The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

'No,' says Ann, and she shakes her head. 'We made it to the gate. Jack and I both, together. We ran and we ran and we ran, and the ape was right there on top of us all the way, so close that I could smell his breath. But we didn't look back, not even once. We ran, and, in the end, we made it to the gate.'

'No, Golden Mother. It did not happen that way.'

One of the sailors on the wall is shouting a warning now, and at first, Ann believes it's only because he can see Kong behind them. But then something huge and long-bodied lunges from the underbrush at the clearing's edge, all scales and knobby scutes, scrabbling talons and the blue-green iridescent flash of eyes fashioned for night hunting. The high, sharp quills sprouting from the creature's backbone clatter one against the other like bony castanets, and it snatches Jack Driscoll in its saurian jaws and drags him screaming into the reedy shadows. On the wall, someone shouts, and she hears the staccato report of rifle fire.

The brown girl stands on the far side of the stream flowing along Fifth Avenue, the tall grass murmuring about her knees. 'You have become lost in All-at-Once time, and you must find your way back from the Everywhen. I can help.'

'I do not need your help,' Ann snarls. 'You keep away from me, you filthy goddamn heathen.'

Beneath the vast, star-specked Indonesian sky, Ann Darrow stands alone. Jack is gone, taken by some unnameable abomination, and in another second the ape will be upon her. This is when she realizes that she's bleeding, a dark bloom unfolding from her right breast, staining the gossamer rags that are all that remain of her dress and underclothes. She doesn't yet feel the sting of the bullet, a single shot gone wild, intended for Jack's attacker, but finding her, instead. I do not blame you, she thinks, slowly collapsing, going down onto her knees in the thick carpet of moss and ferns. It was an accident, and I do not blame anyone …

'That is a lie,' the girl says from the other side of the red stream. 'You do blame them, Golden Mother, and you blame yourself, most of all.'

Ann stares up at the dilapidated skyline of a city as lost in time as she, and the vault of Heaven turns above them like a dime store kaleidoscope.

'Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime. Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

'When does this end?' she asks, asking the girl or herself or no one at all. 'Where does it end?'

'Take my hand,' the girl replies and reaches out to Ann, a bridge spanning the rill and time and spanning all these endless possibilities. 'Take my hand and come back over. Just step across and stand with me.'

'No,' Ann hears herself say, though it isn't at all what she wanted to say or what she meant to say. 'No, I can't do that. I'm sorry.'

And the air around her reeks of hay and sawdust, human filth and beer and cigarette smoke, and the sideshow barker is howling his line of ballyhoo to all the rubes who've paid their two-bits to get a seat under the tent. All the yokels and hayseeds who have come to point and whisper and laugh and gawk at the figure cowering inside the cage.

'Them bars there, they are solid carbon steel, mind you,' the barker informs them. 'Manufactured special for us by the same Pittsburgh firm that supplies prison bars to Alcatraz. Ain't nothing else known to man strong enough to contain her, and if not for those iron bars, well… rest assured, my good people, we have not in the least exaggerated the threat she poses to life and limb, in the absence of such precautions.'

Inside the cage, Ann squats in a corner, staring out at all the faces staring in. Only she has not been Ann Darrow in years — just ask the barker or the garish canvas flaps rattling in the chilly breeze of an Indiana autumn evening. She is the Ape Woman of Sumatra, captured at great personal risk by intrepid explorers and hauled out into the incandescent light the twentieth century. She is naked, except for the moth-eaten scraps of buffalo and bear-pelts they have given her to wear. Every inch of exposed skin is smeared with dirt and offal and whatever other filth has accumulated in her cage since it was last mucked out. Her snarled and matted hair hangs in her face, and there's nothing the least bit human in the guttural serenade of growls and hoots and yaps that escapes her lips.

The barker slams his walking cane against the iron bars, and she throws her head back and howls. A woman in the front row faints and has to be carried outside.

'She was the queen and the goddess of the strange world she knew,' bellows the barker, 'but now she comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Learned men at colleges — forsaking the words of the Good Book — proclaim that we are all descended from monkeys. And, I'll tell you, seeing this wretched bitch, I am almost tempted to believe them, and also to suspect that in dark and far-flung corners of the globe there exist to this day beings still more simian than human, lower even than your ordinary niggers, hottentots, negritos, and lowly African pygmies.'

Ann Darrow stands on the muddy bank of the red stream, and the girl from the ruined and vine-draped jewellery shop holds out her hand, the brown-skinned girl who has somehow found her way into the most secret, tortured recesses of Ann's consciousness.

'The world is still here,' the girl says, 'only waiting for you to return.'

'I have heard another tale of her origin,' the barker confides. 'But I must warn you, it is not fit for the faint of heart or the ears of decent Christian women.'

There is a long pause, while two or three of the women rise from their folding chairs and hurriedly leave the tent. The barker tugs at his pink suspenders and grins an enormous, satisfied grin, then glances into the cage.

'As I was saying,' he continues, 'there is another story. The Chinaman who sold me this pitiful oddity of human de-evolution said that its mother was born of French aristocracy, the lone survivor of a calamitous shipwreck, cast ashore on black volcanic sands. There, in the hideous misery and perdition of that Sumatran wilderness, the poor woman was defiled by some lustful species of jungle imp, though whether it were chimp or baboon I cannot say.'

There is a collective gasp from the men and women inside the tent, and the barker rattles the bars again, eliciting another irate howl from its occupant.

'And here before you is the foul spawn of that unnatural union of anthropoid and womankind. The aged Mandarin confided to me that the mother expired shortly after giving birth, God rest her immortal soul. Her death was a mercy, I should think, as she would have lived always in shame and horror at having borne into the world this shameful, misbegotten progeny.'

'Take my hand,' the girl says, reaching into the cage. 'You do not have to stay here. Take my hand, Golden Mother, and I will help you find the path.'

There below the hairy black tumulus, the great slumbering titan belching forth the headwaters of all the earth's rivers, Ann Darrow takes a single hesitant step into the red stream. This is the most perilous part of the journey, she thinks, reaching to accept the girl's outstretched hand. It wants me, this torrent, and if I am not careful, it will pull me down and drown me for my trespasses.

'It's only a little ways more,' the girl tells her and smiles. 'Just step across to me.'

The barker raps his silver-handled walking cane sharply against the bars of the cage, so that Ann remembers where she is and when, and doing so, forgets herself again. For the benefit of all those licentious, ogling eyes, all those slack jaws that have paid precious quarters to be shocked and titillated, she bites the head off a live hen, and when she has eaten her fill of the bird, she spreads her thighs and masturbates for the delight of her audience with filthy, bloodstained fingers.

Elsewhen, she takes another step towards the girl, and the softly gurgling stream wraps itself greedily about her calves. Her feet sink deeply into the slimy bottom, and the sinuous, clammy bodies of conger eels and salamanders wriggle between her ankles and twine themselves about her legs. She cannot reach the girl, and the opposite bank may as well be a thousand miles away.