Ellen Datlow

“Now the fire’s in the stairwell, and the stairwell’s roaring like a chimney. The girls downstairs can’t get out, and the girls upstairs can’t get down. Then a voice is heard. Far away. From the store cupboard they’d given us for a dressing room.” “You?” I said. Willie took a little bow. Then he switched his voice to something tiny and far away. A doll with its own ventriloquist skills. “Don’t leave me, Max. Come and get me.” And back to normal: “Max couldn’t ignore it. He could never ignore me. He ran through the flames and up those stairs, and the girls on the landing saw him and followed. He was the man with the funny little friend who sat on his knee and made them laugh. He’d look after them, wouldn’t he? He must know the way out. When the fire came up the stairs, they all crammed into the storeroom but by then it was too late. And all of them died.” “Except you.” “Except me. How about that?” “Wait a minute,” I said. “What am I saying? There was no one calling. None of that happened. Did it?” “Are you going to argue with a witness?” “You’re not a witness.” I looked at Alex. “You’re not a witness.”

I remembered everything in detail, like a picture on the screen. I didn’t know what it all meant, most of it, until long after. But the images were sharp and clear, waiting for my eventual knowledge.

The wind was blowing in ahead of the dark clouds and tossing whitecaps against the rocking ferry and wooden dock. The air smelled of river and winter and rain by nightfall.

C'est mon père qui m'a appris que les rêves souhaitaient devenir réels. Quand vous commencez à vous réveiller, me disait-il, ils s'accrochent et si vous n'y prenez garde, ils essayent de s'infiltrer dans le monde éveillé. Les rêves les plus forts, précisait-il, peuvent presque y arriver, ils peuvent persister près d'une demi-journée, mais guère plus.
(La lune se noie tandis que je dors de Charles de Lint )

Il était une fois ce qui était, et qui serait demeuré si rien n'était arrivé. Et il n'y aurait rien eu à raconter. (La lune se noie tandis que je dors de Charles de Lint )

Elle essaya de ne pas regarder les portraits de l'enfant jamais né de l'artiste, mais ils brillaient sur les murs et dans les miroirs. Une fille de neige, peau Nivéa, tresses d'ébène et bouche de glace rouge. Lorsqu'elle était assise dans une pièce, elle avait l'impression que les portaits la surveillaient, et lorsqu'elle marchait dans les couloirs, les peintures la suivaient comme des yeux. (Perce Neige de Tanith Lee)

Le creux formé par ses clavicules, au dessus du corsage de sa combinaison blanche, me paraissait terriblement vulnérable. Les combinaisons blanches m'ont toujours excité. (Carmina de Wendy Wheeler)

Il réalisa instantanément qu'il l'aimerait toujours et à jamais, sans aucune chance et sans espoir de rémission. Accroché à la douce courbe d'une racine de saule avec ses minuscules pattes antérieures, il la contempla avec un émerveillement vain durant de longues et innombrables minutes. Son sang habituellement discret s'était mis à bouillonner et il le sentait courir étrangement dans ses veines, et se réchauffer. Il crut presque le sentir devenir rouge. (Prince Grenouille de Gahan Wilson )

All humans feed on violence, on the small exercises of power over another. But few have tasted—as we have—the ultimate power. And without the Ability, few know the unequaled pleasure of taking a human life. Without the Ability, even those who do feed on life cannot savor the flow of emotions in stalker and victim, the total exhilaration of the attacker who has moved beyond all rules and punishments, the strange, almost sexual submission of the victim in that final second of truth when all options are canceled, all futures denied, all possibilities erased in an exercise of absolute power over another.

I heard something that sounded like gunshots, five of them. Somehow I knew they were shots, even though they were muffled, sounding nothing like what I’d heard in westerns and cops-and-robbers movies.