Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

abstraction. I mean, isn’t that what we were talking about?’

There was silence, and then there was laughter. Distant, dim and very scary.

‘Just an idea. Just an idea.’ He said it over and over and was still laughing when he hung up the phone.

I tried to call him back, but the line was engaged. I crawled back into bed and kissed the tears off Elaine’s face. I tried to go back to sleep, but I kept hearing Klein’s laughter in my head.

I don’t know what time the phone rang.

Elaine had gone to bed early, but I stayed up to watch The South Bank Show. Melvin Bragg was interviewing Derrida.

At about half-eleven, Elaine staggered out of the bedroom clutching her belly. Her face was white as milk, and blood oozed down her thighs. She was crying and moaning and collapsed to the floor before I could get to her. I thought about calling an ambulance, but couldn’t bear the wait. I lifted her up and put her in the car, then sped to the local hospital in a panicked daze.

Elaine lost the baby, but it was worse than that. Her uterus had become malformed in the pregnancy. It was actually touch and go for a while, although the surgeon didn’t tell me that until later. The doctor also said she had never seen or heard of anything quite like it before, and asked if Elaine had ever worked around radioactive or toxic substances. I couldn’t make any sense of it then, but of course anything and everything is explainable now.

I left the hospital confused and exhausted, but satisfied that Elaine was going to be okay.

The police were waiting for me when I got home. A detective accompanied by a pair of PCs. I immediately assumed something had happened to Elaine.

‘Steven Rich?’ the detective asked.

I managed a nod.

He mumbled his name, but I didn’t catch it. ‘Do you know a Dr Paul Klein?’

Another nod.

‘When did you last have contact with him?’

‘A week or two ago. Why? What’s going on? Is this about Elaine? Is Elaine all right?’

The detective glanced at one of the constables who started back toward the car. ‘I don’t know about any Elaine, sir. But Dr Klein killed his wife and took his own life early this morning. Your phone number was found on his person. Did he call you at any time last night or early today?’

I never thought of myself as a fainter, but things went black around me. I felt like Dorothy caught up in the twister and carried over the rainbow into some alien landscape. Fortunately the cop caught me by the arm and helped me to a sitting position on the front steps.

I told him in rambling terms about Elaine and what had happened the previous night. That I knew Klein and Margaritte were having troubles, but that his news was an utter shock. He clucked sympathetically and tried to look interested.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We may want to talk to you some more, but that can wait. Why don’t you get some rest now.’

The cop helped me inside and guided me to the living room sofa where I collapsed. He closed the front door softly as he left and I fell quickly and deeply asleep.

Neither of us thought to check the blinking light on the answerphone.

Our answering machine is an old model — it works well enough that I never saw any reason to buy a fancier one — but it only gives you sixty seconds to leave a message.

‘I’ve been running the equations for days, Steve, but they won’t converge. The iterations will go on for ever now.

‘I was grading exams the other day, you know? The first-year class. A girl wrote out elaborate calculations for a problem that didn’t require it, a problem with a simple answer. In the end she just put a big “X” through it all and gave up. I saw it as sous rature and gave her full credit.

‘It’s coming now, Steve. Almost here. I thought I should warn you. We’re at the base of the S-curve, but the explosion will happen soon. The numbers don’t. didn’t lie.

‘I put her under erasure. Margaritte. I thought it was for the best. The only thing I wish. ’

Sixty seconds.

I remember Klein once told me about something called luminiferous aether. It was an early, discarded notion in physics, like spontaneous generation or phlogiston. Aether was supposed to be the medium which filled all unoccupied space and was the mechanism for transmission of magnetic and electrical forces. Klein said that there had been some promising work verifying its existence and the idea was catching on until Einstein disproved it all with relativity. Klein always repeated the same thing when the topic of relativity came up.

‘Hell of an idea,’ he would say.

Elaine came home from the hospital after a week. We talked about the baby and about Klein and Margaritte. She cried a lot and told me she understood if I didn’t want to stay with her now, but I just told her to hush and held her tight. I didn’t let her hear the phone message, nor did I voice my suspicions, but after a while she pieced it together herself.

The curve is on the rise: Klein’s explosion has started to detonate and the world has begun to change. It’s hard to keep up with because it’s hard to know what’s real, what you can count on to remain solid, consistent from day to day.

The world doesn’t meet at right angles any more. All the assumptions that we’ve depended on for so long have crawled out of the rotten woodwork of our lives. The old formulae don’t add up and the new ones are still a mystery. I know it’s what Klein suspected, but I’m also sure that it’s less awful than he feared. It is certain that he overreacted; living sous rature is still better than dying under it.

Like bugs or fish that spend their lives in the darkness, this sudden flash of bold light has sent all of us scurrying in turbulent new directions. It’s scary, but it’s sort of interesting, too. At times it’s even wondrous. God knows, it’s chaotic, but not without its own subtleties of order.

Mostly, it’s a hell of an idea.

* * *

Jay Russell’s contribution to Dark Terrors 2, ‘Lily’s Whisper’, was one of two stories from that volume selected by Ellen Datlow for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Tenth Annual Collection. His third novel, Burning Bright, a sequel to Celestial Dogs, was recently published in Britain, while American and French editions of Celestial Dogs and his other novel, Blood, are also scheduled over the next year. ‘“Sous Rature” is the piece of fiction that probably comes most directly from my years in academia,’ recalls Russell. ‘Although I was not in either a scientific discipline or a literature department (it probably shows), I did spend more than my fair share of time immersed in the kind of loopy “post-” theory which figures in the story. In fact, I once seriously intended to write a scholarly essay about cyberpunk and call it “The Prosthetic Aesthetic”. Thanks to whatever gods there be, I never got around to it.’

Spanky’s Back In Town CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

1. The History of Rasputin’s Casket

‘Can’t we go any faster?’ Dmitry turned around in the seat, punching at the driver’s fur-clad back. Behind him one of the wolves had almost caught up with the rear-runners of the sleigh and was snapping at the end of his flapping scarf.

‘This is new snow over old,’ the driver shouted. ‘The tracks have hardened and will turn us over.’