The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

I grabbed her by the shoulders and fought her sudden thrashings, but her strength and her will to resist were far greater than I had expected. I found myself literally trying to tackle her, pull her down to the floor. I was willing to kill her just so that she might have to look me in the eyes. Mona shrieked and wailed as she had on that evening on Lower Wacker Drive when the Shabbie tried to wrestle her to the ground for what were probably the exact same reasons.

She struck me across the face. I could feel the blood spreading down my cheek. I struck her next blow aside and backed away.

I called her Mona one last time.

And then she attacked. It was all a blur, the hazy, fading end of it a frail human girl, the harder, on-rushing, leading edge something ugly and ferocious—rows of twitching, flickering blades mounted on glutinous, transparent cords of flesh. I covered my face with folded arms and dropped to the floor as a thousand needle-points pierced and broke off inside my skin. I felt a sprinkle of cool water, then heard the door slam.

I lay there for quite some time, afraid to move. When I finally sat up, it was dark, and Mona was gone.

My skin was clean and unbroken.

I tried to sleep that night, but every time I closed my eyes I was struck again by the image of that girl zooming forward through a self-generated haze, her face turning into a grotesque, glass-flesh monster, mouth open and ready to tear me to shreds. I didn’t want to know what my dreams would have made of such a vision, and ended up going to work the next morning with no sleep whatsoever. I didn’t sleep the next night either, only nodding off occasionally on the train for the next three days, until on the fourth night sleep finally beat me into submission.

I avoided Lower Wacker and spent as little time in the apartment as I could; and when I did, I scrupulously prevented my eyes from coming to rest on that corner of hers.

Did I really believe she wasn’t coming back? It was only in my most agonizing moments that I actually convinced myself I was really in love with Mona and not merely a slave to the presence she had offered me as an antidote to my suffocating loneliness. I began to fantasize that she returned to me in the guise of a shy, repentant but otherwise quite normal woman who would speak to me and not only heal the wounds she’d left me with, but explain away the madness she had suffused into my body and my home and into the world I saw through my tired, suspicious eyes.

It was this hope, pierced with a lifetime’s worth of bitterness, that ruined me in the end.

I lost my job. Various reasons were given for my abrupt termination, but the real reasons were obvious and plentiful. I no longer bathed. I rarely changed my clothes. I talked to myself. Sometimes I talked to Mona. And sometimes I just wept for her, in loud but stifled gasps.

On the night I lost my job I returned to the apartment in a rage. I looked at the shambles I had made of it since I’d frightened Mona away; dirty clothes strewn and wadded across every surface, half-eaten food festering away on the floor and tabletops, magazines opened and tossed across furniture as though I were always in the middle of reading a dozen different useless articles and advertisements. The TV had remained on for three weeks, until the picture fizzled out and I was left with no more than twenty-four hours of static. I felt another useless bout of crying coming over me.

No, not again. No more.

I let out a scream and proceeded to tear the place apart. Why not finish the job since it seemed to be what my body really wanted to do? I tore up clothes and magazines, emptied the contents of my refrigerator and freezer across every surface upon which those contents could land or stick.

And then I tore the old sheet away from Mona’s corner. I was struck again by the insane logic that made it look like so much more than a mere collection of garbage. I began tearing away at the complex, symmetrical formation she had created, hurling rusted metal, grime-coated shards of glass, rat and pigeon corpses, and completely unidentifiable, convoluted masses of slick or hairy or sharp material across my room, so that what had once been a carefully but enigmatically constructed puzzle was no more than a scattered addition to the wasteland of filth and clutter that had once been my apartment.

But within days, the apartment was clean and barren and lifeless. I, too, had grown clean and barren and lifeless. I took showers until I was covered with red, raw patches, and though I stared out my windows for hours on end, I did not leave the place for over a week.

When I finally did, it was to take a train downtown and revisit my old haunts: Lower Wacker Drive, the crossroads of my former life. It was early April now, and the weather had that cruel, unpredictable bite Chicago weather always has in spring along the lakefront: cold or warm—not merely on one frustrating day to the next—but from one gust of wind to another, from one patch of light to the adjacent shadow.

And there they were. I don’t know why it surprised me so much. Only three of them, standing brittle and motionless, as though just barely focusing their translucent flesh into this world. Upon first seeing the three thin and ragged men, all their attention centered inward on some kind of transitional pain, I felt as though I could have stepped right through them and they would have collapsed—like water escaping through an abruptly ruptured membrane. I sat on the catwalk and watched them for several hours, waiting for a sign of movement—of life—just waiting for something that might be a clue, a signpost that would lead me to my Mona.

But as the rush hour began on the streets above, some of it spilled down onto Lower Wacker and people began to pass by on their way home. They didn’t seem to notice the three Shabbies at all. Instead they focused on me, sitting pensive and alone, a very clean but ragged man on a filthy catwalk.

I kept coming back. Soon I began to read those unsettling stares and glances of pity and revulsion on the faces of the passersby and I realized that they thought I was just another homeless resident of Lower Wacker Drive. But of course I had a definite purpose. I was watching the Shabbies, watching their numbers increase slowly and steadily, watching as they came gradually into focus and began moving around, transparent and iridescent at first, but nearly solid, nearly corporeal as the weeks progressed. I walked among them, trying to follow—to imitate—their seemingly random patterns, listening to them speak to one another in those rapid, wordless whispers, and occasionally looking one in the eye and have him return my stare, and acknowledge my existence with a nod of the head or with that unsettling stretch of the facial muscles that I had seen so often in Mona, that grimace which I had always told myself was a smile.

Soon there were dozens of them, milling about a stretch of Lower Wacker that was just over three blocks long. The police would drive by, sometimes lean out the window, but they seemed incapable of seeing the Shabbies for what they really were. So did the muddled and preoccupied commuters. Even the transients who haunted Lower Wacker feared them too much to get close and see what the Shabbies really were, or feel the tension their presence created on the thin, wet fabric of our world. When I arrived in the morning I would feel the warm, oily hug of the membrane as it closed in on me, greasing me as though to ease my passage into the great dark otherspace where Mona hid from me, not knowing how much I needed her, missed her.

Eventually I could no longer return home. I had to stay down there with them, knowing that they could all disappear at any moment, knowing that when that time came, I would have to be there with them, ready to cross over with them, ready to face Mona again and make her understand.

I began to think of myself as Shabbie. I told myself that my clothes and the pallor of my skin were beginning to resemble theirs, that when I spoke to them they were no longer merely words but part of that deeper, hushed language the Shabbies used themselves, that when Mona’s thousand needle-points had pierced me just before her departure, she had passed some of that essence into me.

But the Shabbies could not understand me and I could not understand them. And when I was hungry I had to buy something to eat—at first with my dwindling supply of ready cash, and when that was gone, with money I could squeeze from the people on the streets above me. The Shabbies merely disappeared—only a few at a time—and would return gorged, the stripped limbs of lesser creatures dangling limp from their hands.

One very cold October morning they began to migrate. I followed them as they marched toward lower Michigan Avenue, feeling the tug of the oily strands that brushed and bathed me, anointed me and, finally, held me back as the Shabbies began to disperse before my eyes, spreading out as weightless globules of amber fluid, scattering into smaller and smaller droplets until they were no more than a mist.

When it seemed I was all alone I turned and saw one last Shabbie, a young woman who looked not much difference than Mona had on her first day. I called her Mona but she did not respond. I could already see the frayed