The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

HOME BY THE SEA Pat Cadigan

There was no horizon line out on the water.

“Limbo ocean. Man, did we hate this when I was a commercial fisherman,” said a man sitting at the table to my left. “Worse than fog. You never knew where you were.”

I sneaked a look at him and his companions. The genial voice came from a face you’d have expected to find on a wanted poster of a Middle Eastern terrorist, but the intonations were vaguely Germanic. The three American women with him were all of a type, possibly related. A very normal-looking group, with no unusual piercings or marks. I wondered how long they’d been in Scheveningen.

I slumped down in my chair, closed my eyes, and lifted my face to where I thought the sun should be. It was so overcast, there wasn’t even a hot spot in the sky. Nonetheless, the promenade was crowded, people wandering up and down aimlessly, perhaps pretending, as I was, that they were on vacation. It was equally crowded at night, when everyone came to watch the stars go out.

Of course were on vacation, a woman had said last night at another of the strange parties that kept congealing in ruined hotel lobbies and galleries. This had been one of the fancier places, ceilings in the stratosphere and lots of great, big ornate windows so we could look out anytime and see the stars die. It’s an enforced vacation. Actually, it’s the world that’s gone on vacation.

No, that’s not it, someone else had said in an impeccable British accent. It always surprised me to hear one, though I don’t know why; England wasn’t that far away. What it is, is that the universe has quit its job.

Best description yet, I’d decided. The universe has quit its job.

“Hey, Jess.” I heard Jim plop down in the chair next to me. “Look what I found.”

I opened my eyes. He was holding a fan of glossy postcards like a winning poker hand. Scheveningen and The Hague as they had been. I took them from him, looked carefully at each one. If you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought it had been a happy world, just from looking at these.

“Where’d you find them?”

“Up a ways,” he said, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder. He went up a ways a lot now, scavenging bits of this and that, bringing them to me as if they were small, priceless treasures. Perhaps they were—souvenirs of a lost civilization. Being of the why-bother school now, myself, I preferred to vegetate in a chair. “Kid with a whole pile of them. I traded him that can of beer I found.” He stroked his beard with splayed fingers. “Maybe he can trade it for something useful. And if he can’t, maybe he can fill a water pistol with it. ”

What would be useful, now that the universe had quit its job? I thought of making a list on the back of one of the postcards. Clothing. Shelter. Something to keep you occupied while you waited for the last star to go out—a jigsawpuzzle, perhaps. But Jim never showed up with one of those, and I wasn’t ambitious enough to go looking myself.

My old hard-driving career persona would have viewed that with some irony. But now I could finally appreciate that being so driven could not have changed anything. Ultimately, you pounded your fist against the universe and then found you hadn’t made so much as a dent, let alone reshaped it. Oddly enough, that knowledge gave me peace.

Peace seemed to have settled all around me. Holland, or at least this part of Holland, was quiet. All radio and TV communications seemed to be permanently disrupted—the rest of the world might have been burning, for all we knew, and we’d just happened to end up in a trouble-free zone. Sheerly by accident, thanks to a special our travel agency had been running at the time. We joked about it: How did you happen to come to Holland? Oh, we had a coupon.

A kid walked by with a boombox blaring an all-too-familiar song about the end of the world as we know it and feeling fine. The reaction from the people sitting at the tables was spontaneous and unanimous. They began throwing things at him, fragments of bricks, cups, cans, plastic bottles, whatever was handy, yelling in a multitude of languages for him to beat it.

The kid laughed loudly, yelled an obscenity in Dutch, and ran away up the promenade, clutching his boombox to his front. Mission accomplished, the tourists had been cheesed off again. The man at the next table had half risen out of his chair and now sat down again, grinning sheepishly. “All I was gonna do was ask him where he found batteries that work. I’d really like to listen to my CD player.” He caught my eye and shrugged. “It’s not like I could hurt him, right?”

Jim was paying no attention. He had his left hand on the table, palm up, studiously drawing the edge of one of the postcards across the pad below his thumb, making deep, slanted cuts.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“Fascinating. Really fascinating.” He traced each cut with a finger. “No pain, no pain at all. No blood and no pain. I just can’t get over that.”

I looked toward the horizonless ocean. From where I was sitting, I had a clear view of the tower on the circular pier several hundred feet from the beach, and of the woman who had hanged herself from the railing near the top. Her nude body rotated in a leisurely way, testifying to the planet’s own continuing rotation. As I watched, she raised one arm and waved to someone on the shore.

“Well,” I said, “what did you expect at the end of the world?”

“You really shouldn’t deface yourself,” I said as we strolled back to the hotel where we were squatting. If you could really call it a hotel—there was no charge to stay there, no service, and no amenities. “I know it doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t heal, either. Now you’ve got permanent hash marks, and besides not being terribly attractive, they’ll probably catch on everything.”

Jim sighed. “I know. I get bored.”

“Right.” I laughed. “For the last twenty years, you’ve been telling me I should learn how to stop and smell the roses and now you’re the one who’s complaining about having nothing to do. ”

“After you’ve smelled a rose for long enough, it loses its scent. Then you have to find a different flower.”

“Well, self-mutilation is different, I’ll give you that.” We passed a young guy dressed in leather with an irregular-shaped fragment of mirror embedded in his forehead. “Though maybe not as different as it used to be, since it seems to be catching on. What do you suppose he’s smelling?”

Jim didn’t answer. We reached the circular drive that dead-ended the street in front of our hotel, which had gone from motorcycle parking lot to motorcycle graveyard. On impulse, I took Jim’s hand in my own as we crossed the drive. “I suppose it’s the nature of the end of time or whatever this is, and the world never was a terribly orderly place. But nothing makes sense anymore. Why do we still have day and night? Why does the earth keep turning?”

“Winding down,” Jim said absently. “No reason why the whole thing should go at once.” He stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the hotel. “Listen.”

There was a distant metallic crashing noise, heavy wheels on rails. “Just the trams running again. That’s something else—why does the power work in some places and not in others?”

“What?” Jim blinked at me, then glanced in the general direction of the tram yard. “Oh, that. Not what I meant. Something I’ve been wondering lately”— there was a clatter as a tram went by on the cross street “—why we never got married.”

Speaking of things that didn't seem important anymore—it wasn’t the first time the subject had come up. We'd talked about it on and off through the years, but after eighteen years together, the matter had lost any urgency it might have had, if it had ever had any. Now, under a blank sky in front of a luxury hotel where the guests had become squatters, it seemed to be the least of the shadow-things my life had been full of, like status and career and material comforts. I could have been a primitive tribeswoman hoarding shiny stones for all the real difference those things had ever made. They’d given me nothing beyond some momentary delight; if anything, they’d actually taken more from me, in terms of the effort I’d had to put into acquiring them, caring for them, keeping them tidy and intact. Especially the status and the career. And they sure hadn’t stopped the world from ending, no more than our being married would have.

But I was so certain of what Jim wanted to hear that I could practically feel the words arranging themselves in the air between us, just waiting for me to provide the voice. Well, dear, let’s just hunt up a cleric and get married right now. Add sound and stir till thickened. Then—

Then what? It wasn’t like we actually had a future anymore, together or singly. The ocean didn’t even have a horizon.

“I think we are married,” I said. “I think any two people seeing the world to its conclusion together are married in a way that didn’t exist until now. ”

It should have been the right thing to say. Instead, I sounded like a politician explaining how a tax increase wasn’t really a tax increase after all. After two decades, I could do better than some saccharine weasel words, end of the world or no.

Say it, then. The other thing, what he’s waiting for. What difference does it make? The question I had to answer first, maybe the question Jim was really asking.

The edges of the cuts he’d made in his hand moved against my skin. They felt like the gills of an underwater creature out of its element, seeking to be put back in.

No pain at all. No blood and no pain.

It’s not like I could hurt him, right?

Right. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel nothing. So we can go ahead now, do all those things that used to be so dangerous. Self-mutilation, bonding rituals, any old hazard at all.

Jim’s eyes were like glass.

"Better get into the lobby now if you want to see it. ”

It was the Ghost of Lifetimes Past; that was what Jim and I had been calling her. She stood a respectful distance from us, a painfully thin blond woman in a dirty white tutu and pink satin ballet shoes. The most jarring thing about her was not her silly outfit, or the way she kept popping up anywhere and everywhere, but that face—she had the deep creases of someone who had lived seventy very difficult years. Around the edge of her chin and jawbone, the skin had a peculiar strained look, as if it were being tightened and stretched somehow.

"The crucifixion,” she said, and gave a small, lilting giggle. “They’re probably going to take him down soon, so if you want a look, you’d better hurry.” Her gaze drifted past us and she moved off, as if she’d heard someone calling her.

“You in the mood for a crucifixion?” I said lightly. It was a relief to have anything as a distraction.

“Not if we can possibly avoid it.”

But there was no way we could. Pushing our way through the small crowd in the lobby, we couldn’t help seeing it. I vaguely recognized the man nailed directly to the wall—one of the erstwhile millionaires from the suites on the top floor. He was naked except for a wide silk scarf around his hips and a studded collar or belt cinched wrong side out around his head in lieu of a crown of thorns. No blood, of course, but he was doing his best to look as if he were in pain.

“God,” I whispered to Jim, “I hope it’s not a trend.”

He blew out a short, disgusted breath. “I’m going upstairs.”

Somehow, I had the feeling that it wasn’t really the crucifixion he was so disgusted with. I meant to follow him but suddenly I felt as nailed in place as the would-be Christ. Not that I had any real desire to stand there and stare at this freak show, but it held me all the same. All that Catholic schooling in my youth, I thought, finally catching up with me after all these years, activating a dormant taste for human sacrifice.

Ersatz-Christ looked around, gritting his teeth. “You’re supposed to mock me,” he said, the matter-of-fact tone more shocking than the spikes in his forearms. “It won’t work unless you mock me.”

“You’re a day late and a few quarts low,” someone in the crowd said. “It won’t work unless you shed blood, either.”

The crucified man winced. “Shit.”

There was a roar of laughter.

“For some reason, that never occurs to them. About the blood.”

I looked up at the man who had spoken. He smiled down at me, his angular face cheerfully apologetic. I couldn’t remember having seen him around before.

“This is the third one I’ve seen,” he said, jerking his head at the man on the wall. The straight black hair fell briefly over one eye and he tossed it back. “A grand gesture that ultimately means nothing. Don’t you find it rather annoying, people who suddenly make those grand risky gestures only after there isn’t a hope in the hell of it mattering? Banning the aerosol can after there’s already a hole in the ozone layer, seeking alternate sources of power after nuclear reactors have already gone into operation. It’s humanity’s fatal flaw—locking the barn after the horse has fled. The only creature in the universe who displays such behavior.”

I couldn’t place his accent or, for that matter, determine if he actually had an accent—I was getting tone-deaf in that respect. He didn’t look American, but that meant nothing. All the Americans were getting a European cast as they adopted the local face.

“The universe?” I said. “You must be exceptionally well traveled.”

He laughed heartily, annoying ersatz-Christ and what sympathizers he had left. We moved out of the group, toward the unoccupied front desk. “The universe we know of, then. Which, for all intents and purposes, might as well be all the universe there is.”

I shrugged. “There’s something wrong with that statement, but I’m no longer compulsive enough to pick out what it is. But it might be comforting to know that if there is a more intelligent species somewhere, its foibles are greater than ours, too.”

“Comforting?” He laughed again. “It would seem that in the absence of pain, no comfort is necessary.” He paused, as if waiting for me to challenge him on that, and then stuck out his hand. “I’m Sandor.”

“Jess.” The warmth of his unmarked, uncut hand was a mild shock. Fluctuations in body temperatures were as nonexistent as blood in these nontimes. Which would only stand to reason, since blood flow governed skin temperature. Everyone was the same temperature now, but whether that was something feverish or as cold as a tomb was impossible to tell with no variation. Perhaps I just hadn’t been touching the right people.

“Odd, isn’t it,” he said, politely disengaging his hand from mine. I felt a rush of embarrassment. “They wanted to investigate it at the hospital, but I wouldn’t let them. Do you know, at the hospital, people are offering themselves for exploratory surgery and vivisection? And the doctors who have a stomach for such things take them willingly. Yes. They cut them open, these people, and explore their insides. Sometimes they remove internal organs and sew the people up again to see how they manage without them. They manage fine. And there is no blood, no blood anywhere, just a peculiar watery substance that pools in the body cavity.

“And hidden away in the hospital, there is a doctor who has removed a woman’s head. Her body is inactive, of course, but it does not rot. The head functions, though without air to blow through the vocal cords, it’s silent. It watches him, they say, and he talks to it. They say he is trying to get the head to communicate with him in tongue-clicks, but it won’t cooperate. She won’t cooperate, if you prefer. And then there’s the children’s ward and the nursery where they keep the babies. These babies—”

“Stop it,” I said.

He looked dazed, as if I’d slapped him.

“Are you insane?”

Now he gave me a wary smile. “Does sanity even come into it?”

“I mean . . . well, we just met.”

“Ah, how thoughtless of me. ”

I started to turn away.

That strangely warm hand was on my arm. “I do mean it. It was thoughtless, pouring all that out on someone I don’t know. And a stranger here as well. It must be hard for you, all this and so far from home.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I glanced at the crucified man. “It’s all so weird, I think maybe I’d just as soon not see it happen anyplace familiar. I don’t really like to think about what it must be like back home. ” I jerked my thumb at the man nailed to the wall. “Like, I’d rather that be some total stranger than one of my neighbors.” “Yes, I can see that. Though it must be a little easier to be with someone you’re close to, as well.” He looked down for a moment. “I saw you come in with your companion.”

I gave him points for perception—most people assumed Jim was my husband. “Are you from here?” I asked.

“No. As I’m sure you could tell.”

“Not really. Is Sandor a Polish name?”

He shrugged. “Could be. But I’m not from there, either.”

There was a minor commotion as the police came in, or rather, some people dressed in police uniforms. Scheveningen was maintaining a loose local government—God knew why, force of habit, perhaps—with a volunteer uniformed cadre that seemed to work primarily as moderators or referees, mostly for the foreigners. They pushed easily through the thinning crowd and started to remove the crucified man from the wall, ignoring his protests that he wasn’t finished, or it wasn’t finished, or something.

“Ite missa est,” I said, watching. “Go, the Mass is over. Or something like that. ”

“You remember the Latin rite. I’m impressed.”

“Some things hang on.” I winced at the sound of ersatz-Christ’s forearm breaking. “That sounded awful, even if it didn’t hurt.”

“It won’t heal, either. Just goes on looking terrible. Inconvenient, too. At the hospital, they have—” He stopped. “Sorry. As you said, some things hang on.” “What do you suppose they’ll do with him?” I asked as they took him out. “It’s not like it’s worth putting him in jail or anything.”

“The hospital. It’s where they take all the mutilation cases bad enough that they can’t move around on their own. If they want mutilation, they can have plenty there, under better conditions, for better reasons, where no one has to see them.” Finally, I understood. “Did you work there long?”

“Volunteered,” he said, after a moment of hesitation. “There are no employees anymore, just volunteers. A way to keep busy. I left—” He shrugged. “Sitting ducks.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s the expression in English, isn’t it? For people who leave themselves open to harm? In this case, literally open.”

“If it doesn’t hurt and it doesn’t kill them, and this is the end of it all as we know it,” I said slowly, “how can they be leaving themselves open to harm?”

“A matter of differing cultural perspectives.” He smiled.

I smiled back. “You never told me what culture you were from.”

“I think you could say that we’re all from here now. Or might as well be. There’s an old saying that you are from the place where you die, not where you were born.”

“I’ve never heard that one. And nobody’s dying at the moment.”

“But nothing happens. No matter what happens, nothing happens. Isn’t that a description of a dying world? But perhaps you don’t see it that way. And if you don’t, then perhaps you aren’t dying yet. Do you think if you cut yourself, you might bleed? Is it that belief that keeps you from mutilating yourself, or someone else? Do you even wonder about that?”

I looked from side to side. “I feel like I’m under siege here.”

He laughed. “But don’t you wonder? Why there aren’t people running through the streets in an orgy of destruction, smashing windows and cars and each other? And themselves.”

“Offhand, I’d say there just doesn’t seem to be much point to it.” I took a step back from him.

“Exactly. No point. No reward, no punishment, no pleasure, no pain. The family of humanity has stopped bickering, world peace at last. Do you think if humans had known what it would take to bring about world peace, that they’d have worked a lot harder for it?”

“Do you really think it’s like this everywhere in the world?” I said, casually moving back another step.

“Don’t you?” He spread his hands. “Can’t you feel it?”

“Actually, I don’t feel much.” I shrugged. “Excuse me, I’m going to go catch up on my reading.”

“Wait.” He grabbed my arm and I jumped. “I’m sorry,” he said, letting go almost immediately. “I suppose I’m wrong about there being no pleasure and pain. I’d forgotten about the pleasure of being able to talk to someone. Of sharing thoughts, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

I smiled. “Yeah. See you around.” I shook his hand again, more to confirm what I'd felt when he’d grabbed my arm than out of courtesy, and found I’d been right. His skin definitely felt cooler. Maybe he was the one who wasn’t dying and I had sucked whatever real life he had out of him.

Only the weird survive, I thought, and went upstairs.

No matter what happens, nothing happens. Jim was curled up on the bed, motionless. The silence in the room was darkening. Sleep canceled the breathing habit, if “sleep” it actually was. There were no dreams, nothing much like rest— more like being a machine that had been switched off. Another end-of-the-world absurdity.

At least I hadn’t walked in to find him slicing himself up with a razor, I thought, going over to the pile of books on the nightstand. Whatever had possessed me to think that I would wait out the end of the world by catching up with my reading had drained away with my ambition. If I touched any of the books now, it was just to shift them around. Sometimes, when I looked at the covers, the words on them didn’t always make sense right away, as if my ability to read was doing a slow fade along with everything else.

I didn’t touch the books now as I stretched out on the bed next to Jim. He still didn’t move. On the day—if “day” is the word for it—the world had ended, we’d be in this room, in this bed, lying side by side the way we were now. I am certain that we both came awake at the same moment, or came to might be a better way to put it. Went from unconscious to conscious was the way it felt, because I didn’t wake up the way I usually did, slowly, groggily, and wanting nothing more than to roll over and go back to sleep for several more hours. I had never woken up well, as if my body had always been fighting the busy life my mind had imposed on it. But that “day,” I was abruptly awake without transition, staring at the ceiling, and deep down I just knew.

There was no surprise in me, no regret, and no resistance. It was that certainty: Times up. More than something I knew, it was something I was. Over, finished, done, used up . . . but not quite gone, as a bottle is not gone though emptied of its contents. I thought of Jim Morrison singing “The End,” and felt some slight amusement that in the real end, it hadn't been anywhere near so dramatic. Just . . . times up.

And when I'd finally said, “Jim ...?'' he’d answered, “Uh-huh. I’ve got it, too.” And so had everyone else.

I raised up on one elbow and looked at him without thinking anything. After awhile, still not thinking anything, I pulled at his shirt and rolled him over.

Sex at the end of the world was as pointless as anything else, or as impossible as bleeding, depending on your point of view, I guess. The bodies didn’t function; the minds didn’t care. I felt some mild regret about that, and about the fact that all I could feel was mild regret.

But it was still possible to show affection—or to engage in pointless foreplay— and take a certain comfort in the contact. We hadn’t been much for that in this no-time winding-down. Maybe passion had only been some long, pleasant dream that had ended with everything else. I slipped my hand under Jim’s shirt.

His unmoving chest was cadaver-cold.

That’s it, I thought, now were dying for real. There was a fearful relief in the idea that I wouldn’t have to worry about him mutilating himself any further.

Jim’s eyes snapped open and he stared down at my hand still splayed on his stomach, as if it were some kind of alien, deformed starfish that had crawled out of the woodwork onto his torso.

“You’re warm,” he said, frowning.

And like that, I was lost in the memory of what it was to feel passion for another human being. What it was to want, emotions become physical reactions, flesh waking from calm to a level of response where the edge between pleasure and pain thinned to the wisp of a nerve ending.

I rolled off the bed and went into the bathroom. Behind me, I heard Jim rolling over again. Evidently he didn’t want to know about my sudden change in temperature if I didn’t want to tell him. A disposable razor sat abandoned on the counter near the sink. If I took it and ran my fingertip along the blade, would I see the blood well up in a bright, uneven bead? I didn’t want to know, either.

The exploding star was a fiery blue-white flower against the black sky. Its light fell on the upturned faces of the crowd on the promenade, turning them milky for a few moments before it faded.

“Better than fireworks,” I heard someone say.

“Ridiculous,” said someone else. “Some kind of trick. The stars are thousands and millions of light-years away from us. If we see them exploding now, it means the universe actually ended millions of years ago and we’re just now catching up with it.”

“Then no wonder we never made any contact with life on other planets,” said the first voice. “Doesn’t that make sense? If the universe has been unraveling for the last million years, all extraterrestrial life was gone by the time we got the technology to search for it.”

I looked around to see who was speaking and saw her immediately. The Ghost of Lifetimes Past was standing just outside the group, alone as usual, watching the people instead of the stars. She caught my eye before I could look away and put her fingertips to her mouth in a coy way, as if to stifle a discreet giggle. Then she turned and went up the promenade, tutu flouncing a little, as an orange starburst blossomed in the west.

If Jim had come out with me, I thought, weaving my way through the crowd, I probably wouldn’t have been doing something as stupid as following this obviously loony woman. But he had remained on the bed, unmoving, long after it had gotten dark, and I hadn’t disturbed him again. I had sat near the window with a book in my lap and told myself I was reading, not just staring until I got tired of seeing the same arrangement of words and turning a page, while I felt myself fade. It had been a very distinct sensation, what I might have felt if I had been awake when the world had ended.

The Ghost of Lifetimes Past didn’t look back once but I was sure she knew I was following her, just as I knew she had meant for me to follow her, all the way to the Kurhaus. Even from a distance, I could see that the lights were on. Another party; what was it about the end of the world that seemed to cry out for parties? Perhaps it was some kind of misplaced huddling instinct.

I passed a man sitting on a broken brick wall, boredly hammering four-inch nails into his chest. If we hung notes on them, I thought, and sent him strolling up and down the promenade, we could have a sort of postal service-cum-newspa-per. Hear ye, hear ye, the world is still dead. Or undead. Nondead. Universe still unemployed after quitting old job. Or was it, really?

The Ghost flounced across the rear courtyard of the Kurhaus without pausing, her ballet shoes going scritch-scritch on the pavement. Light spilled out from the tall windows, making giant, elongated lozenges of brightness on the stone. One level up, I could see people peering out the galleria windows at the sky. When the sun went, I thought suddenly, would we all finally go with it, or would it just leave us to watch cosmic fireworks in endless night?

They made me think of birds on a nature preserve, the people wandering around in the lobby. Birds in their best plumage and their best wounds. A young, blackhaired guy in a pricey designer gown moved across the scuffed dusty floor several yards ahead of me, the two chandelier crystals stuck into his forehead above the eyebrows, catching the light. Diaphanous scarves fluttered from holes in his shoulder blades. Trick or treat, I thought. Or maybe it was All Souls’ Day, every day.

At the bar island, someone had used the bottles on the surrounding shelves for target practice and the broken glass still lay everywhere like a scattering of jewels.

I saw a woman idly pick up a shard lying on the bar and take a bite out of it, as if it were a potato chip. A man in white tie and tails was stretched out on the floor on his stomach, looking around and making notes on a stenographer’s pad. I wandered over to see what he was writing, but it was all unreadable symbols, part shorthand, part hieroglyphics.

There was a clatter behind me. Some people were righting one of the overturned cocktail tables and pulling up what undamaged chairs they could find. It was the group that had been sitting near me on the promenade that day, the man and his three women companions, all of them chattering away to each other as if nothing was out of the ordinary. They were still unmarked and seemed oblivious to the freak show going on around them—I half expected the man to go to the bar and try to order. Or maybe someone would sweep up some broken glass and bring it to them on a tray. Happy Hour is here, complimentary hors d’oeuvres.

The Ghost reappeared on the other side of the bar. She looked worse, if that were possible, as if walking through the place had depleted her. A tall man on her left was speaking to her as he ran a finger along the wasted line of her chin while a man on her right was displaying the filigree of cuts he’d made all over his stomach, pulling the skin out and displaying it like a lace bib. The skin was losing its elasticity; it sagged over the waistband of his white satin pajama pants. The layer of muscle underneath showed through in dark brown.

I turned back to the group I’d seen on the promenade, still in their invisible bubble of normalcy. The man caught sight of me and smiled a greeting without a pause in what he was saying. Maybe I was supposed to choose, I thought suddenly; join the freaks or join the normalcy. And yet I had the feeling that if I chose the latter, I’d get wedged in among them somehow and never get back to Jim.

They were all staring at me questioningly now and something in those mild gazes made me think I was being measured. One of the women leaned into the group and said something; it was the signal for their intangible boundary to go back up again. Either I’d kept them waiting too long, or they didn’t like what they saw, but the rejection was as obvious as if there had been a sign over their heads.

I started for the side door, intending to get out as fast as I could, and stopped short. The boy standing near the entrance to the casino might have been the same one who’d had the boombox, or not—it was hard to tell, there were so many good-looking blond boys here—but the man he was talking to was unmistakably Jim. He hadn’t bothered to change his rumpled clothes or even to comb his hair, which was still flat on one side from the way he’d been lying on the bed.

Jim was doing most of the talking. The kid’s expression was all studied diffidence, but he was listening carefully all the same. Jim showed him his hand and the kid took it, touching the cuts and nodding. After a few moments, he put his arm around Jim’s shoulders and, still holding his hand, led him around the front of the closed, silent elevator doors to the stairs. I watched them go up together.

“Do you wonder what that was all about?”

I didn’t turn around to look at him. “Well. Sandor Whoever from Wherever. The man who can still raise the mercury on a thermometer while the rest of us have settled at room temperature. If you start talking about interesting things people are doing in the hospital, I might take a swing at you.”

He chuckled. “That’s the spirit. Next question: Do you wonder how they get the power on in some places when it won’t work in others?”

“In a way.”

“Do you want to find out?”

I nodded.

He didn’t touch me even in a casual way until we reached his room on the fourth floor. It was the first time I’d ever been higher than the galleria level. The lights in the hallway shone dimly, glowing with what little power was left from whatever was keeping the lobby lit up, and his hand was like fire as he pulled me out of the hallway and into the room.

His body was a layer of softness over hard muscle. I tore his clothing to get at it; he didn't mind. Bursts of light from the outside gave me fleeting snapshots of his face. No matter what I did, he had the same expression of calm acceptance. Perhaps out of habit, covering the secret of his warmth—if the rest of us pod creatures knew he was the last (?) living thing on earth, what might we not do for this feeling of life he could arouse?

Already, his flesh wasn’t as warm as it had been. That was me, I thought, pushing him down on the bed. I was taking it from him and I couldn’t help it. Or perhaps it was just something inherent in the nature of being alive, that it would migrate to anyplace it was not. ’

Even so, even as he went from hot to cool, he lost nothing. Receptive, responsive, accommodating in the silent lightning of dying stars, calm and accepting, but not passive. I was leading in this pas de deux, but he seemed to know how and where almost before I did, and was ready for it.

And now I could feel how it was happening, the way the life in his body was leached away into my own un-alive flesh. I was taking it from him. The act of taking is a distinctive one; no one who had ever taken anything had taken it quite like I took Sandor.

He gave himself up without resistance, and yet give up was not what he was doing, unless it was possible to surrender aggressively. It was as if I wanted him because his purpose was to be wanted, and he had been waiting for me, for someone to provide the wanting, to want him to death. Ersatz-Christ in the lobby had had it wrong, it never could have worked. Humans didn’t sacrifice themselves, they were sacrificed to; they didn’t give, they were alive only in the act of taking—

Somehow, even with my head on fire, I pulled away from him. He flowed with the movement like a storm tide. I fought the tangle of sheets and cold flesh against warm, and the violence felt almost as good as the sex. If I couldn’t fuck him to death, I’d settle for beating his head in, I thought dimly. We rolled off the bed onto the carpet and I scrambled away to the bathroom and slammed the door.

Is there something wrong? The puzzlement in his voice was so sincere I wanted to vomit.

"Stop it.”

"Stop what?”

"Why did you let me do that to you?”

He might have laughed. "Did you do something to me?”

A weak pain fluttered through my belly. There was a wetness on my thighs.

Turn on the light,” he said. "You can now, you know. It’ll work for you, now that you’re living.”

I flipped the switch. The sudden brightness was blinding. Turning away from the lights over the sink, I saw myself in the full-length mirror on the door. The wetness on my thighs was blood.

My blood? Or his?

The pain in my belly came again.

“Jess?”

“Get away. Let me get dressed and get out of here. I don't want this.

“Let me in.”

“No. If you come near me, I’ll take more from you.

Now he did laugh. “What is it you think you took?”

“Life. Whatever’s left. You’re alive and I’m one of the fading ones. I’ll make you fade, too.”

“That’s an interesting theory. Is that what you think happened?”

“Somehow you’re still really alive. Like the earth still turns, like there are still stars. Figures we wouldn’t all fade away at once, us people. Some of us would still be alive. Maybe as long as there are still stars, there’ll still be some people alive.” The sound of my laughter in the small room was harsh and ugly. “So romantic. As long as there are stars in the sky, that’s how long you’ll be here for me. Go away. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“And what will you do?” he asked. Go back to your bloodless room and your bloodless man, resume your bloodless wait to see what the end will be? It’s all nothing without the risk, isn’t it? When there’s nothing to lose, there’s really nothing at all. Isn’t that right?”

The lock snapped and the door swung open. He stood there holding on to either side of the doorway. The stark hunger in the angular features had made his face into a predator’s mask, intent, voracious, without mercy. I backed up a step, but there was nowhere to go.

He lunged at me and caught me under the arms, lifting me to eye level. “You silly cow,” he whispered, and his breath smelled like meat. I didn't get cooler, you just got warmer.”

He shoved me away. I hit the wall and slid down. The pain in my shoulders and back was exquisite, not really pain but pure sensation, the un-alive, undead nerve endings frenzied with it. I wanted him to do it again, I wanted him to hit me, or caress me, or cut me, or do anything that would make me feel. Pain or pleasure, whatever there was, I wanted to live through it, get lost in it, die of it, and, if I had to die of it, take him with me.

He stood over me with the barest of smiles. “Starting to understand now?”

I pushed myself up, my hands slipping and sticking on the tiled wall.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I think maybe you are. I think you’re definitely starting to get it.” He backed to the sink and slid a razor blade off the counter. “How about this?” He held the blade between two fingers, moving it back and forth so it caught the light. “Always good for a thrill. Your bloodless man understands that well enough already. Like so many others. Where do you think he goes when he takes his little walks up the promenade, what do you think he does when he leaves you to sit watching the hanging woman twist and turn on the end of her rope?” He laughed and popped the blade into his mouth, closing his eyes with ecstasy. Then he bared his teeth; the blood ran over his lower lip onto his chin and dripped down onto his chest.

“Come on,” he said, the razor blade showing between his teeth. “Come kiss me.”

I wasn’t sure that I leaped at him as much as the life in him pulled me by that hunger for sensation. He caught me easily, holding me away for a few teasing seconds before letting our bodies collide.

The feeling was an explosion that rushed outward from me, and as it did, I finally did understand, mostly that I hadn’t had it right at all, but it was too late to do anything about it. The only mercy he showed was to let the light go out again.

Or maybe that wasn’t mercy. Maybe that was only what happened when he drained it all out of me and back into himself, every bit of pain and pleasure and being alive.

He kept the razor blade between his teeth for the whole time. It went everywhere, but he never did kiss me.

The room was so quiet, I thought he’d left. I got up from where I’d been lying, half in and half out of the bathroom, thinking I’d find my clothes and go away now, wondering how long I’d be able to hide the damage from Jim—if damage it was, since I no longer felt anything—wondering if I would end up in the hospital, if there was already a bed with my name on it, or whether I’d be just another exotic for nightly sessions at the Kurhaus.

“Just one more thing,” he said quietly. I froze in the act of taking a step toward the bed. He was standing by the open window, looking out at the street.

What s the matter? I said. “Aren’t I dead enough yet?”

He laughed, and now it was a soft, almost compassionate sound, the predator pitying the prey. “I just want to show you something.”

He dragged me to the window and forced my head out. “See it anyway, this one time. A favor, because I’m so well pleased.” He pulled my head back to make me look up at the sky. A night sky, very flat, very black, featureless, without a cloud and with no stars, none at all.

“A magic lantern show, yes,” he said, as though I’d spoken. “We put the signs and wonders in the sky for you. So you wouldn’t see this. ”

He forced my head down, digging his fingers more deeply into my hair. Below, in the courtyard, people wandered among a random arrangement of cylindrical things without seeing them. They were pale things, silent, unmoving; long, ropy extensions stretched out from the base of each one, sinking into the pavement like cables, except even in the dim light, I could see how they pulsed.

While I watched, a split appeared in the nearest one. The creature that pushed its way out to stand and stretch itself in the courtyard was naked, vaguely femalelooking, but not quite human. It rubbed its hands over the surface of the cylinder, and then over itself. I pulled away. ’

You see, that s the other thing about your kind besides your tendency toward too little, too late,” he said conversationally as I dressed. If I tucked my shirt into my pants I could keep myself together a little better. “You miss things. You’re blind. All of you. Otherwise, you’d have seen us before now. We’ve always been here, waiting for our time with you. If even one of you had seen us, you might have escaped us. Perhaps even destroyed us. Instead, you all went on with your lives. And now we’re going on with them.” He paused, maybe waiting for me to say something. I didn’t even look at him as I wrapped my shirt around the ruin of my torso. “Don’t worry. What I just showed you, you’ll never see again. Perhaps by the time you get home, you’ll even have forgotten that you saw anything.

He turned back to the window. “See you around the promenade.”

“First time’s the worst. ”

The Ghost of Lifetimes Past fell into step beside me as I walked back along the promenade. She was definitely looking worse, wilted and eaten away. “After that,” she added, “it’s the natural order of things.”

“I don’t know you,” I said.

“I know you. We all know each other, after. Go home to your husband now and he’ll know you, too.”

“I’m not married.”

“Sure.” She smiled at me, her face breaking into a mass of lines and seams. “It could be worse, you know. They like to watch it waste me, they like to watch it creep through me and eat me alive. They pour life into us, they loan it to us, you could say, and then they take it back with a great deal of interest. And fascination. They feed on us, and we feed on them, but considering what they are, we’re actually feeding on ourselves. And maybe a time will come that will really be the end. After all, how long can we make ourselves last?”

She veered away suddenly, disappearing down a staircase that led to one of the abandoned restaurants closer to the waterline.

As I passed the tower, the hanging woman waved a greeting. There would be no horizon line on the ocean again today.

I had thought Jim would know as soon as he saw me, but I didn’t know what I expected him to do. He watched me from where he lay on the bed with his arms behind his head. Through the thin material of his shirt, I could see how he’d been split from below his collarbone down to his navel. It seems to be a favorite pattern of incision with them, or maybe they really have no imagination to speak of.

He still said nothing as I took a book from the stack on the nightstand and sat down in the chair by the window, positioning myself with my back to the room. The words on the pages looked funny, symbols for something I no longer knew anything about.

The mattress creaked as Jim got up and I heard him changing his clothes. I didn’t want to look—after all, it wouldn’t matter what I saw—and still not wanting to, I put the unreadable book aside and turned around.

The incision was actually very crude, as if it had been done with a jagged shard of glass. I wanted to feel bad at the sight, I wanted to feel sorry and sad and angry at the destruction, I wanted of feel the urge to rush to him and offer comfort. But as Sandor had pointed out, in the absence of pain, no comfort was necessary.

Abruptly, Jim shrugged and finished dressing, and I realized he’d been waiting for something, maybe for me to show him my own. But I had no desire to do that yet.

“I’m going for a walk up the promenade,” he said, heading for the door. “You can come if you want.” He didn’t look back for a response.

“Do you think,” I heard myself say just before he stepped out into the hall, “they’re everywhere? Or if we could just get home somehow ...”

“Jess.” He almost smiled. “We are home.”

I followed him at a distance. He didn’t wait for me, walking along briskly but unhurriedly, and I didn’t try to catch up with him. The sky seemed darker and duller, the sounds of the people on the promenade quieter, more muffled. The trams didn’t run.

I stayed out until dark. The dying-stars show was especially spectacular, and I watched it until Sandor finally got around to coming back for me.