Poe by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Solaris

Now that was very interesting, I thought as I stood outside on Prince Street looking back at the school: people had to be within a certain distance before I picked anything up from them. So the news wasn't all bad. I could have a career as a forest ranger or a lighthouse keeper. Did they still have lighthouse keepers?

Should've walked toward the janitor, you wuss, said a little voice in my mind; then you'd know how close you had to be to pick up something. No, only a very general idea; I wasn't good with distances--math strikes again. Too bad Ambrose's sister Rita hadn't been there. She knew space. All she had to do was look at something: a building, a room, a box, and she could give you the dimensions. Rita had capitalized on this and become an interior decorator. Sadly, she didn't have very good taste so she worked in partnership with a designer who, Ambrose said, probably had to tell her several times a week that knotty pine paneling wasn't the Next Big Thing.

I crossed the mercifully empty street but just as I reached the other side, I knew that eleven years and two months from now, a woman was going to die of cancer.

There was no one near me, not on the sidewalk nor in any of the cars parked at the curb. Up at the corner where Prince met Summer there was plenty of traffic but that was farther away from me than the janitor had been.

I didn't get it until the curtains in the front window of the nearest house parted and a woman's face looked out at me. She glanced left and right, and disappeared again. Another useful thing to know, I thought, walking quickly--people had to be within a certain distance but they didn't have to be visible to me.

In the house next door, there was a head injury, forty years; a stroke, thirty-eight years in the one after that. Nothing in the next two--no one home. Internal bleeding, twenty-six years in the next one. A car passed me going the other way: AIDS, ten years behind the wheel and heart failure, twenty-two years in the passenger seat. More AIDS, six years in the house on the corner.

Waiting for a break in the traffic so I could cross, I learned another useful fact--most of the cars on Summer Street passed too quickly for me to pick up on anything about the people in them. Only if one had to slow down or stop to make a turn would something come to me.

Eventually the traffic thinned out enough to let me cross. But by the time I reached the middle of the road, cars had accumulated on every side. My head filled with cancers, heart attacks, infections, organ failures, bleeding brains, diseases, conditions I didn't know the names of. I hefted my backpack, put my head down and watched my feet until I reached the other side.

Baron's Food and Drug was just ahead.

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