Borderlands 5 (43 page)

He would have watched television, but he couldn’t figure out how to work the remote control. None of the buttons, which were arranged in an odd elliptical pattern, were labeled. The only one that did anything when he pushed it rang his doorbell.

MARCH 28

L
ate Sunday morning, the telephone awakened him. He had a pleasant conversation with his father, who had died the previous Christmas. Jeff had a clear memory of standing at the hospital bedside when his father took his last gasping breath, but the man on the other end of the line was definitely the same person he’d spoken to by phone most Sunday mornings since he’d moved away from home ten years ago.

“How’s Mom doing?” he asked.

“Pretty much the same,” his father replied, which was no answer at all but Jeff didn’t inquire further. “When are you coming to visit again, son?”

“Soon,” Jeff said. “I’m having car problems right now, but once I have that straightened out I’ll make plans to fly over.”

“That’s good. We’ll look forward to seeing you.”

They talked for several minutes more about the usual topics from the past and then they hung up.

Jeff redialed the number a few minutes later, but it rang at least twenty times without being answered. When he tried again, the phone didn’t even ring. He listened to staticky silence, going over things he might have said given this chance to speak to his father again.

After a lunch of raw carrots and popcorn, Jeff turned on his computer, planning to print out a map so he could find his way to work on Monday. When it finished booting up, the only icon on the desktop was for Space Invaders, a game he hadn’t played since high school. His Internet software was gone, as was everything else on the computer.

By the end of the evening, he’d gotten pretty good at Space Invaders and had advanced to the forty-third level on two separate occasions before running out of ships.

MARCH 29

T
he newspaper, which Jeff found on his doormat on Monday morning even though he didn’t subscribe, featured a bold headline: No News Today. The front page was blank below the fold. Comics filled the inside two pages. A full-page advertisement on the back said:

WANTED

NEWS

Please call 555-1823

Jeff read the comics. That was what he always turned to first when he bought the newspaper anyway. Some of the strips he recognized but at least half of them were unfamiliar. Some of the jokes he didn’t get, which he hated. He read and reread the problematic strips, searching the panels for subtle clues to the punch line. As he read, he flexed his right hand, which ached from playing Space Invaders.

No one answered at his office when he tried to call in sick again. Around noon, he strolled downstairs to check his mailbox. It was full of letters addressed to someone named Walter. Jeff’s first impulse was to drop them into the outgoing mail slot, but he took them back to his living room. They made for interesting reading and helped him pass the afternoon, especially now that his computer had vanished.

Jeff lay in bed that Monday night, idly wondering what the next day would bring. Or take away. He didn’t miss going to work five mornings a week, but he did miss his computer and Judy. At least the comic section still ran in the newspaper—even if he didn’t understand all the jokes—and maybe he’d get some more interesting mail for Walter. His loafers had solved that annoying shoelaces problem and he’d grown accustomed to using his finger in place of his toothbrush.

MARCH 30

T
uesday morning the outer wall of Jeff’s apartment vanished. Window and all. The first thing he saw after waking up was a pigeon perched at the foot of his bed. He felt an unfamiliar breeze and then became aware of vast space. From his prone position he could see only sky, though a nagging voice in the back of his mind suggested that he should have been able to see at least the apartment building next door.

He climbed out of bed naked, disturbing the pigeon from its perch, and strolled to the edge of his bedroom. His former wall had once held a small window and a framed print of a painting by Camille Pissarro.
Entrance to the Village of Voisins.
Jeff stared through the gaping nothingness that now occupied one full wall of the room. A gentle breeze rolled in, tousling his hair and hardening his nipples.

Outside his apartment building, in this direction at least, there was absolutely nothing but blue as far as the eye could see. No buildings, no people, no clouds, no sun, no sound. Jeff craned his head around the edge of his bedroom wall but vertigo overcame him, forcing him back into the room.

Still naked, he wandered into the living room and found that the outside wall had vanished there, too. Similarly in the bathroom. Jeff had a hard time peeing in front of all that wide-open space, even though no one could see him. He ran the tap for a few seconds to get his own flow started and then he was okay.

The absence of a wall and the disconcerting nothingness beyond
(Entrance to Village Infinity?)
made it hard for Jeff to enjoy the book he was reading. It was the same one he’d started on Saturday but all the character names had changed and instead of being set in Edinburgh the action now took place in Reykjavik. Iceland was a country Jeff had always intended to visit because he’d read somewhere that it was so much like the moon’s surface astronauts had trained there back in the 60s. Some people even believed that the astronauts hadn’t really gone to the moon, but had staged the whole thing in Iceland. Jeff didn’t subscribe to that theory.

Shortly after noon, Jeff opened his apartment door on the way to the lobby to see if Walter had gotten any mail. As he was about to step out into the corridor, he realized that everything had disappeared in that direction, too. Whatever was responsible for stealing his external reality had been kind-hearted enough to leave him a door he could lock against intruders, though.

He imagined that his apartment would suffer a considerable crosswind if two opposing walls went missing. As it was, he had to shoo pigeons out twice that afternoon. He never saw them fly in—he never saw anything beyond the endless blue interface that began where his outer wall used to exist—but the pigeons materialized in his living room all the same. When he chased them into flight they flitted around the room in momentary confusion, looking for an escape route. Both of them eventually darted into the blue neverland and immediately vanished.

Jeff spent the afternoon reading about a hardboiled cop who drank heavily and patrolled the mean streets of Reykjavik. That afternoon, he reread the book, which now featured a spinster amateur detective who solved cases from her cozy living room in New Delhi.

No one had phoned him since his father’s call on Sunday. He dialed the airline number he found on the back of the frequent flier card in his wallet, the card that occupied the slot that used to hold a picture of him with Judy, and booked a flight to visit his parents. He hadn’t figured out how he was going to get to the airport, but that was a detail he’d handle when the time came. The airline refused his credit card but seemed satisfied when he read them his YMCA membership number instead.

MARCH 31

T
he slight breeze had transformed into a moderately healthy gale by Wednesday morning. Jeff’s bedcovers rippled under their assault. He snapped on his bedside lamp but the light only penetrated a perimeter of a few feet. Beyond its sixty watt glow, nothing. Even the pigeons had abandoned him.

Fortunately, he’d brought his book in from the living room the night before. He started from the dog-eared page about a third of the way through, reading about a tough but sensitive ex-cop who ran a private detective agency out of the basement of his house in Gdansk, which he shared with a golden retriever. Jeff occasionally allowed his gaze to drift from the pages to take in his surroundings, but one time when he looked away too long he had to start the book over again because the Polish P.I. was now a former child psychologist who assisted the police with their inquiries in Montevideo. Just when Jeff was sure he’d figured out whodunit, too.

He found a couple of chocolate bars in his nightstand and stopped reading long enough to eat them. For a moment he considered saving one for later, but at the rate things were going—going away—he didn’t think it mattered. He tossed the crumpled wrappers into the darkness surrounding his bed. The steady breeze caught them and carried them away without a sound.

Turning back to the book, he discovered that the main character was a burglar who ran a used bookstore as a cover for his clandestine activities in the streets of Nicosia. Jeff Adams shook his head, leafed back a few pages and started the chapter over.

Fatigue overtook him shortly before midnight. He dog-eared the paperback, rested it carefully on the nightstand and turned out the light.

APRIL 1

APRIL 2

A
dam Jeffries woke up on Friday morning. He sat up, slipped his feet into his moccasins and tied the laces.

Nice and tight.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

GARY A. BRAUNBECK is the author of several short story collections, among them
Things Left Behind; Graveyard People: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Vol. 1; Sorties, Cathexes, and Personal Effects; A Little Orange Book Of Odd Stories; From Beneath These Fields Of Blood;
and the science fiction collection
x3
. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and doesn’t get invited to many parties, which everyone agrees is for the best.

DOMINICK CANCILLA’S work has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including
Cemetery Dance
magazine,
Robert Bloch’s Psychos
, and
October Dreams
. His first novel,
Revenant Savior
, is available from Cemetery Dance Publications

MICHAEL CANFIELD’S work also appears in
Mota3:Courage
, edited by Karen Joy Fowler. He’s employed full-time in the Northwest, has many close friends and a number acquaintances.”

JOHN FARRIS sold his first novel the summer after he graduated from high school, in 1955. By 1959 he had his first million-seller, at age 23, with
Harrison High
—which spawned four sequels. (Farris was writing about students planting bombs in high schools in 1962.) You could call him a suspense writer, a blacksmith of ironclad thrillers. But that would overlook the magical aspect that informs the point of view in most of his work. You could call him a horror novelist, but that’s just a launch footing for his mordant sociopolitical observations. He works labyrinthine intrigues better than nearly anyone writing, but to categorize him into a single genre would overlook the fundamental basis of his fiction—the complex characters that he tinkers together from the ground up, and his efforts to realize each book as an entity whole and apart from the preceding book. One-liner descriptives fall short for the simple reason that he is
sui generis
.

BRIAN FREEMAN’S short stories and novellas have appeared in over a dozen publications. He is the editor of
Dueling Minds
, a hardcover limited edition anthology to be published by Endeavor Press. After graduating from Shippensburg University in May 2002, Brian moved to Baltimore to work fulltime at Cemetery Dance Publications. He can be found on the web at BrianFreeman.com

ADAM CORBIN FUSCO was an associate with a casting agency in Baltimore for more than ten years. He has worked on such films as
Serial Mom, Avalon, CryBaby, Pecker, He Said, She Said
, and the television series “Homicide: Life on the Street.” His short fiction has appeared in
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection, Science Fiction Age, The Best of Cemetery Dance, Touch Wood: Narrow Houses 2,
and
Young Blood.

BILL GAUTHIER started writing in 1990, when he was thirteen, inspired by the first few pages of Stephen King’s novel
The Shining.
He made his first sale to a small press magazine in 1998 at twenty-one and has had four more tales published since in small press magazines, twice in Greg F. Gifune’s
The Edge
,
Tales of Suspense
, and in webzines, including the speculative fiction webzine
Ideomancer
. He lives in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he’s a father, a ticket clerk at the local bus station, and a student. And, like every other writer out there, he’s working on many projects. His current home on the web is http:/
/www.geocities.com/gauthic2001.

DARREN O. GODFREY spends his weekdays making things go bang that should have gone bang on their own and his weekends and holidays making his head go bang against his writing desk until stories fall out. Darren’s fallout has appeared in various anthologies (
Borderlands 2, The Midnighters Club, The Museum of Horrors,
and
Quietly Now: A Tribute to Charles L. Grant
), genre magazines (
Black October, Gorezone, The Scream Factory, Black Petals, Demontia,
and
Aberrations
) as well as a few offbeat publications (
The Art Times, The Goofus Office Gazette,
and
Cracked
).  He and his two daughters divide their time between Idaho and California, depending upon their financial needs and the need for sanity.