The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (76 page)

“Get them to doctors, Mr. Kinney,” I said. “Tomorrow. I’ll be back with the police to check.”

I wanted him to grin again. His grin scared me. And his shrug made me furious. Fear and fury would keep me nailed where I was. Instead, of course, he sat there reading my face, the way he had the fog. The way he did the whole world. “Goodnight, Personal Physician,” he said.

Then he was out of my car, lurching across the street, and Aaron was emerging from the doorway where he’d clearly been waiting, throwing an arm around his mentor’s shoulders to help him back to his Library. And I was all but gunning the engine as I turned around, floored the accelerator, and got the hell out of there.

I should have gone home. I didn’t generally spend much time in my apartment, passed my after-clinic hours eating out or walking the Castro or over to Haight, sometimes seeing concerts or movies but often just haunting the blocks where the used bookshops used to be, and which still retained their traces. I should have done that then.

Instead, I went back to the clinic, figuring I needed to work. Get my brain clear. Get the reek of Erick Kinney out of it. I put
The Anatomy of Melancholy
back in the gaping space it had left on my shelf. I did data entry and paperwork for a while. I ordered out for Pad Thai and turned on the radio. Eventually, I lay back in my reclining armchair and turned out the lights and let the sounds of my street seep into the room. That far-off clanging, as though something were always being built nearby, just around the next corner, but I could never find it. Occasional stumbling footsteps or slurred shouts from a homeless person or a drunk. That faint echo passing cars leave in fog. My nighttime companions for so long.

Is he really that stupid,
the bastard had asked? Damn right, too. Why had Oliver let me go? I’d never understood. Aaron hadn’t either, he’d been furious even at five. The last thing I’d ever wanted, to come between the two of them. And I’d never quite gotten past it all either, apparently.

Very early—too early—I’d settled on this image of myself. The creature in the clinic. The Veiled Lady. Alone with her spells, her private regrets. Why had I done that?

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But what I saw was the Librarian’s wagging beard, his satyr-grin. And what I heard was that bleat, reverberating inside my head.
Burn or bury. That summer.
His panting breath, his crooked hands.
That’s what they told my father. That summer.
His followers arrayed around him in the Library, like broken pieces of a model. Kissing the decrepit book he read them.
How the Morlocks got their limp. The germ of an idea. That summer.

I sat bolt upright, mouth open, grabbing so hard at the chain for the lamp beside my chair that I knocked the whole lamp over, heard the bulb smash on the floor. I stood, the fragments grinding to dust under my soles.

“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud. The words small and useless in my useless little room.

Hurrying into the hall, I flipped on every light in the Clinic, as though that would help. As though light would make any difference.
It’s crazy,
I was thinking.
A night terror. A fog phantom.
I grabbed Erick Kinney’s kit out of my drawer anyway, removed the throat swab from its vial, took it upstairs to the little lab I’d built myself, as a hobby, mostly, over the lonely years.

But it would take weeks—and a much more sophisticated lab, and an expert—to prove what I already knew. What couldn’t be happening, and clearly was. There wasn’t even anyone for me to call. No one who’d believe me enough to run the tests right away. Even if they did, by the time the tests provided results, it would be too late. Because the Scourge of Summer had already risen from the dead.

All the way down the hill toward the Bay, I worked it over in my head. Tried to convince myself it was impossible. Then I gave that up and worked on figuring out how it had happened, instead.
How had I even known?

But I had the answer to that one. I’d figured it out the same way I’d figured out virtually everything I knew: I’d read it somewhere. God knows where. Retained, it somehow. Those summers. Those damp, terrifying Julys and Augusts, when families fled the beaches. When parents kept their children indoors, away from their friends, and prayed the killer in the streets would sweep past them. When kindhearted librarians assembled bundles of books from the shelves and sent them in pouches to the already-afflicted, the ones who’d been quarantined, so they’d have something to do to pass the hours while their muscles withered and their lungs froze and they slowly, slowly strangled. The pouches all came with little candies, a card full of get-well wishes, and a letter of instruction asking that the books not be returned. That they be burned, or buried, just in case polio really could linger on the pages.

Erick Kinney was seated by himself on the sidewalk outside the Library. The door had been yanked shut. I moved straight past him, kicked repeatedly at the metal. The sound boomed and rolled like thunder. No one came.

“They’re gone,” the Librarian said, after the echoes from my volley of kicks finally subsided.

I looked down. “Gone?”

That grin. Horrible. Lopsided. “Every. Last. One.”

My mouth fell open, and I sank to my knees. I would have grabbed the door if there’d been anywhere to grab. I stared straight into the flicker in his eyes. “You
know,
” I said.

“Well of course I know.”

“How did you know? Weren’t you vaccinated?”

“I was indeed. Alarming, no? And that’s not even the most fascinating part.”

His words, in that goat-voice, buzzed in my ears, seemed to set my brain vibrating so that I couldn’t answer, couldn’t even remember how to speak.

“The fascinating part—the real poetry, if you’ll forgive me—is where I think it came from.” And from his lap, he lifted the Kipling book. Held it out to me.

“Your father’s,” I mumbled.

He nodded. “They thought they were going to have to put him in an iron lung, but they didn’t, quite. He just lost the use of his arms. And one leg. He really should have burned this, don’t you think? And yet, how wonderful that he didn’t.”

“It’s . . . ” My brain cleared. I sucked fog deep into my lungs. “That’s absurd. Impossible. A virus can’t live on a page. Not for fifty seconds, let alone fifty years.”

“Impossible. Sure. But what other explanation could there be? And just think, Veiled Lady. Personal Physician to the Library. What if it’s true? What was our virus doing, all these long years, with no one to hold it, no one to play with? All curled up in a book? What sort of bedtime stories do you think a virus tells itself?”

He was rambling again, off on one of his milk-crate rants. I just sagged against the metal doors, momentarily stunned to helplessness.

“I’ve been imagining one,” he said. “Want to hear it? It’s not so different than any of the stories any living thing tells: ‘
Once upon a time, I got out. I got free. I sailed the summer wind. I met others, and fell in love. I leapt from island to island. I confronted my enemies, and laid them waste. I made more of me. I made more of me. I made more of me.’ ”

“Gone,” I said. “Meaning, you sent them out?”

He stopped talking, smiled that smile. “Sharing the good word. Like all proper Librarians before me.”

My hands flashed out, grabbed his, yanked him sideways toward me. His squeal of pain was awful, pig-like, and satisfying.

“Did you tell them? You murdering, fucked-up son-of-a-bitch, did you tell them what they have?”

“The ones who wanted to hear. Mostly, I just said it was time to go see old friends. Go to the parks and teach the children.”

“Jesus. Oh my God.”

“Much better than bombing, don’t you think? The ironies abound.”

Tears blurred my eyes, ran in rivulets down my face. I kept his wrists clutched in mind. “Aaron. He’s got it, too. What did you tell Aaron?”

“Well, Aaron’s pretty special. As you know.”

Absurdly, I felt myself nodding. My breath catching.

“A loving young man. And brave. And very angry. Mostly about what’s happened to you.”

I jerked his wrists. “Does he know?”

“He knows.”

“And he went to ‘spread the word’? To kill children? I don’t believe it.”

“Not at all,” said Erick Kinney. And he smiled once more. “He said to tell you you were right. That it’s long past time he went home to tell his idiot father exactly where he’s been.”

Greek theatre is like magic. There are specific rules you must follow, or the spell is broken.

Four Legs in the Morning
Norman Prentiss

Fresh air lured him from the musty interior of Dr. Sibley’s cabin, and Leonard’s bare feet tested the dry half-circle of dirt outside the porchless doorway. “There’s plumbing and electricity,” Sibley had told him, “but you’ll have to bring your own comforts, I’m afraid.” Leonard interpreted comfort as a coffee maker and a stockpile of vacuum-sealed bricks of caffeine—food supplies and warm clothing were almost an afterthought, so naturally he hadn’t bothered to pack bedroom slippers. If he was lucky, heat from the metal carafe in his hand might eventually work its way down; in the meantime, he curled his toes and favored the outside arch of his feet to minimize contact with cold, hard ground.

This would be an academic’s idea of “roughing it”: no distractions from television or telephone. He brought his laptop, but would do most of his work the old-fashioned way, with notes on index cards, and chapters scratched in longhand on stacks of legal pads. Sibley approved: that was how he’d written his textbook on Greek tragedy. A single book, not one that would merit tenure in the current market, but with good, close readings of Sophocles’ plays. Critics at the time praised Sibley’s depiction of classical performance: outdoor amphitheaters, choric dancers, stone masks over the actors’ faces. Pretty standard historical background, actually, but influential enough in 1956 to establish Sibley’s reputation. Even today, you couldn’t write about the Oedipus trilogy and not cite Bennet Sibley.

Dr. Sibley. Leonard’s department chair at Graysonville University. As a mentor, Sibley couldn’t really provide helpful advice: he was too out-of-touch with recent scholarly trends. But he had the cabin, and generously offered it to Leonard for the full month between semesters. Enough time, Leonard hoped, to kick start ideas for his second book. As a new member to the Graysonville faculty, he needed to make a strong impression.

He sipped his coffee, bracing against the January wind. Caffeine was his muse. He would linger with her a while in the chill outdoors, then retreat to the warm cabin, to his boxes of books and notecards, to pages of half-formed ideas he’d spread last night over a folding card table. Although he briefly considered driving into town for more supplies—surely there was
some
thing vital he’d forgotten?—Leonard resisted. He had to focus on his project. That’s why he was here. And that’s why he’d stepped outside without shoes, without his down-filled jacket: so he wouldn’t be tempted to wander away from the cabin on a lengthy mission that was nine parts avoidance to one part exploration.

He didn’t
need
to explore the area around the cabin. He needed to work.

Look at the text,
Sibley had advised.
All the answers you need are in the text.
Easy for him to say. In 1956, critics didn’t have to worry about new historicism, feminist or queer theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, and all the backlash against (and redefinition of) these same critical approaches.

Unconsciously, either from irritation or to keep warm, Leonard started to pace. He stayed next to the cabin, avoiding the stone-step path to the carport, and the line of grass and rocks and sticks that beckoned to surrounding woods. The cool dirt beneath his feet was packed tight, smooth as asphalt but with occasional bumps of buried stone or tree root. When he stopped pacing, Leonard backed one heel against a broken branch that was thick as a roll of pennies.

He barely brushed over it, expecting to roll the branch with his heel. Instead, he crushed the segment flat.

Startled, Leonard nearly lost his balance. Was it hollow? Rotted through? A sliver of bark stuck to his bare heel; without looking, he scratched it out with his fingernail.

He set his empty carafe on the ground and kneeled to examine the flattened branch. The bark was as thin as paper. The patterns along the segment seemed more fauna than flora. Hard to trace after he’d crushed the hollow cylinder, but it seemed like a repeating geometric design of dark lines and inscribed ovals. Beneath the design were faint ridges, like the whorl of fingerprints.

Probably, this was a segment of snakeskin. How did that work, exactly? The snake wriggled out of the sleeve of its old skin, emerged shiny and fresh—didn’t it? Well, he was no expert on reptiles, wasn’t certain what species were common to this region. Venomous or non-venomous? Either way, he hoped the skin’s former resident had slithered far away by now.

Leonard peeled up the empty skin—brittle, like a piece of overcooked bacon—and brought it inside. He shut the door behind him, checked the seal between the door and the frame. Then he made a nervous sweep of the cabin’s four rooms, looking under furniture, behind appliances, inside closets.

The cabin offered no resources to help alleviate his uneasiness as the day progressed. No Internet access, no phone, and no books on Sibley’s shelf titled
Deadly Snakes of Northeast Alabama.
As he sat in the main room of the cabin, several times he caught himself peering beneath the table to check his feet—now in socks and shoes, thank you, although he wished his pants were more snug at the cuffs. He considered fastening them closed above his ankles with rubber bands.

Again, the temptation to ride into town. He could stop at the General Store, maybe find some out-of-work locals huddled in a warm booth at the Gas ’n’ Dine. He’d show them his strip of bacon, get advice from old coots who’d survived wars and the depression, had hiked through years of Alabama woods, dodging snakes along dark paths. But, for all Leonard knew, his skin sample really was bacon—and how silly he’d feel, then.