The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (65 page)

I had to act.

So what I did was put her in the cellar and lock her up, after which I put on my hunting clothes and located the equipment; rifle, knife, rope. The tape recorder, she had smashed. I didn’t know how far I would have to stalk the Thing or what I would have to do to make it show itself but I was sick of the waiting game. Damn right I was scared. I took the double bar off the back door and went down the steps.

I tiptoed across the night garden, and over to the trees. I know you’re in there, I said in a reasonable tone. If you don’t come out I’m coming in after you.

There was nothing, only the smell. I thought I would pass out.

Homewrecker. Bastard, come on. Right, I was getting mad. I cocked the rifle. In another minute I was going to spray the trees.

Then it showed itself. It just parted the maples like swinging doors and walked out.

Huge? Yes, and that fetor, wow! The hair that covered it, the teeth … You’ve heard tales brought back by hunters. You can imagine the rest. The Thing stood there in the moonlight with its yellow teeth bared while I kept my rifle trained on its chest. It just stood there snuffling. I was, all right, I was overconfident. I yelled: Are you going to leave Susie and me alone or what?

At which point it sprang. Before I could even squeeze the trigger this great
big monstrous Thing sprang right on top of me after which I don’t remember much except the explosion of my rifle, the kick. So it must be wounded, at least, which I suppose means it has left a trail of blood, but Lieutenant, I don’t want to press charges. The thing is, my Susie left me of her own free will and now that all is said and done I understand.

No, I can’t explain, not exactly, except it has to do with the thing, no, I mean,
Thing
: the stench, the roar, the smack of its prodigious flesh. It must have squeezed the daylights out of me and thrown me into Malcolm’s grape arbor, which is where I woke up. They were gone and he was calling the police.

I’m letting her go, Lieutenant, and with my blessings, because I learned something extraordinary in that terrible embrace. There are things we don’t
want
to want but that doesn’t stop us wanting them, even as we beg forgiveness. Life lets us know there is more than the orderly lines we lay out, that these lines can flex so we catch glimpses of the rest, and if a thing like this can happen to my Susie, who am I to say what I would do if it happened to me?

—Asimov’s
SF
, 1984

The Zombie Prince

What do you know, fool, all you know is what you see in the movies: clashing jaws and bloody teeth; raw hunger lurching in to eat you, thud thud thud. We are nothing like you think.

The zombie that comes for you is indifferent to flesh. What it takes from you is tasteless, odorless, colorless, and huge. You have a lot to lose.

The incursion is gradual. It does not count the hours or months it may spend circling the bedroom where you sleep. For the zombie, there is no anxiety and no waiting. We walk in a zone that transcends disorders like human emotion. In the cosmos of the undead there is only being and un-being, without reference to time.

Therefore your zombie keeps its distance, fixed on the patch of warmth that represents you, the unseemly racket you make, breathing. Does your heart have to make all that noise, does your chest have to keep going in and out with that irritating rasp? The organs of the undead are sublimely still. Anything else is an abomination.

Then you cough in your sleep. It is like an invitation.

We are at your bedroom window. The thing we need is laid open for us to devour.

For no reason you sit up in bed with your heart jumping and your jaw ajar:
what?

Nothing
, you tell yourself, because you have to if you’re going to make it through the night
. Just something I ate.

Hush, if you enjoy living. Be still. Try to be as still as me. Whatever you do, don’t go to the window! Your future crouches below, my perfect body cold and dense as marble, the eyes devoid of light. If you expect to go on being yourself tomorrow when the sun comes up, stay awake! Do it! This is the only warning you’ll get.

One woman alone, naturally you are uneasy, but you think you’re safe. Didn’t you lock the windows when you went to bed last night, didn’t you lock your doors and slip the dead bolt? Nice house, gated community with Security patrolling, what could go wrong? You don’t know that while you sleep the zombie seeks entry. This won’t be anything like you think.

Therefore you stumble to the bathroom and pad back to your bedroom in the
dark. You drop on the bed like a felled cedar, courting sleep. It’s as close as you can get to being one of us. Go ahead, then. Sleep like a stone and if tonight the zombie who has come for you slips in and takes what it needs from you, tomorrow you will not wake up, exactly.

You will get up. Changed.

When death comes for you, you don’t expect it to be tall and gorgeous. You won’t even know the name of the disaster that overtakes you until it’s too late.

Last night Dana Graver wished she could just bury herself in bed and never have to wake up. She’d rather die than go on feeling the way she does.

She wanted to die the way women do when the man they love ends it with no apologies and no explanation. “I’d understand,” she cried, “if this was about another girl.” And Bill Wylie, the man she thought she loved—that she thought loved her! Bill gave her that bland, sad look and said unhelpfully, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this any more.”

Her misery is like a bouquet of broken glass flowers, every petal a jagged edge tearing her up inside. She would do anything to make it stop. She’d never put herself out—no pills, no razor blades for Dana Graver, no blackened corpse for Bill to find, although he deserves an ugly shock.

She’d never consciously hurt herself but if she lies on her back in the dark and
wills
herself to die it might just accidentally happen, would that be so bad? Let the heartless bastard come in and find his sad, rejected love perfectly composed, lovely in black with her white hands folded gracefully and her dark hair flowing, a reproach that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Look what you did to me
. Doesn’t he deserve to know what it sounds like to hear your own heart break?

Composed for death, Dana dozes instead. She drops into sleep like an ocean, wishing she could submerge and please God, never have to come back up. She …

She jerks awake.
Oh God, I didn’t mean it!

There is something in the room.

With her heart hammering she sits up, trembling. Switches on the light.

The silent figure standing by the dresser looks nothing like the deaths a single woman envisions. No ski mask, so this is no home invasion; no burglar’s tools. It isn’t emblematic, either, there’s no grim reaper’s robe, no apocalyptic scythe. This isn’t
SARS
coming for her and it isn’t the Red Death. The intruder is tall and composed. Extremely handsome. Impeccable in white. The only hint of difference is the crescents of black underneath the pale, finely buffed fingernails.

She shrieks.

In ordinary incursions the victim’s scream prompts action: threats or gunshots or knife attack, the marauder’s lunge. This person does nothing. If it is a person. The shape of the head is too perfect. There is something sublime in its unwavering scrutiny.

Chilled, Dana scrambles backward until she is clinging to the bedstead. She throws the lamp at it, screaming. “Get out!”

It doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak.

There is only the crash as the glass lamp base shatters against the wall behind the huge head. The light itself survives, casting ragged shadows on the ceiling. The silence spins out for as long as Dana can stand it. They are in stasis here.

When she can speak, she says, “What are you doing here?”

Is it possible to talk without moving your lips? The stranger in her room doesn’t speak. Instead, Dana knows. Uncanny. She
knows.

—
Good evening. Isn’t that what you people say?

She does what you do. She opens her throat and screams to wake the dead.

—
Don’t do that.

“I can’t help it!”

—
I’m sorry. I’m new at this.

“Who are you?”

—
You mean the name I used to have? No idea. It left me when I died …

“Died!”

The intruder continues —
and I would have to die again to get it back, and you know what death brings. Dissolution and decay. Sorrow.

“What
are you?”

—
For the purposes of this conversation, you can call me X. Every one of us is known as X.

“Oh my God. Oh, my God!”

The great head lifts. —
Who?

“Get out.” Higher. Dana sends her voice high enough to clear the room and raise the neighborhood. “Get out!” When she uncovers her face the intruder hasn’t advanced and it hasn’t run away.

It hasn’t moved. It is watching her, graceful and self-contained. As if her screams are nothing to it. —
No.

“Get out or I’ll …” Groping for the empty pistol she keeps under the pillow she threatens wildly. “I’ll shoot!”

—
Go ahead.
So calm. Too calm! —
It won’t change anything.

“Oh.” Noting the fixed, crystalline eyes she understands that this is true. “Oh my
God
.”

The bedroom is unnaturally still. So is the intruder. Except for the trembling Dana can’t control, except for her light, irregular breathing, she too manages to stay quiet. The figure in white stands without moving, a monument to patience. There is a fixed beauty to the eyes, a terrifying lack of expression. They are empty and too perfect, like doll’s eyes: too pale to be real, blue as blown flowers with stars for pupils. —
Don’t be afraid. That won’t change anything either.

Dana isn’t afraid, exactly, she is too badly hurt by the breakup with Bill to think much about anything else, and this? What’s happening here in her bedroom is too strange to be real. It’s as though she is floating far above it. Not an out-of-body experience, exactly, but one in which everything changes.

The intruder is impeccable in a white suit, black shirt, bright circle of silver about one wrist—silver wire braided, she notes in the kind of mad attention to detail that crisis sparks in some people. The rapt gaze. Like an underground prince ravished by its first look at the sun. The attention leaves her more puzzled than frightened. Flattered, really, by that gaze fixed on her as if she really matters. As if this strange figure has come to break her out of the jail that is her life. Bill’s betrayal changed her. She was almost destroyed but even that is changing. She can’t forgive Bill but with this magnetic presence in her room, for seconds at a time she almost forgets about Bill.

The dark hair, the eyebrows like single brushstrokes, the pallor, are eerie and sinister and glamorous. She doesn’t know whether to flirt or threaten. Better the former, she thinks.
Let Bill come in and find us, that will show him
. Unless she’s stalling until her fingers can find bullets and load the gun. As if she could make a dent in that lustrous skin. “What is this?” she asks, overtaken. “Why are you here?”

The answer takes too long coming. It is not that the stranger has stopped to choose its words. It exists without reference to time. When the answer comes, it isn’t exactly an answer. —
You are my first.

“First what?” First what, she wonders. First love? First kill? The stranger is so gorgeous standing there. So courteous and so still. Impervious. None of her fears fit the template. If Dana’s clock is still running, she can’t read the face. Unnerved by the absence of sound—this intruder doesn’t shift on its feet, it doesn’t cough or clear its throat; she doesn’t hear it breathing!—she whispers, “What are you?”

—
Does the word undead mean anything to you?

“No!” It doesn’t. Nice suit, cultivated manner, he’s a bit of a mystery, but the handsome face, the strange, cool eyes lift him so far out of the ordinary that
the rules don’t pertain here. He’s here because he’s attracted to her. “You don’t look like a …”