999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [218]
“What do you mean?”
“Get the ropy thing out of my head.”
Suzie laughed, went to the workbench herself and retrieved a flashlight, which she shined into Jerry’s ears.
“Nothing in there but wax,” she said.
“I don’t want to believe anymore,” Jerry said listlessly, sounding like a ghost.
“It’s too late,” Suzie said. Jerry lay down on the floor and curled up into a ball.
“Then I want to die,” he whispered.
Winter snapped at the heels of autumn. The air was apple cold, but there were no more apples. The ropy thing spent the fall yanking trees and bushes and late roses and grass into the ground.
It was scouring the planet clean of weeds and fish and amoebas and germs.
Jerry stopped eating, and Suzie had to help him walk.
Idly, Jerry wondered what the ropy thing would do after it had killed the Earth.
Suzie and Jerry stood between towns gazing at a field of dirt. In the distance the ropy thing waved and worked, making corn stalks disappear in neat rows. Behind Jerry and Suzie, angled off the highway into a dusty ditch, was the car that Suzie had driven, telephone books propping her up so that she could see over the wheel, until it ran out of gas. The sky was a thin dusty blue-gray, painted with sickly clouds, empty of birds.
A few pale snowflakes fell.
“I want it to end,” Jerry whispered hoarsely.
He had not had so much as a drink of water in days. His clothes were rags, his eyes sunken with grief. When he looked at the sky now his eyeballs ached, as if blinded by light.
“I … want it to stop,” he croaked.
He sat deliberately down in the dust, looking like an old man in a child’s body. He looked up at Suzie, blinked weakly.
When he spoke, it was a soft question: “It wasn’t me, it was you who did it.”
Suzie said nothing, and then she said, “I believed. I believed because I had to. You were the only one who ever loved me. They were going to take me away from you.”
There was more silence. In the distance, the ropy thing finished with the cornfield, stood at attention, waiting. Around its base a cloud of weak dust settled.
Quietly, Jerry said, “I don’t love you anymore.”
For a moment, Suzie’s eyes looked sad—but then they turned to something much harder than steel.
“Then there’s nothing left,” she said.
Jerry sighed, squinting at the sky with his weak eyes.
The ropy thing embraced him, almost tenderly.
And as it pulled him down into its pulsating jelly body, he saw a million ropy things, thin and black, reaching up like angry fingers to the Sun and other stars beyond.
Gene Wolfe
THE TREE IS MY HAT
This is a true story: I once heard a fellow editor say he would quit his job and become Gene Wolfe’s unpaid valet just so Wolfe could continue, without distraction, to write the kind of stories he writes.
Man, oh man, how’s that for a testimonial?
I get the feeling that editor isn’t alone.
Since he burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1970s with stories like “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” Gene Wolfe has been one of the treasures of that field, as well as the related fields of fantasy and horror to which he sometimes lends his talents. His longer work is best represented by his Severian the Torturer books, which at this time number four; they have been omnibused in The Book of the New Sun. His writing is literary, perfumed with allusion, special, and unlike any other writer’s.
For us he has produced a special piece with an odd title that will make all the sense in the world once you’ve read the story.
30 Jan. I saw a strange stranger on the beach this morning. I had been swimming in the little bay between here and the village; that may have had something to do with it, although I did not feel tired. Dived down and thought I saw a shark coming around the big staghorn coral. Got out fast. The whole swim cannot have been more than ten minutes. Ran out of the water and started walking.
There it is. I have begun this journal at last. (Thought