Peter S. Beagle (ed) by The Secret History of Fantasy

Author:The Secret History of Fantasy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-22T18:26:56+00:00

“It’s not the flavor,” Piggy said enthusiastically. “It’s the poison. Properly prepared, see, there’s a very small amount left in the sashimi and you get a threshold dose. Your lips and the tips of your fingers turn cold. Numb.

That’s how you know you’re having the real thing. That’s how you know you’re living right on the edge.”

“I’m already living on the edge,” Russ said. He looked startled when Piggy laughed.

A fat moon floated in the sky, pale as a disk of ice melting in blue water.

It bounced after them as they descended, kicking aside loose soda bottles in Styrofoam sleeves, crushed Marlboro boxes, a scattering of carbonized sparkplugs. On one landing they found a crumpled shopping cart, and Piggy had to muscle it over the railing and watch it fall. “Sure is a lot of crap here,” he observed. The landing smelled faintly of urine.

“It’ll get better farther down,” Russ said. “We’re still near the top, where people can come to get drunk after work.” He pushed on down. Far to one side they could see the brown flow from the industrial canal where it spilled into space, widening and then slowly dispersing into rain bowed mist, distance glamoring it beauty.

“How far are we planning to go?” Donna asked apprehensively.

“Don’t be a weak sister,” Piggy sneered. Russ said nothing.

The deeper they went, the shabbier the stairway grew, and the spottier its maintenance. Pipes were missing from the railing. Where patches of paint had fallen away the bolts anchoring the stair to the rock were walnut-sized lumps of rust.

Needle-clawed marsupials chittered warningly from niches in the rock as they passed. Tufts of grass and moth-white gentians grew in the loess-filled cracks.

Hours passed. Donna’s feet and calves and the small of her back grew increasingly sore, but she refused to be the one to complain. By degrees she stopped looking over the side and out into the sky, and stared instead at her feet flashing in and out of sight while one hand went slap grab tug on the rail. She felt sweaty and miserable.

Back home she had a half-finished paper on the Three Days Incident of March, 1810, when the French Occupation, by order of Napoleon himself, had fired cannonade after cannonade over the Edge into nothingness.

They had hoped to make rainstorms of devastating force that would lash and destroy their enemies, and created instead only a gunpowder haze, history’s first great failure in weather control. This descent was equally futile, Donna thought, an endless and wearying exercise in nothing. Just the same as the rest of her life. Every time her father was reposted, she had resolved to change, to be somebody different this time around, whatever the price, even if — no, especially if — it meant playacting something she was not. Last year in Germany when she’d gone out with that local boy with the Alfa Romeo and instead of jerking him off had used her mouth, she had thought: Everything’s going to be different now.

But no.

Nothing ever changed.

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