Dark Duets: All-New Tales of Horror and Dark Fantasy by Christopher Golden (ed)

Author:Christopher Golden (ed) [Golden, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780062240293
Google: sXWxAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0062240285
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Published: 2014-01-07T08:00:00+00:00

Branches, Curving

Tim Lebbon and Michael Marshall Smith

So what did she do now? Did she get up out of bed or try to go back to sleep? Did she continue to doze or try to wake up?

SHE LAY THERE, arm still held rigidly down by her side, and could not make the choice.

Jenni hated choices. Always had. She took forever to order in restaurants because she wanted every meal to be perfect and couldn’t bear the cost of selecting one thing over another. She spent so long browsing Netflix that by the time she’d chosen her evening’s entertainment she wound up nodding off halfway through the movie. Even a simple trip to Starbucks could strand her blinking up at the menu board, becalmed and indecisive, while people muttered in line behind her. Sometimes there was just too much information. Too many choices, and no telling what to choose.

It was a peculiar trait, this inability to decide, because in other ways she was notably impulsive; two ex-husbands and a string of failed affairs before and after each barren marriage (and also during, regrettably) stood testament to that. Fleeting closeness is not about choice, however. It’s living in the moment, however ill-advisedly. It wasn’t as if she was ever faced with a room full of men to select from. Perhaps that would have been better. At least that way she might still be choosing, still dithering . . . and would not have spent so very, very long looking for whatever was missing from her life. That elusive something, hidden from view, and yet the one solid anchor in the storm of her mind. The thing that would close the circle and make her complete.

She didn’t want yes/no. She wanted a continuum, a permanence, something that would hold her steady forever and put a stop to the endless circle of selection. She was still searching. Still dreaming her life away.

Still waiting to be awake.

AND IN THE meantime she sat at the fork in the road, unreasonably furious at whoever was responsible for the absence of direction. The road to the left angled up a steep slope and soon disappeared around a high-hedged bend. To the right it continued across the hillside, disappearing eventually into a dip in the valley a quarter of a mile away. Both routes were the same width, both imbued with the promise of roads untraveled, and there wasn’t even a road sign to help make a decision. She knew they’d taken down a lot of signs across the countryside during the war—to confuse the Germans if they ever invaded—but that was a hell of a long time ago now, surely. Maybe there was simply nowhere interesting to go from here, and so they’d never bothered putting them back up.

“Nowhere,” she said, the dull word swallowed by the car’s upholstery. “Or somewhere.”

Which was which? If she’d had to bet, she would have put money on the road to the right being the way to go. But there was no way of knowing for sure.

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