Free Shadows 7 by Charles L. Grant (Ed.)

accept."
    "I don't remember how it started. A long time ago, hundreds of years. You wouldn't believe it." I heard the despair, saw it in her maturing face. She knew this was going to be her last night. I wasn't going to let her out of the apartment.
    With a set of handcuffs sometimes used as a prop, I cuffed her to the radiator in the bedroom and made sure she was comfortable. She didn't fight it; maybe she figured it was time. I wasn't actually killing her, only allowing her to die. I guessed about six more hours would do it.
    I'll say one thing for her, she never begged. While I cuffed her to the radiator, she just watched me with a weary resignation. When I started to leave the apartment, she was crying—softly, trying to hide it from me. Somehow I couldn't just close a door on her.
    "Look . . . I'm sorry."
    "I love you, Daddy."
    "Don't say that."
    "Why not? That's part of it. Can't there be that much beauty to it, and can't you believe that much?"
    I closed the door between us.
    Mostly, I just walked in the drizzling rain, stopping now and then for a drink in one of the bars I knew. I wanted to get drunk and blot out the whole impossible thing. I ended up in the bar where I'd picked her up the night before. I realized now that it wasn't a different woman at all; she was always the same. I sat nursing my drink, glancing at my watch now and then. Two hours . . . a long time yet. I couldn't even feel the drinks.
    Just going to let her die, aren't you?
    A friend came over to my booth. We talked for a while, how's business, that sort of thing.
    How does it feel to be God?
    I played the juke. All the songs sounded the same, but who listened? The hallway to the men's room was crowded with drunks. I fumbled my way through. Clear the way for the Lord Who Giveth and Taketh Away.
    The mirror in the john was the sort that really tells you what you look like. I never should have looked. Hey, you've seen it all before, a guy doing all the impossible things to keep a beautiful woman.
    I love you, Daddy.
    What kind of guy would deliver a baby and dispose of a corpse every night for the rest of his life?
    I love you. That's part of it. Can't there be that much beauty?
    I walked out of the bar and headed up the street toward my apartment. It was raining harder now, and I pulled the collar of my raincoat up around my neck as I turned down my street, knowing when I got up in the morning I'd have to raise a little girl to womanhood. I climbed the stairs and walked down the hall to my door.
    And then at night, make love to your own daughter so she can live one day to do it all over again. The full cycle of life a man goes through once, three hundred and sixty-five times a year. But the guys I knew, those guys back in the bar, how many of them ever found a woman like this?
    You tell yourself: nobody is God. They can call it what they want—incest, Dracula's daughter, whatever. Me? I was going for it. I opened the door to my apartment and shed my raincoat, dropping it on the floor, and walked over to the stereo to put on something soft and dreamy. I walked into the bedroom; there she was, still wrapped in the sheet, the most beautiful woman in the world of the late end of her prime, still . . . the impossible best. Her head came up when I entered the room. She looked at me uncertainly a moment, reading me surely, reading me right, then a slow smile curled that seductive mouth. Hell, I'd need a decent nursing bottle and baby food.
    "Hurry, Daddy, or we'll be too late."

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    Vacations used to be a lot of fun; we remember them fondly, and the disasters that befell them often take on a comic overtone, almost as if they were planned. Sometimes they were.
    Ramsey Campbell, winner of the British and World Fantasy awards, lives in England, and his latest works to appear in America are a novel, Incarnate, and a superior collection of his short stories, Dark Companions.

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SEEING THE WORLD by Ramsey Campbell

    At first Angela thought it was a