as twelve inches. This is unremarkable, as candles consume their wax at differing rates, and so dwindle unequally. I assumed that, in pursuit of thrift, Herr Maelzel would save the stubs of candles previously lighted, and make use of them again until their wicks were spent.

With another flourish, Maelzel inserted one of his keys into an aperture in the left side of the cabinet: the Automaton’s right side. I heard the snicketing sound of a mainspring winding taut within the clockwork engine.

Professor Maelzel withdrew the key, and bowed: “Let the chess-match begin.”

Mr Hall, playing white, made the first move: a simple pawn’s gambit. He was seated in profile, so that the spectators had a fair view of both the white and black positions at his chessboard. Professor Maelzel thanked him, then strode to the cabinet of the Automaton. Swiftly, Maelzel grasped the corresponding white pawn on the Automaton’s chessboard, and copied Hall’s move.

I saw no profit in this duplication. Surely it made more thrift for the machine and its antagonist to do battle across opposite ranks of the same chessboard. True, by seating Mr Hall to one side, Maelzel assured the spectators an unchallenged view of the Automaton and its chess pieces. And yet – by means of mirrors, during his makeshift conflagration of Moscow – Maelzel had already displayed his ingenuity in amplifying and translocating flames so that they burnt at one position in space while being perceived entirely elsewhere. Could not a man of such genius likewise project his Automaton’s progress so that the chess-match was visible from all quarters of the room?

As I thought of this, there was a sharp intake of breath from several spectators.

The Automaton raised its left arm. The limb moved upward, forward, downward, jerking in stiff right-angled gesticulations. The Automaton’s head moved slightly, the plumed turban shifting. The eyes rolled, in grotesque parody of human eyes.

The Automaton’s hand lifted the black queen’s pawn, advanced it slightly, and set it down in the square of the fourth rank. Then, releasing its prize, the Automaton’s arm reversed its movements precisely, once more resting its elbow on the cushion.

Maelzel declaimed to the assemblage this movement of the queen’s pawn, while he crossed to Mr Hall’s board and advanced a black chessman in like fashion.

So the chess-match proceeded, each antagonist’s move in duplicate.

The match, in fine, was a superior one: Mr Hall was an excellent gamer, yet the Automaton surpassed him. Several white chessmen were rapidly captured. The Automaton achieved this by lowering a black piece into the square already occupied by a white piece, clumsily knocking it askew. An attendant confiscated the taken piece. On the rarer occasions when Mr Hall captured a black piece, Maelzel removed its counterpart from the Automaton’s display.

There was silence in the hall, utmost silence, as the game was prosecuted: this stillness being broken only by the audience’s occasional cries of admiration at a clever gambit, or dismay at an ill-chosen manoeuvre.

The turbaned head of the Automaton shifted at intervals, yet these movements appeared to be random. More disconcerting were the mechanical eyes. The Turk was just above man-sized, and his eyes were slightly enlarged beyond that proportion, so they were perhaps twice as large as a living man’s organs of sight. They appeared to be sightless, and ornamental, for the eyes of the Automaton never once bent towards the chessboard. Yet they moved. The eyelids blinked, the eyes shifted sidelong as if weighted with the guilt of unknown crimes. At the eleventh move, when Mr Hall made an especially maladroit gambit, the Automaton’s eyes positively rolled in their sockets, arousing laughter from the spectators.

On the thirteenth move, the Automaton responded to Mr Hall’s en passant with a bold assault by the black queen’s rook. At this juncture, the Automaton’s right hand – formerly idle – rapped the top of the cabinet, and the Automaton’s jaws opened.

“Echec,” said a voice within the Automaton’s bosom.

Several spectators gasped as the machine spoke. I was less impressed. It is easy enough, by means of bellows, to equip a mechanism so as to voice a bird’s call or a spoken word. One is put in mind of cuckoo-clocks. Indeed, the cuckoo seemed to be the appropriate bird flying over these proceedings, although there were clearly more than a few gulls within the premises as well. I prolonged this theme of birds by observing that the Automaton had played a black rook. Twenty years ago, when my stepfather brought me to England to be schooled at Stoke Newington, I learnt that the word “rook” signifies not merely a chessman and a black-plumed bird. It is also the London criminals’ cant-word meaning to cheat . . .

I arose from my chair, and stepped into the avenue between the seats.

“I have unriddled this mystery,” I said loudly. “The game is over, and it ends in a fool’s mate. Maelzel’s Automaton is a fraud.”

There was a huzzbuzz, as the heads of spectators turned to confront my intrusion. Even the blind eyes of the Automaton seemed to swivel in their sockets, to behold me.

Herr Maelzel gestured for silence. “Who are you, sir?” he asked me.

“I am Edgar Poe, chief reviewer for the Southern Literary Messenger,” I said, making so bold as to offer a half-bow. I fancied I saw the Automaton start in surprise as I rendered my name.

“I do not know you, Mr Poe,” ventured Maelzel.

“The Automaton is a fraud whether you know me or not,” I went on. “Five months ago, I might have hailed your clockwork Chess-Player as the greatest hoax of the century. But you have been outdistanced and out-hoaxed this past August by the New York Sun’s series of articles about bat-winged beaver-men allegedly observed upon the surface of the Moon. That hoax was exposed in September, and now your own diddling will be unhoaxed as well.” I held up one hand to silence the clamouring spectators while I confronted Maelzel. “I have unmasked your Chess-Player by means of observation and deduction. I ask everyone here to recall your demonstration, when you opened the Chess-Player’s cabinet and moved the levers with your hand. There was a loud clacking noise, as we saw the gears engaged. Yet the Automaton has been waging chess-moves for several minutes now, and never once in that time have we heard the sound of those gears engaging! Further, we all heard you winding a mainspring within the Turk . . . yet there has been no consequent sound of an escapement, the tell-tale tick-tick-tick as the mainspring uncoils. I will wager that your Chess-Player’s cupboard contains a ratchet, to counterfeit the sound of a mainspring turning, without an escapement.”

The spectators’ murmuring grew louder.

“Those gears were only stage-props,” I continued, “to persuade us that the Automaton’s cabinet is entirely filled with machinery, leaving no space for a man,. Yet why is Mr Hall obliged to distance himself from his opponent the Automaton, with the nuisance of two separate chessboards for a single game? The answer: if the Chess-Player’s antagonist were to sit nearer the board, he would hear breathing from within the cabinet!”

The murmuring loudened, and some of the spectators began drumming their feet against the floorboards.

“Furthermore, look to the candles,” I spoke. “One candle gives sufficient light for Mr Hall to distinguish his chessmen. The Automaton’s eyes are sightless and ornamental, needing no light whatever . . . yet Herr Maelzel has set six candles by the board of his mechanical Chess-Player. That is because six candles are required to cast sufficient light so as to penetrate the thick gauze fabric of the Automaton’s waistcloth. I deduce that there is a human confederate within the Automaton. He is seated upon the small pedestal which we all observed inside the cabinet. His head is of a height within the Turk’s abdomen. And his eyes peer outward through the gauze of the Turkish sash.”

I heard the shifting of chairs in the rows behind me, as several spectators now stood, to have a better vantage of the Automaton.

I gestured for silence. “Pray compare the six candles at the Automaton’s chessboard. The four candles farthest from the Automaton burn steadily. There is no draught in this room. Yet the two candle-flames nearest the Turk are seen to flicker, as if caught in a current of air that oscillates back and forth. Only one manner of air current moves back and forth steadily: that of respiration. Good people, the porous cloth of the Chess-Player’s sash affords two functions for the human agent concealed within the Automaton: he can see through it, and he can breathe through it.”

By now, the spectators were demanding a chance to open the Automaton’s casing. Once more, I bade them remain silent while I resumed:

“The gears and pinions in the Chess-Player’s cabinet are merest stage-dressing. I will wager that among them are mirrors, casting reflections so as to make the gears and pinions inside the cabinet seem more numerous than they actually are, and so the cabinet more crowded. True, sir! You have opened all the cabinet’s doors for our inspection, yet you were careful never to open all of them at once. The cupboard’s human inhabitant must shift himself during your demonstration, so that there is always one shut door to conceal him. But I believe that some portion of your enginery is genuine, at least. Inside the Automaton, there must be an ingenious arrangement of levers, so that the human tenant can manipulate the Turk’s arm from within the cabinet. The system probably involves a counterbalance. This would explain the cross-problem that had puzzled me: the operator within your cabinet is probably right-handed, yet the Automaton favours its left hand.” I bowed again to the assemblage. “Good evening, ladies, gentlemen . . . and Automaton.”

Then I turned and strode up the corridor, and made good my departure.

As I left the Museum’s vestibule, and turned homeward for Mrs Yarrington’s rooming-house, once more the grotesque image of a large black-plumed rook swooped through my fancy, its talons arousing my brain to preserve this stark image in a stanza of verse. But the black-winged rooks of England are unknown in America. Perhaps, for the sake of my readers, some other dark-plumed bird of carrion will serve the purpose . . .

My encounter with Maelzel’s Chess-Player occurred three weeks ago. This afternoon – the sixth of January, 1836 – I was again busying myself at my desk in the Messenger’s offices at Fifteenth and Main Streets, when an apologetic messenger-boy brought me a folded length of foolscap. Opening this, it proved to be a scrawled letter. The author’s handwriting was disarrayed, his capitals and cursives elbowing each other in confusion. There was no signature. In fine, the letter had plainly been written by someone in great distress, or by some paralytic who had only the vaguemost control of his own limbs. Here is the missive:

EDGAR POE. Maelzel’s troupe have finished their engagement in Richmond, and depart on the morrow for their next booking. If you will come alone to the Monumental Church tonight, after the vesper-service, you will learn something to your advantage.

That was all. I flung the letter into a waste-paper receptacle, and resumed my duties. But the missive, and its mysteries, held hostage my curiosity. Thus, at eventide tonight, guided by a bright moon nearly full, I made my way through Richmond’s cobblestoned streets to Shockoe Hill.

The Monumental Church is octagonal, surmounted by a dome of peculiar shape and modest convexity. Within the front portico, between the Doric pillars flanking the church’s entrance, stands a white marble tablet commemorating the unfortunates who were lost in the fire of 1811. Stepping past this, I was surprised to find the door-bolt of the entranceway set ajar . . . perhaps by someone anticipating my arrival. Pushing the door open, I stepped within.

I have been here before. This was the church of my childhood. The place was dark now, yet I have been here so often and so intimately that I knew each detail of the church’s interior by embittered memory. Before me was the chancel. I knew by heart the inscription carved in gilt uncial script above the chancel-frame: GIVE EAR, O LORD.

My footsteps echoed on the tiling as I proceeded down the aisle towards the altar. Two candle-frames stood there, either side. Some few of the candles were lighted, and by their faint gleam I beheld a dim shape placed in front of the altar, like some sacrificial offering. A shape like an oblong box, surmounted by an effigied resemblance of a man.

It was the chess-player. Maelzel’s Automaton.

The unseeing eyes of the Turk were downturned, regarding me silently. On top of the cabinet, a few chessmen stood vigil on the gameboard in front of the cross-legged effigy. As I approached, I saw that the chessmen on the board were positioned for the gambit known as an endgame.

With a sudden right-angled convulsion, the Automaton’s left hand jerked sidelong, and nudged the black queen’s rook to the bishop’s file.

I responded in kind, grasping the solitary white knight, and placing this so as to endanger the Automaton’s king.

“Echec,” I declared.

“You were wrong, Edgar Poe,” spoke a muffled voice emerging from the Turk’s abdomen. “There is no man within Maelzel’s Chess-Player.”

I kept standfast. “I have proved through rational deduction that the cabinet is fashioned to contain a human operator.”

“Indeed. And it contains an operator, right enough. But the Chess-Player within the cabinet is no man . . . for I am no longer human.”

There came a sound of gears meshing within the oblong box. The rightmost door of the cabinet swung faintly ajar. From within the cupboard of the Automaton, a hand emerged . . . beckoning.

By candlelight, I beheld the hand of the unseen Chess-Player. There was a discrepancy of fingers, three digits being entirely absent. The remaining thumb and forefinger were scarred and fractured, bent into appendages more nearly resembling claws than any human flesh.

“I was a chess-gamer once, of no little ability,” harshed a voice within the cabinet. The unseen speaker’s voice, like his hand, seemed defective and bestial. “My father, being of respectable Maryland stock, desired for me a career at law. If I had heeded his wishes instead of my own, I would never have come to this crossing.”

I could just barely perceive, within the shadowed cabinet, a human face. Human? There was a hideous concavity within the face, as if some of its portions had been gnawed away, and the remainder twisted beyond recognition. The candlelight threw its faint gleam against a bright cicatrix of scar tissue, bordered by a single pale eye and a cavity where nostrils should have been. A man that was used up . . .

“This church was built upon the wreckage of the Richmond Theatre,” said the voice within Maelzel’s Chess-Player. “I was there that dread night, Edgar Poe. In the first act of the melodrama of ‘The Bleeding Nun’, in the stage-setting representing the house of Baptiste the Robber, a chandelier was employed to illumine the stage. At the second-act climax, a call-boy was ordered to raise the chandelier into the fly-lofts, where the candles could burn in safety.”

The patchworked face within the cabinet paused, as if each word required immense effort. Then it spoke again: “I stood watching, in the wings. I snatched the rope from the boy’s hands, intentionally pulling the chandelier askew so that it went into the scenery flats. These were made of oiled canvas, and they burnt most industriously.”

“You did this?” I asked. “Why?”

“In the service of envy, and anger, and a few other sins. I was a disgraced gambler, a drunkard, a failed actor. My own inadequacy before the footlights was made more embittered by the envy I held for my wife’s superlative talents on the stage.”

The Chess-Player moved within the cabinet. I beheld his face now from a fresh angle. The thick scarrings and disfigurements were less numerous here. In utter revulsion, I discerned in his mutilated countenance a grotesque parody of my own face . . .

“I was David Poe, your father,” said the beckoning thing. “When word reached me in Philadelphia of my wife’s penniless death in a Richmond tavern, I came back here in mourning: to the Richmond Theatre, the scene of her triumphs. I could scarce contain my rage as I stood in the wings and I heard your mother’s understudy speak her lines. How dare this actress live and breathe, when your mother could not? How dare the audience applaud?”

“Wretch!” I said. “You speak concern for my mother, yet she might never have died in poverty if you had not abandoned her.”

“True enough,” said the remnants of my father. “I had no right to live, and I hungered for death. I coveted my wife’s safe passage out of the living world, and I decided to join her onstage in some other realm. When I set the theatre afire, eighteen nights after my wife’s inglorious death, I resolved to immolate myself in the flames . . . and to take with me as many innocents as possible.”

“You succeeded in that last particular.”

“True. The place went up like matchwood, and the entire Richmond Theatre was aflame in two minutes. The pit and the stalls were swiftly abandoned, as the patrons in the dollar seats fled quickly. The galleries upstairs were not so fortunate.” The half-man in the cabinet gestured pathetically; I glimpsed the stub of an interrupted limb, bound in ragged bandagings.

“I was gravely maimed in the conflagration,” moaned the voice of the patchworked half-man. “The major portions of my limbs were amputated in a Richmond poor-ward, where I took care not to give my true name. I knew that my family in Baltimore would not welcome me, so I sent them false news of my death. I lived on such charity as I could find.” The half-man coughed. “Charity came easier for me after August 1812, when I could claim I lost my limbs as a soldier in the siege of Detroit, in Madison’s war against the British.” He coughed again. In the light of the church candles, I saw that the chess-player’s disfigured mouth was coughing up blood.

“How does Herr Maelzel enter this conundrum?” I asked.

“Maelzel was my savior,” said the maimed thing that alleged to be my father. “Maelzel had need of a chess-master who could fit into a small cabinet.” The half-man laughed mirthlessly, and brandished one of his stumps. “In this one vocation, my abbreviated limbs give me an advantage over men more complete than myself. If only your mother . . .”

The Automaton fell silent.

“What about my mother?” I asked.

A faint rustling within the oblong box.

“You spoke of my mother,” I persisted.

The thing in the box uttered a profane oath.

From that instant, I found myself overcome by a grotesque phrensy. It felt precisely as if my arms and legs were suspended on wires, and I became a marionette whose movements were governed by an unseen puppet-master. Confronting me was a man who masqueraded as an Automaton. True! But now I became an Automaton in the guise of a man . . . for my soul no longer captained my flesh, and I found myself moving and gesticulating as if by clockwork: no more the master of my actions, but compelled as if by gears and levers unseen. As a puppet moves on jointed limbs, so I sprang to the altar.

Just as a chesspiece, with no soul of its own, is manipulated by a grandmaster who cares not for the pawn’s ultimate fate, so I was controlled now by a mind alien to myself.

On the chancel’s wall was a wrought-iron sconce, holding three lighted candles. My hands grasped it, obeying the whispered commands of some unseen clockmaker – perhaps it was Maelzel – as I seized this heavy implement, tore it loose of the wall and smashed it squarely into the carved wooden head of the Turkish chess-player, knocking aside the plumed turban and shattering the face. As the Automaton’s face burst open, I saw the articulated eyes tumble forth; they were fashioned of Vienna-glass, and for one instant my own mind was freed from the clockmaker’s grasp long enough for me to admire the workmanship of the counterfeit eyes. Then the mind of the clockmaker seized me again, bidding me to strike the hour. I brought the sconce down – again! again! – upon the cabinet of Maelzel.

The Automaton was headless, for I had decapitated the figure of the Turk. Now a low groan emerged from the figure’s abdomen, and I recalled that the monstrous figure within the chess-player was concealed in that portion. I fractured this with the sconce. I had the fierce pleasure of seeing blood upon the wrought-iron flange in my grasp. I brought it down again . . .

There was an odour of burning cloth. I turned, and perceived that in my phrensy I had scattered the candles. One of these had ignited the drapes behind the altar. And now the chancel was afire.

Inside the cabinet of Maelzel, some scuttling thing – an abridged edition of a man – was struggling desperately to free itself. I brought the sconce down once more, full in the patch-quilt face of the inhuman occupant. The thing groaned, and went slack. I saw the two remaining fingers of its fragmented hand fall open. A single chessman – a carved wooden pawn – tumbled out of the maimed grasp, and it fell upon the burning altar-cloth.

The nameless grandmaster released my soul from the endgame. The unseen puppeteer unloosed my strings. I was no longer clockworked.

I turned, and fled the Memorial Church as it burst into flame. In the portico, I was confronted by a tall white apparition. It was the marble tablet, commemorating the names of the dead who perished on this site amidst the burning Richmond Theatre. I was tempted to add one more soul to the death-list: the name of my father, David Poe.

I awoke to the strong vapours of distilled spirits. I found myself sprawled on the floor of my room in Mrs Yarrington’s lodging-house The door is latched. The derangement of my clothes, and the spasmodic trembling of my limbs, give token that once more I have succumbed to intemperance. My shirtfront is soaked with bourbon, and a shattered bottle lies nearby.

On the table in front of me is an unproofed manuscript, its ink still wet. The handwriting I recognise as my own, but the penmanship is wild and abandoned, and the ink has spattered several passages where the pen-nibs have torn entirely through the paper.

Reading the pages, I find that they contain the above narrative . . . excepting these last paragraphs. But have I written fiction, or reportage? This manuscript is filled with incident, yet my memory is a blank page. I remember nothing of these recent hours.

Are these words on the page truth, or falsehood? Have I nightmared all of this, or some portion? Or is all of it real, in cold sanity? Did I go to Memorial Church tonight? Have I confronted Maelzel’s Automaton? Is the man inside that clockwork hoax the unmourned David Poe? Have I murdered my father? Did I set the church ablaze?

There are shouts in the hall. Someone is pounding on the door, and there are voices.

I must see what they require of me.

RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON

Making Cabinets

RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON IS A NOVELIST, short story writer and screenwriter/producer. He has written and produced hundreds of episodes of television, for over thirty dramatic and comedic primetime network series and, at nineteen, was the youngest writer ever put under contract by Universal Studios.

He has written feature film and television projects for Richard Donner, Mel Brooks, Joel Silver, Ivan Reitman, Steven Spielberg and many others. To date, Matheson has written and sold twelve original, spec feature scripts; considered a record. He has also written over twenty pilots for comedy and dramatic series for Showtime, Fox, NBC, ABC, Spike and CBS.

Matheson recently wrote three scripts for Showtime’s Masters of Horror (the first two directed by Tobe Hooper), while for TNT’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes he wrote the critically acclaimed adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “Battleground”, a one-hour episode starring William Hurt. His decision to write the entire script with no dialogue amazed critics and The New York Times called the episode “. . . a minor masterpiece.” He is currently scripting two feature films and an eight-hour mini-series for director Bryan Singer.

Thirty stories are collected in Matheson’s Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, with an introduction by Stephen King. Dystopia, a hardcover collection of sixty stories is introduced by Peter Straub. His debut novel, Created By, was Bantam’s hardcover lead, a Bram Stoker Award winner and a Book-of-the-Month Club lead selection. It has been translated into several languages.

“In a culture intoxicated by extreme,” observes Matheson, “serial killers, inevitably, are fabled. In their ghastly, photogenic wakes, are collateral victims; those, still living, who knew the killer as routine participant in life – children, co-workers, friends, wives. Once news coverage, funerals and death penalties are eclipsed by fresher abduction and atrocity, the serial killer’s inner circle must continue, despite betrayal which inverts their world.

“ ‘Making Cabinets’ spends time with such a person. Its first draft was fleshless outline. Details were added, though few. In all, I wanted the feelings of aftermath to be a traumatised void.”

ICE WATER; a diamond stalk on white linen.

The clearness tastes warm, red. The thin woman chokes, covers mouth with napkin.

One table over, a boy eats pie, eyes unblinking. Watches her hold menu in pale hands.

She scans gourmet adjectives. Imagines soups, meats. Their dark succulence, piquant sauces.

All of it horror.

She searches more dishes, stomach a sick pit.

Maybe a salad, no dressing.

But the tomatoes; the cook would slice them open, their seeded flesh unprotected, seeping helplessly.

The waitress approaches. Perhaps the Special of the Day? Lamb. Unspiced; a meticulous blank.

The thin woman’s stomach twists. She imagines the dead flesh using her mouth like a coffin; fights nausea.

Why hadn’t she heard them?

The waitress tilts head. The thin woman needs another minute. The waitress nods; the same conversation everyday.

A couple, at the next table, excavate lobster, amused by lifeless claws. The busboy sweeps; a metronome.

The thin woman sees the boy eating pie, his lips berry-blue like a corpse.

Electric saws, pounding hammers.

Maybe the vermicelli. Plain.

But the long strands, like fine, blonde hair.

She tries to sip water, again. But the cubes have melted; water like dread-warm saliva.

His gentle smile, serving his recipes. The perfect husband.

The waitress reminds her she must eat. She loses more weight every day. She’s so pretty. It was almost a year ago. She must move on. The thin woman listens, nods. Tries not to look at the boy.

Making cabinets, he’d said; basement door always locked.

The thin woman looks up at the waitress. The young woman’s lipstick resembles a tortured mouth.

She runs between the red lips, down lightless corridor to the banned door. Inside, music deafens. She presses ear to door; hears blades severing. Pounds on door until it gives.

Finds two little boys, hanging upside down from ropes, screaming through gagged mouths, half peeled. He turns, goggles freckled red, black rubber apron stained. The stove behind him gurgles with spiced stews.

The thin woman tells the waitress she’s lost her appetite.

Maybe tomorrow.

The boy’s smile falls as he watches her leave, bones and veins visible through her starved skin.

GEOFF RYMAN

Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)

GEOFF RYMAN WAS BORN in Canada, but he has lived most of his life in Britain. The author has won the British Science Fiction Award, the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Nebula Award.

Ryman’s science fiction and fantasy books include The Warrior Who Carried Life, The Unconquered Country, The Child Garden, Was, Lust and Air. His 253, or Tube Theatre was initially published electronically before appearing in print, and his latest novel, The King’s Last Song, is set in Cambodia’s past and present.

“In 1975 I read a from-the-scene dispatch in The Times of the evacuation of Phnom Penh and that absolutely gripped my imagination,” remembers Ryman. “In 2000 I was invited by an Australian friend to stay at an Australian archaeological dig. Returning to do research, I fell in love with Cambodia all over again, and the way it was healing. I still haven’t managed to write about the healing, but two long short stories and one novel did follow.”

One of those long stories was “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, which was nominated for a science fiction Hugo Award. “Didn’t they realise it was a ghost story?” asks the author.

IN CAMBODIA PEOPLE ARE used to ghosts. Ghosts buy newspapers. They own property.

A few years ago, spirits owned a house in Phnom Penh, at the Tra Bek end of Monivong Boulevard. Khmer Rouge had murdered the whole family and there was no one left alive to inherit it. People cycled past the building, leaving it boarded up. Sounds of weeping came from inside.

Then a professional inheritor arrived from America. She’d done her research and could claim to be the last surviving relative of no fewer than three families. She immediately sold the house to a Chinese businessman, who turned the ground floor into a photocopying shop.

The copiers began to print pictures of the original owners.

At first, single black and white photos turned up in the copied dossiers of aid workers or government officials. The father of the murdered family had been a lawyer. He stared fiercely out of the photos as if demanding something. In other photocopies, his beautiful daughters forlornly hugged each other. The background was hazy like fog.

One night the owner heard a noise and trundled downstairs to find all five photocopiers printing one picture after another of faces: young college men, old women, parents with a string of babies, or government soldiers in uniform. He pushed the big green off-buttons. Nothing happened.

He pulled out all the plugs, but the machines kept grinding out face after face. Women in beehive hairdos or clever children with glasses looked wistfully out of the photocopies. They seemed to be dreaming of home in the 1960s, when Phnom Penh was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

News spread. People began to visit the shop to identify lost relatives. Women would cry, “That’s my mother! I didn’t have a photograph!” They would weep and press the flimsy A4 sheets to their breasts. The paper went limp from tears and humidity as if it too were crying.

Soon, a throng began to gather outside the shop every morning to view the latest batch of faces. In desperation, the owner announced that each morning’s harvest would be delivered direct to The Truth, a magazine of remembrance.

Then one morning he tried to open the house-door to the shop and found it blocked. He went round to the front of the building and rolled open the metal shutters.

The shop was packed from floor to ceiling with photocopies. The ground floor had no windows – the room had been filled from the inside. The owner pulled out a sheet of paper and saw himself on the ground, his head beaten in by a hoe. The same image was on every single page.

He buried the photocopiers and sold the house at once. The new owner liked its haunted reputation; it kept people away. The FOR SALE sign was left hanging from the second floor.

In a sense, the house had been bought by another ghost.

This is a completely untrue story about someone who must exist.

Pol pot’s only child, a daughter, was born in 1986. Her name was Sith, and in 2004, she was eighteen years old.

Sith liked air conditioning and luxury automobiles. Her hair was dressed in cornrows and she had a spiky piercing above one eye. Her jeans were elaborately slashed and embroidered. Her pink T-shirts bore slogans in English: CARE KOOKY. PINK MOLL.

Sith lived like a woman on Thai television, doing as she pleased in lip-gloss and Sunsilked hair. Nine simple rules helped her avoid all unpleasantness.1. Never think about the past or politics.2. Ignore ghosts. They cannot hurt you.3. Do not go to school. Hire tutors. Don’t do homework. It is disturbing.4. Always be driven everywhere in either the Mercedes or the BMW.5. Avoid all well-dressed Cambodian boys. They are the sons of the estimated 250,000 new generals created by the regime. Their sons can behave with impunity.6. Avoid all men with potbellies. They eat too well and therefore must be corrupt.7. Avoid anyone who drives a Toyota Viva or Honda Dream motorcycle.8. Don’t answer letters or phone calls.9. Never make any friends.

There was also a tenth rule, but that went without saying.

Rotten fruit rinds and black mud never stained Sith’s designer sports shoes. Disabled beggars never asked her for alms. Her life began yesterday, which was effectively the same as today.

Every day, her driver took her to the new Soriya Market. It was almost the only place that Sith went. The colour of silver, Soriya rose up in many floors to a round glass dome.

Sith preferred the 142nd Street entrance. Its green awning made everyone look as if they were made of jade. The doorway went directly into the ice-cold jewellery rotunda with its floor of polished black and white stone. The individual stalls were hung with glittering necklaces and earrings.

Sith liked tiny shiny things that had no memory. She hated politics. She refused to listen to the news. Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter wished the current leadership would behave decently, like her dad always did. To her.

She remembered the sound of her father’s gentle voice. She remembered sitting on his lap in a forest enclosure, being bitten by mosquitoes. Memories of malaria had sunk into her very bones. She now associated forests with nausea, fevers, and pain. A flicker of tree-shade on her skin made her want to throw up and the odour of soil or fallen leaves made her gag. She had never been to Angkor Wat. She read nothing.

Sith shopped. Her driver was paid by the government and always carried an AK-47, but his wife, the housekeeper, had no idea who Sith was. The house was full of swept marble, polished teak furniture, iPods, Xboxes, and plasma screens.

Please remember that every word of this story is a lie. Pol Pot was no doubt a dedicated communist who made no money from ruling Cambodia. Nevertheless, a hefty allowance arrived for Sith every month from an account in Switzerland.

Nothing touched Sith, until she fell in love with the salesman at Hello Phones.

Cambodian readers may know that in 2004 there was no mobile phone shop in Soriya Market. However, there was a branch of Hello Phone Cards that had a round blue sales counter with orange trim. This shop looked like that.

Every day Sith bought or exchanged a mobile phone there. She would sit and flick her hair at the salesman.

His name was Dara, which means Star. Dara knew about deals on call prices, sim cards, and the new phones that showed videos. He could get her any call tone she liked.

Talking to Dara broke none of Sith’s rules. He wasn’t fat, nor was he well dressed, and far from being a teenager, he was a comfortably mature twenty-four years old.

One day, Dara chuckled and said, “As a friend I advise you, you don’t need another mobile phone.”

Sith wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like this one anymore. It’s blue. I want something more feminine. But not frilly. And it should have better sound quality.”

“Okay, but you could save your money and buy some more nice clothes.”

Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter lowered her chin, which she knew made her neck look long and graceful. “Do you like my clothes?”

“Why ask me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s good to check out your look.”

Dara nodded. “You look cool. What does your sister say?”

Sith let him know she had no family. “Ah,” he said and quickly changed the subject. That was terrific. Secrecy and sympathy in one easy movement.

Sith came back the next day and said that she’d decided that the rose-coloured phone was too feminine. Dara laughed aloud and his eyes sparkled. Sith had come late in the morning just so that he could ask this question. “Are you hungry? Do you want to meet for lunch?”

Would he think she was cheap if she said yes? Would he say she was snobby if she said no?

“Just so long as we eat in Soriya Market,” she said.

She was torn between BBWorld Burgers and Lucky7. BBWorld was big, round, and just two floors down from the dome. Lucky7 Burgers was part of the Lucky Supermarket, such a good store that a tiny jar of Maxwell House cost US$2.40.

They decided on BBWorld. It was full of light and they could see the town spread out through the wide clean windows. Sith sat in silence.

Pol Pot’s daughter had nothing to say unless she was buying something.

Or rather she had only one thing to say, but she must never say it.

Dara did all the talking. He talked about how the guys on the third floor could get him a deal on original copies of Grand Theft Auto. He hinted that he could get Sith discounts from Bsfashion, the spotlit modern shop one floor down.

Suddenly he stopped. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, you know.” He said it in a kindly, grownup voice. “I can see, you’re a properly brought up girl. I like that. It’s nice.”

Sith still couldn’t find anything to say. She could only nod. She wanted to run away.

“Would you like to go to K-Four?”

K-Four, the big electronics shop, stocked all the reliable brand names: Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, or Denon. It was so expensive that almost nobody shopped there, which is why Sith liked it. A crowd of people stood outside and stared through the window at a huge home entertainment centre showing a DVD of Ice Age. On the screen, a little animal was being chased by a glacier. It was so beautiful!

Sith finally found something to say. “If I had one of those, I would never need to leave the house.”

Dara looked at her sideways and decided to laugh.

The next day Sith told him that all the phones she had were too big. Did he have one that she could wear around her neck like jewelry?

This time they went to Lucky7 Burgers, and sat across from the Revlon counter. They watched boys having their hair layered by Revlon’s natural beauty specialists.

Dara told her more about himself. His father had died in the wars. His family now lived in the country. Sith’s Coca-Cola suddenly tasted of anti-malarial drugs.

“But . . . you don’t want to live in the country,” she said.

“No. I have to live in Phnom Penh to make money. But my folks are good country people. Modest.” He smiled, embarrassed.

They’ll have hens and a cousin who shimmies up coconut trees. There will be trees all around but no shops anywhere. The earth will smell.

Sith couldn’t finish her drink. She sighed and smiled and said abruptly, “I’m sorry. It’s been cool. But I have to go.” She slunk sideways out of her seat as slowly as molasses.

Walking back into the jewellery rotunda with nothing to do, she realised that Dara would think she didn’t like him.

And that made the lower part of her eyes sting.

She went back the next day and didn’t even pretend to buy a mobile phone. She told Dara that she’d left so suddenly the day before because she’d remembered a hair appointment.

He said that he could see she took a lot of trouble with her hair. Then he asked her out for a movie that night.

Sith spent all day shopping in K-Four.

They met at six. Dara was so considerate that he didn’t even suggest the horror movie. He said he wanted to see Buffalo Girl Hiding, a movie about a country girl who lives on a farm. Sith said with great feeling that she would prefer the horror movie.

The cinema on the top floor opened out directly onto the roof of Soriya. Graffiti had been scratched into the green railings. Why would people want to ruin something new and beautiful? Sith put her arm through Dara’s and knew that they were now boyfriend and girlfriend.

“Finally,” he said.

“Finally what?”

“You’ve done something.”

They leaned on the railings and looked out over other people’s apartments. West toward the river was a building with one huge roof terrace. Women met there to gossip. Children were playing toss-the-sandal. From this distance, Sith was enchanted.

“I just love watching the children.”

The movie, from Thailand, was about a woman whose face turns blue and spotty and who eats men. The blue woman was yucky, but not as scary as all the badly dubbed voices. The characters sounded possessed. It was though Thai people had been taken over by the spirits of dead Cambodians.

Whenever Sith got scared, she chuckled.

So she sat chuckling with terror. Dara thought she was laughing at a dumb movie and found such intelligence charming. He started to chuckle too. Sith thought he was as frightened as she was. Together in the dark, they took each other’s hands.

Outside afterward, the air hung hot even in the dark and 142nd Street smelled of drains. Sith stood on tiptoe to avoid the oily deposits and cast-off fishbones.

Dara said, “I will drive you home.”

“My driver can take us,” said Sith, flipping open her Kermit-the-Frog mobile.

Her black Mercedes Benz edged to a halt, crunching old plastic bottles in the gutter. The seats were upholstered with tan leather and the driver was armed.

Dara’s jaw dropped. “Who . . . who is your father?”

“He’s dead.”

Dara shook his head. “Who was he?”

Normally Sith used her mother’s family name, but that would not answer this question. Flustered, she tried to think of someone who could be her father. She knew of nobody the right age. She remembered something about a politician who had died. His name came to her and she said it in panic. “My father was Kol Vireakboth.” Had she got the name right? “Please don’t tell anyone.”

Dara covered his eyes. “We – my family, my father – we fought for the KPLA.”

Sith had to stop herself asking what the KPLA was.

Kol Vireakboth had led a faction in the civil wars. It fought against the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the King, and corruption. It wanted a new way for Cambodia. Kol Vireakboth was a Cambodian leader who had never told a lie and or accepted a bribe.

Remember that this is an untrue story.

Dara started to back away from the car. “I don’t think we should be doing this. I’m just a villager, really.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

His eyes closed. “I would expect nothing less from the daughter of Kol Vireakboth.”

Oh for gosh sake, she just picked the man’s name out of the air, she didn’t need more problems. “Please!” she said.

Dara sighed. “Okay. I said I would see you home safely. I will.” Inside the Mercedes, he stroked the tan leather.

When they arrived, he craned his neck to look up at the building. “Which floor are you on?”

“All of them.”

Colour drained from his face.

“My driver will take you back,” she said to Dara. As the car pulled away, she stood outside the closed garage shutters, waving forlornly.

Then Sith panicked. Who was Kol Vireakboth? She went online and Googled. She had to read about the wars. Her skin started to creep. All those different factions swam in her head: ANS, NADK, KPR, and KPNLF. The very names seemed to come at her spoken by forgotten voices.

Soon she had all she could stand. She printed out Vireakboth’s picture and decided to have it framed. In case Dara visited.

Kol Vireakboth had a round face and a fatherly smile. His eyes seemed to slant upward toward his nose, looking full of kindly insight. He’d been killed by a car bomb.

All that night, Sith heard whispering.

In the morning, there was another picture of someone else in the tray of her printer.

A long-faced, buck-toothed woman stared out at her in black and white. Sith noted the victim’s fashion lapses. The woman’s hair was a mess, all frizzy. She should have had it straightened and put in some nice highlights. The woman’s eyes drilled into her.

“Can’t touch me,” said Sith. She left the photo in the tray. She went to see Dara, right away, no breakfast.

His eyes were circled with dark flesh and his blue Hello trousers and shirt were not properly ironed.

“Buy the whole shop,” Dara said, looking deranged. “The guys in K-Four just told me some girl in blue jeans walked in yesterday and bought two home theatres. One for the salon, she said, and one for the roof terrace. She paid for both of them in full and had them delivered to the far end of Monivong.”

Sith sighed. “I’m sending one back.” She hoped that sounded abstemious. “It looked too metallic against my curtains.”

Pause.

“She also bought an Aido robot dog for fifteen hundred dollars.”

Sith would have preferred that Dara did not know about the dog. It was just a silly toy; it hadn’t occurred to her that it might cost that much until she saw the bill. “They should not tell everyone about their customers’ business or soon they will have no customers.”

Dara was looking at her as if thinking: This is not just a nice sweet girl.

“I had fun last night,” Sith said in a voice as thin as high clouds.

“So did I.”

“We don’t have to tell anyone about my family. Do we?” Sith was seriously scared of losing him.

“No. But Sith, it’s stupid. Your family, my family, we are not equals.”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“You lied to me. Your family is not dead. You have famous uncles.”

She did indeed – Uncle Ieng Sary, Uncle Khieu Samphan, Uncle Ta Mok. All the Pol Pot clique had been called her uncles.

“I didn’t know them that well,” she said. That was true, too.

What would she do if she couldn’t shop in Soriya Market anymore? What would she do without Dara?

She begged. “I am not a strong person. Sometimes I think I am not a person at all. I’m just a space.”

Dara looked suddenly mean. “You’re just a credit card.” Then his face fell. “I’m sorry. That was an unkind thing to say. You are very young for your age and I’m older than you and I should have treated you with more care.”

Sith was desperate. “All my money would be very nice.”

“I’m not for sale.”

He worked in a shop and would be sending money home to a fatherless family; of course he was for sale!

Sith had a small heart, but a big head for thinking. She knew that she had to do this delicately, like picking a flower, or she would spoil the bloom. “Let’s . . . let’s just go see a movie?”

After all, she was beautiful and well brought up and she knew her eyes were big and round. Her tiny heart was aching.

This time they saw Turn Teav, a remake of an old movie from the 1960s. If movies were not nightmares about ghosts, then they tried to preserve the past. When, thought Sith, will they make a movie about Cambodia’s future? Turn Teav was based on a classic tale of a young monk who falls in love with a properly brought up girl but her mother opposes the match. They commit suicide at the end, bringing a curse on their village. Sith sat through it stony-faced. I am not going to be a dead heroine in a romance.

Dara offered to drive her home again and that’s when Sith found out that he drove a Honda Dream. He proudly presented to her the gleaming motorcycle of fast young men. Sith felt backed into a corner. She’d already offered to buy him. Showing off her car again might humiliate him.

So she broke rule number seven.

Dara hid her bag in the back and they went soaring down Monivong Boulevard at night, past homeless people, prostitutes, and chefs staggering home after work. It was late in the year, but it started to rain.

Sith loved it, the cool air brushing against her face, the cooler rain clinging to her eyelashes.

She remembered being five years old in the forest and dancing in the monsoon. She encircled Dara’s waist to stay on the bike and suddenly found her cheek was pressed up against his back. She giggled in fear, not of the rain, but of what she felt.

He dropped her off at home. Inside, everything was dark except for the flickering green light on her printer. In the tray were two new photographs. One was of a child, a little boy, holding up a school prize certificate. The other was a tough, wise-looking old man, with a string of muscle down either side of his ironic, bitter smile. They looked directly at her.

They know who I am.

As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, she heard someone sobbing, far away, as if the sound came from next door. She touched the walls of the staircase. They shivered slightly, constricting in time to the cries.

In her bedroom she extracted one of her many iPods from the tangle of wires and listened to System of a Down, as loud as she could. It helped her sleep. The sound of nu-metal guitars seemed to come roaring out of her own heart.

She was woken up in the sun-drenched morning by the sound of her doorbell many floors down. She heard the housekeeper Jorani call and the door open. Sith hesitated over choice of jeans and top. By the time she got downstairs she found the driver and the housemaid joking with Dara, giving him tea.

Like the sunshine, Dara seemed to disperse ghosts.

“Hi,” he said. “It’s my day off. I thought we could go on a motorcycle ride to the country.”

But not to the country. Couldn’t they just spend the day in Soriya? No, said Dara, there’s lots of other places to see in Phnom Penh.

He drove her, twisting through back streets. How did the city get so poor? How did it get so dirty?

They went to a new and modern shop for CDs that was run by a record label. Dara knew all the cool new music, most of it influenced by Khmer-Americans returning from Long Beach and Compton: Sdey, Phnom Penh Bad Boys, Khmer Kid.

Sith bought twenty CDs.

They went to the National Museum and saw the beautiful Buddha-like head of King Jayavarman VII. Dara without thinking ducked and held up his hands in prayer. They had dinner in a French restaurant with candles and wine, and it was just like in a karaoke video, a boy, a girl, and her money all going out together. They saw the show at Sovanna Phum, and there was a wonderful dance piece with sampled 1940s music from an old French movie, with traditional Khmer choreography.

Sith went home, her heart singing, Dara, Dara, Dara.

In the bedroom, a mobile phone began to ring, over and over. CALL I said the screen, but gave no name or number, so the person was not on Sith’s list of contacts.

She turned off the phone. It kept ringing. That’s when she knew for certain.

She hid the phone in a pillow in the spare bedroom and put another pillow on top of it and then closed the door.

All forty-two of her mobile phones started to ring. They rang from inside closets, or from the bathroom where she had forgotten them. They rang from the roof terrace and even from inside a shoe under her bed.

“I am a very stubborn girl!” she shouted at the spirits. “You do not scare me.”

She turned up her iPod and finally slept.

As soon as the sun was up, she roused her driver, slumped deep in his hammock.

“Come on, we’re going to Soriya Market,” she said.

The driver looked up at her dazed, then remembered to smile and lower his head in respect.

His face fell when she showed up in the garage with all forty-two of her mobile phones in one black bag.

It was too early for Soriya Market to open. They drove in circles with sunrise blazing directly into their eyes. On the streets, men pushed carts like beasts of burden, or carried cascades of belts into the old Central Market. The old market was domed, art deco, the colour of vomit, French. Sith never shopped there.

“Maybe you should go visit your Mom,” said the driver. “You know, she loves you. Families are there for when you are in trouble.”

Sith’s mother lived in Thailand and they never spoke. Her mother’s family kept asking for favours: money, introductions, or help with getting a job. Sith didn’t speak to them any longer.

“My family is only trouble.”

The driver shut up and drove.

Finally Soriya opened. Sith went straight to Dara’s shop and dumped all the phones on the blue countertop. “Can you take these back?”

“We only do exchanges. I can give a new phone for an old one.” Dara looked thoughtful. “Don’t worry. Leave them here with me, I’ll go sell them to a guy in the old market, and give you your money tomorrow.” He smiled in approval. “This is very sensible.”

He passed one phone back, the one with video and email. “This is the best one, keep this.”

Dara was so competent. Sith wanted to sink down onto him like a pillow and stay there. She sat in the shop all day, watching him work. One of the guys from the games shop upstairs asked, “Who is this beautiful girl?”

Dara answered proudly, “My girlfriend.”

Dara drove her back on the Dream and at the door to her house, he chuckled. “I don’t want to go.” She pressed a finger against his naughty lips, and smiled and spun back inside from happiness.

She was in the ground-floor garage. She heard something like a rat scuttle. In her bag, the telephone rang. Who were these people to importune her, even if they were dead? She wrenched the mobile phone out of her bag and pushed the green button and put the phone to her ear. She waited. There was a sound like wind.

A child spoke to her, his voice clogged as if he was crying. “They tied my thumbs together.”

Sith demanded. “How did you get my number?”

“I’m all alone!”

“Then ring somebody else. Someone in your family.”

“All my family are dead. I don’t know where I am. My name is . . .”

Sith clicked the phone off. She opened the trunk of the car and

tossed the phone inside it. Being telephoned by ghosts was so . . . unmodern. How could Cambodia become a number one country if its cell phone network was haunted?

She stormed up into the salon. On top of a table, the $1500, no-mess dog stared at her from out of his packaging. Sith clumped up the stairs onto the roof terrace to sleep as far away as she could from everything in the house.

She woke up in the dark, to hear thumping from downstairs.

The sound was metallic and hollow, as if someone were locked in the car. Sith turned on her iPod. Something was making the sound of the music skip. She fought the tangle of wires, and wrenched out another player, a Xen, but it too skipped, burping the sound of speaking voices into the middle of the music.

Had she heard a ripping sound? She pulled out the earphones, and heard something climbing the stairs.

A sound of light, uneven lolloping. She thought of crippled children. Frost settled over her like a heavy blanket and she could not move.

The robot dog came whirring up onto the terrace. It paused at the top of the stairs, its camera nose pointing at her to see, its useless eyes glowing cherry red.

The robot dog said in a warm, friendly voice, “My name is Phalla. I tried to buy my sister medicine and they killed me for it.”

Sith tried to say, “Go away,” but her throat wouldn’t open.

The dog tilted its head. “No one even knows I’m dead. What will you do for all the people who are not mourned?”

Laughter blurted out of her, and Sith saw it rise up as cold vapour into the air.

“We have no one to invite us to the feast,” said the dog.

Sith giggled in terror. “Nothing. I can do nothing!” she said, shaking her head.

“You laugh?” The dog gathered itself and jumped up into the hammock with her. It turned and lifted up its clear plastic tail and laid a genuine turd alongside Sith. Short brown hair was wound up in it, a scalp actually, and a single flat white human tooth smiled out of it.

Sith squawked and overturned both herself and the dog out of the hammock and onto the floor. The dog pushed its nose up against hers and began to sing an old-fashioned children’s song about birds.

Something heavy huffed its way up the stairwell toward her. Sith shivered with cold on the floor and could not move. The dog went on singing in a high, sweet voice. A large shadow loomed out over the top of the staircase, and Sith gargled, swallowing laughter, trying to speak.

“There was thumping in the car and no one in it,” said the driver.

Sith sagged toward the floor with relief. “The ghosts,” she said. “They’re back.” She thrust herself to her feet. “We’re getting out now. Ring the Hilton. Find out if they have rooms.”

She kicked the toy dog down the stairs ahead of her. “We’re moving now!”

Together they all loaded the car, shaking. Once again, the house was left to ghosts. As they drove, the mobile phone rang over and over inside the trunk.

The new Hilton (which does not exist) rose up by the river across from the Department for Cults and Religious Affairs. Tall and marbled and pristine, it had crystal chandeliers and fountains, and wood and brass handles in the elevators.

In the middle of the night only the Bridal Suite was still available, but it had an extra parental chamber where the driver and his wife could sleep. High on the twenty-first floor, the night sparkled with lights and everything was hushed, as far away from Cambodia as it was possible to get.

Things were quiet after that, for a while.

Every day she and Dara went to movies, or went to a restaurant. They went shopping. She slipped him money and he bought himself a beautiful suit. He said, over a hamburger at Lucky7, “I’ve told my mother that I’ve met a girl.”

Sith smiled and thought: and I bet you told her that I’m rich.

“I’ve decided to live in the Hilton,” she told him.

Maybe we could live in the Hilton. A pretty smile could hint at that.

The rainy season ended. The last of the monsoons rose up dark grey with a froth of white cloud on top, looking exactly like a giant wave about to break.

Dry cooler air arrived.

After work was over Dara convinced her to go for a walk along the river in front of the Royal Palace. He went to the men’s room to change into a new luxury suit and Sith thought: he’s beginning to imagine life with all that money.

As they walked along the river, exposed to all those people, Sith shook inside. There were teenage boys everywhere. Some of them were in rags, which was reassuring, but some of them were very well dressed indeed, the sons of Impunity who could do anything. Sith swerved suddenly to avoid even seeing them. But Dara in his new beige suit looked like one of them, and the generals’ sons nodded to him with quizzical eyebrows, perhaps wondering who he was.

In front of the palace, a pavilion reached out over the water. Next to it a traditional orchestra bashed and wailed out something old fashioned. Hundreds of people crowded around a tiny wat. Dara shook Sith’s wrist and they stood up to see.

People held up bundles of lotus flowers and incense in prayer. They threw the bundles into the wat. Monks immediately shovelled the joss sticks and flowers out of the back.

Behind the wat, children wearing T-shirts and shorts black with filth rootled through the dead flowers, the smouldering incense, and old coconut shells.

Sith asked, “Why do they do that?”

“You are so innocent!” chuckled Dara and shook his head. The evening was blue and gold. Sith had time to think that she did not want to go back to a hotel and that the only place she really felt happy was next to Dara. All around that thought was something dark and tangled.

Dara suggested with affection that they should get married.

It was as if Sith had her answer ready. “No, absolutely not,” she said at once. “How can you ask that? There is not even anyone for you to ask! Have you spoken to your family about me? Has your family made any checks about my background?”

Which was what she really wanted to know.

Dara shook his head. “I have explained that you are an orphan, but they are not concerned with that. We are modest people. They will be happy if I am happy.”

“Of course they won’t be! Of course they will need to do checks.”

Sith scowled. She saw her way to sudden advantage. “At least they must consult fortunetellers. They are not fools. I can help them. Ask them the names of the fortunetellers they trust.”

Dara smiled shyly. “We have no money.”

“I will give them money and you can tell them that you pay.”

Dara’s eyes searched her face. “I don’t want that.”

“How will we know if it is a good marriage? And your poor mother, how can you ask her to make a decision like this without information? So. You ask your family for the names of good professionals they trust, and I will pay them, and I will go to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s own personal fortuneteller, and we can compare results.”

Thus she established again both her propriety and her status.

In an old romance, the parents would not approve of the match and the fortuneteller would say that the marriage was ill-omened. Sith left nothing to romance.

She offered the family’s fortunetellers whatever they wanted – a car, a farm – and in return demanded a written copy of their judgment. All of them agreed that the portents for the marriage were especially auspicious.

Then she secured an appointment with the Prime Minister’s fortuneteller.

Hun Sen’s Kru Taey was a lady in a black business suit. She had long fingernails like talons, but they were perfectly manicured and frosted white.

She was the kind of fortuneteller who is possessed by someone else’s spirit. She sat at a desk and looked at Sith as unblinking as a fish, both her hands steepled together. After the most basic of hellos, she said. “Dollars only. Twenty-five thousand. I need to buy my son an apartment.”

“That’s a very high fee,” said Sith.

“It’s not a fee. It is a consideration for giving you the answer you want. My fee is another twenty-five thousand dollars.”

They negotiated. Sith liked the Kru Taey’s manner. It confirmed everything Sith believed about life.

The fee was reduced somewhat but not the consideration.

“Payment upfront now,” the Kru Taey said. She wouldn’t take a check. Like only the very best restaurants she accepted foreign credit cards. Sith’s Swiss card worked immediately. It had unlimited credit in case she had to leave the country in a hurry.

The Kru Taey said, “I will tell the boy’s family that the marriage will be particularly fortunate.”

Sith realised that she had not yet said anything about a boy, his family, or a marriage.

The Kru Taey smiled. “I know you are not interested in your real fortune. But to be kind, I will tell you unpaid that this marriage really is particularly well favoured. All the other fortunetellers would have said the same thing without being bribed.”

The Kru Taey’s eyes glinted in the most unpleasant way. “So you needn’t have bought them farms or paid me an extra twenty-five thousand dollars.”

She looked down at her perfect fingernails. “You will be very happy indeed. But not before your entire life is overturned.”

The back of Sith’s arms prickled as if from cold. She should have been angry but she could feel herself smiling. Why?

And why waste politeness on the old witch? Sith turned to go without saying good-bye.

“Oh, and about your other problem,” said the woman.

Sith turned back and waited.

“Enemies,” said the Km Taey, “can turn out to be friends.”

Sith sighed. “What are you talking about?”

The Kru Taey’s smile was a wide as a tiger-trap. “The million people your father killed.”

Sith went hard. “Not a million,” she said. “Somewhere between two hundred and fifty and five hundred thousand.”

“Enough,” smiled the Kru Taey. “My father was one of them.” She smiled for a moment longer. “I will be sure to tell the Prime Minister that you visited me.”

Sith snorted as if in scorn. “I will tell him myself.”

But she ran back to her car.

That night, Sith looked down on all the lights like diamonds. She settled onto the giant mattress and turned on her iPod.

Someone started to yell at her. She pulled out the earpieces and jumped to the window. It wouldn’t open. She shook it and wrenched its frame until it reluctantly slid an inch and she threw the iPod out of the twenty-first-floor window.

She woke up late the next morning, to hear the sound of the TV. She opened up the double doors into the salon and saw Jorani, pressed against the wall.

“The TV . . . ,” Jorani said, her eyes wide with terror.

The driver waited by his packed bags. He stood up, looking as mournful as a bloodhound.

On the widescreen TV there was what looked like a pop music karaoke video. Except that the music was very old fashioned. Why would a pop video show a starving man eating raw maize in a field? He glanced over his shoulder in terror as he ate. The glowing singalong words were the song that the dog had sung at the top of the stairs. The starving man looked up at Sith and corn mash rolled out of his mouth.

“It’s all like that,” said the driver. “I unplugged the set, but it kept playing on every channel.” He sompiahed but looked miserable. “My wife wants to leave.”

Sith felt shame. It was miserable and dirty, being infested with ghosts. Of course they would want to go.

“It’s okay. I can take taxis,” she said.

The driver nodded, and went into the next room and whispered to his wife. With little scurrying sounds, they gathered up their things. They sompiahed, and apologised.

The door clicked almost silently behind them.

It will always be like this, thought Sith. Wherever I go. It would be like this with Dara.

The hotel telephone started to ring. Sith left it ringing. She covered the TV with a blanket, but the terrible, tinny old music kept wheedling and rattling its way out at her, and she sat on the edge of her bed, staring into space.

I’ll have to leave Cambodia.

At the market, Dara looked even more cheerful than usual. The fortunetellers had pronounced the marriage as very favourable. His mother had invited Sith home for the Pchum Ben festival.

“We can take the bus tomorrow,” he said.

“Does it smell? All those people in one place?”

“It smells of air freshener. Then we take a taxi, and then you will have to walk up the track.” Dara suddenly doubled up in laughter. “Oh, it will be good for you.”

“Will there be dirt?”

“Everywhere! Oh, your dirty Nikes will earn you much merit!”

But at least, thought Sith, there will be no TV or phones.

Two days later, Sith was walking down a dirt track, ducking tree branches. Dust billowed all over her shoes. Dara walked behind her, chuckling, which meant she thought he was scared too.

She heard a strange rattling sound. “What’s that noise?”

“It’s a goat,” he said. “My mother bought it for me in April as a present.”

A goat. How could they be any more rural? Sith had never seen a goat. She never even imagined that she would.

Dara explained. “I sell them to the Muslims. It is Agricultural Diversification.”

There were trees everywhere, shadows crawling across the ground like snakes. Sith felt sick. One mosquito, she promised herself, just one and I will squeal and run away.

The house was tiny, on thin twisting stilts. She had pictured a big fine country house standing high over the ground on concrete pillars with a sunburst carving in the gable. The kitchen was a hut that sat directly on the ground, no stilts, and it was made of palm-leaf panels and there was no electricity. The strip light in the ceiling was attached to a car battery and they kept a live fire on top of the concrete table to cook. Everything smelled of burnt fish.

Sith loved it.

Inside the hut, the smoke from the fires kept the mosquitoes away. Dara’s mother, Mrs Non Kunthea, greeted her with a smile. That triggered a respectful sompiah from Sith, the prayer-like gesture leaping out of her unbidden. On the platform table was a plastic sack full of dried prawns.

Without thinking, Sith sat on the table and began to pull the salty prawns out of their shells.

Why am I doing this?

Because it’s what I did at home.

Sith suddenly remembered the enclosure in the forest, a circular fenced area. Daddy had slept in one house, and the women in another. Sith would talk to the cooks. For something to do, she would chop vegetables or shell prawns. Then Daddy would come to eat and he’d sit on the platform table and she, little Sith, would sit between his knees.

Dara’s older brother Yuth came back for lunch. He was potbellied and drove a taxi for a living, and he moved in hard jabs like an angry old man. He reached too far for the rice and Sith could smell his armpits.

“You see how we live,” Yuth said to Sith. “This is what we get for having the wrong patron. Sihanouk thought we were anti-monarchist. To Hun Sen, we were the enemy. Remember the Work for Money program?”

No.

“They didn’t give any of those jobs to us. We might as well have been the Khmer Rouge!”

The past, thought Sith, why don’t they just let it go? Why do they keep boasting about their old wars?

Mrs Non Kunthea chuckled with affection. “My eldest son was born angry,” she said. “His slogan is ‘ten years is not too late for revenge.’ ”

Yuth started up again. “They treat that old monster Pol Pot better than they treat us. But then, he was an important person. If you go to his stupa in Anlong Veng, you will see that people leave offerings! They ask him for lottery numbers!”

He crumpled his green, soft, old-fashioned hat back onto his head and said, “Nice to meet you, Sith. Dara, she’s too high class for the likes of you.” But he grinned as he said it. He left, swirling disruption in his wake.

The dishes were gathered. Again without thinking, Sith swept up the plastic tub and carried it to the blackened branches. They rested over puddles where the washing-up water drained.

“You shouldn’t work,” said Dara’s mother. “You are a guest.”

“I grew up in a refugee camp,” said Sith. After all, it was true.

Dara looked at her with a mix of love, pride, and gratitude for the good fortune of a rich wife who works.

And that was the best Sith could hope for. This family would be fine for her.

In the late afternoon, all four brothers came with their wives for the end of Pchum Ben, when the ghosts of the dead can wander the Earth. People scatter rice on the temple floors to feed their families. Some ghosts have small mouths so special rice is used.

Sith never took part in Pchum Ben. How could she go the temple and scatter rice for Pol Pot?

The family settled in the kitchen chatting and joking, and it all passed in a blur for Sith. Everyone else had family they could honour. To Sith’s surprise one of the uncles suggested that people should write names of the deceased and burn them, to transfer merit. It was nothing to do with Pchum Ben, but a lovely idea, so all the family wrote down names.

Sith sat with her hands jammed under her arms.

Dara’s mother asked, “Isn’t there a name you want to write, Sith?”

“No,” said Sith in a tiny voice. How could she write the name Pol Pot? He was surely roaming the world let loose from hell. “There is no one.”

Dara rubbed her hand. “Yes there is, Sith. A very special name.”

“No, there’s not.”

Dara thought she didn’t want them to know her father was Kol Vireakboth. He leant forward and whispered. “I promise. No one will see it.”

Sith’s breath shook. She took the paper and started to cry.

“Oh,” said Dara’s mother, stricken with sympathy. “Everyone in this country has a tragedy.”

Sith wrote the name Kol Vireakboth.

Dara kept the paper folded and caught Sith’s eyes. You see? he seemed to say. I have kept your secret safe. The paper burned.

Thunder slapped a clear sky about the face. It had been sunny, but now as suddenly as a curtain dropped down over a doorway, rain fell. A wind came from nowhere, tearing away a flap of palm-leaf wall, as if forcing entrance in a fury.

The family whooped and laughed and let the rain drench their shoulders as they stood up to push the wall back down, to keep out the rain.

But Sith knew. Her father’s enemy was in the kitchen.

The rain passed; the sun came out. The family chuckled and sat back down around or on the table. They lowered dishes of food and ate, making parcels of rice and fish with their fingers. Sith sat rigidly erect, waiting for misfortune.

What would the spirit of Kol Vireakboth do to Pol Pot’s daughter? Would he overturn the table, soiling her with food? Would he send mosquitoes to bite and make her sick? Would he suck away all her good fortune, leaving the marriage blighted, her new family estranged?

Or would a kindly spirit simply wish that the children of all Cambodians could escape, escape the past?

Suddenly, Sith felt at peace. The sunlight and shadows looked new to her and her senses started to work in magic ways.

She smelled a perfume of emotion, sweet and bracing at the same time. The music from a neighbour’s cassette player touched her arm gently. Words took the form of sunlight on her skin.

No one is evil, the sunlight said. But they can be false.

False, how? Sith asked without speaking, genuinely baffled.

The sunlight smiled with an old man’s stained teeth. You know very well how.

All the air swelled with the scent of the food, savoring it. The trees sighed with satisfaction.

Life is true. Sith saw steam from the rice curl up into the branches. Death is false.

The sunlight stood up to go. It whispered. Tell him.

The world faded back to its old self.

That night in a hammock in a room with the other women, Sith suddenly sat bolt upright. Clarity would not let her sleep. She saw that there was no way ahead. She couldn’t marry Dara. How could she ask him to marry someone who was harassed by one million dead? How could she explain I am haunted because I am Pol Pot’s daughter and I have lied about everything?

The dead would not let her marry; the dead would not let her have joy. So who could Pol Pot’s daughter pray to? Where could she go for wisdom?

Loak kru Kol Vireakboth, she said under her breath. Please show me a way ahead.

The darkness was sterner than the sunlight.

To be as false as you are, it said, you first have to lie to yourself.

What lies had Sith told? She knew the facts. Her father had been the head of a government that tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of people and starved the nation through mismanagement. I know the truth.

I just never think about it.

I’ve never faced it.

Well, the truth is as dark as I am, and you live in me, the darkness.

She had read books – well, the first chapter of books – and then dropped them as if her fingers were scalded. There was no truth for her in books. The truth ahead of her would be loneliness, dreary adulthood, and penance.

Grow up.

The palm-leaf panels stirred like waiting ghosts.

All through the long bus ride back, she said nothing. Dara went silent too, and hung his head.

In the huge and empty hotel suite, darkness awaited her. She’d had the phone and the TV removed; her footsteps sounded hollow. Jorani and the driver had been her only friends.

The next day she did not go to Soriya Market. She went instead to the torture museum of Tuol Sleng.

A cadre of young motoboys waited outside the hotel in baseball caps and bling. Instead, Sith hailed a sweet-faced older motoboy with a battered, rusty bike.

As they drove she asked him about his family. He lived alone and had no one except for his mother in Kompong Thom.

Outside the gates of Tuol Sleng he said, “This was my old school.”

In one wing there were rows of rooms with one iron bed in each with handcuffs and stains on the floor. Photos on the wall showed twisted bodies chained to those same beds as they were found on the day of liberation. In one photograph, a chair was overturned as if in a hurry.

Sith stepped outside and looked instead at a beautiful house over the wall across the street. It was a high white house like her own, with pillars and a roof terrace and bougainvillaea, a modern daughter’s house. What do they think when they look out from that roof terrace? How can they live here?

The grass was tended and full of hopping birds. People were painting the shutters of the prison a fresh blue-grey.

In the middle wing, the rooms were galleries of photographed faces. They stared out at her like the faces from her printer. Were some of them the same?

“Who are they?” she found herself asking a Cambodian visitor.

“Their own,” the woman replied. “This is where they sent Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen out of favour. They would not waste such torture on ordinary Cambodians.”

Some of the faces were young and beautiful men. Some were children or dignified old women.

The Cambodian lady kept pace with her. Company? Did she guess who Sith was? “They couldn’t simply beat party cadres to death. They sent them and their entire families here. The children too, the grandmothers. They had different days of the week for killing children and wives.”

An innocent looking man smiled out at the camera as sweetly as her aged motoboy, directly into the camera of his torturers. He seemed to expect kindness from them, and decency. Comrades, he seemed to say.

The face in the photograph moved. It smiled more broadly and was about to speak.

Sith eyes darted away. The next face sucked all her breath away.

It was not a stranger. It was Dara, her Dara, in black shirt and black cap. She gasped and looked back at the lady. Her pinched and solemn face nodded up and down. Was she a ghost too?

Sith reeled outside and hid her face and didn’t know if she could go on standing. Tears slid down her face and she wanted to be sick and she turned her back so no one could see.

Then she walked to the motoboy, sitting in a shelter. In complete silence, she got on his bike feeling angry at the place, angry at the government for preserving it, angry at the foreigners who visited it like a tourist attraction, angry at everything.

That is not who we are! That is not what I am!

The motoboy slipped onto his bike, and Sith asked him: What happened to your family? It was a cruel question. He had to smile and look cheerful. His father had run a small shop; they went out into the country and never came back. He lived with his brother in a jeum-room, a refugee camp in Thailand. They came back to fight the Vietnamese and his brother was killed.

She was going to tell the motoboy, drive me back to the Hilton, but she felt ashamed. Of what? Just how far was she going to run?

She asked him to take her to the old house on Monivong Boulevard.

As the motorcycle wove through back streets, dodging red-earth ruts and pedestrians, she felt rage at her father. How dare he involve her in something like that! Sith had lived a small life and had no measure of things so she thought: it’s as if someone tinted my hair and it all fell out. It’s as if someone pierced my ears and they got infected and my whole ear rotted away.

She remembered that she had never felt any compassion for her father. She had been twelve years old when he stood trial, old and sick and making such a show of leaning on his stick. Everything he did was a show. She remembered rolling her eyes in constant embarrassment. Oh, he was fine in front of rooms full of adoring students. He could play the bong thom with them. They thought he was enlightened. He sounded good, using his false, soft and kindly little voice, as if he was dubbed. He had made Sith recite Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Rilke. He killed thousands for having foreign influences.

I don’t know what I did in a previous life to deserve you for a father. But you were not my father in a previous life and you won’t be my father in the next. I reject you utterly. I will never burn your name. You can wander hungry out of hell every year for all eternity. I will pray to keep you in hell.

I am not your daughter!

If you were false, I have to be true.

Her old house looked abandoned in the stark afternoon light, closed and innocent. At the doorstep she turned and thrust a fistful of dollars into the motoboy’s hand. She couldn’t think straight; she couldn’t even see straight, her vision blurred.

Back inside, she calmly put down her teddy-bear rucksack and walked upstairs to her office. Aido the robot dog whirred his way toward her. She had broken his back leg kicking him downstairs. He limped, whimpering like a dog, and lowered his head to have it stroked.

To her relief, there was only one picture waiting for her in the tray of the printer.

Kol Vireakboth looked out at her, middle-aged, handsome, worn, wise. Pity and kindness glowed in his eyes.

The land line began to ring.

“Youl prom,” she told the ghosts. Agreed.

She picked up the receiver and waited.

A man spoke. “My name was Yin Bora.” His voice bubbled up brokenly as if from underwater.

A light blinked in the printer. A photograph slid out quickly. A young student stared out at her looking happy at a family feast. He had a Beatle haircut and a striped shirt.

“That’s me,” said the voice on the phone. “I played football.”

Sith coughed. “What do you want me to do?”

“Write my name,” said the ghost.

“Please hold the line,” said Sith, in a hypnotised voice. She fumbled for a pen, and then wrote on the photograph Yin Bora, footballer. He looked so sweet and happy. “You have no one to mourn you,” she realised.

“None of us have anyone left alive to mourn us,” said the ghost.

Then there was a terrible sound down the telephone, as if a thousand voices moaned at once.

Sith involuntarily dropped the receiver into place. She listened to her heart thump and thought about what was needed. She fed the printer with the last of her paper. Immediately it began to roll out more photos, and the land line rang again.

She went outside and found the motoboy, waiting patiently for her. She asked him to go and buy two reams of copying paper. At the last moment she added pens and writing paper and matches. He bowed and smiled and bowed again, pleased to have found a patron.

She went back inside, and with just a tremor in her hand picked up the phone.

For the next half hour, she talked to the dead, and found photographs and wrote down names. A woman mourned her children. Sith found photos of them all, and united them, father, mother, three children, uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents, taping their pictures to her wall. The idea of uniting families appealed. She began to stick the other photos onto her wall.

Someone called from outside and there on her doorstep was the motoboy, balancing paper and pens. “I bought you some soup.” The broth came in neatly tied bags and was full of rice and prawns. She thanked him and paid him well and he beamed at her and bowed again and again.

All afternoon, the pictures kept coming. Darkness fell, the phone rang, the names were written, until Sith’s hand, which was unused to writing anything, ached.

The doorbell rang, and on the doorstep, the motoboy sompiahed. “Excuse me, Lady, it is very late. I am worried for you. Can I get you dinner?”

Sith had to smile. He sounded motherly in his concern. They are so good at building a relationship with you, until you cannot do without them. In the old days she would have sent him away with a few rude words. Now she sent him away with an order.

And wrote.

And when he came back, the aged motoboy looked so happy. “I bought you fruit as well, Lady,” he said, and added, shyly. “You do not need to pay me for that.”

Something seemed to bump under Sith, as if she was on a motorcycle, and she heard herself say, “Come inside. Have some food too.”

The motoboy sompiahed in gratitude and as soon as he entered, the phone stopped ringing.

They sat on the floor. He arched his neck and looked around at the walls.

“Are all these people your family?” he asked.

She whispered. “No. They’re ghosts who no one mourns.”

“Why do they come to you?” His mouth fell open in wonder.

“Because my father was Pol Pot,” said Sith, without thinking.

The motoboy sompiahed. “Ah.” He chewed and swallowed and arched his head back again. “That must be a terrible thing. Everybody hates you.”

Sith had noticed that wherever she sat in the room, the eyes in the photographs were directly on her. “I haven’t done anything,” said Sith.

“You’re doing something now,” said the motoboy. He nodded and stood up, sighing with satisfaction. Life was good with a full stomach and a patron. “If you need me, Lady, I will be outside.”

Photo after photo, name after name.

Youk Achariya: touring dancer

Proeung Chhay: school superintendent

Sar Kothida child, aged 7, died of “swelling disease”

Sar Makara, her mother, nurse

Nath Mittapheap, civil servant, from family of farmers

Chor Monirath: wife of award-winning engineer

Yin Sokunthea: Khmer Rouge commune leader

She looked at the faces and realised. Dara, I’m doing this for Dara.

The City around her went quiet and she became aware that it was now very late indeed. Perhaps she should just make sure the motoboy had gone home.

He was still waiting outside.

“It’s okay. You can go home. Where do you live?”

He waved cheerfully north. “Oh, on Monivong, like you.” He grinned at the absurdity of the comparison.

A new idea took sudden form. Sith said, “Tomorrow, can you come early, with a big feast? Fish and rice and greens and pork: curries and stir-fries and kebabs.” She paid him handsomely, and finally asked him his name. His name meant Golden.

“Good night, Sovann.”

For the rest of the night she worked quickly like an answering service. This is like a cleaning of the house before a festival, she thought. The voices of the dead became ordinary, familiar. Why are people afraid of the dead? The dead can’t hurt you. The dead want what you want: justice.

The wall of faces became a staircase and a garage and a kitchen of faces, all named. She had found Jorani’s coloured yarn, and linked family members into trees.

She wrote until the electric lights looked discoloured, like a headache. She asked the ghosts, “Please can I sleep now?” The phones fell silent and Sith slumped with relief onto the polished marble floor.

She woke up dazed, still on the marble floor. Sunlight flooded the room. The faces in the photographs no longer looked swollen and bruised. Their faces were not accusing or mournful. They smiled down on her. She was among friends.

With a whine, the printer started to print; the phone started to ring. Her doorbell chimed, and there was Sovann, white cardboard boxes piled up on the back of his motorcycle. He wore the same shirt as yesterday, a cheap blue copy of a Lacoste. A seam had parted under the arm. He only has one shirt, Sith realised. She imagined him washing it in a basin every night.

Sith and Sovann moved the big tables to the front windows. Sith took out her expensive tablecloths for the first time, and the bronze platters. The feast was laid out as if at New Year. Sovann had bought more paper and pens. He knew what they were for. “I can help, Lady.”

He was old enough to have lived in a country with schools, and he could write in a beautiful, old-fashioned hand. Together he and Sith spelled out the names of the dead and burned them.

“I want to write the names of my family too,” he said. He burnt them weeping.

The delicious vapours rose. The air was full of the sound of breathing in. Loose papers stirred with the breeze. The ash filled the basins, but even after working all day, Sith and the motoboy had only honoured half the names.

“Good night, Sovann,” she told him.

“You have transferred a lot of merit,” said Sovann, but only to be polite.

If I have any merit to transfer, thought Sith.

He left and the printers started, and the phone. She worked all night, and only stopped because the second ream of paper ran out.

The last picture printed was of Kol Vireakboth.

Dara, she promised herself. Dara next.

In the morning, she called him. “Can we meet at lunchtime for another walk by the river?”

Sith waited on top of the marble wall and watched an old man fish in the Tonlé Sap river and found that she loved her country. She loved its tough, smiling, uncomplaining people, who had never offered her harm, after all the harm her family had done them. Do you know you have the daughter of the monster sitting here among you?

Suddenly all Sith wanted was to be one of them. The monks in the pavilion, the white-shirted functionaries scurrying somewhere, the lazy bones dangling their legs, the young men who dress like American rappers and sold something dubious, drugs, or sex.

She saw Dara sauntering toward her. He wore his new shirt, and smiled at her but he didn’t look relaxed. It had been two days since they’d met. He knew something was wrong, that she had something to tell him. He had bought them lunch in a little cardboard box. Maybe for the last time, thought Sith.

They exchanged greetings, almost like cousins. He sat next to her and smiled and Sith giggled in terror at what she was about to do.

Dara asked, “What’s funny?”

She couldn’t stop giggling. “Nothing is funny. Nothing.” She sighed in order to stop and terror tickled her and she spurted out laughter again. “I lied to you. Kol Vireakboth is not my father. Another politician was my father. Someone you’ve heard of . . .”

The whole thing was so terrifying and absurd that the laughter squeezed her like a fist and she couldn’t talk. She laughed and wept at the same time. Dara stared.

“My father was Saloth Sar. That was his real name.” She couldn’t make herself say it. She could tell a motoboy, but not Dara? She forced herself onward. “My father was Pol Pot.”

Nothing happened.

Sitting next to her, Dara went completely still. People strolled past; boats bobbed on their moorings.

After a time Dara said, “I know what you are doing.”

That didn’t make sense. “Doing? What do you mean?”

Dara looked sour and angry. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” He sat, looking away from her. Sith’s laughter had finally shuddered to a halt. She sat peering at him, waiting. “I told you my family were modest,” he said quietly.

“Your family are lovely!” Sith exclaimed.

His jaw thrust out. “They had questions about you too, you know.”

“I don’t understand.”

He rolled his eyes. He looked back round at her. “There are easier ways to break up with someone.”

He jerked himself to his feet and strode away with swift determination, leaving her sitting on the wall.

Here on the riverfront, everyone was equal. The teenage boys lounged on the wall; poor mothers herded children; the foreigners walked briskly, trying to look as if they didn’t carry moneybelts. Three fat teenage girls nearly swerved into a cripple in a pedal chair and collapsed against each other with raucous laughter.

Sith did not know what to do. She could not move. Despair humbled her, made her hang her head.

I’ve lost him.

The sunlight seemed to settle next to her, washing up from its reflection on the wake of some passing boat.

No you haven’t.

The river water smelled of kindly concern. The sounds of traffic throbbed with forbearance.

Not yet.

There is no forgiveness in Cambodia. But there are continual miracles of compassion and acceptance.

Sith appreciated for just a moment the miracles. The motoboy buying her soup. She decided to trust herself to the miracles.

Sith talked to the sunlight without making a sound. Grandfather Vireakboth. Thank you. You have told me all I need to know.

Sith stood up and from nowhere, the motoboy was there. He drove her to the Hello Phone shop.

Dara would not look at her. He bustled back and forth behind the counter, though there was nothing for him to do. Sith talked to him like a customer. “I want to buy a mobile phone,” she said, but he would not answer. “There is someone I need to talk to.”

Another customer came in. She was a beautiful daughter too, and he served her, making a great show of being polite. He complimented her on her appearance. “Really, you look cool.” The girl looked pleased. Dara’s eyes darted in Sith’s direction.

Sith waited in the chair. This was home for her now. Dara ignored her. She picked up her phone and dialled his number. He put it to his ear and said, “Go home.”

“You are my home,” she said.

His thumb jabbed the C button.

She waited. Shadows lengthened.

“We’re closing,” he said, standing by the door without looking at her.

Shamefaced, Sith ducked away from him, through the door.

Outside Soriya, the motoboy played dice with his fellows. He stood up. “They say I am very lucky to have Pol Pot’s daughter as a client.”

There was no discretion in Cambodia, either. Everyone will know now, Sith realised.

At home, the piles of printed paper still waited for her. Sith ate the old, cold food. It tasted flat, all its savour sucked away. The phones began to ring. She fell asleep with the receiver propped against her ear.

The next day, Sith went back to Soriya with a box of the printed papers.

She dropped the box onto the blue plastic counter of Hello Phones.

“Because I am Pol Pot’s daughter,” she told Dara, holding out a sheaf of pictures toward him. “All the unmourned victims of my father are printing their pictures on my printer. Here. Look. These are the pictures of people who lost so many loved ones there is no one to remember them.”

She found her cheeks were shaking and that she could not hold the sheaf of paper. It tumbled from her hands, but she stood back, arms folded.

Dara, quiet and solemn, knelt and picked up the papers. He looked at some of the faces. Sith pushed a softly crumpled green card at him. Her family ID card.

He read it. Carefully, with the greatest respect, he put the photographs on the countertop along with the ID card.

“Go home, Sith,” he said, but not unkindly.

“I said,” she had begun to speak with vehemence but could not continue. “I told you. My home is where you are.”

“I believe you,” he said, looking at his feet.

“Then . . .” Sith had no words.

“It can never be, Sith,” he said. He gathered up the sheaf of photocopying paper. “What will you do with these?”

Something made her say, “What will you do with them?”

His face was crossed with puzzlement.

“It’s your country too. What will you do with them? Oh, I know, you’re such a poor boy from a poor family, who could expect anything from you? Well, you have your whole family and many people have no one. And you can buy new shirts and some people only have one.”

Dara held out both hands and laughed. “Sith?” You, Sith are accusing me of being selfish?

“You own them too.” Sith pointed to the papers, to the faces. “You think the dead don’t try to talk to you, too?”

Their eyes latched. She told him what he could do. “I think you should make an exhibition. I think Hello Phones should sponsor it. You tell them that. You tell them Pol Pot’s daughter wishes to make amends and has chosen them. Tell them the dead speak to me on their mobile phones.”

She spun on her heel and walked out. She left the photographs with him.

That night she and the motoboy had another feast and burned the last of the unmourned names. There were many thousands.

The next day she went back to Hello Phones.

“I lied about something else,” she told Dara. She took out all the reports from the fortunetellers. She told him what Hun Sen’s fortuneteller had told her. “The marriage is particularly well favoured.”

“Is that true?” He looked wistful.

“You should not believe anything I say. Not until I have earned your trust. Go consult the fortunetellers for yourself. This time you pay.”

His face went still and his eyes focused somewhere far beneath the floor. Then he looked up, directly into her eyes. “I will do that.”

For the first time in her life Sith wanted to laugh for something other than fear. She wanted to laugh for joy.

“Can we go to lunch at Lucky7?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

All the telephones in the shop, all of them, hundreds all at once began to sing.

A waterfall of trills and warbles and buzzes, snatches of old songs or latest chart hits. Dara stood dumbfounded. Finally he picked one up and held it to his ear.

“It’s for you,” he said and held out the phone for her.

There was no name or number on the screen.

Congratulations, dear daughter, said a warm kind voice.

“Who is this?” Sith asked. The options were severely limited.

Your new father, said Kol Vireakboth. The sound of wind. I adopt you.

A thousand thousand voices said at once, We adopt you.

In Cambodia, you share your house with ghosts in the way you share it with dust. You hear the dead shuffling alongside your own footsteps. You can sweep, but the sound does not go away.

On the Tra Bek end of Monivong there is a house whose owner has given it over to ghosts. You can try to close the front door. But the next day you will find it hanging open. Indeed you can try, as the neighbours did, to nail the door shut. It opens again.

By day, there is always a queue of five or six people wanting to go in, or hanging back, out of fear. Outside are offerings of lotus or coconuts with embedded josh sticks.

The walls and floors and ceilings are covered with photographs. The salon, the kitchen, the stairs, the office, the empty bedrooms, are covered with photographs of Chinese-Khmers at weddings, Khmer civil servants on picnics, Chams outside their mosques, Vietnamese holding up prize catches of fish; little boys going to school in shorts; cyclopousse drivers in front of their odd, old-fashioned pedalled vehicles; wives in stalls stirring soup. All of them are happy and joyful, and the background is Phnom Penh when it was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

All the photographs have names written on them in old-fashioned handwriting.

On the table is a printout of thousands of names on slips of paper. Next to the table are matches and basins of ash and water. The implication is plain. Burn the names and transfer merit to the unmourned dead.

Next to that is a small printed sign that says in English HELLO.

Every Pchum Ben, those names are delivered to temples throughout the city. Gold foil is pressed onto each slip of paper, and attached to it is a parcel of sticky rice. At 8:00 am food is delivered for the monks, steaming rice and fish, along with bolts of new cloth. At 10:00 a.m. more food is delivered, for the disabled and the poor.

And most mornings a beautiful daughter of Cambodia is seen walking beside the confluence of the Tonlé Sap and Mekong rivers. Like Cambodia, she plainly loves all things modern. She dresses in the latest fashion. Cambodian R&B whispers in her ear. She pauses in front of each new waterfront construction whether built by improvised scaffolding or erected with cranes. She buys noodles from the grumpy vendors with their tiny stoves. She carries a book or sits on the low marble wall to write letters and look at the boats, the monsoon clouds, and the dop-dops. She talks to the reflected sunlight on the river and calls it Father.

GLEN HIRSHBERG

Devil’s Smile

GLEN HIRSHBERG’S MOST RECENT collection, American Morons, was published by Earthling in 2006. The Two Sams, his first collection, won the International Horror Guild Award and was selected by Publishers Weekly and Locus as one of the best books of 2003.

Hirshberg is also the author of the novels The Snowman’s Children (published by Carroll & Graf in 2002) and Sisters of Baikal (forthcoming). With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a travelling ghost story performance troupe that tours the West Coast of the United States each October.

His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including multiple appearances in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Dark Terrors 6, The Dark, Inferno, Trampoline, Cemetery Dance, Summer Chills and Alone on the Darkside. He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and children.

“This story grew out of a delicious winter evening spent reading my children a book by Donald J. Sobol called True Sea Adventures,” Hirshberg recalls, “in which we discovered the astonishing story of Charles F. Tallman, his boat the Christina, and the blizzard of January 7th, 1866.

“But the whole piece coalesced during my visit to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which still feels grim and blubber-soaked and strange even before you stick your head in the Whaling Museum and see the wall of implements for carving up whales at sea – as terrifying and poignant in their shapes as the gynaecological instruments for working on ‘mutant women’ in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers – or the photographs of forests of baleen drying on the docks.”

“In hollows of the liquid hillsWhere the long Blue Ridges runThe flatter of no echo thrillsFor echo the seas have none;Nor aught that gives man back man’s strain –The hope of his heart, the dream in his brain.”

– Herman Melville

TURNING IN HIS SADDLE, Selkirk peered behind him through the flurrying snow, trying to determine which piece of debris had lamed his horse. All along what had been the carriage road, bits of driftwood, splintered sections of hull and harpoon handle, discarded household goods – pans, candlesticks, broken-backed books, empty lanterns – and at least one section of long, bleached-white jaw lay half-buried in the sand. The jaw still had baleen attached, and bits of blown snow had stuck in it, which made it look more recently alive than it should have.

Selkirk rubbed his tired eyes against the grey December morning and hunched deeper into his inadequate long coat as the wind whistled off the whitecaps and sliced between the dunes. The straw hat he wore more out of habit than hope of protection did nothing to warm him, and stray blond curls kept whipping across his eyes. Easing himself from the horse, Selkirk dropped to the sand.

He should have conducted his business here months ago. His surveying route for the still-fledgling United States Lighthouse Service had taken him in a crisscrossing loop from the tip of the Cape all the way up into Maine and back. He’d passed within fifty miles of Cape Roby Light and its singular keeper twice this fall, and both times had continued on. Why? Because Amalia had told him the keeper’s tale on the night he’d imagined she loved him? Or maybe he just hated coming back here even more than he thought he would. For all he knew, the keeper had long since moved on, dragging her memories behind her. She might even have died. So many did, around here. Setting his teeth against the wind, Selkirk wrapped his frozen fingers in his horse’s bridle and led her the last down-sloping mile and a half into Winsett.

Entering from the east, he saw a scatter of stone and clapboard homes and boarding houses hunched against the dunes, their windows dark. None of them looked familiar. Like so many of the little whaling communities he’d visited during his survey, the town he’d known had simply drained away into the burgeoning, bloody industry centers at New Bedford and Nantuckett.

Selkirk had spent one miserable fall and winter here fourteen years ago, sent by his drunken father to learn candle-making from his drunken uncle. He’d accepted the nightly open-fisted beatings without comment, skulking afterward down to the Blubber Pike tavern to watch the whalers: the Portuguese swearing loudly at each other and the negroes – so many Negroes, most of them recently freed, more than a few newly escaped – clinging in clumps to the shadowy back tables and stealing fearful glances at every passing face, as though they expected at any moment to be spirited away.

Of course, there’d been his cousin, Amalia, for all the good that had ever done him. She’d just turned eighteen at the time, two years his senior. Despite her blond hair and startling fullness, the Winsett whalers had already learned to steer clear, but for some reason, she’d liked Selkirk. At least, she’d liked needling him about his outsized ears, his floppy hair, the crack in his voice he could not outgrow. Whatever the reason, she’d lured him away from the pub on several occasions to stare at the moon and drink beside him. And once, in a driving sleet, she’d led him on a midnight walk to Cape Roby Point. There, lurking uncomfortably close but never touching him, standing on the rocks with her dark eyes cocked like rifle sites at the rain, she’d told him the lighthouse keeper’s story. At the end, without any explanation, she’d turned, opened her heavy coat and pulled him to her. He’d had no idea what she wanted him to do, and had wound up simply setting his ear against her slicked skin, all but tasting the water that rushed into the valley between her breasts, listening to her heart banging way down inside her.

After that, she’d stopped speaking to him entirely. He’d knocked on her door, chased her half out of the shop one morning and been stopped by a chop to the throat from his uncle, left notes he hoped she’d find peeking out from under the rug in the upstairs hallway. She’d responded to none of it, and hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye when he left. And Selkirk had steered clear of all women for more than a decade afterward, except for the very occasional company he paid for near the docks where he slung cargo, until the Lighthouse Service offered him an unexpected escape.

Now, half-dragging his horse down the empty main street, Selkirk found he couldn’t even remember which grim room the Blubber Pike had been. He passed no one. But at the western edge of the frozen, cracking main thoroughfare, less than a block from where his uncle had kept his establishment, he found a traveler’s stable and entered.

The barn was lit by banks of horseshoe-shaped wall sconces – apparently, local whale oil or no, candles remained in ready supply – and a coal fire glowed in the open iron stove at the rear of the barn. A dark-haired stable lad with a clam-shaped birthmark covering his left cheek and part of his forehead appeared from one of the stables in the back, tsked over Selkirk’s injured mount and said he’d send for the horse doctor as soon as he’d got the animal dried and warmed and fed.

“Still a horse doctor here?” Selkirk asked.

The boy nodded. He was almost as tall as Selkirk, and spoke with a Scottish burr. “Still good business. Got to keep the means of getting out healthy.”

“Not many staying in town anymore, then?”

“Just the dead ones. Lot of those.”

Selkirk paid the boy and thanked him, then wandered toward the stove and stood with his hands extended to the heat, which turned them purplish red. If he got about doing what should have been done years ago, he’d be gone by nightfall, providing his horse could take him. From his memory of the midnight walk with Amalia, Cape Roby Point couldn’t be more than three miles away. Once at the lighthouse, if its longtime occupant did indeed still live there, he’d brook no romantic nonsense – neither his own, nor the keeper’s. The property did not belong to her, was barely suitable for habitation, and its lack of both updated equipment and experienced, capable attendant posed an undue and unacceptable threat to any ship unlucky enough to hazard past. Not that many bothered anymore with this particular stretch of abandoned, storm-battered coast.

Out he went into the snow. In a matter of minutes, he’d left Winsett behind. Head down, he burrowed through the gusts. With neither buildings nor dunes to block it, the wind raked him with bits of shell and sand that clung to his cheeks like the tips of fingernails and then ripped free. When he looked up, he saw beach pocked with snow and snarls of seaweed, then the ocean thrashing about between the shore and the sandbar a hundred yards or so out.

An hour passed. More. The tamped-down path, barely discernible during Winsett’s heyday, had sunk completely into the shifting earth. Selkirk stepped through stands of beach heather and sand bur, pricking himself repeatedly about the ankles. Eventually, he felt blood beneath one heavy sock, but he didn’t peel the sock back, simply yanked out the most accessible spines and kept moving. Far out to sea, bright, yellow sun flickered in the depths of the cloud cover and vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Devil’s smile, as the Portuguese sailors called it. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Selkirk to ask why the light would be the devil, instead of the dark or the gathering storm. Stepping from the V between two leaning dunes, he saw the lighthouse.

He’d read the report from the initial Lighthouse Service survey three years ago, and more than once. That document mentioned rot in every beam, chips and cracks in the bricks that made up the conical tower, erosion all around the foundation. As far as Selkirk could see, the report had been kind. The building seemed to be crumbling to nothing before his eyes, bleeding into the pool of shorewater churning at the rocks beneath it.

Staring into the black tide racing up the sand to meet him, Selkirk caught a sea-salt tang on his tongue and found himself murmuring a prayer he hadn’t planned for Amalia, who’d reportedly wandered into the dunes and vanished one winter night, six years after Selkirk left. Her father had written Selkirk’s father that the girl had never had friends, hated him, hated Winsett, and was probably happier wherever she was now. Then he’d said, “Here’s what I hope: that she’s alive. And that she’s somewhere far from anywhere I will ever be.”

On another night than the one they’d spent out here, somewhere closer to town but similarly deserted, he and Amalia once found themselves beset by gulls that swept out of the moonlight all together, by the hundreds, as though storming the mainland. Amalia had pitched stones at them, laughing as they shrieked and swirled nearer. Finally, she’d hit one in the head and killed it. Then she’d bent over the body, calling Selkirk to her. He’d expected her to cradle it or cry. Instead, she’d dipped her finger in its blood and painted a streak down Selkirk’s face. Not her own.