Through Shattered Glass Read online

  Through Shattered Glass

  David B. Silva

  © 2003 by David B. Silva

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  "The Calling" copyright © 1990 by David B. Silva. From Borderlands.

  "Dwindling" copyright © 1985 by David B. Silva. From Spectrum Stories.

  "Ice Sculptures" copyright © 1987 by David B. Silva. From Masques II.

  "Dry Whiskey" copyright © 1999 by David B. Silva. From Cemetery Dance.

  "A Time To Every Purpose" copyright © 1993 by David B. Silva. From Amazing Stories.

  "Metanoia" copyright © 1986 by David B. Silva. From New Blood.

  "The In-Between" copyright © 2000 by David B. Silva.

  "Empty Vessels" copyright © 1994 by David B. Silva. From Love In Vein.

  "The Hollow" copyright © 1990 by David B. Silva. From Cemetery Dance.

  "Nothing As It Seems" copyright © 1999 by David B. Silva. From Whitley Strieber's Aliens.

  "Ice Songs" copyright © 1989 by David B. Silva. From Pulphouse.

  "Because I Could" copyright © 1993 by David B. Silva. From Pulphouse.

  "Alone of His Kind" copyright © 1991 by David B. Silva. From Obsessions.

  "The Night in Fog" copyright © 1998 by David B. Silva. From Subterranean Press.

  "Metastasis" copyright © 1990 by David B. Silva. From Cemetery Dance.

  "The Song of Sister Rain" copyright © 1995 by David B. Silva. From After Hours.

  "Slipping" copyright © 1991 by David B. Silva. From Borderlands II.

  For Garrett, who sees

  his own wonderful stories

  through shattered glass.

  Table of Contents

  Dave Silva: Person of Mystery

  Introduction by Dean Koontz

  The Calling

  Dwindling

  Ice Sculptures

  Dry Whiskey

  A Time To Every Purpose

  Metanoia

  The In-Between

  Empty Vessels

  The Hollow

  Nothing As It Seems

  Ice Songs

  Because I Could

  Alone of His Kind

  The Night in Fog

  Metastasis

  The Song of Sister Rain

  Slipping

  Dave Silva: Person of Mystery

  Introduction by Dean Koontz

  I have known David B. Silva for more than fifteen years. This is a long, long, long time by any standard: more than a century in dog years. It's an eternity to any may fly, because may flies live only two days, which is the length of time Dave sometimes takes to get up from his armchair after too much beer and a marathon of Ed Wood videotapes. Cheops—King of Eqypt in the 26 century B.C.—built the great pyramid at Giza in but a year, and God created the universe in six days, but after fifteen years of knowing Dave, I'm frustrated to admit that I'm lacking the colorful details needed to create the astonishing and vivid portrait that readers of his work have a right to expect.

  Although I have never met him face to face and have no idea what he looks like, I consider Dave a friend. I believe that he considers me a friend, too, because I detect something warm and ever affectionate in the violent, wordless spluttering that erupts from him every time he picks up his telephone and hears my voice. And from time to time, I receive in the mail a plain white envelope bearing no return address, but which I know comes from Dave because of the Oak Run, California, postmark; inside is always the same and singular thing—a black-ink imprint of Dave's hand, which is his charming way of letting me know that he's thinking about me, his friend.

  Dave and I live in the same sate, so it seems as though we ought to be able to arrange to meet; however, California is big, a full thousand miles long, and Dave has managed to put a great many of those thousand miles between his house and mine. Occasionally, he goes to a horror or fantasy convention, but I rarely do. When I attended my first—and thus far only—World Fantasy Convention, I asked Dave if he was going. "Are you going?" he asked, and when I answered in the affirmative, he moaned, "Oh, dark, I can't make it." Dismayed, I said, "Gosh, maybe we're fated never to meet," and he said, "That's it exactly. Fate. Damn fate! Oh, how I despise fate, how I loathe fate, the unfairness of it all!" He was so distraught that I offered to skip the World Fantasy Convention and come, instead, to visit him in Oak Run; but fate foiled us once more, because Dave was leaving within the hour to join a search party on a perilous mission to the headwaters of the Amazon, where his kindly missionary uncle had disappeared and was probably being fattened by cannibals who wished to serve him as the main course their Feast of the Winter Solstice. And his grandmother had died that morning, and his grandfather was on a Hijacked airliner over Istanbul, and his dog was having puppies even as we spoke, so it, you know, a very busy time for him.

  I have seen two photographs of Dave Silva, but I am not able to provide you with a vivid physical description of him. Both photographs appeared in genre publications, and both were small. In the first, he is pictured in conversation with another writer, and he is wearing a large hat. The photo is slightly blurry, and the hat shades his face. One cannot discern even his height unless one knows the height of the writer with whom he is pictured, but I have never made this Other Writer's acquaintance. (I have written six letters to this Other Writer, inquiring as to his precise height, to within a sixteenth of an inch, and politely asking him to inform me if he and Dave were standing on a flat surface or whether one of them was uphill of the other, but I haven't yet received the courtesy of a reply—even thought the sixth of my six letters was accompanied by a threat.) Anyway, although the first photo reveals little of Dave, the hat is interesting. It is, as I have said, a large hat, and of indeterminate character. Because the photo is slightly blurry and the shadowing is odd, I can't pin down the style: It might be a cowboy hat, an Australian bushman's hat, an oversized fedora, or even a beret to which someone has sewn the brim of a sombrero in a hideous misguided attempt at sartorial innovation. Regardless of the questionable nature of the hat, Dave, being Dave, wears it with flair. The second photo is of Dave alone—the ruse and uncommunicative Other Writer nowhere in sight—and although it was evidently taken on a different occasion from the first photo, it is also a very small image, full of shadow, and Dave is again wearing a hat. I believe it is the same strange hat as in the first photo, but I cannot assure you, with confidence, that it is not altogether new headgear. I might go so far as to say that under a magnifying glass, this chapeau almost appears to be a cloche hat with a darling little feather at the base of the crown, but this would call into question Dave's gender, and I remain all but certain that he is male.

  Extensive computer analysis of these two photos, employing image-enhancement technology first developed for the United States Department of Defense (Global Intelligence Division, Armageddon Bureau, under the oversight of The—Ruskie—Commie—Bastards—Aren't—Really—Gone Committee, in the Office of Managed Paranoia), revealed less of Dave than I had hoped. Because of the poor quality of the photographs, I can report only that Dave has: at least one eye; something rather like a nose if not, indeed, a nose; one lip and perhaps two; either a beard or a strangely pointy chin; some teeth. The computer enhancement also reveals what appears to be a brooding expression, which may or may not be related to Dave's concern over the possibility that he may be lacking a full complement of facial features, though of course that is purest speculation.

  Because Dave is a figure of m
ystery equaled only by Batman, the Easter Island stone heads, and the Taco Bell Chihuahua (How can a dog talk? How can it possibly eat a burrito bigger than it is? How does it manage to hold a chimichanga with just its forepaws?), I find myself speculating about him at odd hours of the day. Just this morning, brushing my teeth, I asked myself, If Dave had to choose between being eaten alive by a panther or by a pack of rabid squirrels, which death would he choose? What would be the moral, intellectual, and spiritual considerations that resulted in his choice? In his will, has he bequeathed to me his mandolin? Does he even have a mandolin? He is such a puzzle, this Dave Silva, such an enigma wrapped in a mystery, boxed in a riddle, tied up with a ribbon of conundrum, that speculation of this sort if irresistible, and once one begins to indulge in it, whole days and weeks can pass in a blur.

  Although I certainly have days and even weeks to devote to the composition of this introduction, especially if it leads me toward a better understanding of my long-distance friend, I am told by the rather stern-voiced publisher that busy readers will not have time to take such a profound journey into the Heart of Dave. I gather that contemporary readers are a frivolous bunch who would prefer to read the fiction herein, and be entertained, rather than fling themselves, with me, into the intellectual pursuit of the Infinite Possibilities of Dave.

  Consequently, putting aside speculation, I will tell you call the important things that I actually know about this man (man, I say, in the assumption that it is not a cloche hat in that photo). He is a fine, sensitive, talented editor who published a landmark magazine; The Horror Show was a champion of—and a beacon for—its genre for over seven years, and those of us who read it and wrote for it will miss it always. He is a talented writer of novels and short fiction, who knows where the heart of the story lies, and who deserves a larger audience than he has yet received. When his mom was dying of cancer and, later, his dad of leukemia, he was there for them in a way and to an extent that is unfortunately not common these days. He is a modest man in a profession that generally attracts people with egos larger than Godzilla's morning stool. I have never heard him speak a mean word about anyone. He has a superb sense of humor and a wonderful laugh, and while he takes his work quite seriously, he never takes himself seriously—which, to me, is the primary hallmark of sanity.

  It has been my pleasure and my privilege to be a friend of Dave's, by phone and by mail, while nearly 1750 may flies have come and tragically gone. I had shared his keen frustration as Amazon cannibals, Turkish terrorists, pregnant dogs, floods, fires, killer bees, evil extraterrestrials, Big Foot, a crazed Richard Simmons, vampire bats, and so damn many other weird emergencies and catastrophes in his life have prevented him from meeting me face-to-face when the opportunities have arisen, but I am grateful that the post office always gets my letters to him and that every time the monumentally incompetent phone company has changed Dave's number and de-listed it without telling him, I have been able to track it down nonetheless, even if sometimes not be legal means. I remain hopeful, however, that one day we will at last meet and shake hands. I'm confident that modern medicine will find a cure for his peculiar, recently diagnosed condition, and that one day this dear, brave man will be able to enter a room with someone of my blood type and have no fear of spontaneous combustion.

  The Calling

  It never stops.

  The whistle.

  The sound is hollow, rising from a cork ball enclosed by red plastic. His mother no longer has the strength to blow had—the cancer has made certain of that—so the sound comes out as a soft song, like the chirring of a cricket somewhere off in another part of the house, just barely audible. But there. Always unmistakably there.

  Blair buries his head beneath his pillow. He feels like a little boy again, trying to close out the world because he just isn’t ready to face up to what is out there. Not yet. Maybe never, he thinks. How do you ever face up to something like cancer? It never lets you catch up.

  It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning now.

  And just across the hall …

  Even with his eyes closed, he has a perfect picture of his mother’s room: the lamp on her nightstand casting a sickly gray shadow over her bed, the blankets gathered at her feet. Behind her, leaning against the wall, an old ironing board serves as a makeshift stand for the IV the nurse was never able to get into mother’s veins. And the television is on. In his mind, Blair sees it all. Much too clearly.

  He wraps himself tighter in the pillow.

  The sound from the television is turned down, but he still thinks he can hear a scene from Starsky and Hutch squealing from somewhere across the hallway.

  Then the whistle.

  A thousand times he had heard it calling him … at all hours of the night … when she is thirsty … when she needs to go to the bathroom … when she needs to be moved to a new position … when she is in pain. A thousand times. He hears the whistle, the whirring call, coming at him from everywhere now. It is the sound of squealing tires from the street outside his bedroom window. It is the high-pitched hum of the dishwasher, of the television set, of the refrigerator when it kicks on at midnight.

  Everywhere.

  He has grown to hate it.

  And he has grown to hate himself for hating it.

  An ugly thought comes to mind: why … doesn’t she succumb? Why hasn’t she died by now? It’s not the first time he’s faced himself with this question, but lately it seems to come up more and more often in his mind. Cancer is not an easy thing to watch. It takes a person piece by piece …

  “My feet are numb.”

  “Numb?”

  “Like walking on sandpaper.”

  “From the chemo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe …” Blair said naively, “maybe your feet will feel better after the chemo’s over.” He had honestly believed that it would turn out that way. When the chemo stopped, then so would her nausea and her fatigue and her loss of hair. And the worst of the side effects had stopped, for a while. But the numbness in her feet … that part had stayed on, an ugly scar left over from a body pumped full of dreadful things with dreadful names like doxorubicin and dacadbazine and vinblastine. Chemicals you couldn’t even pronounce. It wasn’t long before she began to miss a step here and there, and soon she was having to guide herself down the hallway with one hand pressed against the wall.

  “Sometimes I can’t even feel them,” she once told him, a pained expression etched into the lines of her face.

  She knows, Blair had thought at the time. She knows she’s never going to dance again. The one thing she loves most in the world, and it’s over for her.

  The heater kicks on.

  There’s a vent under the bed where he’s trying to sleep. It makes a familiar, almost haunting sound, and for an instant, he can’t be sure if he’s hearing the soft, high-pitched hum of the whistle. He lifts his head, listens. There’s a hush that reminds him of a hot summer night when it’s too humid to sleep. But the house seems at peace, he decides.

  She’s sleeping, he tells himself in a whisper. Finally sleeping.

  For too long, the endless nights have haunted him with her cancerous likeness. She is like a butterfly: so incredibly delicate. She’s lying in bed, her eyes half closed, her mouth hung open. Five feet, seven inches tall and not quite ninety pounds. The covers are pulled back slightly, her nightgown is unbuttoned and the outline of her ribs resembles a relief map.

  She’s not the same person he used to call his mother.

  It’s been ages since he’s seen that other person. Before the three surgeries. Before the chemotherapy. Before the radiation treatments. Before he finally locked up his house and moved down state to care for her …

  She cried the first time she fell. It happened in her bedroom, early one morning while he was making breakfast. He heard a sharp cry, and when he found her, her legs were folded under like broken wings. She didn’t have the strength to climb back to her feet. For a moment, her face wa
s frozen behind a mask of complete surprise. Then suddenly she started crying.

  “Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head, burying her face in her hands.

  “Here, let me help you up.”

  “No.” She motioned him away.

  He retreated a step, maybe two, staring down at her, studying her, trying to put himself in her position. It occurred to him that she wasn’t upset because of the fall—that wasn’t the reason for the tears—she was crying because suddenly she had realized the ride was coming to an end. The last curve of the roller coaster had been rounded and now it was winding down once and for all. No more corkscrews. No more quick drops. No more three-sixties. Just a slow, steady deceleration until the ride came to a final standstill. Then it would be time to get off. The fall … marked the beginning of the end.

  It had been a harsh realization for both of them.

  He began walking with her after that, guiding her one step at a time from her bedroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the living room, from the living room to the bathroom. A week or two later, she was using a four-pronged cane. A week or two after that, she was using a wheelchair.

  Everything ran together those few short weeks, a kaleidoscope of forfeitures, one after the other, all blended together until he could hardly recall a time when she had been healthy and whole …

  She’s going to die.

  Blair has known this for a long time now.

  She’s going to die, but …

  but …

  how long is it going to take?

  It seems like forever.

  A car passes by his bedroom window. It’s been raining lightly and the slick whine of the tires reminds him of that other sound, the one he’s come to hate so much. He hates it because there’s nothing he can do now. There’s no going back, no making things better. All he can do is watch … and wait … and try not to lose his sanity to the incessant call of the whistle.