The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

STEVE RASNIC TEM Miri

THEY SPREAD THE blanket over the cool grass and took their places. The puppet stage was broad and brightly lit, with a colourful and elaborate jungle set. Rick framed his children inside the LCD screen on the back of his camera as they settled in front of him: Jay Jay who was too old for this sort of thing but would enjoy it anyway, and seven-year-old Molly, worrisomely thin, completely entranced, her large eyes riveted on the stage as oversized heads with garishly painted faces danced, their mouths magnified into exaggerated smiles, frowns, and fiercely insistent madness.

The colours began to fade from the faces — the painted ones, and his children’s — he took his eyes away from the camera and blinked. The world had become a dramatic arrangement of blacks and whites. Molly raised her stark face and stared at him, her eyes a smoulder of shadow. Where is she? he thought, and looked around. He thought he caught a glimpse — there by a tree, a pale sliver of arm, a fall of black hair, lips a smear of charcoal. He could feel the breath go out of him. Not here. But he couldn’t be sure. He closed his eyes, tried to stop the rising tide of apprehension, opened them, and found that all the colours had been restored to the world with sickening suddenness.

He quickly took a dozen or so more shots, his finger dancing on the shutter button. Elaine patted his hand and took the camera away. “Enough already,” she whispered into his ear. He tried not to be annoyed, to no avail. She had no idea what she was talking about. It didn’t matter how many pictures he took — it would never be enough.

Between the kids lay the pizza box with their ragged leftovers. Jay Jay would finish it if they let him. Molly would sneak a guilty glance but would not touch it. Rick had no idea what to do to help her; next week he would make more calls.

“You’re a wonderful dad, and a really good person,” Elaine whispered, and kissed that place above his ear where his hairline had dramatically begun to recede. Especially in this early evening light she was lovely — she still managed to put a hitch into his breath.

He smiled and mouthed thanks, even though such naked compliments embarrassed him. He’d finally learned it was bad form, and unattractive, to argue with them. So even though he was thinking he just had a few simple ideas, like always giving your kids something to look forward to, he said nothing. In any case it would be hypocritical. Because he also would not be confessing that he wasn’t the good person she thought he was. Or telling her how often he wished he’d didn’t have kids — it had never been his dream, and sometimes spending an entire day with them and their constant need left him drained, stupid, and angry. He was ashamed of himself — perhaps that was why he sometimes made himself so patient.

An unreal ceiling of stars hung low over the lake, the park, the puppet stage, and all these families sitting out on their assorted colourful blankets. Elaine pulled closer to him, mistakenly saying “I love that you still love the stars.”

But he didn’t. These stars were a lie. This close to the centre of the city you couldn’t see the stars because of the electric lights. And the dark between them had a slightly streaked appearance, as if the brush strokes were showing. Somehow this sky had been faked — he just didn’t know how. But he knew by whom.

Was he lying when he allowed Elaine to mistake his silence or his distraction, for something sweet and good? If so he was a consistent and successful liar.

His gaze drifted. Off to his left an elderly couple standing on their blanket looked a bit too textured, too still. At the moment he decided they were cut-outs the vague suggestion of a slim female form moved slowly in behind them, looking much the cut-out herself, a black silhouette with a painted white face, a dancing paper doll. She turned her head toward him, graceful as a ballerina, presenting one dark eye painted against a background of china white, framed expressionistically by black strokes of hair, black crescent cheekbones, before she turned sideways and vanished.

“I’ll be right back,” he whispered to Elaine. “Bathroom.” He climbed absently to his feet, feeling as if his world were being snatched out from under him. If I could just get my hands on that greedy, hungry bitch.

The kids didn’t even notice him leave, their eyes full of the fakery on stage. He quickly averted his glance — the colour in their faces, the patterns in their shirts, were beginning to fade.

He moved through the maze of blankets quickly, vaguely registering the perfectly outfitted manikin couples with rudimentary features, their arms and legs bent in broken approximations of humanity. Near the outer edge of the crowd he bumped into a stiff tree-coat of a figure with a grey beard glued to the lower part of its oval head. He pardoned himself as it crashed to the ground, scattering paper plates and plastic foods onto the silent shapes of a seated family.

He passed into the well-mannered trees, which grew in geometric patches around the park. He could see her fluttering rapidly ahead of him, alternating shadow side and sunny side like a leaf twirling in the breeze off the water. She peeked back over her shoulder, her cheek making a dark-edged blade. She laughed as sharply, with no happiness in it. Something was whipping his knees — he looked down and the flesh below his shorts had torn on underbrush that hadn’t been here before, that had been allowed to grow and threaten. He started to run and the trees greyed and spread themselves into the patchy walls of an ill-kept hallway — inside the residential hotel he’d lived in his last few years of college. Dim sepia lighting made everything feel under pressure, as if the hall were a tube travelling through deep water.

Wearily he found his door and stepped into a room stinking of his own sweat. He slumped into a collapsed chair leaking stuffing. He thought to watch some television, but couldn’t bring himself to get up and turn the set on. Gravity pushed him deeper into the cushion, adhering his hands to the chair’s palm-stained arms.

The knock on the door was soft, more like a rubbing. “Ricky? Are you home?”

He twisted his head slightly, unable to lift it away from the thickly-padded back. He watched as the doorknob rattled in its collar. He willed the latch to hold.

“Ricky, it’s Miri,” she said unnecessarily. “We don’t have to do anything, I swear. We could just talk, okay?” Her voice was like a needy child’s asking for help. How did she do that? “Ricky, I just need to be with somebody tonight. Please.”

She knew he was there, but he didn’t know how. He’d watched his building and the street outside long before he came in — she’d been nowhere in sight.

“Are you too tired, Ricky? Is that it? Is that why you can’t come to the door?”

Of course he was tired. That had been the idea, hadn’t it? Everything was so incessant about her — you couldn’t listen without being sucked in. She wanted him too tired to walk away from her. He closed his eyes, could feel her rubbing against the door.

He woke up in his living room, the TV muted, the picture flickering in a jumpy, agitated way. It looked like one of those old black and white Val Lewton films, Cat People perhaps, the last thing he’d want to watch in his state of mind. He was desperate to go to bed, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He stared at his right arm and insisted, but he might have been gazing at a stick for all the good it did. He blinked his grainy eyes because at least he could still move them. After a few moments he was able to jerk his head forward — and his body followed up and out of the chair. He almost fell over but righted himself, staggering drunkenly down to their bedroom.

He couldn’t see Elaine in the greasy darkness, but she whispered from the bed. “I know it’s the job, wearing you out, but the kids were asking about you. They were disappointed you didn’t come say goodnight — they wanted to talk more about the puppet show. Go and check on them — at least tomorrow you can tell them you did that.”

He felt like lashing out, or weeping in frustration. Instead he turned and stumbled back out into the hall. He could have lied to her, but he went down to Jay Jay’s room.

The boy in the bed slept like a drunk with one foot on the floor. He looked like every boy, but he didn’t look anything like his son. What his son actually looked like, Rick had no idea.

Molly had kicked all the covers off, and lay there like a sweaty, sick animal, her hair matted and stiff, her mouth open exposing a few teeth. She seemed too thin to be a child — he watched as her ribs made deep grooves in the thin membrane of her flesh with each ragged breath. How was he expected to save such a creature? He walked over and picked her sheet off the floor, tucked her in and, when she curled into a sigh, kissed her goodnight.

When he climbed into bed Elaine was asleep. He avoided looking at her, not wanting to see whatever it was he might see. He must have looked at his wife’s face tens of thousands of times over the years of their marriage. If you added it all up — months certainly — of distracted or irritated or loving or passion-addled gazes. And yet there were times, such as after the 3 a.m. half-asleep trudge to the bathroom, when he imagined that if he were to return to their bedroom and find Elaine dead, it wouldn’t be long before he’d forget her lovely face entirely.

He sometimes loved his family like someone grieving, afraid he would forget what they’d looked like. An obsession with picture-taking helped keep the fear at bay, but only temporarily. As a graphic designer he worked with images every day. He knew what he was talking about. It didn’t matter how many snapshots he kept — we don’t remember people because of a single recognisable image. In his way, he’d conducted his own private study. We remember people because of a daily changing gestalt — because of their ability to constantly look different than themselves. The changing set of the mouth, the tone of the skin, the engagement of the eyes. The weight lost and the weight gained. The changing tides of joy and stress and fatigue. That’s what keeps people alive in our imaginations. Interrupt that flow, and a light leaves them. That’s what Miri had done, was doing, to him. She was draining the light that illumined his day. Sometime during the night he turned over and made the error of opening his eyes, and saw her face where Elaine’s used to be.

“Rick, you’re gonna have to redo these.” Matthew stood over him, a sheaf of papers in hand, looking embarrassed. They’d started in college together, back when Rick had been the better artist. Now Matthew was the supervisor, and neither of them had ever been comfortable with it.

“Just tell me what I did wrong this time — I’ll fix it.”

“It’s this new character, the goth girl. The client will never approve this — it’s the wrong demographic for a mainstream theatre chain.”

“I didn’t—” But seeing the art, he realised he had. The female in each of the movie date scenes was dark-haired and hollow-eyed, depressed-looking. And starved.

“She looks like that woman you dated in college.”

“We didn’t date,” Rick snapped.

“Okay, went out with.”

“We never even went out. I’m not sure what you’d call what we did together.”

“I just remember what a disaster she was for you, this freaky goth chick—”

“Matt, I don’t think they even had goths back then. She was just this poor depressed, suicidal young woman.”

He smirked. “That was always your type, if I recall. Broody, skinny chicks.”

Now his old friend had him confused with someone else. There had never been enough women for Rick to have had a type. “Her name was Miriam, but she always went by Miri. And do you actually still use that word ‘chick’? Do you understand how disrespectful that is?”

“Just when I’m talking about the old days. No offence.”

“None taken. I’ll have the new designs for you end of the week.”

Rick spread the drawings out over his desk and adjusted his lamp for a better look. He never seemed to have enough light anymore. There was an Elvira-like quality to the figures, or like that woman in the old Charles Addams panel cartoons, but Miri had had small, flattened breasts. It embarrassed him that he should remember such a thing.

In college all he ever wanted to do was paint. But it had really been an obsession with colour — brushing it, smearing it, finding its light and shape and what was revealed when two colours came against each other on the canvas. He’d come home after class and paint late into the night, sometimes eating with his brush in the other hand. Each day was pretty much the same, except Saturday when he could paint all day. Then Sunday he’d sleep all day before restarting the cycle on Monday.

Women were not a part of that life. Not that he wasn’t interested. If he wanted anything more than to be a good painter it was to have the companionship and devotion of a woman. He simply didn’t know how to make that happen — he didn’t even know how to imagine it. To ask a woman for a date was out of the question because that meant being judged and compared and having to worry if he would ever be good enough and unable to imagine being good enough. He’d had enough of that insanity growing up.

At least he was sensitive enough to recognise the dangers of wanting something so badly and believing it forever unobtainable. He wasn’t about to let it make him resentful — he wasn’t going to be one of those lonely guys who hated women. The problem was his, after all.

He was aware a female had moved into the residential hotel, because of conversations overheard and certain scents and things found in the shared bathroom or the trash. Then came the night he was at the window, painting, and just happened to glance down at the sidewalk as she was glancing up.

Her face was like that Ezra Pound poem: a petal on a wet black bough. Now detached from its nourishment, now destined for decay.

A few minutes later there was a faint, strengthless knocking on his door. At first he ignored it out of habit. Although it didn’t get louder it remained insistent, so eventually he wiped the paint off his hands and went to answer.

Her slight figure was made more so by a subtle forward slump. She gazed up at him with large eyes. “I’m your neighbour,” she said, “could I come inside for a few minutes?”

He was reluctant — in fact he glanced too obviously at his unfinished painting — but it never occurred to him to say no. She glided in, the scarf hanging from her neck imbued with a perfume he’d smelled before in the hall. Her dress was slip-like, and purple, and might have been silk, and was most definitely feminine. Ribbons of her dull black hair appeared in the cracks among multiple scarves covering her head. She sat down on a chair right by his easel, as if she expected him to paint her.

“You’re an artist,” she said.

“Well, I want to be. I don’t think I’m good enough yet, but maybe I will be.”

“I’ll let you paint me sometime.” He stumbled for a reply and couldn’t find one. “I have no talents. For anything. But it makes me feel better to be around men who do.”

She didn’t say anything more for a while, and he just stood there, not knowing what to do. But he kept thinking about options, and finally said, “Can I get you something to eat?”

There was a slight shift in her expression, a strained quality in the skin around the mouth and nose. “I don’t eat in front of other people,” she finally said. “I can’t — it doesn’t matter how hungry I am. And I’m always hungry.”

“I’m sorry — I was just trying to be a good host.”

She looked at him with what he thought might be amusement, but the expression seemed uncomfortable on her lips. “I imagine you apologise a lot, don’t you?”

His face warmed. “Yes. I guess I really do.”

“I’d like to watch you paint, if that’s okay.”

“Well, I guess. It’ll probably be a little boring. Sometimes I do a section, and then I just stare at the canvas for a while, feeling my way through the whole, making adjustments, or just being scared I’ll mess it up.”

“I’d like to watch. I’m not easily bored.”

And so she sat a couple of hours as if frozen in place, watching him. He might have thought she was sleeping if not for the uncomfortably infrequent blinking. Now and then he would glance at her, and although she was looking at him, he wasn’t sure somehow that she was seeing him. And his dual focus on her and on his painting was rapidly fatiguing him. He appreciated her silence, however — he might not have been able to work at all if she’d said anything. It occurred to him she smelled differently. Under the perfume was a kind of staleness — or gaminess for lack of a better word. Like a fur brought out of storage and warming up quickly. Finally it was he who spoke.

“You’re great company.” It was the first time he’d ever said such a thing. “But I’m feeling so tired, I don’t know why, but I think I might just fall over. I’m sorry — I usually can work a lot longer.”

“You should lie down.” She stood and led him to the bed in the other room of the small apartment. So quickly there hardly seemed a transition. Despite her slightness she forced him down into a reclining position. And without a word lay down beside him, close against him like a child. But even if she had said something, even if she had asked, he would not have said no. And of course he didn’t stop her when she first removed his clothes, then threw off her own. It was all such a stupid cliché, he would think later, and again and again, for the six months or so their relationship lasted, and for years afterward. All the bad jokes about how men could not really be seduced, because they were always ready to have sex with anyone, with anything — it was just part of their nature. They couldn’t help themselves. It embarrassed him, he felt ashamed. He’d never thought it was true, and now look at how he was behaving.

For there was this other sad truth. Men who never expected to be loved, who’d never even felt much like men, had a hard time saying no when the opportunity arrived, because when would it ever come again?

At least he had never been able to fool himself into believing that she actually enjoyed what they were doing. Most of the time she lay there with her eyes closed, as if pretending to be asleep or in some drug-induced semi-consciousness. He was never quite sure if he was hurting her, the way her body rose off the bed as if slapped or stabbed, her back arching, breath coming out in explosions from her as-if wounded lungs, eyes occasionally snapping open to stare from the bottom of some vast and empty place. Certainly there couldn’t be any passion in her for it, as dry as she was, her pubic hair like a bit of thrown-out carpet, so that at some point every time they did it he lost his ability to maintain the illusion, so much it was like fucking a pile of garbage, artfully arranged layers of gristle and skin, tried to escape, but like that moment in the horror movies when the skeleton reaches up and embraces you, she always pulled her bony arms around him, squeezing so hard he could feel her flailing heart right through the fragile web of her ribcage, as they continued to rock and bump the tender hangings of their flesh until bruised and bloody.

“Daddy! I said I saw a monkey at the zoo today!” Across from him at the dinner table, Molly looked furious.

“I know, honey,” he said. “I heard you.”

“No you didn’t! You weren’t paying attention!”

He looked at Elaine, maybe for support, or maybe just for confirmation that he had screwed up. She offered neither, was carefully studying the food on her plate. “Honey, I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t sleep too well, and the next day I have a hard time focusing, so by the time I get home from work I’m really very tired. But I’m going to listen really closely to you, okay? Please tell me all about it.”

Apparently she was willing, because she began again, telling a long story about monkeys, and thrown food, and how Brian got on the bus and started throwing pieces of his lunch like he was the monkey, and what the bus driver said, and what their teacher said, and how lunch was pretty sick-looking, so she couldn’t eat anything again anyway, except for a little bit of a juice box, and some crackers. And the entire time she was telling this story a tiny pulse by her left eye kept beating, like the recording light on a video camera, but he still kept his eyes on her, and he made himself hear every tedious word, and he let the pictures of what she was telling him make a movie in his brain, so that he felt right there.

Even though at the corners of his eyes his view of the dining room, and his daughter speaking at the centre of it, was breaking down into discordancy, into a swarm of tiny black and white pixels, and even though Miri’s face was at one edge of the dining room window, peering in, before her silhouette coiled and fell away.

So that by the end of his daughter’s little story he had closed his eyes by necessity, and spoke to her as if in prayer. “That’s a really nice story, sweetheart, thanks so much for telling it. But you know you really must eat. Why, tonight you’ve hardly touched anything on your plate. That little piece of meat hung up in the edge of your mouth — I can’t tell if it’s even food. But you have to keep your strength up, you’re really going to need every bit of strength you can find.”

The rest of the evening was awkward, with Elaine pleading with him to see a doctor. “You’re not here with me anymore,” she was saying, or was that Miri, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? He no longer knew when or with whom he was. It was all he could do to keep his eyes in the same day and place for more than a few minutes at a time.

By the end Rick had known Miriam for six months or so. He’d told Matt about her, but then had been reluctant to share more than a very few of the actual details. He just wanted someone to know, in case — but he didn’t understand in case of what. Matt ran into them once, when Rick had tried to drive her to a restaurant. He’d been so stupid about it — he should have been driving her to a hospital instead. She’d lost enough fat in her face by then that when she reacted to anything he couldn’t quite tell what the emotion was — everything looked like a grimace on her. When she walked she was constantly clicking her teeth together and there was a disturbing wobble in her gait. He knew she must eat — how could she not? But it could not be much, and she had to be doing it in secret because he’d never actually seen her put anything into her mouth except a little bit of water.

When she breathed sometimes it was as if she were attempting to devour the space around her — her entire frame shook with the effort. When he first experienced this he tried to touch her, pull her in to comfort a distress he simply could not understand. But soon he learned to keep his distance, after getting close enough he felt he might dissolve from the force of what was happening to her.

He hadn’t told her they were going to a restaurant. He said he just wanted to get out of that building where they spent virtually all of their time. Finally she stumbled into his car and caved into the passenger seat. He drove slowly, telling her it was time they both tried new things.

“What, you’re breaking up with me?” A thin crimson line of inflammation separated her eyes from their tightly wrinkled sockets.

“No, that’s not what I meant at all. I mean try new things together, as a couple. Go places, do things.”

“You have the only new thing I need, lover.” Her leer ended with a crusted tongue swiped over cracked lips.

“It doesn’t feel healthy staying in the way we do. Maybe it’s okay for you, but it doesn’t work for me.”

He pulled up in front of a little Italian place. It wasn’t very popular — the flavours were a bit coarse — but the food was always filling.

“No,” she said, and closed her eyes. She was wearing so much eye make-up that it looked as if her eyelids had caved in.

“All I’m asking is that you give it a try. If you don’t like it, okay. No problem. We’ll just go home.”

She slapped his face then, and it felt as if she’d hit him with a piece of wood. She continued hitting him with those hands of so little padding, spitting the word “lover!” at him, as if it were some kind of curse.

He had no idea what to do. He’d never been struck by a woman before. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a physical fight with anyone. And now she was screaming, the angular gape of her mouth like an attacking bird’s.

“Hey! Hey!” The car door was open, and someone was pulling her away from him. Miri was beside herself, struggling, kicking. Rick was leaning back as far as possible to avoid her sharp-pointed shoes. Over her shoulder he saw Matt’s face, grimly determined, as he jerked her out of the car.

She spat at both of them, walking back toward her apartment with one shoe missing, her clothes twisted around on her coat-hanger frame.

“I should go get her, try to coax her back into the car,” Rick said, out of breath.

“Glad you finally introduced us.” Matt was bent over, wheezing.

Of course she had apologised in her own way, showing up at Rick’s door the next night, naked, crying and incoherent. He got her inside before anyone else could see. And then she would not leave for weeks, sleeping in his bed, watching him eat or stand before his easel unable to paint. Most of the time he slept on the floor, but sometimes he had to have something softer, and lay on the bed trying to ignore her mouth and hands all over him, in that fluttering way of hers, until she stopped and lay cold against him.

“I’m glad you were able to join us today.” Matt stood at Rick’s office door, looking unhappy. “Were you really sick, or did you get Elaine to call in and lie for you every day?”

Rick was unable to do anything but stare as Matt’s words rushed by him. He’d been in the office for only five minutes or so and already he was feeling disoriented. Papers were stacked all over his desk, and message notes were attached around his monitor, even to his lamp base. He never left things like this.

Finally, he looked up at his old friend. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You haven’t been here in four days! I can’t keep coming up with excuses for you with the partners.”

“Four days?”

Matt stared at him. It made him uncomfortable, so he started sifting through the piles of papers. But these were piles of print on paper, black on white, black and white. Before he could turn away he was seeing the shadows of her eyes, the angles of her mouth in the smile that wasn’t a smile. “Maybe you are sick,” Matt said behind him.

“You said Elaine called in every day?”

“Right after the office opened, once before I even got in.”

“Elaine never lies. That’s one of the best things about her. I don’t think she even knows how,” Rick said absently, looking around the office, finding more phone messages. Some appeared to be in his own handwriting.

“Well, I know. Of course. Look, I didn’t mean—”

“Are you sure it wasn’t someone who just pretended to be Elaine?”

But then someone was softly knocking, or rubbing, on the door outside. And Rick couldn’t bring himself to speak anymore.

“Ricky?” she had said. “Are you home?”

But he couldn’t get out of his so well-cushioned chair. The doorknob rattled in its collar. He willed the latch to hold.

“Ricky, we don’t have to do anything,” she said in her child’s voice, muffled by the door.

“Ricky, I just need — are you too tired, Ricky? I just need—”

After a few weeks she had stopped. Later he heard she’d killed herself, but he never saw a word about it in the papers. One afternoon a truck came and took away all the stuff in her apartment. A white-haired man came by, knocking on each door. But Rick hadn’t answered when the old man knocked on his. Later one of the other tenants would tell Rick the white-haired man had claimed to be her uncle.

The next week was when the colour-blindness had come over him like some sort of virus, intermittently, then all at once. One of the doctors he saw said it appeared to be a hysterical reaction of some sort. Whatever the source, or the reason, he stopped painting, and she mostly left him alone for a long time after that, reappearing now and then to monochrome the world for a while, or to take a day or two, or to eat one of his new memories and leave one of the tired old ones in its place.

And now it had looked as if he was going to be happy, or at least the possibility was there, and she couldn’t just leave that be.

The bedroom was completely black, except for a few bright white reflections of window pane. And the side of Elaine’s face, as she slept on her back. Lovely and glowing and ghostly.

The children were out there asleep in their own beds, or should be. At least he hadn’t heard them in hours. He prayed they were. Sleeping.

But it was all so black, and white, and something was rubbing at the door.