400 Boys and 50 More (56 page)

Yet she felt no sense of reunion, of coming home. There was no welcome, though she did sense a sort of recognition, a quickening in the dark around her.

“They could have taken us then, Holly,” Heather called from above. “They let us have a good long time, but I always knew they’d want us back. Well, you were too young to realize what the bargain was; you might not think it’s fair, but really, you got the most out of it. Music runs so much deeper than words.”

Holly shook herself, as if trying to throw off a thickening spell. “You’re insane!” she called. “You’re saying you . . . you sold your soul to write those songs?”

Heather laughed, and the last traces of warmth were sucked from Holly’s body. The darkness seemed to thrust its faces at her, and something rattled on the shore of the deep pool.

“No, little sister,” Heather called. “Not
my
soul.”

* * *

Runick knew the way by heart, but he had never had to travel it encumbered by a body as clumsy as his own. Where previously he had always glided down cleanly on a wind of music’s making, now he scrambled and stumbled, gouged by- thorns, and was soon coated in slippery mire, his fingers webbed with the scum and algae that grew between the rocks. The valley had reguired the sacrifice of his invulnerability, but it was worth it. Perhaps in the act of submitting to the place, it would raise him to those black heights he had long ago been promised. He had no doubt that he was crawling still among the lobes of his dreaming brain; that he had found some part of the world that expressed what was deepest and truest in himself, where for the first time he truly belonged and need no longer shut out the rest of creation.

He was coming home to the bottom of the world, and as he advanced a muted, maddening music began to play around him, stirred up by the rattle of stones underfoot, the swirling of water around his ankles.

A voice sounded just ahead, an intruder on the dark fantasy, and suddenly remembered that he was not indeed alone here. He had almost forgotten Holly Terror—that it was she who had brought him here in the first place, she who had introduced him to this portion of himself.

He advanced more cautiously now, forever suspicious of the tricks reality played. In his visions this moment had always been accompanied by a spark of light, but in the actual valley there was no light; he might as well have been born sightless for all the good his eyes did him now. He carefully gauged the location of the voice, decided that it lay just ahead of him, inevitably blocking his way.

Suddenly the voice broke into song, to match the music that curled around him, but it was an ill voice. If this were Holly, then the valley had robbed her of beauty; her voice was sick as death. It sounded as if she were dying, wasting her last bit of life on this awful moaning that hadn’t quite found a form in words.

The reflex of the dream came back to him then. There was no light to pollute the perfect dark sanctity of this place, but the song was even worse than light. The sound drew something terrible out of him; it brought forth the strength of the guardian who had been born to protect the perfect peace and silence of the valley.

Reaching for the horrible shrieking noise, determined to put an end to it, he stumbled forward with all the power of darkness rising in his heart. He could feel his nails growing longer, sharper, his wings spreading wide. He was almost himself again.

* * *

They were the words to “How Black Was My Valley.” Holly had sung them herself thousands of times, but never with such meaning, never to such a response. Her sister’s voice seemed to whirl and echo around her, stirring life in the still pool. The pebbles shifted under her, as if the shore were being scooped away from underneath. The grating rocks made a chuckling sound.

She drew herself to her feet, scrabbling at the stone wall, trying not to let her teeth chatter. Numb fingers grasped a small knob of rock, her foot found a narrow ledge, and she dragged herself up several inches as the scraping sound grew louder beneath her. Water sprayed in her face as she moved straight into the flood. It poured over her head, filled her ears, deafening her for a moment. She pulled herself up another foot.

From far away, in a distant echoing chamber, she heard a scream. She shook the water from her ears, and it was suddenly nearer. Heather’s voice became a harsh coughing, then nothing more than a rattle. She pressed close to the rock, waiting for the next sound, peering desperately upward through the spray.

Dimly, above her, she saw two shapes struggling. One was Heather; she knew the pale flag of hair that lashed the dark. But it seemed as if the other figure was the one that frantically whipped the flag. All she could see of it was its blackness, even darker than the rest of the valley; there was something bird- or batlike about it, a sense of huge wings spreading as the two figures coiled close together and sprang into flight above her.

They soared for only a moment, and then their plunge carried them past her. They hit the surface of the pool with a hollow sound, as if penetrating a drum. Water exploded over Holly, nearly sweeping her from the rock; in its aftermath she heard a rush of loose pebbles, as in an avalanche.

And then silence.

The music was gone from her head; her sister’s song, as well as the source, were gone.

From the top of the slope, she looked back once and found that morning light had finally begun to penetrate the place. Below her—not nearly as far as she had imagined— was a deep still pool, a sheltered well. Water ran out through a narrow cleft in the far wall, a tumble of broken stone where the current became subterranean. Nothing but water could have passed through the crack.

She tried to tear herself away, to hurry for help, but the surface of the pool captured her eye, like a lens into another world. The pool looked bottomless. The falls continued to patter down upon it, agitating the smoothness only slightly; it shook with a steady rippling, crystalline, pure.

And then a face appeared just beneath the surface—not her sister, but a young man’s face that might have been familiar if it hadn’t looked so distorted by the liguid. His eyes were enormous, staring straight up at her, and filled inexplicably with adoration, blazing with love, as if in death she had brought him unspeakable fulfillment. It was that which sent her running, back up the valley- through the brightening day.

* * *

Later, after the police had tied up the obvious loose ends, after the pool had been plumbed and found bottomless, dredged and scoured by divers and yielded up nothing, after Holly Terror had fled Spencer vowing never to return,

Runick’s family came to gather his things. Nevis stayed out of the room for the hour it took to pack a few sad boxes; avoiding their eyes, he didn’t speak of that night, or say anything more than he had told the police. He couldn’t help feeling guilty, somehow responsible. Runick’s parents didn’t say one word to him; dour folks, even when their son had been alive, and no wonder he had sought escape wherever he could find it, but mainly in music and the adoration of a beautiful rock musician. He hadn’t been the first.

When they were gone, Runick went back into the room and found that they had stuffed the trashcan full of tapes and records. Holly Terror, all of them.

Nevis liked her well enough, though not with Runick’s passion—thank God for that. He had other interests. Still, he couldn’t look at the covers without thinking of his roommate. Never quite a friend, but still—there had been something about him Nevis liked. He’d felt a strange affection. He couldn’t help but think that Runick should be remembered in a way he would appreciate.

So Nevis rescued Runick’s favorite album, the one he played several times a day and treated so reverently that there was scarcely a scratch upon it after a thousand playings. He didn’t bother with headphones, because there was no one he might disturb. He shut the door, closed the curtains, turned up the volume, and let the needle fall … And he was walking in darkness. In pine woods.

In a dark place, a deep place.

Before the first note finished, he bolted upright, screaming, searching for the light switch though he hadn’t turned it out, fighting his way back toward brightness and waking, though he hadn’t remembered falling asleep. He shoved the needle screeching over the platter, yanked the album off the turntable and sent it crashing against the wall.

He could never listen to that cut again; could hardly stand to hear another Holly Terror song, no matter how much her style changed with her next band. He couldn’t say exactly why, for he retained only a faint memory of what he’d seen in that moment when the music began. He had a faint, unwelcome memory of blazing eyes, a woman white and weeping, black sweeping wings, and Runick.

Runick had been there to turn him back, and he counted himself grateful for the warning.

* * *

She was Holly Terra now. She had a new band, she and Kelly. They sang of the earth and its mysteries, while avoiding outright horror; there was enough of that in her nightmares. She lost most of her original audience, who considered her too soft, and started to gather another which appreciated the subtler edge. She could look out from the stage and see the appreciation of a milder crowd, older, not so obsessive.

But sometimes, still, a younger face would surface there, eyes wide and drinking in every note, every word— thirsty for things she and Kelly had not put into these songs. Eyes like bottomless wells . . ..

And then she would remember the black pool, and those other eyes. She would recoil and lose a beat, fearing to look into the crowd again for the rest of the concert.

Before such eyes she always felt like prey.

The eyes in the pool had been gorged and satiated, at peace, but what it had taken to satisfy them had been beyond price.

She couldn’t be sure of that, of course. Heather’s life might have been the price exactly. Only Heather would have known that, having driven the initial bargain.

But Heather was gone now. And she had taken Holly Terror with her.

* * *

“Terror Fan” copyright 1993 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared (as “Terror’s Biggest Fan”) in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, May 1993.

THE DIANE ARBUS SUICIDE PORTFOLIO

“It’s very thrilling to see darkness again.”

—Diane Arbus

“You’ll like this,” said Schaeffer as he let Brovnik into the apartment. “She was a photographer.”

Brovnik chuckled unhappily till the smell hit him; it fit right in with the buzzing of flies. The other cops' hard shoes clapped on the uncarpeted boards of the hall; their voices echoed in the cluttered flat. Brovnik walked slowly, as if in a sweltering museum. Dozens of unmounted photographs were thumbtacked to the walls, curled by the July humidity. Schaeffer went into the bathroom with everyone else. Brovnik wasn’t in any hurry to learn the cause of the splashing he heard. He bent close to a picture of a white girl standing against a canvas tent, her head thrown back, arms spread wide, the hilt of a sword and part of the blade poking out of her gullet. The other pictures were just as freakish. He liked them.

“Come on, Bravo!”

He walked into the small tiled bathroom. Too many cops in it, and a humid jungle reek, tainted with carrion. Water dripped from the mirror.

“Give him some room, guys.”

The body slumped in the tub, mostly submerged, short-cropped thick brown hair matted on the surface like seagrass exposed at low tide. She was fully dressed. One arm floated, propped on a knee, the hand looking swollen and peeled. The water was murky pink. Streamers of red, like those little crepe paper flowers you get in Chinatown; drop a clamshell in water so it slowly opens and a tissue flower unfurls. The room was too small and muggy. He clutched his camera gratefully to his face, confining vision to one small window on a distorted tunnel with suicide at the far end. Her other arm hung over one side of the tub, skin sucked in between the tendons. He nearly stepped in blood as he walked around to get a better angle. It was tacky, two days old, kept from hardening by humidity.

When he finished, the others came back in. He stood in the living room, smoking, agitated. Why? Because she was a photographer? He looked over more of the woman’s prints. Dwarfs, giants, freaks, a man covered with tattoos. Wonder what kind of mind she’d had, to take pictures like this.

A few photos lay spread out on the couch, as if she’d been looking them over while the water was running. He didn’t want to disturb them, but the one on top disturbed him. The last thing she’d seen? A picture of Death standing in a freshly mown field; Death as a woman in a Halloween skull, clutching a white sheet around her. Hell, she’d gone rattling around with a head full of death, hunting it with her camera. He couldn’t understand a mind like that. With his job, it was different. He was a cop first, a photographer second, though these days he didn’t do much of anything but photography and lab administration.

Schaeffer came up next to him, pointing at a picture of a shirtless Latin midget in a hat sitting on a bed with a bottle on the nightstand next to him. Schaeffer nudged him.

“What do you think, she slept with that dwarf to get his picture?”

“You’re sick,” Brovnik said.

“Me? She’s the one in the bath.”

“Bravo, hey,” came a call from the bathroom. “You drop something in here?”

He walked back toward the bathroom, trying to see no more of the interior than he had to. Morrissey came out with a crumpled yellow foil film packet. “Messy, messy,” he said.

“Fuck you, Morrissey. I’m shooting 35—that’s a 120 wrapper.”

“Where’d you pick that up from?” Schaeffer said.

Morrissey suddenly looked pale and stupid. “It was under the tub. I—I remember right where.”

“You fucking idiot.” Schaeffer raised a hand as if to strike him. “She was a photographer, too.”

Morrissey scurried backward into the bathroom, Schaeffer right behind him. Brovnik looked around the room at all the prints; most were square, two and a quarter format, would have been shot on 120 roll film. Nice big negatives, real sharp. He had this little Pentax, light and quick, good enough for police work though it always felt too small in his hands.